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A suggestion regarding Oblivion damage.

MindOfTheSwarm
MindOfTheSwarm
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For a long time Oblivion damage has been reviled in PVP for good reason and regarded as very poor in PVE. Currently there are very few sources of Oblivion Damage in the game and as such, a true Oblivion 'build' is not possible. I have a suggestion that would allow for such a build to exist without it being overpowered in PvP and yet stay viable in PvE. I would like to start out with the two main sets that have Oblivion Damage.

1. Sload's Semblance:

This set got hit pretty hard with the nerf hammer, and it was very much needed, but I do feel that it was nerfed in the wrong way. I think something like this would have been better:

5 Piece Bonus: Damaging an enemy applies Shadow Blight on them. Enemies afflicted with Shadow Blight take 3% of their Max Health as Oblivion Damage every second for 4 seconds. This can deal a maximum of 3000 per tick. This effect cannot stack.

In essence, there would no longer be a cooldown and it could affect as many enemies as you can damage, but by removing the ability of it stacking you eliminate the overpowered situation of groups running it in BG's and Cyrodiil.


2. The other set is Knight Slayer, I think that allowing this to also affect PVE enemies would be enough and no further changes would be needed, but I would buff the maximum amount of damage to about 12k to help it compete with other more 'regular' used sets.


3. Finally, the other main source is of course Oblivion Glyphs, this is where things get a bit complicated as they deal a flat amount of damage, but by changing them to fall in line with the 'Max Health' condition you could make them more appealing in PVE situations. Something like this:

Truly Superb Glyph of Decrease Health

Decrease Health Enchantment
Deals 2% Max Heath as Oblivion Damage
Can deal a maximum 2000 Damage.


To put this in perspective let us look at examples.

1. PVE scenario.

Named Enemy

Health = 2 Million

This would allow the above examples apply their maximum amount of damage. If all of these were equipped, you could make a viable and dedicated Max Health build without it being too overpowered and outplaying more 'meta' builds.


2. PVP scenario

Enemy Player

Health 20k

In this situation, the sets would deal a lot less damage, with Sload's only hitting for 600 every second, Knight Slayer would hit for 1600 and the Glyph proc would hit for 400. Together this is only 2600 damage and would not be overpowered at all. Especially if the suggestion of Sload's not stacking is implemented.


In Summary, I believe there is room for a Max Health damage build, provided that it is handled correctly and that these effects cannot stack.


On another note slightly related, Malacath's Band of Brutality does indeed apply to Oblivion Damage too, incase you were wondering.

  • Xvorg
    Xvorg
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    I had a mDK lit staff heavy attack built around Oblivion dmg (Torug's + knightslayer+skoria) some time ago, but it was nerfed into... oblivion. It was decent, not OP, but I recognize I invested 0 into regen and little into spell dmg. Ofc there were people who didn't like such approach, so they asked for nerfs.

    I highly doubt ZoS is going back to that in the future.

    When looking at the build I realize that all the skills were support or dots, and most of them were nerfed xD (wings, dampen magicka, spike armor, shock reach, healing ward, entropy... even soul trap)
    Sarcasm is something too serious to be taken lightly

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  • YandereGirlfriend
    YandereGirlfriend
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    I like the spirit of wanting to raise up Oblivion damage but that tuning wouldn't be attractive in PvP.

    As far as I know, Oblivion damage doesn't bypass Battle Spirit, so you would be spending two 5-pieces and your main enchantment on 1300 damage.

    IMO, that's the fundamental problem with the %-health damage sets, that they are tuned at a level to be intriguing without Battle Spirit, but with that debuff they simply can't compete.

    Rather than scaling with health, it might be more useful to scale with Armor Rating and then put in place a reasonable cap. If a gold Oblivion glyph were: "Does 25% of target's Armor Rating in Oblivion Damage" then you would get 18200 * 0.25 = 4550 damage against a Veteran mob and 33,000 * 0.25 = 8250 / 2 = 4125 damage against a resistance-capped PvP tank.

    Those would be relatively balanced values. In PvE, you would have higher base damage but Oblivion damage doesn't Crit and doesn't apply a status effect, so it is balanced against the other damage glyphs (even slightly under-powered still). In PvP, it would provide a powerful tool against resistance stacking tanks while tapering off significantly against lighter Armor Ratings.

    You could tune Knight-Slayer to use the gold Oblivion glyph values and then set Sload's to be less since it is a DoT. Of course, you would run into a problem with the Infused Trait and Oblivion glyphs but perhaps you could side-step it but having the glyph not work with Infused similarly to how it doesn't work with Torug's OR have it reduce the cooldown but not increase the damage OR simply reduce the base gold glyph value to 20% of Armor Rating.

