Harrowstorm and its offence problems

BohnT2

From the experience of the current Dragonhold patch, there's a fundamental issue with offence that almost any spec is affected by.
The issue in general is bland combat with a lack of options and a really high Time to Kill.
The reasons for this vary across the different classes and specs but share some key points.

1. Health Values
A huge part of the current combat balance is due to the high health pools which on Pc EU average at just above 29k in the CP campaign.
Average health ranges above 25k have been around for some time but they haven't been that much of an issue but certain changes have pushed them much higher and other changes have further influenced them to take a turn for the worse.
One big contribution to them was brought to use with the Murkmire patch when the overall health increased by 1-2k depending on which race you play and other factors which started the trend of increasing health pools.
With nerfs to camoran throne and witch mother along with changes in the overall game, that made sustain a lot easier and regen less attractive like wider access to off balance and therefore double the resource gain from heavy attacks but also the buffs to cost reduction, tri stat food and tri stat glyphs became a lot more common and they offer a lot more stat density than single glyphs which increased health by up to 4k when you swapped from camoran throne and stam glyphs to tristat food and prismatic glyphs while also granting 6k offstat resources (same goes for magicka ofc).
The opportunity cost was pretty low as even the damage loss from going prismatic glyphs is negligible due to camoran throne offering less stam anyway and sustain is easy enough due to the changes mentioned above.
Those inflated health pools get further increased by percentage buffs offered from class passives (NB, Warden, Sorc) and other passives like Heavy armor or Undaunted.

If your regularly PvPing you'll feel a 2k health increase a lot, you're less vulnerable to burst, survive situations you haven't before and notice how often you'll sit at 5-10% health which are those extra HP you gained.
With that in mind you'll get an idea what 6k extra health do to the game and how it plays, you're now not sitting at 5-10% but rather 20-25% which is just 1 healing tick short of being above execute range again.

This leads us to the next key part of our problem which is negatively influenced by the health pools

2. Healing
Even before scalebreaker we saw an increase in healing output on every class due to various changes which got topped by the buffs to Hots in Scalebreaker which almost doubled the healing output of them. With the situation described above we'll survive and then get more powerful Hots on us than before to heal up again along with new healing abilities for all specs, all magicka classes got access to a viable hot, something which previously held them in check and forced them to play in a unique way or made sure they're not able to rely on preemptive healing to survive but rather reacte to incoming damage.
For stamina specs like Stamplar and stamdk saw an increase in their healing due to purge and cauterize now scaling with the highest attribute rather than mag only.

Those heals wouldn't be as much of a problem if the next point on the list wasn't as relevant.

3. Damage spike duration
With the introduction of casttimes on ultimates and lengthened traveltimes on certain skills the minimum timeframe of your burst has been increased over the past, this has been worsened by the removal of offensive CCs which are now extremely rare or simply non existent for many specs. What this means is that not only do people survive your damage with more health than ever before but their chance of getting a saving healing tick or reacting to your damage is also a lot higher and in a game of high reactive healing on many specs and strong hots those extra seconds will make it impossible to ever get a kill as your playing rock paper scissors against someone who can choose to wait for you to take your pick but can then only choose the same thing and stall the fight as long as he wants.

Something i just touched is
4. Lack of offensive CCs
Over the past year we lost many very important offensive stuns which also worked as defensive stuns which is needed as there's simply no bar space to support both.
The removal of the stun on destructive reach and the whole removal of the stun for lightning staves has made the situation very rough for magicka build who don't have a viable ranged and instant stun in their toolkit which are all of them bar Dragonknight which has access to fossilize and Templar with spear which isn't optimal due to how magplar plays and how it knocks people out of your range which leads us back to the issue of minimum time to deal your damage. This leaves five of 6 magicka classes without a CC that can be used to guarantee hits without having to rely on the enemies generosity to stand in your AoE or not dodge your skills.
What about magblade you may ask, well the issue here is that fear doesn't guarantee a hit with strifes minimum traveltime of 450ms and the casttimes on each of the ults which are being used by nightblades.
For stamina specs things look kinda similar after the removal of dizzying swing's CC and the unreliability of DBoS with the cast time and the overall superiority of Onslaught which again has a casttime. There is an universal stamina CC however it doesn't guarantee hits of your ultimates as people can still dodge/block due to travel times and casttimes but it also brings us back to our rock paper scissors game because people can simply avoid being stunned by it by simply walking away. With the off balance changes stamina loses its last reliable option of an offensive CC so things look even worse in the future.


