PTS Update 33 - Feedback Thread for Combat & Classes

Tannus15

Susurrus wrote: »

I am really a one character guy. Magsorc since the beginning. But I have to say, I am loving playing around with hurricane and bound armaments. Having two proc spells in my rotation (c-frags) is really fun.

So thanks! Early testing is promising for an enjoyable update.

it's real good.

guarstompemoji

imidazole wrote: »

Hey, quick feedback to massive cost increase of Blessing of Protection and morphs and opinion of one end-game healer (PC EU, Stress Tested)
@ZOS_GinaBruno

Cost and duration increase are not a good or meaningful change.
TLDR: It would be understandable and fine if provided buffs (minor berserk and minor resolve) were smart
why --->

Since game release, Combat Prayer has never been a smart buff - which was successfully bypassed by smart positining of the group by splitting into 2 smaller groups of 6 people each. However, we as players cant afford such strict positioning in every ingame instance, for example Cloudrest or Rockgrove due to both support and group positioning so for better ultimes we need to press it more often than twice in a tooltip duration. Increasing the cost will make keeping up this uptimes harder in a way, as you would afford less casts of it, and increased duration won't really solve it either, because buff is not smart.

Along several years/patches decreasing healing potential has been a constant topic, and by implementing this change you're not really getting wanted result.
I'll briefly explain why - in any PVE environment (I have no clue about organized PVP so won't say anything, but pretty sure what I say about PVE also happens in Cyro pugs) majority of healing comes from heal over time abilities such as Illustrious healing/Energy orb/Altar and morphs/class hots. Combat prayer is used as a buff + burst heal in a situations of big incoming damage but it is normally 3-5th in the list of abilities contributing to all raw healing done. You probably also noticed that in certain builds it is widely used as a "spammable" - which is big true in case of classes with rather underwhelming group healing utility such as templars - because the only reason to have one in group is either Minor Breach when needed - rarely now, as tanks provide it with Pierce Armor in most of encounters (excluding Lokkestiz HM and several cases where MT is responsible for Brittle, or MT goes offensive while basically being a DPS with taunt) which is minority of cases, and in majority of them Templars are only used for providing Minor Sorcery to the group which is 1 cast per 20 seconds. People spam Prayer because they mostly have nothing to do. Some spam Radiating regen which is not better in any way. On a contrary, Necromancers who have to cast empower 8 times in 20 seconds to keep up good uptime on a group - an expensive skill btw, will have to cast even more expensive skill as an effective burst heal, making use of such item as Pearls of Elnhofey very close to impossible because of huge blow to sustain (you also removed interaction of Pearls with Mend wounds, ye, which was here since Pearls release in Markarth and get nerfed only after becoming popular in Necro builds - the only class which actually needed it to be able to benefit from pearls on nearly every ability cast, while other classes ultigen from Pearls remains unchanged and untouched but thats another topic), and by implementing more and more sets which are tied to Ultimate use/amount this spec will be pretty much dead. To prevent that you could maybe increase duration of Empower then, or maybe make it cheaper! You're not getting rid of Prayer being spammable for some classes, and make it extreme for other classes, but just force people to change mundus stone to Atronach or take vAS restoration staff to be able to sustain such. Or maybe do constant heavy attacks, which I should say is not viable and enjoyable, not only for me but for lots of people in this game, from the feedback I am hearing.


Either make it smart, or do not increase cost that much
Thank you

Don't want this one getting lost. Folks, your healer's main "spam heal" just went up in cost from 3500 to 4800, and it isn't a smart heal.

How this is done need examined, but please don't let this issue fall to the wayside. Poster is an experienced healer, and offers some suggestions.

Seraphayel

So did people already test Stamina skills as Magicka or Magicks builds as Stamina? Are they working well? Does the scaling work? Can I use Curse/Frags on my Stamsorc or Bound Armaments on my MagSorc?

Tannus15

Seraphayel wrote: »

So did people already test Stamina skills as Magicka or Magicks builds as Stamina? Are they working well? Does the scaling work? Can I use Curse/Frags on my Stamsorc or Bound Armaments on my MagSorc?

literally scroll up 2 posts for mag sorc

here is a stam sorc using ele weapon and frags
note, you have to use a mag spammable if you want the frag proc. i could use frags as spammable but i hate the cast time so i didn't

Tannus15

different classes are going to get more or less mileage from the ability change.

bound armaments is really strong single target and boosts mag sorc by a lot both in raw damage and sustain.

nightblades on the other hand only really have a different focus morph which will help a little with sustain and need less refreshing so a couple of extra GCD.

not every class has a good stam morph they can take advantage of and using an off stat spammable requires using max main stat, off stat regen food (max mag, stam regen)

here is another things you can do:

mag sorc with a bow back bar

p00tx

imidazole wrote: »

Hey, quick feedback to massive cost increase of Blessing of Protection and morphs and opinion of one end-game healer (PC EU, Stress Tested)
@ZOS_GinaBruno

Cost and duration increase are not a good or meaningful change.
TLDR: It would be understandable and fine if provided buffs (minor berserk and minor resolve) were smart
why --->

Since game release, Combat Prayer has never been a smart buff - which was successfully bypassed by smart positining of the group by splitting into 2 smaller groups of 6 people each. However, we as players cant afford such strict positioning in every ingame instance, for example Cloudrest or Rockgrove due to both support and group positioning so for better ultimes we need to press it more often than twice in a tooltip duration. Increasing the cost will make keeping up this uptimes harder in a way, as you would afford less casts of it, and increased duration won't really solve it either, because buff is not smart.

Along several years/patches decreasing healing potential has been a constant topic, and by implementing this change you're not really getting wanted result.
I'll briefly explain why - in any PVE environment (I have no clue about organized PVP so won't say anything, but pretty sure what I say about PVE also happens in Cyro pugs) majority of healing comes from heal over time abilities such as Illustrious healing/Energy orb/Altar and morphs/class hots. Combat prayer is used as a buff + burst heal in a situations of big incoming damage but it is normally 3-5th in the list of abilities contributing to all raw healing done. You probably also noticed that in certain builds it is widely used as a "spammable" - which is big true in case of classes with rather underwhelming group healing utility such as templars - because the only reason to have one in group is either Minor Breach when needed - rarely now, as tanks provide it with Pierce Armor in most of encounters (excluding Lokkestiz HM and several cases where MT is responsible for Brittle, or MT goes offensive while basically being a DPS with taunt) which is minority of cases, and in majority of them Templars are only used for providing Minor Sorcery to the group which is 1 cast per 20 seconds. People spam Prayer because they mostly have nothing to do. Some spam Radiating regen which is not better in any way. On a contrary, Necromancers who have to cast empower 8 times in 20 seconds to keep up good uptime on a group - an expensive skill btw, will have to cast even more expensive skill as an effective burst heal, making use of such item as Pearls of Elnhofey very close to impossible because of huge blow to sustain (you also removed interaction of Pearls with Mend wounds, ye, which was here since Pearls release in Markarth and get nerfed only after becoming popular in Necro builds - the only class which actually needed it to be able to benefit from pearls on nearly every ability cast, while other classes ultigen from Pearls remains unchanged and untouched but thats another topic), and by implementing more and more sets which are tied to Ultimate use/amount this spec will be pretty much dead. To prevent that you could maybe increase duration of Empower then, or maybe make it cheaper! You're not getting rid of Prayer being spammable for some classes, and make it extreme for other classes, but just force people to change mundus stone to Atronach or take vAS restoration staff to be able to sustain such. Or maybe do constant heavy attacks, which I should say is not viable and enjoyable, not only for me but for lots of people in this game, from the feedback I am hearing.


Either make it smart, or do not increase cost that much
Thank you

This is a fantastic rundown of the reasons the Combat Prayer change is not a positive one, in its current iteration. The buffs associated with this skill (minor berserk and resolve) and the limitations of the functionality of the skill (no smart targeting of the buffs) necessitate the use of it as a universal spammable for all healer specs across the board. Think of it being similar to a dps using a specific skill as a spammable in between dot applications in a rotation. You wouldn't make a commonly used dps spammable this expensive (or at least I'd hope you wouldn't), so the healer spammable should follow the same set of cost rules.

