PTS Update 35 - Feedback Thread for Combat Balance Changes

SeaUnicorn

What happened with Hybrid Consumables? We were promised that it will be addressed to go along with hybrid meta in later patches and nothing happened. We are still using good ol spell and weapon power potions.

sharquez

Psijic Ability Imbue weapon is taking characters out of stealth This was an undocumented change and as such I assume unintentional?

@Zos_GinaBruno

Styxius

Brief summary:
Bad:
I think it overly simplified rotations across the board.
Wardens changes to Shalk are extremely painful from a playstyle method.
Sorcerer was completely destroyed, Crystal weapon would've worked as an alternating spammable in the new series of events prior to these changes.
Necromancers DoT passive should've been buffed as it's part of their long-standing class identity, not nerfed.
Poisons are still irrelevant, in PvE.
Dot nerf was a little too heavy-handed.
These changes hurt the lower end more than the higher end.
New flurry animation flows awkwardly and the audio seems desynced and off-pitch.
New sets are mediocre, which is fine, but uninteresting to me.
vRG HM and vDSR HM did not receive scaling to help make the player base more content with the changes. If this was done then it'd be like "Oh we got scaled back, but so did the content." Less backlash, and helps redefine and rebalance the game.
Spirit mender is extremely weak in PvE and PvP, lost as the damage transferred to pets like Sorcs pets are not meant to die in trials/dungeons. No clarity if this attribute will persist for Necromancer's ghost as well.
The gap in HPS timing may actually create larger gaps between the high and low end.
Adjustments to LA/HA made HA builds the most ineffective.

Good:
Nightblade tanks received a nice buff, and so did their DPS in terms of mechanical functions/class.
Vigor changes are interesting and I'm okay with them for the most part.
Templar's new jab animation looks solid in my opinion.
The lengthier dots have the potential to allow them to make more visually engaging and difficult content.
Was very heavy-handed in the DPS scaling



So I'd like to close it with this:
I would like to say I do have faith in the team but certain decisions make this difficult. We have conversations where we were told that we would not see massive sweeping changes this year. This was the year of improvements in the game. For the most part, this was true and was applauded. Cyrodiil saw major improvements, FPS went up in general and the game was performing better. Hybridization needed work but was an interesting take on things.

U34 saw very little change, and I was pleased/content for once that it was just a bump and nothing shattering was occurring. This should've continued, had you expanded these changes over the next year in minor increments you likely wouldn't have seen too much backlash if you adjusted ups and downs fine-tuning through a patch instead of balance dumping. When you guys have been doing updates we're left scrambling trying to figure out what you're doing to the game. We spend more time trying to figure out what was damaged that we enjoyed and what was introduced/buffed that we liked. Failure to deliver a new class or race didn't help for the 3rd or 4th year in a row. The current update method treats the player base like an impending doom clock each time. Causing a spike in player frustration and backlash. We lash back because we love the game, and we want to see what's best for it. Change is scary, but what's scarier, introducing and moving a planted pot into a room, or bulldozing it and rebuilding it every three months.

You need to do these changes over a longer span of time, the rushed nature fails to allow the community enjoyment. Had you done half these changes, implemented the buffs to the raid dummy, then in the latter half did the other adjustments? We would've seen metrics, let's are hypothetical, go from 140k high end to 120k up to 132k, down to 110k repeating this ebb-and-flow with a less sheer cliff to fall for the team.

Focus less on these severe balance patches and more on developing more content for the end game, we really should have 2 trials at a minimum per year. Q2 & Q4, what's better than capping off a story in an MMO than having it be a raid where you rally together to face a threat. You did it with HoF & Asylum. Develop a new flow Q1 dungeons, Q2 chapter and raid, Q3 Dungeons, Q4 Story & Raid/Arena. This will provide so much more engaging content. Improve quest activities, other MMO's have US beat on this. Where we have mostly mundane quests, other MMO's have unique activities to make quests spiced up and more enjoyable. You can do this without checking with Bethesda on how we go about doing quests. Give us variety, and creativity. You are a very talented team. Slow down and build, the way this has been done seems more destructive to the communities eyes.

xaraan

My opinion is that the changes are too extreme.

1. Many players are tired of having to rebuild their characters and relearn the game constantly. So drastic changes like this (especially when they will balance nothing and just move a lot of the imbalance to different places) is just unneeded.

2. If you want to raise the floor and help newer players, then why nerf LA damage while still having weaving be a thing. First you teach them how to weave in the game and Second: REWARD them for learning to weave by having the attacks do good damage. Having it do a flat amount is ok, but have that flat amount be higher. Then you keep the top guys at a set level, but actually give maybe even a boost to players that may not be min maxed in their build but at least have learned to weave.

3. The DoT changes are a bit too much as well. I think somewhere in the middle is a happy spot, like maybe 15 seconds. DoT damage is dropping too much and having them last so long really doesn't help in many fights when most bosses have mechanics that move them around, make them invulnerable, etc. It could also contribute to making combat feel more boring as you just increase the amount of time a player has to spam one skill.

You could even do something like having buffs last twenty seconds, but have ground DoTs only lasting 12 or 15 seconds. That makes rotation easier because you can ignore having to rebuff as often without hurting combat flow.

4. I also think the HoTs mostly all healing every two seconds is a horrible change. I like the variety of choice, especially when any class can choose a skill like the Fighter's Guild rune to get the heal tick every half second. Having variety, with some options open to all when they come from non class skill lines is healthier for the game IMO. It's not confusing, it's not too many choices. I liked having the option to use some or a mix of various heals that tick every second, every other second, half second, etc. Variety is good IMO.

This is also going to make certain heals (strong burst heals) more useful and the classes that access them stronger and classes that rely almost exclusively on HoTs weaker - which wasn't a balance issue that needed addressing. This will obviously be noticeable in PvP, but will be pretty noticeable tanking as well.

(Edit: The resolving vigor change seems strong. As a tank, I like it. As a pvp player, giving that much D on top of a heal is pretty strong. Maybe having it give Minor Resolve instead would be a good place. Then it adds to defense without totally replacing most class skills that exist primarily for that buff).

5. Class balance is bad right now on live, but I have no idea how the changes will effect that because of so much else changing in the game. So it could still be just as bad or worse and we won't know for sure until live with changes like this (especially in PvP where there is no good PTS testing outside of duels). So doing a class balance pass while making these other changes is not the best move IMO.

6. Changing anything about the raid dummy (needed or not) looks a bit fishy IMO. It prevents 1:1 comparisons between live and PTS and just comes off like you are trying to hide how bad some changes could possibly be.

EmilyElizabethESO

Pevey wrote: »

In the interest of transparency with the community (and because so many of these changes make no sense to us right now), I would really like to see some of those parses from the 80 hours of parsing.

How did the dev team get comfortable that classes were balanced, for instance? Show us the parses, please.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin can you pass this request onto the team? If they can show us how it's better I think that would go a long way with the players.

Mr_Stach

I would LOVE to see a Dev show me how the Warden Changes improve Warden in an Endgame Environment. Maybe Vet Trials? Or Nice Sweaty Cyrodiil Keep?

Or for any class.

But Warden is my focus, since I've been maining it since Morrowind.

Elsonso

xaraan wrote: »

My opinion is that the changes are too extreme.

2. If you want to raise the floor and help newer players, then why nerf LA damage while still having weaving be a thing. First you teach them how to weave in the game and Second: REWARD them for learning to weave by having the attacks do good damage. Having it do a flat amount is ok, but have that flat amount be higher. Then you keep the top guys at a set level, but actually give maybe even a boost to players that may not be min maxed in their build but at least have learned to weave.