This sums up the biggest issues we have but there's more and more individual issues.

Specs like magden and magnecro have extremely one dimensional offence which consists of a mediocre or bad spammable, a delayed burst ability and a single dot along with a very costly ultimate and as mentioned above no offensive CC and no real execute on both specs. This makes them extremely unreliable in solo play as they have to break through their enemy in one burst or otherwise are doomed to fight eternally as the enemy always has 3 seconds between burst to heal up again and the necro/warden has no way of forcing any further damage as their spammables are dodgeable, the dots in general don't offer enough pressure and they don't have any other offensive class skills because they both have a single skill line that has to satisfy both PvE and PvP which simply isn't possible.
This brings them to the extremely horrible situation of them only being viable when you give them every existing major and minor buff along with even more damage multipliers which then leads to a huge issue with skills like Vampire drain or being forced to be limited to group play to be viable.

There's a lot more issues that can be talked about but this post has to end at some point so the last thing to be touched here is the existence of extremely powerful defensive sets with the likes of BRP DW/Resto, pariah, impreg, armor master and many offensive sets mainly stamina ones which highly benefit tanky players over more squishy ones the sets which come to mind are of course warrior's fury and NMA but also the two upcoming sets in titanborn and unchained aggressor as they become a lot stronger with the bigger offensive windows.

5. Summary
I explained how we ended up in the current state of the game and i think it's pretty clear that it currently isn't a really good one to be frank.
From the things I've talked about there's many appropriate changes that could be done from this point on to make things better again like
- more offensive CCs for everyone
- removal of casttimes on ultimates
- reduction of minimum traveltime
- buffs to camoran throne and witch mother
- removal of the 10% stat increase of health bonuses compared to magicka/stamina
- reduction of the stat density of tri-glyphs and tri food
- rework of the offence for Warden and Necromancer
- reasonable reductions to healing

Just to be clear the addition of more overall damage or access to major defile will not fix the underlying issues but will just make things even worse.

Xvorg

BohnT2 wrote: »

Something i just touched is
4. Lack of offensive CCs
Over the past year we lost many very important offensive stuns which also worked as defensive stuns which is needed as there's simply no bar space to support both.
The removal of the stun on destructive reach and the whole removal of the stun for lightning staves has made the situation very rough for magicka build who don't have a viable ranged and instant stun in their toolkit which are all of them bar Dragonknight which has access to fossilize and Templar with spear which isn't optimal due to how magplar plays and how it knocks people out of your range which leads us back to the issue of minimum time to deal your damage. This leaves five of 6 magicka classes without a CC that can be used to guarantee hits without having to rely on the enemies generosity to stand in your AoE or not dodge your skills.
What about magblade you may ask, well the issue here is that fear doesn't guarantee a hit with strifes minimum traveltime of 450ms and the casttimes on each of the ults which are being used by nightblades.
For stamina specs things look kinda similar after the removal of dizzying swing's CC and the unreliability of DBoS with the cast time and the overall superiority of Onslaught which again has a casttime. There is an universal stamina CC however it doesn't guarantee hits of your ultimates as people can still dodge/block due to travel times and casttimes but it also brings us back to our rock paper scissors game because people can simply avoid being stunned by it by simply walking away. With the off balance changes stamina loses its last reliable option of an offensive CC so things look even worse in the future.

Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.

If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).

MashmalloMan

Just delete CP PvP. Whenever I take a battlegrounds build in there I'm astounded by how easy it is to tank and sustain with no tweaks to my sets.

