The Magblade Problem

KCC11 · December 2019

There are a multitude of pain points with the current state of magicka nightblade, I'll address the major ones I've noticed so far but feel free to state your opinion or anything I missed.

The Assassination Tree(Kinda)
Starting with the Ultimate the cast times were just a terrible idea, and don't really work on what is suppose to be a fast-paced class. The Ultimate was already dodgeable, and frequently doesn't go off, not to mention given the short range of the Ultimate you basically have to be on your opponents lap to cast it.

[*] The cast times need to be removed first and foremost

Next is merciless while removing the delay and increasing the duration was great this skill still needs some work. This is the only skill in the game that provides no benefit when you use resources to cast it. The devs were last seen comparing this skill to frags while in theory this sounds solid in a functional sense it's illogical as no sorc (should) hard cast frags they only wait for the instant cast to be up. So while frags only requires ~ 1200 mag for one cast, merciless requires ~ 3600 mag for one cast because in addition to the initial cast requirement it then requires 50% of that per proc. To quantify this you should be proc your merciless every 10sec..6 procs in 1min equals 7200mag or in other words about 240 additional regen needed to maintain this skill as compared to before they added the resources per cast requirement. The next issue is the dmg mitigation aspect of the skill down to 10% from 15% the mitigation is nice, but still plays into the running theme of magblade as impractical as I have to first cast the skill, then land 5 LA to get the full benefit.

What I would suggest is that they either remove the resources upon cast mechanic of this skill or make it so that when you initially cast it you get the 10% dmg mitigation. My reasoning lies behind the fact that you took away an automatic offensive buff and replaced it with a conditional defensive buff this is imbalanced, and you should always receive some benefit from casting a skill.

The passives in the Assassination line are for most part fine with the exception of Master Assassin and Hemorrhage, the first promotes stealth/gank type gameplay so if you're not utilizing those methods the passive is useless, the second is good but for some reason only applies Minor Savagery and not Minor Prophecy as well; that should be fixed just for equality for both Stam/Mag specs of the class.

The Shadow Tree
Once again starting with the Ultimate..it just costs too much plain and simple as such we're back in the flux of impractical

The Ultimate just needs to be reduced to 150, the radius is small and the duration isn't long

Concealed weapon still costs too much to be used as a spammable tbh not to mention melee magblade doesn't work well as it's just kinda a worse off stamblade.
- Needs to be more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from.
  
  Shadowy Disguise/Dark Cloak
- Shadowy Disguise is more or less fine
- I'd like to see the healing get buffed on Dark Cloak currently I think it's 5% of you Max Health per sec which 2.5% in PvP; I propose an Increase to 10% of your Max Health every sec which would result in 5% in PvP. Not to mention that the skill is expensive for such a small heal and Minor Protection for such a short duration. To compare Wardens Ice Fortress also provides Minor Protection and Major Resolve just like Dark Cloak through Shadow Passives except that the Warden skill lasts for 24sec while Dark Cloak last for 8..to put a number on what that looks like sustain-wise in a 1min period magblade will have to cast Dark Cloak 8x for full uptime this would cost ~29k magicka just for this one skill while a warden would only have to cast it 3x which would cost~11k magicka..now let's ask ourselves is the heal provided by Dark Cloak worth an extra 18k magicka otherwise known as an extra 600regen required to maintain full uptime....no it's not so we either need to A)Significantly buff the heal B)Significantly reduce the cost or C)Significantly increase the duration there's no reason why magblade should have to expend an extra 18k for the same benefits
Refreshing/Twisted Path whether you're using this skill as a DoT or a Heal it's too weak to be this expensive, it doesn't last long nor is the area quite big. The nightblades that I see utilizing this skill only use it for the Major Expedition as magblade is too slow..like really slow..like Dragonknight slow.
- If they want to validate the cost of the skill then they need to improve the effectiveness it's unfortunate that our Major Expedition was linked to this skill
  
  Mass Hysteria is a shell of it's former self the radius is small that coupled with the lack of speed on the class leads to this skill missing often, and while being able to fear 6 enemies is nice if you're surrounded by 6 enemies in a 6m radius you've already messed up in most cases and you're just prolonging the respawn.
  - For costing 3k+ magicka it should do more..there should be some debuff applied
    
    Shadow Image while the reverted it so that it can once again be utilized on different planes was a good move increasing the cost by like 1200 mag imo was a mistake. What they wanted to do is prevent stamblades from slotting both this and fear/cloak it's weird that the devs are actively trying to prevent nightblades from using nightblade skills..don't see this type of attitude with DKs, Templars, Sorcs, or any other class in the game for that matter. Assuming you port to shade every 10sec this once again results in 240regen increase on the class to maintain this skill which is not only our only source of Minor Maim, but our "mobility" (if you can call it that) on the battlefield
    - Both cost and range need to be reverted back to original values
    - Increase the duration
    - Or remove the limit cap on ports back to the shade. To explain further they could make it so that as long as your shade is up and you're further then lets say 10m away you can port back infinitely to the shade, and you can only reposition the shade once it expires.
      
      All the passives here are good skills like Shadow Barrier encapsulate a NIghtblades philosophy "The Best Defense is a Good Offense" as you proc Major resolve by using skills like Concealed Weapon
      Siphoning Tree
      
      Starting with Soul Tether/Siphon once again we're in a situation where a skill cost too much for what it does, so let's breakdown Soul Tether first. Tether does moderate dmg and CCs all enemies in a 8m radius while providing a small heal per enemy the closest skill I can compare it to is leap which has anywhere from a 22-28m range while also CC'ing all enemies in an 8m radius both morphs hit extremely hard, the Stam version has the longer range, more dmg, and reduces the cost to 110, while the mag version has the dmg shield and maintains the 125 cost. Does anyone else see the problem with this? How can it be justified that Soul Tether is more expensive than either of these ultimates when they all basically do the same thing except that for leap you can do it at range, and it can't be blocked, not to mention that both versions are Instant cast while Soul Tether has a .4sec cast time attached to it. What is Soul Tether providing that justifies this? Soul Siphon is a good healing Ult but still runs into the issue of being too expensive.
      - The cast time from Soul Tether should be removed, the cost should be reduced to 125Ult, and it's radius increased to 10m magblade once again is slow as dirt so even with this 8m radius the skill misses a lot..like a lot to the point where it's not even worth using.
        
        My only 2 issues with swallow soul is that the animation is clunky and that they removed the Minor Vitality from the skill which makes no sense as before it had to balanced morphs one that was better for solo play and one that was better for group play.
        
        Healthy Offering is just downright disrespectful so the only burst heal on the entire class..actually the only burst heal in the entire game..actually the only heal in the entire game that isn't able to heal the caster it's utterly ridiculous and shows the obvious bias when it comes to nightblades. This skill is garbage and honestly just about any change would be an improvement from it's current state
        Bar space is so limited that if you're a full healer there's no point in slotting this skill as it provides no benefit to caster
        
        Debilitate/Crippling Grasp I actually think debilitate is in a good spot, crippling on the other hand if I'm not making a dueling build I'm not sure why I'd slot it over debilitate or some other DoT yes the root is nice but still I find it to be pretty underwhelming.
        Both DoTs could use a dmg increase as it's magblades main source of DoT pressure but that's not completely necessary
        
        Crippling would need to have more benefit personally before I'd slot it
        
        Siphoning Attacks compared to it's previous form it's pretty garbage as what made this skill great was that it allowed you a way to sustain your stamina as well this made melee magblade much more viable since the change however melee magblade is a tough sale not to mention it cornholes traditional magblade into either running shackle, or using tri-stat food not even getting to the point that we've all had to spec much more into sustain since the change. Coincidentally enough when the change was made to siphoning they just made it into a worse version of the Wardens Blue Betty Skill. Which unlike siphoning has no cost, restores more magicka, and removes 1 negative effect upon cast (since there's no cost on the skill you can just spam it as a pretty effective way to purge yourself) since then the Warden skill has gotten buffed to the point where 1 negative effect is removed every 5sec. Now siphoning does have a small healing aspect to it which I admit is nice in some cases.
        Remove the cost from the skill
        
        Introduce a way that we can also manage both our primary and secondary stat as was the case with the previous version
        
        After reviewing Magblade there seems to be a running theme of "Really expensive skills that just don't do much or do it effectively enough especially once a healing aspect has been introduced" the class is in a bad spot in comparison to other mag classes our sustain keeps getting nerfed which then indirectly nerfs our dmg to the point where we don't really have either. There's not one thing you can say magblade does better than any other class except maybe kite. The class doesn't have the hight burst, doesn't have the best sustain, doesn't have good defense, and has next to nothing in terms of healing and mobility..it's just a bad class right now. Anything you can do on a magblade you can do on another class just better and usually quicker I'm a terrible magsorc but I'd get kills much easier and just overall have an easier time in PvP on my magsorc than my magblade which I've been playing for nearly 2yrs. People need to stop dismissing it saying magblade is fine..it's not you're just remembering magblade from before Murkmire, or back in Clockwork City, or before Morrowind dropped. Magblade isn't good I play the class because I enjoy the challenge and try not to just go with the meta, but it's a hard unforgiving class that makes you work for everything..to succeed on magblade you more or less kinda have to master the class before that point you're gonna suck and get bursted and not be able to kill anyone hence why when you see a magblade player who's not a cloak-spammer, or gankblade they're really good..because you have to be. These are some pain points and suggestions that I came up with, but I would like to hear from the community and gauge where the temperature is at..do you think I'm spot on or heading in the right direction, or do you FoS either way let's keep it respectful and relatively objective.

GhostofDatthaw · December 2019

Idk what is goin on with that formatting but it walked off the right side of my phone

KCC11 · December 2019

I really should've read over this before posting but I think everyone reading will catch my drift, but just to make sure I meant to say that Leap cannot be dodged as it can of course be blocked, also meant to say that unless you're a healer it's pointless to run Healthy Offering.

GhostofDatthaw · December 2019

We're magblades, the red headed stepchild

Arkew · December 2019

KCC11 wrote: »

There are a multitude of pain points with the current state of magicka nightblade, I'll address the major ones I've noticed so far but feel free to state your opinion or anything I missed.

The Assassination Tree(Kinda)
Starting with the Ultimate the cast times were just a terrible idea, and don't really work on what is suppose to be a fast-paced class. The Ultimate was already dodgeable, and frequently doesn't go off, not to mention given the short range of the Ultimate you basically have to be on your opponents lap to cast it.

[*] The cast times need to be removed first and foremost

Next is merciless while removing the delay and increasing the duration was great this skill still needs some work. This is the only skill in the game that provides no benefit when you use resources to cast it. The devs were last seen comparing this skill to frags while in theory this sounds solid in a functional sense it's illogical as no sorc (should) hard cast frags they only wait for the instant cast to be up. So while frags only requires ~ 1200 mag for one cast, merciless requires ~ 3600 mag for one cast because in addition to the initial cast requirement it then requires 50% of that per proc. To quantify this you should be proc your merciless every 10sec..6 procs in 1min equals 7200mag or in other words about 240 additional regen needed to maintain this skill as compared to before they added the resources per cast requirement. The next issue is the dmg mitigation aspect of the skill down to 10% from 15% the mitigation is nice, but still plays into the running theme of magblade as impractical as I have to first cast the skill, then land 5 LA to get the full benefit.
What I would suggest is that they either remove the resources upon cast mechanic of this skill or make it so that when you initially cast it you get the 10% dmg mitigation. My reasoning lies behind the fact that you took away an automatic offensive buff and replaced it with a conditional defensive buff this is imbalanced, and you should always receive some benefit from casting a skill.

The passives in the Assassination line are for most part fine with the exception of Master Assassin and Hemorrhage, the first promotes stealth/gank type gameplay so if you're not utilizing those methods the passive is useless, the second is good but for some reason only applies Minor Savagery and not Minor Prophecy as well; that should be fixed just for equality for both Stam/Mag specs of the class.

The Shadow Tree
Once again starting with the Ultimate..it just costs too much plain and simple as such we're back in the flux of impractical
The Ultimate just needs to be reduced to 150, the radius is small and the duration isn't long

Concealed weapon still costs too much to be used as a spammable tbh not to mention melee magblade doesn't work well as it's just kinda a worse off stamblade.
Needs to be more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from.

Shadowy Disguise/Dark Cloak

Shadowy Disguise is more or less fine

I'd like to see the healing get buffed on Dark Cloak currently I think it's 5% of you Max Health per sec which 2.5% in PvP; I propose an Increase to 10% of your Max Health every sec which would result in 5% in PvP. Not to mention that the skill is expensive for such a small heal and Minor Protection for such a short duration. To compare Wardens Ice Fortress also provides Minor Protection and Major Resolve just like Dark Cloak through Shadow Passives except that the Warden skill lasts for 24sec while Dark Cloak last for 8..to put a number on what that looks like sustain-wise in a 1min period magblade will have to cast Dark Cloak 8x for full uptime this would cost ~29k magicka just for this one skill while a warden would only have to cast it 3x which would cost~11k magicka..now let's ask ourselves is the heal provided by Dark Cloak worth an extra 18k magicka otherwise known as an extra 600regen required to maintain full uptime....no it's not so we either need to A)Significantly buff the heal B)Significantly reduce the cost or C)Significantly increase the duration there's no reason why magblade should have to expend an extra 18k for the same benefits

Refreshing/Twisted Path whether you're using this skill as a DoT or a Heal it's too weak to be this expensive, it doesn't last long nor is the area quite big. The nightblades that I see utilizing this skill only use it for the Major Expedition as magblade is too slow..like really slow..like Dragonknight slow.
If they want to validate the cost of the skill then they need to improve the effectiveness it's unfortunate that our Major Expedition was linked to this skill

Mass Hysteria is a shell of it's former self the radius is small that coupled with the lack of speed on the class leads to this skill missing often, and while being able to fear 6 enemies is nice if you're surrounded by 6 enemies in a 6m radius you've already messed up in most cases and you're just prolonging the respawn.
For costing 3k+ magicka it should do more..there should be some debuff applied

Shadow Image while the reverted it so that it can once again be utilized on different planes was a good move increasing the cost by like 1200 mag imo was a mistake. What they wanted to do is prevent stamblades from slotting both this and fear/cloak it's weird that the devs are actively trying to prevent nightblades from using nightblade skills..don't see this type of attitude with DKs, Templars, Sorcs, or any other class in the game for that matter. Assuming you port to shade every 10sec this once again results in 240regen increase on the class to maintain this skill which is not only our only source of Minor Maim, but our "mobility" (if you can call it that) on the battlefield
Both cost and range need to be reverted back to original values

Increase the duration

Or remove the limit cap on ports back to the shade. To explain further they could make it so that as long as your shade is up and you're further then lets say 10m away you can port back infinitely to the shade, and you can only reposition the shade once it expires.

