Needed change for Destruction Staff

Vylaera

Destruction Staff's Ancient Knowledge passive is supposed to be the equivalent of Dual Wield's Twin Blade and Blunt and Two-Handed's Heavy Weapons passives, but it isn't actually.

These Two Handed and Dual Wield passives give bonuses based on weapon type, Swords increase your Weapon and Spell Damage by 284, Axes increase your Critical Damage by 12%, and Maces increase your Weapon and Spell Penetration by 3300; but the equivalent Destruction Staff passive doesn't give mirrored bonuses - Inferno Staves increase your single target damage by 10%, Lightning Staves increase your Area of Effect damage by 10%, and Ice Staves reduce the cost of block and increase the amount of damage you can block. This doesn't make any sense, and is overall harmful for build diversity, theory crafting, and all content from early game all the way to endgame.

Ancient Knowledge should be changed to mirror the bonuses of the Heavy Weapons Two Handed passive. Inferno Staves should increase your Weapon and Spell Damage, Lightning Staves should increase your Critical Damage, and Ice Staves should increase your Weapon and Spell Penetration.

Currently, as it is right now, the only viable staff type for dealing damage in endgame PvE and PvP content is the Inferno Staff due to its 10% single target damage bonus, which is by far and away the best of the three bonuses. Where DPS counts most is single target, burning down a boss, not trash that's cleared away, regardless of staff type, in mere seconds. Frost Staff is only viable for tanking unless you're a Warden, but even then, you still can't outperform an Inferno Staff, and even if you could, no one needs your minor brittle when the tank backbars an ice staff specifically to apply that debuff. This puts frost Wardens and lightning Sorcerers, which are seemingly the elemental damage types the game encourages those respective classes to use, at a disadvantage, and negates both a practical and aesthetic synergy. The only choice you have is to use an inferno staff if you want a spot in a group.

On the PvP side of things, the only application where a Lightning Staff is viable is to increase the damage of Dark Convergence, which is already overperforming and perhaps the single biggest thing complained about this patch. There is never a time where a Frost Staff is viable in PvP, and in my anecdotal personal experience, I have never seen anyone use it in all my time in Cyrodiil, the Imperial City, or Battelgrounds.

The effects of this change to Ancient Knowledge would ultimately be beneficial. Inferno Staff would no longer be the only viable option, and greater build freedom would be opened up for everyone. This change would ultimately be a slight, and I emphasize slight, damage loss for endgame PvE, but the benefits far outweigh the costs. This wouldn't present a meta shakeup either, as Inferno Staff would still be the "best" option for PvE since Critical Damage is being softcapped next patch, meaning no one would need to go refarm medusa staves for lightning and gold them out, they could keep their Infernos with no issue, while at the same time, buffing people who choose to use Lightning and Ice anyway. There's no real downside to implementing this change, and it would open up many more options for PvE and PvP builds.

emilyhyoyeon

I completely agree ancient knowledge needs to be changed. All the DESTRUCTION staves should be destruction based like they were in previous TES games. Mirroring the stam weapons passive would work well for that. I like that idea

Jackey

I agree that something needs to be done about the other staves in endgame PvE. Specially the Lightning staff, because it's still a dps loss to use it on a class with many AOE abilities.
The Frost staff did get some adjustments already and I think it’s okay for niche builds.

The problem here is PvP because you're wrong about Lightning staff only being used to buff Dark Convergence. It's actually a good viable option and is frequently used on many builds.

The idea is to make Lightning and Frost staves more desirable in a trial group because xyz. The result would be that you'd reach optimal dps if some of the DDs in a trial group use those options without making it stronger than Inferno staff.
I think it would help a little bit to diversify endgame PvE.

Grandchamp1989

Lightning staffs are also incredibly useful in heavy attack builds for people who don't want to spec into a light attack weaving build.

Tanks need their block mitigation from destru staff. Destru staff tanking is meta and pretty much mandatory to proc crusher and have access to ranged interrupt. If you move the block mitigation to a passive (maybe in heavy armor skill line) I would be okey with it - but DON'T remove it. Tanks have taken enough hits. This patch we lose mist form and soft taunts and QoL have been on a steady decline for 5 patches.

emilyhyoyeon

Jackey wrote: »

I agree that something needs to be done about the other staves in endgame PvE. Specially the Lightning staff, because it's still a dps loss to use it on a class with many AOE abilities.
The Frost staff did get some adjustments already and I think it’s okay for niche builds.

The problem here is PvP because you're wrong about Lightning staff only being used to buff Dark Convergence. It's actually a good viable option and is frequently used on many builds.

