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Spammables have to be reworked and balanced
BohnT2
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Almost every build be it in PvE or PvP has a spammable.
Be it whip for magdk, jabs for Templars or suprise attack for Nightblades or when looking at PvP:
Dizzying for stamdk, dizzying for stamden, dizzying for stamnecro, dizzying for stamsorc, jabs for stamplar and suprise attack for nightblades.
For the magicka side of things we have:
Strife for nbs, jabs for templars, whip for Dks, elemental weapon for Warden, elemental weapon for sorcs, elemental weapon for necro.
See a pattern?
Four stamina and three magicka specs are using the same spammable that's not from their class skill line.
Are they all using them because those skills are so strong?
No, not at all it's simply for the reason that they have no other viable option at their disposal.
Stamina DK has access to stone giant, more commonly referred to as "Poop fist or poop stomp"
A skill that doesn't know what it wants to be.
It swaps from being a small AoE to become a ranged ability that also has a clunky stun attached to it. Not only that it also has a longer casttime than all ultimates and it's surely no where near as powerful, to make matters worse it has a 300ms minimum traveltime, no matter how close you are to the target they have 0.3s time to avoid your skill after you've fired it.
Stamsorc has access to the newly added crystal weapon, a carbon copy of crushing weapon that has seen absolutely no useage in PvP ever because it has multiple issues.
The first one is, it'll take you 1 second before your spammable deals damage because your first light attack in a fight can't proc it and this 1 second delay will occur everytime you start using the skill again. Secondly you never know if your next light or heavy attack actually hits the target thanks to positioning being shifted to server so you can't rely on what you see on your client. In order to not lose any damage when you spam your spammable you have to use crystal weapon every gcd, if your light attack doesn't hit however it's bad luck for you, you just wasted a whole gcd dealing no damage and have wasted all your resources spent in that gcd. When looking at combat logs after pvp fights you'll realise that there's a huge gap between how many times you've casted crystal weapons and how many times you've actually hit them along with the time it took between casting it and landing the light attack to proc the damage.
stamina warden has access to birds which offer a mediocre bleed when hitting targets who are off balanced, this means the secondary effect is only working every 15 seconds for 7 seconds just to go back on cooldown again, meaning the secondary effect is active less than 33% of the time at best. Additionally the skill has the longest traveltime of any spammable or execute in the entire game. It takes an eternal 1.2 seconds for the skill to hit after you've pressed it, your enemy has more than 4 times longer time to react to your skill than the average human reaction time is. You have to rely on the enemy not paying any attention if you want to hit them with this skill.
stamina necromancer again a meele spec with access to a ranged spammable that has a 300ms minimum traveltime while also offering no debuff and it doesn't provide any meaningful secondary effect, additionally the skill is more expensive than meele skills, deals less damage and fails to proc it's 20% damage boost on the third cast after you've been hit by a guard's eclipse.
Why do all those stamina classes use dizzying swing then? Well because dizzy might have a 1 second delay before it deals damage but it makes up for that by offering the damage at the end of your gcd meaning you create a burst spike with the next gcd where you can use an instant ability like executioner to kill someone before they can heal back up again. Additionally the skill offers the immensely important feature of having a stun attached to an offensive skill even if this stun can only occur every 22 seconds. To make up for the long delay the skill also deals more damage than "instant" skills.
Does this mean dizzying swing is overperforming?
NO! it shows how ridiculously underpowered and weak the other skills are.
Stamina spammables have to be instant and by that i mean you press it and they deal damage instantly, no travel time, no cast time, no light attack needed, nothing just instant damage when you want it.
Now let's take a look why elemental weapon is so commonly used on sorc, warden and necromancers.
For sorcs it's not hard to see, the have no class spammable to begin with meaning they have to pick one which leaves eviscerate, force pulse and elemental weapon.
Eviscerate deals more damage and is cheaper but sorcs don't want to be right in the face of the enemy all the time.
Force pulse vs elemental weapon is an easy choice, elemental weapon causes Hp desyncs procs the same status effects and has a faster traveltime because on staff light attacks proc it in the same gcd as you cast the skill, opposed to what crushing weapon does with meele light attacks, and deals more damage while giving you access to the psijic passives.
Necromancer's and Warden's spammable issues have been talked about above already, why use slow skills with weak secondary effects when elemental weapon deals the same damage, provides better secondary effects and is much much faster?
Magicka class spammables are required to be more powerful when it comes to the debuff/ buff department because they are ranged and thus have a very penalizing minimum traveltime which makes hitting them much harder and the skills less reliable overall in PvP. The spammables also have to synergize much better with the class overall as magicka specs have a lot less skill lines to make up for their class's shortcomings which is why magnecro and warden are generally seen as pathetic offensive specs.
All those class spammables above have to be reworked to make the game better and more fun.
It's boring to use the same skills across multiple specs, but you have to because the classes simply don't come with a sufficient toolkit.