While I'm semi joking, CP is a huge problem for PvP and the rework couldn't come at a better time.

katorga

Xvorg wrote: »

BohnT2 wrote: »

Something i just touched is
4. Lack of offensive CCs
Over the past year we lost many very important offensive stuns which also worked as defensive stuns which is needed as there's simply no bar space to support both.
The removal of the stun on destructive reach and the whole removal of the stun for lightning staves has made the situation very rough for magicka build who don't have a viable ranged and instant stun in their toolkit which are all of them bar Dragonknight which has access to fossilize and Templar with spear which isn't optimal due to how magplar plays and how it knocks people out of your range which leads us back to the issue of minimum time to deal your damage. This leaves five of 6 magicka classes without a CC that can be used to guarantee hits without having to rely on the enemies generosity to stand in your AoE or not dodge your skills.
What about magblade you may ask, well the issue here is that fear doesn't guarantee a hit with strifes minimum traveltime of 450ms and the casttimes on each of the ults which are being used by nightblades.
For stamina specs things look kinda similar after the removal of dizzying swing's CC and the unreliability of DBoS with the cast time and the overall superiority of Onslaught which again has a casttime. There is an universal stamina CC however it doesn't guarantee hits of your ultimates as people can still dodge/block due to travel times and casttimes but it also brings us back to our rock paper scissors game because people can simply avoid being stunned by it by simply walking away. With the off balance changes stamina loses its last reliable option of an offensive CC so things look even worse in the future.

Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.

If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).

Those skills (and others nerfed over time) were the game for a long, long time with 75% of the classes having zero counter play, and every one seemed to do just fine.

IAVITNI

Xvorg wrote: »

BohnT2 wrote: »

Something i just touched is
4. Lack of offensive CCs
Over the past year we lost many very important offensive stuns which also worked as defensive stuns which is needed as there's simply no bar space to support both.
The removal of the stun on destructive reach and the whole removal of the stun for lightning staves has made the situation very rough for magicka build who don't have a viable ranged and instant stun in their toolkit which are all of them bar Dragonknight which has access to fossilize and Templar with spear which isn't optimal due to how magplar plays and how it knocks people out of your range which leads us back to the issue of minimum time to deal your damage. This leaves five of 6 magicka classes without a CC that can be used to guarantee hits without having to rely on the enemies generosity to stand in your AoE or not dodge your skills.
What about magblade you may ask, well the issue here is that fear doesn't guarantee a hit with strifes minimum traveltime of 450ms and the casttimes on each of the ults which are being used by nightblades.
For stamina specs things look kinda similar after the removal of dizzying swing's CC and the unreliability of DBoS with the cast time and the overall superiority of Onslaught which again has a casttime. There is an universal stamina CC however it doesn't guarantee hits of your ultimates as people can still dodge/block due to travel times and casttimes but it also brings us back to our rock paper scissors game because people can simply avoid being stunned by it by simply walking away. With the off balance changes stamina loses its last reliable option of an offensive CC so things look even worse in the future.

Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.

If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).

While I am all for buffing wings, we can't act like 50% ranged mitigation isn't strong nor does 1 class having a counter mean there was counterplay to those skills. I also like the 15m idea, though I would reimplement the reflect mechanic but only for 1.5 seconds as it was a pretty iconic ability and then have the 50% mitigation. Ideally the 50% should be toned down closer to 33% or have the reduction degrade over time.

But that's kind of off-topic. The "counter" to ranged classes were gap closers, something that was slotted on almost all stam builds in order to stay on top of opponents.

They didn't do much else but abilities tended to have a lot more utility on them before. Which meant you could mix up your bar. However, using warden and necro as examples again, combat design has become over simplistic to the point where 10 bar slots is simply not enough.

Prior to these new classes the only class that had the same extent of singular purposed abilities was sorcerer, and those abilities outperformed the competition damage-wise as compensation. Birds and skulls simply do too little.The current design direction simply does not work, at least not for years.

That said, I bought ESO, not ESO beta. The player base should not have to suffer through a revisioning simply because developers decided to 360 and use the Live environment as their actual testing grounds.

