You've still completely missed the mark on DoT damage.

JinMori

Zos should have done this.

During elsweyr they has pretty strong dots but not too powerful, what they should have done was slightly increase st dots damage, and i mean slightly, like 5 or 10 % at max, maybe 20 % for the weaker ones, put the other dots in line without overshadowing class dots, and kept aoe dots the same, this way someone could have decided to build for versatility or to build for pure st dps, also this way if dots do relatively the same damage, more or less, they could have differentiated them by adding different utility, so they are useful in different situations.

More diversity in short.

But no, they *** it up, and decided to ruin aoe dots, and now to nerf them all, creating basically a new meta, but not really more build diversity, if anything all they accomplished is making every class feel pretty much the same. As usual good job zos.....

Emma_Overload

MartiniDaniels wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

LiquidPony wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.

No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.

I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.

Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.

What do you mean "nobody objected"? People have been complaining about useless skills and morphs since the game launched, just like they've been complaining about all the useless gear that needs to be re-worked. "Reverting them to previous state" would be the most healthy move for who exactly? You? Not for me.

Just because the forums were full of crying about the buffed DOTs for a few weeks doesn't mean that everyone feels that way about them. Plenty of people are fine with the DOTs, even though I think they could be toned down a little without harm to anybody. A 2X spammable multiplier would be fine.

LiquidPony

Emma_Overload wrote: »

MartiniDaniels wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

LiquidPony wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.

No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.

I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.

Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.

What do you mean "nobody objected"? People have been complaining about useless skills and morphs since the game launched, just like they've been complaining about all the useless gear that needs to be re-worked. "Reverting them to previous state" would be the most healthy move for who exactly? You? Not for me.

Just because the forums were full of crying about the buffed DOTs for a few weeks doesn't mean that everyone feels that way about them. Plenty of people are fine with the DOTs, even though I think they could be toned down a little without harm to anybody. A 2X spammable multiplier would be fine.

And what was the end result of complaining about "useless skills"?

More useless skills.

If DoTs are significantly more powerful than spammables (as they should be), and suddenly you've got 6-8+ DoTs that all do the same amount of damage, what's obviously going to happen? Everyone's going to run nothing but DoTs.

This is a real (and abundantly obvious) problem that apparently the people complaining about "useless skills", and ZOS, weren't able to foresee.

But here we are.

The game was in a much better state in Elsweyr than in Scalebreaker or on the PTS right now.

BattleAxe

Dots need to be strong so to make spammables appealing they need to bring unique and strong functionality to make deciding between dots and burst becomes more difficult. Simple example every other cast of a spammable half cost increased damage to offset the discrepancy between dots and spammables

Davadin

LiquidPony wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

MartiniDaniels wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

LiquidPony wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.

No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.

I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.

Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.

What do you mean "nobody objected"? People have been complaining about useless skills and morphs since the game launched, just like they've been complaining about all the useless gear that needs to be re-worked. "Reverting them to previous state" would be the most healthy move for who exactly? You? Not for me.

Just because the forums were full of crying about the buffed DOTs for a few weeks doesn't mean that everyone feels that way about them. Plenty of people are fine with the DOTs, even though I think they could be toned down a little without harm to anybody. A 2X spammable multiplier would be fine.

If DoTs are significantly more powerful than spammables (as they should be), and suddenly you've got 6-8+ DoTs that all do the same amount of damage, what's obviously going to happen? Everyone's going to run nothing but DoTs.

this.

i dont want combat where the name of the game is "see how many DoT u can stack!".

so as other pointed out,

slow and high damage, or fast and low damage.

this is embodied with light attack vs heavy attack.

or,

DoT or spammable.

the problem is of course balancing it. DoT too fast, it'll do too much damage. Of course, the facepalm moment is when this happens, ZOS decided to decrease the damage instead of making it slower.

same as DK new spammable. fast and low damage? nothing fast about a projectile with travel time that also costs 3.4k stamina.


oh well. i suppose we'll all just have to adjust comes Oct 21. we getting another patch hopefully by Monday.

JinMori

LiquidPony wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

MartiniDaniels wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

LiquidPony wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.

No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.

I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.

Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.

What do you mean "nobody objected"? People have been complaining about useless skills and morphs since the game launched, just like they've been complaining about all the useless gear that needs to be re-worked. "Reverting them to previous state" would be the most healthy move for who exactly? You? Not for me.

Just because the forums were full of crying about the buffed DOTs for a few weeks doesn't mean that everyone feels that way about them. Plenty of people are fine with the DOTs, even though I think they could be toned down a little without harm to anybody. A 2X spammable multiplier would be fine.

And what was the end result of complaining about "useless skills"?

More useless skills.

If DoTs are significantly more powerful than spammables (as they should be), and suddenly you've got 6-8+ DoTs that all do the same amount of damage, what's obviously going to happen? Everyone's going to run nothing but DoTs.

This is a real (and abundantly obvious) problem that apparently the people complaining about "useless skills", and ZOS, weren't able to foresee.

But here we are.

The game was in a much better state in Elsweyr than in Scalebreaker or on the PTS right now.

The way they can counter this is by making spammables give something else otehr than just the raw damage on their tooltip, like how whip grants a stacking mechanic+ weapon and spell damage, or a proc like burning light etc...

muh

Only scrolled through the first two pages, so I apologize if it has been mentioned already. Edit: Just saw that jypcy mentioned damage per GCD already, on page two even....

@LiquidPony
You basically compare 9 Surprise Attacks versus 1 Rending Slashes which certainly paints a picture that supports your case, but because of that your analysis and conclusion "missed the mark" in my opinion.

If we just look at your Test 5 (no CP investment in DoTs):
A single cast of Surprise Attack deals on average 14672
A single cast of Rending Slashes deals 12125 (DoT) + 2x 4444 (direct) damage for a total of 21013
So a single cast of Rending Slashes deals ~43% more damage than Surprise Attacks.

Given that we have a limited amount of global cooldowns in a fight, what would you rather use, an ability that deals 21013 damage or one that deals 14672?

If we assume a fight length of 60 seconds and that we're only using Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes the second it falls off. That gives us 6 casts of full duration Rending Slashes, given the values above, we would deal 918366 damage versus only Surprise Attacks 880320 damage. Ignoring light attacks.

That's a difference of 38064 damage or 38064/14672 = 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks in the same amount of time.

If we would assume that Poison Injection deals the exact same amount as Rending Slashes, we would look at another 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks. If we also assume Soul Trap and Trap Beast would (assume a 10 second duration for simplicity) deal the exact amount as Rending Slahes we would look at another 5.18 extra Surprise Attacks over the 60 second period for a total of 10.36 extra Surprise Attacks.

So in 60 seconds with just those 4 DoTs we would deal the same amount of damage we would deal in about 70 seconds of pure Surprise Attack spam.

With the current state on PTS, the gap between someone who struggles to keep up DoTs and someone who has almost 100% uptime on every DoT on their bar is lower than prior to Dragonhold, but there is still a difference and someone who min/maxes their performance in PvE will definitely want to run a couple DoTs.

