PTS Update 35 - Feedback Thread for Combat Balance Changes

DeathStalker

I did some more parsing on the pts. Was able to get my NB to a better place than live at around 21k dps, my Magcro up to around 16k dps, and my Magplar to around 18k Dps. It is Still a slight drop for both compared to live for my Magcro and Magplar but not as bad as the first day. Just did some skill swapping.

The biggest takeaway for me was for some reason I seem to be able to LA weave a little easier, especially with the Magplar. I say easier which for me means around 45-55 instead of 15-25 according to the addon for counting LA. Still don't like the damage nerfs but maybe not armageddon quite yet.

MindOfTheSwarm

Tannus15 wrote: »

@MindOfTheSwarm what are you talking about? infused hasn't been used on front bar for builds for years. Precise is the go to, except for warden and DK who have been using charged since the charged buff.
DW setups have been using nirnhoned and charged.

I never said front bar.

MindOfTheSwarm

Some people are worried about DPS, but I think for most its dull rotations and loss of diverse play styles that have ruined the game if this patch goes through.

I really wish ZOS would drop the whole "Set bonuses make diverse gameplay". It is nonsense. To be honest, am actually sick of sets. Gimmicky nonsense half the time that might add one little perk, but the other 90% of the play style remains the same across all classes. It is really 1 dimensional gameplay.

If they wanted, they would add new skills outside of classes instead of sets. There is no reason why not. Take Whorl of the Depths for example or Nunatak. I love these sets but they could have easily been new skills on a new skill line. The choice that we have is very limited, its kind of opened up a bit with hybridization. But its isn't anything new.

Even when new skills were added with Psijic or Vamp rework, they were kind of gimmicky outside of a few outliers. Not a fan of third morphs as they will still be palette swaps essentially. Truth is, you can patch things as much as you want to try and shake up the meta. But at the end of the day the pool of options we have to build around are very small. This is exacerbated with this patch which puts 90% into our spammable. That's 1 skill.... no wonder people are saying its boring.

aetherial_heavenn

Anyammis wrote: »

Positives
I think extending dot/hot duration is a good thing for people who have high or erratic ping. I noticed uptimes felt cleaner on pts vs live. My internet is sometimes erratic and it often could mess up parses or damage. I play with several others who have bad internet or are EU players who prefer the community of NA and I think this is a good change to keep of all of them. This does help people with suboptimal systems/connections in a way that ESO has failed to do in the past.

Thanks for saying this. It will make a huge difference, as will the increase skill timers from. .300 to .800 on some skils to allow for lag. On a side note ZoS have also addressed most of the completion issues (where performing mechanics because of 300 ms ping was nigh impossible) in more recent dungeons/trials for which I am grateful*.

I think the DoT duration change is a complex one: for server performance, and people with slow internet and people with disabilities the intentions are great---- but the knock on affects are very complex across classes/feel/damage output/healing.

I think these really needed much more incremental changes ie do DoT's after the Oakensoul nuke and the LA changes had settled, still on PTS only, so intended changes to accessibility could be checked and class changes tweaked for first one thing, then the next. Heaven knows how they'll benchmark anything with all this happening and the trials dummy changed at the same time.


*edited to add: that there is a great post on other accessibilty issues in dungeons which still exist and some solutions here.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/611514/if-you-actually-cared-about-those-with-accessibility-issues#latest

Krym

aetherial_heavenn wrote: »

My thoughts based on some general observations. (edit: mostly concerned with 'accessibility')

As I have said, this patch seems to be about standardising server calcs and possibly reducing the number of those calcs per second?

I expect DoTs will be buffed up in patch 3 because the dps loss of average players will cause sufficient valid backlash and the cycle is usually take a lot away, then give a bit back. edit: (Haven't tested HoTs. But both are/should be adjusted back up, together.)

Reducing high end dps maybe a secondary goal but most people in the high parse range (85k plus on a trials dummy) are back to parsing nearly as high numbers again. Plus one can medium weave! (LOL) The DoT changes seem to be easy to keep up and require less attention once our internal timers reset. This may be a good thing for me, but YMMV.

The latency changes ie adjusting times from 330 ms (the average Oceanic and Southern American ping) to 880ms on a range of calculations seems a genuine attempt at making the game internationally playable. I am glad they are realising that instant reactions to insta kill mechanics, or perfect timing skills firing when calculated at a third of a second is not always possible with 300ms or above latency. There are a number of ways these changes will cut players with slow reactions, internet, etc. some slack while trying to do rotations.

My main accessibility concern is them rendering Oakensoul useless. This was a great tool to bridge the gap for those of us stuck just under good enough dps to do vet DLC content. Plus overland soloers could actually play the more challenging content they wanted to without requiring groups. There was a genuine change to those able to access harder content from this item alone. The nerf bat hit this far too hard in my opinion.

good point about the ping, haven't thought about that at all.