All the passives here are good skills like Shadow Barrier encapsulate a NIghtblades philosophy "The Best Defense is a Good Offense" as you proc Major resolve by using skills like Concealed Weapon
Siphoning Tree

Starting with Soul Tether/Siphon once again we're in a situation where a skill cost too much for what it does, so let's breakdown Soul Tether first. Tether does moderate dmg and CCs all enemies in a 8m radius while providing a small heal per enemy the closest skill I can compare it to is leap which has anywhere from a 22-28m range while also CC'ing all enemies in an 8m radius both morphs hit extremely hard, the Stam version has the longer range, more dmg, and reduces the cost to 110, while the mag version has the dmg shield and maintains the 125 cost. Does anyone else see the problem with this? How can it be justified that Soul Tether is more expensive than either of these ultimates when they all basically do the same thing except that for leap you can do it at range, and it can't be blocked, not to mention that both versions are Instant cast while Soul Tether has a .4sec cast time attached to it. What is Soul Tether providing that justifies this? Soul Siphon is a good healing Ult but still runs into the issue of being too expensive.
The cast time from Soul Tether should be removed, the cost should be reduced to 125Ult, and it's radius increased to 10m magblade once again is slow as dirt so even with this 8m radius the skill misses a lot..like a lot to the point where it's not even worth using.

My only 2 issues with swallow soul is that the animation is clunky and that they removed the Minor Vitality from the skill which makes no sense as before it had to balanced morphs one that was better for solo play and one that was better for group play.

Healthy Offering is just downright disrespectful so the only burst heal on the entire class..actually the only burst heal in the entire game..actually the only heal in the entire game that isn't able to heal the caster it's utterly ridiculous and shows the obvious bias when it comes to nightblades. This skill is garbage and honestly just about any change would be an improvement from it's current state
Bar space is so limited that if you're a full healer there's no point in slotting this skill as it provides no benefit to caster

Debilitate/Crippling Grasp I actually think debilitate is in a good spot, crippling on the other hand if I'm not making a dueling build I'm not sure why I'd slot it over debilitate or some other DoT yes the root is nice but still I find it to be pretty underwhelming.
Both DoTs could use a dmg increase as it's magblades main source of DoT pressure but that's not completely necessary

Crippling would need to have more benefit personally before I'd slot it

Siphoning Attacks compared to it's previous form it's pretty garbage as what made this skill great was that it allowed you a way to sustain your stamina as well this made melee magblade much more viable since the change however melee magblade is a tough sale not to mention it cornholes traditional magblade into either running shackle, or using tri-stat food not even getting to the point that we've all had to spec much more into sustain since the change. Coincidentally enough when the change was made to siphoning they just made it into a worse version of the Wardens Blue Betty Skill. Which unlike siphoning has no cost, restores more magicka, and removes 1 negative effect upon cast (since there's no cost on the skill you can just spam it as a pretty effective way to purge yourself) since then the Warden skill has gotten buffed to the point where 1 negative effect is removed every 5sec. Now siphoning does have a small healing aspect to it which I admit is nice in some cases.
Remove the cost from the skill

Introduce a way that we can also manage both our primary and secondary stat as was the case with the previous version

After reviewing Magblade there seems to be a running theme of "Really expensive skills that just don't do much or do it effectively enough especially once a healing aspect has been introduced" the class is in a bad spot in comparison to other mag classes our sustain keeps getting nerfed which then indirectly nerfs our dmg to the point where we don't really have either. There's not one thing you can say magblade does better than any other class except maybe kite. The class doesn't have the hight burst, doesn't have the best sustain, doesn't have good defense, and has next to nothing in terms of healing and mobility..it's just a bad class right now. Anything you can do on a magblade you can do on another class just better and usually quicker I'm a terrible magsorc but I'd get kills much easier and just overall have an easier time in PvP on my magsorc than my magblade which I've been playing for nearly 2yrs. People need to stop dismissing it saying magblade is fine..it's not you're just remembering magblade from before Murkmire, or back in Clockwork City, or before Morrowind dropped. Magblade isn't good I play the class because I enjoy the challenge and try not to just go with the meta, but it's a hard unforgiving class that makes you work for everything..to succeed on magblade you more or less kinda have to master the class before that point you're gonna suck and get bursted and not be able to kill anyone hence why when you see a magblade player who's not a cloak-spammer, or gankblade they're really good..because you have to be. These are some pain points and suggestions that I came up with, but I would like to hear from the community and gauge where the temperature is at..do you think I'm spot on or heading in the right direction, or do you FoS either way let's keep it respectful and relatively objective.

Healthy Offering hahahahaha are you kidding me it's one of the best skill of the entire game the proof in pvp.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/786370981464568498/CA1CF89D370B51176EEDC6F23BB4F232D0BBBEE3/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/771731984845697705/218C508B56C77D81548C832FE83C1FDE27B58275/

Iskiab · December 2019

Arkew wrote: »

KCC11 wrote: »

There are a multitude of pain points with the current state of magicka nightblade, I'll address the major ones I've noticed so far but feel free to state your opinion or anything I missed.

The Assassination Tree(Kinda)
Starting with the Ultimate the cast times were just a terrible idea, and don't really work on what is suppose to be a fast-paced class. The Ultimate was already dodgeable, and frequently doesn't go off, not to mention given the short range of the Ultimate you basically have to be on your opponents lap to cast it.

[*] The cast times need to be removed first and foremost

Next is merciless while removing the delay and increasing the duration was great this skill still needs some work. This is the only skill in the game that provides no benefit when you use resources to cast it. The devs were last seen comparing this skill to frags while in theory this sounds solid in a functional sense it's illogical as no sorc (should) hard cast frags they only wait for the instant cast to be up. So while frags only requires ~ 1200 mag for one cast, merciless requires ~ 3600 mag for one cast because in addition to the initial cast requirement it then requires 50% of that per proc. To quantify this you should be proc your merciless every 10sec..6 procs in 1min equals 7200mag or in other words about 240 additional regen needed to maintain this skill as compared to before they added the resources per cast requirement. The next issue is the dmg mitigation aspect of the skill down to 10% from 15% the mitigation is nice, but still plays into the running theme of magblade as impractical as I have to first cast the skill, then land 5 LA to get the full benefit.
What I would suggest is that they either remove the resources upon cast mechanic of this skill or make it so that when you initially cast it you get the 10% dmg mitigation. My reasoning lies behind the fact that you took away an automatic offensive buff and replaced it with a conditional defensive buff this is imbalanced, and you should always receive some benefit from casting a skill.

The passives in the Assassination line are for most part fine with the exception of Master Assassin and Hemorrhage, the first promotes stealth/gank type gameplay so if you're not utilizing those methods the passive is useless, the second is good but for some reason only applies Minor Savagery and not Minor Prophecy as well; that should be fixed just for equality for both Stam/Mag specs of the class.

The Shadow Tree
Once again starting with the Ultimate..it just costs too much plain and simple as such we're back in the flux of impractical
The Ultimate just needs to be reduced to 150, the radius is small and the duration isn't long

Concealed weapon still costs too much to be used as a spammable tbh not to mention melee magblade doesn't work well as it's just kinda a worse off stamblade.
Needs to be more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from.

Shadowy Disguise/Dark Cloak

Shadowy Disguise is more or less fine

I'd like to see the healing get buffed on Dark Cloak currently I think it's 5% of you Max Health per sec which 2.5% in PvP; I propose an Increase to 10% of your Max Health every sec which would result in 5% in PvP. Not to mention that the skill is expensive for such a small heal and Minor Protection for such a short duration. To compare Wardens Ice Fortress also provides Minor Protection and Major Resolve just like Dark Cloak through Shadow Passives except that the Warden skill lasts for 24sec while Dark Cloak last for 8..to put a number on what that looks like sustain-wise in a 1min period magblade will have to cast Dark Cloak 8x for full uptime this would cost ~29k magicka just for this one skill while a warden would only have to cast it 3x which would cost~11k magicka..now let's ask ourselves is the heal provided by Dark Cloak worth an extra 18k magicka otherwise known as an extra 600regen required to maintain full uptime....no it's not so we either need to A)Significantly buff the heal B)Significantly reduce the cost or C)Significantly increase the duration there's no reason why magblade should have to expend an extra 18k for the same benefits

Refreshing/Twisted Path whether you're using this skill as a DoT or a Heal it's too weak to be this expensive, it doesn't last long nor is the area quite big. The nightblades that I see utilizing this skill only use it for the Major Expedition as magblade is too slow..like really slow..like Dragonknight slow.
If they want to validate the cost of the skill then they need to improve the effectiveness it's unfortunate that our Major Expedition was linked to this skill

Mass Hysteria is a shell of it's former self the radius is small that coupled with the lack of speed on the class leads to this skill missing often, and while being able to fear 6 enemies is nice if you're surrounded by 6 enemies in a 6m radius you've already messed up in most cases and you're just prolonging the respawn.
For costing 3k+ magicka it should do more..there should be some debuff applied

Shadow Image while the reverted it so that it can once again be utilized on different planes was a good move increasing the cost by like 1200 mag imo was a mistake. What they wanted to do is prevent stamblades from slotting both this and fear/cloak it's weird that the devs are actively trying to prevent nightblades from using nightblade skills..don't see this type of attitude with DKs, Templars, Sorcs, or any other class in the game for that matter. Assuming you port to shade every 10sec this once again results in 240regen increase on the class to maintain this skill which is not only our only source of Minor Maim, but our "mobility" (if you can call it that) on the battlefield
Both cost and range need to be reverted back to original values

Increase the duration

Or remove the limit cap on ports back to the shade. To explain further they could make it so that as long as your shade is up and you're further then lets say 10m away you can port back infinitely to the shade, and you can only reposition the shade once it expires.

All the passives here are good skills like Shadow Barrier encapsulate a NIghtblades philosophy "The Best Defense is a Good Offense" as you proc Major resolve by using skills like Concealed Weapon
Siphoning Tree

Starting with Soul Tether/Siphon once again we're in a situation where a skill cost too much for what it does, so let's breakdown Soul Tether first. Tether does moderate dmg and CCs all enemies in a 8m radius while providing a small heal per enemy the closest skill I can compare it to is leap which has anywhere from a 22-28m range while also CC'ing all enemies in an 8m radius both morphs hit extremely hard, the Stam version has the longer range, more dmg, and reduces the cost to 110, while the mag version has the dmg shield and maintains the 125 cost. Does anyone else see the problem with this? How can it be justified that Soul Tether is more expensive than either of these ultimates when they all basically do the same thing except that for leap you can do it at range, and it can't be blocked, not to mention that both versions are Instant cast while Soul Tether has a .4sec cast time attached to it. What is Soul Tether providing that justifies this? Soul Siphon is a good healing Ult but still runs into the issue of being too expensive.
The cast time from Soul Tether should be removed, the cost should be reduced to 125Ult, and it's radius increased to 10m magblade once again is slow as dirt so even with this 8m radius the skill misses a lot..like a lot to the point where it's not even worth using.

My only 2 issues with swallow soul is that the animation is clunky and that they removed the Minor Vitality from the skill which makes no sense as before it had to balanced morphs one that was better for solo play and one that was better for group play.

Healthy Offering is just downright disrespectful so the only burst heal on the entire class..actually the only burst heal in the entire game..actually the only heal in the entire game that isn't able to heal the caster it's utterly ridiculous and shows the obvious bias when it comes to nightblades. This skill is garbage and honestly just about any change would be an improvement from it's current state
Bar space is so limited that if you're a full healer there's no point in slotting this skill as it provides no benefit to caster

Debilitate/Crippling Grasp I actually think debilitate is in a good spot, crippling on the other hand if I'm not making a dueling build I'm not sure why I'd slot it over debilitate or some other DoT yes the root is nice but still I find it to be pretty underwhelming.
Both DoTs could use a dmg increase as it's magblades main source of DoT pressure but that's not completely necessary

Crippling would need to have more benefit personally before I'd slot it

Siphoning Attacks compared to it's previous form it's pretty garbage as what made this skill great was that it allowed you a way to sustain your stamina as well this made melee magblade much more viable since the change however melee magblade is a tough sale not to mention it cornholes traditional magblade into either running shackle, or using tri-stat food not even getting to the point that we've all had to spec much more into sustain since the change. Coincidentally enough when the change was made to siphoning they just made it into a worse version of the Wardens Blue Betty Skill. Which unlike siphoning has no cost, restores more magicka, and removes 1 negative effect upon cast (since there's no cost on the skill you can just spam it as a pretty effective way to purge yourself) since then the Warden skill has gotten buffed to the point where 1 negative effect is removed every 5sec. Now siphoning does have a small healing aspect to it which I admit is nice in some cases.
Remove the cost from the skill

Introduce a way that we can also manage both our primary and secondary stat as was the case with the previous version

After reviewing Magblade there seems to be a running theme of "Really expensive skills that just don't do much or do it effectively enough especially once a healing aspect has been introduced" the class is in a bad spot in comparison to other mag classes our sustain keeps getting nerfed which then indirectly nerfs our dmg to the point where we don't really have either. There's not one thing you can say magblade does better than any other class except maybe kite. The class doesn't have the hight burst, doesn't have the best sustain, doesn't have good defense, and has next to nothing in terms of healing and mobility..it's just a bad class right now. Anything you can do on a magblade you can do on another class just better and usually quicker I'm a terrible magsorc but I'd get kills much easier and just overall have an easier time in PvP on my magsorc than my magblade which I've been playing for nearly 2yrs. People need to stop dismissing it saying magblade is fine..it's not you're just remembering magblade from before Murkmire, or back in Clockwork City, or before Morrowind dropped. Magblade isn't good I play the class because I enjoy the challenge and try not to just go with the meta, but it's a hard unforgiving class that makes you work for everything..to succeed on magblade you more or less kinda have to master the class before that point you're gonna suck and get bursted and not be able to kill anyone hence why when you see a magblade player who's not a cloak-spammer, or gankblade they're really good..because you have to be. These are some pain points and suggestions that I came up with, but I would like to hear from the community and gauge where the temperature is at..do you think I'm spot on or heading in the right direction, or do you FoS either way let's keep it respectful and relatively objective.

Healthy Offering hahahahaha are you kidding me it's one of the best skill of the entire game the proof in pvp.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/786370981464568498/CA1CF89D370B51176EEDC6F23BB4F232D0BBBEE3/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/771731984845697705/218C508B56C77D81548C832FE83C1FDE27B58275/

Was... was....

Magblades lack enough self healing to be able to use it very often. To offset the lack of self healing you need to build tankier, add onto that expensive ability costs and you also need to build for more sustain than other classes.