I'm not into PvP, but I'd defnitely want to run a couple DoTs to increase pressure while I attack with direct damage abilities in PvP as well.

(Also, your light attack damage from Test 4 to Test 5 seems off skewing results in favour of Test 4.)

---

So what would've been much more informative and would safe me some work on PTS later this week, would have been using a single Surprise Attack and a single cast of pretty much every DoT you would want to run on your bar. See which of those DoTs land above Surprise Attack and are by that metric better than casting a Surprise Attack in that global cooldown and which are not. Obviously the decision to cast a DoT in every given moment depends on whether or not it is already running and if it is likely it will run its entire duration. If it's already running or wouldn't run it's entire duration -> Surprise Attack.

In your original conclusion you also touched slotting another ability with a passive increase instead.
If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013.

You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.
DoTs also stick to a target, so in situations where the boss doesn't disappear and cleanses DoTs, but you e.g. have to swap targets the DoT would still deal damage while you're not in a situations to use Surprise Attack on it at all.

---

So in conclusion and in my personal opinion. I think 1.5x is a decent place for DoTs. The bigger issue is that not all DoTs hit that mark as far as I could tell from limited testing so far, e.g. Soul Splitting Trap's total damage per cast was less than a spammable.

I strongly disagree with the notion that DoTs "need to be significantly stronger". You also mentioned opportunity cost, but in my opinion the biggest resource in ESO is global cooldowns because stamina/magicka sustain is pretty much no issue at all. If it would be you would still want to look at total damage per cast vs cost of a cast to get damage per resource. Which would help you to cut out abilities that don't perform well given those constraints.

(Sorry if this post is quite all over the place, only had time to write a bit here and there and not in one session.)

LiquidPony

muh wrote: »

Only scrolled through the first two pages, so I apologize if it has been mentioned already. Edit: Just saw that jypcy mentioned damage per GCD already, on page two even....

@LiquidPony
You basically compare 9 Surprise Attacks versus 1 Rending Slashes which certainly paints a picture that supports your case, but because of that your analysis and conclusion "missed the mark" in my opinion.

If we just look at your Test 5 (no CP investment in DoTs):
A single cast of Surprise Attack deals on average 14672
A single cast of Rending Slashes deals 12125 (DoT) + 2x 4444 (direct) damage for a total of 21013
So a single cast of Rending Slashes deals ~43% more damage than Surprise Attacks.

Given that we have a limited amount of global cooldowns in a fight, what would you rather use, an ability that deals 21013 damage or one that deals 14672?

If we assume a fight length of 60 seconds and that we're only using Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes the second it falls off. That gives us 6 casts of full duration Rending Slashes, given the values above, we would deal 918366 damage versus only Surprise Attacks 880320 damage. Ignoring light attacks.

That's a difference of 38064 damage or 38064/14672 = 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks in the same amount of time.

If we would assume that Poison Injection deals the exact same amount as Rending Slashes, we would look at another 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks. If we also assume Soul Trap and Trap Beast would (assume a 10 second duration for simplicity) deal the exact amount as Rending Slahes we would look at another 5.18 extra Surprise Attacks over the 60 second period for a total of 10.36 extra Surprise Attacks.

So in 60 seconds with just those 4 DoTs we would deal the same amount of damage we would deal in about 70 seconds of pure Surprise Attack spam.

With the current state on PTS, the gap between someone who struggles to keep up DoTs and someone who has almost 100% uptime on every DoT on their bar is lower than prior to Dragonhold, but there is still a difference and someone who min/maxes their performance in PvE will definitely want to run a couple DoTs.

I'm not into PvP, but I'd defnitely want to run a couple DoTs to increase pressure while I attack with direct damage abilities in PvP as well.

(Also, your light attack damage from Test 4 to Test 5 seems off skewing results in favour of Test 4.)

---

So what would've been much more informative and would safe me some work on PTS later this week, would have been using a single Surprise Attack and a single cast of pretty much every DoT you would want to run on your bar. See which of those DoTs land above Surprise Attack and are by that metric better than casting a Surprise Attack in that global cooldown and which are not. Obviously the decision to cast a DoT in every given moment depends on whether or not it is already running and if it is likely it will run its entire duration. If it's already running or wouldn't run it's entire duration -> Surprise Attack.

In your original conclusion you also touched slotting another ability with a passive increase instead.
If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013.

You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.
DoTs also stick to a target, so in situations where the boss doesn't disappear and cleanses DoTs, but you e.g. have to swap targets the DoT would still deal damage while you're not in a situations to use Surprise Attack on it at all.

---

So in conclusion and in my personal opinion. I think 1.5x is a decent place for DoTs. The bigger issue is that not all DoTs hit that mark as far as I could tell from limited testing so far, e.g. Soul Splitting Trap's total damage per cast was less than a spammable.

I strongly disagree with the notion that DoTs "need to be significantly stronger". You also mentioned opportunity cost, but in my opinion the biggest resource in ESO is global cooldowns because stamina/magicka sustain is pretty much no issue at all. If it would be you would still want to look at total damage per cast vs cost of a cast to get damage per resource. Which would help you to cut out abilities that don't perform well given those constraints.

(Sorry if this post is quite all over the place, only had time to write a bit here and there and not in one session.)

@muh

I think you're making the same mistake ZOS apparently made. You're looking at the damage of a DoT over its duration in a vacuum compared to the damage of casting a spammable during that GCD. This doesn't actually consider all of the variables.

You're brushing aside opportunity cost as if it doesn't matter, but it does.

You say:

If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013

... but that encapsulates about 1% of the point. You're not only applying that passive damage increase to the single cast of the spammable. You have to apply that passive damage increase to all damage.

So let's say you've got a DPS setup and you're doing 80k DPS on a 21m dummy with Rending Slashes included, and Rending Slashes is doing 5k DPS (which is generous at this point but we'll roll with it because it's a nice round number).

Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).

So we remove Rending Slashes, and assuming we literally just do nothing in the GCD where it was being used, we've still got +2,250 DPS just from the 3% passive DPS increase (0.03 * 75,000).

Then factor in that you're actually going to put those GCDs to use. Let's say you cast Rending Slashes 20 times in the 80k parse, and you replace 17 of those with Surprise Attacks that hit for 33k and 3 of those with Killer's Blades that hit for 88k (and these are actual average values for those skills taken from 21m parses I've done on PTS). That's ~3k DPS (17 * 33,000 + 3 * 88,000) / (21,000,000 / 80,000).

In total, our passive DPS gain of +2260 and our active DPS gain of +3000 exceed the total DPS added by Rending Slashes.

So it's not worth using.

And this is in a pretty favorable case for Rending Slashes, because Surprise Attack has minimal additional DPS utility in a raid buffed parse. Consider alternatives like Wrecking Blow, where you'd also have to consider a 40% damage increase to ~15 additional Light Attacks, or Cutting Dive where you've got the stacking bleed DoT to factor, or Biting Jabs and its Burning Light procs.

