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This game's combat is currently the worst it has ever been
Raeyleigh
✭✭✭
Hello,
In my opinion, and that of most other people that I know, the game's combat has become significantly worse since about Elsweyr. It is currently worse than ever before and I intend to voice my utter dissatisfaction.
tl;dr version:
Performance is bad and wont improve. An unbelievable amount of desync has been added to the game and is sucking the joy out of it. The community is ignored, the new balance team misguided. Standartization of skills made the game more boring, class identy got compromised. Dots and spammables got a pass but most were left or even made useless. Offbalance changes werent great. Cast times on ultimates are pointless. The vampire rework was a flop and theyre underpowered, werewolfes on the other hand are left overpowered and theyre everywhere. Targetable pets are frustrating to play against and now everyone wears engine guadian. Malacath is completly overpowered on almost anything, just like proc sets, most of which are boring with no feasible counterplay. They rebalanced the major/minor buffs but didnt bother adjusting the abilities that relied on them. Only being able to heal group members may have slightly improved performance but is the saddest change yet. Inconsistency in number balance exists despite a spreadsheet approach, making it appear so that they have no real direction afterall. The meta is the worst it has ever been and all current forms of PvP are heavily compromised.
Performance is bad:
This game has never had particularly good combat balance. However this issue is always overshadowed by the deteriorating performance. Performance has gotten worse since about 5 Years now. If some shady ZoS employee in a back alley offered me a magical deal in which I had to choose between either great performance or great balance, I would without hestitation take the great performance. However back in reality land we should all have realized by now that they either physicaly cannot improve their server performance, or perhaps they needed to invest a sizeable portion of money into it and some suit at the company doesnt approve. The "year of performance" is now over and if they could do something significant, they would have done so by now. This situation not ideal or even acceptable, but atleast I can wrap my head around it.
Community is ignored:
However, what I will never understand is how the balancing of this game, over all the years but particulary since Elsweyr and the new combat balance team, can constantly be so appaling. It doesnt even have hardware limits or costs extra money to implement a decent degree of balance. Even if the employees at ZoS seriously have no good idea how to achieve this, they could always reach out to the community.
Over the years this game has seen many content creators. And those are just the outward faces of the community. Behind the surface there is an even larger and more varied community who all love, support and play this game. This community has always stood here with open arms and offered up their feedback and advice. It nearly all fell on deaf ears. Communication with the community is, from what I can perceive, always been kept to a bare minimum. I will never understand how a great and passionate community like this one can be so utterly ignored by its game developers. I have been at a loss of words for it since a long time now.
Class reps ignored:
With Elsweyr on the horizon and talk of a class representative programm I had one last surge of hope within me. The hope that they learned from their past mistakes and are going to actively communicate and work with the community instead of against it. All in addition to a new combat balance team, with a lot of promises and even a former member of the community on it. Boy did I set myself up for disappointment.
The class representatives gave massive, detailed and in my opinion great advice on their respective classes and how to make the gameplay more fun and enticing. Almost all of it was ignored. Instead we constantly get changes, every patch, that I refuse to believe were their recommendations. If they were even asked about it in the first place...
Standartization:
The new balance team is a beast on a whole nother level. Most famous for its new spreadsheet approach that has since become a meme in the community. When i first heard that they wanted to implement a fixed standard for things I was excited. I believed they wanted to put a standard to create a baseline that served to define outliers that were stronger or weaker, depending on the needs of balance. I was wrong. Now everything is the same. Abilities are now boring, same cost, same damage, same duration carbon copies with a different animation and no real reason to use them. The good abilities have decent utility atached, the bad abilities have none.
The DK wings, an iconic class skill, were ripped off and replaced by a hot pile of garbage. But atleast they nerfed slows and immobilizes. After 4 long years I could finally move my character in PvP. Hooray.
DoTs:
And who could forget scalebreaker? More like gamebreaker. A terrible dot meta no dedicated PvP player enjoyed. Atleast they made many of the severely underpowered abilities that were not used since ages somewhat good. No wait, they didnt. The very next patch Dragonhold nerfed all dots into the ground. Further than they needed to. Since then nobody ever casted a dot to deal damage again, with the exception of StamDKs Venomous Claw. Dots now only get cast to acces their utility. Many have bad utility, some even none. For every ability that was finally decent, another one got gutted. No value added.