The idea is to make Lightning and Frost staves more desirable in a trial group because xyz. The result would be that you'd reach optimal dps if some of the DDs in a trial group use those options without making it stronger than Inferno staff.
I think it would help a little bit to diversify endgame PvE.

Ultimately the 10% increase to all single target damage (includes light attacks, enchants, etc) on fire staff is why it's so good in PVE/trial content. There's more to fire staff than just the 10% bonus but the issue, at least like 90%, comes down to the current ancient knowledge passive.

And it doesn't help that the main AOE destruction abilities (things fire staff seemingly would fall lower in the damage aspect than lightning due to not having an AOE damage passive), get bonus damage in their tooltips anyway. Fire elemental rage gets 15% damage increase. Fire WoE gives extra damage to burning enemies.

Vylaera

Grandchamp1989 wrote: »

Tanks need their block mitigation from destru staff. Destru staff tanking is meta and pretty much mandatory to proc crusher and have access to ranged interrupt. If you move the block mitigation to a passive (maybe in heavy armor skill line) I would be okey with it - but DON'T remove it.

The block bonuses should get moved to Tri Focus where there are already tanky benefits, those being "Fully-charged Ice Staff Heavy Attacks grants you a damage shield that absorbs 4000 damage. While an Ice Staff is equipped, blocking costs Magicka instead of Stamina."

Stack the current Ancient Knowledge tank passives into Tri Focus for ice tanks so that the staff isn't gimped entirely for frost warden dps. So it reads "Fully-charged Ice Staff Heavy Attacks grants you a damage shield that absorbs 4000 damage. While an Ice Staff is equipped, blocking costs Magicka instead of Stamina. Equipping an Ice Staff reduces the cost of blocking by 36% and increases the amount of damage you block by 20%." sure it would be a loaded passive, but I think it was weird for frost staves to be used for tanking anyway.

emilyhyoyeon

BroughBreaux wrote: »

Grandchamp1989 wrote: »

Tanks need their block mitigation from destru staff. Destru staff tanking is meta and pretty much mandatory to proc crusher and have access to ranged interrupt. If you move the block mitigation to a passive (maybe in heavy armor skill line) I would be okey with it - but DON'T remove it.

The block bonuses should get moved to Tri Focus where there are already tanky benefits, those being "Fully-charged Ice Staff Heavy Attacks grants you a damage shield that absorbs 4000 damage. While an Ice Staff is equipped, blocking costs Magicka instead of Stamina."

Stack the current Ancient Knowledge tank passives into Tri Focus for ice tanks so that the staff isn't gimped entirely for frost warden dps. So it reads "Fully-charged Ice Staff Heavy Attacks grants you a damage shield that absorbs 4000 damage. While an Ice Staff is equipped, blocking costs Magicka instead of Stamina. Equipping an Ice Staff reduces the cost of blocking by 36% and increases the amount of damage you block by 20%." sure it would be a loaded passive, but I think it was weird for frost staves to be used for tanking anyway.

Another option is to attach the magicka blocking to the Bulwark CP in case people are worried about ice staff being ''too good'' with offense and defense (people have said essentially that to me)

Vylaera

emilyhyoyeon wrote: »

BroughBreaux wrote: »

Grandchamp1989 wrote: »

Tanks need their block mitigation from destru staff. Destru staff tanking is meta and pretty much mandatory to proc crusher and have access to ranged interrupt. If you move the block mitigation to a passive (maybe in heavy armor skill line) I would be okey with it - but DON'T remove it.

The block bonuses should get moved to Tri Focus where there are already tanky benefits, those being "Fully-charged Ice Staff Heavy Attacks grants you a damage shield that absorbs 4000 damage. While an Ice Staff is equipped, blocking costs Magicka instead of Stamina."

Stack the current Ancient Knowledge tank passives into Tri Focus for ice tanks so that the staff isn't gimped entirely for frost warden dps. So it reads "Fully-charged Ice Staff Heavy Attacks grants you a damage shield that absorbs 4000 damage. While an Ice Staff is equipped, blocking costs Magicka instead of Stamina. Equipping an Ice Staff reduces the cost of blocking by 36% and increases the amount of damage you block by 20%." sure it would be a loaded passive, but I think it was weird for frost staves to be used for tanking anyway.

Another option is to attach the magicka blocking to the Bulwark CP in case people are worried about ice staff being ''too good'' with offense and defense (people have said essentially that to me)

That's a good suggestion. If left in the passives, Frost staff would immediately become BiS for PvP mag specs overnight with the penetration bonus and bonuses to durability. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing since magicka is already underperforming in PvP simply by the nature of PvP being heavily reliant on Weapon Damage stacking and lots of stamina for break free and roll dodging as well as mag needing to wear light armor which has horrible defense and causes you to take more martial damage. People would need to slot CP to get that bonus so there's a balanced tradeoff.

