PTS Update 27 - Feedback Thread for Combat & Classes

Celestro

Brun1234 wrote: »

Celestro wrote: »

Brun1234 wrote: »

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Internet_Mask wrote: »

Some feedback about Crystal Weapon:

The name does not at all sound like a stamina sorcerer ability calling it something like Storm's Bite or Storm Strike sounds much more thematically fitting for a stamina sorcerer.

The ability itself is not at all interesting it is literally a copy-paste of Imbue Weapon with some tweaks. Please make it an actual direct damage spammable ability so stamina sorcerers can become a bit less reliant on weapon skills. Following that train of thought it would also be great for stamina sorcerers if one of Bolt Escape's morphs could be turned into a stamina based charge ability.

I see why they did it, doesn't necessarily mean i agree though. as stamsorc is based around weapons and being an arcane warrior, mixed with it's light attacks being used for bound armaments, it makes sense to me, why they did it from a thematical point of view. it looks cool, but they should have learned from crushing, that it's extremely clunky to use with melee weapons, and not ranged weapons, it's the whole reason mag can even use it in the first place, because you can pre-load a light attack onto it.

Having tested it for quite a bit of time myself, in melee it actually weaves incredibly cleanly. Much cleaner than Crushing Weapon ever did. I'd guess they cleaned up the animation timing and lockout from LAs or other effects. I had absolutely zero issues weaving it, but always hated weaving Crushing. I haven't played Stam Sorc in a while, and it instantly felt better than weapon spammables on them. I honestly give this change a 9/10.

Even if it weaves clean if it doesn't account for more damage than Rapid Strikes/Wrecking Blow it won't get used. They need to re-evaluate the bonus effects or the Dark Magic passives.

Some of the suggestions here (making it a cast-time melee ability like Wrecking with a change on LA/HA to proc an instant cast, to mirror Crystal Frags) are good, but I don't know if ZOS wants to completely redesign the ability at this point.

I mean, they've done that with DK's Stonefist a few times already. Would only be fair if they did so but maybe it won't all happen in this same patch.

I'm still in favor of directly adding the additional damage to Light and Heavy attacks instead, so it synergizes better with stamsorc's Bound Armaments light attack but a cast time "Wrecking Blow" is pretty okay with me as long as the secondary effect is still useful for both solo and group compositions.

When using Wrecking you still weave LA between casts, so having something like that wouldn't necessarily make an antisynergy with Bound Armaments.

But I get what you're saying and I do like the "buff next weapon attack" abilities. Maybe something like this:

Crystal Weapon:
Empower your weapon with dark crystals, causing your next Light Attack or Heavy Attack to deal XXXX additional damage and apply Dark Resonance to the target. Dark Resonance gives your next light or heavy attack a Y% chance to strike twice.

By "strike twice" I mean just duplicate its damage, but from a mechanical standpoint it would count as two separate hits (the extra LA/HA would not trigger an animation, so it would be "free"). This would provide some nice extra damage as well as alleviating some of the issues I described in my earlier post regarding on-hit procs, enchants, and poisons. It would also synergize really well with Bound Armaments as you would get an extra stack when Dark Resonance procs.

EDIT: Thinking about it more, it wouldn't necessarily need to be a debuff. Just bake the extra hit chance into the ability itself:

Crystal Weapon:
Empower your weapon with dark crystals, causing your next Light Attack or Heavy Attack to deal XXX additional damage. Striking an enemy with this ability has a Y% chance to trigger an extra Light or Heavy Attack.

I think they'd need to bring down the extra damage granted considerably to balance out the extra attacks, but it's a lot more interesting than a clone of Crushing Weapon.

Oh yeah I know WB synergizes with stamsorc as far as Light Attacks go. I just meant the reworked Crystal Weapon (and Crushing Weapons) don't since the additional damage applied by the ability is separate.

Also I gotta say, I absolutely love a suggestion like this. Emphasizes the "weapon" aspect to a whole new level that does shore up the weakness of using class skills over weapon skills. It doesn't directly possess the group composition I was hoping for but I dunno, I almost wouldn't mind forgoing something like that honestly.

Kolzki

Crystal weapon lowers the targets resistance but does not proc the Ravager set which should add a ravager stack "Each time you attempt to reduce the targets Physical or Spell resistance".

JoSePHRiNG

I am a MagSorc pet user, but not just a normal pet user,

I train them with 60K Magicka, when I saw the patch notes I immediately log on to the PTS.

I use both Volatile Familiar and Twilight Tormentor in normal server

Volatile Familiar deals 2700 with normal attack and 4100 damage with its ability.
Twilight Tormentor deals 5800 with normal attack and it deals %50 more damage its ability.

But now in PTS;

Volatile Familiar deals 1725 with normal attack and 2560 damage with its ability.
Twilight Tormentor deals 3460 with normal attack and it deals %50 more damage its ability.

I am not saying don't make it scale with both spell damage and Magicka,

I say if my Magicka is higher make it scale with just Magicka again rather than spell damage.

Because I test it, their damage doesn't even come close to the original one even with high spell damage.

My sets give me only Magicka not spell damage,

I play this build like I am the commander of them. Please don't take it away from me.

Wolf81

JoSePHRiNG wrote: »

I am a MagSorc pet user, but not just a normal pet user,

I train them with 60K Magicka, when I saw the patch notes I immediately log on to the PTS.

I use both Volatile Familiar and Twilight Tormentor in normal server

Volatile Familiar deals 2700 with normal attack and 4100 damage with its ability.
Twilight Tormentor deals 5800 with normal attack and it deals %50 more damage its ability.

But now in PTS;

Volatile Familiar deals 1725 with normal attack and 2560 damage with its ability.
Twilight Tormentor deals 3460 with normal attack and it deals %50 more damage its ability.

I am not saying don't make it scale with both spell damage and Magicka,

I say if my Magicka is higher make it scale with just Magicka again rather than spell damage.

Because I test it, their damage doesn't even come close to the original one even with high spell damage.

My sets give me only Magicka not spell damage,

I play this build like I am the commander of them. Please don't take it away from me.

I was hoping infused spell power jewelry would compensate the pets along with courage buff you tend have going in group content...Its challenging for me to move away from necropotence on my petsorc it has been dependable for me since I don't have the trial sets yet.

JoSePHRiNG

Wolf81 wrote: »

I was hoping infused spell power jewelry would compensate the pets along with courage buff you tend have going in group content...Its challenging for me to move away from necropotence on my petsorc it has been dependable for me since I don't have the trial sets yet.

I tested it with 5100 spell and 40 k magicka
Familiar deals 2100 with normal attack and 3140 damage with its ability.
Tormentor deals 4300 with normal attack and it deals %50 more damage its ability.

Trust me on this one it won't go higher than this.

I wish they don't change it.

JayKwellen

While I like the changes to nightblades in that they will definitely help our lackluster damage in PvP and better fit with our identity, I do feel like zos has been kind of slowly destroying the dark cloak magblade playstyle. Whether accidental or by design I'm not sure.

The nerf to defensive monster sets was unfortunate, but could be survived.

The nerf to mitigation from spectral bow is going to hurt quite a bit. While we can still build to take advantage of the 10% healing, it still leaves us squishier overall and more liable to burst.

The changes to our passives are nice, since I had literally zero access to 10% increased damage from stealth, but still not the most useful since I'm not a ganker or opportunist, I'm in your face trying to brawl, the one place the passive doesn't activate.

These changes make me think I need to look into a defensive set like pariah, armor master, or buffer of the swift just to maintain the mag brawler playstyle. The downside to this being of course that magblade damage is already low, and switching to a defensive 5 piece means either taking that damage even lower, or completely sacrificing my sustain.

On their own each change is fine, but taken together is still enough to make me kind of stand back and think "Am I even going to be able to make this work anymore?"