Further, the buff to the healing output was never actually needed. I mean, it's nice, but not worth the cost increase. There are very few instances where a larger burst heal is going to be the thing that saves a group from death. If your goal was to help increase healing output, it would be better applied to hots like energy orb or illustrious springs.

kookster

Seraphayel wrote: »

So did people already test Stamina skills as Magicka or Magicks builds as Stamina? Are they working well? Does the scaling work? Can I use Curse/Frags on my Stamsorc or Bound Armaments on my MagSorc?

Curse yes, crystal fragments not really cause it requires you to cast a magicka skill, which I think should be changed to any skill.

luchtt

I have another post where I discuss this in the PTS forum area, but ill post it here again. For the heavy attack/light attack sets, since we don't know any developer comments behind the reason you nerfed this into the ground, I'll simply assume it's either 1: Unifying sets to be scaled on spell damage and weapon damage, so that outliers like these sets no longer seem so outlier-y, but unfortunately did not realize where these sets got their dps from, or how it scaled thus ending up nerfing them severely.

Or 2nd: this is an intentional nerf to combat heavy attack builds in PvP where they are a bit loose. I'll coment on this one a bit here, the reason you see these absurdly high dmg ticks from lightning heavies in pvp is mainly because of off balance, it severely increases the HA dmg, so another thing you could do is nerf that aspect of it, but there's a much easier solution to make almost everyone happy, here demonstrated with Undaunted Unweaver's set bonus changed:

(2 items) Adds 1096 Maximum Magicka
(3 items) Adds 1096 Maximum Magicka
(4 items) Adds 657 Critical Chance
(5 items) When you use an ability that costs Stamina while in combat, you increase the damage of your Light and Heavy Attacks by 1685 for 10 seconds.

to:

(2 items) Adds 1096 Maximum Magicka
(3 items) Adds 1096 Maximum Magicka
(4 items) Adds 657 Critical Chance
(5 items) When you use an ability that costs Stamina while in combat, you increase the damage of your Light and Heavy Attacks by 1685 against non-player enemies for 10 seconds.

I don't think anyone is complaining about these sets in pve, except maybe some toxic casuals, the only real problem is these massive off balance LHA ticks, that go up to like 40k damage in pvp. it's frustrating to play against I understand, and if they really do deserve a nerf I think this change would be perfect for it. The only problem would be that these sets no longer are availible for pvp use other than the 4 piece bonuses, but I think the question of whether this build should be nerfed like this suggestion or the current PTS way is pretty clear.

If you really wanted to keep these sets in pvp, you could for example add a tooltip like this:

(5 items) When you use an ability that costs Stamina while in combat, you increase the damage of your Light and Heavy Attacks by 1685 for 10 seconds, this bonus is halved against player enemies.

To put it simply: the reason these sets are a bit weird is because they seem a bit overtuned in pvp, but still remain a nice balanced niche for lower skill players, due to their inherent minimum damage due to the flat damage increase. You can even scale up these builds with a good parse to hit up to 80-90k ish dps on the dummy, 90k being pretty much the absolute limit. This is a fairly good dps number, and you can get into most trials and clear them effectively with this type of build. For build diversity, this type of heavy attack build fits perfectly I would say. However, with these massive nerfs, my 90k dps build now hits only about 65k if I'm REALLY trying.

Quoting someone who commented on my original post:

Allowing for build diversity is what you would like to encourage with the new changes however the changes to these sets make them so weak as to be pointless, effectively killing off a viable DPS build. Reconsidering these changes is a must in order to ensure that the playstyle remains playable. 90k dps is an acceptable top end for a high sustain setup however 65k is so low as to be barely allowed into basically any vet trial.

Tannus15

@luchtt wait, how can you lose 25k dps from this change? That makes no sense.

katorga

Firstmep wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

So only one class is stuck without native class access to major sorcery/brutality?

And one class gets major/minor sorcery/brutality, plus a 6% class passive to that stat, plus major crit buff.

That's not right.

Which class gets both minor sorcery and brutality?

Correction Illuminate passive (minor sorcery) is group, so not being combined. My bad.

master_vanargand

Need change Drain Power's Major Brutality and Major Sorcery to Siphoning Strikes.
And Drain Power, Sap Essence, Power Extraction needs to be redesigned.

[My idea]
Change Drain Power's Major Brutality and Major Sorcery to Siphoning Strikes.
Change Minor Cowardice of Power Extraction to Drain Power.
Adds an effect to Power Extraction that "the more enemies hit, the more damage Power Extraction do".
(It's like the Titanic Cleave of the Master Weapon set for two-handed skill)

The summary is as follows.

Drain Power
AoE damage + Minor Cowardice.

Power Extraction (Stamina Morph)
AoE damage + Minor Cowardice + "the more enemies hit, the more damage Power Extraction do".

Sap Essence (Magicka Morph)
AoE damage + Minor Cowardice + "Same heal effect as before".

Siphoning Strikes
Major Brutality and Major Sorcery + "Same effect as before".

Nightblade need ZoS's love.

N00BxV1

Volatile Armor (morph): The Area of Effect damage from this ability now scales off your Physical and Spell Resistance as well, rather than Spell Damage and Max Magicka.

Why scale this ability's aoe/dot damage from physical and spell resistance? Hurricane, Boundless Storm, etc. isn't scaled from resistances yet those are also "armor" buffs that do damage. It doesn't seem fair to me. Been using this skill on my MagDK as an extra aoe/dot for years. If a tank used this the damage would've already been low due to low magicka/spell damage. Please stop trying to shoehorn the DK into the tank role. People already complain that DK's are too tanky, well that's because it's the only thing you want them to do.

Burning Embers (morph): This ability now heals for up to 100% of the damage done any time it deals damage, rather than up to 75% of the total damage done when the effect ends.

This sounds like an amazing change. If it is, then thank you!

[Edit for additional quote]

ESO_Nightingale

The warden changes this patch are incredibly lackluster especially when so much work needs to be done.

the lotus flower changes are rather boring, but definitely a lot better than what we have on live servers. it would be really nice to have the green lotus visuals on lotus blossom as well for visual feedback and because they look really good compared to lotus blossom's.

the change to nature's grasp for standardisation completely ignores the fact that it's a targeted skill that is delayed and forcibly repositions you. people barely use the skill anymore and getting another nerf is kicking the skill while it's down. why should we ever use this skill? you keep removing reasons to use it ZOS.

The deep fissure change is insulting because it really doesn't mean much. we already cast the skill every 3-4 gcds so the major breach duration we had before was sufficient. We could have had a change that created a genuine reason to use deep fissure in pve but now that sub assault does almost as much as it but saves GCDs and applies a better type there's even less reason to use it now. Deep Fissure needs to stand out. major breach is so much worse than a recast in pve, I'm not saying it should be removed since it's useful for the few remaining magdens in pvp but something should be added to deep fissure along with getting a damage type change to frost. if, for example it did a DoT to the target or in the location where the shalks emerged over 3 seconds that'd give people more of a reason to actually use it over sub assault.

we still lack a solid self burst heal that can compete with other classes, green balance needs to provide this.
we still lack a solid class offensive stun that we can use from range. Arctic blast is an awful offensive stun.

luchtt

Tannus15 wrote: »

@luchtt wait, how can you lose 25k dps from this change? That makes no sense.

