PTS Update 35 - Feedback Thread for Combat Balance Changes

starkerealm

Mrtoobyy wrote: »

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

Automatically unlocked when you logged in. Same with your dye unlocks.

mlee3141

ZoS if you really want to close the skill gap between endgamers and newbies, then build an advanced combat tutorial school. Perhaps somewhere in Craglorn, next to Hel Ra? You built the festival grounds next to Belkarth, so building an advanced combat tutorial school should be a breeze. Incentivize newer players to learn about LA weaving, global cooldowns, rotations, spammables and DoT timing by offering rewards for completing advanced combat tutorials (Perhaps gold upgrade mats such as Dreugh wax, Rosin, etc...), thus, uplifting and educating the newer players instead of tearing down your most loyal and longtime endgame playerbase who invested literally thousands of hours, if not more, into mastering ESO combat.

Nerfing LA damage is absurd because newbies usually only LA, maybe cast some skills here and there when they have the resources. The majority of damage from endgamers is actually from skills, not LAs, so this will only disproportionately affect the bottom tier of players. Nerfing HoT tick frequencies will only make some content neigh impossible to complete, such as vKA HM, where the boss does 70% of your HP every second, which must be outhealed. If the HoTs tick every 2 seconds, that is not enough to keep up with the constant, massive damage. Nerfing DoTs to tick once every 2 seconds and increasing their duration will massively reduce the damage output against highly mobile bosses, such as Za'maja in vCR+3 or Baron Zauldrous HM in the Cauldron.

All this patch is going to do is widen the gap between skilled players and non skilled players, all the while encouraging the endgame community to quit the game, thus no longer buying any crowns or subscribing to ESO+ any longer. You obviously care about revenue, well, this is going to hurt your bottom line if your most loyal and longtime customers/ playerbase leave the game. Not to mention the salt, friction, resentment, sense of betrayal and mistrust between you and the playerbase will continue to linger, thus, encouraging potential new customers/ players to steer clear of your MMO and hurting your bottom line even more in the long term.

To conclude, uplift and educate the newbies ZoS, not tear down the endgame community and salt the fields to boot. This new patch will do nothing to help anyone in your community get any better.

siddique

I'm sure people have said this before too but power creep is not a bad thing.

3 years ago, Hodor was the first to get GS. For patches upon patches after, as power creeped up, the title evaded most groups until it reached a point where people below the very top tier could achieve it too. And we saw more people getting that trifecta. Until even more power creeped and more midtier groups thought it was achievable. Progs started. Progs cleared. Progs still disbanded and three years down the line with so much more powercreep, that old trifecta still eluded many groups and many good players.

Fast forward to High Isle. Two teams have Swasbuckler. Most groups will not even attempt this until power has creeped much higher months maybe years down the line.

But now, with the nerf sledgehammer, mid tier groups progging years old titles like GS or even recent ones like PB where they had somewhat of a hope of clearing, will have no hopes of clearing. In attempting to raise the floor and lowering the ceiling, you shifted the ground beneath the vast majority of the population.

This is unfortunate and tragic. And unless reverted, I am sure will be cause of a lot of players leaving the game. I for one, cancelled my sub today, for the first time in years.

Edit: typos.

LordDragonMara

2legit2quit wrote: »

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.

Exactly this.
Devs should read this and put it on their wall, and never ever again think of removing skills from the game.

[edited to remove quote]

FluffyReachWitch

I just did solo Veteran Vaults of Madness on live and PTS for comparison.

As a magicka Sorcerer I definitely noticed the changes to damage over time. My setup relies on using critical hits, AoE, and DoT to deal damage and sustain my health using Critical Surge. On the PTS, damage over time ticking every 2 seconds reduced the opportunities to deal critical damage overall, reduced my incoming self heals, and pretty much doubled the amount of time spent on each boss fight. The mobs of regular enemies, however, became much more annoying than the boss fights due to their spread out positions and the fact that they deal damage much more frequently. I ended up dodge rolling much more to make up for the reduction to damage and healing.

