PTS Update 26 - Feedback Thread for Vampire & Werewolf

navystylz_ESO

XomRhoK wrote: »

As i said before i think that core concept of this skill is bad and not vampiric at all
...

All that this skill gives could be easily be transferred to passives. For example, if you want to keep gameplay around HP loss, then all vampire skills may cost resource and some Health to use, and when you Health is lowering you recieve additional power, 100-0% HP -> 0-1200 wp/sp damage. Or, if you want more encourage hit and run gameplay give vampires some active dash or allow to almost instantly go to sneak and adjust "Strike from shadows" passive.

Maybe not a vampire thing as far as Elder Scrolls goes... but remove the name and look at the concept and it's definitely vampire.

Burning the power of your blood to increase your vampiric strength beyond it's normal range. Translation: Take health dmg to boost your dmg OR have to feed more often because you burned your blood supply to push your vampiric strength. Is a concept in a lot of vampire lore, especially Vampire the Masquerade with Tremere vampires using blood sorcery.

But I agree, they could have reflected that in so many other ways to make that more interesting than a toggle steroid. Your idea, and some others I have seen sounded super interesting. I've played a game where vampire was a race and made all skills cost only health, so you have to balancing your ability spamming with several drain skills to restore health. Could be very dangerous to play with similar penalties, but very rewarding and fun when style of play done right.

wills43b14_ESO

Some ideas for skill reworks even though I'm sure they'll be ignored:

The vamp theme is all about draining life from the victim and stealthy maneuvering/mobility. The frenzy aspect doesn't make as much sense to me intuitively (as a vamp theme) compared to werewolf.

1. Leave blood for blood as is, but change arterial burst to a reverse execute. The rationale here is it synergizes well with execute classes. The lore perspective is that it is draining more blood/doing higher damage to "healthier" targets with more vitality (blood) in their veins.

2. The whole frenzy skill just needs to go. It's unhealthy and doesn't make sense since vampires are supposed to be more cunning. Instead, add a blink (teleport) skill. Maybe this needs to be a gap closer instead of a straight teleport like streak to preserve other class's identity, but you get the idea. The rationale here is this opens up access to gap closers and makes a melee spammable more viable. The lore perspective is that vampires are cunnming and highly athletic/mobile creatures (and this exists with creatures like bloodfiends, Spindle 2 final boss, and vKA mini boss). Adding mobility to the vampire toolkit with a gap closer blink allows them to express that mobility and cunning gameplay and synergizes well with class abilities (cloak, streak, fossilize, warden vine pull, etc.).

Just some ideas - I'm definitely open to others. I just want to make vamp viable if we're going to be forced into using it for PvE and PvP on the magicka side.

navystylz_ESO

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

It even makes sense from a lore perspective as the vampire is draining more life/doing more damage to a healthier (more full of blood) victim.

Not really. That doesn't speak of why all of a sudden, the strength of your drains should be much weaker because someone has less blood. If a shot had the power to exsanguinate 25% of a targets blood... what's the reason that instead of completely draining target in 4 goes, it gets worse and worse?

wills43b14_ESO

@navystylz_ESO it's literally called "arterial burst" and "blood for blood" it centralizes around the amount of blood your target has. As they receive wounds and become damaged, there's not as much left if you want to think of it that way. If anything, B4B should do more damage if you're higher hp since you have more to sacrifice.

wills43b14_ESO

Also, like you said, 25% of 25% is NOT 50%. It is 56.25% (0.75 * 0.75). You *just* said it's a technique to exsanguinate a victim. Less blood = less stuff to exsanguinate. The rationale is that there is less to drain, so subsequent attacks drain less and less each time, meaning less and less damage.

navystylz_ESO

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

Also, like you said, 25% of 25% is NOT 50%. It is 56.25%. The rationale is that there is less to drain, so subsequent attacks drain less and less each time.

I meant to say, if your ability on first hit has enough strength that it would take 25% of targets blood, why does it lose strength. I didn't say the strength of the ability was to do 25% of what was there.

Think of it this way. The strength of a pump doesn't change because it cleared all the water out of a tank. The tank just ends up empty. I'm not a fan of these kinds of abilities outside of MOBAs because they're generally abilities used to fight against a tank. With the amount of sustain people get in this game, you would get a lot of use out of it on the strong end, but as the person is close to death it loses any of it's killing power.

