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What we should learn from the Vampire rework about class balance

BohnT2
BohnT2
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Greymoor is coming to the live servers in roughly three and a half weeks from now on.

The big theme of this patch is the vampire rework.

Since beta vampire has been more or less the same, ult morphs were changed, skills got changed, skills became overperforming and got nerfed but in the grand scheme it was the same thing: 1 ultimate, 2 skills and passives you'll always benefit from along with some downsides in order to balance those.

In the next patch this will drastically change, a completely reworked ultimate, 1 skill being preserved and one having its focus changed along with 3 new skills and new passives.
However the detriment of becoming a vampire has became a lot more punishing.

For the first time in ages the devs have shared what their ideas for vampires are:
While combat abilities are only a small part of the Vampire rework, special care was given to create a suite of abilities that work synergistically with each other and round out the Vampire kit. Blood Magic, Hit-and-Run Aggressiveness, Stealth and Elusiveness are the primary gameplay concepts that define the combat experience

They explicitly stated that they want skills to synergize with each other, this can be seen with eviscerate and blood frenzy for example.
Eviscerate becomes stronger the lower your health is while blood frenzy increases your over all damage but trades a portion of your health every second for the effect.
With vamp drain being based on your missing HP you can also recover from your injuries.
Now another passive kicks in and helps you "undeath".
By doing this the devs have shown that they can combine multiple skills and hand out an unique playstyle that also works along with a concept of vampires being more powerful creatures but also closer to death than others.

This sounds great however we have to touch on the big issues that are present not only with Vampires but with most classes especially warden and necromancer.

Even with this synergy between 2-3 skills and some passives vampires aren't powerful enough to compete in PvP and on top of that they can't satisfy other roles like tanking or healing and they are solely focused around magicka.

All the spell damage you gain from being a vampire along with the relatively strong spammable with eviscerate a vampire still had no sufficient offence in and of itself.

The only skill that deals damage is eviscerate, there is no Dot unless you use your ultimate and choose a specific morph or only minor damage via mist form/ vamp drain neither of those deals delayed damage or offers something.
This means a "vampire" would have to spam eviscerate from 100%-0% to kill an enemy, nothing else, light attack weave - eviscerate repeat, ofc you can use the skills of your class or weapon skills, but all of those are affected by the cost increase and the skills in general won't fit into the playstyle you try to fulfill when using the other vampire skills.

This is the point when overall class balance comes into play, the issue of lack of useable skills to satisfy a synergistic toolkit is relevant for more than just vampires.
Warden and necromancer are the two classes which are affected most by this as they've been designed in a special way of treating Healers, DDs and Tanks the same way by dedicating one skill line each for those playstyles.

This leads to the issues that both classes feel, their magicka counterparts are extremely underwhelming offensive wise as they have 5 skills and 1 ultimate to satisfy all their offensive demands for both PvE and PvP but those are incredibly different which leads to blank skills for either side as those simply don't help you.
For a necromancer in PvP this leads to 1 single skill being useable from their offensive skill line with blastbones and 1 morph with grave robber which itself limits necromancer further (for other reasons i won't analyze here)
All other skills don't fulfill any role in PvP or are so underwhelming that they can't be used like shock siphon, ricochet skulls or skeleton arcanist.

This means a necromancer has to get the following skills from non class skill lines:
An offensive CC --> non existent at the moment
A decent dot to keep pressure up --> non existent
Major buff/debuff skills --> exist but are underwhelming except for elemental drain
A spammable --> gone with next patch due to master destro nerf
An execute --> non existent (gets even worse next patch with malacath being straight better than crits)

This leaves magicka necromancers stuck in a situation where they cycle their suboptimal spammable with blastbones without access to a stun giving the opponent an easy time surviving as they can easily recover between the blastbones and don't have to fear being executed or stunned.

What necromancers have more than enough however are skills which increase their survivability, there's 2 full skill lines which are only build around keeping you alive.

For warden the situation is a little bit better as the ground AoE needed for PvE is just a morph in the taking skill line thus doesn't take up a whole skill of the offensive skill line and having access to almost every single damage buff this game has to offer from off balance, to 10% damage done, with multiple other damage increases.
But even this incredible plethora of buffs and debuffs doesn't make wardens offensive competitive in a solo environment as they struggle from the same issues of having to cycle a few skills (spammable, shalks, fetchers flies) without an offensive CC or the option to execute someone who drops low without having to wait for the next shalks to blow up.