Maybe I'm just being hyperbolic, I can be prone to that. Still worried about it though.

katorga

JoSePHRiNG wrote: »

Wolf81 wrote: »

I was hoping infused spell power jewelry would compensate the pets along with courage buff you tend have going in group content...Its challenging for me to move away from necropotence on my petsorc it has been dependable for me since I don't have the trial sets yet.

I tested it with 5100 spell and 40 k magicka
Familiar deals 2100 with normal attack and 3140 damage with its ability.
Tormentor deals 4300 with normal attack and it deals %50 more damage its ability.

Trust me on this one it won't go higher than this.

I wish they don't change it.

ZOS has a habit of wrecking pets then over buffing them when they realize no one uses them.

wild_kmacdb16_ESO

As a Necromancer main, here my thoughts after a quick test:

Undertuned

Grave Grasp - Having its effectiveness be determined by what is essentially some sort of 'lawn darts' minigame was an... 'interesting' decision, but makes it even more awkward to use than it was. Regardless, this skill still needs more juice if you want anyone in the game to slot it. My proposal would be to have it grant Minor Berserk together with the already existing Minor Maim on the enemy; simulating 'stealing' their power.

Stalking Blastones - This still needs a functioning morph ability. Hell just rename it 'Immolating Blastbones', give it some sort of short duration burn DOT effect and call it a day. It would be something. To add a little spice to it, make the DOT weak but stackable.

Overtuned

Detonating Siphon - The detonation triggering each time the effect ends for any reason is great, however, because it grants a full damage detonation each time, the optimal way to use this now is to trigger the detonation asap for some decent free damage. I suspect that is not how the skill is intended to be used so I would have the detonation power increase in strength the longer the channel beam has been going, with it only reaching the tooltip value after a full channel.

Rtzon

I don't understand why BfB is being nerfed. The only time it really played well was in parses. In real gameplay, like dungeons, it simply wasn't super viable due to the mobs, boss AOEs, etc. I think that it being melee range is already something that keeps it "in tune." Nerfing it more will simply kill the vampire skill line since the vampire heal ability is useless.

JMadFour

Hi.

I love being a Vampire. Vampire NB is now my main. I think the Greymoor Vampire is much, much better and more fun than the pre-Greymoor Vampire.

I just wanted to lead with that, so that when you read below, you understand where I am coming from.

Blood for Blood (morph):
Decreased the execute multiplier on this morph to 60%, down from 100%.
This ability now ranks up in 5% execute scaling damage per rank, rather than scaling in 1.1% damage per rank.
After casting this ability, you cannot be healed by allies for 5 seconds.

This last change to Blood For Blood must not make it to live. I feel like the Devs have not truly, fully considered the ramifications of this change.

Blood for Blood is a spammable. It will be used CONSTANTLY. All the time. Several times per fight. This will ensure that we have near 100% uptime on this debuff. We will ALWAYS have this debuff on us. Which means we will spend the vast majority of our time in any dungeon/trial/cyrodiil/Battlegrounds UNHEALABLE.

This alone, by itself, with no other changes to Vampire, will make Vampires COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY UNUSABLE IN ANY GROUP CONTENT. We will NOT be welcome. We WILL be kicked from groups constantly, We WILL be a liability to groups. We will be a DPS loss for every group we are ever in, because we will have to spend SO MUCH TIME self-healing because OUR GROUP HEALERS WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO HEAL US. We WILL NOT be able to argue against this, and no amount of "git gud" will allow us to work around this.

And again, I *love* being a Vampire now, I am having a lot of fun with it on Live, and it is much better now than it was prior to Greymoor. But these PTS changes will make Vampires unusable and unwelcome in Group content. if they go forward, I, a Vampire Main who loves being a Vampire and greatly enjoys playing my Vampire post Greymoor, will cure my Vampire.

Please don't do this. Find some other way to make BfB not mandatory for DPS. Make it cost Magicka. Decrease the damage. Increase the Health cost. something. But not this.

Stx

Honestly I think the janitor thought of the Blood for Blood change.

Nser

Blood for blood

The change is great, u need self heal to use it and i like that for both pve and pvp, but return the damage 100% on missing health same as before no need to nerf the damage.

casparian

Grim Focus

I love the change on paper. It fits the theme and natural playstyle of the class much better than the damage mitigation mechanic. Great decision.

In practice, it feels a bit underwhelming, mainly because the crit damage boost does not apply to the spectral bow projectile, since activating the projectile immediately removes the skill's buffs. This seems like an oversight, and I hope it is, but one way or another it would be great to get some communication about this. Maybe the intent is that we need to choose between a high-damage proc or buffing our other abilities? That may make sense on paper, but it doesn't translate well into actual gameplay, since the bow proc is still very avoidable, even when you CC the opponent before firing it. It takes a lot of patience and close attention to your opponent to even land the thing (much, much more than other classes' big hitters do, such as Purifying Light).

One way or another, can we get some clarification on whether or not the bow proc is intended to benefit from the Grim Focus damage boost?

casparian

Crystal Weapon

The good
I love the cosmetic design of the skill -- it's hard not to read it as an homage to Dark Souls, as it's virtually identical to Crystal Magic Weapon. Whatever brave hollow is working in ESO's art department, I salute you.

I also appreciate the attempt to create some in-class synergy, with Bound Armaments and now Crystal Weapon both promoting a light attack theme. Synergy is good.

The bad
The skill does not feel good to use. At all. I would have assumed that ZOS would already know from their numbers on the usage of Crushing Weapon just how few of their players enjoy using a skill that works this way. It's not because players don't like light attacks (they do) or even because of the damage (it's not overwhelmingly good but it's decent). It's because Crushing Weapon is the clunkiest spammable in the game. It screws up the timing of your other skills. Light attacks whiff for no discernable reason. Any fight with any degree of mobility or mechanics will inevitably result in wasted Crushing/Crystal Weapon casts. The extra two seconds to use Crystal Weapon don't make a noticeable difference here.

All of these issues make this skill just feel bad to use. It's not fun. And no, it's not that this is something new and I just need to get used to it -- I already spent a lot of time trying to get used to this mechanic back in Summerset when Crushing Weapon came out and I thought it could be a stamsorc spammable. What I experienced then is the same as what we're experiencing now: damage-added-to-your-next-light-attack is a clunky mechanic that does not reliably produce results *on a melee build in any context except for a target dummy.

My recommendation
Please just give stamsorcs a regular spammable. Please. I'd be happy if you kept the light attack theme, and the penetration is nice for stamsorcs in a wide variety of contexts, especially PVE tanking. I'd suggest making Crystal Weapon a regular spammable attack that gives your next light attack used in 4 seconds a 1k penetration debuff. This would make the skill stronger and more fun to use for damage (in both PVE and PVP), because it would actually be reliably usable, while keeping its application for tanks.

TLDR: Crystal Weapon is an idea that has already been tried, tested, and rejected, just with different art, and the minor tweaks ZOS has made to Crushing Weapon to create Crystal Weapon are not enough to make it fun or effective to use. Just make it a regular spammable.

Kuratius

JoSePHRiNG wrote: »

Wolf81 wrote: »

I was hoping infused spell power jewelry would compensate the pets along with courage buff you tend have going in group content...Its challenging for me to move away from necropotence on my petsorc it has been dependable for me since I don't have the trial sets yet.

I tested it with 5100 spell and 40 k magicka
Familiar deals 2100 with normal attack and 3140 damage with its ability.
Tormentor deals 4300 with normal attack and it deals %50 more damage its ability.

Trust me on this one it won't go higher than this.

I wish they don't change it.

Your character's damage, which is the majority of your damage for most sorcs, will be higher with the spell damage build.
It will likely come out close to the same overall, if it doesn't they just need to give the the pets a higher multiplier.
Before, when you were playing a sorc you were restricted to choosing sets that increased your magicka instead of your spell damage, and sorc pet design didn't work with many of the buffs in the game (see e.g. major courage). You can still focus on a pet build, the pet build will just have to be in the skills you use, not necessarily the gear.
Overall it's a positive change with regard to itemization.
If you sorc is underpowered as a whole (not just the pet being weaker, but your combined damage!), feel free to ask them to increase the skill coefficient.

