Class identity and weapon lines

techprince

As you have seen, over the past mega patches, classes have been losing their unique skills and effects.

Some unique skills that defined class identity made them very favorable for that role. Ex: DragonKnight for chains, minor brutality, team shields, engulfing flames or Templar for ritual, minor sorcery, purge, bol etc. For this reason, some of the effects either got removed or made available to all the classes via weapon skill lines/generic skill lines.

As i see, the idea was to make class skills usable for magicka classes and weapon skills for stamina so that both class and weapon skills would get used. But this resulted in loss of identity for stamina classes as they felt generic.

Now how do you add identity to the class without making them Best In Class for that role? How do you make class skills worth using over weapon skills and vice-versa?

Developers solution to this problem was to make weapon skills provide unique buffs/debuffs and add/improve effects via arena weapons. Now the problem is, if a class skill becomes superior than its weapon variant or vice-versa then why would anyone use one over the other?

Existing games accomplish this by :
1) Providing class skills only and by enhancing them via talent trees as a progression reward.
2) Providing generic weapon lines, limiting the weapon type to class/gender and by using talent trees to add class specific effects to them.

My solution is to combine both by removing the weapon active skills and by keeping the passives only. I know some of you will flip out but just keep calm and read further.

- Active class skills will have unique effects based on the weapon equipped.
- This will allow developers to change class skills properly for their respective roles. Tanks will get chain/taunt/debuff skills built into their skill line. Healers will get ground hots, instant heals etc. DamageDealers will get spammables, single/aoe dots, ground dots etc.
- Arena weapons will get modified to enhance the effects on the weapon passives rather than actives so that one will continue to use class abilities making them unique.
- This will simplify the game a bit as new players wont get overwhelmed by so many active skills.

The traits and enchantments already change in magnitude according to the weapon type so this will help alot with the above suggestion.

Challenges -
- What would happen to skyshards if all those active skills gets removed?

Any comments?

MrGhosty

The easy answer as to the extra skyshards is to not remove the skills at all but have them change based on the class that is equipping them.

For example, GW2 does this (they also limit which weapons can be equipped but I think just the one approach could make great strides)

non weapon skill lines would remain untouched as their "flavor" is already done and dusted. The weapon animations could be tuned and reworked so that they took advantage of the current skill lines. Examples being dual wield animations on a nightblade could have the red, smokey effect like many of the NB class skills. Each skill could be worked to have a mag and stam version for specialized play while the default skill remained more specialization agnostic.

There are folks much better at armchair dev than I am, but I really feel like making all weapons usable to all the classes and tweaking some of the way damage scales could bring us a long way towards the traditional ESO feeling of picking any weapon/armor/spell type to create your own little monster. They could then round things out by adding some new mag based weapons such as focus, wand, etc to represent some of the missing schools of magicka.

Additionally just as the more stamina centric weapons got magicka morphs, staves could get stam morphs as well. Perhaps staves could be reworked into a melee weapon with a new animation? Much like how stam DK skills convert to disease damage, maybe a flame destro staff skill like wall of elements could convert into wall of corruption? Restoration Staff could get their stam equivalent skills turned into mantras or chants.

The real sticking point is that it feels like you lose your class identity when you morph over to stam, the only exception I have found is with Nightblade because so many of their skills already feel very melee heavy and you have a much better representative mix of class/weapon skills. I also feel like this might help with balancing as everyone could make use of all the skills rather than shutting off access to many skills based purely on the decision to go mag or stam.

techprince

MrGhosty wrote: »

The easy answer as to the extra skyshards is to not remove the skills at all but have them change based on the class that is equipping them.

For example, GW2 does this (they also limit which weapons can be equipped but I think just the one approach could make great strides)

non weapon skill lines would remain untouched as their "flavor" is already done and dusted. The weapon animations could be tuned and reworked so that they took advantage of the current skill lines. Examples being dual wield animations on a nightblade could have the red, smokey effect like many of the NB class skills. Each skill could be worked to have a mag and stam version for specialized play while the default skill remained more specialization agnostic.

There are folks much better at armchair dev than I am, but I really feel like making all weapons usable to all the classes and tweaking some of the way damage scales could bring us a long way towards the traditional ESO feeling of picking any weapon/armor/spell type to create your own little monster. They could then round things out by adding some new mag based weapons such as focus, wand, etc to represent some of the missing schools of magicka.

Additionally just as the more stamina centric weapons got magicka morphs, staves could get stam morphs as well. Perhaps staves could be reworked into a melee weapon with a new animation? Much like how stam DK skills convert to disease damage, maybe a flame destro staff skill like wall of elements could convert into wall of corruption? Restoration Staff could get their stam equivalent skills turned into mantras or chants.

The real sticking point is that it feels like you lose your class identity when you morph over to stam, the only exception I have found is with Nightblade because so many of their skills already feel very melee heavy and you have a much better representative mix of class/weapon skills. I also feel like this might help with balancing as everyone could make use of all the skills rather than shutting off access to many skills based purely on the decision to go mag or stam.

Then class skills will not be used if weapon skills gets modified. By not having to use weapon skills, one will be forced to use what their class provides which automatically adds to uniqueness and all class skills will stay relevant.