The only reason stamina still works so well is because of the utility granted by their large stamina pools alongside sustain being carried by off-balance meaning they do not have to slot resource management tools/these tools are secondary functions on necessary abilities (Major Resolve).

100% agree with the OP. 100% have 0 faith that devs will listen. It's great that they have a vision and all but we didn't buy their game. We bought ESO. The fact that we as players paid for 1 product and are being spoon-fed another is immoral imo.

YandereGirlfriend

While I don't agree with everything (CC and Snare spam is awful gameplay--though that's mainly a function of AoE CC and ball groups) in the OP, I do find myself agreeing with much of it.

Healing feels way overtuned at the moment and is, IMO, at the root of most of the maladies afflicting PvP. Between the ball groups running AoE HoTs spam and the Heavy Armor DPS with easy access to Major Mending and recovering from ~15% to ~75% health in like 2 GCDs, healing just feels broken these days.

IMO, effective healing should require a dedicated actual Healer as part of your group composition, it shouldn't be an easy side-hussle that all DPS have access to. Want to run a weak HoT on your back-bar to keep you topped up after taking a small amount of damage, that's totally fine; but huge burst heals should be something that only a real Healer can provide (and ideally, as only a healing ultimate). Such changes would benefit PvP and PvE, since so many complain about the 3DPS 1Tank dungeon meta.

I think it's also generally fine if someone wants to stack health and/or resistances and be a damage-less troll-tank, but sets like Fury and NMA are a mistake, and I say this as someone who uses both of them. Heavy Armor is for damage reduction not DPS and it should absolutely be a trade-off that you have to make to forego survivability for the ability to kill things.

BohnT2

katorga wrote: »

Xvorg wrote: »

BohnT2 wrote: »

Something i just touched is
4. Lack of offensive CCs
Over the past year we lost many very important offensive stuns which also worked as defensive stuns which is needed as there's simply no bar space to support both.
The removal of the stun on destructive reach and the whole removal of the stun for lightning staves has made the situation very rough for magicka build who don't have a viable ranged and instant stun in their toolkit which are all of them bar Dragonknight which has access to fossilize and Templar with spear which isn't optimal due to how magplar plays and how it knocks people out of your range which leads us back to the issue of minimum time to deal your damage. This leaves five of 6 magicka classes without a CC that can be used to guarantee hits without having to rely on the enemies generosity to stand in your AoE or not dodge your skills.
What about magblade you may ask, well the issue here is that fear doesn't guarantee a hit with strifes minimum traveltime of 450ms and the casttimes on each of the ults which are being used by nightblades.
For stamina specs things look kinda similar after the removal of dizzying swing's CC and the unreliability of DBoS with the cast time and the overall superiority of Onslaught which again has a casttime. There is an universal stamina CC however it doesn't guarantee hits of your ultimates as people can still dodge/block due to travel times and casttimes but it also brings us back to our rock paper scissors game because people can simply avoid being stunned by it by simply walking away. With the off balance changes stamina loses its last reliable option of an offensive CC so things look even worse in the future.

Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.

If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).

Those skills (and others nerfed over time) were the game for a long, long time with 75% of the classes having zero counter play, and every one seemed to do just fine.

They haven't been the same throughout their life which is mainly responsible for their nerfs.
Back in the days scattershot was limited to 8m range but always had a very wonky stun with multiple bugs attached to it.

With a complete rework for knockbacks and stuns the Devs managed to break them and make the extremely unreliable to break especially in lag, the stun went from being a non issue to being a death sentence as it created offensive windows of 3+ seconds in lag, ironically we went from 1 frequently stun which was "broken" (fear) and all others being somewhat fine to almost every CC being unreliable to break.

Tattooo

Where can I get a vykosa monster set and how good will it work on a cp pvp heavy stamina dragonknight ?

olsborg

The passive mitigation and high hp pools coupled with strong healing..tank meta has never been this strong.

Tolino

@BohnT2
One "agree" isn't enough!

Xvorg wrote: »

Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.

If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).