My feeling is that LA _is_ the newer player's spammable, and cutting that hurts their bottom line significantly. Yeah, they will eventually move to a class or weapon spammable, but they always start with that LA spammable. When they run out of Stamina and Magicka because they haven't learned how to meter their resources, LA and HA is all they have left.

It'll be interesting to see what they do. My money is on a slight increase in LA and HA damage, but probably not enough to really matter.

Hailan

Elsonso wrote: »

xaraan wrote: »

My opinion is that the changes are too extreme.

2. If you want to raise the floor and help newer players, then why nerf LA damage while still having weaving be a thing. First you teach them how to weave in the game and Second: REWARD them for learning to weave by having the attacks do good damage. Having it do a flat amount is ok, but have that flat amount be higher. Then you keep the top guys at a set level, but actually give maybe even a boost to players that may not be min maxed in their build but at least have learned to weave.

My feeling is that LA _is_ the newer player's spammable, and cutting that hurts their bottom line significantly. Yeah, they will eventually move to a class or weapon spammable, but they always start with that LA spammable. When they run out of Stamina and Magicka because they haven't learned how to meter their resources, LA and HA is all they have left.

It'll be interesting to see what they do. My money is on a slight increase in LA and HA damage, but probably not enough to really matter.

The big issue is not light attack nerfs it’s how they destroyed class diversity and the stupid way they’ve changed how dots and hots work. These changes need to be thrown in the garbage and not be allowed to hit the live server.

katorga

Elsonso wrote: »

xaraan wrote: »

My opinion is that the changes are too extreme.

2. If you want to raise the floor and help newer players, then why nerf LA damage while still having weaving be a thing. First you teach them how to weave in the game and Second: REWARD them for learning to weave by having the attacks do good damage. Having it do a flat amount is ok, but have that flat amount be higher. Then you keep the top guys at a set level, but actually give maybe even a boost to players that may not be min maxed in their build but at least have learned to weave.

My feeling is that LA _is_ the newer player's spammable, and cutting that hurts their bottom line significantly.

Bingo.

Lazerus

Oakensoul nerf in PVE is bad. As others said, add a "-10% to Players" or so instead. nerf it in PVP only.

Overall there are way too many changes at once.

Nerfing LA Weaving? Fine.
But adjusting Damage over Time effects in the same Update? Hold on.

You cant nerf most mechanics and expect that it still works. If you plan to go with these changes, you need to readjust every piece of content to match these new values.

virtus753

The new Ritual of Retribution needs to be reviewed in the context of actual combat (i.e. not spreadsheets or dummies).

On live, Ritual does 100% of its current damage over 12 seconds, one tick every 2 seconds with 5% extra damage (calculated from the base tick) added each tick. On the PTS, Ritual does 109.5% of the current damage in total, but over 20 seconds now, for a theoretical loss of about 33% average dps, in line with other DoT nerfs.

Due to the ramping nature of the skill, however, and the increase to the increments each tick, the skill suffers a 44.6% dps loss over its current live duration of 12 seconds. Even now we don't see the full benefit of this skill on live when we have to recast it before it expires on phased or mobile fights like Olms and Z'Maja. These bosses will most definitely not sit happily in a Ritual for 20 seconds for most of the time. That's already curbing the efficacy of this skill on live, and on PTS it will be significantly worse.

Here's the math on live per tick:

tick 1: x (base damage)
tick 2: 1.05x
tick 3: 1.1x
tick 4: 1.15x
tick 5: 1.2x
tick 6: 1.25x

Total damage on live: 6.75x over 12 seconds

That means that the skill has done this much of its damage cumulatively as a percentage of its total on live:

tick 1: 1x = 14.8%
tick 2: 2.05x = 30.4%
tick 3: 3.15x = 46.7%
tick 4: 4.3x = 63.7%
tick 5: 5.5x = 81.5%
tick 6: 6.75x = 100%

On PTS, Ritual has far more ticks with greater increments each tick but a significantly lower (-52%) base tick:

tick 1: y (new base damage, 48% of x, old base damage)
tick 2: 1.12y
tick 3: 1.24y
tick 4: 1.36y
tick 5: 1.48y
tick 6: 1.6y
tick 7: 1.72y
tick 8: 1.84y
tick 9: 1.96y
tick 10: 2.08y

Total: 15.4y

Here's how much of its damage Ritual will have done cumulatively as a percentage of its total each tick on PTS:

tick 1: 1y = 6.5% (equivalent to 0.48x, or 7.1% of the total damage on live) - dps loss of 52% compared to live
tick 2: 2.12y = 13.8% (1.08x, or 15.1% of live) - dps loss of 50.3%
tick 3: 3.36y = 21.8% (1.61x, or 23.9% of live) - dps loss of 48.8%
tick 4: 4.72y = 30.6% (2.27x, or 33.5% of live) - dps loss of 47.4%
tick 5: 6.2y = 40.3% (2.98x, or 44.12% of live) - dps loss of 45.9%
tick 6: 7.8y = 50.6% (3.74x, or 55.4% of live) - dps loss of 44.6%
tick 7: 9.52y = 61.8% (4.57x, or 67.7% of live)
tick 8: 11.36y = 73.8% (5.45x, or 80.8% of live)
tick 9: 13.32y = 86.5% (6.39x, or 94.7% of live)
tick 10: 15.4y = 100% (7.39x, or 109.5% of live)

If we assume that Ritual is recast on live on expiration, as is typically done:

tick 1 of recast Ritual: 7.75x (cumulative with the previous RoR) vs. tick 7 of new PTS Ritual: 9.52y = 4.57x - dps loss of 41%
tick 2 of recast Ritual: 8.8x cumulative vs. tick 8 of new PTS Ritual: 11.36y = 5.45x - dps loss of 38%
tick 3 of recast Ritual: 9.9x cumulative vs. tick 9 of new PTS Ritual: 13.32y = 6.39x - dps loss of 35.5%
tick 4 of recast Ritual: 11.05x cumulative vs. tick 10 of new PTS Ritual: 15.4y = 7.39x - dps loss of 33.1%

So this skill will do 33% less damage on average over consecutive full casts, but in order to minimize the loss to that point we have to assume the skill will be applied for its full 20-second length. If you have to recast it any sooner, the loss is more and more severe for each second sooner you recast it.

Please rebalance this skill's damage distribution for actual content.

Also please let me know if my math is wrong, and I will adjust it accordingly.

Morvan

We don't want these changes, you're literally destroying something that has been working for so long without any plausible reason, you won't help new players by reducing damage, you're actually nerfing everyone and making less rewarding for them to get stronger, please, discard these changes.

lazarusrevives

Eigh1_Puppies wrote: »

To all coming from my socials I want to re-emphasize, please promote respectful and constructive dialogue. Avoid saying dumb things like "Devs don't play the game," or "Devs don't know what they're doing." These devs care deeply about the game and this community, and even if you don't believe that, they are a business. A business has to listen to its consumer base in order to maintain a profit. Keep these things in mind, present rational arguments, and good solutions.

Hi There. Long time ESO Player and Heavy Endgame Raider here. I play on both PC NA and Xbox NA. I have been raiding for the better part of the past 3 years, and I've completed almost every trifecta on both of these platforms. Most of my time however has been spent building teams for the sake of teaching, starting with Crag HMS and working all the way through the most difficult Trifectas, done 100s teaching runs over the course of my time raiding, and have spent the last year avidly content creating in an effort to teach Console players specifically, in an effort to close the massive Knowledge Gap that exists between both servers.

I say all of this to note that I am a very experienced endgame player who's focus is growing the endgame community. The changes suggested, after just some initial testing, very avidly prove that they act counterintuitively towards the goal of lessening the skill gap between players.