In fact, the extended fight duration made the game feel much more punishing, especially when fumbling or getting incapacitated and dying as a result. The longer the fight goes on, the more painful it is to have to restart.

Ironically, Combat Metrics showed somewhat more damage per second on the PTS version of the final boss, and I suspect this is because I resorted to stacking everything on the boss himself so fewer ticks would be wasted. But that particular fight took 50% longer than the same fight on live, and I suspect I could shorten the battle on live if I employed the same tactics.

The unexpected benefit of having more time between ticks was that the Cursed One's laser beam of "stop hitting yourself!" was much easier to survive in cases where I laid down a ground DoT right before the damage reflection began. Unfortunately, the visual effects of the laser beam can vanish before the effect ends.

Ulguna Soul-Reaver was also much easier due to the extended duration of my ground DoT abilities and the fact that she is a stationary fight. Despite being suspended in the air, I had a pretty stable output of damage at all times during that battle.

My other thoughts about DoT duration are basically that there is still a lot of disparity between DoT times that would be nice if it were tweaked, ticks every 1 second would be preferable to 2, and that it might be better to increase the costs instead of lowering the DPS.

renne

Given the new rotations will all be "spamming the heck out of the spammable while the dots eventually tick down", can anyone tell me how does this translate to sustain for each class?

Especially curious about (mag)DKs considering they gutted sustain last patch, given the weird hybrid resources whip now has - and what happens when you run out of one of those resources because you're a mag toon who doesn't build for stam, and also need to use your small stam pool for things like, y'know, avoiding mechanics.

prof_doom

A good explanation of why healing is a problem in the new patch

fizl101

renne wrote: »

Given the new rotations will all be "spamming the heck out of the spammable while the dots eventually tick down", can anyone tell me how does this translate to sustain for each class?

Especially curious about (mag)DKs considering they gutted sustain last patch, given the weird hybrid resources whip now has - and what happens when you run out of one of those resources because you're a mag toon who doesn't build for stam, and also need to use your small stam pool for things like, y'know, avoiding mechanics.

On my stamplar I usually run magicka dots alongside my stam jabs and can run all jewellery with damage glyphs and bloodthirsty. On pts i was using my magicka pool so infrequently and my stam pool so often with my spammable i couldnt sustain it without using a recovery glyph and the occasional synergy on the dummy, losing yet more damage

MarioSMB

I can't help but wonder how many healing-related balance issues would be solved if healing didn't scale off damage stats...

Marcus_Justicia

i have been playing the elder scrolls online since its release on xbox, i have seen many good and bad updates.
I am extremely experienced in pvp so I will limit myself to this area.
I think we've gotten to a point where the game has to make a real distinction between pvp and pve.
You could obsolete sets in either as you did during no proc.
Create a third pve morph for skills that will only work in pve.
Regarding HA and LA, I agree with reducing LA damage but it should always correlate to your weapon stats.
To reduce the APM I think we should increase the damage of the HA to promote weaving over a longer frequency, you could give regeneration with the LA and HA but in a much lower proportion for the LA because of their speed.
I will add regarding PVP that the meta tanks are too present and the cross healing is much too strong, so you should probably favor direct damage now that you are reducing the DOT in order to have a more incisive and attractive gameplay.
I know you're trying to smooth things over and think you're doing well but the community plays your game with passion, you should give them special attention when it comes to combat direction.

prof_doom

If we were to look at the things that really need to change on week 3, here's what I think is on the list.

1. DOTs and HOTs need to go back to 1 tick per second
2. Pretty much all the Warden changes need to be rolled back
3. Roll back the Sorc changes - you can leave a crystal weapon nerf, just maybe not so much, since LA is already nerfed.