I'm not very good at the math, but basically the way HA builds stack the heavy attacks is like, it stacks up the damage, and all of those can crit together in a stacking way, and they're also affected by some multipliers like off balance (significantly) and empower (not very significantly, but still enough to make it worth it. empower only affects the base HA damage, so for example if I hit a max HA crit on live, which is about 67k on the trial dummy for my build, it would be only 61k without empower. but without the sets and with empower, it would be closer to 20-30k, thats the best way I can explain it)

The reason I lose so much damage, or well everyone loses so much damage using these sets, is because spell damage barely affects heavy attack damage. When I test my build with vamp toggle, which adds spell damage a LOT, and using ring of the pale order instead of kilt, this reduces my damage a lot. I can reach up to 13000 spell damage, up from about 4000 flat, and the damage is only 2k more dps than if I just use the kilt. Any other build reaching that much spell damage would see insane increases, even while dropping the kilt. I think the ratio of heavy attack damage compared to spell dmg that affects it is like 1:4 or something (1 being 1 unit of a flat stat bonus, compared to 4 being spell damage, but this is just a guess. could be more could be less, whatever the exact value is, it is a LOT less than a flat dmg boost)

peacenote

p00tx wrote: »

imidazole wrote: »

Hey, quick feedback to massive cost increase of Blessing of Protection and morphs and opinion of one end-game healer (PC EU, Stress Tested)
@ZOS_GinaBruno

Cost and duration increase are not a good or meaningful change.
TLDR: It would be understandable and fine if provided buffs (minor berserk and minor resolve) were smart
why --->

Since game release, Combat Prayer has never been a smart buff - which was successfully bypassed by smart positining of the group by splitting into 2 smaller groups of 6 people each. However, we as players cant afford such strict positioning in every ingame instance, for example Cloudrest or Rockgrove due to both support and group positioning so for better ultimes we need to press it more often than twice in a tooltip duration. Increasing the cost will make keeping up this uptimes harder in a way, as you would afford less casts of it, and increased duration won't really solve it either, because buff is not smart.

Along several years/patches decreasing healing potential has been a constant topic, and by implementing this change you're not really getting wanted result.
I'll briefly explain why - in any PVE environment (I have no clue about organized PVP so won't say anything, but pretty sure what I say about PVE also happens in Cyro pugs) majority of healing comes from heal over time abilities such as Illustrious healing/Energy orb/Altar and morphs/class hots. Combat prayer is used as a buff + burst heal in a situations of big incoming damage but it is normally 3-5th in the list of abilities contributing to all raw healing done. You probably also noticed that in certain builds it is widely used as a "spammable" - which is big true in case of classes with rather underwhelming group healing utility such as templars - because the only reason to have one in group is either Minor Breach when needed - rarely now, as tanks provide it with Pierce Armor in most of encounters (excluding Lokkestiz HM and several cases where MT is responsible for Brittle, or MT goes offensive while basically being a DPS with taunt) which is minority of cases, and in majority of them Templars are only used for providing Minor Sorcery to the group which is 1 cast per 20 seconds. People spam Prayer because they mostly have nothing to do. Some spam Radiating regen which is not better in any way. On a contrary, Necromancers who have to cast empower 8 times in 20 seconds to keep up good uptime on a group - an expensive skill btw, will have to cast even more expensive skill as an effective burst heal, making use of such item as Pearls of Elnhofey very close to impossible because of huge blow to sustain (you also removed interaction of Pearls with Mend wounds, ye, which was here since Pearls release in Markarth and get nerfed only after becoming popular in Necro builds - the only class which actually needed it to be able to benefit from pearls on nearly every ability cast, while other classes ultigen from Pearls remains unchanged and untouched but thats another topic), and by implementing more and more sets which are tied to Ultimate use/amount this spec will be pretty much dead. To prevent that you could maybe increase duration of Empower then, or maybe make it cheaper! You're not getting rid of Prayer being spammable for some classes, and make it extreme for other classes, but just force people to change mundus stone to Atronach or take vAS restoration staff to be able to sustain such. Or maybe do constant heavy attacks, which I should say is not viable and enjoyable, not only for me but for lots of people in this game, from the feedback I am hearing.


Either make it smart, or do not increase cost that much
Thank you

This is a fantastic rundown of the reasons the Combat Prayer change is not a positive one, in its current iteration. The buffs associated with this skill (minor berserk and resolve) and the limitations of the functionality of the skill (no smart targeting of the buffs) necessitate the use of it as a universal spammable for all healer specs across the board. Think of it being similar to a dps using s specific skill as a spammable in between dot applications in a rotation. You wouldn't make a commonly used dps spammable this expensive (or at least I'd hope you wouldn't), so the healer spammable should follow the same set of cost rules.

Further, the buff to the healing output was never actually needed. I mean, it's nice, but not worth the cost increase. There are very few instances where a larger burst heal is going to be the thing that saves a group from death. if your goal was to help increase healing output, it would be better applied to hots like energy orb or illustrious springs.

I just want to say I agree with all that has been said here. I'm not a theorycrafter but just finished the notes and this one definitely caught my eye. I instinctively felt what all of you have so elegantly written out properly.

I have not much to add except we've had a continuous erosion of spammable abilities as healers and it is extremely boring if there is nothing you can do to fill the gaps. Combat should be fast-paced for healers along with everyone else. Springs now can't stack; if you cast it again it moves. Orbs can no longer be cast multiple times; if you cast it again the one that's out disappears and it re-starts its slow moving path. Regen is almost banned from trials except in niche situations. And for templars BoL was nerfed so many times as to be laughable. It kind of used to be a nice filler heal when it hit more people and went all directions. And plus the Combat Prayer buff is not needed as much due to Kinras being standard so its value as a spammable had become its main drawing point this patch. If CP is too expensive we'll need to drop it to keep up the HOTs over the group as priority and there doesn't seem to be anything we can use to take its place. I hope I'm missing something but this seems like an unnecessary and negative change for the purpose of standardization.

Kory

Can Necro's get Major Brutality too?

If I were to be asked to make a suggestion maybe put it on Bitter Harvest and one or both of it's morphs. Or Death Scythe.

burglar

After 6 years, I think melee magicka nightblade will be viable for more than a couple of months - before we always had to exploit some overtuned set or ability, and lost viability when things were patched. I'm on console, so I haven't been able to try any of this yet, but thank you guys so much for making these changes!

I still wish nightblade had a class ability that provided major sorc/brutality without needing to hit a target first. Momentum will do, but this means that to achieve that most melee magblades will need to be 2h, which isn't so bad - it beats being forced to use a staff! I really wish y'all would follow the recommendation of others that propose adding major sorc/brut to siphoning attacks.

Tommy_The_Gun

I wanted to point something out:

Class skill: Mass Hysteria (Aspect of Terror morph):
Range: Radius: 6 meters
Cost: 3780 Magicka

Summon a dark spirit to terrify up to 6 enemies, causing them to cower in fear for 3 seconds.
Morph effect: Increases the amount of targets who can be feared

And:

Guild skill: Turn Evil (Circle of Protection morph)
Range: Radius: 5 meters
Cost: 4590 Stamina

Brand the earth at your location with a rune of protection for 20 seconds. You and your allies in the area gain Minor Protection and Minor Endurance, reducing your damage taken by 5% and increasing your Stamina Recovery by 15%. Upon activation, enemies in the area are feared for 5 seconds.
Morph effect: Enemies in the initial area upon activation are feared.

So, basically, we have:

Class skill that has:
- AOE fear with target cap (6 max) for 3 seconds

Guild skill that has:
- AOE fear without target cap for 5 seconds
- 2 AOE minor buffs for you and your group that lasts for 20 seconds

I am not expert, but It kinda feels like either one of those abilities is way too weak or the other way too strong. Ignoring the fact (as far as I am aware) that class skills are supposed to be a bit stronger than weapon / world / guild skills etc, NB fear (Mass Hysteria) is very lackluster, dull & even outdated. All it does is that it increases target cap (from 3 that base morph has to 6). And that is pretty much it. It fells like it is lacking the auxiliary effect(s). At least the other morph (Manifestation of Terror) has an interesting "trap" mechanics as you can place it on the ground, but the Mass Hysteria morph feels extremely underwhelming. Especially once you compare it to Turn Evil skill, even cost vs effect.

