Why the changes in Update 35 miss the mark and fail to fix the issues that it seeks to address

HanYolo

Thanks so much for the precise and level headed write-up. I tried something similar and gave up because I kept drifiting off into a rant and getting emotional. Now we can only hope that ZOS will actually listen to this and all the other examples of constructive criticism that are beeing voiced a lot right now.

tomfant

Totally agree with OP.

Whiskey_JG

code65536 wrote: »

Note: This thread is a repost of a post that I made in the official discussion thread.

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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.

@ZOS_BrianWheeler @ZOS_Gilliam @ZOS_RichLambert @ZOS_Finn

By far, the most comprehensive, reasonable and fair post I have seen.
Well done for explaining the top-end struggles. People seriously underestimate how difficult Rockgrove is especially Xalvakka HM. The group I was in managed to clear xalvakka hm only twice within a 4 month progression and all the DDs were outputting 100k+ dps. You need to be highly dedicated to clear it, and even more for Planesbreaker (MAD respect to anyone that has achieved it).

The significance of unbalanced timers should not be understated. When timers do not coincide it takes a dedicated player to squeeze the maximum benefit for his group - case in point brittle.

You also touched on a small issue (among the grand scheme of things) but this was always watered down. The issue of REWARDS for top-end achievements. Rewards in ESO are heavily skewed to the bottom end, meaning that the higher you progress, the less rewards you get. Even worse some rewards are blatantly useless. A good discussion needs to be had on this as the rewards given do not take into consideration the time invested by the player.

I think it would also help if the game had a practical combat tutorial that highlights basic knowledge us raiders have amassed through the years and make this readily available for new players.

Whiskey_JG

1) This I would say represents the current Performance vs Optimisation Graph:



It stands to reason that the higher you optimise, the optimal your performance would be. This power creep is not linear since the dps gained at mid-tier optimisation is lower than the dps gained at the higher percentile.

2) The below is what I think ZoS had in mind for this patch.



If the aim was to lower the gap between low and high dps players, it stands to reason that the graph would flatten out at the top end, granting players at low & mid-tier optimisation greater performance gains. This is not a bad target to have, theoretically this would increase the player base and ensure more participation in hard content.

3) The below is what ZoS actually achieved with the proposed changes



The maximum dps achieved by everyone has been lowered to the extent that the performance gained at mid-tier optimisation arrives to a plateau and will not see increases unless the player invests further time. There are slight gains between the 60 - 80% tiers but the under 40% optimised players will remain where they are.

The data associated from the above graphs was taken from parse numbers. I took a couple high end, mid-tier and low end parses and sought comparisons between live and pts. The results have been rounded up to % changes.

Cayr

Very well said. More thought went into writing this post than it seemingly did into the combat changes. Here's hoping that the dev team has it in them to listen.

ghost_bg_ESO

Now forget what is written as goals.

Regular nerf as damage is trough the roof - Done.
Regular meta flip - Done.
Optimizing to some point server loads - Done.
Optional - catering part of the player base in case of mass exodus - Done.
Class balance - when more data is available - Follows to be done next 6 months to next flip.
Optimizing dungeon encounters - not enough data (see previous)

Looked at this point actually U35 is successful.

danno8

I'm all for a stacking buff that increases consecutive LA's. Right now spammables seem to be around 2x the power of LA's on live. Imagine a buff that gives your next LA a 40% boost after a LA. Stacks twice, vanishes upon a skill activation.

Right now:

1s 2s 3s 4s 5s
Just LA Spamming 1x 1x 1x 1x 1x = 5x damage
Just skill spamming 2x 2x 2x 2x 2x = 10x damage
Weaving 3x 3x 3x 3x 3x = 15x damage


With the buff:

1s 2s 3s 4s 5s
Just LA Spamming 1x 1.4x 1.8x 1.8x 1.8x = 7.8x damage
Just skill spamming 2x 2x 2x 2x 2x = 10x damage
Weaving 3x 3x 3x 3x 3x = 15x damage

There. Just raised the floor with no effect at all on the ceiling. Closed the gap. This would also have a positive effect on poor weavers who resort to LA spamming in stressful encounters, and it would help resource starved builds (especially early in the game).

Helps beginners, helps the middle, top end stays the same.

starkerealm

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

I feel like that would require the encounters/dungeon/trials team to make adjustments, and that is the one team that seemingly has refused to do so, catering to the 0.01%.

And since this change is coming from the combat team, I don't expect that to change at all. It'll be at least 6-9 months (2-3 patches) before any adjustments to the content will be made. By that time I feel it'll be too late.

The two teams don't seem like they are in sync (maybe they don't even talk to one another), which is unfathomable to me. Some of the comments made by devs on both teams on the "Thursday Night Streamers/Devs" runs (which are streamed by at least 8-9 other stream team members) made it seem as such. I found it very enlightening that one of the combat designers was seeing the new trial for the first time on the live servers.