It's supposed to be a spammable for the vampire. I wasn't one of the people that had issue with it being melee and I quite liked the abilities, if maybe it could use some number tweaking.

But doesn't matter now. I don't care what they do with the skill line, and hope maybe some last minute changes for those who are going to continue to play. I refunded. I didn't want to get sucked back into ESO but got hopeful with the vampire changes for my main, and would have even found fun in playing the story in western skyrim. But I know now this won't make my vampire fun for me, what they did to it. So $150 saved there I guess.

I supposed I could play through it on PTS now just to see it.

Paradisius

XomRhoK wrote: »

As i said before i think that core concept of this skill is bad and not vampiric at all(it encourage to use not vampiric heal and feels like berserker's skill not vampire's). The only ones who will absolutly benefit from this skill will be gankers, bombers and snipers. New and not experienced players will often die, because of this ability, that will lead to frustration. Average players,depending on balance, will overcome HP loss and will never turn off this ability during fight(used like passive) or will use it as periodical buff, but requiring much more attention and control than regular buffs, visuals almost not readable in fight, because it out of GCD you often don't understand did you turn it on or off, all this will lead to a chore or frustaration again and only for top players it wouldn't be a problem.
So it will end up as "passive" skill, that occupy skill slot on vampire skill line, that could be given for another active skill or it will end up as skill for top players and gankers. Don't sounds interesting for me, especially with deficit of acive/spammable skills at vampire skill line.
All what this skill gives could be easily be transferred to passives. For example, if you want to keep gameplay around HP loss, then all vampire skills may cost resource and some Health to use, and when you Health is lowering you recieve additional power, 100-0% HP -> 0-1200 wp/sp damage(in fact Blood for Blood skill already fulfil this type of gameplay). Or, if you want more encourage hit and run gameplay give vampires some active dash or allow to almost instantly go to sneak and adjust "Strike from shadows" passive.

I agree, it is not healthy for the overall game. But personally I cant possibly believe they will overhaul this ability, its core function is here to stay. Such is why Im advocating for number tweaking, because that is the most reasonable outlook for feedback in this stage. Would I have loved something like ranged blood magic or bats? Sure! But I cant expect them to change it to that 2 weeks away from launch, so number tweaking is the best we can do. Unfortunately..

XomRhoK

Paradisius wrote: »

XomRhoK wrote: »

As i said before i think that core concept of this skill is bad and not vampiric at all(it encourage to use not vampiric heal and feels like berserker's skill not vampire's). The only ones who will absolutly benefit from this skill will be gankers, bombers and snipers. New and not experienced players will often die, because of this ability, that will lead to frustration. Average players,depending on balance, will overcome HP loss and will never turn off this ability during fight(used like passive) or will use it as periodical buff, but requiring much more attention and control than regular buffs, visuals almost not readable in fight, because it out of GCD you often don't understand did you turn it on or off, all this will lead to a chore or frustaration again and only for top players it wouldn't be a problem.
So it will end up as "passive" skill, that occupy skill slot on vampire skill line, that could be given for another active skill or it will end up as skill for top players and gankers. Don't sounds interesting for me, especially with deficit of acive/spammable skills at vampire skill line.
All what this skill gives could be easily be transferred to passives. For example, if you want to keep gameplay around HP loss, then all vampire skills may cost resource and some Health to use, and when you Health is lowering you recieve additional power, 100-0% HP -> 0-1200 wp/sp damage(in fact Blood for Blood skill already fulfil this type of gameplay). Or, if you want more encourage hit and run gameplay give vampires some active dash or allow to almost instantly go to sneak and adjust "Strike from shadows" passive.

I agree, it is not healthy for the overall game. But personally I cant possibly believe they will overhaul this ability, its core function is here to stay. Such is why Im advocating for number tweaking, because that is the most reasonable outlook for feedback in this stage. Would I have loved something like ranged blood magic or bats? Sure! But I cant expect them to change it to that 2 weeks away from launch, so number tweaking is the best we can do. Unfortunately..