Spammables:
This patch also featured degrading uppercut from a iconic skill to a wet noodle. That still got used by every stamina class regardless. Perhaps because it has some decent utility atached and all other options for spammables are plain garbage in PvP? The only exception are the class specific jabs, later a rebuffed surprise attack and thankfully rending slashes if you are willing to farm and equip master dual wield for it. Magicka classes face the same problem, the only good spammables are jabs, whip and strife. All class specific. Crushing shock and Elemental weapon are just mediocre at best. They tried tempering with warden birds in failure, the stamina one could be good if off balance wasnt so horribly designed now. StamDks received a spammable, lovingly dubbed poop throw by the community, and the name reflects its strengths. StamSorcs were finally given a spammable. Just joking its a relativly weak delayed burst ability, developers missed the mark as always. Unironic thanks for that one, we take what we can get.
Off balance:
On the topic of dizzying swing, I also love the change to offbalance they made. Not. Now a status with a static, long and out of all standards cooldown in a dynamic combat system. They really showed some refound love for that forgotten status and put it everywhere. And now, since you can get stunned off of even the slightest medium weave in a prolongued window after being set off balanced, which enables people to almost unpredictably deliver high damage abilities on the same global cooldown as they stun you while at the same time getting their damage output buffed, everybody needs to build tankier and/or play more defensiv. I remember that they stated how they didnt want stuns to be atached to high damaging abilities. Way to miss your goals. Another reason for the tank meta. How about making it have short duration and short cooldown? Like 4 seconds duration, 4 seconds cooldown and only stunning the victim when hit with a fully charged heavy attack?
Ultimate cast times:
And of course, to top it all off, they gave cast times to ultimates. Why? Nobody in the community likes this change to this day. It doesnt do anything except make the gameplay clunkier and less enjoyable, especially since they practicaly removed block canceling. Nobody ever said "Thank god, I could totally react in that dawnbreakers 0.4 second cast time" and no casual player ever noticed a difference. And still, this unpopular and uncalled for change persists to this day.
Desyncs:
Fast forward to Harrowstorm. I returned to the game once more after i quit in Scalebreaker. What I quickly noticed was that the performance got way worse, if that was even possible, but with a twist. It was not straight lagg that had been added to the game, it was constant desyncs. Turns out ZoS decided to move a lot of calculations to the server side. Yes, to those already dying servers. Maybe they tried to improve performance through that, maybe they tried to prevent cheating through that, maybe they just set up for the game`s release on Stadia one patch after. I dont know, but I can definetly judge the outcome: widespread desync and the destruction of especially PvP`s integrity. Whatever they did there was a mistake. A big one, maybe their greatest yet. ZoS has a track record of not taking back obvious mistakes, so I wont get my hopes up for this to ever get reverted.
Most obvious should be the delay on breaking free of hard crowd control. In the past a player could always break free and block or roll before the next ability of his opponent hit him. Not so anymore. It is now the rule that one gets hit by the next ability, because breaking free takes so long. This wouldnt be such an issue if it were consistent. In that case the game would merely be different. But it is utterly inconsistent. Sometimes you can break free and roll/block in time, most of the time you cant, sometimes you even get hit by two subsequent global cooldowns before you can act. I even noticed that if you are to attempt a break free shortly before it ever happens on your screen the stun gets instantly broken just like it used to in the past. But it doesnt stop at stuns. People constantly get hit through block and mid dodgeroll by things that are block or dodgeable. I saw more dead bodies slide around than ever before. Projectiles are more often desynced than ever. Abilities that were always prone to desyncing you, like snipe, meteor or dragonleap, now desync you all the damn time. Positional desync is outright crazy, at this point they might aswell add a 50% miss chance disclaimer to Dawnbreakers tooltip. Nightblades have become one of the most frustrating classes both to play and to play against. Cloak is a special kind of garbage now. If you play a nightblade cloak will break all the time for no apparent reason, but if you play against a nightblade it wont get taken out of cloak even though it should according to what is happening on your screen. But those things dont always happen. It is not a feature.
The tank meta gets reinforced once more. If I cannot rely on my active defenses to counterplay my opponents and im just forced to take hits what do I do? Thats right, build tankier. More maximum health, resistances and other passive defense. Less skill based gameplay this game`s PvP is actually played and loved for.