@Xvorg
Were reach / clench really to strong or were they only OP together with a master staff?
Every time I saw someone ask if you should use the skill without the master staff, the answer was no!!!

IAVITNI

BohnT2 wrote: »

From the experience of the current Dragonhold patch, there's a fundamental issue with offence that almost any spec is affected by.
The issue in general is bland combat with a lack of options and a really high Time to Kill.
The reasons for this vary across the different classes and specs but share some key points.

1. Health Values

A huge part of the current combat balance is due to the high health pools which on Pc EU average at just above 29k in the CP campaign.
Average health ranges above 25k have been around for some time but they haven't been that much of an issue but certain changes have pushed them much higher and other changes have further influenced them to take a turn for the worse.
One big contribution to them was brought to use with the Murkmire patch when the overall health increased by 1-2k depending on which race you play and other factors which started the trend of increasing health pools.
With nerfs to camoran throne and witch mother along with changes in the overall game, that made sustain a lot easier and regen less attractive like wider access to off balance and therefore double the resource gain from heavy attacks but also the buffs to cost reduction, tri stat food and tri stat glyphs became a lot more common and they offer a lot more stat density than single glyphs which increased health by up to 4k when you swapped from camoran throne and stam glyphs to tristat food and prismatic glyphs while also granting 6k offstat resources (same goes for magicka ofc).
The opportunity cost was pretty low as even the damage loss from going prismatic glyphs is negligible due to camoran throne offering less stam anyway and sustain is easy enough due to the changes mentioned above.
Those inflated health pools get further increased by percentage buffs offered from class passives (NB, Warden, Sorc) and other passives like Heavy armor or Undaunted.

If your regularly PvPing you'll feel a 2k health increase a lot, you're less vulnerable to burst, survive situations you haven't before and notice how often you'll sit at 5-10% health which are those extra HP you gained.
With that in mind you'll get an idea what 6k extra health do to the game and how it plays, you're now not sitting at 5-10% but rather 20-25% which is just 1 healing tick short of being above execute range again.

This leads us to the next key part of our problem which is negatively influenced by the health pools

The nerfs to dubious and witch mother were completely unnecessary. Tristat, bistat and drinks all had their uses. Not sure why they were nerfed. The drinks simply saw slightly more use due to the meta at the time. In todays live patch they would be perfectly competitive.

As you said, opportunity cost is low or simply in favour of stacking Health. Kind of hard to simply nerf health pools since there's no real way to do so while isolating high health builds and avoiding unnecessary nerfs to other low health builds (20k-25k health).

Mechanics such as the old uncap stun requiring the nightblade to have less health or even the newer Engulfing Flame mechanic of having stat breakpoints could be further explored to target high health builds. Building for high health should be possible but it should come with its limitations and draw backs, which it currently does not.

Health pools on NA are also around +28k btw.

BohnT2 wrote: »

2. Healing

Even before scalebreaker we saw an increase in healing output on every class due to various changes which got topped by the buffs to Hots in Scalebreaker which almost doubled the healing output of them. With the situation described above we'll survive and then get more powerful Hots on us than before to heal up again along with new healing abilities for all specs, all magicka classes got access to a viable hot, something which previously held them in check and forced them to play in a unique way or made sure they're not able to rely on preemptive healing to survive but rather reacte to incoming damage.
For stamina specs like Stamplar and stamdk saw an increase in their healing due to purge and cauterize now scaling with the highest attribute rather than mag only.

Those heals wouldn't be as much of a problem if the next point on the list wasn't as relevant.

Magicka Vigor was a horrible decision, though is a blessing in disguise since they gutted shields in the same patch. That said, magicka was intentionally designed to not have strong hots.

Healing got buffed across the board as if in backlash to the DoT damage and numerous sources of defile despite those same triggers being severely nerfed in I believe the patch prior? Damage pressure, healing debuffs and heals need to be balanced together, not in separate patches based on outdated metas. This does not mean that because the player base is complaining about a Healing meta that heals should be nerfed too useless AND defiles should be buffed the moon.

