Update 31 Combat Preview

waitwhat

RogueShark wrote: »

Mr_Arce88 wrote: »

Also: "areas of the game we currently feel are lacking: Two Handed’s ability to stick in melee encounters and offer comparable sustained damage in PvE" 2H is strongest weapon in PvP, are you seriousely gonna buff it up more because it lacks in PvE? If you want to touch weapons, just give DW a proper Major Brutality like 2H has. That will give us a real choice of weapons, instead of locking every single class without native brutality sourcing to 2H...

Want to note that 2H is also a top weapon in PvE for stam DPS. DW is comparable with vatesharan but just look at ESO logs for stam DPS (what few are around, but that's another topic entirely) and you'll see plenty of 2H, more than DW maybe. Every single other stam DPS I've run with has been running 2H. Stampede, Executioner and Wrecking Blow are all very good. Even as a die-hard DW fan, I run 2H on trash because brawler with master's is just too good to pass up. I'm confused: do they not realize stampede is a gap closer? And slotted not only for being a gap closer, but because it does good damage? And that DW does not have a decent gap closer? But 2h is the one that struggles to stick to melee? Huh?

This is hilariously out of touch.

Are any of these stamblades and what do they all do about the loss of critical chance, and the fact that wrecking blow has a channel time?

waitwhat

Elo106 wrote: »

Hope the 2 handed buff is pve only, making 2 handed even stronger in pvp would be unhealthy, elevating it even further beyond all other weapons

Exactly, and I feel 2h doesn't need a PvE buff at all. Not only is 2h the favorite in PvP, but also the dichotomy of 2h-for-PvP and DW-for-PvE makes thematic sense with 2h as a hulkier bursty defense-penetrator (i.e. bruiser) and DW as a riskier DoT crit-stacker (i.e. rogue).

waitwhat

Jaraal wrote: »

Will you be refunding all our Kutas and Hakeijos when you make Prismatic Onslaught irrelevant?

Strider__Roshin wrote: »

Any word on removing cast times from Death Stroke, Soul Tether, Onslaught, or Dawn breaker?

Agreed. These ultimates rarely fire correctly in the Cyrodiil lag.

And we have the same problem in PvE: input lag in high-activity situations delays the ultimate from firing but still imposes the channel time action lock, which prevents bar-swapping and delays the entire rotation, throwing it off and leading to wasted resource expenditure.

LordArconSeptim

Why would you deny existance of stealth and invisibility? Its a core mechanic to Elder Scrolls gameplay especially for assassin type of a character and specific class in ESO?
It would just ruin the class because it revolves around that certain mechanic.
It is the same as removing Templars huge healing stats from its passives and abilities.
Same as removing Dragon Knights flame damage bonuses and damage mitigation passives and abilities.
And basically turning sorcerer teleport into a 3 meter vertical jump instead of what it is currently.

x48rph

The fact that you've needed a huge post every three months for a few years now to explain combat changes says enough on it's own. When are we going to see stability again so it's stops feeling like a beta test.

alberichtano

Fazuszek wrote: »

Its nice that u are giving more start in CP system, but u know what? I cant slot most of them. I just put my cp points for collections, and then i have to select ONLY a few of them

Give MORE SLOTS for cp bonuses. Thats the priority. We dont need more stars, that need to be slotted. Its just annoying.

Said it before, saying it again - Slottable stars should also be passives. Meaning - if a slottable gives you (just to make something up) 1000 extra weapon damage when slotted, it could give you 100 extra weapon damage when NOT slotted, thus working as a weak passive that becomes far stronger when slotted.

This way ALL stars would become interesting, wether you plan to slot them or not, as they will grant some small bonus even when not used.

Faint_One

Mr_Arce88 wrote: »

Also: "areas of the game we currently feel are lacking: Two Handed’s ability to stick in melee encounters and offer comparable sustained damage in PvE" 2H is strongest weapon in PvP, are you seriousely gonna buff it up more because it lacks in PvE? If you want to touch weapons, just give DW a proper Major Brutality like 2H has. That will give us a real choice of weapons, instead of locking every single class without native brutality sourcing to 2H...

also 2H now already stronger than DW in pve

Jaraal

alberichtano wrote: »

Fazuszek wrote: »

Its nice that u are giving more start in CP system, but u know what? I cant slot most of them. I just put my cp points for collections, and then i have to select ONLY a few of them

Give MORE SLOTS for cp bonuses. Thats the priority. We dont need more stars, that need to be slotted. Its just annoying.