Here's an easy list how to make spammables good:
Stamina or magicka?
Edited by BohnT2 on October 2, 2020 1:04PM Be it whip for magdk, jabs for Templars or suprise attack for Nightblades or when looking at PvP:
Dizzying for stamdk, dizzying for stamden, dizzying for stamnecro, dizzying for stamsorc, jabs for stamplar and suprise attack for nightblades.
For the magicka side of things we have:
Strife for nbs, jabs for templars, whip for Dks, elemental weapon for Warden, elemental weapon for sorcs, elemental weapon for necro.
See a pattern?
Four stamina and three magicka specs are using the same spammable that's not from their class skill line.
Are they all using them because those skills are so strong?
No, not at all it's simply for the reason that they have no other viable option at their disposal.
Stamina DK has access to stone giant, more commonly referred to as "Poop fist or poop stomp"
A skill that doesn't know what it wants to be.
It swaps from being a small AoE to become a ranged ability that also has a clunky stun attached to it. Not only that it also has a longer casttime than all ultimates and it's surely no where near as powerful, to make matters worse it has a 300ms minimum traveltime, no matter how close you are to the target they have 0.3s time to avoid your skill after you've fired it.
Stamsorc has access to the newly added crystal weapon, a carbon copy of crushing weapon that has seen absolutely no useage in PvP ever because it has multiple issues.
The first one is, it'll take you 1 second before your spammable deals damage because your first light attack in a fight can't proc it and this 1 second delay will occur everytime you start using the skill again. Secondly you never know if your next light or heavy attack actually hits the target thanks to positioning being shifted to server so you can't rely on what you see on your client. In order to not lose any damage when you spam your spammable you have to use crystal weapon every gcd, if your light attack doesn't hit however it's bad luck for you, you just wasted a whole gcd dealing no damage and have wasted all your resources spent in that gcd. When looking at combat logs after pvp fights you'll realise that there's a huge gap between how many times you've casted crystal weapons and how many times you've actually hit them along with the time it took between casting it and landing the light attack to proc the damage.
stamina warden has access to birds which offer a mediocre bleed when hitting targets who are off balanced, this means the secondary effect is only working every 15 seconds for 7 seconds just to go back on cooldown again, meaning the secondary effect is active less than 33% of the time at best. Additionally the skill has the longest traveltime of any spammable or execute in the entire game. It takes an eternal 1.2 seconds for the skill to hit after you've pressed it, your enemy has more than 4 times longer time to react to your skill than the average human reaction time is. You have to rely on the enemy not paying any attention if you want to hit them with this skill.
stamina necromancer again a meele spec with access to a ranged spammable that has a 300ms minimum traveltime while also offering no debuff and it doesn't provide any meaningful secondary effect, additionally the skill is more expensive than meele skills, deals less damage and fails to proc it's 20% damage boost on the third cast after you've been hit by a guard's eclipse.
Why do all those stamina classes use dizzying swing then? Well because dizzy might have a 1 second delay before it deals damage but it makes up for that by offering the damage at the end of your gcd meaning you create a burst spike with the next gcd where you can use an instant ability like executioner to kill someone before they can heal back up again. Additionally the skill offers the immensely important feature of having a stun attached to an offensive skill even if this stun can only occur every 22 seconds. To make up for the long delay the skill also deals more damage than "instant" skills.
Does this mean dizzying swing is overperforming?
NO! it shows how ridiculously underpowered and weak the other skills are.
Stamina spammables have to be instant and by that i mean you press it and they deal damage instantly, no travel time, no cast time, no light attack needed, nothing just instant damage when you want it.
Now let's take a look why elemental weapon is so commonly used on sorc, warden and necromancers.
For sorcs it's not hard to see, the have no class spammable to begin with meaning they have to pick one which leaves eviscerate, force pulse and elemental weapon.
Eviscerate deals more damage and is cheaper but sorcs don't want to be right in the face of the enemy all the time.
Force pulse vs elemental weapon is an easy choice, elemental weapon causes Hp desyncs procs the same status effects and has a faster traveltime because on staff light attacks proc it in the same gcd as you cast the skill, opposed to what crushing weapon does with meele light attacks, and deals more damage while giving you access to the psijic passives.
Necromancer's and Warden's spammable issues have been talked about above already, why use slow skills with weak secondary effects when elemental weapon deals the same damage, provides better secondary effects and is much much faster?
Magicka class spammables are required to be more powerful when it comes to the debuff/ buff department because they are ranged and thus have a very penalizing minimum traveltime which makes hitting them much harder and the skills less reliable overall in PvP. The spammables also have to synergize much better with the class overall as magicka specs have a lot less skill lines to make up for their class's shortcomings which is why magnecro and warden are generally seen as pathetic offensive specs.
All those class spammables above have to be reworked to make the game better and more fun.