Snipe:
And on the note of desyncs, why was snipe never changed? This skill has always been desyncing like crazy, most likely because of it's arched projectile courve and slow traveling time. You cant even use it for anything else than that, try actually fighting people with a bow instead of shooting them in the back from 40 meters away. Why is this skill unchanged to this day? For the memes? They could easily flatten the projectile curve, fasten up its travel speed and reduce its cast time to an uninterruptable 0.8 seconds to mirror dizzying swing, just for ranged. People who want to fight using a bow can keep the lethal arrow morph, focused aim can be changed to dealing massive bonus damage when fired from sneak. Less desyncs for everyone, more fun gameplay for people who use bows in PvP, even more dps to make the PvE crowd happy. Everybody can profit here. Just do it.
But wait, theres more!
Enter Greymoor
Vampire rework:
The Vampire rework was a giant flop. The staging system is lore breaking, not becoming a proper vampire lord simply disappointing. What we got tho were new abilities and passives. Those are by their design not nessecarily bad, just extremly underpowered. The best we got out of it was shimmering frenzy to cheese PvE parses and buff snipe gankers, because if there is one thing in this game that desperatly needed a buff it was snipe ganking. Thanks. Mist form got slightly changed for the better. Thats it. No more good things from here on out.
Eviscerate could be good if it had, say, a 15 meter range gapcloser atached to it, so you can actually get into and stay in 5m meele range. Mesmerize could fill many gaps on classes aswell. The skill would instantly be decent and see a lot of usage if it werent for its dumb and unreliable condition. Drain Essence just needs a strong buff to either its healing and/or stam/ult generation. Its expensive, risky and has no decent pay off currently. The ultimate... the ultimate. Old Bat Swarm was far better. There, I said it. It costed a lot less, dealt more dps and healed for far more. How about just reverting the swarm morph and making the Perfect Scion worthy of its name in some capacity? Like increasing the healing from damage dealt to 50-100%?
As for the passives, why is the invisibility on stage 4? Its not even decent outside of ganking or roleplaying... wouldnt it make more sense to reorder them to Sneak speed -> invisibility -> Damage buff -> Damage mitigation? That seems like a gradual increase in power and capability. They should also reduce the health recovery debuff on later stages, so that the mighty vampire lord doesnt slowly die by stumbling over sticks and rocks.
Werewolf:
Werewolf is completly and utterly broken. I say that as someone who played werewolf since always. They are as tanky as full tanks, but have far greater mobility, damage and utility: minor courage, aoe fear, aoe breach, aoe offbalance, aoe minor main, aoe minor defile, aoe major defile, all with permanent uptime. Can you name one other class that brings that much buff coverage to a group, even on a dedicated support build? The only thing that took atleast a degree of skill - managing the transformation timer - was practically removed. The only "weakness" werewolfes currently have is a limit on how many times in a row they can heal and having no snare immunity. Or to put it into other words, their only weakness is to be zerged down. Fun and enticing gameplay lads. This is also the only reason why there is no complete werewolf infestation in cyrodiil unlike the other forms of PvP - their only counter is present.
Targetable pets:
When they made infernal guardian and werewolf pets not targetable I thought they finally came to their senses and the rest would follow suit later. Instead they buffed Engine Guardian and practically removed its counterplay, just like they did with the sorc pets. Now everyone runs around with it to have a portable line of sight automaton, nevermind it being one of the best sets beyond just that. I really have fun randomly hitting pets I never intended to target, especially when playing templars or ranged builds that get *** the hardest, how could they tell?
Malacaths band of brutality:
And then theres malacath. Lovingly dubbed the "pay to win ring" by the community. Nevermind it buffing all procsets, even on a stat based build it is far stronger to run malacath than to work with crit, safe for StamNb and StamSorc. On everything else it is best in slot or atleast just as good. Anyone with a calculator and basic math skills can tell you this. "It has an opportunity cost" some say, "its inconvenient to build". You know what sure is convenient? Not having to build an ounce of crit chance or damage.
Proc sets:
Then came Stonethorn with the most obnoxious proc meta yet. Proc sets deal far more damage than building for stats and just using your abilities. They cant crit but that matters less in PvP, especially since malacaths band. Just compare the tooltip of one of those popular sets to your actual dot tooltips. On top they have quicker and easier application, they dont even cost ressources. There are sets like scavenging maw or icy conjurer nobody ever minded because they have FEASIBLE counterplay and specific proc conditions. And then theres the likes of caluurions and syvarra.