The thing is i gave them similar feedback at April 6 after first videos of pre PTS build of the game and at April 22, after PTS launched. It seems that someone at ZOS just thinks this is a fun skill.

Vevvev

Overall this patch (6.0.3) was a step in the right direction and I'm glad ZOS has begun changing things. Mesmerize is actually useful now since its increased range actually gets around the issue of the target needing to look at you, and I can comfortably use all the stages with my normal skills. (Stage 4 -100% health regeneration is still a nuisance though).

Sadly despite these improvements the skill line still feels more like a bloodfiend than a true vampire. The passives are great, although the stage 4 one lets you cheese all PVE content but other people have come up with better ideas what to do with it than I have. My current issues are Eviscerate and Blood Frenzy don't feel like something a vampire would use, but I've been thinking of a way to solve that issue on the Eviscerate skill, and the solution is found in the Live build.


Clouding Swarm is an ultimate vampires on the live server have access to and when you use it the ability turns into a skill called Materialize. Materialize is a powerful spammable ability that teleports you to the target each time you use it, and hits just about as hard as Eviscerate does at base. Animation wise you don't even use weapons when you use Materialize as they disappear when your character shoots a blast out blood magic out of their hands at their target after each use of the skill.

This ability really should be a morph for Eviscerate. Arterial Burst is great for dealing a ton of damage quickly, but Blood for Blood is a bit more risky to use. You can please some people who are looking for a more refined vampiric attack by making Blood for Blood the Materialize ability where the fact its a gap closer be the added special effect. It gives you a choice of guaranteed crits or the ability to close the gap instantly, which is an issue the current vampire skill line has since they can't close the gap quickly.

Tessitura

So, everything feels pretty good on vamp, the stun works a little better now, which is huge, and the cost of things seems to help people run their classes much more smoothly. I almost think you lowered the cost too much but combined with increased fire damage and lowered health regen I think its fine.

My biggest issue is the lack of a built in gap closer, I think one of the Eviscerate morphs would be a good option for a potential gap closer if you ever had a mind to do it. Magicka builds on a lot of classes like Necro and Warden lack the ability to make use of this spammable because they can't always catch their target and sometimes get stuck holding their privates in their hands while trying to fight. And, I do think it should remain magicka based. Some kind of bat teleport to the target instead of say, a sure shot critical, or a blood cost morph. It would help out a lot of magicka builds. Doesn't even have to be super long range, maybe 10-15 meters.

Now I have one more issue, and it's a small one, but Frenzy, after getting to play with it a while I think the escalating cost increase is a bit too high and needs to be brought down, it's a little too hard to use right now. I could make some suggestions, such as keep the increases cost the same and allow them to receive healing from outside sources, or just make it a flat 20% cost increase that does not double every second. Even sated is too hard to maintain right now. Thats not saying it can't be maintained but the amount of work it takes verses the damage you get does not work well. You spend more time just trying not to die then damaging anything and as a result end up not getting to use the benefit from the ability.Now do not get me wrong, I understand why you changed it the way you did, but I think it went a little too far is all.

Cameron991

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

Some ideas for skill reworks even though I'm sure they'll be ignored:

The vamp theme is all about draining life from the victim and stealthy maneuvering/mobility. The frenzy aspect doesn't make as much sense to me intuitively (as a vamp theme) compared to werewolf.

1. Leave blood for blood as is, but change arterial burst to a reverse execute. The rationale here is it synergizes well with execute classes. The lore perspective is that it is draining more blood/doing higher damage to "healthier" targets with more vitality (blood) in their veins.

2. The whole frenzy skill just needs to go. It's unhealthy and doesn't make sense since vampires are supposed to be more cunning. Instead, add a blink (teleport) skill. Maybe this needs to be a gap closer instead of a straight teleport like streak to preserve other class's identity, but you get the idea. The rationale here is this opens up access to gap closers and makes a melee spammable more viable. The lore perspective is that vampires are cunnming and highly athletic/mobile creatures (and this exists with creatures like bloodfiends, Spindle 2 final boss, and vKA mini boss). Adding mobility to the vampire toolkit with a gap closer blink allows them to express that mobility and cunning gameplay and synergizes well with class abilities (cloak, streak, fossilize, warden vine pull, etc.).

