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Another suggestion for the light/heavy attack rework

ZeroXFF
ZeroXFF
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The idea: treat light attacks as medium attacks with a short charge time, and start scaling those attacks at 0 damage at 0ms, with say ~80% of a spammable in damage at the 1s mark.

In an earlier thread I suggested to put LAs on the GCD with skills. But even though it is an improvement over the current system and anything that was suggested at the time, that concept has some issues that this new suggestion does not have:
1. Some people (who are wrong in my opinion, but whatever) say that LA weaving makes the game feel "fast paced", and putting LAs on the GCD would take it away.
2. It would require a fairly big rework of skills and sets within the same patch cycle.

So here is how treating LA damage as medium attack damage would address these issues:
The animation of a light attack will be kept, and aside from the damage that the attacks do, everything remains looking and working exactly the same. So when you hold down the mouse button for <100ms (or whatever the max is for it still being a light attack now), visually you do the same as what you do when you do it now. This attack triggers all the effects and benefits from all the bonuses that it benefits from on live now. So if you are a nightblade that is using the Undaunted Infiltrator set for whatever reason and you do your usual rotation with LA weaving, your light attacks will deal at least the 774 damage from the set + the proportion of damage that they would do for those few milliseconds that you held down the button, will add charges to your Grim Focus skill the same way they do now, and will restore the resources from Siphoning Strikes and Incapacitating Strike. If you hold the mouse down for longer, the mechanics for medium/heavy attacks start applying exactly the same way they do now.

If this is implemented, aside from a general straight forward rescaling of skill damage or enemy HP bars, the only changes that would need to happen are changes to the Blood Moon set and the Empowered buff. That is definitely a small enough amount of work to be acceptable even for a dungeon DLC patch (this addresses the issue 2 with my previous proposal). All the other changes that would need to happen could be spread-out across following patches, because the combat system would remain functional.

Now for those who like LA weaving because it makes the game feel "fast paced", you still have a reason to do it. There are sets, BIS sets in fact, that work with light attacks (for example Relequen and Siroria, as well as a ton of non-BIS sets, and possibly some new sets in the future). This means that "high APM" people who do LA weaving properly, and build for LA weaving, will still have an edge over everyone else. So those who like RPing as epileptics can still do it and be rewarded for doing so (addressing issue 1 with my previous proposal). LA weaving builds will be an option similar to HA builds now.

What this approach would also do is further increase build diversity. You will no longer be forced to choose between an LA build by default and a niche HA build if you really-really want it. With this change you will get a 3rd competitive option that does not exist right now: a skills-only build.

This will give "low APM" people an intuitive build option that is actually viable. But as opposed to putting LAs on the GCD, people would not be forced to change how they play.

An issue that this concept has that the "LAs on the GCD" does not is that LA spammers will be out of luck. But the same is true for what was tested on the PTS a few weeks ago, so I suppose it's an acceptable loss for the sake of addressing the skill gap between the biggest "low APM" group and the top end players while not forcing anyone to change the way they are playing.
  • Atherakhia
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    I didn't see your other thread discussing the merits of putting basic attacks on the GCD, but that honestly sounds like the correct solution for this game. That said, I'm not sure your solution really 'solves' the problem because it's still basically encouraging weaving just in a different way that feels slightly less weavy but still just as unintuitive to the user.

    The problem with light attack weaving is that the process of animation cancelling is buggy, unintuitive, and inconsistent throughout the game. It's never explained or encouraged throughout a player's natural gaming experience. And light attacks make up too large a portion of a player's overall DPS so the process of light attack weaving is the single most important part of any build for any class. Any changes to the combat system needs to solve all of those problems.

    The outcry from the playerbase on the proposed changes they had several weeks ago had next to nothing to do with the actual changes. People complained from the moment those changes were made public and few people actually bothered to go and test them. The complaints generally fit into two camps: Those who felt the changes were unnecessary because there were so many other things that needed improvement first, and those who had a grievance with the acronym 'APM'.

    The solution is quite simple really. Adjust light attack damage downward by a considerable margin and increase the damage on spammables across the board by a large enough margin to encourage their use over light attacking and those who do light attack weave will still be rewarded for their effort but it won't be the single largest contributor to their overall DPS.

    Light attack weaving has nothing to do with high or low APM players, veteran or novice players, or a player's inability to 'learn' how to do it. It needs to go away because of the reasons I stated above: it's buggy, it's unintuitive, and it's inconsistently applied.
  • Septimus_Magna
    Septimus_Magna
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    Why would anyone use a light attack if you have to wait for the GCD again to use skills that are much more powerful?
    Currently skill > LA > skill > LA would takes about 2 seconds.
    If you proposal would go live nobody would use LAs in their rotation: skill > LA > skill > LA would take 4 seconds.
    So it would slow down combat too much if you put LAs on the same GCD.

    Putting LAs on the GCD seems like it an easy way to reduce the skill gap but I am sure it wont make combat any better.

    Edited by Septimus_Magna on May 6, 2020 2:47PM
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  • Olupajmibanan
    Olupajmibanan
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    We should reduce the gap by teaching players to LA weave. That way the gap is smaller and real end-game players don't have to suffer from unnecessary nerfs.

    There is already a suggestion on this:
    https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/6747060
  • ZeroXFF
    ZeroXFF
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    Why would anyone use a light attack if you have to wait for the GCD again to use skills that are much more powerful?
    Currently skill > LA > skill > LA would takes about 2 seconds.
    If you proposal would go live nobody would use LAs in their rotation: skill > LA > skill > LA would take 4 seconds.
    So it would slow down combat too much if you put LAs on the same GCD.

    Putting LAs on the GCD seems like it an easy way to reduce the skill gap but I am sure it wont make combat any better.

    A free spammable. Frees up space on skill bars.

    But this is not what I'm suggesting here. I'm suggesting to make LAs do a negligible amount of damage while keeping all the secondary effects of LAs and create a sliding scale for how much damage basic attacks do starting at 0 damage and scaling up with the charge-up time (i.e. calculate the damage for all basic attacks the way it was calculated for medium attacks on PTS, except start at 0).
  • ZeroXFF
    ZeroXFF
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    We should reduce the gap by teaching players to LA weave. That way the gap is smaller and real end-game players don't have to suffer from unnecessary nerfs.

    There is already a suggestion on this:
    https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/6747060

    The issue isn't that people don't know how to do it, the issue is that the mechanic itself is broken, and people refuse to press 2 buttons, one of which is always the same one, to activate 1 skill. So teaching people how to do it will not solve the underlying problem, only make more people aware of how broken the game is.

    There should be arenas to teach people other things, for example an undaunted arena that teaches the basics of doing a dungeon as a tank/healer/DD, but LA weaving is not a thing that there should be an arena for. It should just be removed from the game entirely, or made optional (the latter being the case with this suggestion).
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