Recent changes:
In Markarth they rebalanced the major and minor buff system. A shame they didnt bother to adjust the majority of abilities that relied on those buffs. That might have shown that they actually cared somewhat.
They somewhat improved performance by reducing maximum group size to 12 and making heals only go to fellow group members. The reduction of group size has been recommended by the community for 5 years now. At last it is now here. But I have never felt so sad in Cyrodiil as when I hopped onto my full healer only to realize that I now have to watch my allies die slow and miserables deahts next to me, because they were not in the same group as me. Get rekt randoms. We won slight performance gains, but at what cost?
The patch kept crashing the game for an entire month on playstation. You know what is funny? When I cant properly PvP or PvE because of it, so I go do some quest out of boredom and I joke not, the first quest I touched had me instantly and permanently crashing, no escape possible. Thanks for the great experience. Time to log off.
No coherent direction:
Some people may believe that they are enacting some grand design upon us. That once the last piece of the puzzle is set, everything is going to make perfect sense and we will all eat our own words. No. They have no clue what they are doing. If you didnt learn from Scalebreaker/Dragonhold then here is a quick and easy example: In Greymoor they nerfed Grundwulf to adhere to some magical standard. The same patch they released the ridicliously overstat eternal vigor. The next patch they made Bloodthorn, that has an even easier proc condition and adheres to the same standard, twice as good as grundwulf, but still far worse than Eternal vigor. Apples compared to apples, 1 standard, 3 results.
Nevermind people actually wanting to have a good time playing this game right now, and not on some unspecified future date.
The current meta:
I have seen many terrible metas over the years, but nothing comes close to the horrible state of balance there currently is. The meta is different on each server but let me tell you what it looks like over here. First came the desyncs and everyone had to build for more health. Second came the powercreep, malacath boosting pressure builds so everyone had to tank up some more and torc of tonal constancy, engine guardian and eternal vigor boosted sustain to infinity. And third came the proc meta, so everyone eventually figured they need even more tankiness and tons of health recovery to counter it. Currently the tank meta is the worst I have ever witnessed, there are semi immortal werewolfes and StamDens at every corner, everybody and their mother runs malacath and/or engine guardian and everyone is as tanky as they can be to not immediatly get procced to death.
Duelling has lost all integrity due to constant desyncs. I always went to IC, now I havent gone for months because of the immortal werewolfes in there. Battlegrounds is plagued by the same infestations, that are especially fun to play against in all the objective modes we now randomly get. And in Cyrodiil one is haunted by every little stingy thing at once.
I used to think that this game was a tragedy. But now I realize its a comedy.
I love playing this game so it saddens me immensly that over the years I have lost all faith and my goodwill has been completly exhausted. Personally, the CP rework is going to be the last straw for me. I have no illusions that this post will change anything at all.
Have a great day.
Edited by Raeyleigh on December 19, 2020 10:37AM In my opinion, and that of most other people that I know, the game's combat has become significantly worse since about Elsweyr. It is currently worse than ever before and I intend to voice my utter dissatisfaction.
tl;dr version:
Performance is bad and wont improve. An unbelievable amount of desync has been added to the game and is sucking the joy out of it. The community is ignored, the new balance team misguided. Standartization of skills made the game more boring, class identy got compromised. Dots and spammables got a pass but most were left or even made useless. Offbalance changes werent great. Cast times on ultimates are pointless. The vampire rework was a flop and theyre underpowered, werewolfes on the other hand are left overpowered and theyre everywhere. Targetable pets are frustrating to play against and now everyone wears engine guadian. Malacath is completly overpowered on almost anything, just like proc sets, most of which are boring with no feasible counterplay. They rebalanced the major/minor buffs but didnt bother adjusting the abilities that relied on them. Only being able to heal group members may have slightly improved performance but is the saddest change yet. Inconsistency in number balance exists despite a spreadsheet approach, making it appear so that they have no real direction afterall. The meta is the worst it has ever been and all current forms of PvP are heavily compromised.
Performance is bad:
This game has never had particularly good combat balance. However this issue is always overshadowed by the deteriorating performance. Performance has gotten worse since about 5 Years now. If some shady ZoS employee in a back alley offered me a magical deal in which I had to choose between either great performance or great balance, I would without hestitation take the great performance. However back in reality land we should all have realized by now that they either physicaly cannot improve their server performance, or perhaps they needed to invest a sizeable portion of money into it and some suit at the company doesnt approve. The "year of performance" is now over and if they could do something significant, they would have done so by now. This situation not ideal or even acceptable, but atleast I can wrap my head around it.