For stamina classes those issues aren't relevant at all it's widely accepted that both stamina necromancer and stamina warden are overperforming.
Both classes have another skill line that gives them offensive presence with the 2h one along with burst ultimates even if those are held back by obnoxious cast times.
And unlike the "old" classes they have 2 full skill lines to gain survivability and healing from which has proven to make them overperforming.
Mix this with stamina necromancer having access to 100% uptime to major defile and you know why they are considered overpowered and broken.

For "old" classes this is somewhat reversed as they were designed around magicka and have only gotten stamina skills over the years often without any vision behind them, which leads to all stamina classes playing more or less the same (bar stamnb and stamplar) as they all lack a good spammable and skills that would change how they played as they use the same pool of weapon skills mixed with some class skills.

So what could be done to tackle those issues and make Vampires and all classes better on their own and overall more interesting to play?

First of all remove the idea of having to dedicate full skill lines for tanking and healing as many skill slots are already taken by non class skills and a healing/tanking skill can easily be satisfied by making one morph of an skill be focused around it an example is cinder storm of DK which can be either the ground AoE dot or be a heal, because there is always more to kill than to tank or to heal there's a reason DD numbers exceed healers/ tanks combined im trials.

Additionally offence for magicka classes has to be fleshed out on the new classes and a potentially new universal skill line that benefits all magicka classes offensive wise would make a big step of changing how all magicka specs play and can have their own viable playstyle

For stamina specs especially old one we can see that their playstyles have to be shaped more distinctively to be distinguishable from one another.

And finally the Vampire rework has a good foundation but now those 5 skill slots have to be used to make the combat identity to be viable and be fed by enough skills.

@Zos_BrianWheeler , @Zos_Gilliam

TL:DR
The devs sharing their vision on how a class/subspec should work is great

Building classes around a playstyle and having skills synergize with each other is what we need

Offence needs to be fleshed out way more than healing/ tanking and requires a bigger variety of skills while single morphs can satisfy the Healing/Tanking needs.

Dedicating 1 skill line to healing, damage and tanking is bad and leads to offensively weak classes with overtuned defence --> tank meta here we come
Edited by BohnT2 on May 1, 2020 12:12PM
  • Saelent
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    Phew, long read, worth it though.
    Only problem I have is that the vampire skills just come off as sidelines Nightblade skills, the NPCs have the actual vampire skills.
  • Vevvev
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    Saelent wrote: »
    Phew, long read, worth it though.
    Only problem I have is that the vampire skills just come off as sidelines Nightblade skills, the NPCs have the actual vampire skills.

    Agreed, current vampire on the PTS feels like a bloodfiend using their claws and nothing else. NPCs get the cool powerful drains, bat swarms, summonable blood creatures, teleports, and other cool vampiric stuff.
    PC NA - Ceyanna Ashton - Breton Vampire MagDK
  • wheem_ESO
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    Magicka Necromancer and Magicka Warden are the two classes most in need of both a good stun, and a new spammable (due to terrible projectile speed, and in the case of Ricochet Skull being extremely clunky to weave). Funnily enough, the Vampire CC turns out to be unreliable and the spammable is mostly useless to both classes in many scenarios.

    When you're on a build with bad mobility, no gap closer, and no good/reliable snare or root, a spammable with a 5 meter range is essentially worthless. Anyone who feels like running away or kiting you, can and will. So one thing they should have learned, but apparently didn't, is that if you're going to make a skill line that basically requires a player to fully commit to it, you'll need to include all the tools necessary to actually make it function competitively...or make those tools available to everyone through other skill lines.

    The classes which can utilize Eviscerate effectively, simply won't. Why would a Magicka DK or Magicka Templar give up their (superior) class spammables, and deal with all the other drawbacks of Vampirism?