Even though in theory healthy Offering should be the best single target heal (besides the matriarch heal) with how you have to build it doesn’t end up being the strongest.

If you want to show off big tooltips or heals the matriarch heal will blow it out of the water (though it’s very expensive). If you want a spammable heal that’s effective honour the dead is better in pvp.

This is after playing all three classes as a pvp healer.... btw, let me know when you break 2 million, or a million damage and healing. Big healing amounts usually come from games where everyone's tanky so can't kill anyone. It'll pad the damage and healing stats but won't necessarily win you the game.

Another thing about healthy offering is it shows the health cost per second. With a 12k tooltip you're only actually healing 8k with a 4k health cost, spread out over 8 seconds done to yourself. You then heal that amount with dark cloak. So it somewhat pads the stats, you're transferring health from yourself to others but the cost at 4 stacks is the breaking point where you're too vulnerable.

Arkew · December 2019

Iskiab wrote: »

Arkew wrote: »

KCC11 wrote: »

There are a multitude of pain points with the current state of magicka nightblade, I'll address the major ones I've noticed so far but feel free to state your opinion or anything I missed.

The Assassination Tree(Kinda)
Starting with the Ultimate the cast times were just a terrible idea, and don't really work on what is suppose to be a fast-paced class. The Ultimate was already dodgeable, and frequently doesn't go off, not to mention given the short range of the Ultimate you basically have to be on your opponents lap to cast it.

[*] The cast times need to be removed first and foremost

Next is merciless while removing the delay and increasing the duration was great this skill still needs some work. This is the only skill in the game that provides no benefit when you use resources to cast it. The devs were last seen comparing this skill to frags while in theory this sounds solid in a functional sense it's illogical as no sorc (should) hard cast frags they only wait for the instant cast to be up. So while frags only requires ~ 1200 mag for one cast, merciless requires ~ 3600 mag for one cast because in addition to the initial cast requirement it then requires 50% of that per proc. To quantify this you should be proc your merciless every 10sec..6 procs in 1min equals 7200mag or in other words about 240 additional regen needed to maintain this skill as compared to before they added the resources per cast requirement. The next issue is the dmg mitigation aspect of the skill down to 10% from 15% the mitigation is nice, but still plays into the running theme of magblade as impractical as I have to first cast the skill, then land 5 LA to get the full benefit.
What I would suggest is that they either remove the resources upon cast mechanic of this skill or make it so that when you initially cast it you get the 10% dmg mitigation. My reasoning lies behind the fact that you took away an automatic offensive buff and replaced it with a conditional defensive buff this is imbalanced, and you should always receive some benefit from casting a skill.

The passives in the Assassination line are for most part fine with the exception of Master Assassin and Hemorrhage, the first promotes stealth/gank type gameplay so if you're not utilizing those methods the passive is useless, the second is good but for some reason only applies Minor Savagery and not Minor Prophecy as well; that should be fixed just for equality for both Stam/Mag specs of the class.

The Shadow Tree
Once again starting with the Ultimate..it just costs too much plain and simple as such we're back in the flux of impractical
The Ultimate just needs to be reduced to 150, the radius is small and the duration isn't long

Concealed weapon still costs too much to be used as a spammable tbh not to mention melee magblade doesn't work well as it's just kinda a worse off stamblade.
Needs to be more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from.

Shadowy Disguise/Dark Cloak

Shadowy Disguise is more or less fine

I'd like to see the healing get buffed on Dark Cloak currently I think it's 5% of you Max Health per sec which 2.5% in PvP; I propose an Increase to 10% of your Max Health every sec which would result in 5% in PvP. Not to mention that the skill is expensive for such a small heal and Minor Protection for such a short duration. To compare Wardens Ice Fortress also provides Minor Protection and Major Resolve just like Dark Cloak through Shadow Passives except that the Warden skill lasts for 24sec while Dark Cloak last for 8..to put a number on what that looks like sustain-wise in a 1min period magblade will have to cast Dark Cloak 8x for full uptime this would cost ~29k magicka just for this one skill while a warden would only have to cast it 3x which would cost~11k magicka..now let's ask ourselves is the heal provided by Dark Cloak worth an extra 18k magicka otherwise known as an extra 600regen required to maintain full uptime....no it's not so we either need to A)Significantly buff the heal B)Significantly reduce the cost or C)Significantly increase the duration there's no reason why magblade should have to expend an extra 18k for the same benefits

Refreshing/Twisted Path whether you're using this skill as a DoT or a Heal it's too weak to be this expensive, it doesn't last long nor is the area quite big. The nightblades that I see utilizing this skill only use it for the Major Expedition as magblade is too slow..like really slow..like Dragonknight slow.
If they want to validate the cost of the skill then they need to improve the effectiveness it's unfortunate that our Major Expedition was linked to this skill

Mass Hysteria is a shell of it's former self the radius is small that coupled with the lack of speed on the class leads to this skill missing often, and while being able to fear 6 enemies is nice if you're surrounded by 6 enemies in a 6m radius you've already messed up in most cases and you're just prolonging the respawn.
For costing 3k+ magicka it should do more..there should be some debuff applied

Shadow Image while the reverted it so that it can once again be utilized on different planes was a good move increasing the cost by like 1200 mag imo was a mistake. What they wanted to do is prevent stamblades from slotting both this and fear/cloak it's weird that the devs are actively trying to prevent nightblades from using nightblade skills..don't see this type of attitude with DKs, Templars, Sorcs, or any other class in the game for that matter. Assuming you port to shade every 10sec this once again results in 240regen increase on the class to maintain this skill which is not only our only source of Minor Maim, but our "mobility" (if you can call it that) on the battlefield
Both cost and range need to be reverted back to original values

Increase the duration

Or remove the limit cap on ports back to the shade. To explain further they could make it so that as long as your shade is up and you're further then lets say 10m away you can port back infinitely to the shade, and you can only reposition the shade once it expires.

All the passives here are good skills like Shadow Barrier encapsulate a NIghtblades philosophy "The Best Defense is a Good Offense" as you proc Major resolve by using skills like Concealed Weapon
Siphoning Tree

Starting with Soul Tether/Siphon once again we're in a situation where a skill cost too much for what it does, so let's breakdown Soul Tether first. Tether does moderate dmg and CCs all enemies in a 8m radius while providing a small heal per enemy the closest skill I can compare it to is leap which has anywhere from a 22-28m range while also CC'ing all enemies in an 8m radius both morphs hit extremely hard, the Stam version has the longer range, more dmg, and reduces the cost to 110, while the mag version has the dmg shield and maintains the 125 cost. Does anyone else see the problem with this? How can it be justified that Soul Tether is more expensive than either of these ultimates when they all basically do the same thing except that for leap you can do it at range, and it can't be blocked, not to mention that both versions are Instant cast while Soul Tether has a .4sec cast time attached to it. What is Soul Tether providing that justifies this? Soul Siphon is a good healing Ult but still runs into the issue of being too expensive.
The cast time from Soul Tether should be removed, the cost should be reduced to 125Ult, and it's radius increased to 10m magblade once again is slow as dirt so even with this 8m radius the skill misses a lot..like a lot to the point where it's not even worth using.

My only 2 issues with swallow soul is that the animation is clunky and that they removed the Minor Vitality from the skill which makes no sense as before it had to balanced morphs one that was better for solo play and one that was better for group play.

Healthy Offering is just downright disrespectful so the only burst heal on the entire class..actually the only burst heal in the entire game..actually the only heal in the entire game that isn't able to heal the caster it's utterly ridiculous and shows the obvious bias when it comes to nightblades. This skill is garbage and honestly just about any change would be an improvement from it's current state
Bar space is so limited that if you're a full healer there's no point in slotting this skill as it provides no benefit to caster

Debilitate/Crippling Grasp I actually think debilitate is in a good spot, crippling on the other hand if I'm not making a dueling build I'm not sure why I'd slot it over debilitate or some other DoT yes the root is nice but still I find it to be pretty underwhelming.
Both DoTs could use a dmg increase as it's magblades main source of DoT pressure but that's not completely necessary

Crippling would need to have more benefit personally before I'd slot it

Siphoning Attacks compared to it's previous form it's pretty garbage as what made this skill great was that it allowed you a way to sustain your stamina as well this made melee magblade much more viable since the change however melee magblade is a tough sale not to mention it cornholes traditional magblade into either running shackle, or using tri-stat food not even getting to the point that we've all had to spec much more into sustain since the change. Coincidentally enough when the change was made to siphoning they just made it into a worse version of the Wardens Blue Betty Skill. Which unlike siphoning has no cost, restores more magicka, and removes 1 negative effect upon cast (since there's no cost on the skill you can just spam it as a pretty effective way to purge yourself) since then the Warden skill has gotten buffed to the point where 1 negative effect is removed every 5sec. Now siphoning does have a small healing aspect to it which I admit is nice in some cases.
Remove the cost from the skill

Introduce a way that we can also manage both our primary and secondary stat as was the case with the previous version

After reviewing Magblade there seems to be a running theme of "Really expensive skills that just don't do much or do it effectively enough especially once a healing aspect has been introduced" the class is in a bad spot in comparison to other mag classes our sustain keeps getting nerfed which then indirectly nerfs our dmg to the point where we don't really have either. There's not one thing you can say magblade does better than any other class except maybe kite. The class doesn't have the hight burst, doesn't have the best sustain, doesn't have good defense, and has next to nothing in terms of healing and mobility..it's just a bad class right now. Anything you can do on a magblade you can do on another class just better and usually quicker I'm a terrible magsorc but I'd get kills much easier and just overall have an easier time in PvP on my magsorc than my magblade which I've been playing for nearly 2yrs. People need to stop dismissing it saying magblade is fine..it's not you're just remembering magblade from before Murkmire, or back in Clockwork City, or before Morrowind dropped. Magblade isn't good I play the class because I enjoy the challenge and try not to just go with the meta, but it's a hard unforgiving class that makes you work for everything..to succeed on magblade you more or less kinda have to master the class before that point you're gonna suck and get bursted and not be able to kill anyone hence why when you see a magblade player who's not a cloak-spammer, or gankblade they're really good..because you have to be. These are some pain points and suggestions that I came up with, but I would like to hear from the community and gauge where the temperature is at..do you think I'm spot on or heading in the right direction, or do you FoS either way let's keep it respectful and relatively objective.

Healthy Offering hahahahaha are you kidding me it's one of the best skill of the entire game the proof in pvp.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/786370981464568498/CA1CF89D370B51176EEDC6F23BB4F232D0BBBEE3/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/771731984845697705/218C508B56C77D81548C832FE83C1FDE27B58275/

Was... was....

Magblades lack enough self healing to be able to use it very often. To offset the lack of self healing you need to build tankier, add onto that expensive ability costs and you also need to build for more sustain than other classes.

Even though in theory healthy Offering should be the best single target heal (besides the matriarch heal) with how you have to build it doesn’t end up being the strongest.

If you want to show off big tooltips or heals the matriarch heal will blow it out of the water (though it’s very expensive). If you want a spammable heal that’s effective honour the dead is better in pvp.

This is after playing all three classes as a pvp healer.... btw, let me know when you break 2 million, or a million damage and healing. Big healing amounts usually come from games where everyone's tanky so can't kill anyone. It'll pad the damage and healing stats but won't necessarily win you the game.

dat joke honour of dead is bad for me ,why i doing waste my magicka when i can use my own health bar for that.

Iskiab · December 2019

Arkew wrote: »

Iskiab wrote: »

Arkew wrote: »

KCC11 wrote: »

There are a multitude of pain points with the current state of magicka nightblade, I'll address the major ones I've noticed so far but feel free to state your opinion or anything I missed.

The Assassination Tree(Kinda)
Starting with the Ultimate the cast times were just a terrible idea, and don't really work on what is suppose to be a fast-paced class. The Ultimate was already dodgeable, and frequently doesn't go off, not to mention given the short range of the Ultimate you basically have to be on your opponents lap to cast it.

[*] The cast times need to be removed first and foremost

Next is merciless while removing the delay and increasing the duration was great this skill still needs some work. This is the only skill in the game that provides no benefit when you use resources to cast it. The devs were last seen comparing this skill to frags while in theory this sounds solid in a functional sense it's illogical as no sorc (should) hard cast frags they only wait for the instant cast to be up. So while frags only requires ~ 1200 mag for one cast, merciless requires ~ 3600 mag for one cast because in addition to the initial cast requirement it then requires 50% of that per proc. To quantify this you should be proc your merciless every 10sec..6 procs in 1min equals 7200mag or in other words about 240 additional regen needed to maintain this skill as compared to before they added the resources per cast requirement. The next issue is the dmg mitigation aspect of the skill down to 10% from 15% the mitigation is nice, but still plays into the running theme of magblade as impractical as I have to first cast the skill, then land 5 LA to get the full benefit.
What I would suggest is that they either remove the resources upon cast mechanic of this skill or make it so that when you initially cast it you get the 10% dmg mitigation. My reasoning lies behind the fact that you took away an automatic offensive buff and replaced it with a conditional defensive buff this is imbalanced, and you should always receive some benefit from casting a skill.

The passives in the Assassination line are for most part fine with the exception of Master Assassin and Hemorrhage, the first promotes stealth/gank type gameplay so if you're not utilizing those methods the passive is useless, the second is good but for some reason only applies Minor Savagery and not Minor Prophecy as well; that should be fixed just for equality for both Stam/Mag specs of the class.

The Shadow Tree
Once again starting with the Ultimate..it just costs too much plain and simple as such we're back in the flux of impractical
The Ultimate just needs to be reduced to 150, the radius is small and the duration isn't long

Concealed weapon still costs too much to be used as a spammable tbh not to mention melee magblade doesn't work well as it's just kinda a worse off stamblade.
Needs to be more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from.