I'd like to add that people see the changes too much in a vacuum, damage isn't everything. dungeons aren't just a bunch of dummies you have to kill in a certain amount of time, they're are a lot more involved to the point even high level parsers are apparently still to incompetent to do a quick interrupt in their rotation or not blow through damage goals...
damage is also a matter of tuning, not systems. ZOS could keep the changes in duration etc. while let everybody do the same damage as before, and it would look quite differently. @ZOS_Lunar maybe split the discussion into combat and class specific changes? would make it easier for the devs to find feedback for specific classes and the combat itself.

as for the combat, nothing I've seen so far on the PTS egregious to me (not talking damage, just flow). sure, you could call the new rotations boring, but imo there's not much difference to pressing the same button more often in a longer spammable window to now. some classes are already "boring" (ymmv), so there's not much change to me. you still need to dodge, block, interrupt and most importantly move in a real fight all the same.

we should also consider how it looks from the perspective of some of the lower dps players, no one really talked (or wanted to talked) WHY they only make that amount of DPS. "boring" for us might be just right for them, so if the longer spam windows makes it easier for them to at least try to weave a bit (weaving 1 button is much easier than 2 bars) while also making the rotation more manageable, on top of all the other things in a dungeon/trial, isn't that a good thing? just look at @Artim_X post about vateshran, he actually went ahead and tried it in an actual combat scenario. meanwhile lot of comments boil down to "I DO LESS DAMAGE WTF ZOS!!!??!" based on other people's parses, while never complaining when damage in general went up and up over the years. a change was necessary and inevitable (and we all had ample warning), dunno why people are surprised. plus, a stagnant game or constant powercreep makes people also quit, either because nothing changes in the aspects they don't like, or they can't/don't want to keep up. so any remarks THIS WILL MAKE PEOPLE QUIT conveniently ignore that people are already quitting and always will. no change is only good or bad, and in that regard I consider the new combat (not the individual class damage numbers mind you) a step in the right direction.

fully agree on the oakensoul nerf btw, it's pure garbage. half the classes can source those minor buffs themselves, let alone in a group scenario. major buffs are much harder to get and keep up (especially for groups not on the top end), the new version makes it completely pointless sacrificing a whole bar for it. worse, it impacts the people who'd actually "need" it the most: higher dps players will just go back to 2 bars and shrug it off. solo/overland players were never really affected either, they've been doing fine with pale order so far.
if there ever was a point to finally separate pvp and pve stats, which has been an issue and affecting balance FOR YEARS, it's probably now. what's the point in collecting all the stuff for an item that's only worthwhile for a single update cycle?

aetherial_heavenn wrote: »

Great post. Changing DoTs and the LA changes are too much at once. Add the consequent adjustments to sets and the somewhat odd changes to class skills and it's very hard, particularly for ad hoc players and mid level players aspiring to end game, to adjust.

There's too much information overload and anxiety induced by multiple adjustments in one roll out.

This scale of change required a different test process on PTS over 3 separate cycles, in my opinion, but that's not how finance and marketing departments let game developers work.

except if not now, then when? people are already complaining about the "constant changes", and do you really want ZOS balance part of it now (otherwise people will complain), then have to re-balance all of it again next patch (so people don't complain)? at some point the big change has to come, and I prefer that in a sudden "ripping of the bandaid and (mostly) be done with it" move than dragging it out over several patches which will only annoy people further.

as I said above, DOTs and LA changes aren't really the issue, but the numbers people end up with. quick reminder this is the first week of the PTS, things WILL change (hopefully...). if they'd still do roughly the same damage people would care a lot less.

Ghaleb wrote: »

In that group we have exactly 3 DDs who put out good numbers and carry a good amount of the weight of the group.
We have 2 DDs who pull at least decent numbers for vet content. And as decent I consider 40k DPS with which I wouldn’t even need to try to apply for a random vet trial group in Craglorn on PC EU.
And then we have 3 DDs who are constantly below 40k DPS and partly even below 20k DPS. Now some might argue why we take them with us but they want to learn and progress. So of course we take them with us and understand in the same instance that they might never bring 100k parses to the dummy, which was and is ok for us.

We have been wiping with that group at Oaxiltso so so often, as we are struggling to apply sufficient DPS to not be required to play mechanics for ages, especially as a good number of the group parks itself in venom AoE of Oaxiltso as all things can sometimes be overwhelming maybe.

Lately we managed to progress more reliably which is a good thing and shows that the team slowly starts to adhere to mechanics and not die in the stampede or the venom or to frogs.

But with these changes we are back to square one as most DPS in our group will drop below 40k DPS which will increase the wipes again substantially, as the longer you need, the more can go south.

3 of us can find other groups as we pull good numbers. Yay, good for us? Issue is, I like playing with that team, I like seeing how we progress and enjoy beating formerly tricky steps in the process. And this change will now take this chance away as we either happily wipe away and enjoy that since wiping is now even more achievable as seemingly ZOS considers that to be more inclusive or we stop trying with the team.

40k is fine for craglorn trials, even when that's the whole group. this is content from 2014. as for Oaxiltso, up until a month ago this was current endgame content. you're supposed to play the mechanics. this is basically blaming ZOS for not being able to cheese anymore.

high dps on dummy parses are not an indicator how severely low end people are affect, because they're simply affected differently. for example if they only do 40k without any weaving at all, buffing LA by 200% won't suddenly make them do more damage either. this also ignores the effects the simpler rotation will have - maybe they won't stand in stupid as much anymore when they're not trying to weave and keep a constant eye on their dots as much?

if you want to blame ZOS, blame them for the oakensoul nerf, which made it basically useless for PVE and completely destroyed the point of the item (to make it easier for people) in the first place.

renne

DeathStalker wrote: »

I did some more parsing on the pts. Was able to get my NB to a better place than live at around 21k dps, my Magcro up to around 16k dps, and my Magplar to around 18k Dps. It is Still a slight drop for both compared to live for my Magcro and Magplar but not as bad as the first day. Just did some skill swapping.

The biggest takeaway for me was for some reason I seem to be able to LA weave a little easier, especially with the Magplar. I say easier which for me means around 45-55 instead of 15-25 according to the addon for counting LA. Still don't like the damage nerfs but maybe not armageddon quite yet.

Were you weaving with jabs? Because they actually reduced the channel time theoretically to make it easier to weave (while also gutting the damage).