Community is ignored:
However, what I will never understand is how the balancing of this game, over all the years but particulary since Elsweyr and the new combat balance team, can constantly be so appaling. It doesnt even have hardware limits or costs extra money to implement a decent degree of balance. Even if the employees at ZoS seriously have no good idea how to achieve this, they could always reach out to the community.
Over the years this game has seen many content creators. And those are just the outward faces of the community. Behind the surface there is an even larger and more varied community who all love, support and play this game. This community has always stood here with open arms and offered up their feedback and advice. It nearly all fell on deaf ears. Communication with the community is, from what I can perceive, always been kept to a bare minimum. I will never understand how a great and passionate community like this one can be so utterly ignored by its game developers. I have been at a loss of words for it since a long time now.
Class reps ignored:
With Elsweyr on the horizon and talk of a class representative programm I had one last surge of hope within me. The hope that they learned from their past mistakes and are going to actively communicate and work with the community instead of against it. All in addition to a new combat balance team, with a lot of promises and even a former member of the community on it. Boy did I set myself up for disappointment.
The class representatives gave massive, detailed and in my opinion great advice on their respective classes and how to make the gameplay more fun and enticing. Almost all of it was ignored. Instead we constantly get changes, every patch, that I refuse to believe were their recommendations. If they were even asked about it in the first place...
Standartization:
The new balance team is a beast on a whole nother level. Most famous for its new spreadsheet approach that has since become a meme in the community. When i first heard that they wanted to implement a fixed standard for things I was excited. I believed they wanted to put a standard to create a baseline that served to define outliers that were stronger or weaker, depending on the needs of balance. I was wrong. Now everything is the same. Abilities are now boring, same cost, same damage, same duration carbon copies with a different animation and no real reason to use them. The good abilities have decent utility atached, the bad abilities have none.
The DK wings, an iconic class skill, were ripped off and replaced by a hot pile of garbage. But atleast they nerfed slows and immobilizes. After 4 long years I could finally move my character in PvP. Hooray.
DoTs:
And who could forget scalebreaker? More like gamebreaker. A terrible dot meta no dedicated PvP player enjoyed. Atleast they made many of the severely underpowered abilities that were not used since ages somewhat good. No wait, they didnt. The very next patch Dragonhold nerfed all dots into the ground. Further than they needed to. Since then nobody ever casted a dot to deal damage again, with the exception of StamDKs Venomous Claw. Dots now only get cast to acces their utility. Many have bad utility, some even none. For every ability that was finally decent, another one got gutted. No value added.
Spammables:
This patch also featured degrading uppercut from a iconic skill to a wet noodle. That still got used by every stamina class regardless. Perhaps because it has some decent utility atached and all other options for spammables are plain garbage in PvP? The only exception are the class specific jabs, later a rebuffed surprise attack and thankfully rending slashes if you are willing to farm and equip master dual wield for it. Magicka classes face the same problem, the only good spammables are jabs, whip and strife. All class specific. Crushing shock and Elemental weapon are just mediocre at best. They tried tempering with warden birds in failure, the stamina one could be good if off balance wasnt so horribly designed now. StamDks received a spammable, lovingly dubbed poop throw by the community, and the name reflects its strengths. StamSorcs were finally given a spammable. Just joking its a relativly weak delayed burst ability, developers missed the mark as always. Unironic thanks for that one, we take what we can get.
Off balance:
On the topic of dizzying swing, I also love the change to offbalance they made. Not. Now a status with a static, long and out of all standards cooldown in a dynamic combat system. They really showed some refound love for that forgotten status and put it everywhere. And now, since you can get stunned off of even the slightest medium weave in a prolongued window after being set off balanced, which enables people to almost unpredictably deliver high damage abilities on the same global cooldown as they stun you while at the same time getting their damage output buffed, everybody needs to build tankier and/or play more defensiv. I remember that they stated how they didnt want stuns to be atached to high damaging abilities. Way to miss your goals. Another reason for the tank meta. How about making it have short duration and short cooldown? Like 4 seconds duration, 4 seconds cooldown and only stunning the victim when hit with a fully charged heavy attack?