Choucroute

1. Perfected False God set: I don't understand why you nerf a set that was released last year in a DLC to make it on the same level as a set from the vanilla game that was released years ago. What's the logic behind it ? Boost the other set, don't nerf Perfected False God.

2. Olorime: same thing, really. I get it that you want people to use Spell Power Cure more and I think buffing it is good, but why change Olorime when it was a good buffing set that had a good balance of cons and pros ? Pros: it lasts 30s and is aoe, it buffs several targets as long as they step on the circle. Cons: it requires you to use an aoe ground ability, the circle is static and can't be moved for 10s, people need to be grouped or to step on it.
With the change to Spell Power Cure, you could have made it the BiS buffing set in non-static fights, while Olorime could have said the BiS for static fights. Win-win, both sets are used and we all get Major Courage, everybody's happy.

3. Worm Cult/Hircine's: I don't see the point of nerfing Worm Cult and Hircine's. Those changes make them 100% useless. They used to be pretty nice sets sometimes used for specific trials and you seem to want players to use dungeon sets, so why completely destroy Worm Cult and Hircine's?

4. Blood For Blood: why nerf a skill that really helped with some people's sutain ? It had two good cons already: you needed to be melee and it used your health (so there were cases when you couldn't use it). Lower the base damage of the skill to not make it that strong and of its execute bonus if you want, but don't make it so you can't be healed for 5s... 5s is insane !
I doubt that'll help PvP since in general in PvP you're mostly self-healing, but in PvE that's not the case, so 5s make a huge difference. Help the classes with low sustain and no/bad spammables, let them keep their BFB
I also feel that some good players/classes actually might be able to keep using BFB as a spammable in PvE because they have good self-heals and passives, but some other classes won't, which is pretty unfair for a spammable available to everybody...

5. Hollowfang: mostly related to the BFB nerf. I find it pretty weird that you'd remove the spammable that helps magicka classes with terrible sustain, while at the same time nerfing a set that helps them so much. It's like you don't want Dragonknights and Templars to be able to sustain ?

ESO_Nightingale

maddiniiLuna wrote: »

[Warden - Stamina]

Still have no real execute or spammable. Yeah cutting dive it's just.. Okay it CAN do a lot of damage, when you get the 7 stacks up it's pretty good. The only problem is, that it's only a ranged ability and it does not have animation cancel and it takes for ever for the animation to complete. If i have to stand there spam 7x cutting dive i might as well not use it at all. It does bleed damage - cool! Except for every player in this game has CP's invested in all 3 perks that mitigate bleed damage. Doesn't make a difference.

Remove the cast time, make it instant bleed damage but don't stack it. That's the changes i want to see.

It took a year to fix the stamina Swarm and at this point every class has a good spammable except for warden But nobody reads this anyway. Was quite disappointed when i saw that warden got almost no changes except a little bug fix and a nerf.

I think that stamina classes don't need executes quite as much as magicka classes, as you have access to stamina weapon executes, that isn't to say it's struggling in pve though. Dive is absolutely an issue and we've been reporting it for years. i've even personally spoken to Rich Lambert about the skill last year during PAX AUS. But honestly, the bleed theme is entirely unique as a class damage identity. So i don't think removing it is good. I think the fact that they stack is good and kinda unique. But my issue with the skill overall are it's proc conditions, and speed. what i'd do to the base skill, and therefore morphs, is make the off balance proc when in close range(7 meters or closer rather than 7 meters or more away from target) and i would increase the speed of the projectile by 30% so that it's actually reliable at hitting people in PvP. For cutting dive, i'd remove the off balance requirement entirely for the bleed, and reduce the max stacks of the bleed to about 3, just instead proccing when the ability hits the target. For screaming cliff racer, I would make the ability do 7% more damage when 7 meters or closer instead of it's current "up to 15% more damage from range" mechanic. That way, the skill doesn't feel anywhere near as awkward and bad to use. Since it would be faster overall, reducing the damage from the secondary effects is probably a better way to go about balancing it.

when it comes to fetcher infection and growing swarm. i would actually add a poison injection type execute to fetcher infection, not to increase it's overall damage, but simply to make it more consistent. What would be interesting is, if the base skill gained the functionality of growing swarm, and then you can add the execute to fetcher infection, and another useful effect to growing swarm. something like that. it would make the entire skill more interesting as a DoT rather than just a copy paste of most other ranged DoTs.

Additionally, both magden and stamden really each need a unique playstyle-defining skill in my opinion. and while i've been thinking of ideas for stamden, i still need to speak to more stamdens who play PvE to nail down something good, and, I'm absolutely certain that the Arctic Blast 4.0 suggestion is the best skill for magicka warden's playstyle. At least in pvp. As it would provide us a linking skill between deep fissure and northern storm, as well as a decent offensive class stun with 2 AoE damage components. here is the link to a document describing the entire change: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n68B7D2Zna4NNcDCiPp1zYmJP4KDh3n-PsRAI80RLnM/edit?usp=sharing. my entire class rework roadmap is in my signature. it aims to make the class more unique/interesting and fun, as well as more balanced (as much as possible). And it's not trying to ask for flat buffs, rather doing it's best to consider who the changes effect and how.

allhailskippy

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not make the proposed changes to switch rapid maneuver for vigor.

You will be negatively affecting every single one of my alts.

I currently have 10 characters that I use for crafting that all use rapids on a daily basis. They are not used for combat.
I also hate PVP content. The people are toxic, and even participating in the last event was enough to cause me to stop playing for a week.

Making this change will mean that I need to go farm nearly HALF A MILLION AP just to remain where I am now. On toons that do not participate in combat. That is not acceptable.

Or at least if you MUST change their slots, unlock it at level 3 instead of 5. This would mean an 80k farm, which while not ideal means the difference between losing 1 battleground per character vs losing 10.

Rapid maneuvers is not a PVP specific skill. Move it out of the skill line if you must, but please do not make this change.

Dusk_Coven

Could we please get a comment on the reason that it is not possible / not preferable to simply set the Skill Line Rank requirement for Vigor to 1, instead of swapping places with another skill?

Cinbri

And so here is Templar feedback:
overall instead of decrease pain points of class in pvp, changes in first patch only increasing them.
a. Damage arsenal was nerfed post dot-meta and as class that heavily rely on dots it overall decreased pressure damagee. With change to Ritual of Retribution pressure damage will decrease even harder becasuse every magpalr now forced to use Extended to get at leas some hot and have synnergy with updated Light Weaver.
b. Class is lacking of burst damage skill, only damage amplifier skill - Backalsh. But along with bug fixes this skills mecahnics wasnt updated , making this already outdated skill even worse; in addition weird cahnge to Burning Light, that was some kind of burst damage, but no longer. And thus those 2 changes decreasing templar burst damage even further.
c. Class is lacking of any proactive defense skill or sources of mitigation skills taht in combine allow to push to large mitigations, it lack of trully strong HoT. Its entire defense is spammig purge and burst heal and as result its entire defense got heavily affected by changes to battle spirit healing. Now with nerf to Sweeps healing, its survivability in outnumbered situation will lowere even more.


Now more detaily:
1. Light Weaver - after update of this passive both bonuses bugged out as I showed up here https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/6866868/#Comment_6866868
Patchnotes however forgot to mention that Armor bonus got buffed twice. However even pre-update there was low profit of this effect due to Armor cap is easily to achieve and bonus that jsut add more armor is waste. Now bonus taht grant 33k armor will most of time waste half of it, i.e. additional armor numbers will simply wont have effect.
Thats why I suggest fully turn Light Weaver into typical passive with singular strong effect: remove Armor bonus on Rite of Passage altogether but change hp threshold of ult return from 50% to 75% hp. This exact way was cahnged Honor the Dead back in One Tamriel patch and it proved to be positive change. Given that Armor bonus no longer working after update, jsut dont waste time on fixing, but delete altogether.