TLDR: Mass Hysteria needs at least a tiny buff, as pretty much everyone is using Turn Evil instead. Lack of balance between two skills that have same use case is obvious.

VarisVaris

The balance in PvP currently isn't really optimal on the live servers right now, some abilities, set and mechanics are clearly overperforming and should be addressed before making things even worse with the upcoming changes.


Skills

Intensive Mender

This skill offers healing way beyond other HoTs while being really cheap and also allows for insane crosshealing capabilities. The easy way out is simply reducing the heal because right now it's simply too strong, this should be done by reducing the overall heal by 25% but increase the duration to 12 seconds this keeps the skill rather cheap but prevents it from basically being a burst heal every time it heals you

Living Dark

This skill has been indirectly buffed to mindbogglingly high healing numbers with the changes to how people can stack spelldamage, but even a build that doesn't fully builds into stacking damage gets more healing out of this ability than other Hots can provide, additionally the way it works makes this heal even better as it always heals you when you take damage and therefore acts as a direct reduction to the damage you take. Depending on who you fight (read this as anything that isn't a full damage build) this ability will keep you alive infinitely with no chance for the enemy to ever kill you, it might even outheal the damage from the skills you're eating.
This ability should retain it's function but have it's healing potential against single targets reduced significantly. Having 5k hps in duels vs another templar from a single skill is just laughable.
Therefore the heal should still have a 500ms cooldown but can only be procced by each target every 2 seconds.
This makes it a great option when fighting outnumbered but prevents it from turning templars into unkillable damage absorbing blobs of doom

Bombard

This skill provides way too much bang for its buck, not only does it deal great damage while being undodgeable, it also comes with a root that you can refresh over and over again on targets who can't break the root in the first place, no other skill offers this much utility by chewing through the enemy's stamina while also helping ball groups to kite and keep people locked in places to nuke them afterwards.
This skill should lose its root and rather gain something else and AoE Root with high damage simply isn't balanced and it won't ever be even if you remove the snare it also offers like you did in Patch v7.3.0

Radiating Regen

This is the biggest offenders when it comes to high survivability of ballgroups and groups in general, this skill is so powerful that the viability of a certain spec instantly increases when it can slot this ability, this goes so far that stamsorc in smallscale runs bow+resto now
This ability has to have it's crosshealing capabilities nerfed significantly, make it so that you can only have 2 Radiating regen active on you (like vigor before it was changed to a single target heal) at any given moment, this way it won't hurt PvE but it will help PvP significantly

Sets
Caluurion's Legacy

This set offers too much burst especially when using it on NB which guarantees a hit in conjunction with cloak, with it being able to crit it's damage numbers went through the roof and now once again allows people to have oneshot gank builds with little to no counterplay depending on how good or bad performance is and if you break-free button is responsive.
The amount of burst this set offers is simply too much and should be split into a direct damage and dot portion to make this set less bursty but keeps it's damage consistent overall.

Draurgkin

This set allows people to achieve burst and pressure numbers that simply shouldn't be reachable with how many different damage instances one can squeeze into those 6 seconds it provides way too much damage compared to other sets.
This set only working against a single target doesn't work as enough of a drawback as you can use this set to obliterate this target, in a situation where you only face a single opponent there is no set that comes even close to the power Draugrkin offers.

Ironblood

This set offers too much survivability while the drawback isn't anywhere near enough to keep this set in check, additionally the potential uptime of the set is really high (66%)
The cooldown of this set should be increased to 25 seconds up from 15 seconds in order to give people a slight chance of killing someone using this set

Other issues
Undeath and CPs

Please read this post as it describes the issue more detailed.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/7510100#Comment_7510100

Harmony

This jewelry trait allows people to generate incredible burst that's not tied to the global cooldown. These synergies often provide more damage than ultimates while only having a 20 seconds cooldown per person. Due to Synergies being able to be stacked this gives groups way more power than they should have access to.
This Trait should be reworked completely. Synergies are fine the way they are without anything buffing them

Crossheals in general

Although I have touched on this a little bit above already by mentioning Intensive mender and radiating regen, I want to emphasize once more that crosshealing in its current iteration is too powerful and often results in fights being endless stalemates that can only be ended by dropping multiple ultimates on a single person because otherwise they'll never die.
This also means that the time between ult drops won't help you make any progress which makes PvP feel very frustrating. It's a cycle of tanking each other's damage and then praying that your ult drop every 2 minutes gets you a kill.
There is no perfect fix for this issue as crossheals scale with the amounts of players involved in a fight.

This is why I propose a new healing reduction added to battle spirit that directly targets crossheals. "Any healing you receive from other players is reduced by X%" in a first iteration it should be tested with a 15% reduction as this change could have big impact on how PvP plays

The upcoming changes that we can currently test on the PTS will further worsen balance.
Hybridization of almost any skills will result in an unhealthy meta where only a single build for each Class will be viable, many skills will become worthless as they won't find their way onto bars as the competition just became way harder.
The potential for gamebreaking combinations has increased significantly, especially when it comes to healing and survivability.
Those changes will have such a strong impact on the meta that it is insanity to push this in one go.
All healing abilities should retain the old scaling in order to prevent Specs to merge completely and also to prevent the survivability to go through the roof.

Two more issues on the PTS:
Burning Embers being changed into a HoT is laughably broken, there is no way this should ever make it to the live server. Magdk has always been built around being forced to fight for their heals, they had to stay in a fight to get their powerlash heals, to recast their burning embers to get the heal early or to heal themselves by using Draw Essence. The addition of Cauterize and Coagulating blood are more than enough to allow magdks to have healing even when they don't face an opponent atm.

Power Bash and morphs counting as Bash damage. I totally get where the idea came from but it is unbalanced as heck. You can easily stack bash damage via bash glyphs, deadlands demolisher and other bash sets. This is totally fine on the live server, however the new interaction with a skill that has the regular meele spammable TT is too much, on non optimised build you can easily reach Power Slam tooltips of 15k without even having the 33% extra damage.
This interaction with additional bash damage for Power Bash should be removed, Power Bash and it's morphs should retain the function of bash to interrupt targets channeling a skill.


I'm confident that tackling all these issues will significantly improve PvP balance and saves us from another unbalanced patch.

gariondavey

Drdeath20 wrote: »

gariondavey wrote: »

Drdeath20 wrote: »

gariondavey wrote: »

Drdeath20 wrote: »

Templar

I am loving this new change to jabs. In pve Damage dealers generally got our buffs from a weapon power potion. Major savagery was made redundant twice over with jabs and camo hunter. Now we are free to pre buff major brutality with a simple jab before combat no different than using any other buff. This change frees templars from using weapon power potions in favor of ultimate generating potions and yes we jab at least once every 10 seconds soo major brutality uptime is a non issue.

This change alone is a net gain in DPS. If shards scales that is another bump in DPS. Add in Jesus beam…

In pvp vamps bane will scale for damage and grant major savagery/prophecy or we passively get it with inner light/camo hunter. If need be we still can pre buff damage with a potion or skill but once in combat we will be jabbing at least once every 10 seconds. No doubt about that. Free’ing templars to use all sorts of potions and using vigor over rally for heals.

I want to say kudos to the developers for attaching this to a core Templar skill. Imagine how annoying it would be if it was attached to solar barrage or ritual of retribution, that would be about as awkward as a football bat. At least we know we will be jabbing.

Sorry, but are you being sarcastic? It would be a million times better on solar barrage. Randomly jabbing before engaging in a fight in PvP is so weird and a waste of a gcd + resources.

Lose empower for the most common major buff. Yeah that’s an easy no. With it being on jabs we lost nothing and gained it on a skill that all Stamplars use and will use every 10seconds. Other than a fight opener I’d have to shoehorn other advocated damage skills in just for good uptime. Anyways we always start a fight with a potion just make yours a weapon power potion after that you are almost guranteed to be jabbing once every 10 seconds.