Beyond that, it is IMO utterly ridiculous that we're at the point where we literally have to quibble about whether maybe incorporating standard DoTs like Rending Slashes, Carve, and Poison Injection in a build is even worth doing at all. It shouldn't even be a question. Stacking up DoTs and adding complexity to a rotation should have a noticeable positive impact on DPS and it currently does not.

BattleAxe

The biggest problems dots had was the direct counter hots more specifically vigor were nerfed due to players building specifically to have overtuned vigor tooltips had vigor gone live under the original intended goal the dot issue in pvp wouldn’t have been bad. In pve the problem became so many dots and not enough spammable skills so people simply went with dots. The simplest solution the combat team could have went with is instead of nerfing all dots bring more options so spammables may be more appealing. This can be achieved a multitude of ways much lower costs on spammables add utility to spammables such as empower or the devs new favorite tool stacking mechanics on skills. This way it’s a choice of dot rotations or rotations with minimal dots and a lot of utility.

muh

LiquidPony wrote: »

muh wrote: »

Only scrolled through the first two pages, so I apologize if it has been mentioned already. Edit: Just saw that jypcy mentioned damage per GCD already, on page two even....

@LiquidPony
You basically compare 9 Surprise Attacks versus 1 Rending Slashes which certainly paints a picture that supports your case, but because of that your analysis and conclusion "missed the mark" in my opinion.

If we just look at your Test 5 (no CP investment in DoTs):
A single cast of Surprise Attack deals on average 14672
A single cast of Rending Slashes deals 12125 (DoT) + 2x 4444 (direct) damage for a total of 21013
So a single cast of Rending Slashes deals ~43% more damage than Surprise Attacks.

Given that we have a limited amount of global cooldowns in a fight, what would you rather use, an ability that deals 21013 damage or one that deals 14672?

If we assume a fight length of 60 seconds and that we're only using Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes the second it falls off. That gives us 6 casts of full duration Rending Slashes, given the values above, we would deal 918366 damage versus only Surprise Attacks 880320 damage. Ignoring light attacks.

That's a difference of 38064 damage or 38064/14672 = 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks in the same amount of time.

If we would assume that Poison Injection deals the exact same amount as Rending Slashes, we would look at another 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks. If we also assume Soul Trap and Trap Beast would (assume a 10 second duration for simplicity) deal the exact amount as Rending Slahes we would look at another 5.18 extra Surprise Attacks over the 60 second period for a total of 10.36 extra Surprise Attacks.

So in 60 seconds with just those 4 DoTs we would deal the same amount of damage we would deal in about 70 seconds of pure Surprise Attack spam.

With the current state on PTS, the gap between someone who struggles to keep up DoTs and someone who has almost 100% uptime on every DoT on their bar is lower than prior to Dragonhold, but there is still a difference and someone who min/maxes their performance in PvE will definitely want to run a couple DoTs.

I'm not into PvP, but I'd defnitely want to run a couple DoTs to increase pressure while I attack with direct damage abilities in PvP as well.

(Also, your light attack damage from Test 4 to Test 5 seems off skewing results in favour of Test 4.)

---

So what would've been much more informative and would safe me some work on PTS later this week, would have been using a single Surprise Attack and a single cast of pretty much every DoT you would want to run on your bar. See which of those DoTs land above Surprise Attack and are by that metric better than casting a Surprise Attack in that global cooldown and which are not. Obviously the decision to cast a DoT in every given moment depends on whether or not it is already running and if it is likely it will run its entire duration. If it's already running or wouldn't run it's entire duration -> Surprise Attack.

In your original conclusion you also touched slotting another ability with a passive increase instead.
If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013.

You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.
DoTs also stick to a target, so in situations where the boss doesn't disappear and cleanses DoTs, but you e.g. have to swap targets the DoT would still deal damage while you're not in a situations to use Surprise Attack on it at all.

---

So in conclusion and in my personal opinion. I think 1.5x is a decent place for DoTs. The bigger issue is that not all DoTs hit that mark as far as I could tell from limited testing so far, e.g. Soul Splitting Trap's total damage per cast was less than a spammable.

I strongly disagree with the notion that DoTs "need to be significantly stronger". You also mentioned opportunity cost, but in my opinion the biggest resource in ESO is global cooldowns because stamina/magicka sustain is pretty much no issue at all. If it would be you would still want to look at total damage per cast vs cost of a cast to get damage per resource. Which would help you to cut out abilities that don't perform well given those constraints.

(Sorry if this post is quite all over the place, only had time to write a bit here and there and not in one session.)

@muh

I think you're making the same mistake ZOS apparently made. You're looking at the damage of a DoT over its duration in a vacuum compared to the damage of casting a spammable during that GCD. This doesn't actually consider all of the variables.

You're brushing aside opportunity cost as if it doesn't matter, but it does.

You say:

If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013

... but that encapsulates about 1% of the point. You're not only applying that passive damage increase to the single cast of the spammable. You have to apply that passive damage increase to all damage.

So let's say you've got a DPS setup and you're doing 80k DPS on a 21m dummy with Rending Slashes included, and Rending Slashes is doing 5k DPS (which is generous at this point but we'll roll with it because it's a nice round number).

Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).

So we remove Rending Slashes, and assuming we literally just do nothing in the GCD where it was being used, we've still got +2,250 DPS just from the 3% passive DPS increase (0.03 * 75,000).

Then factor in that you're actually going to put those GCDs to use. Let's say you cast Rending Slashes 20 times in the 80k parse, and you replace 17 of those with Surprise Attacks that hit for 33k and 3 of those with Killer's Blades that hit for 88k (and these are actual average values for those skills taken from 21m parses I've done on PTS). That's ~3k DPS (17 * 33,000 + 3 * 88,000) / (21,000,000 / 80,000).

In total, our passive DPS gain of +2260 and our active DPS gain of +3000 exceed the total DPS added by Rending Slashes.

So it's not worth using.

And this is in a pretty favorable case for Rending Slashes, because Surprise Attack has minimal additional DPS utility in a raid buffed parse. Consider alternatives like Wrecking Blow, where you'd also have to consider a 40% damage increase to ~15 additional Light Attacks, or Cutting Dive where you've got the stacking bleed DoT to factor, or Biting Jabs and its Burning Light procs.

Beyond that, it is IMO utterly ridiculous that we're at the point where we literally have to quibble about whether maybe incorporating standard DoTs like Rending Slashes, Carve, and Poison Injection in a build is even worth doing at all. It shouldn't even be a question. Stacking up DoTs and adding complexity to a rotation should have a noticeable positive impact on DPS and it currently does not.

You do know that a Fighter's Guild ability gives 3% increased weapon damage, which is not a 3% damage increase, right?
It's more like a 1.8% increase. At which point you would deal less damage without Rending Slashes with the values given in your example.

Yes, I can agree that it is indeed a fairly small difference, quite possibly too small. Still I wouldn't want to see them go much higher than 1.75x, for a 30% nerf compared to current live. It should be rewarding to opt into DoTs, but there is no reason that the difference between a DoT rotation and spammable rotation has to be 10k dps.

