Please buff Destructive Clench

InvictusApollo

For years Destructive Clench was the go to ranged CC for all magicka classes. It allowed us to line up combos from range to kill our opponents in PvP. It's animation and projectile travel time were bad enough to allow skilled players to block and completely negate the incoming CC.
It was a little abused with Master's Staff to serve as a spammable so it got nerfed. And the nerf was far too big. Not only did it lose most of it's damage but also it's range.
And the limited range is what killed this skill. Before this nerf we weere able to CC one enemy at the standard range of 28m. This allowed us to get closer and engage our enemy.
Now Destructive Clench is completely useless for that. It has become almost a melee ability. It has lost it's primary use case.
At this moment I can think of only two scenarios in which it might be usefull:
1. Defending against gap closing melee opponent.
2. Knocking someone off high place during a close combat.

The worst thing is that this nerf has killed a very satisfying gamestyle. Ofcourse there are other CCs but I for one loved this skill so much that used it on all of my magicka builds.

Dear @ZOS please consider buffing Destructive Clench's range - even if that came at the cost of damage. Let us play the way we got used to and loved to.

Narthalion

Coming at this from a PvE perspective, I also feel like both morphs were over nerfed.

Compare Destructive Reach to either Entropy morph. Damage-wise they're the same, Reach with the slight advantage of more damage up front. Reach's only other advantage is being slightly cheaper (a couple hundred mana) but given that the extra efficiency is on something you'll only cast once every 10 seconds in a rotation, you're gaining little.

And then of course, Entropy grants Major Sorcery and either heals you or returns more magicka than you would have saved casting Reach.

The passives build Reach back up a little, but I'm not sure it's enough to balance it. It'll ignore 10% spell resistance, restore 3600 magicka if it gets the killing blow, and has a chance to apply a status effect. That's definitely better than Entropy granting Empower, but I don't think it's "better enough" to make it on peoples' bars. (Edit: and I spaced and forgot to include the duration increase passive for Entropy...and the max mag/recovery. So...yeah.)

And that's just Reach. Clench got massacred. Heck, my DK's Stone Giant looks good in comparison, and who uses Stone Giant?

ZOS didn't get this one right, IMHO.

Ash_In_My_Sujamma

Shock reach/clench was the one nerfed the hardest and for no reason. Now the long ranged is just a single target and the short range is an aoe. Which makes the long range pretty useless since it doesn't even get the buff from ancient knowledge.
They should make both shock morphs aoe and put the stun only on the short range one.
I play, among others, a magicka warden in non cp and I am really out of options on what to use as a stun.

MrBrownstone

They also made the Master staves extremely useless.

ZarkingFrued

Yeah they just deleted the whole skill. Whatever

Avrael

Clench needs the same range as reach, before all other changes, that would already solve most problems. I was happy i could use reach as a spammable with the lightning master staff, not i cant... could only use clench, but as you already said, thats pretty much a melee skill now. If i wanted to play a melee sorc, i would play stamina...

Saucy_Jack

I'm forced to use the Destructive Clench after eating at Taco Bell; once I get home I have to quickly switch over to the Destructive Unclench morph on my back bar.

StabbityDoom

Just clench harder. You could make diamonds!

sly007

Saucy_Jack wrote: »

I'm forced to use the Destructive Clench after eating at Taco Bell; once I get home I have to quickly switch over to the Destructive Unclench morph on my back bar.

Lol.

I think the nerf was warranted. Being able to damage a player from 36 meters and being able to CC a player from 36 meters are two very different things. Your damage from range was actually buffed considering the buff to dots. To add the pressure from ranged CC that deal adequate damage on top of that would have been abysmal to all melee builds (not stamina builds).

Starlock

I still find clench fine on fire staves and ice staves. If the intent was to have one morph be cc/utility and the other to be DoT, they succeeded at that with fire and ice staves. But with lightning staves, they removed the cc/utility from it for some reason, which I just don't understand. They instead made it an inferior version of elemental ring. It is very weird and inconsistent.

Kagukan

It was fun and useful. Now it is sad and useless.

JamieAubrey

I miss my 28m knockback and Mages Fury combo

AndyMac

Agree - the skill was very useful in PvP - now it just useless - waste of bar space really.

CynicK

Before it was very useful I had destructive clench and used it when someone got too close, I used a lighting staff before patch for the stun but since I red the nerfs I changed for a fire staff but when it got live the range poor damage and lack of dot made me change it for destructive reach, at least i do some damage but I miss how useful it was in pvp.

I do not have a proper cc now, I could use rune prision but it think it's meh, my cc is the vampire drain when people gets too close but I cannot do other things either during the 3 seconds it lasts if it is no cc broken and I cannot run away.

I do not know It was labeled as utility skill but it is not very useful.

olsborg

MrBumblefoot wrote: »

They also made the Master staves extremely useless.

They made the destruction master staff trash.

RoninOfNight

Yup.. Master destro staff is trash.