Ultimate cast times:
And of course, to top it all off, they gave cast times to ultimates. Why? Nobody in the community likes this change to this day. It doesnt do anything except make the gameplay clunkier and less enjoyable, especially since they practicaly removed block canceling. Nobody ever said "Thank god, I could totally react in that dawnbreakers 0.4 second cast time" and no casual player ever noticed a difference. And still, this unpopular and uncalled for change persists to this day.
Desyncs:
Fast forward to Harrowstorm. I returned to the game once more after i quit in Scalebreaker. What I quickly noticed was that the performance got way worse, if that was even possible, but with a twist. It was not straight lagg that had been added to the game, it was constant desyncs. Turns out ZoS decided to move a lot of calculations to the server side. Yes, to those already dying servers. Maybe they tried to improve performance through that, maybe they tried to prevent cheating through that, maybe they just set up for the game`s release on Stadia one patch after. I dont know, but I can definetly judge the outcome: widespread desync and the destruction of especially PvP`s integrity. Whatever they did there was a mistake. A big one, maybe their greatest yet. ZoS has a track record of not taking back obvious mistakes, so I wont get my hopes up for this to ever get reverted.
Most obvious should be the delay on breaking free of hard crowd control. In the past a player could always break free and block or roll before the next ability of his opponent hit him. Not so anymore. It is now the rule that one gets hit by the next ability, because breaking free takes so long. This wouldnt be such an issue if it were consistent. In that case the game would merely be different. But it is utterly inconsistent. Sometimes you can break free and roll/block in time, most of the time you cant, sometimes you even get hit by two subsequent global cooldowns before you can act. I even noticed that if you are to attempt a break free shortly before it ever happens on your screen the stun gets instantly broken just like it used to in the past. But it doesnt stop at stuns. People constantly get hit through block and mid dodgeroll by things that are block or dodgeable. I saw more dead bodies slide around than ever before. Projectiles are more often desynced than ever. Abilities that were always prone to desyncing you, like snipe, meteor or dragonleap, now desync you all the damn time. Positional desync is outright crazy, at this point they might aswell add a 50% miss chance disclaimer to Dawnbreakers tooltip. Nightblades have become one of the most frustrating classes both to play and to play against. Cloak is a special kind of garbage now. If you play a nightblade cloak will break all the time for no apparent reason, but if you play against a nightblade it wont get taken out of cloak even though it should according to what is happening on your screen. But those things dont always happen. It is not a feature.
The tank meta gets reinforced once more. If I cannot rely on my active defenses to counterplay my opponents and im just forced to take hits what do I do? Thats right, build tankier. More maximum health, resistances and other passive defense. Less skill based gameplay this game`s PvP is actually played and loved for.
Snipe:
And on the note of desyncs, why was snipe never changed? This skill has always been desyncing like crazy, most likely because of it's arched projectile courve and slow traveling time. You cant even use it for anything else than that, try actually fighting people with a bow instead of shooting them in the back from 40 meters away. Why is this skill unchanged to this day? For the memes? They could easily flatten the projectile curve, fasten up its travel speed and reduce its cast time to an uninterruptable 0.8 seconds to mirror dizzying swing, just for ranged. People who want to fight using a bow can keep the lethal arrow morph, focused aim can be changed to dealing massive bonus damage when fired from sneak. Less desyncs for everyone, more fun gameplay for people who use bows in PvP, even more dps to make the PvE crowd happy. Everybody can profit here. Just do it.
But wait, theres more!
Enter Greymoor
Vampire rework:
The Vampire rework was a giant flop. The staging system is lore breaking, not becoming a proper vampire lord simply disappointing. What we got tho were new abilities and passives. Those are by their design not nessecarily bad, just extremly underpowered. The best we got out of it was shimmering frenzy to cheese PvE parses and buff snipe gankers, because if there is one thing in this game that desperatly needed a buff it was snipe ganking. Thanks. Mist form got slightly changed for the better. Thats it. No more good things from here on out.
Eviscerate could be good if it had, say, a 15 meter range gapcloser atached to it, so you can actually get into and stay in 5m meele range. Mesmerize could fill many gaps on classes aswell. The skill would instantly be decent and see a lot of usage if it werent for its dumb and unreliable condition. Drain Essence just needs a strong buff to either its healing and/or stam/ult generation. Its expensive, risky and has no decent pay off currently. The ultimate... the ultimate. Old Bat Swarm was far better. There, I said it. It costed a lot less, dealt more dps and healed for far more. How about just reverting the swarm morph and making the Perfect Scion worthy of its name in some capacity? Like increasing the healing from damage dealt to 50-100%?