Just some ideas - I'm definitely open to others. I just want to make vamp viable if we're going to be forced into using it for PvE and PvP on the magicka side.

I agree I think at this point we all just want some new vampire abilities and definitely a gap closer with bats would be nice, and an overall more vampire feel to our vampire abilities

Tessitura

Vevvev wrote: »

Overall this patch (6.0.3) was a step in the right direction and I'm glad ZOS has begun changing things. Mesmerize is actually useful now since its increased range actually gets around the issue of the target needing to look at you, and I can comfortably use all the stages with my normal skills. (Stage 4 -100% health regeneration is still a nuisance though).

Sadly despite these improvements the skill line still feels more like a bloodfiend than a true vampire. The passives are great, although the stage 4 one lets you cheese all PVE content but other people have come up with better ideas what to do with it than I have. My current issues are Eviscerate and Blood Frenzy don't feel like something a vampire would use, but I've been thinking of a way to solve that issue on the Eviscerate skill, and the solution is found in the Live build.


Clouding Swarm is an ultimate vampires on the live server have access to and when you use it the ability turns into a skill called Materialize. Materialize is a powerful spammable ability that teleports you to the target each time you use it, and hits just about as hard as Eviscerate does at base. Animation wise you don't even use weapons when you use Materialize as they disappear when your character shoots a blast out blood magic out of their hands at their target after each use of the skill.

This ability really should be a morph for Eviscerate. Arterial Burst is great for dealing a ton of damage quickly, but Blood for Blood is a bit more risky to use. You can please some people who are looking for a more refined vampiric attack by making Blood for Blood the Materialize ability where the fact its a gap closer be the added special effect. It gives you a choice of guaranteed crits or the ability to close the gap instantly, which is an issue the current vampire skill line has since they can't close the gap quickly.

I love your idea for a Materialize morph to Eviscerate, as long as it remains a magicka spammable I am all for it. They already have the animation set for Materialize too so it should not be too difficult to rig if they wanted to. Fits that elusive and hard hitting predator vibe too, very vampire like. Let it keep the missing health scaling of the base ability and maybe give it a range of 10-15 meters so it's not crazy long but enough to stay on someone.

Vevvev

Tessitura wrote: »

I love your idea for a Materialize morph to Eviscerate, as long as it remains a magicka spammable I am all for it. They already have the animation set for Materialize too so it should not be too difficult to rig if they wanted to. Fits that elusive and hard hitting predator vibe too, very vampire like. Let it keep the missing health scaling of the base ability and maybe give it a range of 10-15 meters so it's not crazy long but enough to stay on someone.

Exactly what I was thinking. Costs magicka, nice gap closer, adds a bit of range where the current vampire feels lacking, and feels more refined than a claw swipe.

Cuddler

From the PVP perspective, the 6.0.3 vampire is overtuned. I now have no incentive to cure vampirism on any of my characters. Removing choice from min-maxing is not good.

If the negatives are to remain as weak as they are now, Undeath and Unnatural Movement should be toned down. The new Undeath is much stronger than on Live and should be nerfed by about 50%. Unnatural Movement should kick in later e.g. in 5 seconds and apply an escalating increase to the Sprint cost.

Blood Scion is still overperforming as well, but this is unrelated to today's changes.

BohnT2

Mesmerize and Morphs are still trash abilities with no utility other than being stuns, a skill that has only one single use has to be so strong that you can sacrifice one bar slot for it and this clearly isn't the case, the base morph needs something and both stupefy and hypnosis need further buffing in order to be useful.

The only reason people would run it is because they have no other instant CC but winning a race with only one leg because there's no other attendants isn't impressive and no one will choose you for an actual race.


Vamp drain has to be reworked into an offensive and defensive version with the offensive version complementing your damage without simply replacing eviscerate spam, this could be by turning it into a dot, applying debuffs that proc with other vampire abilities etc but it needs something else vampires will be stuck with 1 single damage ability and that's by far not enough.

The cost of bloodscion has to be reduced across the board, otherwise using perfected scion just a waste of a morph as your uptime is so small that you'll still be affected by the disadvantages most of the time and the actual benefits are ridiculously small, you just gain a little bit more sustain and become "humane" but the added benefits aren't worth it, you get no extra bang and that's the only reason you use ultimates.