    From where I sit, it looks like this new version of the Vampire skill line is basically made for gankers and roleplayers.
  • xaraan
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    I have commented on another thread about the cost penalties for class abilities to be a bit strong IMO b/c of mainly what you talk about here. Yes, it's great that being a vampire isn't just about a couple passives, but actually BEING a vampire, but that said, this is not a full class. It does not have 3 different skill lines to work with and build a good tool kit.

    I think in the end, vampires might end up like WW's where they are never quite balanced well b/c they are either too strong in a very particular build and/or too weak everywhere else. At least with vamp you can pay the price and use other skills, but if you really want to vamp it up, you'll pretty much be in the same shoes as a WW and be stuck with the same skills as every other vampire.

    The only thing I can think of if they don't want to adjust the cost increase is perhaps a sliding scale of cost increases based on the amount of vamp abilities on your bar. If you want one class skill, then it's a minor penalty, but if you are going to load up 4 skills and an ult and just have one vamp ability then the cost increase is at the max it is now. (With the penalty adjusting for more/less vamp skills on the bar.)
    -- @xaraan --
    nightblade: Xaraan templar: Xaraan-dar dragon-knight: Xaraanosaurus necromancer: Xaraan-qa warden: Xaraanodon sorcerer: Xaraan-ra
    AD • NA • PC
  • Tessitura
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    So I don't disagree with everything you said here, but there are some issues I would like to touch adn even dispute.

    Fact of the matter, is, even though vampire synergizes well with it's own skills, it's not built in the way many believe, it is not intended to force players to only run vampire skills, this is a misconception brought on by the knee jerk panic people had to the 20% cost increase at stage 4 vampire. Truth is, it's not that bad, and while some classes suffer from this more then others, it's still very managable even at stage 4, I know because I actually bothered to test it. ( Now thats not saying I would complain if the numbers were tuned down on that cost, but I think the cost increase should remain. )

    I tested Stamina too, and vampire current works very well with the stamina builds I used, I usually sit at stage 2 or stage three on stamina builds though, I can't really say I can make stage 4 work all that well, but thats fine, its not needed.

    Another thing, tanking is very easy with vampire builds, vampire is probably gonna be used more not less for tanking, the crazy *** I could tank with Blood Mist, at stage 3 and the health siphon that gives stamina for blocking, or just more ult which would get you in your scion form faster to survive even more damage. If anything I'd say vampire was built for tanking more then damage.

    Most of your points on class balance is not something I am not going to disagree with, I just wanted to touch on the vampire thing, especially the idea that stamina is not considered for vampire when to me, it seems they very much considered it, given all the weapon damage and Mist Form being so cheap and costing a off resource that doesn't eat into their ability to dodge roll, block, or use their stamina abilities.
  • BohnT2
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    Tessitura wrote: »
    Fact of the matter, is, even though vampire synergizes well with it's own skills, it's not built in the way many believe, it is not intended to force players to only run vampire skills, this is a misconception brought on by the knee jerk panic people had to the 20% cost increase at stage 4 vampire. Truth is, it's not that bad, and while some classes suffer from this more then others, it's still very managable even at stage 4, I know because I actually bothered to test it. ( Now thats not saying I would complain if the numbers were tuned down on that cost, but I think the cost increase should remain. )

    I tested Stamina too, and vampire current works very well with the stamina builds I used, I usually sit at stage 2 or stage three on stamina builds though, I can't really say I can make stage 4 work all that well, but thats fine, its not needed.

    Another thing, tanking is very easy with vampire builds, vampire is probably gonna be used more not less for tanking, the crazy *** I could tank with Blood Mist, at stage 3 and the health siphon that gives stamina for blocking, or just more ult which would get you in your scion form faster to survive even more damage. If anything I'd say vampire was built for tanking more then damage.

    Hey thank you for your reply and sharing your view on that topic.

    However I do disagree with some parts of your post.
    The first thing is that Vampire is still intended to be complementing a class toolkit or be complemented by class skills, depending how much of a vampire you want to be.

    As vampire revolves around the synergy I described above while also having a direct synergy with cloak due to strike from the shadows.

    The issue that prevails here is that you have two playstyles that have to merge, the one from your class and the one from vampire.
    In most cases there is absolutely no benefit for the vampire playstyle from classes, one example would be warden and necromancers as both have a passive which helps you heal up faster when at low health, but that's about it.

