New Champ points, buff or nerf and other thoughts.

f047ys3v3n

My background
To start out, where I'm coming from. I have 1,500 champ points and have been an endgame raider of and on for years. Lately I have been a dps but have a built that designed to do the various utility roles in trials. Portals, upstairs, backyard, downstairs, interrupter, whatever. It is therefore not 100% maximum dps but rather has some utility in the form of shields, major expedition, self heals, etc. and is more focused on direct damage at range than most dps builds. I have long been a advocate of changes that shrink the difference in performance between multi-dot complex builds such as I had not long ago during the obligatory all DOT's meta and simpler mostly spamable builds as I think ESO, with it's 10 bar slot format does not play well to the typical DOT timer MMO management format and is better with more utility on the bar and with players more focused on mechanics than rotations.

Current issues I see on live
The biggest balance issues I see in game on live are currently:
1) Cheats continue to plague ESO, especially in PVP and Battlegrounds. They have been an issue for years without much action. The new management does seem to care but has not had much more luck than the old and still keep players in the dark. I can't stress enough that an MMO with a cheat issue is pathetic and any balance decisions are pretty mute. Cheaters will kill everybody, only die to eachother, dominate all PVE leaderboards, and make super hard content look trivial. They will also complicate all your other balance decisions.
2) Proc sets in PVP have become a plague. Many are quite OP and don't leave much tradeoff between tankieness and burst damage.
3) Heavy armor has no meaningful downside in PVP and lots of upside.
4) Champ points allow a lot of tankieness and a lot of dps with no tradeoffs between.
5) With a champ point cap well below where most players are there is no meaningful "progression" for casual players.
6) At the same time, those entering the game and therefore having no CP are super weak when they reach max level and are therefore dissuaded from even starting the grind.
7) Small health pools in PVE allow no time for healer reaction but adding any health is stupid as dps is more important. This has been an issue since softcaps were removed.
8) Lots of old PVE content has been broken by power creep and no longer requires any mechanics at all.
8) We hate respecing our CP every time we do anything. It is a slow, tedious, complete waste of time.

The new CP system, buff or nerf
I set up a little test build on the PTS. Lots of sustain, and the same bar I use in solo stuff on live.
PTS:
28.1k dps 26.1k mag 27.6k health, 3840 s-dam, 61.9% s-crit, 8324s-pen, 1620 m-recovery. Blue constellation actives (+10% crit dam, +165 damage, +7% heals off direct damage, +10% single target damage)
Live:
33.3k dps, 26k mag, 19.6k health, 2760 s-dam, 69.1% s-crit, 1561 m-recovery.

So, on a dummy you currently have a 16% reduction in damage with the changes on the face of it. However, word has it dummies are bugged and immune to penetration right now. In that case, the dummy has 18200 resistance which is 26.5% damage resistance. I should have (8324 base pen + 5948 eled pen= 14272 pen) this gives the dummy 3928 remaining resistance or 6%. So, I should do 21% more dps on PTS than I am actually doing, or 34k. The changes are a slight dps buff, not a substantial nerf.

Furthermore, while there is obviously less resistance for a dps toon on PTS (you now have to trade off dps for resistance in the tree), you have 8k more health so you will survive much better, even if you take higher hits. You also have a little more sustain. Not much, but a little and it was noticable.

In summary, for a simple damage build with a lot of champ points the changes are a small buff. They will be a big nerf for a tanky pvp toon but that doesn't really matter because in PVP everyone else takes the same nerf.

Do the changes aid or exacerbate existing issues
Clearly you now have to trade off damage and resistance to damage. This is obvious in the stars and also with the armor changes. That is good for PVP in no uncertain terms. I suspect in the changes to how set bonuses are calculated there is also some anti-cheat ramification. That would also be a huge boon. Overall, there has been a big movement of power from the CP system to your base stats. In total I suspect that makes the CP system a lower percent of our total power. That is also good for new players as they will be less worthless when they reach max level and have none. Despite this, there is clearly progression in the system beyond even the 1,500 points I have. It appears, for instance that you can always just add base stats. If I had 1,500 points in the current system there would be no progression any more. I would have every star that mattered maxed and be adding things that would not matter. So it's a win in a lot of ways.