Elsonso

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

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?
    • If you did, was it better or worse in your experience? 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.Popped into Fungal Grotto 1 and did a couple bosses after spending some time in overland Vvardenfell getting a feel for the changes.
  • Do you feel like Light and Heavy Attacks still provide meaningful impact to your play experience after the adjustments? Please explain your reasoning. Nope. They did not feel like they had much impact.
• Damage over Time
  • Did you notice these adjustments on the PTS while playing?Oh, yes.
    • If you did, was it better or worse in your experience? 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.Fungal Grotto 1
  • After the balance changes, did you make changes to the amount of Damage over Time abilities your build utilized? Please explain any reasoning. Spent less time casting them, but did have to recast AoE dots as the bosses would move out, as they tend to do.
  • While using Damage over Time effects, did you notice any other impacts on your play experience? Yes, My DPS Mirri kept grabbing boss aggro. Apparently, I was not making enough DPS to pull aggro, but that ended up working out since she held the boss in place longer, which let the slow burn AoE do more damage.
• Healing over Time
  • Did you notice these adjustments on the PTS while playing? No, did not utilize this.
• If you did, was it better or worse in your experience? N/A
• 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.N/A

[*] After the balance changes, did you make changes to the amount of Healing over Time abilities your build utilized? Please explain any reasoning. N/A
[*] While using Healing over Time effects, did you notice any other impacts on your play experience? N/A
[*] 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?N/A
[/list][/quote]


I did a very quick cursory test. Normally, I would follow this up with a more detailed second pass and do an Apples to Applies with the same content on Live, then do additional testing from there on different characters. I was expecting lower DPS and expecting bosses to wander out of my AoE areas, but did not fully appreciate that AoE was going to be such a slow burn until I tried it. I don't feel like doing additional testing. I can clear the content I tried, but it is so much slower and just feels weak.

Edit: And to clarify... I am waaaaay out of practice playing ESO, after having been on an overland break for the last 6 months and not really caring about DPS or even trying to do lots of damage. To say my DPS is in the toilet on Live would be generous. Still, on Live, Mirri does not grab the War Chief aggro like she does on PTS.

Suna_Ye_Sunnabe

EnderSouth2468 wrote: »

It is going to be hard to determine true differences between live and PTS when adjustments have been made to the target dummies. Is there any possibility of the dummy being adjusted to the same settings as live for a period of time so that we can better understand the impact of changes on our live dps vs dps with the changes? Changing combat systems and the standards of measuring their impact at the same time could obfuscate data and confuse players.

This, so much. Changing the dummy from what we knew when we need it most is a horrible idea. Buffing it to help staunch dissatisfaction is disingenuous at a time like this.

But: my thoughts on the patch itself. Light attacks damage being nerfed is fine with me. I have always been a proponent of lessening their impact. HOWEVER.... only if skills were brought up in power to compensate. This... this is not it. These nerfs. These changes to timers. Class changes. This helps NO ONE. This utterly fails at bringing up the floor. You have buried the floor. End game will be more restrictive than ever. Light attacks are now more important than ever to compensate for lost dps. And dots.... our skill bars will be nothing but dots. To compensate. This patch fails every single stated goal.

These are not "knee jerk reactions", as Lambert so rudely said. That we shouldn't be upset unless we've tried it. You're telling me amputating my arm will be okay because I can still live a good life without it.

You cannot ask for trust when all you do is break it. Another broken promise.

Tannus15

MarioSMB wrote: »

I can't help but wonder how many healing-related balance issues would be solved if healing didn't scale off damage stats...

healing should scale off resource, damage from weapon / spell damage the same as proc sets.

the problem they have here is that there is nothing to stop DD from stacking into health and damage.

Sambucca1973

Here’s what I don’t get (and apologies if already posted), instead of doing all this why not:

1. Give users a sliding scale of difficulty, a la Skyrim. There’s already a small option for it: enabling hard mode in trials. Would apply to overland, dungeons, and trials. That way players can choose how much of a challenge they want. (Honestly, there are days I’d like less of a challenge and just poke around looking at stuff.)