Can we get some visual improvements for the blood scion ult in terms of wings and a more monstrous appearance rather than the current version of someone doing it Ash style but with STDs.

katorga

Cuddler wrote: »

From the PVP perspective, the 6.0.3 vampire is overtuned. I now have no incentive to cure vampirism on any of my characters. Removing choice from min-maxing is not good.

If the negatives are to remain as weak as they are now, Undeath and Unnatural Movement should be toned down. The new Undeath is much stronger than on Live and should be nerfed by about 50%. Unnatural Movement should kick in later e.g. in 5 seconds and apply an escalating increase to the Sprint cost.

Blood Scion is still overperforming as well, but this is unrelated to today's changes.

Undeath has been in the game literally forever; there is not a single overpowered build that depends on Undeath. And no build is "immortal" because of that single passive.

Unnatural Movement will be a non-issue. (Speed in general will be a bigger issue than Unnatural Movement.)

After all is said and done, the same classes forced to be vampires to get a stun will still be forced to be vampires, with more negatives than before. They probably won't go above stage 2. Everyone else will be free to take it or leave it.

Spectral_Force

Vevvev wrote: »

Tessitura wrote: »

I love your idea for a Materialize morph to Eviscerate, as long as it remains a magicka spammable I am all for it. They already have the animation set for Materialize too so it should not be too difficult to rig if they wanted to. Fits that elusive and hard hitting predator vibe too, very vampire like. Let it keep the missing health scaling of the base ability and maybe give it a range of 10-15 meters so it's not crazy long but enough to stay on someone.

Exactly what I was thinking. Costs magicka, nice gap closer, adds a bit of range where the current vampire feels lacking, and feels more refined than a claw swipe.

Very big fan of the idea, especially since all the resources (sounds/animations/visuals + coding behind it all) are already in the game. It never occurred to me that Eviscerate could be a gap closer. Just... make sure it teleports you towards the target, not behind it.

I'll do a big write-up here in a few hours and will definitely include this idea in it.

Qbiken

WEREWOLF

Pounce and Carnage interactions need urgent rework. As said previously, the intention of Carnage is good but the way it's been implemented is horrible. Being locked out of your gapcloser for 5 seconds (during the duration you can activate Carnage) is just bad combat design. There's no way to keep up with a mobile target in PvP if you can't use your gapcloser.

My suggestion is to make carnage apply instantly when you connect with your target, and lower the execute scaling from 450% to 300% as a compensation. But this skill needs tweaking or you will be able to more or less just walk away from any werewolf in PvP which makes no sense.



Fix Howl of Agony so it does more damage vs targets who are facing you (still does 25% more damage to feared targets).

Alexium

Replace Blood Frenzy to the charge/gap closer skill please. For example bat swarm teleport to the target. It will be usable with Eviscerate skill. Enemies often stays over the distance of the Eviscerate attack. So we need to get closer to them.

Merca

Cuddler wrote: »

From the PVP perspective, the 6.0.3 vampire is overtuned. I now have no incentive to cure vampirism on any of my characters. Removing choice from min-maxing is not good.

If the negatives are to remain as weak as they are now, Undeath and Unnatural Movement should be toned down. The new Undeath is much stronger than on Live and should be nerfed by about 50%. Unnatural Movement should kick in later e.g. in 5 seconds and apply an escalating increase to the Sprint cost.

Blood Scion is still overperforming as well, but this is unrelated to today's changes.

Disappear, the demon! Do not tempt developers.

Thevampirenight

Alexium wrote: »

Replace Blood Frenzy to the charge/gap closer skill please. For example bat swarm teleport to the target. It will be usable with Eviscerate skill. Enemies often stays over the distance of the Eviscerate attack. So we need to get closer to them.

This guy/gal right here could use a hundred or more agrees to his post.
Because that would be a much better vampire skill get rid of the Blood Frenzy give us a Bat Gap Closer.
Bat Closer also known as Materialize should replace Blood Frenzy.