Ironically, just over a year ago they actually INCREASED the channel time on it. Sounds a bit like someone is making changes to stay in a job, really.

Darkstorne

Potential solution to LA/HA nerfs affecting newer players and LA builds (consecutive LA spam):

LA Combo Buff - dealing damage with a light attack increases the damage of your next light attack by 20%, stacking up to 5 times. Casting a spell or using an ability erases all stacks. Dealing damage with a heavy attack consumes all stacks of this buff, increasing your heavy attack damage by 50% for each stack consumed.

Now you can keep the LA damage nerf to tone down "free" damage for weavers, while simultaneously buffing the floor for casual players who like to play this game like an Elder Scrolls game. Heavy attacks can also have that "punch" some players expect, and that ZOS wanted with their previous attempt at LA/HA changes, as a combo finisher type of move.

DeathStalker

renne wrote: »

DeathStalker wrote: »

I did some more parsing on the pts. Was able to get my NB to a better place than live at around 21k dps, my Magcro up to around 16k dps, and my Magplar to around 18k Dps. It is Still a slight drop for both compared to live for my Magcro and Magplar but not as bad as the first day. Just did some skill swapping.

The biggest takeaway for me was for some reason I seem to be able to LA weave a little easier, especially with the Magplar. I say easier which for me means around 45-55 instead of 15-25 according to the addon for counting LA. Still don't like the damage nerfs but maybe not armageddon quite yet.

Were you weaving with jabs? Because they actually reduced the channel time theoretically to make it easier to weave (while also gutting the damage).

Ironically, just over a year ago they actually INCREASED the channel time on it. Sounds a bit like someone is making changes to stay in a job, really.

Yes, I was trying ( very badly ) to weave with jabs. I am not of fan of the new amination of jabs but it was easier to weave than live.

Glantir

Sorc is getting behind with this changes.

Make Bound Armaments passive so we dont Need wo waste Time with recast every 40s, and give it empower on use

Change crystal weapon to a normal spamable and throw away the Double proc. At normal skill cost so that magicka users also can use it

Greater Storm Atro should last minimum 20-25 seconds. Its often durping around before attacking or first attacks the wrong target.

colossalvoids

It's crazy to see nb players saying it's all fine. As a NB main since horns of the reach its absolute garbage. Both PvP and PvE. Surprise attack is already overloaded enough, if the change goes through the class will be nerfed even harder next couple patches and this nonsense would be also reverted most probably as a final nail. Consealed one is just... why? Can we not support hide and seek playstyle and give magblade an effective melee offensive tool? Not even talking about dark cloak, like that's basic not understanding why and how it's used. Changes only to the stamina execute, right, as they're suffering the most I guess.

Consuming darkness anyone? Swallow soul? That's the price for getting late class adjustments I guess, late to the party when classes had it's balance pass more adequate years ago.

JustAGoodPlayer

What about buffing all damage after HA for some amount for short amount of time and buff next attack on some ammount for doing no LA damage ?

Then LA will not need to be nerfed and not LA players damage goes up and no one lose anything ?

The same if in LA rotation you lose some LA you will not lose a lot of damage.

jecks33

AerunSun wrote: »

Can anyone remember if any game changes have ever been withdrawn after so many complaints? Or are these "improvements", regardless of what is posted here, implemented anyway.

no, Murkmire and Morrowind were bad patches as this one but they never reverted any change (except for 3s cast on shields, in this case they cappet shields at 50% of your HP and removed the cast time, bad change anyway)

KlauthWarthog

Well... let´s do this, then.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

This is the official feedback thread for the combat changes in Update 35. After you have a chance to try out different combat scenarios, let us know what you think of the current balance and changes. Specific feedback that the team is looking for includes the following:

• 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?
    • Light attacks, no change. Lightning heavy attacks might as well not exist anymore.
    • What activities did you primarily feel the differences in, if any (parsing, dungeons, overland, dueling)? Please feel free to include before and after images of metrics on data, such as combat logs, to showcase your point.
    • Soloing dragons on N. Elsweyr
  • Do you feel like Light and Heavy Attacks still provide meaningful impact to your play experience after the adjustments? Please explain your reasoning.
  • Light attacks, yes. Heavy attacks, no. They are now glorified resource potions that take forever to go off and deal no damage whatsoever for the time they take.
• 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. On a vacuum, there is a lot less fumbling around required to keep the DoTs up, which is better. But they are now all off-sync with any non-arena back bar sets. And the change to 2s tick frequency reduces the passive uptime on weapon damage glyphs. If you want it up 100% of the time, well, better get to swapping and light-attacking every 5 seconds, which is horribly worse.
    • What activities did you primarily feel the differences in, if any (parsing, dungeons, overland, dueling)? Please feel free to include before and after images of metrics on data, such as combat logs, to showcase your point.
    • Soloing dragons on N. Elsweyr
  • After the balance changes, did you make changes to the amount of Damage over Time abilities your build utilized? Please explain any reasoning.
  • No.
  • While using Damage over Time effects, did you notice any other impacts on your play experience?
  • DoTs do not feel impactful enough to merit casting on anything other than dummies now (and yes, I am counting static boss fights as glorified dummies here).
• Healing over Time
• Did not test.

Mrtoobyy

Hey, I've made a template with a max level character on the PTS. Where on earth in the inventory is the item that lets you learn all outfit/armor styles? I can find EVERYTHING else

ESO_Nightingale

code65536 wrote: »

I want to start off by saying that I have no qualms with the "mission statement" of these PTS changes. Specifically:

The closer the gap between the low and high end, the easier it is to create content that can accommodate a wider audience.