I'm coming from a pvp perspective. I am not discussing pve.

Losing empower is a dps loss for both pve and pvp. Stamplars have many alternatives to getting major brutality and really outside of an opening burst, you will have better uptime potential to have it on jabs than a scaled up version of anything else plus less global cooldowns.

Rally gives major brutality at all times, even when not attacking. Burst heal. Minor endurance.

Major brutality on jabs is redundant. Dropping rally because you get it in a wonky way from jabs results in you losing 15 percent stam sustain and a burst heal.

From the other thread:

"Currently - jabs + rally
I get - a semi on demand burst heal, major brutality, major savagery on offense, minor endurance
In 2 skills

Pts - jabs + rally
I get - a semi on demand burst heal, majority brutality, minor endurance
In 2 skills

Pts - jabs + camo hunter
I get - major brutality, 3 percent wd on offense bar, a bit of uptime on minor berserk, major savagery that does not carry over to defense bar if it was up
In 2 skills

This is not a win. Losing crit (option 2) or losing defensive and sustain (option 3) are not good, especially on a class that has survival issues even while using bubble + vigor + er + rally + run.

Losing bar space because of this frustrates me because I'm already short on it.

Getting honor the dead is nice, but again, bar space.

With the exception of power of the light being better than purifying light, stamplar is just inferior to magplar.

With the hybridization, there is very little reason to use jabs in PvP over sweeps."

katorga

VarisVaris wrote: »

The balance in PvP currently isn't really optimal on the live servers right now, some abilities, set and mechanics are clearly overperforming and should be addressed before making things even worse with the upcoming changes.


Skills

Intensive Mender

This skill offers healing way beyond other HoTs while being really cheap and also allows for insane crosshealing capabilities. The easy way out is simply reducing the heal because right now it's simply too strong, this should be done by reducing the overall heal by 25% but increase the duration to 12 seconds this keeps the skill rather cheap but prevents it from basically being a burst heal every time it heals you

Living Dark

This skill has been indirectly buffed to mindbogglingly high healing numbers with the changes to how people can stack spelldamage, but even a build that doesn't fully builds into stacking damage gets more healing out of this ability than other Hots can provide, additionally the way it works makes this heal even better as it always heals you when you take damage and therefore acts as a direct reduction to the damage you take. Depending on who you fight (read this as anything that isn't a full damage build) this ability will keep you alive infinitely with no chance for the enemy to ever kill you, it might even outheal the damage from the skills you're eating.
This ability should retain it's function but have it's healing potential against single targets reduced significantly. Having 5k hps in duels vs another templar from a single skill is just laughable.
Therefore the heal should still have a 500ms cooldown but can only be procced by each target every 2 seconds.
This makes it a great option when fighting outnumbered but prevents it from turning templars into unkillable damage absorbing blobs of doom

Bombard

This skill provides way too much bang for its buck, not only does it deal great damage while being undodgeable, it also comes with a root that you can refresh over and over again on targets who can't break the root in the first place, no other skill offers this much utility by chewing through the enemy's stamina while also helping ball groups to kite and keep people locked in places to nuke them afterwards.
This skill should lose its root and rather gain something else and AoE Root with high damage simply isn't balanced and it won't ever be even if you remove the snare it also offers like you did in Patch v7.3.0

Radiating Regen

This is the biggest offenders when it comes to high survivability of ballgroups and groups in general, this skill is so powerful that the viability of a certain spec instantly increases when it can slot this ability, this goes so far that stamsorc in smallscale runs bow+resto now
This ability has to have it's crosshealing capabilities nerfed significantly, make it so that you can only have 2 Radiating regen active on you (like vigor before it was changed to a single target heal) at any given moment, this way it won't hurt PvE but it will help PvP significantly

Sets
Caluurion's Legacy

This set offers too much burst especially when using it on NB which guarantees a hit in conjunction with cloak, with it being able to crit it's damage numbers went through the roof and now once again allows people to have oneshot gank builds with little to no counterplay depending on how good or bad performance is and if you break-free button is responsive.
The amount of burst this set offers is simply too much and should be split into a direct damage and dot portion to make this set less bursty but keeps it's damage consistent overall.

Draurgkin

This set allows people to achieve burst and pressure numbers that simply shouldn't be reachable with how many different damage instances one can squeeze into those 6 seconds it provides way too much damage compared to other sets.
This set only working against a single target doesn't work as enough of a drawback as you can use this set to obliterate this target, in a situation where you only face a single opponent there is no set that comes even close to the power Draugrkin offers.

Ironblood

This set offers too much survivability while the drawback isn't anywhere near enough to keep this set in check, additionally the potential uptime of the set is really high (66%)
The cooldown of this set should be increased to 25 seconds up from 15 seconds in order to give people a slight chance of killing someone using this set

Other issues
Undeath and CPs

Please read this post as it describes the issue more detailed.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/7510100#Comment_7510100

Harmony

This jewelry trait allows people to generate incredible burst that's not tied to the global cooldown. These synergies often provide more damage than ultimates while only having a 20 seconds cooldown per person. Due to Synergies being able to be stacked this gives groups way more power than they should have access to.
This Trait should be reworked completely. Synergies are fine the way they are without anything buffing them

Crossheals in general

Although I have touched on this a little bit above already by mentioning Intensive mender and radiating regen, I want to emphasize once more that crosshealing in its current iteration is too powerful and often results in fights being endless stalemates that can only be ended by dropping multiple ultimates on a single person because otherwise they'll never die.
This also means that the time between ult drops won't help you make any progress which makes PvP feel very frustrating. It's a cycle of tanking each other's damage and then praying that your ult drop every 2 minutes gets you a kill.
There is no perfect fix for this issue as crossheals scale with the amounts of players involved in a fight.

This is why I propose a new healing reduction added to battle spirit that directly targets crossheals. "Any healing you receive from other players is reduced by X%" in a first iteration it should be tested with a 15% reduction as this change could have big impact on how PvP plays

The upcoming changes that we can currently test on the PTS will further worsen balance.
Hybridization of almost any skills will result in an unhealthy meta where only a single build for each Class will be viable, many skills will become worthless as they won't find their way onto bars as the competition just became way harder.
The potential for gamebreaking combinations has increased significantly, especially when it comes to healing and survivability.
Those changes will have such a strong impact on the meta that it is insanity to push this in one go.
All healing abilities should retain the old scaling in order to prevent Specs to merge completely and also to prevent the survivability to go through the roof.

Two more issues on the PTS:
Burning Embers being changed into a HoT is laughably broken, there is no way this should ever make it to the live server. Magdk has always been built around being forced to fight for their heals, they had to stay in a fight to get their powerlash heals, to recast their burning embers to get the heal early or to heal themselves by using Draw Essence. The addition of Cauterize and Coagulating blood are more than enough to allow magdks to have healing even when they don't face an opponent atm.

Power Bash and morphs counting as Bash damage. I totally get where the idea came from but it is unbalanced as heck. You can easily stack bash damage via bash glyphs, deadlands demolisher and other bash sets. This is totally fine on the live server, however the new interaction with a skill that has the regular meele spammable TT is too much, on non optimised build you can easily reach Power Slam tooltips of 15k without even having the 33% extra damage.
This interaction with additional bash damage for Power Bash should be removed, Power Bash and it's morphs should retain the function of bash to interrupt targets channeling a skill.


I'm confident that tackling all these issues will significantly improve PvP balance and saves us from another unbalanced patch.

Battle Spirit having two categories heal yourself and heal others is a really, really, really good idea. But it is a group game, cross healing is a fact of life.

Scaling off highest stats will be broken across the board. If they go that route then all stamina skills need to lose their inherent 15% cost reduction. . Stamina builds which can get better stats than mag will have access to massive heals. Example, my stamsorc will be able to use Matriarch now. My effective weapon damage is way higher than what I can get with a mag build, and I gain a truly massive heal and body block.....really?