    The big question stands however, why should i deal with 100% cost poison uptime on my non vampire skills even at stage two when my class doesn't even benefit much from it.
    I've also been testing on the PTS playing around witwith vamp stages, I don't know what you did on pts so I'll just share my experience.
    The cost increase is way too punishing in duels when running vamp stage >=2 especially on magicka classes as they can't rely on heavy attacks unlike stamina, there's no reason to waste all your magicka due to cost increase when the Vampire skills don't really benefit you all that much.

    For stamina running vampire is only tied to running sated fury (which is overperforming in my eyes) and then finding the stage that limits damage strong enough for you to easily outheal it without being too punishing on your stamina as all of your skills will see that cost increase as the other ones just aren't worth using.
    If you play stamnecro it's fine running stage 3, due to major defile and the battle spirit changes you pressure is high enough even when spamming heavy attacks all the time while the heal of sated fury and undeath to make stamnecro even more tanky.

    On other stamina specs I don't see the point of ever going higher than stage 1 due to lack of damage even with blood frenzy.

    When it comes to tanking I highly doubt people will be using mist form over block in Trials as you want to keep your buffs and debuffs up and the cost increase is unnecessarily punishing on your resources even more than other classes as you use both magicka and stamina skills.
    The best interaction i can see is using exhilarating drain in order to use more ultimates however I haven't seen many tanks use invigorating drain this patch in Trials so i doubt people would start using it as it's even stronger right now (5 ult/s vs 4 ult/s)

    Is it useable in dungeons? Yes probably and it might gives people a feel of siphoning tanks back
    Is it viable in Trials? I highly doubt it

    However the existence of exhilarating drain is the culprit of how I like healing and tanking be woven into class skill lines it adds another layer to a skill which makes it useable for tanks, eventhough i think that brain drain and the base skill are lacklustre.
  • Firstmep
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    I agree that vampire by itself isn't a wholesome thing, but don't forget you can use other skills, and the skill costs can be easily remedied.
    If you look at vamp from the perspective as it is on live:another skill line to complement your class, shore up weaknesses etc. then the vamp rework is actually great.
    Op. I'm glad you brought up the lack of offensive cc for both warden and necromancer, since vampire provides exactly that.
    Alongside with the reworked mist being much better for repositioning, or amount of damage you can get out of vamp, and you start seeing why they added the skill cost.
    As far as master destro "nerf" this is only true if you used clench as a spammable, if you used it for utility, it's a straight up buff, and a pretty big one at that.
  • BohnT2
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    Firstmep wrote: »
    I agree that vampire by itself isn't a wholesome thing, but don't forget you can use other skills, and the skill costs can be easily remedied.
    If you look at vamp from the perspective as it is on live:another skill line to complement your class, shore up weaknesses etc. then the vamp rework is actually great.
    Op. I'm glad you brought up the lack of offensive cc for both warden and necromancer, since vampire provides exactly that.
    Alongside with the reworked mist being much better for repositioning, or amount of damage you can get out of vamp, and you start seeing why they added the skill cost.
    As far as master destro "nerf" this is only true if you used clench as a spammable, if you used it for utility, it's a straight up buff, and a pretty big one at that.

    I highly disagree with you saying mesmerize actually works as an offensive CC, I had another post about it but will just share it here as the other one is basically dead:

    Mesmerize:
    Visually it looks great and feels smooth to use as the CC is instant, there's no delay or anything but now we have to talk about the big issues of the skill and why it will just be a "bad CC you have to use because there's no other options"


    The base skill and the Stupefy morph only have a tiny cone and is also tied to enemies looking at you, meaning someone who's running away from you can just turn around and you can't stop them, this is bad game design, mercy is something coming from dominant participant of a fight not from the inferior one who decides to run away this also applies to hypnosis.

    All three versions of this skill offer no secondary effect that would make it better as a skill to use over other options.
    A 50% snare is irrelevant and completely unnecessary.
    Having the CC be 360° is good but enemies still have to face you and it's just a stun.

    What I propose is this:
    - Increase the cone of the base morph and stupefy to be a 135° angle infront of you.
    -add this to the base morph "affected targets who get hit by one of your vampire abilities in the next 3 seconds are affected by 'crippling fear' which deals dot damage over 5 seconds" this helps with vampires lack of offensive abilities.