[...]

we hope to reduce the stress of many combat rotations, allowing for you to focus more on the action in front of you rather than the action of juggling buffs and debuffs on your ability bar and making the game far more accessible.

I agree that there is a very large power gap, that this power gap is one that has grown over the years, and that such a large power gap isn’t particularly healthy. But I don’t think that the changes in Update 35 is correct way to address these problems.

My post will be in three parts, where I talk about the light attacks and weaving, about effect durations, and about the power gap problem in general.

---

PART 1: Light Attacks, Heavy Attacks, and Weaving

This is probably the least controversial change. Reducing light attack damage would reduce the power gap between those who can and can’t weave. But there are three issues with this change:

1. It also impacts some of the people who are ostensibly part of the “target audience” for this change. The proverbial floor--people who just spam light attacks--will be even less effective after this change.
2. The nerf to heavy attacks seems completely counterproductive, especially since heavy attack builds have been a popular accessibility option for years.
3. This change reduces everyone’s damage. Yes, it will reduce the damage of someone to weaves perfectly a bit more than someone who misses light attacks, but it’s still a nerf for the latter. And, as mentioned, those people who just use light and heavy attacks.

For the people who are your “target audience”, how do you justify to them that their combat effectiveness is going down? It’s one thing to say to someone parsing 130K on live that a reduction to their damage was for the health of the game, but it’s quite another to say to someone who’s using an accessible heavy attack build that their playstyle is getting hit for their own good. (Example)

This was one of the key issues that I raised two years ago during that special PTS testing LA/HA changes. Back then, I suggested that a better solution was to discriminate between consecutive (and thus non-weaved) light attack and non-consecutive (and thus weaved) ones. I know that you already have the means to do this, as there are sets that require consecutive light attacks.

So, halve the damage of non-consecutive light attacks, preserve the damage of consecutive light attacks, and there’s no need to touch heavy attacks at all. That kind of change would be a far more focused change than what you have here on this PTS, in that it would more precisely target weaving without as much collateral damage to bystanders.

---

PART 2: Durations

I remember the days when Wall of Elements lasted for just 6 seconds; in 2019, this was increased to 10 seconds. I—and most people—believe that the duration increase in 2019 was the right move. It made the skill easier to manage and on the whole things felt better as a result of this duration change.

So, here we are, three years later, looking at another duration increase. This time, I’m not on board with these changes. Why not?

For short durations, the main problem is that they require a lot of micromanagement. You need to pay attention to that Wall and recast it every 6s, and people will often forget and lose potential damage.

For long durations, the problem is that you are more severely penalized for an early recast. Recasting a 20s Wall at or before the 10s mark is a loss: you would’ve been better to use a spammable instead. You don’t get the full benefit of Wall being 2x the power of a spammable unless you let that single cast of Wall go for the full 20s.

Which brings us to a key problem: I feel like that this duration change makes no sense outside of the sterile environment of target dummy testing.

• Dungeons and trials: @ZOS_Finn said in an interview that they are actively looking at making sure that fights incorporate movement. The first boss of Graven Deep, for example, is constantly dashing around the room. And there are fights where there are specific burst windows in which to hit the boss: Olms and Archcustodian, for example. For dungeons and trials, around 12 seconds was a sweet spot; you could usually get most of a 12s ground DoT in a mobile fight, and 12s lines up well with burst-window fights like Olms and Archcustodian. 20-second DoTs that do less than a spammable until after the 10s mark are just not worth using in many fights.
• Overland: Do overland fights last long enough for 20s DoTs to make sense? The existing 10s DoTs are already too long for the vast majority of open world encounters, with World Bosses being the most notable among the few exceptions.
• PvP: Ground DoTs are already mostly useless in PvP because people will just sidestep them. The lower damage per second will make ground DoTs even less effective at applying pressure and make them even less effective at denying areas. And when fighting classes with accessible class purges (Templars and Wardens), 20s “sticky” DoTs make absolutely zero sense to use, since it’s very likely that they will be removed before they could do more damage than just a spammable skill.

So, in short, buffing durations from 6s to 10s did help with the goal of making effects easier to manage. But there is a limit to how much further increases can help, and in a large number of “real world” scenarios, 20s durations just make no sense. This change is simply incompatible with what combat is like in reality, outside of an artificial target dummy testing environment.

(Aside: I think for self-buffs--e.g., Crit Surge--long durations are fine, but most of those self-buffs already have long durations.)

So, what can we do instead? If the goal is to make timer-watching easier, then consistent timers are more important than long timers. For example, on Live, Stampede leaves behind a 15s AoE while Twisting Path leaves behind a 10s AoE. Disparate timers means that I need to watch both timers separately, whereas if they both had the same timer, I could say to myself, “every time I refresh my Path, I should refresh my Stampede too”.

A timer consistency pass to synchronize durations would’ve helped tremendously with the timer-watching problem, without the myriad of problems with the current long-duration approach.

But instead of timer consistency, we just got long timers. As Nefas demonstrated in his PTS DK parse video, the rotation is still complicated, because the timers are all over the place. Some abilities are shorter than 20s, some are longer, and so he still needs to watch a bank of timers. This isn’t really much easier, and in real combat situations, you need to also constantly ask yourself, “should I be refreshing my Eruption now, or will the boss be moving away soon?”.

Furthermore, not everything was buffed. I mostly play as a tank, and Clench applies a 15s taunt, a 5s Major Maim, and a 4s Minor Brittle. That’s three different timers for one ability, and neither the 5s maim or the 4s brittle were buffed at all by the long duration changes. An even more forgettable 30s blockade means nothing to me when I still need to refresh Clench every few seconds to keep Maim and Brittle up.