You, for the most part, seem to be focused on situations where you have perfect uptime on an enemy and never have to disengage to deal with mechanics. For example, running tombs on Lokkestiiz. Spammables won't deal any damage while you're frozen compared to more DoTs that continue to tick.

If all you care about is the portion of the PvE community that have Godslayer potential or have completed Godslayer, sure they're able to skip quite a few more mechanics and have higher uptime on the boss itself. Most other people however won't have that luxury and to stay with Lokkestiiz, might even opt to kill the Frost Atronachs that spawn during ground phase before pushing Lokkestiiz into flight phase.

There are situations where either setup can perform better, but if both are about equal with a little edge towards DoTs, I don't think that's a bad situation at all.

And currently it would actually be a decision to use one setup over the other, because both perform about equal. If it gets changed to heavily favour DoTs again that decision would once again be made for you.

WrathOfInnos

muh wrote: »

LiquidPony wrote: »

muh wrote: »

Only scrolled through the first two pages, so I apologize if it has been mentioned already. Edit: Just saw that jypcy mentioned damage per GCD already, on page two even....

@LiquidPony
You basically compare 9 Surprise Attacks versus 1 Rending Slashes which certainly paints a picture that supports your case, but because of that your analysis and conclusion "missed the mark" in my opinion.

If we just look at your Test 5 (no CP investment in DoTs):
A single cast of Surprise Attack deals on average 14672
A single cast of Rending Slashes deals 12125 (DoT) + 2x 4444 (direct) damage for a total of 21013
So a single cast of Rending Slashes deals ~43% more damage than Surprise Attacks.

Given that we have a limited amount of global cooldowns in a fight, what would you rather use, an ability that deals 21013 damage or one that deals 14672?

If we assume a fight length of 60 seconds and that we're only using Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes the second it falls off. That gives us 6 casts of full duration Rending Slashes, given the values above, we would deal 918366 damage versus only Surprise Attacks 880320 damage. Ignoring light attacks.

That's a difference of 38064 damage or 38064/14672 = 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks in the same amount of time.

If we would assume that Poison Injection deals the exact same amount as Rending Slashes, we would look at another 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks. If we also assume Soul Trap and Trap Beast would (assume a 10 second duration for simplicity) deal the exact amount as Rending Slahes we would look at another 5.18 extra Surprise Attacks over the 60 second period for a total of 10.36 extra Surprise Attacks.

So in 60 seconds with just those 4 DoTs we would deal the same amount of damage we would deal in about 70 seconds of pure Surprise Attack spam.

With the current state on PTS, the gap between someone who struggles to keep up DoTs and someone who has almost 100% uptime on every DoT on their bar is lower than prior to Dragonhold, but there is still a difference and someone who min/maxes their performance in PvE will definitely want to run a couple DoTs.

I'm not into PvP, but I'd defnitely want to run a couple DoTs to increase pressure while I attack with direct damage abilities in PvP as well.

(Also, your light attack damage from Test 4 to Test 5 seems off skewing results in favour of Test 4.)

---

So what would've been much more informative and would safe me some work on PTS later this week, would have been using a single Surprise Attack and a single cast of pretty much every DoT you would want to run on your bar. See which of those DoTs land above Surprise Attack and are by that metric better than casting a Surprise Attack in that global cooldown and which are not. Obviously the decision to cast a DoT in every given moment depends on whether or not it is already running and if it is likely it will run its entire duration. If it's already running or wouldn't run it's entire duration -> Surprise Attack.

In your original conclusion you also touched slotting another ability with a passive increase instead.
If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013.

You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.
DoTs also stick to a target, so in situations where the boss doesn't disappear and cleanses DoTs, but you e.g. have to swap targets the DoT would still deal damage while you're not in a situations to use Surprise Attack on it at all.

---

So in conclusion and in my personal opinion. I think 1.5x is a decent place for DoTs. The bigger issue is that not all DoTs hit that mark as far as I could tell from limited testing so far, e.g. Soul Splitting Trap's total damage per cast was less than a spammable.

I strongly disagree with the notion that DoTs "need to be significantly stronger". You also mentioned opportunity cost, but in my opinion the biggest resource in ESO is global cooldowns because stamina/magicka sustain is pretty much no issue at all. If it would be you would still want to look at total damage per cast vs cost of a cast to get damage per resource. Which would help you to cut out abilities that don't perform well given those constraints.

(Sorry if this post is quite all over the place, only had time to write a bit here and there and not in one session.)

@muh

I think you're making the same mistake ZOS apparently made. You're looking at the damage of a DoT over its duration in a vacuum compared to the damage of casting a spammable during that GCD. This doesn't actually consider all of the variables.

You're brushing aside opportunity cost as if it doesn't matter, but it does.

You say:

If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013

... but that encapsulates about 1% of the point. You're not only applying that passive damage increase to the single cast of the spammable. You have to apply that passive damage increase to all damage.

So let's say you've got a DPS setup and you're doing 80k DPS on a 21m dummy with Rending Slashes included, and Rending Slashes is doing 5k DPS (which is generous at this point but we'll roll with it because it's a nice round number).

Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).

So we remove Rending Slashes, and assuming we literally just do nothing in the GCD where it was being used, we've still got +2,250 DPS just from the 3% passive DPS increase (0.03 * 75,000).

Then factor in that you're actually going to put those GCDs to use. Let's say you cast Rending Slashes 20 times in the 80k parse, and you replace 17 of those with Surprise Attacks that hit for 33k and 3 of those with Killer's Blades that hit for 88k (and these are actual average values for those skills taken from 21m parses I've done on PTS). That's ~3k DPS (17 * 33,000 + 3 * 88,000) / (21,000,000 / 80,000).

In total, our passive DPS gain of +2260 and our active DPS gain of +3000 exceed the total DPS added by Rending Slashes.

So it's not worth using.

And this is in a pretty favorable case for Rending Slashes, because Surprise Attack has minimal additional DPS utility in a raid buffed parse. Consider alternatives like Wrecking Blow, where you'd also have to consider a 40% damage increase to ~15 additional Light Attacks, or Cutting Dive where you've got the stacking bleed DoT to factor, or Biting Jabs and its Burning Light procs.

Beyond that, it is IMO utterly ridiculous that we're at the point where we literally have to quibble about whether maybe incorporating standard DoTs like Rending Slashes, Carve, and Poison Injection in a build is even worth doing at all. It shouldn't even be a question. Stacking up DoTs and adding complexity to a rotation should have a noticeable positive impact on DPS and it currently does not.

You do know that a Fighter's Guild ability gives 3% increased weapon damage, which is not a 3% damage increase, right?
It's more like a 1.8% increase. At which point you would deal less damage without Rending Slashes with the values given in your example.

Yes, I can agree that it is indeed a fairly small difference, quite possibly too small. Still I wouldn't want to see them go much higher than 1.75x, for a 30% nerf compared to current live. It should be rewarding to opt into DoTs, but there is no reason that the difference between a DoT rotation and spammable rotation has to be 10k dps.