As for the passives, why is the invisibility on stage 4? Its not even decent outside of ganking or roleplaying... wouldnt it make more sense to reorder them to Sneak speed -> invisibility -> Damage buff -> Damage mitigation? That seems like a gradual increase in power and capability. They should also reduce the health recovery debuff on later stages, so that the mighty vampire lord doesnt slowly die by stumbling over sticks and rocks.
Werewolf:
Werewolf is completly and utterly broken. I say that as someone who played werewolf since always. They are as tanky as full tanks, but have far greater mobility, damage and utility: minor courage, aoe fear, aoe breach, aoe offbalance, aoe minor main, aoe minor defile, aoe major defile, all with permanent uptime. Can you name one other class that brings that much buff coverage to a group, even on a dedicated support build? The only thing that took atleast a degree of skill - managing the transformation timer - was practically removed. The only "weakness" werewolfes currently have is a limit on how many times in a row they can heal and having no snare immunity. Or to put it into other words, their only weakness is to be zerged down. Fun and enticing gameplay lads. This is also the only reason why there is no complete werewolf infestation in cyrodiil unlike the other forms of PvP - their only counter is present.
Targetable pets:
When they made infernal guardian and werewolf pets not targetable I thought they finally came to their senses and the rest would follow suit later. Instead they buffed Engine Guardian and practically removed its counterplay, just like they did with the sorc pets. Now everyone runs around with it to have a portable line of sight automaton, nevermind it being one of the best sets beyond just that. I really have fun randomly hitting pets I never intended to target, especially when playing templars or ranged builds that get *** the hardest, how could they tell?
Malacaths band of brutality:
And then theres malacath. Lovingly dubbed the "pay to win ring" by the community. Nevermind it buffing all procsets, even on a stat based build it is far stronger to run malacath than to work with crit, safe for StamNb and StamSorc. On everything else it is best in slot or atleast just as good. Anyone with a calculator and basic math skills can tell you this. "It has an opportunity cost" some say, "its inconvenient to build". You know what sure is convenient? Not having to build an ounce of crit chance or damage.
Proc sets:
Then came Stonethorn with the most obnoxious proc meta yet. Proc sets deal far more damage than building for stats and just using your abilities. They cant crit but that matters less in PvP, especially since malacaths band. Just compare the tooltip of one of those popular sets to your actual dot tooltips. On top they have quicker and easier application, they dont even cost ressources. There are sets like scavenging maw or icy conjurer nobody ever minded because they have FEASIBLE counterplay and specific proc conditions. And then theres the likes of caluurions and syvarra.
Recent changes:
In Markarth they rebalanced the major and minor buff system. A shame they didnt bother to adjust the majority of abilities that relied on those buffs. That might have shown that they actually cared somewhat.
They somewhat improved performance by reducing maximum group size to 12 and making heals only go to fellow group members. The reduction of group size has been recommended by the community for 5 years now. At last it is now here. But I have never felt so sad in Cyrodiil as when I hopped onto my full healer only to realize that I now have to watch my allies die slow and miserables deahts next to me, because they were not in the same group as me. Get rekt randoms. We won slight performance gains, but at what cost?
The patch kept crashing the game for an entire month on playstation. You know what is funny? When I cant properly PvP or PvE because of it, so I go do some quest out of boredom and I joke not, the first quest I touched had me instantly and permanently crashing, no escape possible. Thanks for the great experience. Time to log off.
No coherent direction:
Some people may believe that they are enacting some grand design upon us. That once the last piece of the puzzle is set, everything is going to make perfect sense and we will all eat our own words. No. They have no clue what they are doing. If you didnt learn from Scalebreaker/Dragonhold then here is a quick and easy example: In Greymoor they nerfed Grundwulf to adhere to some magical standard. The same patch they released the ridicliously overstat eternal vigor. The next patch they made Bloodthorn, that has an even easier proc condition and adheres to the same standard, twice as good as grundwulf, but still far worse than Eternal vigor. Apples compared to apples, 1 standard, 3 results.
Nevermind people actually wanting to have a good time playing this game right now, and not on some unspecified future date.