Next, a lot of buffs come from sets. One good example is Powerful Assault, which lasts for 10s. The skill most often used by a tank or healer to proc Powerful Assault is Echoing Vigor, which also happens to last for 10s. On Live, all I need to do is to keep Echoing Vigor up, and I know that I’m also refreshing Powerful Assault when it’s needed. But on PTS, with the longer duration, now the timers don’t match, and I’d often forget to refresh the Powerful Assault buff. So, instead of making things easier, this change actually made things harder and worse. Frankly, it looks like very little thought was put into all of this.

Finally, there has been much said already by others about the tick-every-2s change. From worries about how heals will line up with incoming damage in difficult content that often tick for more than once per second (Example of how many damage ticks a tank could take in 1.4s) to concerns about how this will affect set and enchantment procs.

---

PART 3: Power Creep and Content Creep in PvE

The two problems that I see right now in ESO's PvE endgame are:

• There is a large power gap.
• New vet HM content is balanced around what is possible at the top end.

First, I want to give people some idea of what I mean when I say “large power gap”. For example, my weekend group got another Dawnbringer (Kyne’s Aegis trifecta) a few months ago. Our group has Godslayer, and this was our second Dawnbringer, so you can probably say that we’re part of that “elitist 0.1%”. Anyway, for that Dawnbringer run, we killed the second boss in 1m 46s. Recently, a group on EU set a new world record for Kyne’s Aegis. And their second boss kill time was 58s: it was almost twice as fast. So there is a pretty wide power delta even between the 0.1% like us and the competitive 0.01% like them, and this is not even considering the power gap between us and groups that are just able to clear vKA HM, the power gap between those kinds of groups and people who don’t even participate in vet HM content, and finally the power gap between those those who just do vet non-HM and people who don’t even participate in vet content.

And this power gap is growing. I’ve been participating in vet trials since 2016, I’ve never seen the power gap as high as it is today.

So, there’s a large (and growing) power gap. But by itself, a large power gap isn’t a huge problem, except that in ESO, the trials team seems to be targeting those 0.01% people at the very top when they balance the new hard modes. Looking at Rockgrove’s HM, for example, the group DPS required to clear Oax HM cleanly and the DPS required to beat the DPS check on Xalvakka HM is higher than the DPS required for Godslayer.

The end result of this large (and growing) power gap is that the two most recent trial hard modes are less accessible than the four most recent trial hard modes that preceded them; I actually don't have a Rockgrove HM clear because my group got frustrated with how it was so overtuned and voted to leave the trial. This is why there are so many players who will cry bloody murder at even the faintest whispers of a power nerf for them. For the vast majority of players, the stuff at the top end is already out of reach, and you are now telling them that, for their own good, they’ll lose power. It should be no surprise to anyone that this will elicit hostility from many players.

Also, power creep isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it means that people who can’t tackle the latest hard modes might have a chance to do so in the future. This is especially true since new content balance takes this power creep into account. People have come to expect power creep each patch to help bring inaccessible content closer within reach, and telling everyone that you intend to roll back power creep is, um, controversial, to put it lightly.

Conversely, balancing for the top end is okay, when there isn’t a huge power gap. If the difference between what we can do and what a world record group could do is only 10-20%, then it’s fine for trials to be balanced around “if there's a group that could pull it off, then it’s fine”. But when that gap is as large as it is today, that just means that far too many players are excluded.

It’s the combination of a large power gap and balancing for the top that is causing problems.

And as someone else has pointed out in their PTS feedback, not everyone sees this power creep. Seemingly every patch, new things are added that are not universally accessible. New buffs to keep up (e.g., Minor Brittle), new sets to juggle around and maintain uptimes for, new "kiss-curse" mechanisms offering power to players skilled enough to deal with the "curse", etc. All of these things provide opportunities for players and groups with the wherewithal to efficiently take advantage of new sources of power, while most players will not see their benefits. This is why when I recently joined a number of vet trials PUGed out of Craglorn, I still saw 8-minute Yolnahkriin non-HM kills that don't seem any faster than what I saw in PUG runs a couple of years ago, while at the top end, Yolnahkriin kill times have gone down with each new world record that gets set.

The power creep that we see is predominately power creep at the top, because it's power that requires skill and group coordination to extract, and this is why we have an ever-increasing power gap.

But NONE of the changes being proposed in Update 35 targets any of this. Hard-to-maintain effects are unchanged (e.g., Minor Brittle is still 4s, buffs and effects from sets like Powerful Assault are unchanged, etc.), so that gap between groups that are able to efficiently maintain that effect and most other groups is untouched. It doesn't change that there is an ever growing number of supportive item sets that well-coordinated groups are able to work into their composition, while more casual groups will not have them.

At the end of the day, I’m perfectly okay with there being a large power gap and power creep, as long as content isn’t balanced for what the top end is capable of doing. Let them have their portal-skip Cloudrest; that trial is still hard for the vast majority of groups even today, but that’s fine, because Cloudrest and the achievements in Cloudrest were never tuned for those kinds of “tippity-top” groups (to borrow phrasing from Rich). It’s when you have things like DPS checks in Rockgrove HM and insane speedrun time requirements in Dreadsail HM that are clearly aimed at those “tippity-top” groups that the power gap becomes a major problem in PvE. Let score competition be the (open-ended) outlet for those groups at the apex of the game, and buff up leaderboard rewards for them, but stop balancing achievements and even just hard mode clears around that level of play, and you'll have a much healthier raiding scene where more things are accessible to a greater range of player power. And perhaps then, people will not be as likely to react with such strident hostility to the prospect any power being ripped away from them.

i mostly agree, however i think brittle needs to remain at 4 seconds. it's the only thing frost dps has keeping it "viable". unless of course, they increase it's damage in some other way, that it may keep up in dps with fire.