You, for the most part, seem to be focused on situations where you have perfect uptime on an enemy and never have to disengage to deal with mechanics. For example, running tombs on Lokkestiiz. Spammables won't deal any damage while you're frozen compared to more DoTs that continue to tick.

If all you care about is the portion of the PvE community that have Godslayer potential or have completed Godslayer, sure they're able to skip quite a few more mechanics and have higher uptime on the boss itself. Most other people however won't have that luxury and to stay with Lokkestiiz, might even opt to kill the Frost Atronachs that spawn during ground phase before pushing Lokkestiiz into flight phase.

There are situations where either setup can perform better, but if both are about equal with a little edge towards DoTs, I don't think that's a bad situation at all.

And currently it would actually be a decision to use one setup over the other, because both perform about equal. If it gets changed to heavily favour DoTs again that decision would once again be made for you.

DoT rotations are more affected by mechanics than spammable rotations. If you are running 10 different 10s DoTs and spend 5s in one of Lokke’s Ice Cages you are going to lose 5s uptime on every one of those DoTs. If you are using a spammable rotation with only 2-3 DoTs then it’s easy to time your rotation so that your DoTs never fall off and you only miss out on 5 spammable casts (less impactful).

Also, on the note of Sunspire dragons, every time they fly away you lose the remaining damage of every DoT applied. Every time the dragon lands again, DoT rotations take several seconds to ramp up to their maximum damage again. Spammable rotations lose less then the enemy becomes invulnerable, and are back up to their maximum DPS almost instantly when it returns.

LiquidPony

muh wrote: »

LiquidPony wrote: »

muh wrote: »

Only scrolled through the first two pages, so I apologize if it has been mentioned already. Edit: Just saw that jypcy mentioned damage per GCD already, on page two even....

@LiquidPony
You basically compare 9 Surprise Attacks versus 1 Rending Slashes which certainly paints a picture that supports your case, but because of that your analysis and conclusion "missed the mark" in my opinion.

If we just look at your Test 5 (no CP investment in DoTs):
A single cast of Surprise Attack deals on average 14672
A single cast of Rending Slashes deals 12125 (DoT) + 2x 4444 (direct) damage for a total of 21013
So a single cast of Rending Slashes deals ~43% more damage than Surprise Attacks.

Given that we have a limited amount of global cooldowns in a fight, what would you rather use, an ability that deals 21013 damage or one that deals 14672?

If we assume a fight length of 60 seconds and that we're only using Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes the second it falls off. That gives us 6 casts of full duration Rending Slashes, given the values above, we would deal 918366 damage versus only Surprise Attacks 880320 damage. Ignoring light attacks.

That's a difference of 38064 damage or 38064/14672 = 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks in the same amount of time.

If we would assume that Poison Injection deals the exact same amount as Rending Slashes, we would look at another 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks. If we also assume Soul Trap and Trap Beast would (assume a 10 second duration for simplicity) deal the exact amount as Rending Slahes we would look at another 5.18 extra Surprise Attacks over the 60 second period for a total of 10.36 extra Surprise Attacks.

So in 60 seconds with just those 4 DoTs we would deal the same amount of damage we would deal in about 70 seconds of pure Surprise Attack spam.

With the current state on PTS, the gap between someone who struggles to keep up DoTs and someone who has almost 100% uptime on every DoT on their bar is lower than prior to Dragonhold, but there is still a difference and someone who min/maxes their performance in PvE will definitely want to run a couple DoTs.

I'm not into PvP, but I'd defnitely want to run a couple DoTs to increase pressure while I attack with direct damage abilities in PvP as well.

(Also, your light attack damage from Test 4 to Test 5 seems off skewing results in favour of Test 4.)

---

So what would've been much more informative and would safe me some work on PTS later this week, would have been using a single Surprise Attack and a single cast of pretty much every DoT you would want to run on your bar. See which of those DoTs land above Surprise Attack and are by that metric better than casting a Surprise Attack in that global cooldown and which are not. Obviously the decision to cast a DoT in every given moment depends on whether or not it is already running and if it is likely it will run its entire duration. If it's already running or wouldn't run it's entire duration -> Surprise Attack.

In your original conclusion you also touched slotting another ability with a passive increase instead.
If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013.

You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.
DoTs also stick to a target, so in situations where the boss doesn't disappear and cleanses DoTs, but you e.g. have to swap targets the DoT would still deal damage while you're not in a situations to use Surprise Attack on it at all.

---

So in conclusion and in my personal opinion. I think 1.5x is a decent place for DoTs. The bigger issue is that not all DoTs hit that mark as far as I could tell from limited testing so far, e.g. Soul Splitting Trap's total damage per cast was less than a spammable.

I strongly disagree with the notion that DoTs "need to be significantly stronger". You also mentioned opportunity cost, but in my opinion the biggest resource in ESO is global cooldowns because stamina/magicka sustain is pretty much no issue at all. If it would be you would still want to look at total damage per cast vs cost of a cast to get damage per resource. Which would help you to cut out abilities that don't perform well given those constraints.

(Sorry if this post is quite all over the place, only had time to write a bit here and there and not in one session.)

@muh

I think you're making the same mistake ZOS apparently made. You're looking at the damage of a DoT over its duration in a vacuum compared to the damage of casting a spammable during that GCD. This doesn't actually consider all of the variables.

You're brushing aside opportunity cost as if it doesn't matter, but it does.

You say:

If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013

... but that encapsulates about 1% of the point. You're not only applying that passive damage increase to the single cast of the spammable. You have to apply that passive damage increase to all damage.

So let's say you've got a DPS setup and you're doing 80k DPS on a 21m dummy with Rending Slashes included, and Rending Slashes is doing 5k DPS (which is generous at this point but we'll roll with it because it's a nice round number).

Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).

So we remove Rending Slashes, and assuming we literally just do nothing in the GCD where it was being used, we've still got +2,250 DPS just from the 3% passive DPS increase (0.03 * 75,000).

Then factor in that you're actually going to put those GCDs to use. Let's say you cast Rending Slashes 20 times in the 80k parse, and you replace 17 of those with Surprise Attacks that hit for 33k and 3 of those with Killer's Blades that hit for 88k (and these are actual average values for those skills taken from 21m parses I've done on PTS). That's ~3k DPS (17 * 33,000 + 3 * 88,000) / (21,000,000 / 80,000).

In total, our passive DPS gain of +2260 and our active DPS gain of +3000 exceed the total DPS added by Rending Slashes.

So it's not worth using.

And this is in a pretty favorable case for Rending Slashes, because Surprise Attack has minimal additional DPS utility in a raid buffed parse. Consider alternatives like Wrecking Blow, where you'd also have to consider a 40% damage increase to ~15 additional Light Attacks, or Cutting Dive where you've got the stacking bleed DoT to factor, or Biting Jabs and its Burning Light procs.

Beyond that, it is IMO utterly ridiculous that we're at the point where we literally have to quibble about whether maybe incorporating standard DoTs like Rending Slashes, Carve, and Poison Injection in a build is even worth doing at all. It shouldn't even be a question. Stacking up DoTs and adding complexity to a rotation should have a noticeable positive impact on DPS and it currently does not.