Shadowy Disguise/Dark Cloak

Shadowy Disguise is more or less fine

I'd like to see the healing get buffed on Dark Cloak currently I think it's 5% of you Max Health per sec which 2.5% in PvP; I propose an Increase to 10% of your Max Health every sec which would result in 5% in PvP. Not to mention that the skill is expensive for such a small heal and Minor Protection for such a short duration. To compare Wardens Ice Fortress also provides Minor Protection and Major Resolve just like Dark Cloak through Shadow Passives except that the Warden skill lasts for 24sec while Dark Cloak last for 8..to put a number on what that looks like sustain-wise in a 1min period magblade will have to cast Dark Cloak 8x for full uptime this would cost ~29k magicka just for this one skill while a warden would only have to cast it 3x which would cost~11k magicka..now let's ask ourselves is the heal provided by Dark Cloak worth an extra 18k magicka otherwise known as an extra 600regen required to maintain full uptime....no it's not so we either need to A)Significantly buff the heal B)Significantly reduce the cost or C)Significantly increase the duration there's no reason why magblade should have to expend an extra 18k for the same benefits

Refreshing/Twisted Path whether you're using this skill as a DoT or a Heal it's too weak to be this expensive, it doesn't last long nor is the area quite big. The nightblades that I see utilizing this skill only use it for the Major Expedition as magblade is too slow..like really slow..like Dragonknight slow.
If they want to validate the cost of the skill then they need to improve the effectiveness it's unfortunate that our Major Expedition was linked to this skill

Mass Hysteria is a shell of it's former self the radius is small that coupled with the lack of speed on the class leads to this skill missing often, and while being able to fear 6 enemies is nice if you're surrounded by 6 enemies in a 6m radius you've already messed up in most cases and you're just prolonging the respawn.
For costing 3k+ magicka it should do more..there should be some debuff applied

Shadow Image while the reverted it so that it can once again be utilized on different planes was a good move increasing the cost by like 1200 mag imo was a mistake. What they wanted to do is prevent stamblades from slotting both this and fear/cloak it's weird that the devs are actively trying to prevent nightblades from using nightblade skills..don't see this type of attitude with DKs, Templars, Sorcs, or any other class in the game for that matter. Assuming you port to shade every 10sec this once again results in 240regen increase on the class to maintain this skill which is not only our only source of Minor Maim, but our "mobility" (if you can call it that) on the battlefield
Both cost and range need to be reverted back to original values

Increase the duration

Or remove the limit cap on ports back to the shade. To explain further they could make it so that as long as your shade is up and you're further then lets say 10m away you can port back infinitely to the shade, and you can only reposition the shade once it expires.

All the passives here are good skills like Shadow Barrier encapsulate a NIghtblades philosophy "The Best Defense is a Good Offense" as you proc Major resolve by using skills like Concealed Weapon
Siphoning Tree

Starting with Soul Tether/Siphon once again we're in a situation where a skill cost too much for what it does, so let's breakdown Soul Tether first. Tether does moderate dmg and CCs all enemies in a 8m radius while providing a small heal per enemy the closest skill I can compare it to is leap which has anywhere from a 22-28m range while also CC'ing all enemies in an 8m radius both morphs hit extremely hard, the Stam version has the longer range, more dmg, and reduces the cost to 110, while the mag version has the dmg shield and maintains the 125 cost. Does anyone else see the problem with this? How can it be justified that Soul Tether is more expensive than either of these ultimates when they all basically do the same thing except that for leap you can do it at range, and it can't be blocked, not to mention that both versions are Instant cast while Soul Tether has a .4sec cast time attached to it. What is Soul Tether providing that justifies this? Soul Siphon is a good healing Ult but still runs into the issue of being too expensive.
The cast time from Soul Tether should be removed, the cost should be reduced to 125Ult, and it's radius increased to 10m magblade once again is slow as dirt so even with this 8m radius the skill misses a lot..like a lot to the point where it's not even worth using.

My only 2 issues with swallow soul is that the animation is clunky and that they removed the Minor Vitality from the skill which makes no sense as before it had to balanced morphs one that was better for solo play and one that was better for group play.

Healthy Offering is just downright disrespectful so the only burst heal on the entire class..actually the only burst heal in the entire game..actually the only heal in the entire game that isn't able to heal the caster it's utterly ridiculous and shows the obvious bias when it comes to nightblades. This skill is garbage and honestly just about any change would be an improvement from it's current state
Bar space is so limited that if you're a full healer there's no point in slotting this skill as it provides no benefit to caster

Debilitate/Crippling Grasp I actually think debilitate is in a good spot, crippling on the other hand if I'm not making a dueling build I'm not sure why I'd slot it over debilitate or some other DoT yes the root is nice but still I find it to be pretty underwhelming.
Both DoTs could use a dmg increase as it's magblades main source of DoT pressure but that's not completely necessary

Crippling would need to have more benefit personally before I'd slot it

Siphoning Attacks compared to it's previous form it's pretty garbage as what made this skill great was that it allowed you a way to sustain your stamina as well this made melee magblade much more viable since the change however melee magblade is a tough sale not to mention it cornholes traditional magblade into either running shackle, or using tri-stat food not even getting to the point that we've all had to spec much more into sustain since the change. Coincidentally enough when the change was made to siphoning they just made it into a worse version of the Wardens Blue Betty Skill. Which unlike siphoning has no cost, restores more magicka, and removes 1 negative effect upon cast (since there's no cost on the skill you can just spam it as a pretty effective way to purge yourself) since then the Warden skill has gotten buffed to the point where 1 negative effect is removed every 5sec. Now siphoning does have a small healing aspect to it which I admit is nice in some cases.
Remove the cost from the skill

Introduce a way that we can also manage both our primary and secondary stat as was the case with the previous version

After reviewing Magblade there seems to be a running theme of "Really expensive skills that just don't do much or do it effectively enough especially once a healing aspect has been introduced" the class is in a bad spot in comparison to other mag classes our sustain keeps getting nerfed which then indirectly nerfs our dmg to the point where we don't really have either. There's not one thing you can say magblade does better than any other class except maybe kite. The class doesn't have the hight burst, doesn't have the best sustain, doesn't have good defense, and has next to nothing in terms of healing and mobility..it's just a bad class right now. Anything you can do on a magblade you can do on another class just better and usually quicker I'm a terrible magsorc but I'd get kills much easier and just overall have an easier time in PvP on my magsorc than my magblade which I've been playing for nearly 2yrs. People need to stop dismissing it saying magblade is fine..it's not you're just remembering magblade from before Murkmire, or back in Clockwork City, or before Morrowind dropped. Magblade isn't good I play the class because I enjoy the challenge and try not to just go with the meta, but it's a hard unforgiving class that makes you work for everything..to succeed on magblade you more or less kinda have to master the class before that point you're gonna suck and get bursted and not be able to kill anyone hence why when you see a magblade player who's not a cloak-spammer, or gankblade they're really good..because you have to be. These are some pain points and suggestions that I came up with, but I would like to hear from the community and gauge where the temperature is at..do you think I'm spot on or heading in the right direction, or do you FoS either way let's keep it respectful and relatively objective.

Healthy Offering hahahahaha are you kidding me it's one of the best skill of the entire game the proof in pvp.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/786370981464568498/CA1CF89D370B51176EEDC6F23BB4F232D0BBBEE3/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/771731984845697705/218C508B56C77D81548C832FE83C1FDE27B58275/

Was... was....

Magblades lack enough self healing to be able to use it very often. To offset the lack of self healing you need to build tankier, add onto that expensive ability costs and you also need to build for more sustain than other classes.

Even though in theory healthy Offering should be the best single target heal (besides the matriarch heal) with how you have to build it doesn’t end up being the strongest.

If you want to show off big tooltips or heals the matriarch heal will blow it out of the water (though it’s very expensive). If you want a spammable heal that’s effective honour the dead is better in pvp.

This is after playing all three classes as a pvp healer.... btw, let me know when you break 2 million, or a million damage and healing. Big healing amounts usually come from games where everyone's tanky so can't kill anyone. It'll pad the damage and healing stats but won't necessarily win you the game.

dat joke honour of dead is bad for me ,why i doing waste my magicka when i can use my own health bar for that.

Agreed for the first two casts. After that what players generally do (or should) is do a quick switch from the target to you. You end up being the weak link in the group reliant on other mag classes healing or off healing to stay alive.

Xvorg · December 2019

Op, sorry, but do you know how ultimate value is calculated?

Under that point of view, the cost of Tether is OK. It has a stun, a burst dmg, a heal, and a DoT associated. I agree with the innecesary cast time, but for the rest, the cost of the skill is just OK.

A similar skill to Tether is DBoS. It has a burst dmg, a stun, and a DoT associated and it costs 125 Ulti, just 25 ulti point less than Tether because it doesn't have a heal. So if you want to decrease Tether cost, then you have to reduce its effects.

I have absolutely 0 problem if you make soul siphon a 125 ulti skill if, for example, you change major vitality for minor mending (Siphon is one of my favorite ultis in the game), but tether should stay as it is.

Regarding Swallow sould, just leave is it is... it used to be really clunky some years ago, now is more than OK and can be easily weaved. If you feel it clunky, then you should practice.

Healthy offering is one of the best heals in this game. It procs a *** ton of sets that work on dmg, including alma mercy, desert rose or magicka furnace in LA, Imperium, Hagraven's garden, Ironblood, Juggernaut, etc... in HA. It could be useful to make work sets like Withestrakes retribution or Lamae. And even if you go the health recovery path on a NB (quite easy to do) you could use it to trigger Orgnum's + troll king combo. Just use your imagination to make it work.

Arkew · December 2019

Iskiab wrote: »

Arkew wrote: »

Iskiab wrote: »

Arkew wrote: »

KCC11 wrote: »

There are a multitude of pain points with the current state of magicka nightblade, I'll address the major ones I've noticed so far but feel free to state your opinion or anything I missed.

The Assassination Tree(Kinda)
Starting with the Ultimate the cast times were just a terrible idea, and don't really work on what is suppose to be a fast-paced class. The Ultimate was already dodgeable, and frequently doesn't go off, not to mention given the short range of the Ultimate you basically have to be on your opponents lap to cast it.

[*] The cast times need to be removed first and foremost

Next is merciless while removing the delay and increasing the duration was great this skill still needs some work. This is the only skill in the game that provides no benefit when you use resources to cast it. The devs were last seen comparing this skill to frags while in theory this sounds solid in a functional sense it's illogical as no sorc (should) hard cast frags they only wait for the instant cast to be up. So while frags only requires ~ 1200 mag for one cast, merciless requires ~ 3600 mag for one cast because in addition to the initial cast requirement it then requires 50% of that per proc. To quantify this you should be proc your merciless every 10sec..6 procs in 1min equals 7200mag or in other words about 240 additional regen needed to maintain this skill as compared to before they added the resources per cast requirement. The next issue is the dmg mitigation aspect of the skill down to 10% from 15% the mitigation is nice, but still plays into the running theme of magblade as impractical as I have to first cast the skill, then land 5 LA to get the full benefit.
What I would suggest is that they either remove the resources upon cast mechanic of this skill or make it so that when you initially cast it you get the 10% dmg mitigation. My reasoning lies behind the fact that you took away an automatic offensive buff and replaced it with a conditional defensive buff this is imbalanced, and you should always receive some benefit from casting a skill.

The passives in the Assassination line are for most part fine with the exception of Master Assassin and Hemorrhage, the first promotes stealth/gank type gameplay so if you're not utilizing those methods the passive is useless, the second is good but for some reason only applies Minor Savagery and not Minor Prophecy as well; that should be fixed just for equality for both Stam/Mag specs of the class.

The Shadow Tree
Once again starting with the Ultimate..it just costs too much plain and simple as such we're back in the flux of impractical
The Ultimate just needs to be reduced to 150, the radius is small and the duration isn't long

Concealed weapon still costs too much to be used as a spammable tbh not to mention melee magblade doesn't work well as it's just kinda a worse off stamblade.
Needs to be more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from.

Shadowy Disguise/Dark Cloak

Shadowy Disguise is more or less fine

I'd like to see the healing get buffed on Dark Cloak currently I think it's 5% of you Max Health per sec which 2.5% in PvP; I propose an Increase to 10% of your Max Health every sec which would result in 5% in PvP. Not to mention that the skill is expensive for such a small heal and Minor Protection for such a short duration. To compare Wardens Ice Fortress also provides Minor Protection and Major Resolve just like Dark Cloak through Shadow Passives except that the Warden skill lasts for 24sec while Dark Cloak last for 8..to put a number on what that looks like sustain-wise in a 1min period magblade will have to cast Dark Cloak 8x for full uptime this would cost ~29k magicka just for this one skill while a warden would only have to cast it 3x which would cost~11k magicka..now let's ask ourselves is the heal provided by Dark Cloak worth an extra 18k magicka otherwise known as an extra 600regen required to maintain full uptime....no it's not so we either need to A)Significantly buff the heal B)Significantly reduce the cost or C)Significantly increase the duration there's no reason why magblade should have to expend an extra 18k for the same benefits

Refreshing/Twisted Path whether you're using this skill as a DoT or a Heal it's too weak to be this expensive, it doesn't last long nor is the area quite big. The nightblades that I see utilizing this skill only use it for the Major Expedition as magblade is too slow..like really slow..like Dragonknight slow.
If they want to validate the cost of the skill then they need to improve the effectiveness it's unfortunate that our Major Expedition was linked to this skill

Mass Hysteria is a shell of it's former self the radius is small that coupled with the lack of speed on the class leads to this skill missing often, and while being able to fear 6 enemies is nice if you're surrounded by 6 enemies in a 6m radius you've already messed up in most cases and you're just prolonging the respawn.
For costing 3k+ magicka it should do more..there should be some debuff applied

Shadow Image while the reverted it so that it can once again be utilized on different planes was a good move increasing the cost by like 1200 mag imo was a mistake. What they wanted to do is prevent stamblades from slotting both this and fear/cloak it's weird that the devs are actively trying to prevent nightblades from using nightblade skills..don't see this type of attitude with DKs, Templars, Sorcs, or any other class in the game for that matter. Assuming you port to shade every 10sec this once again results in 240regen increase on the class to maintain this skill which is not only our only source of Minor Maim, but our "mobility" (if you can call it that) on the battlefield
Both cost and range need to be reverted back to original values

Increase the duration

Or remove the limit cap on ports back to the shade. To explain further they could make it so that as long as your shade is up and you're further then lets say 10m away you can port back infinitely to the shade, and you can only reposition the shade once it expires.

All the passives here are good skills like Shadow Barrier encapsulate a NIghtblades philosophy "The Best Defense is a Good Offense" as you proc Major resolve by using skills like Concealed Weapon
Siphoning Tree

Starting with Soul Tether/Siphon once again we're in a situation where a skill cost too much for what it does, so let's breakdown Soul Tether first. Tether does moderate dmg and CCs all enemies in a 8m radius while providing a small heal per enemy the closest skill I can compare it to is leap which has anywhere from a 22-28m range while also CC'ing all enemies in an 8m radius both morphs hit extremely hard, the Stam version has the longer range, more dmg, and reduces the cost to 110, while the mag version has the dmg shield and maintains the 125 cost. Does anyone else see the problem with this? How can it be justified that Soul Tether is more expensive than either of these ultimates when they all basically do the same thing except that for leap you can do it at range, and it can't be blocked, not to mention that both versions are Instant cast while Soul Tether has a .4sec cast time attached to it. What is Soul Tether providing that justifies this? Soul Siphon is a good healing Ult but still runs into the issue of being too expensive.
The cast time from Soul Tether should be removed, the cost should be reduced to 125Ult, and it's radius increased to 10m magblade once again is slow as dirt so even with this 8m radius the skill misses a lot..like a lot to the point where it's not even worth using.