The current meta:
I have seen many terrible metas over the years, but nothing comes close to the horrible state of balance there currently is. The meta is different on each server but let me tell you what it looks like over here. First came the desyncs and everyone had to build for more health. Second came the powercreep, malacath boosting pressure builds so everyone had to tank up some more and torc of tonal constancy, engine guardian and eternal vigor boosted sustain to infinity. And third came the proc meta, so everyone eventually figured they need even more tankiness and tons of health recovery to counter it. Currently the tank meta is the worst I have ever witnessed, there are semi immortal werewolfes and StamDens at every corner, everybody and their mother runs malacath and/or engine guardian and everyone is as tanky as they can be to not immediatly get procced to death.
Duelling has lost all integrity due to constant desyncs. I always went to IC, now I havent gone for months because of the immortal werewolfes in there. Battlegrounds is plagued by the same infestations, that are especially fun to play against in all the objective modes we now randomly get. And in Cyrodiil one is haunted by every little stingy thing at once.
I used to think that this game was a tragedy. But now I realize its a comedy.
I love playing this game so it saddens me immensly that over the years I have lost all faith and my goodwill has been completly exhausted. Personally, the CP rework is going to be the last straw for me. I have no illusions that this post will change anything at all.
Have a great day.
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ivramirez✭✭✭I understand your frustration.
It is incredible how we have months complaining of the situation and there is no official information about how it is going to be fixed.1 -
JayKwellen✭✭✭✭✭I understand your frustration.
It is incredible how we have months complaining of the situation and there is no official information about how it is going to be fixed.
There is no official information because there is no solution to inform us about. As we have all witnessed in our time here, the development team has tied itself into a Gordian Knot regarding class balance and still as of yet haven't figured out what their bold solution to untie the knot is.
My own personal interpretation is simply that they can't untie the knot because they can't figure out what they want to do or what direction they want to take the game. They've had six years to do this but hey, it is what it is. I base this assumption off all of the wild swings this game has gone through, but in particular the way they're constantly going back and forth, often purposefully contradicting their own internal logic.
Think back to the first procpocalypse - it was unpopular, and the devs killed it. You can search right here on these forums and find numerous threads and posts by the developers themselves literally saying that they "don't like free damage", and that's why procs needed to change. Well here we are in Markarth, and free proc damage is back with vengeance.
There was a couple year gap there though, so I understand maybe they (unfortunately) changed their minds. Enter DoT's.
DoT's were buffed massively by the developers last year, as they felt they needed to be improved from their current baseline to be more viable. Everyone knows what happened, and they were quickly nerfed again. Thing is they weren't just nerfed, they were nerfed to be worse than they even were to begin with.
So let me try to understand. You say, "DoT's are weak", so you make them stronger. You make them too strong, so in response you make them weaker than they were before?
That's like me saying I'd like to have my drink refilled, realizing it was filled too much, and then pouring the majority of my drink out so I have less than I did to start with. It's literally nonsensical, and it's not the behavior of a person who has a firm grasp of what end result they'd like to see.
But who knows, 2021 is right around the corner, maybe they'll have figured out a clear path going into year 7.Edited by JayKwellen on December 17, 2020 11:29AMXbox NA - JaeKwellen
AD PvP
Trying to main a magcro. This is awful.0 -
Waffennacht✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭As for server side performances...
That I blame squarely on the cheaters.
They moved server side because cheaters cant help but cheat0 -
NeillMcAttack✭✭✭✭✭
✭Waffennacht wrote: »As for server side performances...
That I blame squarely on the cheaters.
They moved server side because cheaters cant help but cheat
Well, that or to help implement Stadia. We will never know sadly!PC EU - NoCP PvP, is real PvPTiidehunter Nord StamDK EP PvP MainLegion Commander Tresdin Stamplar DC PvE MainSephirith Altmer MagPlar EP Gondar the Bounty Hunter Khajiit StamBlade DCThe Dirge Redguard StamNecro EP Disruptor Stormcrafter Nord StamSorc ADLone Druid Bosmer Stam Warden EP Necro-Phos Argonian MagBlade AD@ McAttack in gamePlayed since beta, and then on console at release, until the game became unplayable on console.1 -
x48rph✭✭✭✭✭
✭NeillMcAttack wrote: »Waffennacht wrote: »As for server side performances...
That I blame squarely on the cheaters.
They moved server side because cheaters cant help but cheat
Well, that or to help implement Stadia. We will never know sadly!
Considering they were suppose to be improving performance and then right before stadia came out they did this and they surely had to know the result of adding more work to already overloaded servers, I feel like they were definitely putting stadia above having the game actually work right. But then I guess money talks....1