I'll start by saying that I think the light attack changes do accomplish the goal. 90% of the player base underestimates how important weaving is to overall damage output, not just to hit light attacks in between skills, but to weave as quickly as possible. Nerfing light attacks by roughly 5% (as shown by testing) is not a significant change, keeping weaving very relevant to learn and practice, while still making it slightly less important. Light attack weaving is free damage output, and the amount of damage light attacks were doing, I think is fair to say, was a little over the top. The skill gap was properly addressed with this change.

The change that I advocated as much more important to address, even before patch notes dropped, was the changes to Dots and AOE abilities. There are so many issues with these changes, and I hate to say it, they should all be scrapped in their entirety.

The biggest issue with these changes for me, is the constant push towards a lack of diversity that the Meta has come to offer. Over the course of the year, we've seen gear standardized, completely rendering half the sets in the game that Mag Toons had previoulsy sought for as useless. The Meta shifted to just about all of the most powerful Stam gear options, and that was it. Then we had the changes to skills, where everything was made the same. There was choice, no pros or cons, to choosing mag or stam based skills. This effectively killed half the class options that we had to choose from. The Meta shifts to simply "Run the strongest sets and the strongest skills, spec your resources for whichever you need to sustain." There is no longer a Mag DK or Stam DK it is just the DK. We went from 12 classes to 6. Not only that, but these changes affected the complexity endgame players have grown to love in making decisions based on raid composition. Room for testing and creativity in terms of maximizing damage was higher than I've ever seen it in my time playing this game before the first update of the year. It was fun while it lasted...

With the changes presented in update 35, we have yet again cut the class pool in half. By increasing dots to a standardized timer, to change all of them to 20 seconds flat, you have universalized rotations. Recalling the nature of a Global Cooldown, it's easy to build static rotations for every class without even testing, because, assuming perfect weaving, you'll be able to fit 19 total skills in before needing to recast a 20 second dot. And even if your weaving isn't clean, it is now better for skills to completely expire rather than recast them, as, if you recast a dot 1 second before it expires, you'll lose a full tick of damage. Not only does this add another layer of complexity for players unfamiliar in rotational practice to have to be aware of to maximize their damage, it now makes rotations and combat for experienced players dull and boring. DKs and Plars will drop 8 or 9 Dots/AOEs in a row, then do 11-12 spammables, replacing a spammable when they need to drop an ult. Cros and Dens are slightly more complicated in needing to weave blastbones or shalks between every couple of skill casts, so they'll drop 8 or 9 dots and do only 6-7 spammables. Blades and Sorcs would theoretically have a near identical rotation, both utilizing an execute and merciless resolve/bound armaments if not for the change to the new favorite Sorc skill, but now that we aren't even using Bound Armaments due to the nerf, the sorc falls closer in line to the DK/Plar Rotation.

If this massive lack of diversity had amounted in solutions that actually addressed the skill gap, the changes would be more bearable. But these Dot changes have quite literally done the opposite. First of all, making a rotation easier does not address the skill gap. It's an idea that looks good on paper, but does not hold in reality. Damage does not improve in content unless you have the reps to be comfortable enough to handle mechanics while focusing on your rotation. Regardless of how easy a rotation is, Time on Target is the most important element of doing damage in content. When players that are new to trials are presented with mechancis that they've never seen before, damage quite literally stops in most cases. Players stop, look at the mechanic, handle the mechanic, then attempt to pick their rotation back up, even completely restarting it half the time. No amount of dulling down rotations will change this simple fact of progression. Even as an experienced player who has maxed dummy parses and hit top logs, I myself have seen my damage increase in the new trial as I get more comfortable, reps and reps and reps later. When this team progressing the new Trifecta started on PTS, we barely had the damage to skip two bridges on the final boss. Now that we are more repped, we skip all bridges on non hard mode with plenty of time to spare. It's the nature of progression.

And even at that, there are classes that currently exist with very simple static rotations that do almost as much damage as dynamic alternatives. The DK is the best example. This class is very very strong in content, and I posted a video showcasing a 115K Dynamic rotation and a 114.2K Static rotation. A purely static rotation that will always require a little bit of practice.

And that's a good transition into the next point, it doesn't matter how simple a rotation is, you MUST practice if you want to get into heavy endgame content. Period. You can't walk into a vet hard mode and just expect to clear. You have to pull a little weight. This requires an understanding and practice of a rotation, as well as understanding basic concepts in doing good damage, such as weaving and time on target. Making a rotation easier does not incentivize players to practice. Most players new to end game that parse on a dummy for the first time will hit 30K, see a youtube video of someone hitting 115K, and then give up. They'll decide it's not worth it, and go back to what they were already doing in ESO. And there is NOTHING wrong with that at all. Other player's who make it to endgame though practice to improve. There's no way around that.

So not only do the dot changes completely fail to adequately address the skill gap, the current damage loss that we have currently seen from the PTS is quite possibly the absolute worst thing you can do for newer players. Keep in mind, as a long time endgamer, I've advocated for damage nerfs for a while. Content feels too easy, and the only incentive endgamers have to complete content as it stands, is a pat on the back for working for a trifecta for 3 months. Completing challenging content is what we've accepted as a reward, and a damage nerf like this makes content challenging again. But if your goal is to lower the skill gap, these changes have done the exact opposite. Nerfing damage by 5K? Sure not a huge deal. But 30-35K is as counterproductive as it gets.

I've tested both the DK and Cro on the PTS server thus far. On live, I hit about 115K on the DK and 125K on the Cro. The best parse that I've managed so far on the DK is around 105K and on the cro, about 106K. Starting with the DK, I obviously had to adjust some skills to account for some changes, we got to add Talons which would've added about 5K DPS to the live test if we were able to sustain talons on live. The biggest thing to keep in mind though, are the new buffs added to the dummy this cycle. First off we have about 2K more pen, which I'll disregard for the sake of argument, because we were about at pen cap anyway on live. But we got a 10% damage done boost from Major Slayer and 215 Spell/Weapon Damage from Minor Courage. 10% of 120K (Accounting for talons) is 12K dps, add maybe another 5K for Minor Courage, and all of a sudden the comparison jumps to 137K on live to 105K on PTS. I think the DK could jump to around 110K with more tweaking on PTS, better crits, more practice, so I'll give a low end estimate of 25K DPS lost and a high end estimate of 35K DPS lost. The cro is much worse off with the nerfs the class took, much like the sorc, seeing close to a 40K DPS loss...

This is all in the name of closing the skill gap. Not only does the logic behind the change to standardizing dot and aoe timers not hold due to the elements of raiding and progression that we've discussed earlier, but this type of a damage nerf kills so many early stage progression teams. You have to execute rotations and weaving to near perfection in all content to have a shot at clearing with this type of damage nerf. The endgamer in me is excited by this type of nerf admittedly, but the part of me who wants to see endgame grow can clearly see how this is a massive negative. The amount of practice, and reps required to even clear some regular vet content is now much greater.


So the question becomes, how do we address this skill gap?

The changes to dots and aoes in their entirety need to be scrapped and reworked. A much more reasonable solution that would at least somewhat address this issue if you really wanted to move forward with reworking dot and aoe timers, would be to simply add 10 seconds to the currently existing timers of all dots and aoes, without changing the damage per second output of the abilities. Though I would argue that even a change like this would kill diversity in endgame. Even the notion of these changes have already caused quite a few teams to disband, and have put the large portion of the endgame community into the mindset of quitting.

And players leaving endgame is a trend that we've seen happen over and over again throughout the last year. If these changes were really affecting players in terms of the skill gap, we would see old players leaving due to a distaste for the new game that we've come to find ourselves playing in 2022, replaced by new players constantly getting into these trials for the first time. Instead, we're seeing old players leave and nobody new joining. This could be anecdotal admittedly, but I'd love to see you post statistics related to this claim, in terms of players either clearing content for the first time, or just the server stress in general in trials over the last year or two.