You do know that a Fighter's Guild ability gives 3% increased weapon damage, which is not a 3% damage increase, right?
It's more like a 1.8% increase. At which point you would deal less damage without Rending Slashes with the values given in your example.

Yes, I can agree that it is indeed a fairly small difference, quite possibly too small. Still I wouldn't want to see them go much higher than 1.75x, for a 30% nerf compared to current live. It should be rewarding to opt into DoTs, but there is no reason that the difference between a DoT rotation and spammable rotation has to be 10k dps.

You, for the most part, seem to be focused on situations where you have perfect uptime on an enemy and never have to disengage to deal with mechanics. For example, running tombs on Lokkestiiz. Spammables won't deal any damage while you're frozen compared to more DoTs that continue to tick.

If all you care about is the portion of the PvE community that have Godslayer potential or have completed Godslayer, sure they're able to skip quite a few more mechanics and have higher uptime on the boss itself. Most other people however won't have that luxury and to stay with Lokkestiiz, might even opt to kill the Frost Atronachs that spawn during ground phase before pushing Lokkestiiz into flight phase.

There are situations where either setup can perform better, but if both are about equal with a little edge towards DoTs, I don't think that's a bad situation at all.

And currently it would actually be a decision to use one setup over the other, because both perform about equal. If it gets changed to heavily favour DoTs again that decision would once again be made for you.

@muh

Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).

But I have to disagree with the general idea.

If we're at the point where ground DoT + Minor Force + spammable gets you to 95%+ of the DPS ceiling, the game has been dumbed down to a parody of itself.

Like I keep saying, DoT values in Elsweyr were just fine. The *new* DoTs can eat nerfs, whatever, but "classic" DoTs should be stronger than they are now.

And to the point about disengaging to deal with mechanics, the opposite is also true. Using Lokkestiiz again as an example, sure, if you're running prisons then you'll have times where you won't be in spammable range (for most builds) ... but you'll have an equal number of times where Lokke is going to fly off and your DoTs are going to cease ticking midway through their duration. In those cases, you're going to skip your DoT casts because you're better off just hitting a spammable for the last ~6 seconds or so before he takes off, so you're not going to get near 100% practical uptime on DoTs anyway.

And this is just the case for Rending Slashes and PI, which are *strong* comparatively. Stuff like Consuming Trap and Growing Swarm are laughably weak (the DoTs are the same strength but they lack the DD component).

muh

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

Also, on the note of Sunspire dragons, every time they fly away you lose the remaining damage of every DoT applied.

LiquidPony wrote: »

... but you'll have an equal number of times where Lokke is going to fly off and your DoTs are going to cease ticking midway through their duration. In those cases, you're going to skip your DoT casts because you're better off just hitting a spammable for the last ~6 seconds or so before he takes off, so you're not going to get near 100% practical uptime on DoTs anyway.

Yes?

muh wrote: »

You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.

---

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

DoT rotations are more affected by mechanics than spammable rotations. If you are running 10 different 10s DoTs and spend 5s in one of Lokke’s Ice Cages you are going to lose 5s uptime on every one of those DoTs. If you are using a spammable rotation with only 2-3 DoTs then it’s easy to time your rotation so that your DoTs never fall off and you only miss out on 5 spammable casts (less impactful).

Also, on the note of Sunspire dragons, every time they fly away you lose the remaining damage of every DoT applied. Every time the dragon lands again, DoT rotations take several seconds to ramp up to their maximum damage again. Spammable rotations lose less then the enemy becomes invulnerable, and are back up to their maximum DPS almost instantly when it returns.

I never said either extreme is good (or bad for that matter). I've not been talking about 10 DoT rotations anywhere.

From what LiquidPony communicated so far pretty much no DoT is worth running right now. They basically called Rending Slashes and PI trash, so they'd not run those. I think it would be fair to assume that their setup wouldn't involve much more than Barbed Trap and Endless Hail, since ... PI is hot garbage and that excludes the use of Master's Bow obviously.

When I was talking about a DoT rotation I was primarily talking about a setup similar to what you'd run on live right now and even with 3-5 DoTs you should be able to keep almost 100% uptime during tombs.

And yes, DoT rotations have a ramp up time, but also a higher sustained DPS after DoTs are applied, and I already mentioned that DoTs should have a slight edge over spammable focused rotations, just not as huge a gap as it is on live right now.

LiquidPony wrote: »

Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).

But I have to disagree with the general idea.

If we're at the point where ground DoT + Minor Force + spammable gets you to 95%+ of the DPS ceiling, the game has been dumbed down to a parody of itself.

I already wrote that I agree that the margin might be too small, sorry I distracted you with my obviously marked jab at your argument.

Edit: Just to increase the level here.
To me it doesn't really matter much if I press 123451234 and call it my rotation or if I press 123111111. ESO compared to almost every other games has only very limited rotational complexity, but with weaving and weapon swaps it's more mechanically challenging and that is mostly unaffected by which abilities you use.

LiquidPony wrote: »

And this is just the case for Rending Slashes and PI, which are *strong* comparatively. Stuff like Consuming Trap and Growing Swarm are laughably weak (the DoTs are the same strength but they lack the DD component).

Which is the issue I was referring to going into this discussion.

It seems like they looked at abilities like Rending Slashes and Poison Injection and made their total damage per cast about 1.5x a spammable, made a blanket pass on every ability with their newly chosen adjustment, 20% this time around, and called it a day.

I think the DoT component should deal 1.5x of a spammable and if it has a direct damage component to it, that's on top, not part of it. That would mean abilities like Consuming Trap and Growing Swarm actually perform at a level where they are options.

LiquidPony

muh wrote: »

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

Also, on the note of Sunspire dragons, every time they fly away you lose the remaining damage of every DoT applied.

LiquidPony wrote: »

... but you'll have an equal number of times where Lokke is going to fly off and your DoTs are going to cease ticking midway through their duration. In those cases, you're going to skip your DoT casts because you're better off just hitting a spammable for the last ~6 seconds or so before he takes off, so you're not going to get near 100% practical uptime on DoTs anyway.

Yes?

muh wrote: »

You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.

---

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

DoT rotations are more affected by mechanics than spammable rotations. If you are running 10 different 10s DoTs and spend 5s in one of Lokke’s Ice Cages you are going to lose 5s uptime on every one of those DoTs. If you are using a spammable rotation with only 2-3 DoTs then it’s easy to time your rotation so that your DoTs never fall off and you only miss out on 5 spammable casts (less impactful).

Also, on the note of Sunspire dragons, every time they fly away you lose the remaining damage of every DoT applied. Every time the dragon lands again, DoT rotations take several seconds to ramp up to their maximum damage again. Spammable rotations lose less then the enemy becomes invulnerable, and are back up to their maximum DPS almost instantly when it returns.

I never said either extreme is good (or bad for that matter). I've not been talking about 10 DoT rotations anywhere.

From what LiquidPony communicated so far pretty much no DoT is worth running right now. They basically called Rending Slashes and PI trash, so they'd not run those. I think it would be fair to assume that their setup wouldn't involve much more than Barbed Trap and Endless Hail, since ... PI is hot garbage and that excludes the use of Master's Bow obviously.