2. Add delves to the Dungeon Finder, so that people can group for those, too.

Granted, this would probably need a lot of work on the backend, but once it’s done, it’s done. And people would probably still need help “graduating” to a new level (e.g., Scalecaller at level 1 would be easier and maybe fewer rewards than at level 3, and scaling up to what he hardest level would be, etc.)

renne

fizl101 wrote: »

renne wrote: »

Given the new rotations will all be "spamming the heck out of the spammable while the dots eventually tick down", can anyone tell me how does this translate to sustain for each class?

Especially curious about (mag)DKs considering they gutted sustain last patch, given the weird hybrid resources whip now has - and what happens when you run out of one of those resources because you're a mag toon who doesn't build for stam, and also need to use your small stam pool for things like, y'know, avoiding mechanics.

On my stamplar I usually run magicka dots alongside my stam jabs and can run all jewellery with damage glyphs and bloodthirsty. On pts i was using my magicka pool so infrequently and my stam pool so often with my spammable i couldnt sustain it without using a recovery glyph and the occasional synergy on the dummy, losing yet more damage

Oh wow, that's even worse than what I was expecting.

WreckfulAbandon

The Sorc nerfs are way too heavy-handed and Nocturnals Ploy needs to be scrapped/reworked.

Billium813

fizl101 wrote: »

On my stamplar I usually run magicka dots alongside my stam jabs and can run all jewellery with damage glyphs and bloodthirsty. On pts i was using my magicka pool so infrequently and my stam pool so often with my spammable i couldnt sustain it without using a recovery glyph and the occasional synergy on the dummy, losing yet more damage

I noticed this as well. Now I am casting Biting Jabs so often that my stam is incredibly hard to sustain. I would also add that with the new Jabs animation I am not used to weaving yet which may help slightly. However, the horrendous DPS I have now makes me not even want to try. I dropped from 56k on live to 35k on the pts trial dummy.

JMadFour

I say this as a player who is far less bothered by the changes than everyone else is. I'm not here to argue whether the changes are good or bad. I don't have access to the PTS as a Console Player, so I cannot judge for myself.

I am here to argue that it DOESN'T MATTER if the changes are good for the game or not.

At this point there is just SO much outrage, and SO much absolute venomous hatred for these patch notes from virtually everyone in the community, that ZOS would be better off just scrapping the changes wholesale and releasing U35 with no combat changes at all. Just release the dungeons and leave it be.

I think if they go forward with this at all, even if they make substantial changes in the upcoming PTS patches, it won't matter. The community is already pissed off and quitting or whatever, and nothing they can do in 5 weeks short of just scrapping everything entirely will win anyone over.

It's a no-win situation for ZOS. Just cut bait and move forward.

I think ZOS should just take the L, wipe all the combat changes and go forward with nothing, and just leave the combat exactly the way it is on Live, and don't mess with it further at all in any way.

sporkfairy

Ran through vMA with my magsorc. Extended ground dots felt bad with how mobile some of the encounters are and the less impactful damage. The change to mystic orb being sustain and not increased damage was noticable. Storm Atro being so short seems like a waste of ultimate as it is. Fights lasted longer. Frozen Lake smashy guys took longer to kill. Mushroom stage taking longer so more chances for the poison lottery.. Right now, not as fun.