And furthermore, you have a perfect testing ground for accessibility. It is no secret that simple vet and vet hard mode clears are far more common on PC than console. This quite literally represents the accessibility issue that you claim to want to fix. The biggest difference between the two platforms is as simple as it seems. Certain add ons provide information and tools to practice elements of damage efficiently on PC that Console players don't have access to. CMX and Logs is the BIGGEST tool that you could integrate into base game to help accessibility. Adding a combat metronome, making better ability bar timers, integrating srrendar, even being able to see your damage compared to your team mates live through Hodor makes players more likely to do better damage. Tutorials explaining GCDs and weaving, and Time on Target, and Rotations, would all be immensely helpful too. It's a complicated game, and PC players have 70% of the tools that they need to be able to learn and play the game thanks to add ons, while Console players have to rely on one Console Content creator for reliable information as to the facts and fictions regarding damage and raid comps, having 5% of the information needed to do good damage available as apart of base game. Start here, add these things into base game, see console clears and console endgame begin to rise, and then come back to these changes if you feel it's still necessary.

And please in the mean time, work to give us class diversity back. Thank you for your time, I hope this opens a constructive dialogue.

A very detailed and thoughtful examination of the changes with multiple perspectives on this it seems.

As a more casual player, who is fairly intimidated by end game content, i don't understand how removing things helps anyone. Why not add things? I've heard people toy with the idea of spell crafting. Maybe seperate pvp and pve, like some others have said that i spoke with. I also like the idea of including more PC only addons to the game for ALL platforms. Mouse and keyboard play is already a more accurate method of play (generally speaking), so why not give the console folks a leg up. This will has caused lots of waves...i guess it is fitting with the new story about the:

[ship of leaders (end game players) being broken by the storm and raging waves (game changes)]****

Editing on a phone is frustrating lol

Pevey

Things the patch should have done with respect to combat changes:

1. Small, reasonable nerf to bring 2H/stampede back in line (and promote more backbar variety).
2. Small, reasonable nerf to bring stamsorc back in line.
3. Small changes to certain sets like Rele and Kinras to make them not LA-dependent if you really want weaving to be less important (you tried to nerf weaving but completely missed the main reasons it is powerful, which is these two sets)

DONE. Use a scalpel instead of burning everything to the ground. Do you really hate your game so much that you feel the need to completely scrap it like this and reinvent everything?

JamieJammer

Eigh1_Puppies wrote: »

To all coming from my socials I want to re-emphasize, please promote respectful and constructive dialogue. Avoid saying dumb things like "Devs don't play the game," or "Devs don't know what they're doing." These devs care deeply about the game and this community, and even if you don't believe that, they are a business. A business has to listen to its consumer base in order to maintain a profit. Keep these things in mind, present rational arguments, and good solutions.

Hi There. Long time ESO Player and Heavy Endgame Raider here. I play on both PC NA and Xbox NA. I have been raiding for the better part of the past 3 years, and I've completed almost every trifecta on both of these platforms. Most of my time however has been spent building teams for the sake of teaching, starting with Crag HMS and working all the way through the most difficult Trifectas, done 100s teaching runs over the course of my time raiding, and have spent the last year avidly content creating in an effort to teach Console players specifically, in an effort to close the massive Knowledge Gap that exists between both servers.

I say all of this to note that I am a very experienced endgame player who's focus is growing the endgame community. The changes suggested, after just some initial testing, very avidly prove that they act counterintuitively towards the goal of lessening the skill gap between players.

I'll start by saying that I think the light attack changes do accomplish the goal. 90% of the player base underestimates how important weaving is to overall damage output, not just to hit light attacks in between skills, but to weave as quickly as possible. Nerfing light attacks by roughly 5% (as shown by testing) is not a significant change, keeping weaving very relevant to learn and practice, while still making it slightly less important. Light attack weaving is free damage output, and the amount of damage light attacks were doing, I think is fair to say, was a little over the top. The skill gap was properly addressed with this change.

The change that I advocated as much more important to address, even before patch notes dropped, was the changes to Dots and AOE abilities. There are so many issues with these changes, and I hate to say it, they should all be scrapped in their entirety.

The biggest issue with these changes for me, is the constant push towards a lack of diversity that the Meta has come to offer. Over the course of the year, we've seen gear standardized, completely rendering half the sets in the game that Mag Toons had previoulsy sought for as useless. The Meta shifted to just about all of the most powerful Stam gear options, and that was it. Then we had the changes to skills, where everything was made the same. There was choice, no pros or cons, to choosing mag or stam based skills. This effectively killed half the class options that we had to choose from. The Meta shifts to simply "Run the strongest sets and the strongest skills, spec your resources for whichever you need to sustain." There is no longer a Mag DK or Stam DK it is just the DK. We went from 12 classes to 6. Not only that, but these changes affected the complexity endgame players have grown to love in making decisions based on raid composition. Room for testing and creativity in terms of maximizing damage was higher than I've ever seen it in my time playing this game before the first update of the year. It was fun while it lasted...

With the changes presented in update 35, we have yet again cut the class pool in half. By increasing dots to a standardized timer, to change all of them to 20 seconds flat, you have universalized rotations. Recalling the nature of a Global Cooldown, it's easy to build static rotations for every class without even testing, because, assuming perfect weaving, you'll be able to fit 19 total skills in before needing to recast a 20 second dot. And even if your weaving isn't clean, it is now better for skills to completely expire rather than recast them, as, if you recast a dot 1 second before it expires, you'll lose a full tick of damage. Not only does this add another layer of complexity for players unfamiliar in rotational practice to have to be aware of to maximize their damage, it now makes rotations and combat for experienced players dull and boring. DKs and Plars will drop 8 or 9 Dots/AOEs in a row, then do 11-12 spammables, replacing a spammable when they need to drop an ult. Cros and Dens are slightly more complicated in needing to weave blastbones or shalks between every couple of skill casts, so they'll drop 8 or 9 dots and do only 6-7 spammables. Blades and Sorcs would theoretically have a near identical rotation, both utilizing an execute and merciless resolve/bound armaments if not for the change to the new favorite Sorc skill, but now that we aren't even using Bound Armaments due to the nerf, the sorc falls closer in line to the DK/Plar Rotation.

If this massive lack of diversity had amounted in solutions that actually addressed the skill gap, the changes would be more bearable. But these Dot changes have quite literally done the opposite. First of all, making a rotation easier does not address the skill gap. It's an idea that looks good on paper, but does not hold in reality. Damage does not improve in content unless you have the reps to be comfortable enough to handle mechanics while focusing on your rotation. Regardless of how easy a rotation is, Time on Target is the most important element of doing damage in content. When players that are new to trials are presented with mechancis that they've never seen before, damage quite literally stops in most cases. Players stop, look at the mechanic, handle the mechanic, then attempt to pick their rotation back up, even completely restarting it half the time. No amount of dulling down rotations will change this simple fact of progression. Even as an experienced player who has maxed dummy parses and hit top logs, I myself have seen my damage increase in the new trial as I get more comfortable, reps and reps and reps later. When this team progressing the new Trifecta started on PTS, we barely had the damage to skip two bridges on the final boss. Now that we are more repped, we skip all bridges on non hard mode with plenty of time to spare. It's the nature of progression.

And even at that, there are classes that currently exist with very simple static rotations that do almost as much damage as dynamic alternatives. The DK is the best example. This class is very very strong in content, and I posted a video showcasing a 115K Dynamic rotation and a 114.2K Static rotation. A purely static rotation that will always require a little bit of practice.