Where the new system sucks is with respecs. It is worse, not better. For whatever reason the crafting tree has a ton of active stars that you will have to constantly swap when harvesting, fishing, refining, doing chest etc. Similarly, you will not just be able to swap active stars in the damage tree when you do different things. To optimize you will need to remove as many points from actives not in use as possible and put them in passives whenever you swap stars. The clear solution to this is that probably all crafting stars should be passives. Given how many players interact with the crafting tree and how much of a PITA it is right now you really shouldn't put it live. You may poison your whole champ revamp with the tedious, ultimately pointless. crafting tree active swap time waster. Crafting makes no sense to have actives in since you are never in a position where you need to make players experience trade offs as with combat between resistance and damage. With crafting all you have made is a tedious system where every interaction requires point movement with no actual trade off.

As for the total point respec every time it comes to swaping an active combat star, when it comes to active stars it might make sense to have the actives not take points but rather just unlock when you got a certain number of points and then all you points go in passives. Of course, you would need to rescale the stars to keep the power level similar. At that point you could swap actives to do different things without having to also move around all your points each time. Currently the new system is a respecking mess even a little worse than the old one as there is not much diminishing returns in most lines so you can't just average the stars and call it within 2% of as good as it will get like you currently can.

QOL changes
Lastly, on the QOL changes
- Bless you for the passive rapid change. Not having to waste a bar slot for that or run buggy adds and have the chance of getting caught in combat unable to change is so appreciated. The passive unlocking at alliance level 3 also shows great responsiveness following the community outrage after the last rapids change.
- Ayleid wells should also reset your target dummies to full health. It would be nice if we could buy them with writ vouchers as well.
- It is true that we use our houses as free wayshrines to travel to and that being able to "travel to outside" will help with this. However, more often we would like to use our houses in lieu of a town visit. What we really want is for our assistants to be fully functional in out houses offering repairs, guild bank and sales interaction, and fencing and laundering at normal prices. We also would rather be able to wayshrine out of our houses once in them than being able to travel to the outside of our houses. This is especially true since many houses, especially larger ones, are not located near any town or wayshrine and traveling "outside" them is basically being air dropped in the middle of nowhere.

Conclusion
Overall, the QOL changes in the new update look great and show ZOS is responsive to community feedback. Furthermore, it looks to me as though the worry over the changes amounting to another Morrowind level nerf are unfounded. I would caution ZOS against going live with the crafting tree representing a tedius star swapping to do anything constant nagging chore. Other than that, it looks like a net win. Hopefully it will also be accompanied by more effective anti-cheat measures as that continues to be the biggest balance issue.

Ergele

haven't heard of cheats before, can u elaborate?

f047ys3v3n

Ergele wrote: »

haven't heard of cheats before, can u elaborate?

Programs that alter working memory in order to grant advantages. Originally, this was quite easy as ESO didn't encrypt anything and almost all character stats were client side. So, with a simple memory editing program you could pretty easily identify the variable for say spell power and set it to whatever you liked. This state persisted for years until the night of a thousand meteors where a couple of PVP guys who had been on ZOS for years to fix it decided to make their point known by literally flying around in pvp dropping meteors. They were perma-banned but nobody else was.

After that, ZOS made it harder to cheat by hiding the variables in different ways at different times essentially making cheats more exclusive to those who bought shady Russian purpose built programs for the purpose. They also sued the memory editing program into oblivion for making them look dumb. Cheating persisted though. Enhancing stats, being invisible even in combat, flying, telaporting, walking though walls, and commonly being able to locate players supposed to be invisible at hundreds of meteors distant were all still common. Occasionally, a few players would get a temp ban but no one I know of got a perma-ban except the players who made ZOS look foolish and one guy I knew who was actually not memory hacking but just experimenting with a bugged item set. ZOS toleration of cheating players and failed technical fixes made cheating exceptionally common. Even though it was harder, after the night of a thousand meteors most players knew it existed so the cat was out of the bag.

With the last update, the first after Microsoft came to own ZOS a lot of variables were moved server side. This clearly made cheating less effective. There were a few weeks post patch were I didn't encounter anyone who seemed to have cheats. Even now, there is clearly less efficacy to cheats than there was though it does seem that there are some working cheats as I have seen some players with builds that I don't think add up. I suspect this is though hacking set stats instead of base stats. I also suspect that this, and pre-buffing, may be the reason for the changes in how set bonuses are going to be applied.