Jaimeh

I parsed for a few hours on the PTS on my stamina nightblade; I tried front daggers with bow/2h/staff backbar, and also double dual wield. Putting aside damage gaps, floors and ceilings: the new rotations are horrendous. With backbar DOTs being between 20-30 sec long, this left a huge amount of time for the front bar spammable, which was incredibly boring (and personally, I also found it taxing on the hands as well, because you have to weave with the same skill button for a much longer time, compared to how it's on live now). StamNB had one of the most interesting rotations in the game, and now if the changes goes through, it will be extremely unenjoyable (not to mention that best results were with dw/staff, which feels wrong on many levels, and leaves all the other weapon combos in the dust). If players stop enjoying combat, they will stop enjoying playing, it's simple as that. @ZOS_Gilliam I know you play NB, with hand on heart, can you honestly say you're enjoying the new rotation, and how NB combat feels? Please, please reconsider the DOT timers (not just for the damage and the rotations, but indirectly to balance backbar weapon choices as well).

xylena_lazarow

DoT abilities already underperform in PvP. Further nerfing DoT dps is an absolutely horrible idea in both PvP and PvE. Do they really want combat to be nothing but one button spam?

ZOS_Volpe

Greetings, as we've removed a few non-constructive comments around baiting. Please remember that while it’s alright to disagree or even debate with each other, provoking conflict, baiting, inciting, mocking, etc. is never acceptable on our forums.

TirantLoBlanch

Llets resume in a metaphor.

Imagine some Mozar style freaks able to learn to play piano in just a week- They exist.
A normal person can learn piano after years of practise.
Imagine ZOS saying " we want to close the gap between Mozarty tryhards an average joes"
Imagine ZOS reducing the keyboard, making the keys bigger, and worst, changin the disposition of the notes every week.
Now music treatises are useless, average joes will NEVER be proficient playing, Chopin or Listz are impossible to play, and the monster freaks of piano will be able ro relearn to play every week.

if you can imagin this scenario you can imagine update 35 in live servers-

ZOS, for god sake, the hard work of your communitiy MUST be reinforced and appreciated. Don trhow years of creating content to the trash bin just because you are unable to realize that a 8 years beta is too much.
The old players can´t have time and motivation to teach the people YOU let alone in the game withour information, if they need to relearn the game again and again.

Aeaeren

My Feedback from PTS:

So I am relearning light attack weaving, I have been doing it wrong for a while so I got a Metronome add on and started working on the dummy. With Oakensoul I managed to get up to 40k dps on my NB and 57k on my Templar. I went from avg of 20 to 25k to at least 35k now and that was with just 1 day of beating on the dummy. I am still missing attacks in between skills and not refreshing them properly, so in essence this patch is for people like me. I am trying to close the gap and get higher damage for trials. I have done some trials and my output is horrid hence the reason for the dummy work. The NB rotation is very dynamic so there are lots of things to keep track of, so I cut that down with Oakensoul (my training wheel). I have also been farming Arx Corinium so I have run that dungeon at least 30 times this last week so I have a feel for the flow of the dungeon. I am one of those people who spends a lot of time watching bars because I haven’t gotten the feel for when things run out just yet.

I am not going to do a dummy dps check as we all already know the dps is down, but I will give you my honest feed back on how my NB feels to me on PTS in Arx. The flow of the dungeon was actually better. I am not using Oakensoul for my dungeons runs on either server so I have to swap bars and try and keep up all the dot and buffs. It was just MUCH easier to do with the changes on PTS. I am already starting to get a feeling of when DoTs are expiring because the ones I use are all on the same timers now. The feeling of the amount of dps hasn’t really changed but then again Arx is not a difficult dungeon with DPS checks and for the most part all the mobs stay put. I don’t spend as much time staring at bars so I can concentrate more on the mechanics with these changes and my light attack weaving.

So with that said I like the changes to the time of DoTs, I absolutely love the changes to NB execute. I would like to see some adjustments to the DoT damage as I think they are a tad bit low. I also think you should rework the changes to Oakensoul for PvE. The mythic was perfect the way it was in PvE. It is over powered for PvP for sure so some of the suggestions of when battle spirit it gives minor would be a better way to correct the imbalance. Changes to Light/Heavy attack don’t affect me as much as that is the one thing I am currently trying to correct on live. I don’t see the reason for adjusting them other then maybe putting a death nail to the One shot DKs in PvP. If you making the changes to free up CPU for other calculations then that is what you should have said are the cause for the changes, you’re not closing the gap between me and the Uber 1%. Their dps is down and so is mine so it’s a wash.

One other thing. I came from Everquest where mistakes could be extremely brutal. Die in the bottom of the dungeon and you better know people to get your corpse as your equipment stayed with the corpse and camping for gear took freakin forever. I also have been playing ESO from release. I remember when doing the fighters guild quest I had to actually leave Doshia for a few levels and get GUD because she just flat kicked my butt. Now she is a complete joke. Making things easier doesn’t always equate to keeping or gaining new players. In fact I find the lack of challenge boring. I have managed to complete Veteran Maelstrom one time on Xbox with a Stamina Sorc (this was during the Cradle of Shadows DLC) I went in got slaughtered and LEARNED and that achievement is my wallpaper on the Xbox still to this day. I understand you want to bring in new players and I think having normal version of the dungeons with almost as good drops is a good idea but constantly adjusting things to cater to new players comes with the risk of boring and losing long lasting players. I guess what I am saying is another way to help new players is tutorials that teach them things like LA weaving instead of trying to dumb it down. If you make the content easier then achievements like Maelstrom are worthless.

muh

If the goal is to raise the floor, the solution can't be to nerf the baseline.