And that's a good transition into the next point, it doesn't matter how simple a rotation is, you MUST practice if you want to get into heavy endgame content. Period. You can't walk into a vet hard mode and just expect to clear. You have to pull a little weight. This requires an understanding and practice of a rotation, as well as understanding basic concepts in doing good damage, such as weaving and time on target. Making a rotation easier does not incentivize players to practice. Most players new to end game that parse on a dummy for the first time will hit 30K, see a youtube video of someone hitting 115K, and then give up. They'll decide it's not worth it, and go back to what they were already doing in ESO. And there is NOTHING wrong with that at all. Other player's who make it to endgame though practice to improve. There's no way around that.

So not only do the dot changes completely fail to adequately address the skill gap, the current damage loss that we have currently seen from the PTS is quite possibly the absolute worst thing you can do for newer players. Keep in mind, as a long time endgamer, I've advocated for damage nerfs for a while. Content feels too easy, and the only incentive endgamers have to complete content as it stands, is a pat on the back for working for a trifecta for 3 months. Completing challenging content is what we've accepted as a reward, and a damage nerf like this makes content challenging again. But if your goal is to lower the skill gap, these changes have done the exact opposite. Nerfing damage by 5K? Sure not a huge deal. But 30-35K is as counterproductive as it gets.

I've tested both the DK and Cro on the PTS server thus far. On live, I hit about 115K on the DK and 125K on the Cro. The best parse that I've managed so far on the DK is around 105K and on the cro, about 106K. Starting with the DK, I obviously had to adjust some skills to account for some changes, we got to add Talons which would've added about 5K DPS to the live test if we were able to sustain talons on live. The biggest thing to keep in mind though, are the new buffs added to the dummy this cycle. First off we have about 2K more pen, which I'll disregard for the sake of argument, because we were about at pen cap anyway on live. But we got a 10% damage done boost from Major Slayer and 215 Spell/Weapon Damage from Minor Courage. 10% of 120K (Accounting for talons) is 12K dps, add maybe another 5K for Minor Courage, and all of a sudden the comparison jumps to 137K on live to 105K on PTS. I think the DK could jump to around 110K with more tweaking on PTS, better crits, more practice, so I'll give a low end estimate of 25K DPS lost and a high end estimate of 35K DPS lost. The cro is much worse off with the nerfs the class took, much like the sorc, seeing close to a 40K DPS loss...

This is all in the name of closing the skill gap. Not only does the logic behind the change to standardizing dot and aoe timers not hold due to the elements of raiding and progression that we've discussed earlier, but this type of a damage nerf kills so many early stage progression teams. You have to execute rotations and weaving to near perfection in all content to have a shot at clearing with this type of damage nerf. The endgamer in me is excited by this type of nerf admittedly, but the part of me who wants to see endgame grow can clearly see how this is a massive negative. The amount of practice, and reps required to even clear some regular vet content is now much greater.


So the question becomes, how do we address this skill gap?

The changes to dots and aoes in their entirety need to be scrapped and reworked. A much more reasonable solution that would at least somewhat address this issue if you really wanted to move forward with reworking dot and aoe timers, would be to simply add 10 seconds to the currently existing timers of all dots and aoes, without changing the damage per second output of the abilities. Though I would argue that even a change like this would kill diversity in endgame. Even the notion of these changes have already caused quite a few teams to disband, and have put the large portion of the endgame community into the mindset of quitting.

And players leaving endgame is a trend that we've seen happen over and over again throughout the last year. If these changes were really affecting players in terms of the skill gap, we would see old players leaving due to a distaste for the new game that we've come to find ourselves playing in 2022, replaced by new players constantly getting into these trials for the first time. Instead, we're seeing old players leave and nobody new joining. This could be anecdotal admittedly, but I'd love to see you post statistics related to this claim, in terms of players either clearing content for the first time, or just the server stress in general in trials over the last year or two.

And furthermore, you have a perfect testing ground for accessibility. It is no secret that simple vet and vet hard mode clears are far more common on PC than console. This quite literally represents the accessibility issue that you claim to want to fix. The biggest difference between the two platforms is as simple as it seems. Certain add ons provide information and tools to practice elements of damage efficiently on PC that Console players don't have access to. CMX and Logs is the BIGGEST tool that you could integrate into base game to help accessibility. Adding a combat metronome, making better ability bar timers, integrating srrendar, even being able to see your damage compared to your team mates live through Hodor makes players more likely to do better damage. Tutorials explaining GCDs and weaving, and Time on Target, and Rotations, would all be immensely helpful too. It's a complicated game, and PC players have 70% of the tools that they need to be able to learn and play the game thanks to add ons, while Console players have to rely on one Console Content creator for reliable information as to the facts and fictions regarding damage and raid comps, having 5% of the information needed to do good damage available as apart of base game. Start here, add these things into base game, see console clears and console endgame begin to rise, and then come back to these changes if you feel it's still necessary.

And please in the mean time, work to give us class diversity back. Thank you for your time, I hope this opens a constructive dialogue.

I haven’t seen one person top tier or bottom of the barrel increase their dps on the new pts. There isn’t a “gap close” as intended. The only people who are agreeing with this patch are those who only have read “gap close” in the patch notes.

I very much enjoyed reading your post and watching your reaction.

B6L6Z6BUB

Lets just make the game where you dont need skill to acheive stuff. Nerfing toggle was great. Had many people tell me they want to rp a vamp since toggle has no penalty. Now people can rp as endgamers since only damage exists in our imaginations with these changes

CameraBeardThePirate

As a PvPer, I thought I'd share my thoughts on the PvE related changes, as I've already shared my thoughts on the PvP related changes in other posts and comments.

In short, rotations in the PTS are dreadfully boring now. My DPS went down, but I'm not too concerned about that as I don't really do any vet trials and still have confidence that I'll be able to complete vet dungeons about as easily as before.

However, a lot of my PvP friends often like to joke around at how "boring" PvE is in comparison (mostly sarcastically, at least on my end). With these changes, these jokes have kind of become a reality. I enjoy PvE on live as it's a nice break from PvP content and practicing my rotation, even if I'm not in any sort of prog group, is a fun mental game for me. With the new DoT timers, rotations are now so straightforward that I found the parses I completed extremely boring. When every DoT is on the same timer, rotations lack the dynamism that kept them engaging before.

Again, I'm not a hardcore PvE'r, and as such I'm not going to comment on the damage numbers/damage loss I felt because at the end of the day I'll still be able to complete the content I want to complete; however now that content will likely feel much less exciting for me.

B6L6Z6BUB

Patch 35-. The Unheroic Damage Patch

TechMaybeHic

Tested jabs, burning light, and POTL, and it feels bad. Have some numbers and its just really felt awful. Jabs doesn't even feel like it is hitting your target. It's off slightly to the left or something, so if you turn to where it hits rather than crosshair, you miss, which seems odd with the cone size

sdh91885

WARNING: Wall of text inbound.

Forgive my Soul Shriven status, I've been playing since launch and in earnest since console launch. I'm just fairly quiet on forums. Which indicates I take most of your larger shakeups in stride. Nerfs to Crit Chance, capping Crit Damage, etc. I have enough faith in our community to adapt. But I didn't see that happening...not with these changes, so I took to the PTS.

On console I can produce ~103,000 DPS on a Dunmer magicka Nightblade with Relequen, Kinras front-barred with dual-wield daggers Nirn/Charged Fire/Poison, vMA 2H Sword Infused Weapon Damage, Kilt, 1 pc. Slimecraw. Bloodthirsty/Spell Damage, full Divines/Magicka Enchants.

On PTS I was able to produce a CMX of ~75,000 DPS. I'm not a score-pusher or meta-chaser, so my rotation is not perfect like some of our outstanding content creators out there producing 110K - 120K parses on nightblade and higher on other classes and other patches. I miss a few light attacks, I don't get every bow proc on the 5th light attack, and I let DoTs fall off longer than they should. I'm not perfect. But I'm good.