2. Burning Light - changes of this passive are against pattern of update.
Its' slight redesign will barely affect PvE but it seems consequences of how it will affect PvP were ignored:
1. Perfomance - it is said that devs trying to optimizate perfomance of skills by lowering claculations it require. But It doesnt look as way taht was using for this passive. Previously it had calculation of proc chance and cooldown timer, both as global cd of caster. But now you cant deal 3 ticks of aedric skill to 1 target and then hit other target with 1 tick and proc BL because it apply now hidden debuff on enemy with timer and amount of stacks; so now instead of global calcualtions of caster it apply calcualtions on target, this doesnt look like calcualtions reduction and increase of perfomance.
2. After redesign passive in PvP defacto working with only 1 skill out of 6 - Jabs. This is not how similar passive Implosion was treated. In PvP: Spear Shards is immobile AoE, due to low uptime of Burning Light stacks and high mobility players can easily achieve - skill wont be able to proc it, so only Jabs remains. And as result any spec that is not using Jabs, like rangeplars that utilize only Javelin skill - wont be able to proc this passive in any way which means for them like having 1 less passive in aedric tree.
3. Overall change suppose to lower burst capability of passive by double proc within 1.0sec which wasnt rare thing but inexchange guaranteed its proc within 1sec, however given that Jabs only way to proc it - problem that jabs is slwoest melee channel that also heavily desyncing and thus simply unusable with latency spikes, resulting in fact thar guaranteed proc oftenly simply won't occure. So we at situation when de facto we have chance to proc guaranteed effect, kidna paradox.

So, I believe to fix this inconsistent in passive it could be treated same way as comparable passive, like Blood Magic:

Difference between this and Bl is that Blood Magic skilline вont have high intense spammable and thus such difference could be redeemed by cooldown difference.
So, to make BL equally strong in PvP and PvE without full overhaul (like was with Implosion) I suggest to keep BL as it is on live, remove 25% proc chance and increasing cooldown from 0.5s to 1.0s. Remove Charge from possiblity to proc it
With such treatment BL in PvE will be similar to how it operate now since with Jabs+Shards into dps rotation with such change will proc once per second while with current state it also procing at same rate, less efective than on live:

However in PvP it will fix all new problems:
it will be still dynamic ability that you can apply on differnt targets. It will be usable on any spec that utilize at least 1 skill from aedric skilline. It will loose its bursty nature when it was dealing too much damage by double proc within 1.0sec. It will have less calculations due to guaranteed proc.
Literally elimitating rng with lowering its powerlevel.


3. Survivability - templar desperately need skill equal to hot/procative defense/mitigation. And this skill is Living Dark but due to all changes to skill itself and overall pvp changes - its utility is at all times low, even lower than Total Dark was. Because for Total Dark situativeness it granted at least "spiked" boost to survivability, but for Living Dark with making it less situative it also stoped providing utility taht would be enough to use skill for its cost. Idescribed it in tempalr thread:

Cinbri wrote: »

And here we go with some feedback again:

DEFENSE

Main offender in templar defense arsenal is Eclipse, or more precisely Living Dark:
A. back in time this skill was situational CC but in echange granted high damage and heal, however to "lower it ceiling" and increase its reliability and also to make skill work for PvE skill was changed to self-buff. However all nerfs resulted in making profit of this skill less than its reliability along with no achieving its usability in PvE for next reasons:
1. Skill dont have actual scaling mechanic - in comparison with with similiar skills: NB Blur apply major evasion, this buff scale completely on amount of enemies and aoe they use - and in result can grant rudiculous amount of reduced damage, given that aoe most popular type of damage. DK Scales - also scale on amount of enemies atacking caster from range. Shimmering Shield - grant 100% mitigation agaisnt ranged attacks with very strong morph effects.
However Living Dark doesnt actually scale approximately to amount of enemies like previous skills. Also after Battle Spirit nerf - its functionality decreased by alot.
2. Ever since overhaul skill lost its cpability to protect against large portion of direct damage attacks, like procsets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKz3N5xI5jg

even despite those attacks are Direct Damage.
3. In PvE it simply dont work - first: its morph effect have no use against lot of targets. Second and most important - skill dont work in PvE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUJu0_UN6LI

simply because alot of NPCs attacks are not considered as Direct Attack, and I doubt that work to fix it is worth it, given amount of it needed.
Recap: skill scaling doesnt actually scale as efectively as other skills in game nowdays and its proc condition is unreliable nor achieve goal of making its usefull in PvE.

B. Even since its heal was nerfed for 20% its actuall amount of healing per proc became equal to heal proc of Living Vines or HPS in perfect conditions (which not possible to gain) equal to Intensive Mender. However main problem as i showed in lasted Spoiler tag above - its not reliable because it proc only on Direct Damage attacks. And reality is that you never get hit by enough dircet damage attacks for skill's scaling to effectively work unless you being heavily focused and recieve so much damage that wont be capable to survive. This making skill is even less reliable bacuse in combat where you not being constantly focused - there is no use of skill at all.
Cost-wise: Vines 2700(2700/10=270mana/s); Shimmering 3780-831*3-1287(1287/6=214m/s); Scales 3510(3510/6=585m/s); LD 4320 (4320/6=720m/s); Mender 2160(2160/8=270m/s). LD most expensive skill to keep up.

For reasons described above, i.e. skill terribly scale, dont work in PvE, dot work agaisnt some direct attacks, healing tick nerf, cost vs effectiveness like otehr skills, I believe there is simple solution that fix all the problems and bugs - Push Living Dark further into category of proactive healing/hot like Living Vines, i.e. change proc condition for skill to proc on any damage taken not only Direct Damage. so tooltip would looke like:

As you can see from red lines i marked this way of proc is eact how its effect described in morph description i.e. "when you take damage".
Thus LD with 6sec duration will have almsot triple cost than Vines or Mender. Total heals will be inline of each other: Mender 969x4=3876; Vines-254x10=2540; LD-254x8=~2032 (3048 on paper but 0.5s cd apply own limitation).
Thus LD vs Mender: LD is only self-applied proc only on damage 6sec cost 720m/s with total heal ~3000. Mender can be applied on self and as tool to heal allies HOT with 8sec cost 270m/s with total heal 3876. Almsot everything benefit Mender.
LD vs Vines: LD is only self-applied proc only on damage 6sec cost 720m/s with total heal ~3000. Vines can be applied on self and as tool to heal allies proc only on damage 10sec cost 270m/s with total heal 2540. Without taking in account morphs it looks comparably strong.
Visual affect could be changed into something more cooler and more precisely describe that skill is not mitigating damage but healing/HOT:

^^ i.e. looks effect of Unstable Core that also can be paired with smth like, for example, making armor layer completely black while skill is active, so it more definitive visual to figure that enemy use skill, while this yellow eesene floating from you could represent either healing proc or simply like it now - cosntantly active to represent uptime of skill in dark areas:

Overall - into smth as cool looking as Vampire Blood Frenzy which also has effect of darkness floating around.