The only problem with calling for nerfs based on *this* meta's experience, is next patch is an entirely new meta, and everything you think is a problem now, isn't. Day late. Dollar short. These things need to be called out in PTS or it is too late.

divnyi

Tannus15 wrote: »

@luchtt wait, how can you lose 25k dps from this change? That makes no sense.

Damage increase for each tick of 4 ticks of lightning heavy (before) vs overall damage increase (now).

Those numbers of WD/SD on light & heavies are too tiny to make any difference in any possible scenario.
I do understand why devs are going this way, but they should up the numbers *significantly*.

Eric_Prince

Guess it's time to once again ask for class change tokens. Would be cool if it would be at least one free token, but well... at least give us those tokens.

Zekka

VarisVaris wrote: »

The balance in PvP currently isn't really optimal on the live servers right now, some abilities, set and mechanics are clearly overperforming and should be addressed before making things even worse with the upcoming changes.


Skills

Intensive Mender

This skill offers healing way beyond other HoTs while being really cheap and also allows for insane crosshealing capabilities. The easy way out is simply reducing the heal because right now it's simply too strong, this should be done by reducing the overall heal by 25% but increase the duration to 12 seconds this keeps the skill rather cheap but prevents it from basically being a burst heal every time it heals you

Living Dark

This skill has been indirectly buffed to mindbogglingly high healing numbers with the changes to how people can stack spelldamage, but even a build that doesn't fully builds into stacking damage gets more healing out of this ability than other Hots can provide, additionally the way it works makes this heal even better as it always heals you when you take damage and therefore acts as a direct reduction to the damage you take. Depending on who you fight (read this as anything that isn't a full damage build) this ability will keep you alive infinitely with no chance for the enemy to ever kill you, it might even outheal the damage from the skills you're eating.
This ability should retain it's function but have it's healing potential against single targets reduced significantly. Having 5k hps in duels vs another templar from a single skill is just laughable.
Therefore the heal should still have a 500ms cooldown but can only be procced by each target every 2 seconds.
This makes it a great option when fighting outnumbered but prevents it from turning templars into unkillable damage absorbing blobs of doom

Bombard

This skill provides way too much bang for its buck, not only does it deal great damage while being undodgeable, it also comes with a root that you can refresh over and over again on targets who can't break the root in the first place, no other skill offers this much utility by chewing through the enemy's stamina while also helping ball groups to kite and keep people locked in places to nuke them afterwards.
This skill should lose its root and rather gain something else and AoE Root with high damage simply isn't balanced and it won't ever be even if you remove the snare it also offers like you did in Patch v7.3.0

Radiating Regen

This is the biggest offenders when it comes to high survivability of ballgroups and groups in general, this skill is so powerful that the viability of a certain spec instantly increases when it can slot this ability, this goes so far that stamsorc in smallscale runs bow+resto now
This ability has to have it's crosshealing capabilities nerfed significantly, make it so that you can only have 2 Radiating regen active on you (like vigor before it was changed to a single target heal) at any given moment, this way it won't hurt PvE but it will help PvP significantly

Sets
Caluurion's Legacy

This set offers too much burst especially when using it on NB which guarantees a hit in conjunction with cloak, with it being able to crit it's damage numbers went through the roof and now once again allows people to have oneshot gank builds with little to no counterplay depending on how good or bad performance is and if you break-free button is responsive.
The amount of burst this set offers is simply too much and should be split into a direct damage and dot portion to make this set less bursty but keeps it's damage consistent overall.

Draurgkin

This set allows people to achieve burst and pressure numbers that simply shouldn't be reachable with how many different damage instances one can squeeze into those 6 seconds it provides way too much damage compared to other sets.
This set only working against a single target doesn't work as enough of a drawback as you can use this set to obliterate this target, in a situation where you only face a single opponent there is no set that comes even close to the power Draugrkin offers.

Ironblood

This set offers too much survivability while the drawback isn't anywhere near enough to keep this set in check, additionally the potential uptime of the set is really high (66%)
The cooldown of this set should be increased to 25 seconds up from 15 seconds in order to give people a slight chance of killing someone using this set

Other issues
Undeath and CPs

Please read this post as it describes the issue more detailed.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/7510100#Comment_7510100

Harmony

This jewelry trait allows people to generate incredible burst that's not tied to the global cooldown. These synergies often provide more damage than ultimates while only having a 20 seconds cooldown per person. Due to Synergies being able to be stacked this gives groups way more power than they should have access to.
This Trait should be reworked completely. Synergies are fine the way they are without anything buffing them

Crossheals in general

Although I have touched on this a little bit above already by mentioning Intensive mender and radiating regen, I want to emphasize once more that crosshealing in its current iteration is too powerful and often results in fights being endless stalemates that can only be ended by dropping multiple ultimates on a single person because otherwise they'll never die.
This also means that the time between ult drops won't help you make any progress which makes PvP feel very frustrating. It's a cycle of tanking each other's damage and then praying that your ult drop every 2 minutes gets you a kill.
There is no perfect fix for this issue as crossheals scale with the amounts of players involved in a fight.

This is why I propose a new healing reduction added to battle spirit that directly targets crossheals. "Any healing you receive from other players is reduced by X%" in a first iteration it should be tested with a 15% reduction as this change could have big impact on how PvP plays

The upcoming changes that we can currently test on the PTS will further worsen balance.
Hybridization of almost any skills will result in an unhealthy meta where only a single build for each Class will be viable, many skills will become worthless as they won't find their way onto bars as the competition just became way harder.
The potential for gamebreaking combinations has increased significantly, especially when it comes to healing and survivability.
Those changes will have such a strong impact on the meta that it is insanity to push this in one go.
All healing abilities should retain the old scaling in order to prevent Specs to merge completely and also to prevent the survivability to go through the roof.

Two more issues on the PTS:
Burning Embers being changed into a HoT is laughably broken, there is no way this should ever make it to the live server. Magdk has always been built around being forced to fight for their heals, they had to stay in a fight to get their powerlash heals, to recast their burning embers to get the heal early or to heal themselves by using Draw Essence. The addition of Cauterize and Coagulating blood are more than enough to allow magdks to have healing even when they don't face an opponent atm.

Power Bash and morphs counting as Bash damage. I totally get where the idea came from but it is unbalanced as heck. You can easily stack bash damage via bash glyphs, deadlands demolisher and other bash sets. This is totally fine on the live server, however the new interaction with a skill that has the regular meele spammable TT is too much, on non optimised build you can easily reach Power Slam tooltips of 15k without even having the 33% extra damage.
This interaction with additional bash damage for Power Bash should be removed, Power Bash and it's morphs should retain the function of bash to interrupt targets channeling a skill.


I'm confident that tackling all these issues will significantly improve PvP balance and saves us from another unbalanced patch.

All around solid suggestions.
But before they touch anything about mag necro or the tools they use, ZOS really need to give it a real offensive kit that isn't based on a clunky synergy (which relies on two sets, with one of them most people would argue should have never made it in the game) because right now it's either DC/vicious death harmony bomb or crutching on draugrkin for single target.

Amorpho

Only just saw this thread, so I will post my comments here:

The latest changes to templar skills (specifically puncturing strikes/jabs and sunfire) express a positive concept, but a wrong approach in my opinion as they predominantly favour PVE gameplay over PVP.

I believe a stamplar will continue to use rally as a source of burst heal and major brutality, despite the changes. And this for sustain reasons. Having major savagery incorporated in biting jabs enabled stamplars to run one less skill with 100% uptime. This, in turns, enabled them to run tristat pots, replenishing all their pools and in a very cheap way.

On the other hand, what magplar lacked was a class based access to major sorcery, that they however now relegated to biting jabs (stamina based) rather than puncturing strikes... 🤦🏻‍♂️

A far better solution in my opinion would be to attach major sorcery and brutality to sun fire (or another under-used class based skill like radiant aura?) and keep major prophecy and savagery on biting jabs. This approach would not only benefit PVE gameplay, but PVP too.