Said it before, saying it again - Slottable stars should also be passives. Meaning - if a slottable gives you (just to make something up) 1000 extra weapon damage when slotted, it could give you 100 extra weapon damage when NOT slotted, thus working as a weak passive that becomes far stronger when slotted.

This way ALL stars would become interesting, wether you plan to slot them or not, as they will grant some small bonus even when not used.

My guess is they want to limit the number of passives to reduce server calculations.

Faint_One

2Hs are now flood more power than DW，but it still got buff，as 2H has stronger aoe dot(also works on single)and most powerful execute skill，DW should share same benefits from whatever passive (it actually better than 2H for dps)or active skills (

marius_buys

Ragnaroek93 wrote: »

To be honest, stop messing around with Battlespirit so much. You need to adjust the outliers, you won't fix Necro defense in pvp by adjusting Battlespirit for example. Giving everybody 20% effective damage mitigation for free looks like a terrible idea. It's not like the ttk of vampire stage 3 + Pariah builds is too low right now...

20 players towing behind an almost immortal mist player running that exact setup is about to increase

sweatapodimas

Strider__Roshin wrote: »

Any word on removing cast times from Death Stroke, Soul Tether, Onslaught, or Dawn breaker?

Please this! Cast times on these ultimates throw off the timing of combat

UrbWzrd

TagCdog wrote: »

I have a question about how this will impact stealing indoors and being caught by a guard.

If you get caught stealing, flee, and pop an invisibility pot, usually the guard will still attack you and prevent you from exiting the door. Does this change things where one could possibly exit without being locked inside until you get killed by the guard?

Kill/close the game client. That is the way I learnt in my Playstation. After running in a small inn half an hour, spending precious potions, almost breaking my controller, just not to loose my stolen loot, I ended up death. But next time, with a frustration, I closed the app, and when I next time logged in, voila, guard was not on my neck, I was there safe and sound.

UrbWzrd

UrbWzrd wrote: »

TagCdog wrote: »

I have a question about how this will impact stealing indoors and being caught by a guard.

If you get caught stealing, flee, and pop an invisibility pot, usually the guard will still attack you and prevent you from exiting the door. Does this change things where one could possibly exit without being locked inside until you get killed by the guard?

Kill/close the game client. That is the way I learnt in my Playstation. After running in a small inn half an hour, spending precious potions, almost breaking my controller, just not to loose my stolen loot, I ended up death. But next time, with a frustration, I closed the app, and when I next time logged in, voila, guard was not on my neck, I was there safe and sound.

that said, escaping guards should not be easy and crime should be punished. This is an RPG anyway.

UrbWzrd

Skoomah wrote: »

ZOS_Gilliam wrote: »

Greetings!

Today, the combat team would like to share what we’ve been working on since Update 30! While this update won’t have too many large-scale changes, there are a number of little things. We’d like to highlight a few of the more noteworthy changes in this post as well as talk about some behind the scenes work we’ve been doing.

Let’s start with something we’ve seen a lot of discussion on: Time to Kill (TTK) in Player versus Player environments. Compared to previous updates, the amount of damage is higher across the board than it was previously, but simultaneously, defensive power is lower too. This is mainly caused by two things: the balance standards that Champion Point 2.0 was held to in Update 29 where we introduced more choices between either offensive or defensive options, as well boosting up stats on fresh characters with the introduction of base Weapon and Spell Damage, and the base Maximum Resource adjustments from Update 30. Between these two, many builds are making more choices in improving their ability to deal or take damage while experiencing a sharper operational loss of the other. As many player builds lean towards dealing damage in PvP environments, this creates a situation where TTK lowers. While we’ve identified specifics, such as base stat adjustments, we wanted to stay focused on where the problem was felt, which was exclusively related to PvP. Our main adjustment in Update 31 will be to Battle Spirit and focusing on the damage taken portion, increasing it so the base character takes 60% less overall damage, rather than 50%. Aside from this and a few more specific, smaller adjustments, we’re still monitoring many of the moving parts (such as proc set scaling) and discussing measures we can take in future updates that won’t adversely affect parts of the game where problems aren’t as severe.