Anyhow, I hope there will be a continued attention to cheats as it has plagued the game for years.

Kurat

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

My background
To start out, where I'm coming from. I have 1,500 champ points and have been an endgame raider of and on for years. Lately I have been a dps but have a built that designed to do the various utility roles in trials. Portals, upstairs, backyard, downstairs, interrupter, whatever. It is therefore not 100% maximum dps but rather has some utility in the form of shields, major expedition, self heals, etc. and is more focused on direct damage at range than most dps builds. I have long been a advocate of changes that shrink the difference in performance between multi-dot complex builds such as I had not long ago during the obligatory all DOT's meta and simpler mostly spamable builds as I think ESO, with it's 10 bar slot format does not play well to the typical DOT timer MMO management format and is better with more utility on the bar and with players more focused on mechanics than rotations.

Current issues I see on live
The biggest balance issues I see in game on live are currently:
1) Cheats continue to plague ESO, especially in PVP and Battlegrounds. They have been an issue for years without much action. The new management does seem to care but has not had much more luck than the old and still keep players in the dark. I can't stress enough that an MMO with a cheat issue is pathetic and any balance decisions are pretty mute. Cheaters will kill everybody, only die to eachother, dominate all PVE leaderboards, and make super hard content look trivial. They will also complicate all your other balance decisions.
2) Proc sets in PVP have become a plague. Many are quite OP and don't leave much tradeoff between tankieness and burst damage.
3) Heavy armor has no meaningful downside in PVP and lots of upside.
4) Champ points allow a lot of tankieness and a lot of dps with no tradeoffs between.
5) With a champ point cap well below where most players are there is no meaningful "progression" for casual players.
6) At the same time, those entering the game and therefore having no CP are super weak when they reach max level and are therefore dissuaded from even starting the grind.
7) Small health pools in PVE allow no time for healer reaction but adding any health is stupid as dps is more important. This has been an issue since softcaps were removed.
8) Lots of old PVE content has been broken by power creep and no longer requires any mechanics at all.
8) We hate respecing our CP every time we do anything. It is a slow, tedious, complete waste of time.

The new CP system, buff or nerf
I set up a little test build on the PTS. Lots of sustain, and the same bar I use in solo stuff on live.
PTS:
28.1k dps 26.1k mag 27.6k health, 3840 s-dam, 61.9% s-crit, 8324s-pen, 1620 m-recovery. Blue constellation actives (+10% crit dam, +165 damage, +7% heals off direct damage, +10% single target damage)
Live:
33.3k dps, 26k mag, 19.6k health, 2760 s-dam, 69.1% s-crit, 1561 m-recovery.

So, on a dummy you currently have a 16% reduction in damage with the changes on the face of it. However, word has it dummies are bugged and immune to penetration right now. In that case, the dummy has 18200 resistance which is 26.5% damage resistance. I should have (8324 base pen + 5948 eled pen= 14272 pen) this gives the dummy 3928 remaining resistance or 6%. So, I should do 21% more dps on PTS than I am actually doing, or 34k. The changes are a slight dps buff, not a substantial nerf.

Furthermore, while there is obviously less resistance for a dps toon on PTS (you now have to trade off dps for resistance in the tree), you have 8k more health so you will survive much better, even if you take higher hits. You also have a little more sustain. Not much, but a little and it was noticable.

In summary, for a simple damage build with a lot of champ points the changes are a small buff. They will be a big nerf for a tanky pvp toon but that doesn't really matter because in PVP everyone else takes the same nerf.

Do the changes aid or exacerbate existing issues
Clearly you now have to trade off damage and resistance to damage. This is obvious in the stars and also with the armor changes. That is good for PVP in no uncertain terms. I suspect in the changes to how set bonuses are calculated there is also some anti-cheat ramification. That would also be a huge boon. Overall, there has been a big movement of power from the CP system to your base stats. In total I suspect that makes the CP system a lower percent of our total power. That is also good for new players as they will be less worthless when they reach max level and have none. Despite this, there is clearly progression in the system beyond even the 1,500 points I have. It appears, for instance that you can always just add base stats. If I had 1,500 points in the current system there would be no progression any more. I would have every star that mattered maxed and be adding things that would not matter. So it's a win in a lot of ways.

