End of Week 1 Thoughts

ValindorPinebrook

With a surprising amount of limited time considering we are all basically in some form of quarantine or shelter in place; however, work and family have kept me quite busy. But I have been able to get in there on all roles finally, and here are my thoughts...

• The damage nerf was too far with the 78% decrease, but the nerf was needed. I would recommend a nerf between 30-40% for LAs.
• The damage increase to HAs was a great idea, but using a HA instead of LA weaving still results in a dps loss due to the windup time. I would suggest a further buff to HAs, but do not know a good % to increase them by.
• The removal of resource gain from HAs is rough for tanks and healers. Once you are out of resources which is inevitable regardless of LA weaving now in the support roles, regaining resources is painful and slow. I would suggest having both HAs and LAs restore resources. I would keep the amount of stam or mag that HAs restore on live with the updates that have gone into place.

When testing my tanks and healers, I especially noticed the removal of the resource restore from HAs. Honestly, if the live amount of resources was still available in this PTS patch I think it would be a fine patch outside of the 78% LA nerf. In conclusion, we need some sort of resource restore associated with heavy attacks or tie them into the skill lines of restore and one hand and shield.

LiquidPony

Why do HAs need to be buffed further, though? I'm seeing upwards of 70k DPS on trial dummies across multiple classes for heavy attack builds.

IMO that's more than sufficient. Plenty of DPS to complete any content in the game and not be a total drag on your team but still leaves room for a sufficient "skill gap" for there to be a reason to actually try to be better.

SirLeeMinion

The 70K DPS HA attack parses I'm seeing are weaving light attacks with skills on all but two HAs on the front bar. These are not significantly lower APM builds. Backloading damage onto the final tick will further ensure that less skilled players see nowhere near this damage in actual combat. While I'm not arguing that HA damage needs to be further buffed, I would suggest that the changes will do little to reduce the need for high APM. People pulling under 20 K DPS will likely see an increase, as they can simply tape their mouse button down. To reach the upper half of DPS, though, will not be any easier.

Dracane

I can not believe you keep encouraging them to nerf light attacks. This was never a good idea to begin with.

imnottrolling

Dracane wrote: »

I can not believe you keep encouraging them to nerf light attacks. This was never a good idea to begin with.

Go back to ic what are you doing here lol

MashmalloMan

ValindorPinebrook wrote: »

• The damage increase to HAs was a great idea, but using a HA instead of LA weaving still results in a dps loss due to the windup time. I would suggest a further buff to HAs, but do not know a good % to increase them by.

Seriously, heavy attack rotation buffs will be way to problematic for pvp if they're pushed any further. They simply can not offer higher dps than light attack rotations, the changes need to make them more competitive than live, not better.

Reason being, heavy attacks are already extremely powerful (despite the preceived lower dps on a parse). Did you know a 2H heavy attack is now about the same damage as a dizzy swing.

When you compare them against each other, they have close to the same animation time except 1 costs no resources to use, the other costs resources, but provides utility with off-balance, stun, snare, etc.

This balance (debatable) at least makes some semblence of sense. Using resources = added utility.

If ZOS buffs heavy attacks anymore than they already have, you're taking away any point of using spammables in the game if they don't offer utility for the cost (pve environments rarely care for utility). Why are we rewarding players with free damage by holding a button key down? It's already too much at it's current state.

We need to stop treating dps as a metric to balance the entire game. Dummy parses are not the answer. Heavy attacks are already very powerful. Think about the amount of burst you can pull with a heavy attack into an instant skill. We're regressing to why they nerfed heavy attacks in the first place, they were nerfed because being burst down from stealth felt cheap af.

The benefit of live heavy attacks is; although the damage is lower, it offers increased resource regen which is exactly what newer players need. Newer players aren't as good at managing their resources, they cast dots too early, they cast ground aoe dots like volley/blockade in the wrong place forcing them to cast it again, they often play in groups thats are not opitmized to carry their sustain. Lower dps = harder sustain since fights are longer and require more resources.

The damage being lower pays for itself this way. When you completely gut resource return from heavy attacks, they now need to rely on pure damage to be competitive options and this is exactly why these changes will never work simply by nerfing LA from 78% to 30-40% and HA even higher than they are now. HA rotations can not be better than LA rotations simply by increasing the damage they do further. For HA's to beat LA's, they need to do like 50% more damage than they already are and at that point, 0 reason to use spammables, we're already in a meta that barely needs dots. Wrecking Blow is so close in damage to a single target dot like Rending Slash, Soul Trap or Poison Injection that pve builds have completely removed them for damage increasing skills like fighters guilds. What do you think happens if HA's get stronger than spammables?

A happy medium is what Code mostly suggested. Resource return should gradually increase from Light -> Medium -> Heavy along with the damage. The damage of Heavy attacks now are the highest they should ever go, but some resource return should be added back. Light Attacks receiving a nerf of 30-40% should also be coupled with reducing the resource return to 0/50, something so neglible that it's not a huge loss/gain to avoid light attack rotations. Current end game builds don't need +400 free regen from light attack rotations, it's absurd. It will completely remove any reason to use the sustain races in pve content. On an Orc/High Elf/Dark Elf, you usually use sustain food/sustain enchants, this +200 regen a light attack removes that necessity.

llBlack_Heartll

MashmalloMan wrote: »

ValindorPinebrook wrote: »

• The damage increase to HAs was a great idea, but using a HA instead of LA weaving still results in a dps loss due to the windup time. I would suggest a further buff to HAs, but do not know a good % to increase them by.

