Determining damage after the update

malistorr

Hi all,

I'm an Xbox NA player without access to the PTS. After reading the wording for how damage calculations will be changed, I'm completely lost. The wording is vague and impossible to understand without additional context. Here is the wording:

"Player abilities that scale with your offensive stats, such as Weapon Damage and Max Stamina, will now dynamically scale with the highest of your offensive stats"

So for a stamblade for example my understanding is that damage for my physical abilities is currently determined by my max stam and also my weapon damage. Adding to ether of those stats increases the damage of my physical abilities. I understand that other things can boost damage also. (Such as crit, having more pen, and CP) But what I don't understand is how the new damage calculations will work after the update in late March. Basically what does "highest of your offensive stats" actually mean? Will damage on my skills now be determined by just weapon damage, just max stam, or still a combination of both?

Also, my understanding is that even damage for magic skills will be determined by the answer to the above question instead of by the current method which would be max mag and spell damage. Thanks for clearing this up for me. The answer will obviously affect how we all build a toon moving forward whether it is PVE or PVP.

belial5221_ESO

It means if you got 3k physical and 2k spell damage,it would calculate based off physical whether you are magic or stam user.It only calculates based on your damage stats,nothing else,as far as I can tell.

malistorr

Thanks for answering but I'm sorry, the answer isn't very clear. Does max mag or max stam get factored in here like they do now? Or is it simply spell damage or weapon damage that are used to calculate damage? This is obviously hugely important in determining how to make a build.

Currently it's weapon damage + mag stam that determines damage on a physical ability. So is it still going to be both of those added together that determines damage for all abilities (even magic) moving forward?

VaxtinTheWolf

Highest stat between the combo. If max Magicka is higher, and weapon damage is higher, it'll use those. Not all skills scale with both, and may only scale with one, like Sorcerer Shields and Max Magicka, but that's the gist of it as I understand.

jaws343

It's pretty simple:

Highest of your max stats, meaning the higher of the set of stats you choose to use.

So for your current build, which is built around Stam and Weapon damage, literally nothing will change with your damage scaling.

Alternatively, another player could run the same skills, with max Mag and Spell damage being larger and get the same damage out of those skills.

What this would mean for your build is that the current build will be exactly the same (unless you are running any skills that have been directly changed). But you could also decide to run a magicka damage skill and get the full amount of damage from it as it will scale with your stam and weapon damage now.

rnklippel

From my understanding, the "abilities will dynamically scale with the highest of your offensive stats" part means that, if you have more magicka than stamina, your abilities will scale with your maximum magicka instead of max stamina. The same with weapon/spell damage.

In this page you can check the formulas for all abilities (at the left panel, click on "Show skill coefficients"): http://esoitem.uesp.net/viewSkills.php

For example, Surprise Attack has the following formula:

Damage = 0.103247*MaxStat + 1.08487*MaxDamage - 0.783649

Where MaxStat is your maximum stamina or magicka, whichever is higher, and MaxDamage is your Weapon or Spell Damage

In the previous patch (U32), the formula was Damage = 0.103321*Stamina + 1.08474*WeaponDamage - 1.50461

malistorr

Ok thank you. So yes for most or maybe even all builds nothing will change. I don't think it will even be possible to have a stam toon with higher spell damage than weapon damage (and vice-versa). And since sources of raising weapon or spell damage on sets now raise both equally it really won't matter anyway. Sounds like they might as well eliminate max mag and max stam and just call it "resource" and get rid of weapon damage and spell damage and just call it "damage". That's basically what they are doing with these changes and the gear changes anyway. I personally don't like it.

I'm just happy that I wont' have to go grind more and completely redo my builds.

jaws343

malistorr wrote: »

Ok thank you. So yes for most or maybe even all builds nothing will change. I don't think it will even be possible to have a stam toon with higher spell damage than weapon damage (and vice-versa). And since sources of raising weapon or spell damage on sets now raise both equally it really won't matter anyway. Sounds like they might as well eliminate max mag and max stam and just call it "resource" and get rid of weapon damage and spell damage and just call it "damage". That's basically what they are doing with these changes and the gear changes anyway. I personally don't like it.

I'm just happy that I wont' have to go grind more and completely redo my builds.

Max mag/stam are now equally valuable for damage scaling, but unequally balanced for resource usage. So it still benefits to have more of one stat or the other to ensure that you have a large enough resource pool for your primary damage type. For example, while having 40K mag and 20K stam would still mean your stam skills would scale with your 40K mag, you won't be able to cast as many stam skills as mag skills. Independent resource cost means that you still have to put thought into costing off stat skills even if their damage scales with your main stat. I doubt they will remove or change that in any way. It forces a limit on off stat skill usage.

malistorr

Yep and it was already like that. The off-stat skill would not be as strong as it will be soon but you still had to have enough of that stat to cast the skill already. But I get it. If you want to use a lot of skills that are of the other (lower) stat, you'll have to put more resources there and it will lower your overall damage essentially. So players will still be incentivized to use mainly skills that use their primary resource. IMO these changes are like change for the sake of change and not something that was really needed. I would have preferred they just left things the way they were.

jaws343

malistorr wrote: »

Yep and it was already like that. The off-stat skill would not be as strong as it will be soon but you still had to have enough of that stat to cast the skill already. But I get it. If you want to use a lot of skills that are of the other (lower) stat, you'll have to put more resources there and it will lower your overall damage essentially. So players will still be incentivized to use mainly skills that use their primary resource. IMO these changes are like change for the sake of change and not something that was really needed. I would have preferred they just left things the way they were.

But the changes open up a ton of possibilities. For example, on my mag sorc, I can now effectively run a skill like Bound Armaments for an effective, but cheap, burst skill that doesn't eat into my primary resources.

This also means that in PVP on my mag sorc, I can slot Vigor and finally get a reliable self heal that costs me stam to use but scales off my mag and spell damage.

Runefang

It opens up plenty of possibilities though. Stam can wear 5 light armour pieces more easily to hit pen cap. You can run candied jester coins and a few more mag skills. You can run spell damage pots and spell damage glyphs if you need to sustain a mag spammable for a ranged only fight.

malistorr

Yes there will be more options for viable skills potentially. That is about the only thing really changing. I'm curious what's going to happen to skills that were based on just 1 thing. I don't remember if there were any skills based ONLY on max mag or stam but if there were maybe it will be based on either (whichever is higher now). I think sorc shield was 1 of those and they were mentioned in the notes to not be changing yet. I guess it's TBD on some of them.

VaxtinTheWolf

I believe Templar Backlash skill, the explosion damage to be specific, still continues to scales off of a single Damage type between Spell/Physical depending on morph. I thought it was Max Stamina before, but the website I'm using to check at this moment is using damage values for it instead.

I don't actively know of any other skills from the top of my memory other than the Light Armor and Sorcerer class shield which are only checking Max Magicka.

Sparxlost

what it means is that physical damage dealers can now do any type of damage and also heal themselves extremely well