In relation to TTK and PvP in general, we’re also doing a substantial pass on player abilities, item sets, and passives in Update 31 in regard to how they operate with both Stealth and Invisibility. This pass focuses on trying to improve the rules on what abilities should and should not hit or remove Stealth or Invisibility on targets, as well as fixing some issues where Sneak attacks were stronger than intended in some areas. To clarify, Sneak attacks, or attacks made from the Hidden state while crouching, should only do the following:

• A guaranteed Critical Strike on one direct damage attack
• 275% bonus critical damage against monsters if it was a melee attack
• 40% bonus critical damage against monsters if it was a ranged attack
• Stun the target if it was a melee attack

In hopes to improve both the ability to utilize or distinctly deny and remove Stealth and Invisibility, we’re adjusting our rules to what player attacks should break these effects, or even attempt to try and hit them. Previously, this was handled purely on the ability level of these effects, like Shadow Cloak, leaving them very susceptible to breaking in a multitude of ways when complex and dynamic abilities were used against them. Now, we’re adjusting a significant amount of player-sourced attacks and effects to have rules applied to them, in addition to the rules built into abilities like Shadow Cloak, reaching a much more streamlined experience.

For player abilities, the only things that will break Stealth or Invisibility are direct damage, Crowd Controls such as stuns or immobilizes, or revealing effects such as Expert Hunter or Revealing Flare. Player Damage over Time abilities of any type will no longer remove targets from Stealth or Invisibility, but may still damage them depending on their source of attack. Area of Effect based Damage over Time will damage targets under these effects, but not remove the effects themselves. There will also now be a short window when entering Stealth or Invisibility, where player single target attacks made against you will no longer cancel the activation or strip the effect. On the other hand, we’ve better accounted for reveals or detections in these rule sets of Stealth and Invisibility, so attacks won’t miss as often as before when utilizing them. All in all, we hope this improves both using and fighting against Stealth and Invisibility in ESO by improving the consistency of the experiences so patterns and strategies may better evolve!

Much of our focus outside of the pass mentioned above has been on the back-end scripting of abilities and cleaning up the amount of information they have, making sure they use relevant technological advancements we’ve made in the recent years, rather than using older and less efficient systems. For example, removing errant data or finding better ways for one-off checks and validations to be done was a large focus here, while cleaning up inconsistencies in behavior or power along the way. Expect many little changes and bug fixes as a result of this such as improving Flame Skull’s damage bonus calculation, or minor tweaks to values like Essence Drain granting Major Mending for a full integer duration at all ranks.

One of the larger changes you’ll see from this pass are reworks for the Skilled Hunter passive, Expert Hunter and its morphs’ visual displays on enemies, and Prismatic Weapon enchants. Previously, all three of these effects were constantly validating themselves against massive lists to determine if your target was an Undead, Werewolf, or Vampire with very little pay off for the amount of extra weight they had. We’ve decided to retain the slayer of evil theme of Fighters Guild, but only have it active against players to improve performance while still getting the feel-good identity they have. Prismatic Weapon enchants, however, have been completely changed to better fit their theme of Tri Resource seen from the other Prismatic enchants. They now operate similarly to a Drain Life or Magicka weapon enchantment but grant all three resources!

Outside of behind the scenes work and minor adjustments, there’s a handful of larger changes or new introductions coming as well. We’re adding three new sub constellations to the Fitness tree filled with all new slotted stars! Their names are Wind Chaser, Survivor’s Spite, and Walking Fortress, with each focusing on unique aspects of core mechanics and actions. Speaking of passives, we’re also adjusting all player passives to grant hybrid versions of their stats, so things like Balanced Warrior will give Weapon and Spell Damage plus Armor, rather than Weapon Damage and Spell Resistance. In addition to this, we’re reworking a few older item sets that had an incredibly low amount of player engagement: Sithis’ Touch will focus on zipping around from successful battles quickly one after the other, Nikulas’s Heavy Armor will improve its ability to shrug off incoming attacks, and Crusader will receive a fitting shift to grant something more appropriate of an enabling bruiser. Likely the biggest adjustment to an existing set is to Pelinal’s Aptitude, which will be changed to Pelinal’s Wrath, which now focuses on the blood lust this hero of lore succumbed to in their legacy left in Tamriel! Finally, there will be some targeted buffs to niche areas of the game we currently feel are lacking: Two Handed’s ability to stick in melee encounters and offer comparable sustained damage in PvE, as well as Frost Staff’s ability to give the touch of cold death. Keep an eye out in the patch notes for some juicy buffs to two specific abilities!