When I was talking about a DoT rotation I was primarily talking about a setup similar to what you'd run on live right now and even with 3-5 DoTs you should be able to keep almost 100% uptime during tombs.

And yes, DoT rotations have a ramp up time, but also a higher sustained DPS after DoTs are applied, and I already mentioned that DoTs should have a slight edge over spammable focused rotations, just not as huge a gap as it is on live right now.

LiquidPony wrote: »

Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).

But I have to disagree with the general idea.

If we're at the point where ground DoT + Minor Force + spammable gets you to 95%+ of the DPS ceiling, the game has been dumbed down to a parody of itself.

I already wrote that I agree that the margin might be too small, sorry I distracted you with my obviously marked jab at your argument.

Edit: Just to increase the level here.
To me it doesn't really matter much if I press 123451234 and call it my rotation or if I press 123111111. ESO compared to almost every other games has only very limited rotational complexity, but with weaving and weapon swaps it's more mechanically challenging and that is mostly unaffected by which abilities you use.

LiquidPony wrote: »

And this is just the case for Rending Slashes and PI, which are *strong* comparatively. Stuff like Consuming Trap and Growing Swarm are laughably weak (the DoTs are the same strength but they lack the DD component).

Which is the issue I was referring to going into this discussion.

It seems like they looked at abilities like Rending Slashes and Poison Injection and made their total damage per cast about 1.5x a spammable, made a blanket pass on every ability with their newly chosen adjustment, 20% this time around, and called it a day.

I think the DoT component should deal 1.5x of a spammable and if it has a direct damage component to it, that's on top, not part of it. That would mean abilities like Consuming Trap and Growing Swarm actually perform at a level where they are options.

I didn't say that no DoT is worth running. They are trash, though.

Parses are hilarious. LA + Relequen + Spammable/Execute + passive procs (poisons, monster sets, axe bleeds, status effects, etc.) is like ... 70% of your total DPS.

However, Rending Slashes? I don't know, doesn't look like it's worth running to me. If it is, only by a hair. It's honestly hard to tell. I don't see any DPS difference when I add it.

Poison Injection? Barely. And in no small part *because* you want to enable the Master's Bow bonus.

Consuming Trap? Well, only as a relief from spending stamina for sustain purposes. And of course, in practice, most people run Splitting Trap in real content ... and that is definitely not worth running in a single-target parse or fight.

Carve? Too expensive, don't think so.

Growing Swarm? Doesn't look like it to me. However, this does have some actual utility depending on group comp via Minor Vuln.

IMO another +20% (at minimum) on all of the above DoTs, maybe excepting Soul Trap, would put them in a decent place, where adding them into your rotation gives you an immediately noticeable increase in DPS.

SirMewser

The game has been out for how long and they are still learning to measure DoT strength just before 2020 rolls?
This is actually happening?

Feel like I'm playing a beta game still.

Nerhesi

SirMewser wrote: »

The game has been out for how long and they are still learning to measure DoT strength just before 2020 rolls?
This is actually happening?

Feel like I'm playing a beta game still.

Yup. The problem is the consequence of creating a game where there is only viable build across classes: The I can burstDPS-cc-sustain indefinitely. In creating the "play your way" they made everyone a healer/attrition-immune/DPS class.

Now you've got a player base that is used to this busted-as-all-hell formula, that is complaining the second you introduces "other ways to play".

Realization is slowly dawning that having meaningful options and variety, by necessity, requires "roles".

Faulgor

LiquidPony wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

MartiniDaniels wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

LiquidPony wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.

No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.

I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.

Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.

What do you mean "nobody objected"? People have been complaining about useless skills and morphs since the game launched, just like they've been complaining about all the useless gear that needs to be re-worked. "Reverting them to previous state" would be the most healthy move for who exactly? You? Not for me.

Just because the forums were full of crying about the buffed DOTs for a few weeks doesn't mean that everyone feels that way about them. Plenty of people are fine with the DOTs, even though I think they could be toned down a little without harm to anybody. A 2X spammable multiplier would be fine.

And what was the end result of complaining about "useless skills"?

More useless skills.

If DoTs are significantly more powerful than spammables (as they should be), and suddenly you've got 6-8+ DoTs that all do the same amount of damage, what's obviously going to happen? Everyone's going to run nothing but DoTs.

This is a real (and abundantly obvious) problem that apparently the people complaining about "useless skills", and ZOS, weren't able to foresee.

But here we are.

The game was in a much better state in Elsweyr than in Scalebreaker or on the PTS right now.

I'm a bit puzzled by this. Making skills so bad they are unattractive to use can't be an acceptable solution for developers or players. When having more useful skills in the game is detrimental to the gameplay, something else is fundamentally broken.
But I don't think it is, because you talk about it yourself in the OP: There's always an opportunity cost. Even if there were 100 amazing DoTs in the game, you still only have 10 skill slots, and can't cast an unlimited number due to global cooldown. Every skill is competing for a slot on your bar and in your rotation.

That means, slotting skills with passive buffs instead of DoTs seem to be the intended trade-off for limiting DoT dominance.

Admittedly I don't have the numbers (PTS is laggy as hell for me), but in theory what you laid out in the OP should allow for a choice between dedicated direct damage builds (with a CP-focus in Master-at-Arms, passive stat boosts and possibly 1-2 class DoTs on their skill bar) and dedicated DoT builds (with a CP-focus in Thaumaturge and as many DoTs as they can fit on their skill bar). Personally, that would seem like a reasonable choice to me.

What we probably won't get back to are builds that can slot all available DoTs and still rotate a spammable for all the reasons you laid out. Focusing on one or the other just seems more viable - hybrids really can't catch a break.

But if that's ZOS' intent, there are some issues I foresee without even checking the actual numbers.

1. Not all classes have DoTs with built-in passives. Specifically looking at stamina, Sorcerers don't make a huge trade-off when slotting Hurricane and Bound Armor instead of a Fighter Guild ability (2% from Expert Mage vs 3%), so they can keep using their class DoTs even in spammable rotations. Same thing for Wardens and their new stam Swarm. Nightblades on the other hand don't even have a class DoT, which means their rotations are going to be especially lackluster. DoTs without passives, like Poison Injection, Rending Slashes and Soul Trap, can't cut it without focusing on DoTs exclusively (if even), and NBs don't have anything also to use in their stead. So it's spammable or bust for them. For that reason, Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes might actually be a poor choice of comparison - ZOS doesn't intend for those skills to compete against each other. Cliff Racer / Swarm or Stonefist / Venomous Claw might yield more favorable results for (class) DoTs.
2. I have yet to see how this pans out for magicka builds. There is nothing like the Deadly Strike set or vMA daggers for them (even if those are still lackluster).

Instant

Faulgor wrote: »

That means, slotting skills with passive buffs instead of DoTs seem to be the intended trade-off for limiting DoT dominance.

