Cloak is unreliable again

fred4

A few patches ago, last autumn as far as I remember, ZOS tidied up invisibility and detection. Cloak got more reliable, but also had harder counters. This made Cloak more predictable, which could play into either party's hand, the nightblade's or their opponent's. Great! As far as I know this made most people happy. Uncertainty about how the game works was not good for anyone's enjoyment. So far, so good.

Fast forward to this patch (High Isle). From the patch notes:

"Fixed an issue where many player-sourced Damage over Time effects could still miss invisible targets, rather than hitting them without removing the invisibility."

Let's go over the history. Once upon a time all manner of attacks would knock nightblades out of cloak. That said, there was also an unwritten rule for the longest time that Cloak caused single-target DOTs, placed upon the nightblade, to be ignored. However various skills had secondary effects that would cause Cloak to be unreliable. Soul Trap was among those skills. Sloads was a big offender at one point. The nightblade placing DOTs on others also caused problems, particularly if something had a healing from damage component that would filter back to the nightblade. The nightblade would either be knocked out of cloak or they would become visible due to a visible effect being placed on them, even if the nightblade itself was invisible. As far as I remember that was how Soul Trap broke Cloak at one point. All of that was finally fixed last autumn or as good as it's ever been.

Some people have argued that Cloak suppressing DOTs, causing the DOT ticks to miss, made Shadowy Disguise too overloaded a skill. They would also point out that this functionality was never included in the tooltip. It seems that ZOS finally heard those voices and treated this as a bug fix.

The first issue I have is that this should not have been treated as a bug fix. It should have been treated as a class balance adjustment. When a feature persists for such a long time as this, then it affects the evaluation of the class' strength. What was nightblade's class strength as of Ascending Tide? I think tier lists are often subjective, but this one appears backed by multiple PvPers:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/606134/pvp-tierlist-for-ascending-tide

Based on that, did nightblades deserve a nerf at this time? I would say, no.

From my own experience, the fact that my nightblade now takes damage in cloak has been more surprising than a true problem so far. However a friend of mine remarked that Cloak now feels unreliable to him. He didn't know why. I subsequently noticed that, when I was hit with Structured Entropy, yep, those little blue projectiles between the caster of that skill and the nightblade, those are back, giving the position of the nightblade away. We're exactly back where we started.

How could this happen? IMO there was likely a disconnect between the programmer at ZOS and the combat designer. The programmer was asked to make Cloak reliable last autumn. They looked at the code. They found at some point - I am not 100% sure everything happened last autumn - that making attacks miss would fix the undesirable side effects from DOTs on cloaking nightblades. Some people in the playerbase weren't happy. Maybe the ZOS combat team wasn't happy. It remained on the bug fix list. The programmer was asked to rework the code. Now (some / all / not sure) DOTs hit nightblades in Cloak. Did the programmer or anyone review how we arrived at the present time? Nope! Maybe there was time pressure. Probably no one contemplated why attacks were made to miss in the first place, which was likely the smallest piece of code to change without having tons of side effects. What really needs to be done is that they go over all of those. Yes, let's say the nightblade should take damage from Structured Entropy now. Maybe that should even heal the caster. But that little blue projectile, the visual effect? That should not happen. Structured Entropy is hardly going to be the only thing. If you want these skills to do damage to a cloaking nightblade, you have to go over the visual effects of each and every one of them or we're right back to Cloak being an unreliable mess. Got that? Thank you!

xylena_lazarow

fred4 wrote: »

That said, there was also an unwritten rule for the longest time that Cloak caused single-target DOTs, placed upon the nightblade, to be ignored.

IIRC many years ago, they quite deliberately changed Cloak from outright purging DoTs to "suppressing" them, and at that time made it clear that this was the new intended behavior. Spammable invisibility still has an extremely high PvP power ceiling that makes it extremely hard to balance, and the class continues to suffer in the name of preserving it.

birdik

Nb sacks:
No delayed burst
Predictable casting burst
Healing is busted that works against NB
no ~good~ unblockables/undodgables ( hold rmb and heal up in 2 sec after 80% burst )
Cloak now sucks even more
Supposed to be dodge class - aoe stuns/aoe damage everywhere ( damage equals single target..fair fair..)
P.S. still love aoe no cast ultimate vs nb half of year casting sound ultimate ( you ll say yeah you can do it from stealth, but everybody knows that if nb in stealh just hold block )

Yeah Yeah you can say Balorg -> Soul Siphon -> spin to win
Works only vs squishes

DrNukenstein

Honestly haven't noticed it any more than usual lately.

Cloak just breaks really easily and always has even when it was "fixed". The best way I've found to use it for disengage is to roll before you cloak (gives I-frames to keep it from breaking for a second and creates distance), crouch (if vamp) then recast every second until you break combat. Works against everything except dk breath and detect pots.

mb10

this is terrible... you take all the DOT damage in cloak in PVP so in order to NOT die you have to heal right? well that takes you right out of cloak, making you available to take more damage again.

Utterly ridiculous, such a awful change. Who even thought that would be a good idea? NB has no cleanse, that was the only form of DOT mitigation you had.

kyatos_binarini

same with invisibility potions and that's really annoying: if there is a dot on you or projectile targeting character then you will lose invisibility and will have to wait 45sec

JerBearESO

Yeah I'm hating how cloak is almost entirely an out of combat skill nowadays, because during the fight you get some dot applied which will pull you out of invis constantly. Way of fire proc from rending slashes seems to be an offender, as well as the mages guild dot.

Did you know, the siphoning skill line dot that applies the status effects every tick is one of the best dots in the game, but pulls the user out of cloak so...that sucks.

We NEED for all indirect damage to not effect cloak. Maybe only ability direct damage should pull out of cloak. And damage from the user should never pull out of cloak, but only ability casts should in that regard