It's boring to use the same skills across multiple specs, but you have to because the classes simply don't come with a sufficient toolkit.
Here's an easy list how to make spammables good:
Stamina or magicka?
whatever is needed but keep in mind they don't have to be exactly similar. There can be a meele stamina morph and a ranged magicka morph.
Ranged or meele
Both possible for magicka but has to be complemented by the class's toolkit but minimum traveltime has to be 200ms max.
For stam it's a rhetoric question because every ranged stam build will spam snipe till the world ends
Channel, casttime or instant
For stam it's a rhetoric question because every ranged stam build will spam snipe till the world ends
instant is the way to go.
Channeled and casttime only with powerful debuffs and more damage to make up for the delay and risk
Buffs and debuffs?
Channeled and casttime only with powerful debuffs and more damage to make up for the delay and risk
Yes spammables can't just deal damage or no one uses them. Debuffs and buffs have to complement the class
Spammables are too similar across classes?
the combat flow of a class isn't dictated by the spammable it's how the whole toolkit works together.
It's not bad if all class spammables had the same blueprint that got changed to fit the class
Maybe keep the current spammables?
It's not bad if all class spammables had the same blueprint that got changed to fit the class
Hell no make the game fun to play and not make people feel miserable everytime they use their damn class spammable
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Flaaklypa✭✭✭✭✭Thought this was a nerf thread, happy to see its not.
agreed. they missed a huge and nice opportunity with the stamsorc spammable, which sucks.
they should have made it like surprise attack, only with the animation slashing downwards instead of upwards like surprise attack (to add some sense of difference), insta cast ability, and hopefully with either off balance, or stun attached to it. would open up so much more for the stamsorc.0 -
Firstmep✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭I remember when they first announced necro and said it would have a scythe, just find out its a tank skill(Altough makes necro levelling brain dead easy).
I really wish they gave up on giving Stam classes ranged spammables, clearly the majority wants melee. Or keep the ranged spammables and give them melee alternatives. Or make the already existing ranged skills behave differently close range like a melee skill.0 -
BohnT2✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭Thought this was a nerf thread, happy to see its not.
agreed. they missed a huge and nice opportunity with the stamsorc spammable, which sucks.
they should have made it like surprise attack, only with the animation slashing downwards instead of upwards like surprise attack (to add some sense of difference), insta cast ability, and hopefully with either off balance, or stun attached to it. would open up so much more for the stamsorc.
Well there simply isn't a spammable that would be in desperate need of a nerf, what we have is the plethora of trash spammables.
Flurry - only useable with a 5pc set: draugrkin and still outdone by master DW
Crushing weapons - a worse version of an already bad skill in Crystal weapons
Deep slash - disgustingly low damage after the nerf just like heroic
Pierce Armor- will only be an issue next patch when it gives 9k penetration but still doesn't work as a spammable
Silvershards - hello ranged stamina spammable no one ever asked for
And of course all the skills mentioned above
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casparian✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭The combat development team seems laser-focused on (a very mathematical concept of) balance -- from what we can tell, they spend the lion's share of their time on juggling numbers to make sure every source of damage deals roughly the same amount.
What seems to have gotten left out is any attempt to think about what makes skills fun to use. This game is more than a TES-themed spreadsheet. At its heart, it is an action combat MMO, and the fundamental rule of a game like this is that skills should be fun to use. Stonefist, Crystal Weapon, etc. are clearly attempts to balance the spreadsheet by spreading out class spammables (otherwise there would be a blank space on the spreadsheet where stamDK and stamsorc spammables would go, and we can't have that!), and that's all well and good. But it's far more important to pay attention to what it feels like to use those skills. ZOS has gotten the feel right on numerous skills! Players consistently mention Surprise Attack, Jabs, DK's Whip, and a few others are whenever class and skill discussions happen. When people say "just give stamsorcs a version of Surprise Attack", they aren't asking this because of the damage numbers associated with Surprise Attack, but because Surprise Attack is fun to use and Crystal Weapon is not.
When I talk about skill feel, I'm not talking about what ZOS calls "class fantasy", I'm talking about how fun it is to use a skill. I can't remember the last time ZOS so much as mentioned this. Does ZOS have game designers working on class mechanics, or is just spreadsheet engineers now?7-day PVP campaign regular 2016-2019, Flawless Conqueror. MagDK/stamplar/stamwarden/mageblade. Requiem, Legend, Knights of Daggerfall. Currently retired from the wars; waiting on performance improvements.0 -
Danksta✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭This must be for PvP because I don't know anyone that uses ele weapon on necro.BawKinTackWarDs PS4/NA0 -
NordSwordnBoard✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭Mag Necro skulls should do a mini Vicious Death (all units, not just players) on all casts. Or, go (back?) into maelstrom for inspiration - have the skulls do a knock back like Voriak tosses at you upstairs.Fear is the Mindkiller0