IsmeldaHuine

I still don't see the point of going to stage 4 in the current state of the Vampire line. If you meant to have a vampire more powerful as the stage progress then the drawbacks should be reversed. A well sated vampire would not regenerate less but more as more blood to dedicate to regeneration so this whole thing should be the opposite of what it is right now.

Same goes for susceptibility to fire. The less blood a vampire has the more brittle he is. Also the less blood the less effective so the more difficult to do anything (hence the higher cost in skills). Now I understand that you want drawbacks on the higher stage so pick one and I guess the higher skill cost it would be but really the 2 others should be reversed if you really want players taking the vampire line to actually even try to feed.

The feeding should be to get away from a fragile state to a more powerful and less pathetic stage. As it is right now I'm going for a mostly human stage with some drawbacks to a pathetic stage with crippling inferiorities without anything to show for it imho.

Spectral_Force

Alright, finally got to do some testing for 6.0.3. The following feedback is meant mostly for ZOS (though I'm happy to discuss anything) and any suggestions I make will be taking into consideration the tight schedule the team is now facing:

• The new sounds and visuals look good. Eviscerate finally got some love, and while it's still not as visceral as it could've been, it's in a much better state than it used to be; I'm happy with the way it is now. The Scion form also sounds and feels much better to use. These were my main concerns regarding visuals prior to the patch so I'm focusing on them; however, the other improvements in this department are all great as well.
• I'm not sure why, but Scion feels much more nimble than it used to be. Maybe you've given it a speed boost, maybe it's an illusion of some kind, but the clunkiness I've experienced before is (mostly) gone.
• The increased distance/radius of Mesmerize and morphs makes these feel a lot better. It's still a little inconsistent when it comes to enemies facing you, but the increased range makes up for it somewhat.
• Decreased penalty to regular ability costs helps immensely. Now you can actually slot regular abilities if you need to, though at later stages you still want to more heavily rely on your Vampire abilities if possible. Flame damage reduction is minor, but welcome. The health recovery at Stage 1/2/3 is barely relevant; in combat you'll be relying on active heals (either from yourself or your healer), and out of combat you have all the time in the world to regenerate health. Stage 4 health regen is a concern, however. Shutting down passive regeneration completely really hurts overworld exploration and travelling in general if you're at Stage 4, since every bit of fall damage will be eating away at your health bar, and you'll eventually have to dismount and heal yourself up. Lowering the penalty to -90% or even -95% will solve the issue. If ZOS are adamant on removing health regen while at Stage 4, at least give us the ability to regenerate health while out of direct sunlight (shadows/indoors) or, if that's not possible, allow us to regenerate health at night. This should be feasible, since Dark Stalker on Live is already able to distinguish between daytime and nighttime.
• Another suggestion to at least remedy the health regeneration issue would be to add a fall damage reduction effect to one of the vampire passives (Dark Stalker and Unnatural Movement would make the most sense). This effect already exists on one of the Bosmer passives, so the implementation shouldn't be too difficult. Vampires in the Elder Scrolls are known to get bonuses to Agility and Acrobatics, reducing the fall damage they take. I'd love for this to be as high as 50% less fall damage, but I don't really have any suggestions for concrete values here.
• Patch 6.0.3 made the Perfect Scion morph less desireable, since the penalties it's supposed to eliminate have been reduced. Given the time limitations, I suggest either increasing its duration or reducing the Ultimate cost while preserving the Stage 5 mechanic.
• I feel like the Blood Scion ability in general is a tad too expensive now that Vampire ability discounts have gone down. If I'm not mistaken, the base cost is around 334 Ultimate. This means that even at Stage 4 it will cost more than Bone Goliath (254 Ultimate). Bringing the cost down to 300 Ultimate will make it (almost) even out with Bone Goliath at Stage 3 in terms of cost (252 Ultimate) while still remaining quite steeply-costed at Stage 1.
• Vampiric Drain needs a damage buff. As it stands right now, the damage it deals is quite pathetic (even less than on Live, I believe), especially for a channeled ability. I understand that the ability's focus has shifted away from dealing damage to being more of a self-heal/utility, but a burst heal will do the job better (especially if it's coming from your healer), and the Ultimate generation/Stamina regen isn't worth giving up the DPS for.
• Blood Frenzy is a fundamentally broken ability. This discussion goes through the issues with the ability in quite a lot of depth. To summarise: the ability is quite uninspired, bland, is awkward to use, broadens the skill gap between newbies and veterans, and is incredibly difficult to balance. As such, I will support the other posters here in that Frenzy needs to be replaced with a different ability. Since there are only two weeks left (unless the update was delayed further, which I would honestly be okay with if it meant a more polished release), we need to work with what we have. Shoutout to @Vevvev, who came up with this idea: use the Materialize part of the Clouding Swarm ultimate as a base for a gap closing ability - this shouldn't be too difficult to implement since all the required assets already exist in the game (except for maybe the skill icons). His original idea was to replace one of the Eviscerate morphs with this, but it would likely be easier to just replace Frenzy with it. It doesn't need to be overdeveloped: just make a basic ability which teleports you towards (not behind) your target and deals flat Magic damage. A gap closer will naturally play into the melee spammable and will minimise the Scion uptime wasted on moving from enemy to enemy; since it will be a Vampire ability, you will be rewarded for using it as you stage up instead of being punished. Besides, this ability would further reinforce Vampires as unnaturally quick and agile creatures.