OnGodiDoDis

The DoTs take too long to do their total damage. Instead of increasing them to 20s, why not make them all have the same duration instead of having random ones? 10-12 seconds was fine; it kept people on their toes. Eliminatong morphs that increase the duration is going to be necessary. You should replace them with a different bonus. If you made sticky DoTs last 10 seconds, they would retain their viability in PvP. We don't usually use ground DoTs in PvP, so if you made those last longer for PvE and have their damage ramp up every tick, it would make every one happy. Also, if you truly want to make DoTs stronger than HoTs, have the former tick every half second and the latter every second. Two seconds to deal damage is just too slow and sluggish. Having a shorter duration for sticky DoTs than ground DoTs will give PvErs a reason to keep bar swapping, instead of having them glued to their front bar for 20 seconds. There are some mobs in PvE that usually die quickly with a few DoTs and a spammable. But now, since the DoTs take longer to deal their damage, those mobs persist for unnecessary amounts of time. The longer duration for buffs and debuffs is nice in both PvP and PvE. But you're taking away the fast-paced combat that we all got accustomed to over the years. Buffs should last longer than debuffs. 10s duration for debuffs is nice; they're purgeable anyway. Shorter duration for debuffs will force people to keep applying them more frequently, increasing the pace of combat for anyone wanting to go offensive, rather than having it be boring. Same goes for HoTs, 10s duration for sticky HoTs, since they're more reliable than ground HoTs. Having a ramping increase in ground HoTs will make ot more rewarding for standing in them in intense combat scenarios.

katorga

OnGodiDoDis wrote: »

The DoTs take too long to do their total damage.

For 90% of the content a 20s dot are a waste of resources. Things die too fast.

For mobile fights, 20s ground dots are a waste of resources.

MudcrabAttack

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?

A much higher percentage than live servers after I started using empower and the Maelstrom staff on the back bar. It kind of looks like light attacks will be meta since the maelstrom staff setup is hitting higher than everything else on back bar

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

Solo parsing with the unbuffed 3 million health target dummy. Warden dropped 25%, nightblade was the same as on live, but probably since I’m using ambush now on PTS, which adds a lot of buffs for solo play. But light attacks still seem to be the way to go

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?

Worse, I have to count 10-15 spam skills if I want to refresh damage over time efficiently. My brain doesn’t do that well, even on a dummy parse. Sequentially hitting a lineup of skills makes it easier to track timers when you’re preoccupied with things, like not dying.

The overall DOT damage is very low compared to live, I don’t know how my groups are going to clear content now, they still struggle on the twins in Dreadsail reef, where 12 people have to have good coordination. Like if there’s a 10% chance someone fails a wipeout mechanic each time it comes up, adding minutes to the fight length will just make it that much harder to get through. The odds are stacking against us with the damage nerf. Meanwhile super groups will just continue to execute things flawlessly, albeit ~16 seconds slower


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

Used fewer DOT skills. Adding a bunch of passive fighters guild skills to the front bar was a stronger parse


While using Damage over Time effects, did you notice any other impacts on your play experience?

It’s a very repetitive and unengaging experience hitting a spam skill dozens of times in a row

WrathOfInnos

I've noticed a problem with the 2s tick frequency on certain abilities that proc enchants. For example, 3 of the most useful enchants are berserker, crusher, and weakening, all 5 second buffs/debuffs which are used along with the infused trait to make the cooldown 5s for full uptime. This works on live, but on PTS the skills that can activate the enchant now do not tick every 5s, only 4s (too early) and 6s (generating downtime). This results in max 86% uptime on these effects, which is a problem when something like weakening is a key piece of surviving a one-shot.



Technically we can work around it by planning a rotation that light attacks on the back bar every 5s to proc then enchant, but 99% of players will not be tracking this. It is another (unintended?) nerf that lowers the floor, both in group buff uptimes and individual DPS (losing an average of 90 weapon and spell damage from Berserker uptime).



You may think the answer is to use damage proc enchants instead, since they have a base cooldown of 4s, and this becomes 2s with infused (even numbers, line up with DoT ticks). However, this does not work in practice because DoT ticks have millisecond variation that cause them to randomly fall outside that 2 second cooldown and fail to proc.

For example, I tried an Infused Poison Glyph with Unstable Wall. In theory it should proc on every tick of the wall (11 total over 20s, each spaced 2s apart). In practice the enchant only hit 6 times and failed 5.