You should have already seen some of the community who have come here to share their feedback. 25 - 30% drops in damage. I understand your intent was to close the gap between the newer/less experienced part of the community (we'll just refer to them as casual, and that's just for a lack of a better term, there are plety of reasons why someone may not be a top tier damage dealer) and that top tier. The way to go about this is by raising the floor. You have lowered the ceiling. If damage dealers across the board are suffering a DPS loss of ~25%, I would expect progression and score pushing groups to lower their requirements in kind. So, time for some math.

If I am dealing 100,000 DPS, and I want into a Godslayer progression group with a 110,000 DPS requirement, I must increase my damage by 10% Following these changes, I will end up dealing 75,000 DPS. I would expect that same progression group to lower its requirement to ~82,500. So, instead of increasing my DPS by 10K, I must increase it by 7.5K. This sounds nice, but it's still a 10% increase. Nothing has changed, relatively speaking. It will take me just as long to produce that additional 7.5K on PTS as it would the 10K on live.

Now, take a less experience player dealing 75K DPS on live servers. This person must increase their DPS 35K or 46.67% on live to reach the 110K requirement. On PTS, this individual can expect to produce a 56,250 DPS parse. Instead of increasing their damage 35K, they must now increase their damage by 26,250 DPS or 46.67%.

Why does this matter? I will make up the 10,000 points of damage or the 7,500 points of damage I need to get into that group in the same amount of time on PTS as I would on live. As will the casual player. But I will have a much easier time doing it. Why? Not because I have a much shorter gap to cover, no. Because I understand the game's mechanics, the importance of light attack weaving, buff and DoT management, etc. I already mentioned my weak areas I know what they are. The casual player may not know what they are.

The first step in improving performance, is first acknowledging performance can still be improved. Having the best gear/mundus/CP will only get you part of the way there, but knowing where you're weak and having the patience and willingness to put in the effort to mitigate or eliminate those weaknesses is the only way to do it. ESO is not unique in this. This is how much of life is. Light attack weaving is still necessary to maximizing damage. Establishing a flat amount of damage will not make the casual player's parse any better, it won't bring them any closer. Maybe from a raw numbers perspective, sure, but relatively speaking? They will be just as far off as they are on live.

I would be remiss if I did not mention what I liked about the changes. I liked the increase to the DoT durations. I did not like the nerf to the DoT damage. It may be a bit ridiculous to say leave damage alone, but double duration, but I'm selfish in this regard and I've already seen how much easier of a time I have managing my buffs and my DoTs. It's much easier to keep up my Kinras stacks, it's much easier to make sure I'm hitting my spectral arrow on the 5th light attack, it's much easier to keep my DoTs up. I did see some comments about how they don't like spamming the same button 14 times in a row...I certainly did not have this experience, I still found myself swapping bars often, but I was able to work my spammable into the rotation much more frequently. On live, my spammable is essentially a single cast before it's time to start reapplying DoTs.

So, what i think would be ideal is to completely lose the changes to light attacks. This accomplishes nothing and is regressive. Instead of increasing DoT duration by ~100%, increase by ~75%. Instead of a 33% nerf to DoT damage, make no change to relative DoT damage. In other words, if a DoT deals 10K over 10s, deal 17.5K over 17.5s.

If nothing else, I strenuously suggest you take these combat and balance changes and move them to the recycle bin, right-click, Empty Recycle Bin. Remove the notes from the change log. Remove them from the website. Take down your earlier announcement, destroy any evidence, including these threads, that you ever, for even a moment, ever considered them.

Sincerely,

The Mad God

festegios

Not purely against the light attack thing, I don’t like it but can live with it.

But the damage and healing changes just feel like too MUCH of a change and not in a good direction.

I still can’t see how any of this works towards helping anyone really. It’s got most in my guilds considering what game to move onto.

Tar000un

Hello,

I m member of cores progressing into hm and trifecta. I rarely post on the forum but the incoming patch may force us to review our goal and eventually to pause the core. Then players will wonder why they bought a chapter that they can't progress.

I've no issue with changes, each changes needed some time to be accommodated. I was reading the thread and I want to quote some messages that highlight the main issues of changes concerning weaving and dot.

tyran404_ESO wrote: »

[...] So As a mid-tier player it is now likely impossible for me to finish that climb of content. Combat is less engaging, the numbers are lower, and none of your content got adjusted for the new numbers so all the old HM's are going to be an untouchable summit for most of us. I cannot play the way i want to play now. People have posted pages of solid feedback that they should just take a step back and read over and consider some alternatives.

Sussuris wrote: »

As an endgame player (Templar DPS [Magplar 105k Deadlands]/Heals) - progging vRG and vDSR HM's and some older trifectas - who has played on and off since Closed Betas, if they wanted to reduce damage, I'm fine with that. As long as they went and retouched some of the newer content designed with those much higher numbers from the last few patches in mind (not that they're ever going to actually do that, as they've stated loudly and often) [...]

So, ZOS, you need to do it step by step. People are not complaining about the changes, people are complaining because you don't change : you are not changing the trials, the dungeons, the encounters.
You could do whatever you want if you were changing the content too. It's a matter of balancing the game, ie players interacting with game environment.

I suggest to keep weaving update, maybe reducing the nerf, but to mainly focus on updating the encounters before the dot update.

BretonMage

xaraan wrote: »

2. If you want to raise the floor and help newer players, then why nerf LA damage while still having weaving be a thing. First you teach them how to weave in the game and Second: REWARD them for learning to weave by having the attacks do good damage. Having it do a flat amount is ok, but have that flat amount be higher. Then you keep the top guys at a set level, but actually give maybe even a boost to players that may not be min maxed in their build but at least have learned to weave.

Agree. I'm one of the low- to mid-tier players this change was supposed to help, but my damage went down by 10%. It may not have decreased as much as the top players, but it was still a reduction.

4. The DoT changes are a bit too much as well. I think somewhere in the middle is a happy spot, like maybe 15 seconds. DoT damage is dropping too much and having them last so long really doesn't help in many fights when most bosses have mechanics that move them around, make them invulnerable, etc. It could also contribute to making combat feel more boring as you just increase the amount of time a player has to spam one skill.

Absolutely agree with this. Ground-based DoTs are already at a disadvantage in a lot of fights because enemies don't stay in one spot. Nerfing the damage to them means they become unviable for both low and top end players. If ZOS wants to make rotations more forgiving to new players, 15 seconds is really more than enough.

Faded

[*] Light and Heavy Attacks
[*] Did you notice these adjustments on the PTS while playing?

Yes.

[*] If you did, was it better or worse in your experience?

Worse, but not very important. Heavy lightning stick attacks feel too weak. I noticed the loss of LA damage most with bow.

[*] Do you feel like Light and Heavy Attacks still provide meaningful impact to your play experience after the adjustments? Please explain your reasoning.

Yes. I use HAs for resource return. Where I leaned on them for damage they had less impact than I was expecting, but still meaningful. LAs could be cut by another 50 percent and I wouldn't care. Empower exists.

[*] Damage over Time
[*] Did you notice these adjustments on the PTS while playing?

Yes.

[*] If you did, was it better or worse in your experience?

Mixed. Less terrible than I expected, but some DOTs will be useless to me in this iteration. The slow damage doesn't work for everything. OTOH I loved not having to tell the volatile familiar to pulse so often. Had no idea how much that lowkey irritates me until now.

[*] After the balance changes, did you make changes to the amount of Damage over Time abilities your build utilized? Please explain any reasoning.

Yes, although I'm not sure I couldn't change them for other DOTs. I didn't test everything.


[*] Healing over Time
[*] Did you notice these adjustments on the PTS while playing?