In addition - its heal from scaling off offensive stats could be overhauled into scaling off Max HP and thus it would became scaling defensive ability for both magplars and stamplars. Similar to nb dark cloak which is even tooltip-wise are familiar "cover yourself in protective...".
Visually-wise: if you dont want to overhaul effect - jsut swap that ugly bubble into 1st stage of Living Dark bubble, i.e. without this additional ugly yellow glowing layer taht ruining impression of "darkness". Here is comparison of effect - as you can see black bubble is easily visible even without glowing, so this glwoing layer just unnecessary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmPIaOqxauc

In addition cast animation of Living Dark is not precise and simply wrong. Current animation is taken from Backlash and imply that you summon smth out of/ cast into the sky and this is wrong as you cover yourself in a protective stuff and thus animation should be some kidn of defensive posture and there is already such animation:



4. Jabs - with chagnes to healings Jabs operate as aoe skill even less coz additional damage is lesser than standartized damage of aoe and thus overhauled heal calcualtions will grant lower than possible heal from aoe that would have % heal. And more importantly that closest-target damage now detached from additional damage. So how about finally treat initial single-target damage and exclude it from being affect by Evasion buff? You know like, Render Flash is not aoe heal but single target one even tho its heal is rektangle radius.

5. Backlash - there is so many wrong stuff with this skill. Its low store damage and limit on release was coz possibility for allies to store damage and skill having skill memory on stored damage. Now that it dont have group utility, its memory capabiltiy should be wiped, store damage % increased, max limit on store removed and possiblity for released damage to crit also removed as it break rule of how it operate.
Or simply get rid of skill and grant us actuall burst ability, here is couple ideas:

Cinbri wrote: »

Templar class ever since launch of ESO was dot-based class similarly to dragonknight and then suddenly ZOS decided that dots are to ffective and nerfed tham into too weak. However even tho templar was based on dots like DK - its dots wasnt treated differently like DK dots and thus suddenly lost bunch of damage.
Obviously if dot rotation got nerfed - it time to switch to burst rotation, but here is tempalr problm again - class simply dont have viable burst skill.
We have Backlash - which is not even burst skill but damage amplifier skill, bad part of that - it amplify damage of nerfed dot arsenal along while Backlash mechanic itself wasn't treated properly as I described in previous posts.
Other skills that possibly could be used as burst are:
A. Dark Flare - which wont be used effectively for same reasons why people dont use Crystal Blast. In addition keeping in mind that Empowered buff possibly will be changed into affect only heavy attacks - it come to the point that to take benefit of skil you have cast time Flare for 1 sec then channeling heavy attack for another 2sec. It is so clunky, leaving caster totally vulnerable, that, keeping in mind its straight pvp debuff, even "low apm players" doubtly will use this skill.
B. Solar Barrage - was fine before take palce of DOT version of such burst skills as Shalks or Blastbones yet after dot nerfs its damage decreased to the point where it cant be used as some kind of semi-burst skill. In addition this skill suffer from weird standartization of dots where its damage tick every 2sec, and thus cant even fully benefit with dot-based builds that is main build that Draugrkin set supposed to buff. And this is weird because back in time dev comment regarding Purifying Ritual was that it deal damage/heal every 2sec because its multifunction, yet Solar Flare dont have such multifunction. In its core mechanic is exact of sorc Lightning Form - its literally aura that ticking and dealing unblockable damage to targets around , with additional buffs. Yet Barrage tick every 2 sec while Form every 1 sec. Also visually Barrage not precisely describing its effect as its visual effect which is just recolored Impulse effect imply that it deal direct damage burst every 2sec. While precise visual effect should jsut have essence aura around caster with visual damage ticks on hitted enemy, and look like that simply:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXi_w7k3yoU

Also once again keep in mind possible Empower changes that will make Barrage loose its last reason for usability for "high apm players".
Recap: we simply dont have viable burst ability that would work in burst rotation and after dot skills nerfs - there wasnt any improvement of this problem.
So I suggest:
1. Address Backalsh mechanics and update them to how skill works nowdays without its group utility. I pretty sure my old posts about its bugs, like for example its incorrect skill memory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-zhnjmQS3s

are not forgotten. But then there is risk to get too strong Xv1 ability that wont be fun to use.
2. Change Backlash into back to oldest mechanic when it was double reduce by battle spirit, etc. and thus was strong but only in PvE rotation; or turn it into yet another dot but in return address Flare skill to behave as burst skill with different functionality through it morphs:
A. Dark Flare - instead of keeping it as Crystal Blast-like version, to swap it in Crystal Frags-like Version:

And thus it will be single-target burst ability.
B. Solar Barrage - there is 2 ways of address it:
First is - to kkep it visual effect of impulse-like effect ticking every 2 sec - change Barrage into similar to Wild Impulse mechanic - strong blockable direct damage aoe pulsing every 2sec.
Second is - change its mechanic to how burst abilitiies of wardens and necromancers works, which are ~3s burst ability with aoe damage that apply strong effect. So Barrage would apply on yourself magnetic bomb visual effect that currently was removed from Unstable Core and only used now by NPC Mage eclipse (very beautiful effect) with essence aura it use now to imply that there is gona be explosion in its radius and megnetic bomb explode after 3sec in X radius, dealing damage similar to Deep Fissure and Stalking Blastbones.
Visual effect of exploding magnetic bomb is perfectly fit this type of skill unlike its currently used for Unstable Core:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dSjIoYka1E

Its definitve enough fro enemy to see what hitted them even in large fights.

@ZOS_Gilliam

Ragnarock41

Sleep724 wrote: »

So why hasn't Stone Giant been touched? No one outside of trials uses this.

Well the developers need to take a big sip of the truth juice but that isn't gonna happen, so why even bother? To them its a success cause people put a skill point in it and that means the ability is clearly used.

Firstmep

Cinbri wrote: »

And so here is Templar feedback:
overall instead of decrease pain points of class in pvp, changes in first patch only increasing them.
a. Damage arsenal was nerfed post dot-meta and as class that heavily rely on dots it overall decreased pressure damagee. With change to Ritual of Retribution pressure damage will decrease even harder becasuse every magpalr now forced to use Extended to get at leas some hot and have synnergy with updated Light Weaver.
b. Class is lacking of burst damage skill, only damage amplifier skill - Backalsh. But along with bug fixes this skills mecahnics wasnt updated , making this already outdated skill even worse; in addition weird cahnge to Burning Light, that was some kind of burst damage, but no longer. And thus those 2 changes decreasing templar burst damage even further.
c. Class is lacking of any proactive defense skill or sources of mitigation skills taht in combine allow to push to large mitigations, it lack of trully strong HoT. Its entire defense is spammig purge and burst heal and as result its entire defense got heavily affected by changes to battle spirit healing. Now with nerf to Sweeps healing, its survivability in outnumbered situation will lowere even more.


Now more detaily:
1. Light Weaver - after update of this passive both bonuses bugged out as I showed up here https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/6866868/#Comment_6866868
Patchnotes however forgot to mention that Armor bonus got buffed twice. However even pre-update there was low profit of this effect due to Armor cap is easily to achieve and bonus that jsut add more armor is waste. Now bonus taht grant 33k armor will most of time waste half of it, i.e. additional armor numbers will simply wont have effect.
Thats why I suggest fully turn Light Weaver into typical passive with singular strong effect: remove Armor bonus on Rite of Passage altogether but change hp threshold of ult return from 50% to 75% hp. This exact way was cahnged Honor the Dead back in One Tamriel patch and it proved to be positive change. Given that Armor bonus no longer working after update, jsut dont waste time on fixing, but delete altogether.