My only 2 issues with swallow soul is that the animation is clunky and that they removed the Minor Vitality from the skill which makes no sense as before it had to balanced morphs one that was better for solo play and one that was better for group play.

Healthy Offering is just downright disrespectful so the only burst heal on the entire class..actually the only burst heal in the entire game..actually the only heal in the entire game that isn't able to heal the caster it's utterly ridiculous and shows the obvious bias when it comes to nightblades. This skill is garbage and honestly just about any change would be an improvement from it's current state
Bar space is so limited that if you're a full healer there's no point in slotting this skill as it provides no benefit to caster

Debilitate/Crippling Grasp I actually think debilitate is in a good spot, crippling on the other hand if I'm not making a dueling build I'm not sure why I'd slot it over debilitate or some other DoT yes the root is nice but still I find it to be pretty underwhelming.
Both DoTs could use a dmg increase as it's magblades main source of DoT pressure but that's not completely necessary

Crippling would need to have more benefit personally before I'd slot it

Siphoning Attacks compared to it's previous form it's pretty garbage as what made this skill great was that it allowed you a way to sustain your stamina as well this made melee magblade much more viable since the change however melee magblade is a tough sale not to mention it cornholes traditional magblade into either running shackle, or using tri-stat food not even getting to the point that we've all had to spec much more into sustain since the change. Coincidentally enough when the change was made to siphoning they just made it into a worse version of the Wardens Blue Betty Skill. Which unlike siphoning has no cost, restores more magicka, and removes 1 negative effect upon cast (since there's no cost on the skill you can just spam it as a pretty effective way to purge yourself) since then the Warden skill has gotten buffed to the point where 1 negative effect is removed every 5sec. Now siphoning does have a small healing aspect to it which I admit is nice in some cases.
Remove the cost from the skill

Introduce a way that we can also manage both our primary and secondary stat as was the case with the previous version

After reviewing Magblade there seems to be a running theme of "Really expensive skills that just don't do much or do it effectively enough especially once a healing aspect has been introduced" the class is in a bad spot in comparison to other mag classes our sustain keeps getting nerfed which then indirectly nerfs our dmg to the point where we don't really have either. There's not one thing you can say magblade does better than any other class except maybe kite. The class doesn't have the hight burst, doesn't have the best sustain, doesn't have good defense, and has next to nothing in terms of healing and mobility..it's just a bad class right now. Anything you can do on a magblade you can do on another class just better and usually quicker I'm a terrible magsorc but I'd get kills much easier and just overall have an easier time in PvP on my magsorc than my magblade which I've been playing for nearly 2yrs. People need to stop dismissing it saying magblade is fine..it's not you're just remembering magblade from before Murkmire, or back in Clockwork City, or before Morrowind dropped. Magblade isn't good I play the class because I enjoy the challenge and try not to just go with the meta, but it's a hard unforgiving class that makes you work for everything..to succeed on magblade you more or less kinda have to master the class before that point you're gonna suck and get bursted and not be able to kill anyone hence why when you see a magblade player who's not a cloak-spammer, or gankblade they're really good..because you have to be. These are some pain points and suggestions that I came up with, but I would like to hear from the community and gauge where the temperature is at..do you think I'm spot on or heading in the right direction, or do you FoS either way let's keep it respectful and relatively objective.

Healthy Offering hahahahaha are you kidding me it's one of the best skill of the entire game the proof in pvp.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/786370981464568498/CA1CF89D370B51176EEDC6F23BB4F232D0BBBEE3/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/771731984845697705/218C508B56C77D81548C832FE83C1FDE27B58275/

Was... was....

Magblades lack enough self healing to be able to use it very often. To offset the lack of self healing you need to build tankier, add onto that expensive ability costs and you also need to build for more sustain than other classes.

Even though in theory healthy Offering should be the best single target heal (besides the matriarch heal) with how you have to build it doesn’t end up being the strongest.

If you want to show off big tooltips or heals the matriarch heal will blow it out of the water (though it’s very expensive). If you want a spammable heal that’s effective honour the dead is better in pvp.

This is after playing all three classes as a pvp healer.... btw, let me know when you break 2 million, or a million damage and healing. Big healing amounts usually come from games where everyone's tanky so can't kill anyone. It'll pad the damage and healing stats but won't necessarily win you the game.

dat joke honour of dead is bad for me ,why i doing waste my magicka when i can use my own health bar for that.

Agreed for the first two casts. After that what players generally do (or should) is do a quick switch from the target to you. You end up being the weak link in the group reliant on other mag classes healing or off healing to stay alive.

i'm not so weak as you think i can cast it a lot of time without problem. and my risk of being a target is very low.

a true healblade doing stay in the shadow.

Xvorg · December 2019

Iskiab wrote: »

Arkew wrote: »

KCC11 wrote: »

There are a multitude of pain points with the current state of magicka nightblade, I'll address the major ones I've noticed so far but feel free to state your opinion or anything I missed.

The Assassination Tree(Kinda)
Starting with the Ultimate the cast times were just a terrible idea, and don't really work on what is suppose to be a fast-paced class. The Ultimate was already dodgeable, and frequently doesn't go off, not to mention given the short range of the Ultimate you basically have to be on your opponents lap to cast it.

[*] The cast times need to be removed first and foremost

Next is merciless while removing the delay and increasing the duration was great this skill still needs some work. This is the only skill in the game that provides no benefit when you use resources to cast it. The devs were last seen comparing this skill to frags while in theory this sounds solid in a functional sense it's illogical as no sorc (should) hard cast frags they only wait for the instant cast to be up. So while frags only requires ~ 1200 mag for one cast, merciless requires ~ 3600 mag for one cast because in addition to the initial cast requirement it then requires 50% of that per proc. To quantify this you should be proc your merciless every 10sec..6 procs in 1min equals 7200mag or in other words about 240 additional regen needed to maintain this skill as compared to before they added the resources per cast requirement. The next issue is the dmg mitigation aspect of the skill down to 10% from 15% the mitigation is nice, but still plays into the running theme of magblade as impractical as I have to first cast the skill, then land 5 LA to get the full benefit.
What I would suggest is that they either remove the resources upon cast mechanic of this skill or make it so that when you initially cast it you get the 10% dmg mitigation. My reasoning lies behind the fact that you took away an automatic offensive buff and replaced it with a conditional defensive buff this is imbalanced, and you should always receive some benefit from casting a skill.

The passives in the Assassination line are for most part fine with the exception of Master Assassin and Hemorrhage, the first promotes stealth/gank type gameplay so if you're not utilizing those methods the passive is useless, the second is good but for some reason only applies Minor Savagery and not Minor Prophecy as well; that should be fixed just for equality for both Stam/Mag specs of the class.

The Shadow Tree
Once again starting with the Ultimate..it just costs too much plain and simple as such we're back in the flux of impractical
The Ultimate just needs to be reduced to 150, the radius is small and the duration isn't long

Concealed weapon still costs too much to be used as a spammable tbh not to mention melee magblade doesn't work well as it's just kinda a worse off stamblade.
Needs to be more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from.

Shadowy Disguise/Dark Cloak

Shadowy Disguise is more or less fine

I'd like to see the healing get buffed on Dark Cloak currently I think it's 5% of you Max Health per sec which 2.5% in PvP; I propose an Increase to 10% of your Max Health every sec which would result in 5% in PvP. Not to mention that the skill is expensive for such a small heal and Minor Protection for such a short duration. To compare Wardens Ice Fortress also provides Minor Protection and Major Resolve just like Dark Cloak through Shadow Passives except that the Warden skill lasts for 24sec while Dark Cloak last for 8..to put a number on what that looks like sustain-wise in a 1min period magblade will have to cast Dark Cloak 8x for full uptime this would cost ~29k magicka just for this one skill while a warden would only have to cast it 3x which would cost~11k magicka..now let's ask ourselves is the heal provided by Dark Cloak worth an extra 18k magicka otherwise known as an extra 600regen required to maintain full uptime....no it's not so we either need to A)Significantly buff the heal B)Significantly reduce the cost or C)Significantly increase the duration there's no reason why magblade should have to expend an extra 18k for the same benefits

Refreshing/Twisted Path whether you're using this skill as a DoT or a Heal it's too weak to be this expensive, it doesn't last long nor is the area quite big. The nightblades that I see utilizing this skill only use it for the Major Expedition as magblade is too slow..like really slow..like Dragonknight slow.
If they want to validate the cost of the skill then they need to improve the effectiveness it's unfortunate that our Major Expedition was linked to this skill

Mass Hysteria is a shell of it's former self the radius is small that coupled with the lack of speed on the class leads to this skill missing often, and while being able to fear 6 enemies is nice if you're surrounded by 6 enemies in a 6m radius you've already messed up in most cases and you're just prolonging the respawn.
For costing 3k+ magicka it should do more..there should be some debuff applied

Shadow Image while the reverted it so that it can once again be utilized on different planes was a good move increasing the cost by like 1200 mag imo was a mistake. What they wanted to do is prevent stamblades from slotting both this and fear/cloak it's weird that the devs are actively trying to prevent nightblades from using nightblade skills..don't see this type of attitude with DKs, Templars, Sorcs, or any other class in the game for that matter. Assuming you port to shade every 10sec this once again results in 240regen increase on the class to maintain this skill which is not only our only source of Minor Maim, but our "mobility" (if you can call it that) on the battlefield
Both cost and range need to be reverted back to original values

Increase the duration

Or remove the limit cap on ports back to the shade. To explain further they could make it so that as long as your shade is up and you're further then lets say 10m away you can port back infinitely to the shade, and you can only reposition the shade once it expires.

All the passives here are good skills like Shadow Barrier encapsulate a NIghtblades philosophy "The Best Defense is a Good Offense" as you proc Major resolve by using skills like Concealed Weapon
Siphoning Tree

Starting with Soul Tether/Siphon once again we're in a situation where a skill cost too much for what it does, so let's breakdown Soul Tether first. Tether does moderate dmg and CCs all enemies in a 8m radius while providing a small heal per enemy the closest skill I can compare it to is leap which has anywhere from a 22-28m range while also CC'ing all enemies in an 8m radius both morphs hit extremely hard, the Stam version has the longer range, more dmg, and reduces the cost to 110, while the mag version has the dmg shield and maintains the 125 cost. Does anyone else see the problem with this? How can it be justified that Soul Tether is more expensive than either of these ultimates when they all basically do the same thing except that for leap you can do it at range, and it can't be blocked, not to mention that both versions are Instant cast while Soul Tether has a .4sec cast time attached to it. What is Soul Tether providing that justifies this? Soul Siphon is a good healing Ult but still runs into the issue of being too expensive.
The cast time from Soul Tether should be removed, the cost should be reduced to 125Ult, and it's radius increased to 10m magblade once again is slow as dirt so even with this 8m radius the skill misses a lot..like a lot to the point where it's not even worth using.

My only 2 issues with swallow soul is that the animation is clunky and that they removed the Minor Vitality from the skill which makes no sense as before it had to balanced morphs one that was better for solo play and one that was better for group play.

Healthy Offering is just downright disrespectful so the only burst heal on the entire class..actually the only burst heal in the entire game..actually the only heal in the entire game that isn't able to heal the caster it's utterly ridiculous and shows the obvious bias when it comes to nightblades. This skill is garbage and honestly just about any change would be an improvement from it's current state
Bar space is so limited that if you're a full healer there's no point in slotting this skill as it provides no benefit to caster

Debilitate/Crippling Grasp I actually think debilitate is in a good spot, crippling on the other hand if I'm not making a dueling build I'm not sure why I'd slot it over debilitate or some other DoT yes the root is nice but still I find it to be pretty underwhelming.
Both DoTs could use a dmg increase as it's magblades main source of DoT pressure but that's not completely necessary

Crippling would need to have more benefit personally before I'd slot it

Siphoning Attacks compared to it's previous form it's pretty garbage as what made this skill great was that it allowed you a way to sustain your stamina as well this made melee magblade much more viable since the change however melee magblade is a tough sale not to mention it cornholes traditional magblade into either running shackle, or using tri-stat food not even getting to the point that we've all had to spec much more into sustain since the change. Coincidentally enough when the change was made to siphoning they just made it into a worse version of the Wardens Blue Betty Skill. Which unlike siphoning has no cost, restores more magicka, and removes 1 negative effect upon cast (since there's no cost on the skill you can just spam it as a pretty effective way to purge yourself) since then the Warden skill has gotten buffed to the point where 1 negative effect is removed every 5sec. Now siphoning does have a small healing aspect to it which I admit is nice in some cases.
Remove the cost from the skill

Introduce a way that we can also manage both our primary and secondary stat as was the case with the previous version

After reviewing Magblade there seems to be a running theme of "Really expensive skills that just don't do much or do it effectively enough especially once a healing aspect has been introduced" the class is in a bad spot in comparison to other mag classes our sustain keeps getting nerfed which then indirectly nerfs our dmg to the point where we don't really have either. There's not one thing you can say magblade does better than any other class except maybe kite. The class doesn't have the hight burst, doesn't have the best sustain, doesn't have good defense, and has next to nothing in terms of healing and mobility..it's just a bad class right now. Anything you can do on a magblade you can do on another class just better and usually quicker I'm a terrible magsorc but I'd get kills much easier and just overall have an easier time in PvP on my magsorc than my magblade which I've been playing for nearly 2yrs. People need to stop dismissing it saying magblade is fine..it's not you're just remembering magblade from before Murkmire, or back in Clockwork City, or before Morrowind dropped. Magblade isn't good I play the class because I enjoy the challenge and try not to just go with the meta, but it's a hard unforgiving class that makes you work for everything..to succeed on magblade you more or less kinda have to master the class before that point you're gonna suck and get bursted and not be able to kill anyone hence why when you see a magblade player who's not a cloak-spammer, or gankblade they're really good..because you have to be. These are some pain points and suggestions that I came up with, but I would like to hear from the community and gauge where the temperature is at..do you think I'm spot on or heading in the right direction, or do you FoS either way let's keep it respectful and relatively objective.

Healthy Offering hahahahaha are you kidding me it's one of the best skill of the entire game the proof in pvp.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/786370981464568498/CA1CF89D370B51176EEDC6F23BB4F232D0BBBEE3/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/771731984845697705/218C508B56C77D81548C832FE83C1FDE27B58275/

Was... was....

Magblades lack enough self healing to be able to use it very often. To offset the lack of self healing you need to build tankier, add onto that expensive ability costs and you also need to build for more sustain than other classes.

