LA/HA with physical weapons on magicka characters

StarOfElyon

I hope the proposed changes of these attacks being able to scale with magicka is implemented. This was actually a good idea. I play a magplar with a 2H on front bar and I would love it if my light attacks were actually doing damage.

Dracane

I think it would not make much sense. I'd rather that every alingment has their own identity.
Also, a scaling with magicka would not be enough. When your spell penetration does not affect them, your damage with them remains underwhelming.

Which is why I laugh when I see magicka characters use dawnbreaker. Barely anything gets through since you have 0 physical penetration.

StarOfElyon

They made resistances one trait and called it armor. They can make penetration one trait as well. What's the reason for having a difference between magic and physical penetration anyway? @ZOS_BrianWheeler

xaraan

Yeah, unless they change pen, plus the way CP is applied, using physical weapons, even if they scale like the PTS will still be a DPS loss overall. Won't matter to casuals, but it will create this group of play how you want riders that are like, I don't understand why I'm doing less than so and so just b/c I want to use double swords.

The PTS change to the way weapon LAs scale was a good idea, but didn't do what people think it did without the other changes.

x48rph

StarOfElyon wrote: »

They made resistances one trait and called it armor. They can make penetration one trait as well. What's the reason for having a difference between magic and physical penetration anyway? @ZOS_BrianWheeler

Armor was just to make it easier to read for sets and stuff but your character still has a separate value for spell resistance and physical resistance which is what the 'armor' buff gets added to, just gets added to both. They are not one stat. Having different penetration for spell and weapon is the same as why they have separate ones for damage, separate resource pools, ect, it's to make you choose.

Chilly-McFreeze

xaraan wrote: »

Yeah, unless they change pen, plus the way CP is applied, using physical weapons, even if they scale like the PTS will still be a DPS loss overall.

Don't forget the crit chance.

Dagoth_Rac

Chilly-McFreeze wrote: »

xaraan wrote: »

Yeah, unless they change pen, plus the way CP is applied, using physical weapons, even if they scale like the PTS will still be a DPS loss overall.

Don't forget the crit chance.

And crit damage multiplier. And magic/elemental damage versus physical/poison/disease damage. And light armor passives versus medium armor passives. And racial passives. The splitting of builds into magicka-focused or stamina-focused touches nearly every stat in the game. It is deeply embedded in game.

YandereGirlfriend

The thing about these comments about deficiencies in Critical Rate, Penetration, etc. miss is that under the proposed changes, the damage of Light Attacks would have been massively decreased, reducing the overall relevance of the damage of Light Attacks to your overall DPS.

In other words, missing out on those additional modifiers for something that would have only been providing ~5% of your damage would have been much less of a DPS hit than lacking them when Light Attacks are ~25% of your damage.

Also, ZOS WILL circle back to this idea again, just not in this exact form and not for Update 25. If I could bet on such things (maybe you can in Ireland!), I would put money on a LA nerf at some point in 2020 and we can only hope that when that happens, it also includes quality-of-life changes such as unifying Penetration and Critical Chance.

Lastly, in a full raid you are already going to have lots of Physical Penetration supplied automatically via Fracture(s), Alkosh, and Crusher.

It's also not a huge loss to take some of the highly diminishing returns CP and allocate a quick 15% in Physical Critical Damage (requires 37 points) which also gets you 9% more Physical Critical Chance via the star. Then you could throw another 10% to Physical Light Attack (requires 16 points) and you've substantially improved your Light Attacks at a cost of 1% from Elemental, Master-At-Arms, and a few percent from Thaumaturge.

Darkstorne

StarOfElyon wrote: »

I hope the proposed changes of these attacks being able to scale with magicka is implemented. This was actually a good idea. I play a magplar with a 2H on front bar and I would love it if my light attacks were actually doing damage.

@StarOfElyon Don't let them fool you like this. They know we want new magicka weapon lines like One Handed and Spell, or a magicka 2H line, but clearly don’t want to put the effort in. Their effort goes towards Crown Store reskins for the most part. This proposed change for magicka scaling is completely half-assed because there are so many factors that need to be built in for magicka damage (max magicka, spell damage, spell crit chance, spell penetration, CP etc) and there’s no way to support that unless they completely gut the entire system and combine all physical and magic damage stats into single stats that affect both magic and physical attacks. That would require a massive rework to skills and sets, much more work than adding a new magicka weapon line, so you know they won’t do it properly.

Their proposed scaling change wouldn’t solve anything. You’ll still need to use staves as a magicka dps if you care about being effective. It’s their half-assed attempt to say “see, we gave you what you want!”

Your best option for boosting 2H light attack damage as a magicka character atm would be the Undaunted Infiltrator set. In the mean time, join the chorus asking for some real melee magicka love!

Undaunted Infiltrator:
(2 items) Adds 1096 Max Magicka
(3 items) Adds 1096 Max Magicka
(4 items) Adds 833 Weapon Critical
(5 items) When you use an ability that costs Magicka, your Light Attacks deal an additional 774 damage and Heavy Attacks deal an additional 1161 damage for 10 seconds.

Chilly-McFreeze

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

The thing about these comments about deficiencies in Critical Rate, Penetration, etc. miss is that under the proposed changes, the damage of Light Attacks would have been massively decreased, reducing the overall relevance of the damage of Light Attacks to your overall DPS.

In other words, missing out on those additional modifiers for something that would have only been providing ~5% of your damage would have been much less of a DPS hit than lacking them when Light Attacks are ~25% of your damage.

Also, ZOS WILL circle back to this idea again, just not in this exact form and not for Update 25. If I could bet on such things (maybe you can in Ireland!), I would put money on a LA nerf at some point in 2020 and we can only hope that when that happens, it also includes quality-of-life changes such as unifying Penetration and Critical Chance.

Lastly, in a full raid you are already going to have lots of Physical Penetration supplied automatically via Fracture(s), Alkosh, and Crusher.

It's also not a huge loss to take some of the highly diminishing returns CP and allocate a quick 15% in Physical Critical Damage (requires 37 points) which also gets you 9% more Physical Critical Chance via the star. Then you could throw another 10% to Physical Light Attack (requires 16 points) and you've substantially improved your Light Attacks at a cost of 1% from Elemental, Master-At-Arms, and a few percent from Thaumaturge.

At that point you would be so far off the endgame scorepusher meta that it doesn't really matter anyway.
I'm running some hybrid builds since years and complete most content outside the vet trials and the likes with it, so nothing stops you from doing it now.

However, you are right that light attacks would matter less if it the changes went through. But what about the buffed heavies?

I haven't been on the PTS for the tests so correct me if I'm wrong. But wouldn't you still run into resource issues if you use off-resource weapons? Wouldn't daggers and maces still affect only weapon crit/ physical penetration? Or did they made them inclusive?