But this is just what I think.

ealdwin

Amorpho wrote: »

Only just saw this thread, so I will post my comments here:

The latest changes to templar skills (specifically puncturing strikes/jabs and sunfire) express a positive concept, but a wrong approach in my opinion as they predominantly favour PVE gameplay over PVP.

I believe a stamplar will continue to use rally as a source of burst heal and major brutality, despite the changes. And this for sustain reasons. Having major savagery incorporated in biting jabs enabled stamplars to run one less skill with 100% uptime. This, in turns, enabled them to run tristat pots, replenishing all their pools and in a very cheap way.

On the other hand, what magplar lacked was a class based access to major sorcery, that they however now relegated to biting jabs (stamina based) rather than puncturing strikes... 🤦🏻‍♂️

A far better solution in my opinion would be to attach major sorcery and brutality to sun fire (or another under-used class based skill like radiant aura?) and keep major prophecy and savagery on biting jabs. This approach would not only benefit PVE gameplay, but PVP too.

But this is just what I think.

(emphasis mine)

Yeah... it's not altogether negative change, per se, just a really awkward and weird one that's not good for the class as a whole.

It would be like ZOS telling Nightblades "We hear you don't like Sorcery/Brutality on Drain Power, so we're adding it to Concealed Weapon!" instead of putting it on Siphoning Strikes where it should be [cough... ZOS... cough].

Side note: Necros at this point should get class access to the buffs too, I'm just not aware of which skill those playing the class feel it would fit best on at this time.

Noerra

MagDK and MagPlar are the two strongest classes in PvP right now and they got buffs... I mean.... I haven't played MagDK in a while .... It's looking super strong, I'll probably main it next patch

vgabor

p00tx wrote: »

This is a fantastic rundown of the reasons the Combat Prayer change is not a positive one, in its current iteration. The buffs associated with this skill (minor berserk and resolve) and the limitations of the functionality of the skill (no smart targeting of the buffs) necessitate the use of it as a universal spammable for all healer specs across the board. Think of it being similar to a dps using a specific skill as a spammable in between dot applications in a rotation. You wouldn't make a commonly used dps spammable this expensive (or at least I'd hope you wouldn't), so the healer spammable should follow the same set of cost rules.

Further, the buff to the healing output was never actually needed. I mean, it's nice, but not worth the cost increase. There are very few instances where a larger burst heal is going to be the thing that saves a group from death. If your goal was to help increase healing output, it would be better applied to hots like energy orb or illustrious springs.

As a main PvE healer my thoughts on the combat prayer change:

- The 10 second duration instead of 8 is nice as lines up better with other hots and buffs/debuffs.
- The healing increase does not really needed, the current healing it provides is plenty enough, the extra healing will come just as overhealing most of the time.
- The increased cost is a big drawback and really not good.

I would rather prefer leaving the healing output as it is and only increasing the cost to balance the longer duration, maybe somewhere between 3700 and 4000 magicka or so.

LordeGian

VarisVaris wrote: »

The balance in PvP currently isn't really optimal on the live servers right now, some abilities, set and mechanics are clearly overperforming and should be addressed before making things even worse with the upcoming changes.


Skills

Intensive Mender

This skill offers healing way beyond other HoTs while being really cheap and also allows for insane crosshealing capabilities. The easy way out is simply reducing the heal because right now it's simply too strong, this should be done by reducing the overall heal by 25% but increase the duration to 12 seconds this keeps the skill rather cheap but prevents it from basically being a burst heal every time it heals you

Living Dark

This skill has been indirectly buffed to mindbogglingly high healing numbers with the changes to how people can stack spelldamage, but even a build that doesn't fully builds into stacking damage gets more healing out of this ability than other Hots can provide, additionally the way it works makes this heal even better as it always heals you when you take damage and therefore acts as a direct reduction to the damage you take. Depending on who you fight (read this as anything that isn't a full damage build) this ability will keep you alive infinitely with no chance for the enemy to ever kill you, it might even outheal the damage from the skills you're eating.
This ability should retain it's function but have it's healing potential against single targets reduced significantly. Having 5k hps in duels vs another templar from a single skill is just laughable.
Therefore the heal should still have a 500ms cooldown but can only be procced by each target every 2 seconds.
This makes it a great option when fighting outnumbered but prevents it from turning templars into unkillable damage absorbing blobs of doom

Bombard

This skill provides way too much bang for its buck, not only does it deal great damage while being undodgeable, it also comes with a root that you can refresh over and over again on targets who can't break the root in the first place, no other skill offers this much utility by chewing through the enemy's stamina while also helping ball groups to kite and keep people locked in places to nuke them afterwards.
This skill should lose its root and rather gain something else and AoE Root with high damage simply isn't balanced and it won't ever be even if you remove the snare it also offers like you did in Patch v7.3.0

Radiating Regen

This is the biggest offenders when it comes to high survivability of ballgroups and groups in general, this skill is so powerful that the viability of a certain spec instantly increases when it can slot this ability, this goes so far that stamsorc in smallscale runs bow+resto now
This ability has to have it's crosshealing capabilities nerfed significantly, make it so that you can only have 2 Radiating regen active on you (like vigor before it was changed to a single target heal) at any given moment, this way it won't hurt PvE but it will help PvP significantly

Sets
Caluurion's Legacy

This set offers too much burst especially when using it on NB which guarantees a hit in conjunction with cloak, with it being able to crit it's damage numbers went through the roof and now once again allows people to have oneshot gank builds with little to no counterplay depending on how good or bad performance is and if you break-free button is responsive.
The amount of burst this set offers is simply too much and should be split into a direct damage and dot portion to make this set less bursty but keeps it's damage consistent overall.

Draurgkin

This set allows people to achieve burst and pressure numbers that simply shouldn't be reachable with how many different damage instances one can squeeze into those 6 seconds it provides way too much damage compared to other sets.
This set only working against a single target doesn't work as enough of a drawback as you can use this set to obliterate this target, in a situation where you only face a single opponent there is no set that comes even close to the power Draugrkin offers.

Ironblood

This set offers too much survivability while the drawback isn't anywhere near enough to keep this set in check, additionally the potential uptime of the set is really high (66%)
The cooldown of this set should be increased to 25 seconds up from 15 seconds in order to give people a slight chance of killing someone using this set

Other issues
Undeath and CPs

Please read this post as it describes the issue more detailed.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/7510100#Comment_7510100

Harmony

This jewelry trait allows people to generate incredible burst that's not tied to the global cooldown. These synergies often provide more damage than ultimates while only having a 20 seconds cooldown per person. Due to Synergies being able to be stacked this gives groups way more power than they should have access to.
This Trait should be reworked completely. Synergies are fine the way they are without anything buffing them

Crossheals in general

Although I have touched on this a little bit above already by mentioning Intensive mender and radiating regen, I want to emphasize once more that crosshealing in its current iteration is too powerful and often results in fights being endless stalemates that can only be ended by dropping multiple ultimates on a single person because otherwise they'll never die.
This also means that the time between ult drops won't help you make any progress which makes PvP feel very frustrating. It's a cycle of tanking each other's damage and then praying that your ult drop every 2 minutes gets you a kill.
There is no perfect fix for this issue as crossheals scale with the amounts of players involved in a fight.

This is why I propose a new healing reduction added to battle spirit that directly targets crossheals. "Any healing you receive from other players is reduced by X%" in a first iteration it should be tested with a 15% reduction as this change could have big impact on how PvP plays

The upcoming changes that we can currently test on the PTS will further worsen balance.
Hybridization of almost any skills will result in an unhealthy meta where only a single build for each Class will be viable, many skills will become worthless as they won't find their way onto bars as the competition just became way harder.
The potential for gamebreaking combinations has increased significantly, especially when it comes to healing and survivability.
Those changes will have such a strong impact on the meta that it is insanity to push this in one go.
All healing abilities should retain the old scaling in order to prevent Specs to merge completely and also to prevent the survivability to go through the roof.