Overall, I'd say the patch was a step in the right direction. A large chunk of Vampire mechanics is now a lot more polished and pleasant to use. However, there is still room for improvement, and despite the time limitations there are ways to quickly and efficiently make playing as a Vampire much more enjoyable.
EDIT: Corrected myself on release date.

Jaimeh

I would have preferred 0% cost increase at stage 1 vamprism, for aesthetic purposes. All my currest characters, inlcuding stamina ones, are vampires because of the stam/mag regeneration passive, however, when the new update drops, I'll be forced to cure my stam characters, since that passive will be gone, and they will not be using any of the new skills anyway. However, I'm one of the few people who actually liked the stage 2 vampirism look, and I'm used to my characters looking like that, so I would really love it (and I'm sure a lot of RP-ers would too) if stage 1 would have no skill cost increase, so my stam characters in particular could continue to look like they already do, and without having any negative effects on their rotations. Please consider dropping cost increase from stage 1 entirely.

Septimus_Magna

I really like that the cost increase for non-vamp abilities is reduces, it seems ZOS listened to the feedback which is great!

The changes of Blood Frenzy are too extreme, its a powerful buff but there are too many disadvantages in my opinion. For classes that have to bar swap a lot its not easy to quickly deactivate Blood Frenzy, unless you slot it on both bar. With an increasing health cost I think it should be possible to be healed by others. Its a lot of work if you constantly have to activate/deactivate Blood Frenzy while self-healing for the most part. It also makes healers even more obsolete which is already the case for the majority of the dungeons.

XomRhoK

Not tested it in practice, but theoretically Blood Frenzy skill can end up as another weave mechanics, because this skill is out of GCD if you weave it before each attack or before every second attack you will bypass increasing HP loss. So it could end up as one more mandatory weaving skill to be top DPS and it will increase skill ceiling and gap between players.

Vevvev

Spectral_Force wrote: »

Blood Frenzy is a fundamentally broken ability. This discussion goes through the issues with the ability in quite a lot of depth. To summarise: the ability is quite uninspired, bland, is awkward to use, broadens the skill gap between newbies and veterans, and is incredibly difficult to balance. As such, I will support the other posters here in that Frenzy needs to be replaced with a different ability. Since there are only two weeks left (unless the update was delayed further, which I would honestly be okay with if it meant a more polished release), we need to work with what we have. Shoutout to @Vevvev, who came up with this idea: use the Materialize part of the Clouding Swarm ultimate as a base for a gap closing ability - this shouldn't be too difficult to implement since all the required assets already exist in the game (except for maybe the skill icons). His original idea was to replace one of the Eviscerate morphs with this, but it would likely be easier to just replace Frenzy with it. It doesn't need to be overdeveloped: just make a basic ability which teleports you towards (not behind) your target and deals flat Magic damage. A gap closer will naturally play into the melee spammable and will minimise the Scion uptime wasted on moving from enemy to enemy; since it will be a Vampire ability, you will be rewarded for using it as you stage up instead of being punished. Besides, this ability would further reinforce Vampires as unnaturally quick and agile creatures.