The list of changes coming for Update 31 is quite long, but it’s built up from many little changes rather than huge ones, so our hope is it will be less disruptive than some of our more recent updates. We still look forward to hearing your feedback and discussion that comes from the upcoming PTS cycle based on the changes! Thanks for reading and see you in Tamriel.

Thank you Gilliam and the rest of the combat team for the effort, but when do you plan on releasing new PVP content and not just the 1,000th rework to skills or sets that completely changes the meta and how the game is played? New PVP content means a new map the size of cyrodiil or new PvP game modes or a new PvP zone. Or even the ability to just queue for Deathmatch in BGs, which by the way is not new content. PvP players in this game feel completely neglected and not listened to. The past 2 years of proc meta, turning off sets meta, and now crazy one shot builds that kill you from full to zero without even seeing animations has been a terrible experience. The community’s patience for this neglect and complete lack of new PvP content has run out for many folks.

Just so you know... if you don’t already... Cyrodiil is.a laggy mess. Imperial City is empty most times. Battlegrounds is full of PVE’ers that avoid fighting other players and just run from flag to flag or just run away from players to turn in relics. Those are the only game modes PVP’ers have and the experience in all three places are extremely low quality. And then you put on top of that very unenjoyable metas due to these reworks.

God, are we so obvious? I am the PvE guy running to the flags in BGs. I am never good in PvP but, even I can say that PvP really sucks in this game. Tanks hate rogues, rogues hate tanks... sorcerers, have no clue. But even in PvE, I can see that this game sucks balancing the three archetypes; warrior, sorcerer and rogue. I never heard of blaming a rogue being a rogue, until this game and I am 40 years old! They said they will do this balance with gear (rock paper scissors as they put) but I don't think it worked. So nerfing rouge not to be a rogue (you are right, I am a rogue or NB for this game) will not make any better and will just change the color of the mess at hand.

UrbWzrd

itscompton wrote: »

Fazuszek wrote: »

Its nice that u are giving more start in CP system, but u know what? I cant slot most of them. I just put my cp points for collections, and then i have to select ONLY a few of them

Give MORE SLOTS for cp bonuses. Thats the priority. We dont need more stars, that need to be slotted. Its just annoying.

Yes, announcing more slottable stars when most people are complaining they're frustrated because they have to choose only 4 of the huge number already currently available in each tree stood out to me as being particularly tone deaf.
The flavor stars such as magic/stamina back on kills or giving someone minor heroism for a few seconds if you heal them from under 50% health are never going to compete with core stars like direct/AOE/Dot damage or healing stars for the 4 slots. If they buff them to compete then they become "core" stars instead of "flavor".
My idea of making flavor stars competitive is to give all active stars a value separate from CP cost. Make core stars each worth 25 points and flavor stars worth 10 points. And instead of a set number of slots make it so you can slot up to 100 points worth of active stars. Then you have real choices; go with 2 core/5 flavor, 3core/2 flavor, maybe make some crazy 0 core/10 flavor build off lots of small flavor buffs? It would give us more options but we still wouldn't be able to stack any more of the bigger core buffs to damage done/mitigated and healing than we can now.

I really don't understand why ZOS is obsessed with this "balance" thing. It is an RPG, a good one, where you can loose yourself for years and seek more power. But they constantly butcher this more power seeking and call it "balance". I feel myself like an accountant trying to balance the budget!

Let us be Gods! And give us challenges to go after. No problem if this is uber trials!

Syrpynt

UrbWzrd wrote: »

I really don't understand why ZOS is obsessed with this "balance" thing. It is an RPG, a good one, where you can loose yourself for years and seek more power. But they constantly butcher this more power seeking and call it "balance". I feel myself like an accountant trying to balance the budget!

Let us be Gods! And give us challenges to go after. No problem if this is uber trials!

No. Have you played any game with /togglegodmode enabled? It gets boring really fast. The major problem is really that there are too many combinations now to properly balance. The best combination of sets gets publicized and "meta", then one or both sets get nerfed until the same old sets (or newest ones) are the only best ones.