Two more issues on the PTS:
Burning Embers being changed into a HoT is laughably broken, there is no way this should ever make it to the live server. Magdk has always been built around being forced to fight for their heals, they had to stay in a fight to get their powerlash heals, to recast their burning embers to get the heal early or to heal themselves by using Draw Essence. The addition of Cauterize and Coagulating blood are more than enough to allow magdks to have healing even when they don't face an opponent atm.

Power Bash and morphs counting as Bash damage. I totally get where the idea came from but it is unbalanced as heck. You can easily stack bash damage via bash glyphs, deadlands demolisher and other bash sets. This is totally fine on the live server, however the new interaction with a skill that has the regular meele spammable TT is too much, on non optimised build you can easily reach Power Slam tooltips of 15k without even having the 33% extra damage.
This interaction with additional bash damage for Power Bash should be removed, Power Bash and it's morphs should retain the function of bash to interrupt targets channeling a skill.


I'm confident that tackling all these issues will significantly improve PvP balance and saves us from another unbalanced patch.

Good points you put here in an organized and reasoned way.
Some classes in my opinion were too strong which are Magplar and Magdk. I expected a nerf but Magkdk got a buff, it seems to me that whoever makes such changes hasn't tried PVP currently.

Vevvev

LordeGian wrote: »

VarisVaris wrote: »

The balance in PvP currently isn't really optimal on the live servers right now, some abilities, set and mechanics are clearly overperforming and should be addressed before making things even worse with the upcoming changes.


Skills

Intensive Mender

This skill offers healing way beyond other HoTs while being really cheap and also allows for insane crosshealing capabilities. The easy way out is simply reducing the heal because right now it's simply too strong, this should be done by reducing the overall heal by 25% but increase the duration to 12 seconds this keeps the skill rather cheap but prevents it from basically being a burst heal every time it heals you

Living Dark

This skill has been indirectly buffed to mindbogglingly high healing numbers with the changes to how people can stack spelldamage, but even a build that doesn't fully builds into stacking damage gets more healing out of this ability than other Hots can provide, additionally the way it works makes this heal even better as it always heals you when you take damage and therefore acts as a direct reduction to the damage you take. Depending on who you fight (read this as anything that isn't a full damage build) this ability will keep you alive infinitely with no chance for the enemy to ever kill you, it might even outheal the damage from the skills you're eating.
This ability should retain it's function but have it's healing potential against single targets reduced significantly. Having 5k hps in duels vs another templar from a single skill is just laughable.
Therefore the heal should still have a 500ms cooldown but can only be procced by each target every 2 seconds.
This makes it a great option when fighting outnumbered but prevents it from turning templars into unkillable damage absorbing blobs of doom

Bombard

This skill provides way too much bang for its buck, not only does it deal great damage while being undodgeable, it also comes with a root that you can refresh over and over again on targets who can't break the root in the first place, no other skill offers this much utility by chewing through the enemy's stamina while also helping ball groups to kite and keep people locked in places to nuke them afterwards.
This skill should lose its root and rather gain something else and AoE Root with high damage simply isn't balanced and it won't ever be even if you remove the snare it also offers like you did in Patch v7.3.0

Radiating Regen

This is the biggest offenders when it comes to high survivability of ballgroups and groups in general, this skill is so powerful that the viability of a certain spec instantly increases when it can slot this ability, this goes so far that stamsorc in smallscale runs bow+resto now
This ability has to have it's crosshealing capabilities nerfed significantly, make it so that you can only have 2 Radiating regen active on you (like vigor before it was changed to a single target heal) at any given moment, this way it won't hurt PvE but it will help PvP significantly

Sets
Caluurion's Legacy

This set offers too much burst especially when using it on NB which guarantees a hit in conjunction with cloak, with it being able to crit it's damage numbers went through the roof and now once again allows people to have oneshot gank builds with little to no counterplay depending on how good or bad performance is and if you break-free button is responsive.
The amount of burst this set offers is simply too much and should be split into a direct damage and dot portion to make this set less bursty but keeps it's damage consistent overall.

Draurgkin

This set allows people to achieve burst and pressure numbers that simply shouldn't be reachable with how many different damage instances one can squeeze into those 6 seconds it provides way too much damage compared to other sets.
This set only working against a single target doesn't work as enough of a drawback as you can use this set to obliterate this target, in a situation where you only face a single opponent there is no set that comes even close to the power Draugrkin offers.

Ironblood

This set offers too much survivability while the drawback isn't anywhere near enough to keep this set in check, additionally the potential uptime of the set is really high (66%)
The cooldown of this set should be increased to 25 seconds up from 15 seconds in order to give people a slight chance of killing someone using this set

Other issues
Undeath and CPs

Please read this post as it describes the issue more detailed.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/7510100#Comment_7510100

Harmony

This jewelry trait allows people to generate incredible burst that's not tied to the global cooldown. These synergies often provide more damage than ultimates while only having a 20 seconds cooldown per person. Due to Synergies being able to be stacked this gives groups way more power than they should have access to.
This Trait should be reworked completely. Synergies are fine the way they are without anything buffing them

Crossheals in general

Although I have touched on this a little bit above already by mentioning Intensive mender and radiating regen, I want to emphasize once more that crosshealing in its current iteration is too powerful and often results in fights being endless stalemates that can only be ended by dropping multiple ultimates on a single person because otherwise they'll never die.
This also means that the time between ult drops won't help you make any progress which makes PvP feel very frustrating. It's a cycle of tanking each other's damage and then praying that your ult drop every 2 minutes gets you a kill.
There is no perfect fix for this issue as crossheals scale with the amounts of players involved in a fight.

This is why I propose a new healing reduction added to battle spirit that directly targets crossheals. "Any healing you receive from other players is reduced by X%" in a first iteration it should be tested with a 15% reduction as this change could have big impact on how PvP plays

The upcoming changes that we can currently test on the PTS will further worsen balance.
Hybridization of almost any skills will result in an unhealthy meta where only a single build for each Class will be viable, many skills will become worthless as they won't find their way onto bars as the competition just became way harder.
The potential for gamebreaking combinations has increased significantly, especially when it comes to healing and survivability.
Those changes will have such a strong impact on the meta that it is insanity to push this in one go.
All healing abilities should retain the old scaling in order to prevent Specs to merge completely and also to prevent the survivability to go through the roof.

Two more issues on the PTS:
Burning Embers being changed into a HoT is laughably broken, there is no way this should ever make it to the live server. Magdk has always been built around being forced to fight for their heals, they had to stay in a fight to get their powerlash heals, to recast their burning embers to get the heal early or to heal themselves by using Draw Essence. The addition of Cauterize and Coagulating blood are more than enough to allow magdks to have healing even when they don't face an opponent atm.

Power Bash and morphs counting as Bash damage. I totally get where the idea came from but it is unbalanced as heck. You can easily stack bash damage via bash glyphs, deadlands demolisher and other bash sets. This is totally fine on the live server, however the new interaction with a skill that has the regular meele spammable TT is too much, on non optimised build you can easily reach Power Slam tooltips of 15k without even having the 33% extra damage.
This interaction with additional bash damage for Power Bash should be removed, Power Bash and it's morphs should retain the function of bash to interrupt targets channeling a skill.


I'm confident that tackling all these issues will significantly improve PvP balance and saves us from another unbalanced patch.

Good points you put here in an organized and reasoned way.
Some classes in my opinion were too strong which are Magplar and Magdk. I expected a nerf but Magkdk got a buff, it seems to me that whoever makes such changes hasn't tried PVP currently.

It's not necessarily a buff that DK got. Burning Embers if it was left to run turned into a massive burst heal that could come multiple times out of the blue, or after reapplication of the ability, leading to them surviving some insanely brutal things. This change removes the burstyness of the Burning Embers heal and makes it a trickle heal.

Another thing to realize is that bursty heal injection could crit making a mag DK able to full heal instantly while still attacking.