You can see the cause with the timestamps above. At 4.008s a Wall tick correctly procs the Poisoned Weapon, but then the next Wall tick lands at 5.995s (only 1.987s after the previous) and the Poison glyph is still on cooldown. Its next proc is at 8.076s, which is 4.068s between procs (not the stated 2s for an infused glyph). After 8.076 it again fails to proc on the "10s" tick at 10.041, and this trend continues through the entire 20s DoT duration. I did manage to get lucky and win the RNG game at the 14s tick, after getting a proc at 12s. It seems to be a random 50/50 chance of consecutive procs.

I don't know if this is technically a bug, but it's certainly unintended cooldown behavior on enchants combined with DoTs that don't tick consistently. It could easily be solved by making the cooldown 1.9s instead of a rigid 2s.

For the 5s buff/debuff enchants, I would recommend extending the duration to 6s and giving them a cooldown of 11.8s (5.9s infused).

Alternatively, we could just keep weapon line ground DoTs at 1s tick rate. This includes Wall of Elements, Volley, Stampede and Blade Cloak.

Tickna

The proposed changes are significantly detrimental to teams trying to progress content . Incremental changes are manageable, but these dramatic changes are NOT.

The changes to the dots and how that will impact healing and damage are clearly a problem. You will lose end game players and raid leads, which will lead to loss of knowledge and activity in the game - something that nobody wants.

Secondly, if you want to reduce the skill gap, shorter dot times that enable a simple 10 second static rotation is far smarter. Having shown countless new players how to parse / do damage, this is by far the easiest way. If you fail to reapply your dots every 10 seconds, you will fail to do it every 20 seconds.

Seperalty, if a person can not do a static 10 second parse, then they will not be able to master the complex mechanics of your end game trials.

Also, as a day one player can I ask you place greater focus into content rather than wild changes to classes and skills. Add a “nightmare mode” to your older trials for example.

All said, it broadly sounds like you are losing the confidence of your player base. Even proposing these sorts of combat changes highlights that you’re really out of touch. Sorry, that’s just honest truth.

wolfsilver00

Light and Heavy Attacks
Did you notice these adjustments on the PTS while playing?
Who wouldnt?
If you did, was it better or worse in your experience?
Of course it's worse, I spent so much time learning to weave, and now I just got nerfed.. Its insane
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.
All of them, [snip] You nerfed EVERYTHING
Do you feel like Light and Heavy Attacks still provide meaningful impact to your play experience after the adjustments? Please explain your reasoning.
Of course they do, they still are impactful, because it still is some damage, no one will stop lightweaving because you nerfed it, you just made weak players weaker, why cant you see such an unequivocally truth? You didnt shorten the gap, you just made weak players that could not get enough damage with lightweaving, even weaker, [snip]
Damage over Time
Did you notice these adjustments on the PTS while playing?
Are you actually asking this question to players? [snip] YOU *** NUKED DoTS, OF COURSE WE NOTICED
If you did, was it better or worse in your experience?
Worse. In some sort of unfounded luck [snip], the changes presented made the game more BORING. I mean, hell, this even goes beyong dps, you made it more boring! [snip]
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.
All activities in which you use DoTs and light attacks felt the difference.. And you know what those activities are? All of them. I uninstalled PTS and I wont go into it again to get you a picture of something that you already know happens, because, my dear team of people [snip], YOU KNOW MATH. SO YOU DONT NEED A *** IMAGE TO SHOW YOU WHAT YOUVE DONE
After the balance changes, did you make changes to the amount of Damage over Time abilities your build utilized? Please explain any reasoning.
No! [snip] WE HAVE ONE SPAMMABLE AND THERE IS NO REASON TO NOT FILL YOUR VOID WITH DOTS, EXCEPT FOR BUFF SLOTS. What [snip] do you want me to do? To put 5 buffs on my backbar that dont count cause they are not sloted on my main ***? Or you want me to put another spammable to spam alongside my main spammable? [snip] And if I were to continue to play this after this *** comes out, WHICH IF IT DOES, I WONT, I would put even more *** dots in there, to at least try to get to the place I was before.. Which cuts on utility and versatility and the dynamic aspect of any build, but *** fun right? Who needs it? need ESO is 6 dots and 14 *** spams.
While using Damage over Time effects, did you notice any other impacts on your play experience?
You've got the *** kidding me
Healing over Time
Did you notice these adjustments on the PTS while playing?
[snip]
If you did, was it better or worse in your experience?
Better of course, I LOVE LESS HEALING ON A TRIAL IN WHICH WE ALREADY HAVE LESS DAMAGE, amazing, fantastic. the *** kind of answer do you expect here? And even on vet dungeons.. the tics are on a 2 second timer you uninspired manatees, thats 2 *** seconds of time for a dps to get *** by one mechanic, literally double the time we had before.
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.
Again? All of them, YOU HEAL EVERYWHERE, EVEN IN PVP
After the balance changes, did you make changes to the amount of Healing over Time abilities your build utilized? Please explain any reasoning.
Yeah, I just took them off cause they serve no *** purpose now
While using Healing over Time effects, did you notice any other impacts on your play experience?
Yeah, that it became ***.
How do you feel about the healing experience and its overall impact in your primary activities (PvP/Dungeons/Solo/Trials)?
I think healers need a mechanic to make them more engaged, things like being able to block to give a shield to a player, healers being able to apply more buffs to make their rotation more interesting, resto staff needs some work done to it so its not relegated to a back bar and a specific stat (with sets to match) to reduce healing cd... Healers could be so much fun, [snip]
Has your sentiment changed based on these PTS adjustments?
Yeah.. I thought healers took the butt end of the development.. [snip]