Even though in theory healthy Offering should be the best single target heal (besides the matriarch heal) with how you have to build it doesn’t end up being the strongest.

If you want to show off big tooltips or heals the matriarch heal will blow it out of the water (though it’s very expensive). If you want a spammable heal that’s effective honour the dead is better in pvp.

This is after playing all three classes as a pvp healer.... btw, let me know when you break 2 million, or a million damage and healing. Big healing amounts usually come from games where everyone's tanky so can't kill anyone. It'll pad the damage and healing stats but won't necessarily win you the game.

Another thing about healthy offering is it shows the health cost per second. With a 12k tooltip you're only actually healing 8k with a 4k health cost, spread out over 8 seconds done to yourself. You then heal that amount with dark cloak. So it somewhat pads the stats, you're transferring health from yourself to others but the cost at 4 stacks is the breaking point where you're too vulnerable.

Question, shouldn't Healthy Offering proc Buffer of the Swift effect 100% of the time, reducing it's cost in a 10%? I mean, Swift reduce the dmg from players, right?

Arkew · December 2019

Xvorg wrote: »

Op, sorry, but do you know how ultimate value is calculated?

Under that point of view, the cost of Tether is OK. It has a stun, a burst dmg, a heal, and a DoT associated. I agree with the innecesary cast time, but for the rest, the cost of the skill is just OK.

A similar skill to Tether is DBoS. It has a burst dmg, a stun, and a DoT associated and it costs 125 Ulti, just 25 ulti point less than Tether because it doesn't have a heal. So if you want to decrease Tether cost, then you have to reduce its effects.

I have absolutely 0 problem if you make soul siphon a 125 ulti skill if, for example, you change major vitality for minor mending (Siphon is one of my favorite ultis in the game), but tether should stay as it is.

Regarding Swallow sould, just leave is it is... it used to be really clunky some years ago, now is more than OK and can be easily weaved. If you feel it clunky, then you should practice.

Healthy offering is one of the best heals in this game. It procs a *** ton of sets that work on dmg, including alma mercy, desert rose or magicka furnace in LA, Imperium, Hagraven's garden, Ironblood, Juggernaut, etc... in HA. It could be useful to make work sets like Withestrakes retribution or Lamae. And even if you go the health recovery path on a NB (quite easy to do) you could use it to trigger Orgnum's + troll king combo. Just use your imagination to make it work.

i like you now

Gilvoth · December 2019

this thread is based on the writers opinion alone. my entire guild and all my friends love the cast time on ultimates and several other things this thread suggests we disagree with. especially on multiple points, the thread is based on the writers solo opinions, not the opinions of the rest of the eso community. i wish this was stated on every thread that gives the impression that their opinion is based on the writers beliefs and not how everyone in the eso community thinks and feels about those opinions. hopefully in the future this forum will include a forced comment to be within these type of topics to show that the writers opinion is not that of the community, but the writers opinion alone.

Iskiab · December 2019

Xvorg wrote: »

Op, sorry, but do you know how ultimate value is calculated?

Under that point of view, the cost of Tether is OK. It has a stun, a burst dmg, a heal, and a DoT associated. I agree with the innecesary cast time, but for the rest, the cost of the skill is just OK.

A similar skill to Tether is DBoS. It has a burst dmg, a stun, and a DoT associated and it costs 125 Ulti, just 25 ulti point less than Tether because it doesn't have a heal. So if you want to decrease Tether cost, then you have to reduce its effects.

I have absolutely 0 problem if you make soul siphon a 125 ulti skill if, for example, you change major vitality for minor mending (Siphon is one of my favorite ultis in the game), but tether should stay as it is.

Regarding Swallow sould, just leave is it is... it used to be really clunky some years ago, now is more than OK and can be easily weaved. If you feel it clunky, then you should practice.

Healthy offering is one of the best heals in this game. It procs a *** ton of sets that work on dmg, including alma mercy, desert rose or magicka furnace in LA, Imperium, Hagraven's garden, Ironblood, Juggernaut, etc... in HA. It could be useful to make work sets like Withestrakes retribution or Lamae. And even if you go the health recovery path on a NB (quite easy to do) you could use it to trigger Orgnum's + troll king combo. Just use your imagination to make it work.

This is flat out wrong. Unless they changed it recently, which I doubt, healthy Offering will not proc any damage taken sets.

Xvorg wrote: »

Iskiab wrote: »

Arkew wrote: »

KCC11 wrote: »

There are a multitude of pain points with the current state of magicka nightblade, I'll address the major ones I've noticed so far but feel free to state your opinion or anything I missed.

The Assassination Tree(Kinda)
Starting with the Ultimate the cast times were just a terrible idea, and don't really work on what is suppose to be a fast-paced class. The Ultimate was already dodgeable, and frequently doesn't go off, not to mention given the short range of the Ultimate you basically have to be on your opponents lap to cast it.

[*] The cast times need to be removed first and foremost

Next is merciless while removing the delay and increasing the duration was great this skill still needs some work. This is the only skill in the game that provides no benefit when you use resources to cast it. The devs were last seen comparing this skill to frags while in theory this sounds solid in a functional sense it's illogical as no sorc (should) hard cast frags they only wait for the instant cast to be up. So while frags only requires ~ 1200 mag for one cast, merciless requires ~ 3600 mag for one cast because in addition to the initial cast requirement it then requires 50% of that per proc. To quantify this you should be proc your merciless every 10sec..6 procs in 1min equals 7200mag or in other words about 240 additional regen needed to maintain this skill as compared to before they added the resources per cast requirement. The next issue is the dmg mitigation aspect of the skill down to 10% from 15% the mitigation is nice, but still plays into the running theme of magblade as impractical as I have to first cast the skill, then land 5 LA to get the full benefit.
What I would suggest is that they either remove the resources upon cast mechanic of this skill or make it so that when you initially cast it you get the 10% dmg mitigation. My reasoning lies behind the fact that you took away an automatic offensive buff and replaced it with a conditional defensive buff this is imbalanced, and you should always receive some benefit from casting a skill.

The passives in the Assassination line are for most part fine with the exception of Master Assassin and Hemorrhage, the first promotes stealth/gank type gameplay so if you're not utilizing those methods the passive is useless, the second is good but for some reason only applies Minor Savagery and not Minor Prophecy as well; that should be fixed just for equality for both Stam/Mag specs of the class.

The Shadow Tree
Once again starting with the Ultimate..it just costs too much plain and simple as such we're back in the flux of impractical
The Ultimate just needs to be reduced to 150, the radius is small and the duration isn't long

Concealed weapon still costs too much to be used as a spammable tbh not to mention melee magblade doesn't work well as it's just kinda a worse off stamblade.
Needs to be more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from.

Shadowy Disguise/Dark Cloak

Shadowy Disguise is more or less fine

I'd like to see the healing get buffed on Dark Cloak currently I think it's 5% of you Max Health per sec which 2.5% in PvP; I propose an Increase to 10% of your Max Health every sec which would result in 5% in PvP. Not to mention that the skill is expensive for such a small heal and Minor Protection for such a short duration. To compare Wardens Ice Fortress also provides Minor Protection and Major Resolve just like Dark Cloak through Shadow Passives except that the Warden skill lasts for 24sec while Dark Cloak last for 8..to put a number on what that looks like sustain-wise in a 1min period magblade will have to cast Dark Cloak 8x for full uptime this would cost ~29k magicka just for this one skill while a warden would only have to cast it 3x which would cost~11k magicka..now let's ask ourselves is the heal provided by Dark Cloak worth an extra 18k magicka otherwise known as an extra 600regen required to maintain full uptime....no it's not so we either need to A)Significantly buff the heal B)Significantly reduce the cost or C)Significantly increase the duration there's no reason why magblade should have to expend an extra 18k for the same benefits

Refreshing/Twisted Path whether you're using this skill as a DoT or a Heal it's too weak to be this expensive, it doesn't last long nor is the area quite big. The nightblades that I see utilizing this skill only use it for the Major Expedition as magblade is too slow..like really slow..like Dragonknight slow.
If they want to validate the cost of the skill then they need to improve the effectiveness it's unfortunate that our Major Expedition was linked to this skill

Mass Hysteria is a shell of it's former self the radius is small that coupled with the lack of speed on the class leads to this skill missing often, and while being able to fear 6 enemies is nice if you're surrounded by 6 enemies in a 6m radius you've already messed up in most cases and you're just prolonging the respawn.
For costing 3k+ magicka it should do more..there should be some debuff applied

Shadow Image while the reverted it so that it can once again be utilized on different planes was a good move increasing the cost by like 1200 mag imo was a mistake. What they wanted to do is prevent stamblades from slotting both this and fear/cloak it's weird that the devs are actively trying to prevent nightblades from using nightblade skills..don't see this type of attitude with DKs, Templars, Sorcs, or any other class in the game for that matter. Assuming you port to shade every 10sec this once again results in 240regen increase on the class to maintain this skill which is not only our only source of Minor Maim, but our "mobility" (if you can call it that) on the battlefield
Both cost and range need to be reverted back to original values

Increase the duration

Or remove the limit cap on ports back to the shade. To explain further they could make it so that as long as your shade is up and you're further then lets say 10m away you can port back infinitely to the shade, and you can only reposition the shade once it expires.

All the passives here are good skills like Shadow Barrier encapsulate a NIghtblades philosophy "The Best Defense is a Good Offense" as you proc Major resolve by using skills like Concealed Weapon
Siphoning Tree

Starting with Soul Tether/Siphon once again we're in a situation where a skill cost too much for what it does, so let's breakdown Soul Tether first. Tether does moderate dmg and CCs all enemies in a 8m radius while providing a small heal per enemy the closest skill I can compare it to is leap which has anywhere from a 22-28m range while also CC'ing all enemies in an 8m radius both morphs hit extremely hard, the Stam version has the longer range, more dmg, and reduces the cost to 110, while the mag version has the dmg shield and maintains the 125 cost. Does anyone else see the problem with this? How can it be justified that Soul Tether is more expensive than either of these ultimates when they all basically do the same thing except that for leap you can do it at range, and it can't be blocked, not to mention that both versions are Instant cast while Soul Tether has a .4sec cast time attached to it. What is Soul Tether providing that justifies this? Soul Siphon is a good healing Ult but still runs into the issue of being too expensive.
The cast time from Soul Tether should be removed, the cost should be reduced to 125Ult, and it's radius increased to 10m magblade once again is slow as dirt so even with this 8m radius the skill misses a lot..like a lot to the point where it's not even worth using.

My only 2 issues with swallow soul is that the animation is clunky and that they removed the Minor Vitality from the skill which makes no sense as before it had to balanced morphs one that was better for solo play and one that was better for group play.

Healthy Offering is just downright disrespectful so the only burst heal on the entire class..actually the only burst heal in the entire game..actually the only heal in the entire game that isn't able to heal the caster it's utterly ridiculous and shows the obvious bias when it comes to nightblades. This skill is garbage and honestly just about any change would be an improvement from it's current state
Bar space is so limited that if you're a full healer there's no point in slotting this skill as it provides no benefit to caster

Debilitate/Crippling Grasp I actually think debilitate is in a good spot, crippling on the other hand if I'm not making a dueling build I'm not sure why I'd slot it over debilitate or some other DoT yes the root is nice but still I find it to be pretty underwhelming.
Both DoTs could use a dmg increase as it's magblades main source of DoT pressure but that's not completely necessary

Crippling would need to have more benefit personally before I'd slot it

Siphoning Attacks compared to it's previous form it's pretty garbage as what made this skill great was that it allowed you a way to sustain your stamina as well this made melee magblade much more viable since the change however melee magblade is a tough sale not to mention it cornholes traditional magblade into either running shackle, or using tri-stat food not even getting to the point that we've all had to spec much more into sustain since the change. Coincidentally enough when the change was made to siphoning they just made it into a worse version of the Wardens Blue Betty Skill. Which unlike siphoning has no cost, restores more magicka, and removes 1 negative effect upon cast (since there's no cost on the skill you can just spam it as a pretty effective way to purge yourself) since then the Warden skill has gotten buffed to the point where 1 negative effect is removed every 5sec. Now siphoning does have a small healing aspect to it which I admit is nice in some cases.
Remove the cost from the skill

Introduce a way that we can also manage both our primary and secondary stat as was the case with the previous version

After reviewing Magblade there seems to be a running theme of "Really expensive skills that just don't do much or do it effectively enough especially once a healing aspect has been introduced" the class is in a bad spot in comparison to other mag classes our sustain keeps getting nerfed which then indirectly nerfs our dmg to the point where we don't really have either. There's not one thing you can say magblade does better than any other class except maybe kite. The class doesn't have the hight burst, doesn't have the best sustain, doesn't have good defense, and has next to nothing in terms of healing and mobility..it's just a bad class right now. Anything you can do on a magblade you can do on another class just better and usually quicker I'm a terrible magsorc but I'd get kills much easier and just overall have an easier time in PvP on my magsorc than my magblade which I've been playing for nearly 2yrs. People need to stop dismissing it saying magblade is fine..it's not you're just remembering magblade from before Murkmire, or back in Clockwork City, or before Morrowind dropped. Magblade isn't good I play the class because I enjoy the challenge and try not to just go with the meta, but it's a hard unforgiving class that makes you work for everything..to succeed on magblade you more or less kinda have to master the class before that point you're gonna suck and get bursted and not be able to kill anyone hence why when you see a magblade player who's not a cloak-spammer, or gankblade they're really good..because you have to be. These are some pain points and suggestions that I came up with, but I would like to hear from the community and gauge where the temperature is at..do you think I'm spot on or heading in the right direction, or do you FoS either way let's keep it respectful and relatively objective.

Healthy Offering hahahahaha are you kidding me it's one of the best skill of the entire game the proof in pvp.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/786370981464568498/CA1CF89D370B51176EEDC6F23BB4F232D0BBBEE3/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/771731984845697705/218C508B56C77D81548C832FE83C1FDE27B58275/

Was... was....

Magblades lack enough self healing to be able to use it very often. To offset the lack of self healing you need to build tankier, add onto that expensive ability costs and you also need to build for more sustain than other classes.

Even though in theory healthy Offering should be the best single target heal (besides the matriarch heal) with how you have to build it doesn’t end up being the strongest.

If you want to show off big tooltips or heals the matriarch heal will blow it out of the water (though it’s very expensive). If you want a spammable heal that’s effective honour the dead is better in pvp.

This is after playing all three classes as a pvp healer.... btw, let me know when you break 2 million, or a million damage and healing. Big healing amounts usually come from games where everyone's tanky so can't kill anyone. It'll pad the damage and healing stats but won't necessarily win you the game.