Where the new system sucks is with respecs. It is worse, not better. For whatever reason the crafting tree has a ton of active stars that you will have to constantly swap when harvesting, fishing, refining, doing chest etc. Similarly, you will not just be able to swap active stars in the damage tree when you do different things. To optimize you will need to remove as many points from actives not in use as possible and put them in passives whenever you swap stars. The clear solution to this is that probably all crafting stars should be passives. Given how many players interact with the crafting tree and how much of a PITA it is right now you really shouldn't put it live. You may poison your whole champ revamp with the tedious, ultimately pointless. crafting tree active swap time waster. Crafting makes no sense to have actives in since you are never in a position where you need to make players experience trade offs as with combat between resistance and damage. With crafting all you have made is a tedious system where every interaction requires point movement with no actual trade off.

As for the total point respec every time it comes to swaping an active combat star, when it comes to active stars it might make sense to have the actives not take points but rather just unlock when you got a certain number of points and then all you points go in passives. Of course, you would need to rescale the stars to keep the power level similar. At that point you could swap actives to do different things without having to also move around all your points each time. Currently the new system is a respecking mess even a little worse than the old one as there is not much diminishing returns in most lines so you can't just average the stars and call it within 2% of as good as it will get like you currently can.

QOL changes
Lastly, on the QOL changes
- Bless you for the passive rapid change. Not having to waste a bar slot for that or run buggy adds and have the chance of getting caught in combat unable to change is so appreciated. The passive unlocking at alliance level 3 also shows great responsiveness following the community outrage after the last rapids change.
- Ayleid wells should also reset your target dummies to full health. It would be nice if we could buy them with writ vouchers as well.
- It is true that we use our houses as free wayshrines to travel to and that being able to "travel to outside" will help with this. However, more often we would like to use our houses in lieu of a town visit. What we really want is for our assistants to be fully functional in out houses offering repairs, guild bank and sales interaction, and fencing and laundering at normal prices. We also would rather be able to wayshrine out of our houses once in them than being able to travel to the outside of our houses. This is especially true since many houses, especially larger ones, are not located near any town or wayshrine and traveling "outside" them is basically being air dropped in the middle of nowhere.

Conclusion
Overall, the QOL changes in the new update look great and show ZOS is responsive to community feedback. Furthermore, it looks to me as though the worry over the changes amounting to another Morrowind level nerf are unfounded. I would caution ZOS against going live with the crafting tree representing a tedius star swapping to do anything constant nagging chore. Other than that, it looks like a net win. Hopefully it will also be accompanied by more effective anti-cheat measures as that continues to be the biggest balance issue.

Not sure how you only parse 16% less while everyone else have lost 30-40%
What class are you amd how much you parse?

Artanisul

The average player lost less then the elite, that's for sure. Less trickery involved in how combat bonuses are involved now.

Still a boat load of cheese in the combat system to be exploited, but the average player did loose less. Slow and unobservant players are still very very low though.

I still hate the gatekeeper slots in the new CP system. Some things are just in the way. Things that dont go "with" X are blocking access to X.

Agalloch

Ergele wrote: »

haven't heard of cheats before, can u elaborate?

Just google around a bit ..and you will find them.

Cheers.

f047ys3v3n

Kurat wrote: »

Not sure how you only parse 16% less while everyone else have lost 30-40%
What class are you amd how much you parse?

The build is a magica sorc that is built around direct damage. For this test it was wearing:
2x grunwolf
5x pfgd both bars
perfected vMA inferno back
5x medusa 3 jewelry + inferno on front
bars are:
front: (inner light, twilight tormentor, crushing shock, crystal frags, empowered ward, greater storm atro)
Back: (fire ring, unstable wall, crit surge, twilight tormentor, ele-d, fiery rage) (ele-d is swapped for necrotic orb in trials)

I don't really spend time doing dummies on the regular but it did 54k on Yol in vSS yesterday. Not to shelf dps to be sure but sufficient for most trials even on hard mode and very survivable, versatile, mobile, and quick to ramp to maximum dps. A lot more fun to play than a melee stack and whack, stand in my siroria circle or it all goes to hell, build as well. I'm not God Slaying but I did get spirit slayer the other day and a lot of raid groups still bring me because I don't die much, rez a lot of folks, do utility roles well, and somebody has to be on the low end of dps.