2. Burning Light - changes of this passive are against pattern of update.
Its' slight redesign will barely affect PvE but it seems consequences of how it will affect PvP were ignored:
1. Perfomance - it is said that devs trying to optimizate perfomance of skills by lowering claculations it require. But It doesnt look as way taht was using for this passive. Previously it had calculation of proc chance and cooldown timer, both as global cd of caster. But now you cant deal 3 ticks of aedric skill to 1 target and then hit other target with 1 tick and proc BL because it apply now hidden debuff on enemy with timer and amount of stacks; so now instead of global calcualtions of caster it apply calcualtions on target, this doesnt look like calcualtions reduction and increase of perfomance.
2. After redesign passive in PvP defacto working with only 1 skill out of 6 - Jabs. This is not how similar passive Implosion was treated. In PvP: Spear Shards is immobile AoE, due to low uptime of Burning Light stacks and high mobility players can easily achieve - skill wont be able to proc it, so only Jabs remains. And as result any spec that is not using Jabs, like rangeplars that utilize only Javelin skill - wont be able to proc this passive in any way which means for them like having 1 less passive in aedric tree.
3. Overall change suppose to lower burst capability of passive by double proc within 1.0sec which wasnt rare thing but inexchange guaranteed its proc within 1sec, however given that Jabs only way to proc it - problem that jabs is slwoest melee channel that also heavily desyncing and thus simply unusable with latency spikes, resulting in fact thar guaranteed proc oftenly simply won't occure. So we at situation when de facto we have chance to proc guaranteed effect, kidna paradox.

So, I believe to fix this inconsistent in passive it could be treated same way as comparable passive, like Blood Magic:

Difference between this and Bl is that Blood Magic skilline вont have high intense spammable and thus such difference could be redeemed by cooldown difference.
So, to make BL equally strong in PvP and PvE without full overhaul (like was with Implosion) I suggest to keep BL as it is on live, remove 25% proc chance and increasing cooldown from 0.5s to 1.0s. Remove Charge from possiblity to proc it
With such treatment BL in PvE will be similar to how it operate now since with Jabs+Shards into dps rotation with such change will proc once per second while with current state it also procing at same rate, less efective than on live:

However in PvP it will fix all new problems:
it will be still dynamic ability that you can apply on differnt targets. It will be usable on any spec that utilize at least 1 skill from aedric skilline. It will loose its bursty nature when it was dealing too much damage by double proc within 1.0sec. It will have less calculations due to guaranteed proc.
Literally elimitating rng with lowering its powerlevel.


3. Survivability - templar desperately need skill equal to hot/procative defense/mitigation. And this skill is Living Dark but due to all changes to skill itself and overall pvp changes - its utility is at all times low, even lower than Total Dark was. Because for Total Dark situativeness it granted at least "spiked" boost to survivability, but for Living Dark with making it less situative it also stoped providing utility taht would be enough to use skill for its cost. Idescribed it in tempalr thread:

Cinbri wrote: »

And here we go with some feedback again:

DEFENSE

Main offender in templar defense arsenal is Eclipse, or more precisely Living Dark:
A. back in time this skill was situational CC but in echange granted high damage and heal, however to "lower it ceiling" and increase its reliability and also to make skill work for PvE skill was changed to self-buff. However all nerfs resulted in making profit of this skill less than its reliability along with no achieving its usability in PvE for next reasons:
1. Skill dont have actual scaling mechanic - in comparison with with similiar skills: NB Blur apply major evasion, this buff scale completely on amount of enemies and aoe they use - and in result can grant rudiculous amount of reduced damage, given that aoe most popular type of damage. DK Scales - also scale on amount of enemies atacking caster from range. Shimmering Shield - grant 100% mitigation agaisnt ranged attacks with very strong morph effects.
However Living Dark doesnt actually scale approximately to amount of enemies like previous skills. Also after Battle Spirit nerf - its functionality decreased by alot.
2. Ever since overhaul skill lost its cpability to protect against large portion of direct damage attacks, like procsets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKz3N5xI5jg

even despite those attacks are Direct Damage.
3. In PvE it simply dont work - first: its morph effect have no use against lot of targets. Second and most important - skill dont work in PvE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUJu0_UN6LI

simply because alot of NPCs attacks are not considered as Direct Attack, and I doubt that work to fix it is worth it, given amount of it needed.
Recap: skill scaling doesnt actually scale as efectively as other skills in game nowdays and its proc condition is unreliable nor achieve goal of making its usefull in PvE.

B. Even since its heal was nerfed for 20% its actuall amount of healing per proc became equal to heal proc of Living Vines or HPS in perfect conditions (which not possible to gain) equal to Intensive Mender. However main problem as i showed in lasted Spoiler tag above - its not reliable because it proc only on Direct Damage attacks. And reality is that you never get hit by enough dircet damage attacks for skill's scaling to effectively work unless you being heavily focused and recieve so much damage that wont be capable to survive. This making skill is even less reliable bacuse in combat where you not being constantly focused - there is no use of skill at all.
Cost-wise: Vines 2700(2700/10=270mana/s); Shimmering 3780-831*3-1287(1287/6=214m/s); Scales 3510(3510/6=585m/s); LD 4320 (4320/6=720m/s); Mender 2160(2160/8=270m/s). LD most expensive skill to keep up.

For reasons described above, i.e. skill terribly scale, dont work in PvE, dot work agaisnt some direct attacks, healing tick nerf, cost vs effectiveness like otehr skills, I believe there is simple solution that fix all the problems and bugs - Push Living Dark further into category of proactive healing/hot like Living Vines, i.e. change proc condition for skill to proc on any damage taken not only Direct Damage. so tooltip would looke like:

As you can see from red lines i marked this way of proc is eact how its effect described in morph description i.e. "when you take damage".
Thus LD with 6sec duration will have almsot triple cost than Vines or Mender. Total heals will be inline of each other: Mender 969x4=3876; Vines-254x10=2540; LD-254x8=~2032 (3048 on paper but 0.5s cd apply own limitation).
Thus LD vs Mender: LD is only self-applied proc only on damage 6sec cost 720m/s with total heal ~3000. Mender can be applied on self and as tool to heal allies HOT with 8sec cost 270m/s with total heal 3876. Almsot everything benefit Mender.
LD vs Vines: LD is only self-applied proc only on damage 6sec cost 720m/s with total heal ~3000. Vines can be applied on self and as tool to heal allies proc only on damage 10sec cost 270m/s with total heal 2540. Without taking in account morphs it looks comparably strong.
Visual affect could be changed into something more cooler and more precisely describe that skill is not mitigating damage but healing/HOT:

^^ i.e. looks effect of Unstable Core that also can be paired with smth like, for example, making armor layer completely black while skill is active, so it more definitive visual to figure that enemy use skill, while this yellow eesene floating from you could represent either healing proc or simply like it now - cosntantly active to represent uptime of skill in dark areas:

Overall - into smth as cool looking as Vampire Blood Frenzy which also has effect of darkness floating around.

In addition - its heal from scaling off offensive stats could be overhauled into scaling off Max HP and thus it would became scaling defensive ability for both magplars and stamplars. Similar to nb dark cloak which is even tooltip-wise are familiar "cover yourself in protective...".
Visually-wise: if you dont want to overhaul effect - jsut swap that ugly bubble into 1st stage of Living Dark bubble, i.e. without this additional ugly yellow glowing layer taht ruining impression of "darkness". Here is comparison of effect - as you can see black bubble is easily visible even without glowing, so this glwoing layer just unnecessary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmPIaOqxauc

In addition cast animation of Living Dark is not precise and simply wrong. Current animation is taken from Backlash and imply that you summon smth out of/ cast into the sky and this is wrong as you cover yourself in a protective stuff and thus animation should be some kidn of defensive posture and there is already such animation:



4. Jabs - with chagnes to healings Jabs operate as aoe skill even less coz additional damage is lesser than standartized damage of aoe and thus overhauled heal calcualtions will grant lower than possible heal from aoe that would have % heal. And more importantly that closest-target damage now detached from additional damage. So how about finally treat initial single-target damage and exclude it from being affect by Evasion buff? You know like, Render Flash is not aoe heal but single target one even tho its heal is rektangle radius.