The current approach on PTS is missing the mark. The changed tick frequency and durations are not making it easier, quite the opposite. In real world encounters, they will mostly be worth it on stationary dummy like fights. The nerf to e.g. Radiating Regeneneration makes situations that straight up don't allow you to stack up in a ball painful to heal. With the direction the encounter design has taken in recent times there are plenty situations where casting a 20+ second DoT might straight up be the wrong call and the combat shifts to a one button sht show.

Right now placing a DoT is noticeable and rewarding while at the same time it isn't too punishing to recast early. With the proposed changes, if something isn't in it for at least 10 seconds you just straight up wasted a GCD and lost DPS.

That conclusion comes from doing both new dungeons on PTS with at least a fair amount of tries on the majority of HMs in them.

Parasaurolophus

Hey @ZOS. To begin with, I will say that I fully understand and support the desire to reduce the skill gap. In this thread, I described in detail why this is needed. I was very skeptical about the aggressive criticism of these changes and considered these critics to be just alarmists. But after installing PTS and spending some time on the atro, I saw that what you are suggesting now will be a disaster for the combat system. It’s unlikely that I’ll say something new, of course, I’ll just add my five cents:

1) LA/HA changes. Here, basically, I see how the community came to a consensus that this is not bad. Yes, indeed, 18-20% of the total dps from just one mechanic is too much. And nerf light attacks are the right solution to reduce the skill gap. I'll also keep la/ha damage flat if it results in better server performance. However, there are still a large number of mechanics in combat that are critically dependent on la/ha. Top sets literally can only work with perfect weaving. Although any changes in this sets and mechanics, as I believe, you planned for the next update.

2) The worst thing is the DOT`s change. A lot has been said here too. 20 seconds for abilities when there are only 10 panels in the game is too extreme. 10-18 spam skill casts in a row is extreme. Moreover, a single time standardization for all dot`s makes the rotation monotonous and boring. Yes, in order to reduce the skill gap, you need to increase the time for many skills, but not so much. I would say that we need to standardize different times for different dot`s to 14/16/18 seconds so that we have a small dynamics in the rotation. It is possible to reduce the strength of dot`s, but only if you somehow compensate for the damage for spam skills. Then we'll lower the importance of dots uptimes for damage a bit. However, I am not against two second ticks. This, in theory, should have a good effect on server performance. Yes, some particularly difficult mechanics will need to be revised, such as the last boss in vKA hm. But in general, regarding two-second ticks, I don’t see a big problem.

3) General damage nerf. Everything is already quite complicated here. What for? I see how great new content is coming out. For the last four dungeons, for difficult modes, the healer is really relevant. And this is a huge achievement in recent years in the field of pve. But now I can't imagine how painful hell it will be to end vTDC or The Coral Aerie with HM. Normal damage today is 100-115k on the current live atro. Leave it as is.

There is a certain problem to reduce the skill gap. All those solutions that you offer are useless if the player has a low apm. It is most important. Always had normal damage stats on the dummy. But in raids, I often lacked a more aggressive behavior in order to have high dps. I also can't teach my friend good dps, just because he has enough speed to press the keys in the right rhythm. He also understands quite poorly when the boss needs to be bursted, when it is better to wait until all his dots have passed, what skills it is better not to cast on execute, how best to behave when killing trash packs. He just spins his rotation in all situations. And I'm a bit confused if the low apm was taken into account when you were thinking about these changes.

Either way, the patch looks terrible. This is really true and it is very demoralizing for me and many other players. We are literally thinking whether to continue raiding or stop.

Vonsaberhagen

starkerealm wrote: »

Vonsaberhagen wrote: »

(Advanced users prepare to laugh at my DPS, but please don't comment on it.)

Given your circumstances, the live number's pretty respectable. Don't feel bad about doing your best. Probably not a life lesson you need to hear, but, there it is.

If you want to directly compare live to PTS, you probably want to do those tests with a 6m dummy, they tweaked the trial dummies (some things increase damage, other things decrease), and it means you really can't get a clean comparison between them.

I hope that helps, though I fully understand if you don't want to parse it again.

Thank you for the kind words.
I took your suggestion and gave it a shot on the 6 mil dummy and it got SO MUCH WORSE.
Same setup as before.
Live: 6 mil dummy - 28.1k DPS
PTS: 6 mil dummy - 14.3k DPS

That is a 49% DPS loss.

Honestly, if this goes in as is, I'm not sure I'll be able to play anymore.

Aldoss

I just wanted to commend both @starkerealm and @Vonsaberhagen for demonstrating what healthy discourse looks like.

@Vonsaberhagen is a perfect example of how these changes are actively hurting the very players they were marketed at helping.

These patch notes are absolutely terrible and ZOS would be wise to eat their pride, admit that this wasn't fully thought out in their pre-testing, and walk back these changes this coming Monday.

HackTheMinotaur

More feedback on HEAVY ATTACK changes specifically.

We've been testing. It's NOT better! This comment from a new player who can barely achieve 30K DPS on LIVE:

This update is painful and really hurts low to mid-tier players. I use your Infinity One-Bar Sorc build. I have severe arthritis and it really helped me be able to get through more content since I can't weave. I ran tests against both the trial dummy and the 6 mil dummy. On Live, with no weaving, I had over 33k DPS on the Trial and over 28k DPS on the 6mil. On PTS, I managed to just squeak out 27k DPS on the trial and only got 14k DPS on the 6 mil. If this goes through as is, it may very well end the playability of ESO for me.