Anyhow, I suspect I lost less dps than most because:
1) I have 1500 champ points. I can't place most now but I can place them on PTS. They are certainly not worth as much there as they would be on live but I do have more than most and that is worth something.
2) The build I am using is overwhelmingly direct damage. It does not get as much overlapping bonuses from the current CP system as builds that contain more DOT's.
3) I don't know how to do all the cheese like pre-buffing with other sets and such. Heck, I only even learned that pre-buffing with other sets existed 2 weeks ago. I guess some of this cheese doesn't work anymore?
4) I don't practice / optimize dummy fights. I use a dummy occasionally to sandbox build changes but I have never tried to build and optimize specifically for the dummy number. All my builds are going to have good self heals, a shield, and enough sustain that it does not count on the group being perfect because most of the groups I run with just aren't. I also try not to have a lot of different ability set ups for different situations because I screw them up and end up worse off. I build simple and versatile and practice playing it well. Only 2 of my bar slots get switched around on my main dps. This probably comes back to the builds with more sources of damage and more dots.
5) I don't have any cheats and lots of folks do. Perhaps some of those cheats aren't working as well, wouldn't that be a shame.

heng14rwb17_ESO

THE GREAT NERF IS COMING !

f047ys3v3n

Did some more testing on the PTS today now that pen is fixed.

What I found is that if you are "flanking" the enemy damage is basically the same as on live. Like really, really close to the same as in they probably intend it to be the same. That +15% crit damage to enemies you "flank" slot-able star is however, the best star by far. If you are not flanking damage is -10% from live. So, on some trials I will be about where I am on live but on others -10%. That is unless the star it ends up working on all NPC's. It currently works on test dummies no matter which way they are facing so that is a possibility. I also have no idea how to interpret what the front of a crystal in vCR is or an orb or whatever.

My damage to the iron atro was 78k on PTS with the cheese parse food and all the parse sets such as perfected siroria and zaan. So, either OMG that is terrible or damn that is high depending on your point of view. I don't have perfected siroria on live so I can't really compare and even if I did I probably wouldn't gold it out anyway as I consider it basically good for test dummy cheese only. It really isn't a huge dps boost over pfgd (78k on pts vs 75k) and the stupid circle you have to stand in is super small and even the stackiest and parsiest trials fights still require occasional movement. There really isn't a great trials mag dps set in the way there are several great stam dps sets but you already knew that. Heck, most of us use pfgd which is a sustain set with a slight nod to dps not a dps set. There is simply no magica relequin or loketsties.

Lastly, I only put in about 2,200 CP. After that there is no benefit at all outside of being able to swap stars without respecing. You can get full damage a long way before 2,200 CP though as there are a lot of points in passive stars related to mitigation and other non-damage related things. ~2,200 is a cap to where you will see any value of any kind cease to exist though.

Clairelenia

XD cool
... it will be an overall-dps nerf of 10-20%.

But well we have 10% more gold and 50% less repair costs at least

ApoAlaia

Clairelenia wrote: »

XD cool
... it will be an overall-dps nerf of 10-20%.

But well we have 10% more gold and 50% less repair costs at least

The out-of-combat movement speed buff seems nice. I'm looking forward to that.

The green tree is still a slot/un-slot busywork pain but some of the new additions I look at them and go 'yeah, I could use that'.

Guess if my main focus was 12 person trials/score pushing I'd be more miffed.

Bodycounter

Clairelenia wrote: »

XD cool
... it will be an overall-dps nerf of 10-20%.

But well we have 10% more gold and 50% less repair costs at least

And is 10-20% less DPS bad? DPS has been through the roof in the last year and its fine to tune it down. But i do not think there is much point in arguing with you since you appear to only write salty/whiny posts anyway.

Sangwyne

Tanks are less tanky, DPS do less damage, and Healers heal for less. However, tanks now do more damage due to the bump in Stamina/Magicka and the 1000 Weapon/Spell Damage, and DPS and Healers got a boost to their base HP and off stat, which has led to more of a homogenization across the roles. I personally preferred it when we could spec our individual builds to push a particular area (Damage, healing, mitigation, etc) to the maximum at the expense of areas we didn't care about, but people complained there was too much of X (insert area here), so ZOS decided to distribute the stats more evenly. Can't say I'm particularly thrilled about taking so much more magic damage as a tank, but the increased damage is much appreciated and means I can do overland content more easily in Heavy.