Seriously, heavy attack rotation buffs will be way to problematic for pvp if they're pushed any further. They simply can not offer higher dps than light attack rotations, the changes need to make them more competitive than live, not better.

Reason being, heavy attacks are already extremely powerful (despite the preceived lower dps on a parse). Did you know a 2H heavy attack is now about the same damage as a dizzy swing.

When you compare them against each other, they have close to the same animation time except 1 costs no resources to use, the other costs resources, but provides utility with off-balance, stun, snare, etc.

This balance (debatable) at least makes some semblence of sense. Using resources = added utility.

If ZOS buffs heavy attacks anymore than they already have, you're taking away any point of using spammables in the game if they don't offer utility for the cost (pve environments rarely care for utility). Why are we rewarding players with free damage by holding a button key down? It's already too much at it's current state.

We need to stop treating dps as a metric to balance the entire game. Dummy parses are not the answer. Heavy attacks are already very powerful. Think about the amount of burst you can pull with a heavy attack into an instant skill. We're regressing to why they nerfed heavy attacks in the first place, they were nerfed because being burst down from stealth felt cheap af.

The benefit of live heavy attacks is; although the damage is lower, it offers increased resource regen which is exactly what newer players need. Newer players aren't as good at managing their resources, they cast dots too early, they cast ground aoe dots like volley/blockade in the wrong place forcing them to cast it again, they often play in groups thats are not opitmized to carry their sustain. Lower dps = harder sustain since fights are longer and require more resources.

The damage being lower pays for itself this way. When you completely gut resource return from heavy attacks, they now need to rely on pure damage to be competitive options and this is exactly why these changes will never work simply by nerfing LA from 78% to 30-40% and HA even higher than they are now. HA rotations can not be better than LA rotations simply by increasing the damage they do further. For HA's to beat LA's, they need to do like 50% more damage than they already are and at that point, 0 reason to use spammables, we're already in a meta that barely needs dots. Wrecking Blow is so close in damage to a single target dot like Rending Slash, Soul Trap or Poison Injection that pve builds have completely removed them for damage increasing skills like fighters guilds. What do you think happens if HA's get stronger than spammables?

A happy medium is what Code mostly suggested. Resource return should gradually increase from Light -> Medium -> Heavy along with the damage. The damage of Heavy attacks now are the highest they should ever go, but some resource return should be added back. Light Attacks receiving a nerf of 30-40% should also be coupled with reducing the resource return to 0/50, something so neglible that it's not a huge loss/gain to avoid light attack rotations. Current end game builds don't need +400 free regen from light attack rotations, it's absurd. It will completely remove any reason to use the sustain races in pve content. On an Orc/High Elf/Dark Elf, you usually use sustain food/sustain enchants, this +200 regen a light attack removes that necessity.

All they need to do is add HA to battle spirit, easy fix for PvP

RiskyChalice863

Realistically, IMO, here’s how light and heavy attacks should be balanced in theory, at least for DPS:

They should be balanced so that the sustain and damage you get from light attack weaving versus heavy attack weaving is roughly the same—with light attack weaving pulling a bit ahead in order to reward high APM players. At the same time, you need heavy attack damage to not be so high that you can just insta-gank people with heavy attacks in PvP.

And I think that the above is actually how ZOS is trying to balance this. I think, in this PTS patch, the sustain on heavy attack weaving and light attack weaving is actually meant to be similar. In essence, the light attack weaving basically gives you resources back in order to pay for the extra abilities you cast due to having more GCD’s available to use abilities with light attack weaving. And heavy attacks do way more damage than light attacks in order to make it so that heavy attack weaving is competitive with light attack weaving despite being able to use fewer abilities. Meanwhile, the overall DPS is such that light attack weaving is still superior to heavy attack weaving, but not by a ton. And finally, in order to achieve this near parity in terms of DPS—despite the fact that heavy attack weaving means you cast fewer abilities—while ALSO not having heavy attacks be absolutely oppressive in PvP, you basically need light attacks to do virtually no damage. If light attacks actually did decent damage, then you couldn’t get heavy attack weaving to have close to parity in terms of DPS without making them too strong for PvP.

So from that perspective this all makes sense, at least for DPS. That said, as a PvE healer, I’m not a fan of this. The above logic doesn’t quite follow for healers. Healers will not always be able to light attack weave between abilities, because your abilities will often not be aimed at the enemy. For instance, how can you light attack weave a breath of life heal on a ranged DPS? You can’t. So healers won’t gain as much sustain from LA weaving as a DPS might, and you can’t get resources back from heavy attacks. That basically makes it a straight up nerf to a healer’s sustain. I suppose the answer to this is just to build enough sustain into your build that you don’t need that resource sustain from heavy attacks. Some of us may already have that much sustain built in, but a lot will need to nerf their healing (and damage) a bit to get more sustain now—especially to deal with situations in which teammates are taking so much damage that you are needing to spam burst heals to keep up. And, even doing that, I don’t think it’ll realistically be possible to have the same sustain anymore, at least for someone like me who aims to use a heavy attack every other bar swap. So I just don’t think it’ll be possible to keep my healer as well prepared to deal with situations where teammates need constant burst heals pumped into them.