While longer duration effects will be helpful for some, nerfs to DOT damage, heavy attack damage, passive damage and other skills will drop the floor into the basement for players using simple, accessible builds like this. On more standard content, not a trial dummy, this player lost half their DPS! Heavy attack builds in PVE content should be buffed, not nerfed.

If PVP burst is a concern, it should be mitigated through Battle Spirit, and set and skill bonuses that only work against PVE enemies. We've seen that you can do this with recent changes to Noble Duelist, Sergeant's Mail and other sets.

Undaunted Infiltrator and Unweaver: These sets now increase your damage done with Light and Heavy Attacks against monsters by 1645, rather than increasing their Weapon and Spell Damage scaling.

Do this STILL, but ALSO keep a high scale factor or baseline for Heavy Attacks to begin with. Good scaling on a wet noodle is still a wet noodle.

Fully charged melee Heavy Attacks deal 2500 base damage multiplied by their cast time and cooldown

Double or Triple this and it might be OK. This would give a high enough baseline where things like Weapon's Expert, Heavy Attack Sets and Empower would actually start to be noticeable. Right now, these effects do almost nothing and a build totally invested in Heavy Attacks can barely crack 40K DPS on a Trial Dummy.

and 10% less for ranged.

If I use a Lightning Staff but am in Melee Range do I still lose 10%? Hopefully this is looking at range to target and not just a blanket reduction based on weapon type.

Necrotech_Master

@HackTheMinotaur great post on the analysis

on your last point about the lightning staff, those are actually even worse than before because as noted in another thread, they even removed 1 of the "dot" ticks from lightning heavy

so in addition to the ranged dmg loss, they are fully losing a full tick of dmg on the heavy for the same cast time

on live its 3 small ticks and 1 heavy tick with the 2 sec windup
on PTS its 2 small ticks and 1 heavy tick for the same cast time

so if i had to guess lightning staff (and possibly resto) are doing around 40% less dmg than live for heavy attack

DeathStalker

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Lastly, we are working on ways to have more dev communication on the forum as well. We'll have some announcements related to that in the future, as those plans are in progress.

This is from another thread but in a round-a-bout way still on the same subject. More dev communication with the community would be great, especially now. I truly believe feeling ignored, unheard, and unlistened to is feeding a lot of the toxicity in threads like this. Any chance for an update after 4 days of silence?

Cayr

A good middle ground between now and wanting to make things easier for people to focus more on the encounter and less on all their uptimes would be to make all DoT/proc durations (if any) of 10 seconds. That would improve accessibility across the board making rotations more static, meaning less monitoring and therefore more engagement with the encounters, what the devs claim to want, but without causing a myriad of issues in actual combat encounters (as has been repeatedly pointed out above and in other threads) and making combat boring and slow as all hell.

I agree that the game could probably use a reduction on the damage ceiling, but the presented reasoning for it is just terrible. You don't need to have people be uniform dps-wise to be able to create content - that's only a problem if you've been balancing it for the top-end (which has been the case, admittedly). I can see the thought process being that the devs want even the top 1% to feel challenged, and that's great, but the solution isn't to give people content that feels arbitrarily difficult, because you only achieved that difficulty with nerfing everyone's damage, and really-really boring slow combat. Let the top 1% have their fun with super fast clears, it's not hurting anybody, you don't have to do content only for the high end players or violently squash them down. I think ZOS has been on the right path, with Dreadsail Reef, designing encounters where it's about mechs, not the dps, where people can clear the content even without being top parsers as long as they're disciplined and learning the mechanics. If you're centering content creation around players' dps output, we have a bigger problem.

Dulkur

So often the changes to the game appear to have no internal logic to them, we get you had to know it was overpowered sets for abilities that were already performing better than average, with stacking nerfs to things that were performing worse than average.

DoTs were already a wasted cast in many situations, due to fights not lasting long enough, or mechanics that led to evaded damage or DoT cancellation. Causing the DoTs to tick less over longer times makes this situation worse and reduces the number of viable skills when so few exist already. This is going the opposite direction of what was needed.

Having such limited bar space and bar space dedicated to required buffs means we have to go with optimized skills making the game seem cookie cutter and bland. Why not give us a separate buff/pet passive slot or two and force us to choose between the buffs/pets we want always up without having to sacrifice active space? Allowing us to dedicate active bar space or sets to the remaining buffs if we choose or using that freed up space for niche skills.

I could understand the dps reductions if it was for everything but you are leaving the highest potential damage spam skills out of the equation or giving them inexplicable buffs.

I have never understood the Warden nerfs when compared to other classes, you making comments about Warden struggles and weakness but make overall changes that will make them weaker without address what you are trying to address reinforces this. Can bear get a gap closer as part of its active ultimate? Too often the ultimate is wasted by the long movement delay.

2legit2quit

I don't understand the urge to bring all skill levels closer together.. there should be players that are better than others. This is good for rewarding the players that have put in actual work to be better and gives the lower tier players something to strive towards..
Equality isn't this. Equality is equity of opportunity, not equity of ability. You can give people the opportunity to have the ability. That said, i'm not a top tier 'elitist' and i'm not a complete casual, but i like to play harder content and i know if i don't work at it then i won't be good at it. Come to think of it, they are even called ACHIEVEMENTS in the game. Achievements. You earn them. You work for them. If you don't have to, they don't mean [snip]. These changes for me will mostly mean i have nothing to work hard for, just have to find the time to complete. Not satisfying to me.
Be better ZOS, a lot of us love you. There's also a lot of us that show you tough love, but it's love nonetheless. I'm worried there won't be a lot of the players i look up to around if the game is broken.

[edited for profanity bypass]