What do you mean?
Should a simple rotation like spammable -> spammable -> spammable -> spammable do the same dps as a complex dynamic rotation with several dots and a spammable as long as you slot skills with passive buffs?

OG_Kaveman

.Nightblades on the other hand don't even have a class DoT,

Dark shade scales with highest stats.

LiquidPony

Faulgor wrote: »

LiquidPony wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

MartiniDaniels wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

LiquidPony wrote: »

Emma_Overload wrote: »

Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.

No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.

I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.

Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.

What do you mean "nobody objected"? People have been complaining about useless skills and morphs since the game launched, just like they've been complaining about all the useless gear that needs to be re-worked. "Reverting them to previous state" would be the most healthy move for who exactly? You? Not for me.

Just because the forums were full of crying about the buffed DOTs for a few weeks doesn't mean that everyone feels that way about them. Plenty of people are fine with the DOTs, even though I think they could be toned down a little without harm to anybody. A 2X spammable multiplier would be fine.

And what was the end result of complaining about "useless skills"?

More useless skills.

If DoTs are significantly more powerful than spammables (as they should be), and suddenly you've got 6-8+ DoTs that all do the same amount of damage, what's obviously going to happen? Everyone's going to run nothing but DoTs.

This is a real (and abundantly obvious) problem that apparently the people complaining about "useless skills", and ZOS, weren't able to foresee.

But here we are.

The game was in a much better state in Elsweyr than in Scalebreaker or on the PTS right now.

I'm a bit puzzled by this. Making skills so bad they are unattractive to use can't be an acceptable solution for developers or players. When having more useful skills in the game is detrimental to the gameplay, something else is fundamentally broken.
But I don't think it is, because you talk about it yourself in the OP: There's always an opportunity cost. Even if there were 100 amazing DoTs in the game, you still only have 10 skill slots, and can't cast an unlimited number due to global cooldown. Every skill is competing for a slot on your bar and in your rotation.

That means, slotting skills with passive buffs instead of DoTs seem to be the intended trade-off for limiting DoT dominance.

Admittedly I don't have the numbers (PTS is laggy as hell for me), but in theory what you laid out in the OP should allow for a choice between dedicated direct damage builds (with a CP-focus in Master-at-Arms, passive stat boosts and possibly 1-2 class DoTs on their skill bar) and dedicated DoT builds (with a CP-focus in Thaumaturge and as many DoTs as they can fit on their skill bar). Personally, that would seem like a reasonable choice to me.

What we probably won't get back to are builds that can slot all available DoTs and still rotate a spammable for all the reasons you laid out. Focusing on one or the other just seems more viable - hybrids really can't catch a break.

But if that's ZOS' intent, there are some issues I foresee without even checking the actual numbers.

1. Not all classes have DoTs with built-in passives. Specifically looking at stamina, Sorcerers don't make a huge trade-off when slotting Hurricane and Bound Armor instead of a Fighter Guild ability (2% from Expert Mage vs 3%), so they can keep using their class DoTs even in spammable rotations. Same thing for Wardens and their new stam Swarm. Nightblades on the other hand don't even have a class DoT, which means their rotations are going to be especially lackluster. DoTs without passives, like Poison Injection, Rending Slashes and Soul Trap, can't cut it without focusing on DoTs exclusively (if even), and NBs don't have anything also to use in their stead. So it's spammable or bust for them. For that reason, Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes might actually be a poor choice of comparison - ZOS doesn't intend for those skills to compete against each other. Cliff Racer / Swarm or Stonefist / Venomous Claw might yield more favorable results for (class) DoTs.
2. I have yet to see how this pans out for magicka builds. There is nothing like the Deadly Strike set or vMA daggers for them (even if those are still lackluster).

Hurricane is worth running. It wasn't adjusted. It hits harder than pretty much any single-target DoT and also has a very long duration. Also, Bound Armaments isn't a DoT so I'm not sure what it has to do with anything.

Growing Swarm is awful on a stamwarden. Given a Healer in group using Fetcher Infection to proc Minor Vuln, there's no reason a stamwarden would run Growing Swarm.

Nightblades have class DoTs ... stamblades will use Dark Shades and magblades have Dark Shades and Crippling Grasp and Twisting Path (although Shades does scale with MaA as far as I recall and the way ZOS has *** upon Twisting Path is hilarious).

As for Stonefist/Venomous Claw, Venomous Claw is still worth running. It took a significant nerf but it was a much stronger DoT to begin with. The issue here is that DK DPS is horrible now. Obviously, because DKs are a DoT-focused class, DK DPS is trash regardless of how you spin it. DoTs are worth running but we're still looking at a ~20k DPS loss on DK builds from what I can see.

Deadly Strike and vMA daggers are largely irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion because they are not going to be used in meta setups.

What we've got now is a massive across the board DPS nerf (the highest stam parses I've seen so far are still ~15% lower than last patch and in many cases it seems to be worse than that) and a lot of really stupid low-skill rotations performing so closely to complex rotations that it's hard to tell the difference.

evoniee

well bleed doesnt get increased by mighty, right?

also it is already good that dot still practically not useless.

WrathOfInnos

Unfortunately this thread is still relevant in 5.2.5, now on live. It should now be obvious to everyone on PC how poorly balanced DoTs are. Any changes planned?

LiquidPony

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

Unfortunately this thread is still relevant in 5.2.5, now on live. It should now be obvious to everyone on PC how poorly balanced DoTs are. Any changes planned?

lol right?

I mean, the best parses I've seen are basically ...

Endless Hail, spam Wrecking Blow
Endless Hail, spam Snipe
Endless Hail, spam Jabs

I honestly can't believe they went live with this. Well, I guess I can believe it, but it's pretty ridiculous.

Urzigurumash

LiquidPony wrote: »

I mean, the best parses I've seen are basically ...

Endless Hail, spam Wrecking Blow

Oh thank goodness, I can finally queue as DPS

Sanguinor2

LiquidPony wrote: »

lol right?

I mean, the best parses I've seen are basically ...

Endless Hail, spam Wrecking Blow
Endless Hail, spam Snipe
Endless Hail, spam Jabs

I honestly can't believe they went live with this. Well, I guess I can believe it, but it's pretty ridiculous.

Stamnecro Rotation is killing me on the inside. Doesnt get much more boring than what we have now.

Dr_Ganknstein

What baffles me is the math. PI went from a -66% nerf to +33% which eventually equaled -50%. I'm on xbox and logged into PTS and it's exactly- 50%. Lol how the F?

Taloros

To reiterate:

The problem ZOS created isn't in the damage a single DoT does, but in the number of DoTs available. Normalisation has added 3+ viable DoTs to the menu, while the duration stayed relatively short. This allows to create rotations completely filled with DoTs.

Reducing the damage of all or nearly all DoTs isn't a fix to that. The fix is to revert the normalisation, i. e. nerf only the generic DoTs buffed to high heaven by the previous update. E. g., add some other functionality to them like resource regeneration.

Last but not least, the absurd increase in resource cost does nothing to fix the problems. It's like increasing fuel cost to limit a car's speed. It's just annoying, but doesn't reduce the problems.