DoTs and Defile accessibility(preferably only on ultimates or pure conditional utility skills like Warden) need to be slightly adjusted upwards and Healing slightly downwards across the board. Magicka healing also needs to be re-tuned if ZoS attempts to make shields viable again. IF Devs do decide to buff DoTs they need to take that into account when adjusting healing.

Cross healing is also an issue, though healing in general should be addressed first.

BohnT2 wrote: »

3. Damage spike duration

With the introduction of casttimes on ultimates and lengthened traveltimes on certain skills the minimum timeframe of your burst has been increased over the past, this has been worsened by the removal of offensive CCs which are now extremely rare or simply non existent for many specs. What this means is that not only do people survive your damage with more health than ever before but their chance of getting a saving healing tick or reacting to your damage is also a lot higher and in a game of high reactive healing on many specs and strong hots those extra seconds will make it impossible to ever get a kill as your playing rock paper scissors against someone who can choose to wait for you to take your pick but can then only choose the same thing and stall the fight as long as he wants.

This was what I was trying to comment on in my first post before I got distracted by the wings comment. Sorry <333

ZoS attempts to simplify/slow the game down has resulted in damage spike duration and time to kill both keep increasing. If they want to increase the minimum timeframe of our burst then they need to either increase the baseline damage OR decrease time to kill, ideally by punishing high health builds since building health is the most cost effective way to survive right now.

Every time they simplify a skill they potentially increase damage spike durations by 1 GCD because the lost utility needs to be compensated for, often by using 2 abilities when 1 was previously used.

BohnT2 wrote: »

4. Lack of offensive CCs

Over the past year we lost many very important offensive stuns which also worked as defensive stuns which is needed as there's simply no bar space to support both.
The removal of the stun on destructive reach and the whole removal of the stun for lightning staves has made the situation very rough for magicka build who don't have a viable ranged and instant stun in their toolkit which are all of them bar Dragonknight which has access to fossilize and Templar with spear which isn't optimal due to how magplar plays and how it knocks people out of your range which leads us back to the issue of minimum time to deal your damage. This leaves five of 6 magicka classes without a CC that can be used to guarantee hits without having to rely on the enemies generosity to stand in your AoE or not dodge your skills.
What about magblade you may ask, well the issue here is that fear doesn't guarantee a hit with strifes minimum traveltime of 450ms and the casttimes on each of the ults which are being used by nightblades.
For stamina specs things look kinda similar after the removal of dizzying swing's CC and the unreliability of DBoS with the cast time and the overall superiority of Onslaught which again has a casttime. There is an universal stamina CC however it doesn't guarantee hits of your ultimates as people can still dodge/block due to travel times and casttimes but it also brings us back to our rock paper scissors game because people can simply avoid being stunned by it by simply walking away. With the off balance changes stamina loses its last reliable option of an offensive CC so things look even worse in the future.

Lack of offensive CCs make combat very clunky and frustrating. Every class should have a class based CC on a non-ultimate ability and should have the option of an ultimate ability with a stun as well (meteor needs work in this regard). Weapon skill lines should also provide a CC, though ideally nothing like vamp drain.

Offensive combos revolve around CCs. The more unique CCs the player base has the more creative combat becomes.

The old stun on frags was a good example of an offensive CC that required both anticipation and reaction. Templar javelin travels a little to fast but isn't that bad and petrify has some counterplay as well due to the range limitation. CCs should be designed like these abilities.

The latest design philosophy for CCs (warden and Necro CCs) are not ideal as they tend to be counter intuitive to the pacing of ESO combat as they allow the opponent too much counter-play and are awkward to use mechanically.

BohnT2 wrote: »

This sums up the biggest issues we have but there's more and more individual issues.