All in all though, even if it weren't moved to CP, it wouldn't be overpowered considering those tanky bonuses still aren't as good as what stam specs get simply by virtue of wearing medium armor and being able to roll dodge and break free more often and at less consequence than mag specs. If anything, it would be more balanced this way than it is now.

AcadianPaladin

I think the change that destro staves need is the elimination of tanking features and to focus purely on. . . destruction. Create a new weapon line for a new tanking staff. Presently, destro staves are quite suboptimized for either destro or tanking because they are trying to combine two disparate functions. There is a staff line totally focused on healing. So should there be one for tanking.

Vylaera

AcadianPaladin wrote: »

I think the change that destro staves need is the elimination of tanking features and to focus purely on. . . destruction. Create a new weapon line for a new tanking staff. Presently, destro staves are quite suboptimized for either destro or tanking because they are trying to combine two disparate functions. There is a staff line totally focused on healing. So should there be one for tanking.

While that's true, I don' think it would be good for them to make that radical of a change. Moving all the tank benefits into one passive to allow Ice Staff to be a viable destruction weapon would suffice. Maybe they could drop the damage shield from Tri Focus (since I seriously doubt tanks actually get any benefit from that anyway, 4000 isn't much when boss attacks deal like 8 times that) and replace it with a different functionality like applying a debuff like minor vulnerability or breach that's still beneficial for both tanks in optimized groups, dps in unoptimized groups, and PvP players.

Amottica

I do not see how the ancient knowledge passive was designed to be equivalent to Twin Blade Blunt or Heavy Weapon passives as they are clearly not the same. It appears much more likely that Zenimax wanted to add more flavor to the choices between the various destruction staves.

Looking at the lightning stave passive increasing AoE damage, it makes sense because lightning does AoE damage in the game. The Mage fight in AA demonstrates this very well. Further, the heavy attack does AoE damage. When looking at the fire staff heavy attack, it does additional damage which is of course single target. This somewhat is inline with the ancient knowledge passive for the fire staff as well.

Further, the suggestion being made appears as though it would increase the power creep in the game. Power creep has been a problem in ESO.

Adding here. I also disagree with homogenizing the weapons like this.

DrSlaughtr

I'm so tired of hearing about build diversity and theory crafting. 😆😆😆

I'm kidding. But seriously, lightning staff as is works great if you build your character around aoe. Having said that, I think the OP's suggestions aren't terrible other than making the ice staff unusable for tanks.

Oh and that 10% damage you get from flame staff is better than the flat damage increase you get from swords, iirc.

Artim_X

I do a lot of aoe damage on my lightning staff build (unstable wall, lightning flood, and lightning heavies). If you build for it the current passives are fine.

Vylaera

Amottica wrote: »

I do not see how the ancient knowledge passive was designed to be equivalent to Twin Blade Blunt or Heavy Weapon passives as they are clearly not the same. It appears much more likely that Zenimax wanted to add more flavor to the choices between the various destruction staves.

It clearly is meant to be a mirror, I don't know how else to explain it other than simply that it adds additional bonuses to each weapon type

Amottica wrote: »

Looking at the lightning stave passive increasing AoE damage, it makes sense because lightning does AoE damage in the game. The Mage fight in AA demonstrates this very well. Further, the heavy attack does AoE damage. When looking at the fire staff heavy attack, it does additional damage which is of course single target. This somewhat is inline with the ancient knowledge passive for the fire staff as well.

They designed content around game functionality? No way! Doesn't mean it's good functionality when it limits builds and destroys certain class identities like sorcs using lightning and wardens using frost when neither of those two staves are worth anything in challenging endgame content and people will outright refuse to group with you if you use them anyway.

Amottica wrote: »

Further, the suggestion being made appears as though it would increase the power creep in the game. Power creep has been a problem in ESO.

It does the opposite, if you read the post. 10% damage is more than 284 weapon/spell damage, more critical damage isn't necessary in endgame content since the crit cap is already being exceeded and people will have to stop sourcing crit damage to accommodate, and I don't think I even need to explain why extra penetration is completely unnecessary in even a semi coordinated group in PvE.

Amottica wrote: »

Adding here. I also disagree with homogenizing the weapons like this.

It's not homogenization, it's consistency. This is something that's obviously broken, this is a fix that is consistent with the other weapons. People throw around homogenization but do you know what that actually means? This change doesn't make an Inferno Staff and a Greatsword interchangeable, they still have vastly different roles in the sandbox. Homogenization would be the opposite of what I just described.

Vylaera

TheEndBringer wrote: »

lightning staff as is works great if you build your character around aoe. Having said that, I think the OP's suggestions aren't terrible other than making the ice staff unusable for tanks.