Yes.

[*] If you did, was it better or worse in your experience?

Worse.

[*] How do you feel about the healing experience and its overall impact in your primary activities (PvP/Dungeons/Solo/Trials)? Has your sentiment changed based on these PTS adjustments?

The healing experience?

kitsune31987

Eigh1_Puppies wrote: »

To all coming from my socials I want to re-emphasize, please promote respectful and constructive dialogue. Avoid saying dumb things like "Devs don't play the game," or "Devs don't know what they're doing." These devs care deeply about the game and this community, and even if you don't believe that, they are a business. A business has to listen to its consumer base in order to maintain a profit. Keep these things in mind, present rational arguments, and good solutions.

Hi There. Long time ESO Player and Heavy Endgame Raider here. I play on both PC NA and Xbox NA. I have been raiding for the better part of the past 3 years, and I've completed almost every trifecta on both of these platforms. Most of my time however has been spent building teams for the sake of teaching, starting with Crag HMS and working all the way through the most difficult Trifectas, done 100s teaching runs over the course of my time raiding, and have spent the last year avidly content creating in an effort to teach Console players specifically, in an effort to close the massive Knowledge Gap that exists between both servers.

I say all of this to note that I am a very experienced endgame player who's focus is growing the endgame community. The changes suggested, after just some initial testing, very avidly prove that they act counterintuitively towards the goal of lessening the skill gap between players.

I'll start by saying that I think the light attack changes do accomplish the goal. 90% of the player base underestimates how important weaving is to overall damage output, not just to hit light attacks in between skills, but to weave as quickly as possible. Nerfing light attacks by roughly 5% (as shown by testing) is not a significant change, keeping weaving very relevant to learn and practice, while still making it slightly less important. Light attack weaving is free damage output, and the amount of damage light attacks were doing, I think is fair to say, was a little over the top. The skill gap was properly addressed with this change.

The change that I advocated as much more important to address, even before patch notes dropped, was the changes to Dots and AOE abilities. There are so many issues with these changes, and I hate to say it, they should all be scrapped in their entirety.

The biggest issue with these changes for me, is the constant push towards a lack of diversity that the Meta has come to offer. Over the course of the year, we've seen gear standardized, completely rendering half the sets in the game that Mag Toons had previoulsy sought for as useless. The Meta shifted to just about all of the most powerful Stam gear options, and that was it. Then we had the changes to skills, where everything was made the same. There was choice, no pros or cons, to choosing mag or stam based skills. This effectively killed half the class options that we had to choose from. The Meta shifts to simply "Run the strongest sets and the strongest skills, spec your resources for whichever you need to sustain." There is no longer a Mag DK or Stam DK it is just the DK. We went from 12 classes to 6. Not only that, but these changes affected the complexity endgame players have grown to love in making decisions based on raid composition. Room for testing and creativity in terms of maximizing damage was higher than I've ever seen it in my time playing this game before the first update of the year. It was fun while it lasted...

With the changes presented in update 35, we have yet again cut the class pool in half. By increasing dots to a standardized timer, to change all of them to 20 seconds flat, you have universalized rotations. Recalling the nature of a Global Cooldown, it's easy to build static rotations for every class without even testing, because, assuming perfect weaving, you'll be able to fit 19 total skills in before needing to recast a 20 second dot. And even if your weaving isn't clean, it is now better for skills to completely expire rather than recast them, as, if you recast a dot 1 second before it expires, you'll lose a full tick of damage. Not only does this add another layer of complexity for players unfamiliar in rotational practice to have to be aware of to maximize their damage, it now makes rotations and combat for experienced players dull and boring. DKs and Plars will drop 8 or 9 Dots/AOEs in a row, then do 11-12 spammables, replacing a spammable when they need to drop an ult. Cros and Dens are slightly more complicated in needing to weave blastbones or shalks between every couple of skill casts, so they'll drop 8 or 9 dots and do only 6-7 spammables. Blades and Sorcs would theoretically have a near identical rotation, both utilizing an execute and merciless resolve/bound armaments if not for the change to the new favorite Sorc skill, but now that we aren't even using Bound Armaments due to the nerf, the sorc falls closer in line to the DK/Plar Rotation.

If this massive lack of diversity had amounted in solutions that actually addressed the skill gap, the changes would be more bearable. But these Dot changes have quite literally done the opposite. First of all, making a rotation easier does not address the skill gap. It's an idea that looks good on paper, but does not hold in reality. Damage does not improve in content unless you have the reps to be comfortable enough to handle mechanics while focusing on your rotation. Regardless of how easy a rotation is, Time on Target is the most important element of doing damage in content. When players that are new to trials are presented with mechancis that they've never seen before, damage quite literally stops in most cases. Players stop, look at the mechanic, handle the mechanic, then attempt to pick their rotation back up, even completely restarting it half the time. No amount of dulling down rotations will change this simple fact of progression. Even as an experienced player who has maxed dummy parses and hit top logs, I myself have seen my damage increase in the new trial as I get more comfortable, reps and reps and reps later. When this team progressing the new Trifecta started on PTS, we barely had the damage to skip two bridges on the final boss. Now that we are more repped, we skip all bridges on non hard mode with plenty of time to spare. It's the nature of progression.

And even at that, there are classes that currently exist with very simple static rotations that do almost as much damage as dynamic alternatives. The DK is the best example. This class is very very strong in content, and I posted a video showcasing a 115K Dynamic rotation and a 114.2K Static rotation. A purely static rotation that will always require a little bit of practice.

And that's a good transition into the next point, it doesn't matter how simple a rotation is, you MUST practice if you want to get into heavy endgame content. Period. You can't walk into a vet hard mode and just expect to clear. You have to pull a little weight. This requires an understanding and practice of a rotation, as well as understanding basic concepts in doing good damage, such as weaving and time on target. Making a rotation easier does not incentivize players to practice. Most players new to end game that parse on a dummy for the first time will hit 30K, see a youtube video of someone hitting 115K, and then give up. They'll decide it's not worth it, and go back to what they were already doing in ESO. And there is NOTHING wrong with that at all. Other player's who make it to endgame though practice to improve. There's no way around that.

So not only do the dot changes completely fail to adequately address the skill gap, the current damage loss that we have currently seen from the PTS is quite possibly the absolute worst thing you can do for newer players. Keep in mind, as a long time endgamer, I've advocated for damage nerfs for a while. Content feels too easy, and the only incentive endgamers have to complete content as it stands, is a pat on the back for working for a trifecta for 3 months. Completing challenging content is what we've accepted as a reward, and a damage nerf like this makes content challenging again. But if your goal is to lower the skill gap, these changes have done the exact opposite. Nerfing damage by 5K? Sure not a huge deal. But 30-35K is as counterproductive as it gets.

I've tested both the DK and Cro on the PTS server thus far. On live, I hit about 115K on the DK and 125K on the Cro. The best parse that I've managed so far on the DK is around 105K and on the cro, about 106K. Starting with the DK, I obviously had to adjust some skills to account for some changes, we got to add Talons which would've added about 5K DPS to the live test if we were able to sustain talons on live. The biggest thing to keep in mind though, are the new buffs added to the dummy this cycle. First off we have about 2K more pen, which I'll disregard for the sake of argument, because we were about at pen cap anyway on live. But we got a 10% damage done boost from Major Slayer and 215 Spell/Weapon Damage from Minor Courage. 10% of 120K (Accounting for talons) is 12K dps, add maybe another 5K for Minor Courage, and all of a sudden the comparison jumps to 137K on live to 105K on PTS. I think the DK could jump to around 110K with more tweaking on PTS, better crits, more practice, so I'll give a low end estimate of 25K DPS lost and a high end estimate of 35K DPS lost. The cro is much worse off with the nerfs the class took, much like the sorc, seeing close to a 40K DPS loss...