It keeps the game fresh, but also gets extremely tiring. Some people are happy with their builds, even if they're not #1, but sometimes those sets get rendered absolutely useless. Like Update31, and how many sets dependent on weapon/spell power got decimated. The threshold was set too high, and at the same time, the other issue is that stamina/magicka pools STILL dictate damage, when it should only boost sustain and/or healing.

alberichtano

UrbWzrd wrote: »

itscompton wrote: »

Fazuszek wrote: »

Its nice that u are giving more start in CP system, but u know what? I cant slot most of them. I just put my cp points for collections, and then i have to select ONLY a few of them

Give MORE SLOTS for cp bonuses. Thats the priority. We dont need more stars, that need to be slotted. Its just annoying.

Yes, announcing more slottable stars when most people are complaining they're frustrated because they have to choose only 4 of the huge number already currently available in each tree stood out to me as being particularly tone deaf.
The flavor stars such as magic/stamina back on kills or giving someone minor heroism for a few seconds if you heal them from under 50% health are never going to compete with core stars like direct/AOE/Dot damage or healing stars for the 4 slots. If they buff them to compete then they become "core" stars instead of "flavor".
My idea of making flavor stars competitive is to give all active stars a value separate from CP cost. Make core stars each worth 25 points and flavor stars worth 10 points. And instead of a set number of slots make it so you can slot up to 100 points worth of active stars. Then you have real choices; go with 2 core/5 flavor, 3core/2 flavor, maybe make some crazy 0 core/10 flavor build off lots of small flavor buffs? It would give us more options but we still wouldn't be able to stack any more of the bigger core buffs to damage done/mitigated and healing than we can now.

I really don't understand why ZOS is obsessed with this "balance" thing. It is an RPG, a good one, where you can loose yourself for years and seek more power. But they constantly butcher this more power seeking and call it "balance". I feel myself like an accountant trying to balance the budget!

Let us be Gods! And give us challenges to go after. No problem if this is uber trials!

That is because there are a lot of people complaining about the game being too easy. Also because of PvP, having to make all classes, skills and builds somewhat equal. I believe you have seen all the threads about how one build/class/skill or another is OP? :-/

Shadowshire

The following remarks from the Update 31 Patch Notes for the Base Game Combat Abilities do not make any sense to me whatsoever:

Sorcerer
Storm Calling
Bolt Escape
Ball of Lightning (morph): The ball of lightning summoned from this ability now only intercepts projectiles from the caster of the ability, rather than any ally in the ball’s vicinity. The ball now only absorbs up to 1 projectile per second, down from 100.

What this says to me is that when a Sorcerer casts the Ball of Lighting (morph) the ball "only intercepts projectiles from the Sorcerer which cast it". Eh? Why would any Sorcerer cast a Ball of Lightning that does not intercept projectiles from the adversaries that launch them at the Sorcerer? Why would any projectile cast by the Sorcerer at a target adversary be intercepted by it? I don't know about you, but it seems to me that this makes Ball of Lightning into a suicide pill. ......

Dauntess13

DinoZavr wrote: »

Please, re-work weapon penetration. With CP2.0 subsequent nerfs is is laughable, making stamDKs and stamplars a joke.

This was the only thing about CP 2.0 that absolutely pissed me off. The amount of penetration you get now is laughable and makes Stam builds a joke.

Zabagad

Shadowshire wrote: »

The following remarks from the Update 31 Patch Notes for the Base Game Combat Abilities do not make any sense to me whatsoever:

Sorcerer
Storm Calling
Bolt Escape
Ball of Lightning (morph): The ball of lightning summoned from this ability now only intercepts projectiles from the caster of the ability, rather than any ally in the ball’s vicinity. The ball now only absorbs up to 1 projectile per second, down from 100.

What this says to me is that when a Sorcerer casts the Ball of Lighting (morph) the ball "only intercepts projectiles from the Sorcerer which cast it". Eh? Why would any Sorcerer cast a Ball of Lightning that does not intercept projectiles from the adversaries that launch them at the Sorcerer? Why would any projectile cast by the Sorcerer at a target adversary be intercepted by it? I don't know about you, but it seems to me that this makes Ball of Lightning into a suicide pill. ......

Nah - it only protects the caster (from one LA/s lol) and not his group.