I've been thinking of morphs for the Materialize gap closer, and my ideas are probably not the best, but maybe one morph could heal you for a percentage of the damage done to your enemy and the other could give you Minor Berserk for X seconds which boosts your damage by 8%? Someone might come with a much better idea but with those two morphs you can have one keep you in the fight longer with a heal, while the other can boost damage for a bit after teleporting to your target.

Edit:
Just shortly after writing this I though of a different possible morph for Materialize. Could have one called Vampiric Grip and instead of teleporting you to the target it pulls them to you! Would gives tanks an ability to work with who are not Dragonknights and want a kind of magicka pull ability.

Oathunbound

testing the new changes for vampire i find that its now not really worth it to be a vampire at all in a pve setting.

In pve pre 6.0.3 i found the vampire passives worked well enough if you planned on using the vampire spammable and one form or another of blood frenzy, the dps was significant and it was mostly worth the risk of being in melee range as a magcika dps. I never had any issues with sustain on the pts as long as i did not spam any class skills (unless it was execute phase in which as a magblade i stopped using blood for blood and used killers blade instead, even then no sustain issues). Now with the adjusted numbers to the vampire stages i still have no sustain issues in pve but now blood frenzy just seems to be overly complicated to use safely in pve. the 20% increase per second on all morphs combined with the effective 16% increase in cost (all game play i did was at stage 4 for consistency) overall in any parse i was doing on average 10-15k dps more with vampire skills then non vampire on pts. (i used the same gear on live as on the pts and some of that dps is from the new zann buff but not all of it). Now i'm hitting roughly the same dps on pts as on live but with a more complicated rotation and in melee. I see zero reason to be a vampire in pve at all because the only skill worth using is eviscerate and morphs. Blood frenzy is only activated for the "spam" phase of a rotation and then deactivated when reapplying dots and de-buffs. Also i don't know if it is a bug or if i'm hitting it to fast, but the skill will toggle off then immediately toggle back on and if I'm not paying attention it could be a fatal mistake because of the drain+heal block

Overall the changes to the passive values isn't a huge issue but making the only other skill possibly viable for PvE an even more complicated skill to play with makes it even more pointless to be a vampire in PvE. The dps gain is marginal at best using the eviscerate skill over class spammable/destro staff spammable and the passives don't benefit PvE game play at all outside of undeath and maby the sprint cost reduction, but the penaltys are not work the damage/sprint redux. I see a number of ways it could be good for pvp but no real reason to become/stay as a vampire in pve.

opaj

I haven't tested the 6.0.3 vampire changes yet. I'm mentioning it here because I try not to give PTS feedback on things I haven't tested.

As a hardcore potato, Blood Frenzy sounds too difficult to use now. I liked the previous iteration (which I actually did test) because I could toggle it on to make combat a little more spicy without overcomplicating things. Now I'm going to have to manage toggling it off between all my other attacks or it will keep me down at 1 health. My fingers get tangled up just thinking about managing that alongside my other skills.

Guys, I don't think I'll even consider keeping this on my bar with the infinitely escalating health loss. I'll use Eviscerate, not because it's good, but because I want my vampire character to feel more vampire-y. I'll use Mesmerize because it's basically interchangeable with my vampire's current CC and has good non-combat utility. And I'll use Blood Scion because why not. I haven't tested Vampiric Drain because I have heals that won't lock me into a channel, so it didn't occur to me that I might use it. Maybe I'm not skilled enough to understand why I'd ever want to use Mist Form, especially now that I can invisi-sprint.

So... Overall, good job, I think? I'm still sad about Blood Frenzy, since I was excited about it in 6.0.0, but I have a lot more vampire abilities that I'll actually use now compared to live. I appreciate that being a vampire is no longer such a no-brainer as to be a default choice. And I definitely like being able to sneak up on targets and actually bite them.

technohic

wtlonewolf20 wrote: »

Since feeding is now a key factor in getting to stage 4 vampirism and feeding so often interfers with Blade of woe. Can we Please have them be on seperate keybinds? or at least allow us to remap them? If not can we have the Option in settings to Turn one or the other off? or the ability to choose which one to trigger?

This is really obnoxious trying to get the right one.