Specs like magden and magnecro have extremely one dimensional offence which consists of a mediocre or bad spammable, a delayed burst ability and a single dot along with a very costly ultimate and as mentioned above no offensive CC and no real execute on both specs. This makes them extremely unreliable in solo play as they have to break through their enemy in one burst or otherwise are doomed to fight eternally as the enemy always has 3 seconds between burst to heal up again and the necro/warden has no way of forcing any further damage as their spammables are dodgeable, the dots in general don't offer enough pressure and they don't have any other offensive class skills because they both have a single skill line that has to satisfy both PvE and PvP which simply isn't possible.
This brings them to the extremely horrible situation of them only being viable when you give them every existing major and minor buff along with even more damage multipliers which then leads to a huge issue with skills like Vampire drain or being forced to be limited to group play to be viable.

There's a lot more issues that can be talked about but this post has to end at some point so the last thing to be touched here is the existence of extremely powerful defensive sets with the likes of BRP DW/Resto, pariah, impreg, armor master and many offensive sets mainly stamina ones which highly benefit tanky players over more squishy ones the sets which come to mind are of course warrior's fury and NMA but also the two upcoming sets in titanborn and unchained aggressor as they become a lot stronger with the bigger offensive windows.

One dimensional offence is bad and boring.The one skill line for everything is a nice sentiment but as you said its not enough. At the very least ZoS should include "hybrid" abilities into dedicated skill lines. Strife for example is in the "healing" skill line but can be "turned" into an offensive morph. This approach could appease ZoS' vision while also providing enough variety to players.

The approach of "slapping a major" onto everything and hoping it will be strong is problematic as it does nothing to improve QoL but does plenty to disrupt balance. Not every bonus has to be a major. Changing BRP DW to increase the duration of Major Expedition to 8 seconds and BRP Resto to increase shield size by x% would probably see these weapons being used without being gamebreaking carries.

BohnT2 wrote: »

5. Summary
I explained how we ended up in the current state of the game and i think it's pretty clear that it currently isn't a really good one to be frank.
From the things I've talked about there's many appropriate changes that could be done from this point on to make things better again like
- more offensive CCs for everyone
- removal of casttimes on ultimates
- reduction of minimum traveltime
- buffs to camoran throne and witch mother
- removal of the 10% stat increase of health bonuses compared to magicka/stamina
- reduction of the stat density of tri-glyphs and tri food
- rework of the offence for Warden and Necromancer
- reasonable reductions to healing

Just to be clear the addition of more overall damage or access to major defile will not fix the underlying issues but will just make things even worse.

Summary just so people don't forget.

BohnT2

Tolino wrote: »

@BohnT2
One "agree" isn't enough!

Xvorg wrote: »

Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.

If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).

@Xvorg
Were reach / clench really to strong or were they only OP together with a master staff?
Every time I saw someone ask if you should use the skill without the master staff, the answer was no!!!

Without master destro they were rather expensive and dealt only mediocre damage but it was damage and they offered a dot along with the very important CC even at long range.

Calling them OP would be an extreme exaggeration as they could be blocked and dodged with ease. Do note that shock clench had a desynced animation which required you to block/dodge it when the projectile was still mid air which was annoying but still not a big issue.

This kinda changed when CCs got messed up but even with master reach they weren't really overperforming but offered important utility concentration in one skill to have one more free skill slot.

Xvorg

Tolino wrote: »

@BohnT2
One "agree" isn't enough!

Xvorg wrote: »

Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.

If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).

@Xvorg
Were reach / clench really to strong or were they only OP together with a master staff?
Every time I saw someone ask if you should use the skill without the master staff, the answer was no!!!

Don't think they were strong just for the staff. They provided a window for high burst (the good old combo flame reach + soul assault, for example).

If the problem was master staff, then the solution was just nerf master staff, but that wasn't what they did. They just made clench a semi melee skill, just like... 5 years ago.

What's even worse, clench is a short range cc with a crap dmg. If it had a higher tooltip, then it could be an option for HA magsorcs who want to play "melee" (together with impulse)

Stibbons

Main reason is stamina toons are overperforming. Face that reality.

BohnT2

The chances of Harrowstorm PvP, finding itself in a row of Patches, which were being ruined by something that could have been easily spotted and changed during their PTS, have increased by a lot now that the off balance changes didn't get touched, neither did defensive sets like blackrose DW/resto receive a nerf nor did minimum traveltimes see a reduction