5. Backlash - there is so many wrong stuff with this skill. Its low store damage and limit on release was coz possibility for allies to store damage and skill having skill memory on stored damage. Now that it dont have group utility, its memory capabiltiy should be wiped, store damage % increased, max limit on store removed and possiblity for released damage to crit also removed as it break rule of how it operate.
Or simply get rid of skill and grant us actuall burst ability, here is couple ideas:

Cinbri wrote: »

Templar class ever since launch of ESO was dot-based class similarly to dragonknight and then suddenly ZOS decided that dots are to ffective and nerfed tham into too weak. However even tho templar was based on dots like DK - its dots wasnt treated differently like DK dots and thus suddenly lost bunch of damage.
Obviously if dot rotation got nerfed - it time to switch to burst rotation, but here is tempalr problm again - class simply dont have viable burst skill.
We have Backlash - which is not even burst skill but damage amplifier skill, bad part of that - it amplify damage of nerfed dot arsenal along while Backlash mechanic itself wasn't treated properly as I described in previous posts.
Other skills that possibly could be used as burst are:
A. Dark Flare - which wont be used effectively for same reasons why people dont use Crystal Blast. In addition keeping in mind that Empowered buff possibly will be changed into affect only heavy attacks - it come to the point that to take benefit of skil you have cast time Flare for 1 sec then channeling heavy attack for another 2sec. It is so clunky, leaving caster totally vulnerable, that, keeping in mind its straight pvp debuff, even "low apm players" doubtly will use this skill.
B. Solar Barrage - was fine before take palce of DOT version of such burst skills as Shalks or Blastbones yet after dot nerfs its damage decreased to the point where it cant be used as some kind of semi-burst skill. In addition this skill suffer from weird standartization of dots where its damage tick every 2sec, and thus cant even fully benefit with dot-based builds that is main build that Draugrkin set supposed to buff. And this is weird because back in time dev comment regarding Purifying Ritual was that it deal damage/heal every 2sec because its multifunction, yet Solar Flare dont have such multifunction. In its core mechanic is exact of sorc Lightning Form - its literally aura that ticking and dealing unblockable damage to targets around , with additional buffs. Yet Barrage tick every 2 sec while Form every 1 sec. Also visually Barrage not precisely describing its effect as its visual effect which is just recolored Impulse effect imply that it deal direct damage burst every 2sec. While precise visual effect should jsut have essence aura around caster with visual damage ticks on hitted enemy, and look like that simply:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXi_w7k3yoU

Also once again keep in mind possible Empower changes that will make Barrage loose its last reason for usability for "high apm players".
Recap: we simply dont have viable burst ability that would work in burst rotation and after dot skills nerfs - there wasnt any improvement of this problem.
So I suggest:
1. Address Backalsh mechanics and update them to how skill works nowdays without its group utility. I pretty sure my old posts about its bugs, like for example its incorrect skill memory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-zhnjmQS3s

are not forgotten. But then there is risk to get too strong Xv1 ability that wont be fun to use.
2. Change Backlash into back to oldest mechanic when it was double reduce by battle spirit, etc. and thus was strong but only in PvE rotation; or turn it into yet another dot but in return address Flare skill to behave as burst skill with different functionality through it morphs:
A. Dark Flare - instead of keeping it as Crystal Blast-like version, to swap it in Crystal Frags-like Version:

And thus it will be single-target burst ability.
B. Solar Barrage - there is 2 ways of address it:
First is - to kkep it visual effect of impulse-like effect ticking every 2 sec - change Barrage into similar to Wild Impulse mechanic - strong blockable direct damage aoe pulsing every 2sec.
Second is - change its mechanic to how burst abilitiies of wardens and necromancers works, which are ~3s burst ability with aoe damage that apply strong effect. So Barrage would apply on yourself magnetic bomb visual effect that currently was removed from Unstable Core and only used now by NPC Mage eclipse (very beautiful effect) with essence aura it use now to imply that there is gona be explosion in its radius and megnetic bomb explode after 3sec in X radius, dealing damage similar to Deep Fissure and Stalking Blastbones.
Visual effect of exploding magnetic bomb is perfectly fit this type of skill unlike its currently used for Unstable Core:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dSjIoYka1E

Its definitve enough fro enemy to see what hitted them even in large fights.

@ZOS_Gilliam

Great write up as usual.

I would add that id rather see burning light being a strong, low duration dot, beacuse the reason most ppl complain about it, is its burstiness. Even if toppling cannot proc it, ppl wil just use javelin to do so anyway in pvp.
A dot would solve all the calculations issues, finally we could have burning light on more than 1 target at a time, and if its a non-refreshable short duration dot(think 3 seconds), then the opponent also has time to defend aganist, purge etc.

Backlash needs a complete rework at this point, how many times has this skill have been "fixed".
The whole stored damage mechanic has been a buggy mess since its inception, wheter it was double mitigated by battle-spirit, or it wasnt mitigated at all etc.
Its time to make a more skillful ability that doesnt just force you to treat ppl as parse dummies, but an actual skill with a set amount of damage you can actually work around. Right now on live, you can kinda expect this skill to hit hard and line up a cc with it, but apparently its beacuse its storing too much damage, on pts this skill will be once again an absolute crap.

And btw backlash explodes every 6 seconds, compared to blastbones and shalks that can hit just as hard and are aoe and also you can just turtle behind block and rotate heals while you wait for it to go off and passive apply pressure.
You literally cant do that on templar.

And yes templar desperatly needs some kind of better active defense, living dark is only useful aganist other templars, due to the low ICD. and even there its borderline useless.
Ive tested this skill on live with a 5k spd build in heavy armour and malubeth, near a keep and it was returning 2.4k heals when it procced, but mind you, thats a build thats entirely built around self healing, and my damage was poo-poo.
On any offensively built templar it will heal for like 1k-1.5k at best, and if you want to wear even 1 procset, forget about it.

Stamplar has hands down some of the worst self healing in pvp right now, this is even more evident in bgs, where you cant just stack a bunch of carry points into healing to offset.
Repentance literally returns like 1k hp when used, like wtf? This skill has been nerfed multiple times, and even with the current lower ttk, im still better off slotting meditate, which btw returns my off resource as well, and 2 sec of meditate already returns like twice as much resources as 1 repentance, and it doesnt even require a corpse.
Oh and btw, if an enemy is killed by a status effect like poison etc, then the corpse is not repentable and is destroyed.
Also there are still issues with corpses that were killed by necromancers not being usable with repentance.

How about you give repentance minor lifesteal and stamina steal, and give radiant aura lifesteal?

This would be welcome both in pve and pvp, and it would increase templar group utility.

The new jabs 333ms tick rate feels horrible to weave with on pts, granted im from eu, so i really wont be able to test it until it goes live.
I dont understand why you guys couldnt just make the animation shorther to match its tick rate.
Templar is one of the most beginner friendly classes for the game, and its big part in due to jabs.
Making this skill feel horrible to use isnt going to entice people to play this class anymore.

Ritual of retribution, why? Why mess with a skill thats already fine? On live we have the choice of extra purge or dmg on this skill, if you are going through with this change at least put RoR on the same page as ER with 5 purges.
Also like Cinbri mentioned, this change excludes RoR from the light weaver passive, which btw, is the only heal stamplars can even use to proc this passive.

Lets talk about passives:

Enduring rays: This is one of the most mindless crappiest passives in the game, just move the 2 sec duration to the skills and give us an actual passive.
Mending: Not only this passive scales horribly and is barely noticeable, it also has almost no effect for stamina templars
Make it work with all healing skills, and please increase the value to at least 25%, it could start at 50% hp and gradually scale up to 25%(or maybe 20%) as hp goes down.

Sacred ground: with how mobile pvp is, its really hard to stay inside our ritual at all times, which means we often dont benefit from this passive, in contrast DK MAJOR mending doesnt require them to stand around, and that class is supposed to be able to stand its ground.
Either give us back major mending or increase the duration of minor mending or gives some additinal effect for actually staying in our restoring light circles.

Master ritualits: I cant even comprehend how useless this passive is, especially for it being the last passive to get in this skill line.
50% chance to fill an empty soul gem? This is a remnant of when the game was new, and hasnt been updated since, its literally one of the most worthless passives in the game.