    In any case, it all goes to show the problems of trying to balance two different game modes simultaneously.
  • MindOfTheSwarm
    MindOfTheSwarm
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    I like the spirit of wanting to raise up Oblivion damage but that tuning wouldn't be attractive in PvP.

    As far as I know, Oblivion damage doesn't bypass Battle Spirit, so you would be spending two 5-pieces and your main enchantment on 1300 damage.

    IMO, that's the fundamental problem with the %-health damage sets, that they are tuned at a level to be intriguing without Battle Spirit, but with that debuff they simply can't compete.

    Rather than scaling with health, it might be more useful to scale with Armor Rating and then put in place a reasonable cap. If a gold Oblivion glyph were: "Does 25% of target's Armor Rating in Oblivion Damage" then you would get 18200 * 0.25 = 4550 damage against a Veteran mob and 33,000 * 0.25 = 8250 / 2 = 4125 damage against a resistance-capped PvP tank.

    Those would be relatively balanced values. In PvE, you would have higher base damage but Oblivion damage doesn't Crit and doesn't apply a status effect, so it is balanced against the other damage glyphs (even slightly under-powered still). In PvP, it would provide a powerful tool against resistance stacking tanks while tapering off significantly against lighter Armor Ratings.

    You could tune Knight-Slayer to use the gold Oblivion glyph values and then set Sload's to be less since it is a DoT. Of course, you would run into a problem with the Infused Trait and Oblivion glyphs but perhaps you could side-step it but having the glyph not work with Infused similarly to how it doesn't work with Torug's OR have it reduce the cooldown but not increase the damage OR simply reduce the base gold glyph value to 20% of Armor Rating.

    In any case, it all goes to show the problems of trying to balance two different game modes simultaneously.

    I appreciate your points but wouldn't having it work off resistances be incredibly dangerous for low health players with high resistances? I think having it work off of Max Health is fair to everyone. Now I do believe that Battlespirit should not apply to Oblivion Damage, but ONLY if it scales with Max Health. If it remained flat damage in the case of current glyphs then it would be incredibly overpowered.

    The balance would have to make it suit a more of Bruiser style that deals a lot of sustained damage without bypassing more dedicated DPS builds. Basically, a player that cannot burst down DPS or Healers, but is a very real threat to Tanks. This is what such a build should cater for.

  • YandereGirlfriend
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    The problem isn't so much raw health as it is the resistances and the stacking means of non-resistance damage mitigation that leads to huge increases in effective health.

    Most of the tanks in Cyrodiil don't have 45k+ HP, rather, they have ~28-30k but with stacked resistances and %-damage mitigation buffs in addition to healing buffs. Most players in general are in a relatively small HP band, bound from ~20k for a cloaking magBlade to ~25-30k for a Stamina brawler.

    That's why Oblivion damage doesn't really do its job very well, because players simply don't have raw HP pools of the size where Oblivion damage appreciably scales. And then you have the Battle Spirit debuff on top of it.

    So my point is that you can be incredibly tanky (to the point that it is a problem) with a relatively modest raw HP pool and you can be squishy with a high raw HP pool because raw HP is basically a meaningless stat. It's all about the effective HP and to address that (e.g. the true source of the tank meta) you really need to scale off of mitigation.
  • MindOfTheSwarm
    MindOfTheSwarm
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    The problem isn't so much raw health as it is the resistances and the stacking means of non-resistance damage mitigation that leads to huge increases in effective health.

    Most of the tanks in Cyrodiil don't have 45k+ HP, rather, they have ~28-30k but with stacked resistances and %-damage mitigation buffs in addition to healing buffs. Most players in general are in a relatively small HP band, bound from ~20k for a cloaking magBlade to ~25-30k for a Stamina brawler.

    That's why Oblivion damage doesn't really do its job very well, because players simply don't have raw HP pools of the size where Oblivion damage appreciably scales. And then you have the Battle Spirit debuff on top of it.

    So my point is that you can be incredibly tanky (to the point that it is a problem) with a relatively modest raw HP pool and you can be squishy with a high raw HP pool because raw HP is basically a meaningless stat. It's all about the effective HP and to address that (e.g. the true source of the tank meta) you really need to scale off of mitigation.

    This is an interesting point. Would your change though cause tanks to switch to high health instead?
  • PaddyVu
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    Does malacath affect oblivion damage?
  • MindOfTheSwarm
    MindOfTheSwarm
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    PaddyVu wrote: »
    Does malacath affect oblivion damage?

    Yes as far as I know
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