    Stupefy becomes the dedicated offensive morph by also stunning people who aren't looking at you in the cone while retaining the base morph effects and losing the snare.

    Hypnosis becomes a more utility focused CC which gains the 360° angle and applies 2 debuffs that you are affected by to targets in the range for 5 seconds (you still have them on you)

    Mesmerize shows how weak CC became over the years and almost every CC that's currently in the game has to be made a lot stronger, they have to be:
    - instant with no wind up or stacking mechanic
    - deal damage or apply something which helps offensive play
    - be unblockable or undodgeable or have a much more powerful secondary effect if they're none of those

    The CC that has to be used as a standard is fossilize which deals damage, is instant, procs class passives, is undodgeable and unblockable, but as a trade-off is meele and single target only.
    That's how CC's should be and not tied to mechanics that rely on your enemy to step in or look at you

    In terms of Master destro, I have another opinion on that but that discussion ment for another thread
  • Cinbri
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    What we see from vampire skilline is that it based on old animation code, because their animations are so fluid that even with unplayable pts ping it easy to perfectly animation cancelling it. Meanwhile rest of skill...
  • Tommy_The_Gun
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    Saelent wrote: »
    Phew, long read, worth it though.
    Only problem I have is that the vampire skills just come off as sidelines Nightblade skills, the NPCs have the actual vampire skills.
    Pretty much this. ^

    Vampire kinda feels like a "Night-blade-sation" (is that even a word ? :joy: ) available for everyone. It is something like 4th sudo-class skill that can be used on other classes and gives you some NB siphoning skills, NB assassination passives and cloak.

    Imho. Vampire skill line kinda "invades" too much into Nightblade class identity. It is more or less, lets say if restoration staff would have Breath of Life + some stronger Templar passives, or Mages guild for example heaving "teleport" skill (copy - paste sorc's streak skill).
  • BohnT2
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    Saelent wrote: »
    Phew, long read, worth it though.
    Only problem I have is that the vampire skills just come off as sidelines Nightblade skills, the NPCs have the actual vampire skills.
    Pretty much this. ^

    Vampire kinda feels like a "Night-blade-sation" (is that even a word ? :joy: ) available for everyone. It is something like 4th sudo-class skill that can be used on other classes and gives you some NB siphoning skills, NB assassination passives and cloak.

    Imho. Vampire skill line kinda "invades" too much into Nightblade class identity. It is more or less, lets say if restoration staff would have Breath of Life + some stronger Templar passives, or Mages guild for example heaving "teleport" skill (copy - paste sorc's streak skill).

    It doesn't really work as another NB class because the vision behind it is completely different, just because both have access to invisibility doesn't mean they're intended to be the same.

    Nightblade vision has been avoiding as much damage as possible and be more powerful than other due to not having to invest as much into defence, magnb specifically is more around siphoning power from the enemy to become stronger.
    While vampire is ment to take its own life force to become stronger those are two completely different routes even if both gain something from being able to go invisible.

    Not saying either of those visions are 100% fleshed out or viable at this point, but that's the case for all class visions at this point
  • MusCanus
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    BohnT2 wrote: »
    It doesn't really work as another NB class because the vision behind it is completely different.
    You sure about that?
    BohnT2 wrote: »
    Nightblade vision has been avoiding as much damage as possible and be more powerful than other due to not having to invest as much into defence
    ZOS wrote:
    Blood Magic, Hit-and-Run Aggressiveness, Stealth and Elusiveness are the primary gameplay concepts that define the combat experience
    Sounds pretty much the same.

  • JAwtunes
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    You make some really good points.

    Personally I would like to see a change to Simmering Frenzy morph, but mainly because there is no net gain in morphing - double cost AND benefit doesn't quite feel right imo. Also, its really painful with battle spirit in PTS so cant see this being used.

    Sated on the other hand feels manageable, but perhaps the burst heal should be capped.
  • CitizenBurns
    CitizenBurns
    Soul Shriven
    TL:DR
    The devs sharing their vision on how a class/subspec should work is great

    Building classes around a playstyle and having skills synergize with each other is what we need

    Offence needs to be fleshed out way more than healing/ tanking and requires a bigger variety of skills while single morphs can satisfy the Healing/Tanking needs.