No, you're framing it wrong. It ONLY works great if you build for AOE, it doesn't work great for anything else. The whole point, which you missed, what that certain classes encourage you to use certain elemental damage types, sorcerer and warden, but neither of those damage types are viable endgame. Your AOE build will not be accepted in a trial and good luck killing literally anyone with lightning splash in Cyrodiil. You also didn't read where I said the tank passives shouldn't be removed and there were multiple suggestions and comments going back and forth about where they should be moved to.

TheEndBringer wrote: »

Oh and that 10% damage you get from flame staff is better than the flat damage increase you get from swords, iirc.

I addressed that and that's not a bad thing. I said "This change would ultimately be a slight, and I emphasize slight, damage loss for endgame PvE, but the benefits far outweigh the costs."
Damage is already too high, it getting nerfed by like 2% isn't going to end the world. A year ago people could scarce parse 80k, now people can parse 100k on a bad day. God forbid there's a 2% damage nerf or some other likewise sub-double-digit nerf to damage in order to make the meta less ridgid and open up different build opportunities.

ESO_Nightingale

tbh, for frost i'd move the mag block cost to a new red slotted cp with ranking up in additional blocking cost reduction. i think it's possible to keep ancient knowledge as is, but we need better damage morphs. unstable wall of frost needs to match unstable wall of fire in terms of damage output, and the frost based effects of pulsar and icy rage are awful.

Ksariyu

There's a ton of reasons staves are currently unbalanced, and they're mostly all the same reasons the game itself is so unbalanced right now. While yes, the melee weapons may have more balance amongst themselves, they're still weaker as a whole compared to Inferno staves.
Quite honestly the passive itself wouldn't even need to exist if not for ZoS's insistence that Frost be exclusively tanky. Most of the skills in the line already change effects based on the element type, but this passive is one of the biggest reasons Inferno is so much better for DPS. However, the fact that all the elements have different effects is exactly why changing them to mirror Heavy Weapons wouldn't work either.
Ultimately though, the overall design of encounters, bosses, skill lines, allowing gear swapping during trials, the lack of strength in certain buffs (Like the AoE increase in Ancient Knowledge), and probably so many other things I'm forgetting right now. . . those are the real reasons weapon types across the board are unbalanced, and as a result why there's no build diversity.

Amottica

BroughBreaux wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

I do not see how the ancient knowledge passive was designed to be equivalent to Twin Blade Blunt or Heavy Weapon passives as they are clearly not the same. It appears much more likely that Zenimax wanted to add more flavor to the choices between the various destruction staves.

It clearly is meant to be a mirror, I don't know how else to explain it other than simply that it adds additional bonuses to each weapon type

Amottica wrote: »

Looking at the lightning stave passive increasing AoE damage, it makes sense because lightning does AoE damage in the game. The Mage fight in AA demonstrates this very well. Further, the heavy attack does AoE damage. When looking at the fire staff heavy attack, it does additional damage which is of course single target. This somewhat is inline with the ancient knowledge passive for the fire staff as well.

They designed content around game functionality? No way! Doesn't mean it's good functionality when it limits builds and destroys certain class identities like sorcs using lightning and wardens using frost when neither of those two staves are worth anything in challenging endgame content and people will outright refuse to group with you if you use them anyway.

Amottica wrote: »

Further, the suggestion being made appears as though it would increase the power creep in the game. Power creep has been a problem in ESO.

It does the opposite, if you read the post. 10% damage is more than 284 weapon/spell damage, more critical damage isn't necessary in endgame content since the crit cap is already being exceeded and people will have to stop sourcing crit damage to accommodate, and I don't think I even need to explain why extra penetration is completely unnecessary in even a semi coordinated group in PvE.

Amottica wrote: »

Adding here. I also disagree with homogenizing the weapons like this.

It's not homogenization, it's consistency. This is something that's obviously broken, this is a fix that is consistent with the other weapons. People throw around homogenization but do you know what that actually means? This change doesn't make an Inferno Staff and a Greatsword interchangeable, they still have vastly different roles in the sandbox. Homogenization would be the opposite of what I just described.

1. If it was clearly a mirror then it would offer increased damage to one staff type, crit chance to another, and penetration to the third. Since it does not even try to do that it is clearly not a mirror. Granted, everyone can have their own opinions but mine is based on the very distinctive and solid differences between the two, not the small similarity.
2. I merely stated the obvious that lightning is strongly related to AoE with multiple references for how lightning works in-game to support my comments. This also heralds back to #1 in that there are other influences to the design of the passive so it is not a mirror of TBB regardless of the slight similarity to one aspect of TBB.