Another thing about healthy offering is it shows the health cost per second. With a 12k tooltip you're only actually healing 8k with a 4k health cost, spread out over 8 seconds done to yourself. You then heal that amount with dark cloak. So it somewhat pads the stats, you're transferring health from yourself to others but the cost at 4 stacks is the breaking point where you're too vulnerable.

Question, shouldn't Healthy Offering proc Buffer of the Swift effect 100% of the time, reducing it's cost in a 10%? I mean, Swift reduce the dmg from players, right?

Nope, it’s like oblivion damage and cannot be mitigated in any way.

The only way to reduce the dot amount is stacking crit and healing done modifiers. The dot amount increases with more magicka and spell power but not healing done or crits.

Xvorg · December 2019

Iskiab wrote: »

Xvorg wrote: »

Op, sorry, but do you know how ultimate value is calculated?

Under that point of view, the cost of Tether is OK. It has a stun, a burst dmg, a heal, and a DoT associated. I agree with the innecesary cast time, but for the rest, the cost of the skill is just OK.

A similar skill to Tether is DBoS. It has a burst dmg, a stun, and a DoT associated and it costs 125 Ulti, just 25 ulti point less than Tether because it doesn't have a heal. So if you want to decrease Tether cost, then you have to reduce its effects.

I have absolutely 0 problem if you make soul siphon a 125 ulti skill if, for example, you change major vitality for minor mending (Siphon is one of my favorite ultis in the game), but tether should stay as it is.

Regarding Swallow sould, just leave is it is... it used to be really clunky some years ago, now is more than OK and can be easily weaved. If you feel it clunky, then you should practice.

Healthy offering is one of the best heals in this game. It procs a *** ton of sets that work on dmg, including alma mercy, desert rose or magicka furnace in LA, Imperium, Hagraven's garden, Ironblood, Juggernaut, etc... in HA. It could be useful to make work sets like Withestrakes retribution or Lamae. And even if you go the health recovery path on a NB (quite easy to do) you could use it to trigger Orgnum's + troll king combo. Just use your imagination to make it work.

This is flat out wrong. Unless they changed it recently, which I doubt, healthy Offering will not proc any damage taken sets.

Xvorg wrote: »

Iskiab wrote: »

Arkew wrote: »

KCC11 wrote: »

There are a multitude of pain points with the current state of magicka nightblade, I'll address the major ones I've noticed so far but feel free to state your opinion or anything I missed.

The Assassination Tree(Kinda)
Starting with the Ultimate the cast times were just a terrible idea, and don't really work on what is suppose to be a fast-paced class. The Ultimate was already dodgeable, and frequently doesn't go off, not to mention given the short range of the Ultimate you basically have to be on your opponents lap to cast it.

[*] The cast times need to be removed first and foremost

Next is merciless while removing the delay and increasing the duration was great this skill still needs some work. This is the only skill in the game that provides no benefit when you use resources to cast it. The devs were last seen comparing this skill to frags while in theory this sounds solid in a functional sense it's illogical as no sorc (should) hard cast frags they only wait for the instant cast to be up. So while frags only requires ~ 1200 mag for one cast, merciless requires ~ 3600 mag for one cast because in addition to the initial cast requirement it then requires 50% of that per proc. To quantify this you should be proc your merciless every 10sec..6 procs in 1min equals 7200mag or in other words about 240 additional regen needed to maintain this skill as compared to before they added the resources per cast requirement. The next issue is the dmg mitigation aspect of the skill down to 10% from 15% the mitigation is nice, but still plays into the running theme of magblade as impractical as I have to first cast the skill, then land 5 LA to get the full benefit.
What I would suggest is that they either remove the resources upon cast mechanic of this skill or make it so that when you initially cast it you get the 10% dmg mitigation. My reasoning lies behind the fact that you took away an automatic offensive buff and replaced it with a conditional defensive buff this is imbalanced, and you should always receive some benefit from casting a skill.

The passives in the Assassination line are for most part fine with the exception of Master Assassin and Hemorrhage, the first promotes stealth/gank type gameplay so if you're not utilizing those methods the passive is useless, the second is good but for some reason only applies Minor Savagery and not Minor Prophecy as well; that should be fixed just for equality for both Stam/Mag specs of the class.

The Shadow Tree
Once again starting with the Ultimate..it just costs too much plain and simple as such we're back in the flux of impractical
The Ultimate just needs to be reduced to 150, the radius is small and the duration isn't long

Concealed weapon still costs too much to be used as a spammable tbh not to mention melee magblade doesn't work well as it's just kinda a worse off stamblade.
Needs to be more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from.

Shadowy Disguise/Dark Cloak

Shadowy Disguise is more or less fine

I'd like to see the healing get buffed on Dark Cloak currently I think it's 5% of you Max Health per sec which 2.5% in PvP; I propose an Increase to 10% of your Max Health every sec which would result in 5% in PvP. Not to mention that the skill is expensive for such a small heal and Minor Protection for such a short duration. To compare Wardens Ice Fortress also provides Minor Protection and Major Resolve just like Dark Cloak through Shadow Passives except that the Warden skill lasts for 24sec while Dark Cloak last for 8..to put a number on what that looks like sustain-wise in a 1min period magblade will have to cast Dark Cloak 8x for full uptime this would cost ~29k magicka just for this one skill while a warden would only have to cast it 3x which would cost~11k magicka..now let's ask ourselves is the heal provided by Dark Cloak worth an extra 18k magicka otherwise known as an extra 600regen required to maintain full uptime....no it's not so we either need to A)Significantly buff the heal B)Significantly reduce the cost or C)Significantly increase the duration there's no reason why magblade should have to expend an extra 18k for the same benefits

Refreshing/Twisted Path whether you're using this skill as a DoT or a Heal it's too weak to be this expensive, it doesn't last long nor is the area quite big. The nightblades that I see utilizing this skill only use it for the Major Expedition as magblade is too slow..like really slow..like Dragonknight slow.
If they want to validate the cost of the skill then they need to improve the effectiveness it's unfortunate that our Major Expedition was linked to this skill

Mass Hysteria is a shell of it's former self the radius is small that coupled with the lack of speed on the class leads to this skill missing often, and while being able to fear 6 enemies is nice if you're surrounded by 6 enemies in a 6m radius you've already messed up in most cases and you're just prolonging the respawn.
For costing 3k+ magicka it should do more..there should be some debuff applied

Shadow Image while the reverted it so that it can once again be utilized on different planes was a good move increasing the cost by like 1200 mag imo was a mistake. What they wanted to do is prevent stamblades from slotting both this and fear/cloak it's weird that the devs are actively trying to prevent nightblades from using nightblade skills..don't see this type of attitude with DKs, Templars, Sorcs, or any other class in the game for that matter. Assuming you port to shade every 10sec this once again results in 240regen increase on the class to maintain this skill which is not only our only source of Minor Maim, but our "mobility" (if you can call it that) on the battlefield
Both cost and range need to be reverted back to original values

Increase the duration

Or remove the limit cap on ports back to the shade. To explain further they could make it so that as long as your shade is up and you're further then lets say 10m away you can port back infinitely to the shade, and you can only reposition the shade once it expires.

All the passives here are good skills like Shadow Barrier encapsulate a NIghtblades philosophy "The Best Defense is a Good Offense" as you proc Major resolve by using skills like Concealed Weapon
Siphoning Tree

Starting with Soul Tether/Siphon once again we're in a situation where a skill cost too much for what it does, so let's breakdown Soul Tether first. Tether does moderate dmg and CCs all enemies in a 8m radius while providing a small heal per enemy the closest skill I can compare it to is leap which has anywhere from a 22-28m range while also CC'ing all enemies in an 8m radius both morphs hit extremely hard, the Stam version has the longer range, more dmg, and reduces the cost to 110, while the mag version has the dmg shield and maintains the 125 cost. Does anyone else see the problem with this? How can it be justified that Soul Tether is more expensive than either of these ultimates when they all basically do the same thing except that for leap you can do it at range, and it can't be blocked, not to mention that both versions are Instant cast while Soul Tether has a .4sec cast time attached to it. What is Soul Tether providing that justifies this? Soul Siphon is a good healing Ult but still runs into the issue of being too expensive.
The cast time from Soul Tether should be removed, the cost should be reduced to 125Ult, and it's radius increased to 10m magblade once again is slow as dirt so even with this 8m radius the skill misses a lot..like a lot to the point where it's not even worth using.

My only 2 issues with swallow soul is that the animation is clunky and that they removed the Minor Vitality from the skill which makes no sense as before it had to balanced morphs one that was better for solo play and one that was better for group play.

Healthy Offering is just downright disrespectful so the only burst heal on the entire class..actually the only burst heal in the entire game..actually the only heal in the entire game that isn't able to heal the caster it's utterly ridiculous and shows the obvious bias when it comes to nightblades. This skill is garbage and honestly just about any change would be an improvement from it's current state
Bar space is so limited that if you're a full healer there's no point in slotting this skill as it provides no benefit to caster

Debilitate/Crippling Grasp I actually think debilitate is in a good spot, crippling on the other hand if I'm not making a dueling build I'm not sure why I'd slot it over debilitate or some other DoT yes the root is nice but still I find it to be pretty underwhelming.
Both DoTs could use a dmg increase as it's magblades main source of DoT pressure but that's not completely necessary

Crippling would need to have more benefit personally before I'd slot it

Siphoning Attacks compared to it's previous form it's pretty garbage as what made this skill great was that it allowed you a way to sustain your stamina as well this made melee magblade much more viable since the change however melee magblade is a tough sale not to mention it cornholes traditional magblade into either running shackle, or using tri-stat food not even getting to the point that we've all had to spec much more into sustain since the change. Coincidentally enough when the change was made to siphoning they just made it into a worse version of the Wardens Blue Betty Skill. Which unlike siphoning has no cost, restores more magicka, and removes 1 negative effect upon cast (since there's no cost on the skill you can just spam it as a pretty effective way to purge yourself) since then the Warden skill has gotten buffed to the point where 1 negative effect is removed every 5sec. Now siphoning does have a small healing aspect to it which I admit is nice in some cases.
Remove the cost from the skill

Introduce a way that we can also manage both our primary and secondary stat as was the case with the previous version

After reviewing Magblade there seems to be a running theme of "Really expensive skills that just don't do much or do it effectively enough especially once a healing aspect has been introduced" the class is in a bad spot in comparison to other mag classes our sustain keeps getting nerfed which then indirectly nerfs our dmg to the point where we don't really have either. There's not one thing you can say magblade does better than any other class except maybe kite. The class doesn't have the hight burst, doesn't have the best sustain, doesn't have good defense, and has next to nothing in terms of healing and mobility..it's just a bad class right now. Anything you can do on a magblade you can do on another class just better and usually quicker I'm a terrible magsorc but I'd get kills much easier and just overall have an easier time in PvP on my magsorc than my magblade which I've been playing for nearly 2yrs. People need to stop dismissing it saying magblade is fine..it's not you're just remembering magblade from before Murkmire, or back in Clockwork City, or before Morrowind dropped. Magblade isn't good I play the class because I enjoy the challenge and try not to just go with the meta, but it's a hard unforgiving class that makes you work for everything..to succeed on magblade you more or less kinda have to master the class before that point you're gonna suck and get bursted and not be able to kill anyone hence why when you see a magblade player who's not a cloak-spammer, or gankblade they're really good..because you have to be. These are some pain points and suggestions that I came up with, but I would like to hear from the community and gauge where the temperature is at..do you think I'm spot on or heading in the right direction, or do you FoS either way let's keep it respectful and relatively objective.

Healthy Offering hahahahaha are you kidding me it's one of the best skill of the entire game the proof in pvp.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/786370981464568498/CA1CF89D370B51176EEDC6F23BB4F232D0BBBEE3/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/771731984845697705/218C508B56C77D81548C832FE83C1FDE27B58275/

Was... was....

Magblades lack enough self healing to be able to use it very often. To offset the lack of self healing you need to build tankier, add onto that expensive ability costs and you also need to build for more sustain than other classes.

Even though in theory healthy Offering should be the best single target heal (besides the matriarch heal) with how you have to build it doesn’t end up being the strongest.

If you want to show off big tooltips or heals the matriarch heal will blow it out of the water (though it’s very expensive). If you want a spammable heal that’s effective honour the dead is better in pvp.

This is after playing all three classes as a pvp healer.... btw, let me know when you break 2 million, or a million damage and healing. Big healing amounts usually come from games where everyone's tanky so can't kill anyone. It'll pad the damage and healing stats but won't necessarily win you the game.

Another thing about healthy offering is it shows the health cost per second. With a 12k tooltip you're only actually healing 8k with a 4k health cost, spread out over 8 seconds done to yourself. You then heal that amount with dark cloak. So it somewhat pads the stats, you're transferring health from yourself to others but the cost at 4 stacks is the breaking point where you're too vulnerable.

Question, shouldn't Healthy Offering proc Buffer of the Swift effect 100% of the time, reducing it's cost in a 10%? I mean, Swift reduce the dmg from players, right?

Nope, it’s like oblivion damage and cannot be mitigated in any way.

The only way to reduce the dot amount is stacking crit and healing done modifiers. The dot amount increases with more magicka and spell power but not healing done or crits.

I've used the skils several times and it procs at least some of the above mentioned sets (light armkr t least). Maybe I should make a video about testing it.

technohic · December 2019

Gilvoth wrote: »

this thread is based on the writers opinion alone. my entire guild and all my friends love the cast time on ultimates and several other things this thread suggests we disagree with. especially on multiple points, the thread is based on the writers solo opinions, not the opinions of the rest of the eso community. i wish this was stated on every thread that gives the impression that their opinion is based on the writers beliefs and not how everyone in the eso community thinks and feels about those opinions. hopefully in the future this forum will include a forced comment to be within these type of topics to show that the writers opinion is not that of the community, but the writers opinion alone.

Why the hell does anyone like cast times on ultimates? Only thing I can think of is because if you're in a zerg, theres a good chance some cant even activate it in you. Outside of that, I can see no pros to adding the cast time and highlighting the poor performance of the game.

sproattt · December 2019

Nightblade compared to Templar and Dk are insane. No nerfs to Templar nor Dk is needed(Dots on Dks toolkit should be slightly improved 5/15%, Claw/Breathe ONLY if NBS/Stam Ward/Necro and Sorc get some love to be on par).

Cast time ults have screwed all Nightblades. They just have to buff classes to be in line with templars and dks in PvP. The mass amount of healing and mitigation provided has made the Tanky/Overheal meta that we find ourselves.

Sorc is fine, streak should be fixed to work at all times. Undo needs to work, potions need to go off,. CAPPING KEEPS GIVES LOAD SCREENS TO PLAYERS DEFENDING THE KEEP.

sproattt · December 2019

Once PvP performance is fixed those issues above can be addressed. Otherwise lag and performance will be the main issue.