    Dedicating 1 skill line to healing, damage and tanking is bad and leads to offensively weak classes with overtuned defence --> tank meta here we come[/quote]

    I would offer some additional food for thought after your well thought out post. You mentioned specifically that each class should not have a dedicated Heal/Tank/Damage Spec skill line. While I agree that your point is true given the current layout of the skill lines I can't help but think of this... Why exactly are skill lines limited to only 5 active skills? We can't the skill lines be beefier? 6,7,8 skills? There is the depth we need.
  • BohnT2
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    TL:DR
    The devs sharing their vision on how a class/subspec should work is great

    Building classes around a playstyle and having skills synergize with each other is what we need

    Offence needs to be fleshed out way more than healing/ tanking and requires a bigger variety of skills while single morphs can satisfy the Healing/Tanking needs.

    Dedicating 1 skill line to healing, damage and tanking is bad and leads to offensively weak classes with overtuned defence --> tank meta here we come

    I would offer some additional food for thought after your well thought out post. You mentioned specifically that each class should not have a dedicated Heal/Tank/Damage Spec skill line. While I agree that your point is true given the current layout of the skill lines I can't help but think of this... Why exactly are skill lines limited to only 5 active skills? We can't the skill lines be beefier? 6,7,8 skills? There is the depth we need.[/quote]

    I guess this comes down to Skillbars being 5 skills + 1 Ult.
    Additionally I don't think adding more skills will actually add more depth to classes, as more skills would lead to skills being too similar to each other.
    Even now Zos has a hard time making skills different from each other on a functional level.
    Many skills especially Dots are more or less carbon copies of one and another.

    Adding more skills could also lead to every class having access to a huge amount of buffs and debuffs which hinders class identity.
  • OWLTHEMAD
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    BohnT2 wrote: »

    For the first time in ages the devs have shared what their ideas for vampires are:
    While combat abilities are only a small part of the Vampire rework, special care was given to create a suite of abilities that work synergistically with each other and round out the Vampire kit. Blood Magic, Hit-and-Run Aggressiveness, Stealth and Elusiveness are the primary gameplay concepts that define the combat experience


    Sounds like they gave the identity of nightblades completely over to vampires.

    Edit:

    Guess this is why nightblades didnt get any QoL this patch. They want us all to be vampires instead.
    Edited by OWLTHEMAD on May 2, 2020 4:16AM
  • BohnT2
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    OWLTHEMAD wrote: »
    BohnT2 wrote: »

    For the first time in ages the devs have shared what their ideas for vampires are:
    While combat abilities are only a small part of the Vampire rework, special care was given to create a suite of abilities that work synergistically with each other and round out the Vampire kit. Blood Magic, Hit-and-Run Aggressiveness, Stealth and Elusiveness are the primary gameplay concepts that define the combat experience


    Sounds like they gave the identity of nightblades completely over to vampires.

    Edit:

    Guess this is why nightblades didnt get any QoL this patch. They want us all to be vampires instead.

    I didn't really want this to be part of this thread but I'll just rephrase what I said above.

    Nightblade identity was intended to avoid as much damage as possible and strengthen yourself by weakening your enemy.

    Vampire on the other hand become stronger by sacrificing their own lifeforce, that they have access to invisibility doesn't make them carbon copies of NBs.
  • BohnT2
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    From the non existent changes in 6.0.2 it looks like they're fine with vampires, well we'll see how many people will use it.
  • Aedrion
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    I don't like the changes they've brought in here.

    It pigeonholes vampires into maybe two builds where everything else is subpar or downright weak. Mainly because of the cost increase to regular skills and lack of flexibility in vampire skills.

    Build 1:
    Melee vampire stage 4. You're basically running 5 vampire skills and trying to maximise your use of them, using class skills only as a supplementary to boost your Eviscerates or stay alive. High weapon/spell damage and hit and run with Scion for burst. Any magicka class that already has to get into melee range like Magplar and MagDK will benefit more. The cost of your regular skills - of which you still have to slot 5! - is alleviated by the use of 5 cheaper vampire skills. Ganks might be good with this.