This is all in the name of closing the skill gap. Not only does the logic behind the change to standardizing dot and aoe timers not hold due to the elements of raiding and progression that we've discussed earlier, but this type of a damage nerf kills so many early stage progression teams. You have to execute rotations and weaving to near perfection in all content to have a shot at clearing with this type of damage nerf. The endgamer in me is excited by this type of nerf admittedly, but the part of me who wants to see endgame grow can clearly see how this is a massive negative. The amount of practice, and reps required to even clear some regular vet content is now much greater.


So the question becomes, how do we address this skill gap?

The changes to dots and aoes in their entirety need to be scrapped and reworked. A much more reasonable solution that would at least somewhat address this issue if you really wanted to move forward with reworking dot and aoe timers, would be to simply add 10 seconds to the currently existing timers of all dots and aoes, without changing the damage per second output of the abilities. Though I would argue that even a change like this would kill diversity in endgame. Even the notion of these changes have already caused quite a few teams to disband, and have put the large portion of the endgame community into the mindset of quitting.

And players leaving endgame is a trend that we've seen happen over and over again throughout the last year. If these changes were really affecting players in terms of the skill gap, we would see old players leaving due to a distaste for the new game that we've come to find ourselves playing in 2022, replaced by new players constantly getting into these trials for the first time. Instead, we're seeing old players leave and nobody new joining. This could be anecdotal admittedly, but I'd love to see you post statistics related to this claim, in terms of players either clearing content for the first time, or just the server stress in general in trials over the last year or two.

And furthermore, you have a perfect testing ground for accessibility. It is no secret that simple vet and vet hard mode clears are far more common on PC than console. This quite literally represents the accessibility issue that you claim to want to fix. The biggest difference between the two platforms is as simple as it seems. Certain add ons provide information and tools to practice elements of damage efficiently on PC that Console players don't have access to. CMX and Logs is the BIGGEST tool that you could integrate into base game to help accessibility. Adding a combat metronome, making better ability bar timers, integrating srrendar, even being able to see your damage compared to your team mates live through Hodor makes players more likely to do better damage. Tutorials explaining GCDs and weaving, and Time on Target, and Rotations, would all be immensely helpful too. It's a complicated game, and PC players have 70% of the tools that they need to be able to learn and play the game thanks to add ons, while Console players have to rely on one Console Content creator for reliable information as to the facts and fictions regarding damage and raid comps, having 5% of the information needed to do good damage available as apart of base game. Start here, add these things into base game, see console clears and console endgame begin to rise, and then come back to these changes if you feel it's still necessary.

And please in the mean time, work to give us class diversity back. Thank you for your time, I hope this opens a constructive dialogue.

^^^^^^^^THIS. ALL OF THIS!! End gamers aren't upset about dps loss. We aren't upset about the light attack nerf. I am so incredibly sad that this is going to hurt everyone... casuals, newer players, mid tier, end game, pvp. Literally, no one will be unaffected by this. With all of the changes in the game, midtier and end game are dwindling. This might just kill it.

@ZOS_GinaBruno you all listened to our suggestions once before and held off on Light attack changes, please listen to us again and hold off on the DOT/HOT changes in U35. Re-evaluate this whole thing. We really miss our class diversity. We don't want boring rotations. We don't want to NOT be able to complete Vet Kynes Hardmode because of the changes to the healing over time. We want to bridge the skill gap as well, but this is not the way to accomplish it. In fact, just in one day of PTS it looks like this is widening the gap. Please reconsider.

merpins

Chilly-McFreeze wrote: »

At least you are thorough with your changes. Nerfed LA dmg, nerfed crystal weapons by 41,5% and bound armaments by 38% as well.
Nice Job.
Sincerely, a former stam sorc main

I just started maining Stam Sorc, too. And my previous two mains were Warden and Templar. Nerfs say every class is a bad option now.

Did some parses on my 3 mains. 40k damage loss on my sorc (don't even use Crystal Weapons), 30k damage loss on my Warden, 25k damage loss on my Templar. That's taking into account the Major Slayer, took that off of the final scores. The only class that is at 100k dps now is Warden, the rest are below or well below (sorc is down to 65k dps, Templar down to 90k). And Warden is only at 100k because I changed up the rotation a bit, which bumped it up from 95k to 100k.

Zoomichop

I love the changes and I hope you go much further with them in future patches!

In particular, it would be fantastic if you could eliminate the animation canceling but entirely from the game so that our skill choices and selection actually matter. Spamming skills to exploit a bug should never have been allowed in the first place, its an exploit after all!

I also love the new timers for buff/dots. Having to reapply them less often makes combat feel so much nicer too. All in all this is a great update for the combat system in this game and the people complaining are mostly just wanting everything to be faceroll easy instead of fun and they will adapt to the changes fairly easily too.

offbymyself

exiledtyrant wrote: »

Lastly 120k to 100k is a drastic change as 20% is well outside of the bound Zenimax said they were looking to reduce overall DPS by (it was stated to be closer to 6-11% total). I've stated as much in my own thread and if I kept generating 18% or more parses instead of falling into the 6-11% band at 9% I would take issue. Now if high performing players are still facing decreases well outside the band of 6-11% after adapting their builds to the changes, I think it should be addressed.

What I'm saying is that your initial was an 18% difference at middle/lower end and the top end is looking at a 25+% difference. The percentages alone might not seem like a big difference but 25% of 50K is 12.5K and 25% of 120K is 30K. Although it's punishing those at the top more harshly, it's still lowering the floor and the ceiling at the same time, which was not ZOS's expressed goal. You mentioned in your initial post that you were okay with the loss because you could still complete your desired content. The issue at the higher end is that, even with altering builds, we are not going to be able to meet certain minimums in dps and healing to complete our desired content anymore.

The mid players will struggle to complete content because buffs/debuffs will not closely correlate with skill timers and there will still be a skill gap between low, middle, and high end players that won't be breached by an in game tutorial. These changes penalize all players, with the greatest penalty to those who have worked their way to the higher end of gameplay. They're literally punishing hard work. Lol

sbr32

A bunch of other people have covered most everything else, but I haven't seen much attention to this so I will mention it on my way out the door (10k hours over the last 5ish years).

I am 50+ years old and have been playing video games for 40+ years and it is mind-boggling to me that an 8 year old game is making 40%+ adjustments to core class skills that have been in the game since the start (and I feel that way when the adjustments are buffs instead of nerfs). How in the world have you let this game get to the point this point that "balance" involves these kind of changes to core class skills?

Why are you so married to the huge balance changes that come out with each DLC every 3 months instead of having smaller more focused changes throughout the year? More regular balance patches would let you balance with the scalpel instead of taking to take the wrecking ball to the game every 3 months?

I had more to say but I'm done, you have shown you won't listen or change so why should I bother?

Panachudo

It’s the same tiring cycle of negativity every single patch and update. Honestly I’m surprised the developers haven’t just pulled the plug. Would you come to work every day knowing what’s being said in here? If everything stayed the same we’d all be living in caves grunting at each other.

What baffles me is the overbearing need to push higher and higher numbers. Prior to this patch, and the previous, oh, and the one before that, everyone was on the negative bandwagon about DPS dropping. But look, we have 125k+ numbers currently on the live server. All the freaking out was for nothing.

See it as a challenge. See it as a step toward consistency. You all know the server side was overloaded with calculations in how it was working before. These changes look like they tie into the streamlining of the backend efficiency. This will have profound effects on playability. That will actually benefit PvP and PvE. What a huge benefit that will be for everyone.

Positive reinforcement and constructive criticism is far more valuable than screaming and shouting. This atmosphere is enough to drive players away. Regardless of the updates.