Iskiab · December 2019

sproattt wrote: »

Nightblade compared to Templar and Dk are insane. No nerfs to Templar nor Dk is needed(Dots on Dks toolkit should be slightly improved 5/15%, Claw/Breathe ONLY if NBS/Stam Ward/Necro and Sorc get some love to be on par).

Cast time ults have screwed all Nightblades. They just have to buff classes to be in line with templars and dks in PvP. The mass amount of healing and mitigation provided has made the Tanky/Overheal meta that we find ourselves.

Sorc is fine, streak should be fixed to work at all times. Undo needs to work, potions need to go off,. CAPPING KEEPS GIVES LOAD SCREENS TO PLAYERS DEFENDING THE KEEP.

DKs aren’t too bad tbh. It’s a bit of rock/paper/scissors between NBs and DKs and Wardens.

I always saw good DKs as godly as a magblade. Now as a magplar they’re an easy match up, just don’t use projectiles... something a magblade can’t do.

Magtemplar > DK
DK > Warden
Warden > Magplar

The problem is magblades don’t fit in there and magnecros are weird. It holds true unless playing against a lot better players, like I’ve lost 1v1 against a magblade and magnecro as a magtemplar but they were a lot better players then me.

KCC11 · December 2019

Gilvoth wrote: »

this thread is based on the writers opinion alone. my entire guild and all my friends love the cast time on ultimates and several other things this thread suggests we disagree with. especially on multiple points, the thread is based on the writers solo opinions, not the opinions of the rest of the eso community. i wish this was stated on every thread that gives the impression that their opinion is based on the writers beliefs and not how everyone in the eso community thinks and feels about those opinions. hopefully in the future this forum will include a forced comment to be within these type of topics to show that the writers opinion is not that of the community, but the writers opinion alone.

I thought that it was obvious that I'm speaking for myself as unless appointed in some way or fashion no one can speak for an entire community just themselves. Nothing about my post states otherwise nor did I, in the future try to prevent yourself from projecting your views onto other people's intentions

KCC11 · December 2019

I should've prefaced this by saying I'm speaking from a PvP perspective not PVE, and not BGs. BGs is a controlled environment where you have a set number of both allies and enemies..PvP doesn't work that way

KCC11 · December 2019

Xvorg wrote: »

Op, sorry, but do you know how ultimate value is calculated?

Under that point of view, the cost of Tether is OK. It has a stun, a burst dmg, a heal, and a DoT associated. I agree with the innecesary cast time, but for the rest, the cost of the skill is just OK.

A similar skill to Tether is DBoS. It has a burst dmg, a stun, and a DoT associated and it costs 125 Ulti, just 25 ulti point less than Tether because it doesn't have a heal. So if you want to decrease Tether cost, then you have to reduce its effects.

I have absolutely 0 problem if you make soul siphon a 125 ulti skill if, for example, you change major vitality for minor mending (Siphon is one of my favorite ultis in the game), but tether should stay as it is.

Regarding Swallow sould, just leave is it is... it used to be really clunky some years ago, now is more than OK and can be easily weaved. If you feel it clunky, then you should practice.

Healthy offering is one of the best heals in this game. It procs a *** ton of sets that work on dmg, including alma mercy, desert rose or magicka furnace in LA, Imperium, Hagraven's garden, Ironblood, Juggernaut, etc... in HA. It could be useful to make work sets like Withestrakes retribution or Lamae. And even if you go the health recovery path on a NB (quite easy to do) you could use it to trigger Orgnum's + troll king combo. Just use your imagination to make it work.

How exactly do you plan on killing someone with your Orgnum+Troll King combo??? Also DBoS is a much better Ult imo than Tether as it can't miss, and it hits much harder than Tether. I don't think you need to reduce Tether's effects to justify a decrease in cost in comparison to other Ultimates at or near it's cost-range Tether is at or near the bottom if you were to rank them in how they function within the class. This is a multi-faceted game and we can't just look at the Sorc Ultimate the same way we look at a nightblade Ultimate nor could we look at a DK Ult the same way we look at a Templar Ult...all these classes function differently and have their playstyles so what's good for one class may not be good for another and vice versa. All of that withstanding I still maintain that as Soul Tether functions within the magblade class imo is bad the dmg isn't great, the heal/DoT is miniscule, it comes with a CC, hell DBoS has a bigger radius. Swallow Soul is still rather clunky we've all just gotten used to it and have worked around it.

Gilvoth · December 2019

KCC11 wrote: »

Gilvoth wrote: »

this thread is based on the writers opinion alone. my entire guild and all my friends love the cast time on ultimates and several other things this thread suggests we disagree with. especially on multiple points, the thread is based on the writers solo opinions, not the opinions of the rest of the eso community. i wish this was stated on every thread that gives the impression that their opinion is based on the writers beliefs and not how everyone in the eso community thinks and feels about those opinions. hopefully in the future this forum will include a forced comment to be within these type of topics to show that the writers opinion is not that of the community, but the writers opinion alone.

I thought that it was obvious that I'm speaking for myself as unless appointed in some way or fashion no one can speak for an entire community just themselves. Nothing about my post states otherwise nor did I, in the future try to prevent yourself from projecting your views onto other people's intentions

my intention, and belief was directed from the body of this threads title and some of it's wording, in addition to your request for feedback on the subjects you brought forward.
here is an example quote:

KCC11 wrote: »

... more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from ...

my feedback on several of the subjects you mention is based on those directions, although there are several times you mention that these are your opinions and if my interpretation is incorrect i will extend an apology.

stealth gameplay is a main gameplay for entire guilds and groups and solo play throughout all of the elderscrolls series both single player as well as elderscrolls online, and there are guilds dedicated entirely to stealth gameplay.
so as feedback on this specific subject i disagree with your wording and claim that the community 'quote:

"is trying to get away from"

as well as the subject of ultimates having cast times now that previously were not there before.
because with the new changes to ultimates and their cast times it has opened up skill play that was not present previously, that enables timing and lengthier fights that lead to Greater skilled play in pvp.

exeeter702 · December 2019

Healthy offering is one of if not the strongest burst heal in the game currently for reasons outside of the tooltip. Anyone saying otherwise isnt worth listening to.

Iskiab · December 2019

exeeter702 wrote: »

Healthy offering is one of if not the strongest burst heal in the game currently for reasons outside of the tooltip. Anyone saying otherwise isnt worth listening to.

For sure, that’s why there’s tons of magblade healers in pvp. It all makes sense!

KCC11 · December 2019

Gilvoth wrote: »

KCC11 wrote: »

Gilvoth wrote: »

this thread is based on the writers opinion alone. my entire guild and all my friends love the cast time on ultimates and several other things this thread suggests we disagree with. especially on multiple points, the thread is based on the writers solo opinions, not the opinions of the rest of the eso community. i wish this was stated on every thread that gives the impression that their opinion is based on the writers beliefs and not how everyone in the eso community thinks and feels about those opinions. hopefully in the future this forum will include a forced comment to be within these type of topics to show that the writers opinion is not that of the community, but the writers opinion alone.

I thought that it was obvious that I'm speaking for myself as unless appointed in some way or fashion no one can speak for an entire community just themselves. Nothing about my post states otherwise nor did I, in the future try to prevent yourself from projecting your views onto other people's intentions

my intention, and belief was directed from the body of this threads title and some of it's wording, in addition to your request for feedback on the subjects you brought forward.
here is an example quote:

KCC11 wrote: »

... more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from ...

my feedback on several of the subjects you mention is based on those directions, although there are several times you mention that these are your opinions and if my interpretation is incorrect i will extend an apology.

stealth gameplay is a main gameplay for entire guilds and groups and solo play throughout all of the elderscrolls series both single player as well as elderscrolls online, and there are guilds dedicated entirely to stealth gameplay.
so as feedback on this specific subject i disagree with your wording and claim that the community 'quote:

"is trying to get away from"

as well as the subject of ultimates having cast times now that previously were not there before.
because with the new changes to ultimates and their cast times it has opened up skill play that was not present previously, that enables timing and lengthier fights that lead to Greater skilled play in pvp.

Hmm on second glance I can admit that my wording as it came to stealth gameplay could've been better. But to touch on your point about Ultimates..you would have an argument if ALL ULTIMATES had a cast time but that's not the case only some Ultimates did namely to the Nightblade class as 4/6 of our class Ults were changed. Compared to 0 from sorcs, templars, necros, DKs, and wardens. If all Ultimates or at least the Ultimates where it made sense received a cast time you'd have a point..but they don't so not sure where your rationale is. Templars Crescent Sweep is 70 Ult, hits hard, cannot be dodged, an AoE, and has a DoT attached to it..why was no cast time added to that or to Leap. Why is my class consistently singled out and targeted where other classes aren't? Also it is your opinion that "lengthier fights lead to Greater skilled pvp play" that's something I wholeheartedly disagree with; if you die because a nightblade started the fight with a naked Incap..you deserved to die your reaction time to burst is too slow, you didn't go through your healing rotation quick enough etc

If we're aiming for skilled gameplay and the consensus is that adding cast times to Ultimates helped enable that so be it, but lets add them to all Ultimates across every class so that they can also enjoy this "Greater skilled play"

Iskiab · December 2019

KCC11 wrote: »

Gilvoth wrote: »

KCC11 wrote: »

Gilvoth wrote: »

this thread is based on the writers opinion alone. my entire guild and all my friends love the cast time on ultimates and several other things this thread suggests we disagree with. especially on multiple points, the thread is based on the writers solo opinions, not the opinions of the rest of the eso community. i wish this was stated on every thread that gives the impression that their opinion is based on the writers beliefs and not how everyone in the eso community thinks and feels about those opinions. hopefully in the future this forum will include a forced comment to be within these type of topics to show that the writers opinion is not that of the community, but the writers opinion alone.

I thought that it was obvious that I'm speaking for myself as unless appointed in some way or fashion no one can speak for an entire community just themselves. Nothing about my post states otherwise nor did I, in the future try to prevent yourself from projecting your views onto other people's intentions

my intention, and belief was directed from the body of this threads title and some of it's wording, in addition to your request for feedback on the subjects you brought forward.
here is an example quote:

KCC11 wrote: »

... more incentive to use Concealed Weapon to promote it's viability currently it's only bonus is once again linked to stealth gameplay which the community is trying to get away from ...

my feedback on several of the subjects you mention is based on those directions, although there are several times you mention that these are your opinions and if my interpretation is incorrect i will extend an apology.

stealth gameplay is a main gameplay for entire guilds and groups and solo play throughout all of the elderscrolls series both single player as well as elderscrolls online, and there are guilds dedicated entirely to stealth gameplay.
so as feedback on this specific subject i disagree with your wording and claim that the community 'quote:

"is trying to get away from"

as well as the subject of ultimates having cast times now that previously were not there before.
because with the new changes to ultimates and their cast times it has opened up skill play that was not present previously, that enables timing and lengthier fights that lead to Greater skilled play in pvp.

Hmm on second glance I can admit that my wording as it came to stealth gameplay could've been better. But to touch on your point about Ultimates..you would have an argument if ALL ULTIMATES had a cast time but that's not the case only some Ultimates did namely to the Nightblade class as 4/6 of our class Ults were changed. Compared to 0 from sorcs, templars, necros, DKs, and wardens. If all Ultimates or at least the Ultimates where it made sense received a cast time you'd have a point..but they don't so not sure where your rationale is. Templars Crescent Sweep is 70 Ult, hits hard, cannot be dodged, an AoE, and has a DoT attached to it..why was no cast time added to that or to Leap. Why is my class consistently singled out and targeted where other classes aren't? Also it is your opinion that "lengthier fights lead to Greater skilled pvp play" that's something I wholeheartedly disagree with; if you die because a nightblade started the fight with a naked Incap..you deserved to die your reaction time to burst is too slow, you didn't go through your healing rotation quick enough etc

If we're aiming for skilled gameplay and the consensus is that adding cast times to Ultimates helped enable that so be it, but lets add them to all Ultimates across every class so that they can also enjoy this "Greater skilled play"

Issue I think for ultimates and abilities is they look to me like they’ve been balanced using a spreadsheet. X effect = X cost. Completely missing how simple things like the size of the effects, how easy they are to apply, etc...

That plus they have to balance pve and pvp. In pve targets don’t move, dodge roll, block, etc... it’s missing how easy some abilities are to use vs others.

It’s like invigorating drain vs other stuns, besides the cheap cost it’s that it makes break free buggy that makes it effective. Stuff like that can’t be captured in a spreadsheet. Or like how merciless can’t be shot every 5 seconds in pvp, compared to say frags procs which are easy to get and it’s no wonder there’s a power gap.

MartiniDaniels · December 2019

Cast time on all ultimates with exception of onslaught should go away.

exeeter702 · December 2019

Iskiab wrote: »

exeeter702 wrote: »

Healthy offering is one of if not the strongest burst heal in the game currently for reasons outside of the tooltip. Anyone saying otherwise isnt worth listening to.

For sure, that’s why there’s tons of magblade healers in pvp. It all makes sense!

Dont be daft, a single burst heal does not make a healer.

KCC11 · December 2019

exeeter702 wrote: »

Iskiab wrote: »

exeeter702 wrote: »

Healthy offering is one of if not the strongest burst heal in the game currently for reasons outside of the tooltip. Anyone saying otherwise isnt worth listening to.

For sure, that’s why there’s tons of magblade healers in pvp. It all makes sense!

Dont be daft, a single burst heal does not make a healer.

The issue remains that it's the only burst heal in the game that doesn't heal the caster, and as such in practical use on a non-healer build it's a terrible skill.

Iskiab · December 2019

KCC11 wrote: »

exeeter702 wrote: »

Iskiab wrote: »

exeeter702 wrote: »

Healthy offering is one of if not the strongest burst heal in the game currently for reasons outside of the tooltip. Anyone saying otherwise isnt worth listening to.

For sure, that’s why there’s tons of magblade healers in pvp. It all makes sense!

Dont be daft, a single burst heal does not make a healer.

The issue remains that it's the only burst heal in the game that doesn't heal the caster, and as such in practical use on a non-healer build it's a terrible skill.

It was workable before the cast time on ults. Soul Siphon was like a reset to your health bar for when the stacks got too high.

A 1 second cast time on a healing ultimate broke the class. You have about a 50/50 chance of getting the Ult off in pvp without it getting interrupted.

Before anyone pipes up... if I do it all the time... I’m talking against good opponents. The way to tell if you’re fighting good opponents? If you’re half health and don’t get hit with a bunch of DK leaps and other ultimates you’re fighting potatoes.