Edit: Some suggestions:

Eduring rays: Change this passive to instead increase our movement speed when, and after using a cast time or channeled ability by 5/10%

Light weave: Increase your healing done by up to 25% in proportion to the severity of the targets injuires.

Sacred ground: Extend the duraion of minor mending after leaving a restoring light circle to 8 seconds, to allow us to be more mobile and not be punished for it

Master ritualist: Move the skill specific affects from Light weaver to here, and make them work for all skills, for example instead of increasing the duration of restoring aura, instead make it increase the range of both morphs.

Burning light: When you hit an enemy with an aedric spear ability deal x damage for 3 seconds every second. This effect can occur once every 3 seconds per target.

Rework solar barrage to instead be like dark flare, but without major defile and with the following passive:
When you use a dawns wrath ability the cast time of this skill is reduced by 33%, so on every 4th cast this would instant cast.

This way ranger templars would have the option to go for defile, and time burst instead, and would make this skill a viable ranged spammable for once.

Brun1234

Reposting this here from a Crystal Weapon thread:

Brun1234 wrote:

Someone on the ESO Reddit Discord did some testing of Crystal vs. Rapid Strikes on the trial dummy and it was comparable DPS (about 1.2k difference in favor of Rapid, but the crystal parse missed a few LAs which accounts for some of that difference ). The actual DPS dealt by the two abilities in their respective parses was almost identical - 11698 for Rapid, 11811 for Crystal. Sustain is noticeably better with Crystal as expected, plus the self-heals. The armor shred is less of a factor than it would be on the live game, but I think that all else being equal (and data suggests that damage-wise, it is, at least compared to Rapid) the sustain and self-heal benefits of Crystal make a compelling case to use it over a weapon skill. The tester also reported that something had been done to the animation to make it feel less "clunky" than Crushing, though that may be a personal opinion.

So it sounds like our worries about Crystal being uncompetitive may have been unfounded, at least for DW Stamsorc builds.

Heresyall

Hello @Gilliamtherogue @ZOS_Gilliam ,

Sap Essence : Since the bugfix on sap essence, the healing seems underwhelming and could be adjusted by having it
heal for a % of damage done and/or receive bonuses from hitting multiple targets
( that would work like inhale healing) but with a decrease value on allies .
Refreshing path : Since the bugfix of this skill, the healing feels underwhelming(the area,duration,cost making this skill
bad to use aswell). The skill would be worth using by Increasing the duration.(To match the duration of
over ground based healing class abilities like cinder storm.)
Consuming darkness and both morphs : increase the radius to make it easier to use in Pve and Pvp.
increase the damage of dark veil morph and make it so the synergy can be used by
the caster aswell . Another solution would be to swap the damage done by this
morph to healing done to the caster and allies standing in the area.

JayKwellen

Heresyall wrote: »

Hello @Gilliamtherogue @ZOS_Gilliam ,

Refreshing path : Since the bugfix of this skill, the healing feels underwhelming(the area,duration,cost making this skill
bad to use aswell. The skill would be worth using by Increasing the duration.(To match the duration of
over ground based healing class abilities like cinder storm.)

@Heresyall As...underwhelming...as this ability is, I honestly keep wishing I could find a way to roll this into my build. Since I use dark cloak I don't have the benefit of cloaking to hide, so having an extra HoT rolling on me while I'm doing my thing would be excellent.

Unfortunately I can't because it just kinda trash. The heal it provides, while not useless, isn't going to provide you anywhere near the survivability dampen/harness or even healing ward will. The fact that it's a set path also makes it useless because how am I supposed to make that work? If I just stand still and try to facetank people I'm gonna die, and the small HoT it provides isn't going to save me. If I'm using shade to reposition and kit people around, which I have to do since I can't cloak, then I'm just going to be constantly shading out of the paths radius.

I suppose it's probably more meant for healers anyway. Even still, of the small handful of NB healers I've seen cyrodiil, or even just the small amount of magblades in general, I think I've only seen it a handful of times. It's literally so rare that I'm kinda shocked everytime I see it. And outside of using it on a choke point or breech, what usefulness does it even have in the open world?

But I dunno. Maybe there's some build wizard out there who knows a good way to use it and make it worthwhile. I'd honestly be interested to hear from anyone who's not a dedicated healer who's managed to find a way to make it worthwhile in Cyrodiil.

JayKwellen

double post oops

Abyssmol

This is what worries me:

Widowmaker: This set now deals 19728 damage over 5 seconds when it procs, rather than 7740 instantly.

Combined with:

Unleashed Terror (Medium)

2 – Adds 129 Weapon Damage
3 – Adds 1096 Maximum Stamina
4 – Adds 1096 Maximum Stamina
5 – When you deal direct damage with a Charge, Leap, Teleport, or Pull ability, you cut your enemy, causing them to bleed for 5 seconds, dealing 19728 Physical Damage over the duration. This ability can occur once every 10 seconds per target.

Imagine two 20k DOT over only 5 seconds duration procing at the same time while a DK jumps on you. Lol.

I have never seen anything like this before. If you look at magicka proc sets the closes a magicka proc set to this type damage is Icy Conjuror 20k DOT over 10 seconds. Seriously why?

Firstmep

Abyssmol wrote: »

This is what worries me:

Widowmaker: This set now deals 19728 damage over 5 seconds when it procs, rather than 7740 instantly.

Combined with:

Unleashed Terror (Medium)

2 – Adds 129 Weapon Damage
3 – Adds 1096 Maximum Stamina
4 – Adds 1096 Maximum Stamina
5 – When you deal direct damage with a Charge, Leap, Teleport, or Pull ability, you cut your enemy, causing them to bleed for 5 seconds, dealing 19728 Physical Damage over the duration. This ability can occur once every 10 seconds per target.

Imagine two 20k DOT over only 5 seconds duration procing at the same time while a DK jumps on you. Lol.

I have never seen anything like this before. If you look at magicka proc sets the closes a magicka proc set to this type damage is Icy Conjuror 20k DOT over 10 seconds. Seriously why?

Just like with venomous smite it's a double edged sword, since if it gets purged you won be able to reapply it.
Altough unleashed is a bit silly that you can apply it to other targets as well.
IMHO I'd keep the dmg on unleashed but increase the CD to 15 seconds.
That way if you are using the set you have play around it and apply additional pressure, and if you are the one who has it on them you can use defensive abilities, purge, kite, mist form etc for the 5 seconds and then you have a larger window where your opponent doesn't have all that pressure on you.

Firstmep

A few extra bits:

Please make blazing spear stun again and remove the stun from toppling charge(but keep the off balance).

Almost every class have access to some form of aoe stun at this point, expet for templars, i dont see a reason why we couldnt have one.

Also abilities like spear shards, liquid lightning etc were changed way back when to tick once every second instead 0.5, but necromancer siphon abilities, as well as undaunted orb still ticks every 0.5, where are the standards here??

Make all these abilities tick 0.5 seconds instead.

Rianai

Heresyall wrote: »

Refreshing path : Since the bugfix of this skill, the healing feels underwhelming(the area,duration,cost making this skill
bad to use aswell. The skill would be worth using by Increasing the duration.(To match the duration of
over ground based healing class abilities like cinder storm.)

I feel like the duration of path is the least of it's issues, because most of the time, ppl move out of it anyway, long before it expires. And that's because of the tiny area and lacking telegraph (on the heal morph) as well as the lack of synergy with the expedition buff it provides (still can't get behind how anyone would thing a tiny stationary aoe skill is the skill to put a movement speed buff on while removing said buff from every other skill, where it made so much more sense ). Having used Refreshing Path and Illustrious Healing in the same build - both skills with roughly the same numbers hps wise - the latter almost always pulls ahead in healing output even tho i end up casting path much more often in an attempt to keep it up on everyone.

Agree with the rest of your post.