[edited for bashing & profanity bypass]

woe

I've been playing since beta. These changes are pretty YIKES. Spamfest incoming, content will take longer, pvp idek at this point it's going to be a complete *** show. The flurry animation and sounds don't match and are a joke. Jabs was honestly better how it used to look, it just needed a bit of smoothing out.

Hotdog_23

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Excellent feedback as always, Thanks for sharing and taking time to help the community.

My thoughts on part one feedback. I would hope that ZOS have the data to support that people they are targeting on the low end with the changes are spamming skills and not just light attacks.
The Heavy attack change does seem odd considering they’re target. If I had to bet, I would say that the heavy attack change has to do with the cry of late on the forums about heavy attack PVP builds and this seems to be ZOS’s answer.
Does seem odd to me that they keep adding sets that rely on light attacks to produce effects especially if the lower end folks don’t light attack enough.

Part 2
Timers being consistent across the board would help so much. This should have been a much stronger focus on by ZOS. All AOE’s should be standardized and power adjusted to support this. Same as buff and debuffer types as well as self-buffs. This would as help for those that play different characters across the game.

One request I have here is, really wish ZOS would improve the timers for the back bar and show both bars and actual time left and not just some little bar as this means having to “bar watch” closely. Plus, please let us track what buff and debuffs we want and not everything. Talk about bar watching when you can have 30 of these showing at one time and the fact that they are consistently moving based on the time they have left is a nightmare to track.

Part 3
Well stated nothing to add except I wish they would add a group finder for normal trials to get more people involved in them. I run across quite a few people who haven’t ever done any or only one or two. Much less get in a group that wants to learn and attempt them on vet or VetHM. More accessibility means more availability as well.

Stay safe

PrincessOfThieves

I'm absolutely appalled by the lack of communication. It's pretty clear that people don't like this patch, and yet the only dev replies we get are related to a bugged helmet and some cp glitch. I wonder if they even see our feedback...

aetherial_heavenn

Aeaeren wrote: »

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.

Excellent post. I feel the same way about keeping up DoTs feeling more fluid and easier to time and keep up (ie boring for some), the OakenSoul nerf is too much for PvE and the overall DPS loss hits the middle range for exactly the same reasons - even though I play magicka on PC and on quite different classes.