    Build 2: Stage 2-3 vampire. You're running maybe one or two vampire skills to supplement your class skills and getting some use out of the passives. This will be what people try first but the resource cost will be huge and the pay-off small. You might try Sated Fury and Drain here and go three regen enchants, hoping to gain damage from Fury but honestly, you're also taking more fire damage, have lowered HP regen, take huge dmg from Fighter's Guild skills and you can bet Prismatic Glyphs will come to get you too next patch. Maybe a class like magsorc might get away with this due to their ability to Dark Exchange, ability to avoid damage and timed burst window but on most classes, it'll be subpar.

    If Vampire is going to have such huge drawbacks - and make no mistake, they're huge - to the point where it discourages using class skills because you're paying through the nose for them, then it needs a larger assortment of skills than 5. Right now, the game-play urges you strongly into going all-out-vampire in melee because if you don't, the price you pay for the extras vampire gives you, is not worth it.

    It'd say it needs more skills variety first, so more classes can play flexibly with it, and also a nerf to cost increase.

    +2%/+4%/+6%/+8% would be much better.

    An ideal moment to look into NPC vampire skills and perhaps carry them over into player skills, too.



  • OWLTHEMAD
    OWLTHEMAD
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    BohnT2 wrote: »
    OWLTHEMAD wrote: »
    BohnT2 wrote: »

    For the first time in ages the devs have shared what their ideas for vampires are:
    While combat abilities are only a small part of the Vampire rework, special care was given to create a suite of abilities that work synergistically with each other and round out the Vampire kit. Blood Magic, Hit-and-Run Aggressiveness, Stealth and Elusiveness are the primary gameplay concepts that define the combat experience


    Sounds like they gave the identity of nightblades completely over to vampires.

    Edit:

    Guess this is why nightblades didnt get any QoL this patch. They want us all to be vampires instead.

    I didn't really want this to be part of this thread but I'll just rephrase what I said above.

    Nightblade identity was intended to avoid as much damage as possible and strengthen yourself by weakening your enemy.

    Vampire on the other hand become stronger by sacrificing their own lifeforce, that they have access to invisibility doesn't make them carbon copies of NBs.

    "Hit and run agressiveness, stealth, and elusiveness"

    All essential identity to the nightblade. At this point im not even xpeaking to the passive cloak but the overall playstyle that has been gutted from nightblade over the last year and is now being reintroduced like its new and wasnt taken away from another class.

    The using health for power is mostly new (malevolent offering was the beginning of this and many, myself included expected them to do more with the concept)

    The nightblade still has stealth and elusiveness. . . Sort of, but the hit and run aggressiveness, outside of ganking, has been nerfed into the ground.

    This is a playstyle that many of us have been using for ages as zos has steadily dismantled it. Now they bring it back with a vengaence, but literally every other class is better suited to it.

    Next patch the only thing Nightblades specifically will excell in is ganking. And even that is debatable.

    As far as strengthening yoursdlf by weakening your enemy? Yeah we dont do that anymore. The abilities that did have had their function given away.
  • SHOW
    SHOW
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    To OPs point of class gaps i.e. all classes should have the basics covered: gap closer, spammable, dot, execute, heal etc.

    Honestly, each class should cover that for class identity alone.

    But in that absence, I guess weapon skill lines could, but this destroys class identity.

    2H is prob the most obvious example, filling the gaps for stam in pvp. Hence widespread overuse and resulting class identity issues.

    But Magicka's gaps on the other hand are def not solved by the Destruction Staff skill line.

    -Maybe drop impulse for an execute?

    -Eld drain is good, but where is Major Sorcery with a Huge Burst heal? (rally)

    -I hate having to slot resto staff just to get my "vigor" (rapid regen)(I'm magblade, my class sucks, had to rant lol)

    -like a prev commenter said, why limit to just 5 skills per tree, ZOS you can add more to make them more complete, might be safer to add so ur not removing someone's beloved impulse morph lol c'mon its 2020 the world is ending, live a lil lol

    ...but again, the gaps should first be filled at the class level to enhance class identity.
  • BohnT2
    BohnT2
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    Seems like ZOS has a different view on the state of vampires on the pts
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