This is not a new problem, either. Remember when Morrowind (released 5 years ago!) nerfed sustain into the ground and the Trial that came with Morrowind was chock full of mechanics that ... drained your resources! The Dungeon/Trial design team seems to do a lot of mechanic design that is based on fighting the current meta. And then the players get caught in the crossfire when the meta changes.

In point of fact, I do remember Morrowind. The significant difference is that most of Morrowind's changes (specifically the sustain nerf) primarily affected players who were already stacking sustain to the point that they could maintain burst DPS while ignoring the resource system entirely. So, while everyone felt the effects of this nerf to one degree or another, it was most impactful on the top players.

The 35 changes apply indiscriminately to all players, and disproportionately affect low DPS players.

If you were slamming out endgame content in 2016, then, yeah, Morrowind hurt you. But, if you were running dungeons, or wandering around overland, the changes were minimal.

With 35, if you're running around overland or running dungeons, your damage will be heavily nerfed, while if you're slamming out trials, you might need to make some slight adjustments to proceed.

The irony here is that unlike with Morrowind, these changes directly impact the casual players that ZOS wants to protect far more severely than it affects the endgame community.

Cayr

I would be very happy with uniform 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 combat encounters and making combat boring, stale and slow as all hell.

Another thing I've been wondering is what the heck happened to "playing your own way"? I agree that the game could probably use a reduction on the damage ceiling, but the presented reasoning for it is just terrible. As if you would need to have people be uniform dps-wise to be able to create balanced content - that's only a problem if you've been balancing it for the top-end. The can see the thought process being that they want even the top 1% to feel challenged, and that's great, but the solution isn't to give people a trade between content that feels arbitrarily difficult, because you only achieved that difficulty with nerfing everyone's damage, and really-really boring repetitive combat. I think they've 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.

Dagoth_Rac

I think the obsession with DPS numbers, by both the Devs and the player base, misses the forest for the trees. Questions like what should be the DPS ceiling? How wide should the power gap be? How much time and effort should be required to reach certain numbers? What could ZOS do to better train players in the techniques of high DPS?

All of these are putting meta-gaming ahead of gaming.

What is the ultimate goal of these changes? To provide a wide array of content that is challenging and satisfying to a wide array of players. None of these U35 changes are really going to do that. And I am not convinced many of the forum suggestions are going to do that, either.

What is really needed is more control by group leaders over content difficulty.

My suggestion? Decouple enemy health, damage, and mechanics. And let group leader put them back together as they desire.

Enemy Health = Normal, Veteran, Veteran Hard Mode
Enemy Damage = Normal, Veteran, Veteran Hard Mode
Enemy Mechanics = Normal, Veteran, Veteran Hard Mode

All of these things already exist in game! But players cannot control them individually. Add that individual control. And let loot and achievements be based on lowest setting of the three.

So you could, for example, do a Maw of Lorkhaj with Normal Enemy Health, Normal Enemy Damage, but Veteran Enemy Mechanics. This would still be a "normal" run by loot and achievement standards, but it would bump up the difficulty to something like Normal+. And group leaders could mix and match these three variables in different ways to achieve the best result for their group. Something that is not too easy but not too hard. And that could change over time as group gets more experience and more skill.

I think this could both re-invigorate progression and training guilds, because it gives clearer milestones and more opportunities for "small victories". Going from Normal Enemy Health, Normal Enemy Damage, and Veteran Enemy Mechanics, to Normal Enemy Health, Veteran Enemy Damage, and Veteran Enemy Mechanics would be a noticeable step up on difficulty. Veteran bosses hit a lit harder than Normal bosses! But it is unlikely to feel as discouraging and non-linear as the current leap, where your only choice is going from Normal Enemy Health, Normal Enemy Damage, and Normal Enemy Mechanics, to Veteran Enemy Health, Veteran Enemy Damage, and Veteran Enemy Mechanics.

Ultimately, the time and effort to go from Normal Enemy Health, Normal Enemy Damage, and Normal Enemy Mechanics, to Veteran Enemy Health, Veteran Enemy Damage, and Veteran Enemy Mechanics may be the same time and effort as current leap from Normal to Veteran. But having more gradations of difficulty along the way, more moments of group triumph, could make the time spent more enjoyable and satisfying for the players.

This would not make any content easier or more difficult. It would not make any players weaker or more powerful. You would still need to practice and get better to go farther. But it would make the concept and implementation of "progression" more inviting and engaging and player friendly.

And it would not involve wholesale rewriting of the game. Split one difficulty flag into three difficulty flags. Have the calculation of boss health, damage, and mechanics look at new individual flags not the current single flag. Beyond that, you are mostly putting it in the hands of players and group leaders to engage in a kind of "self service" to find the difficulty and challenge most appealing to them.

Necrotech_Master

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

I think the obsession with DPS numbers, by both the Devs and the player base, misses the forest for the trees. Questions like what should be the DPS ceiling? How wide should the power gap be? How much time and effort should be required to reach certain numbers? What could ZOS do to better train players in the techniques of high DPS?

All of these are putting meta-gaming ahead of gaming.

What is the ultimate goal of these changes? To provide a wide array of content that is challenging and satisfying to a wide array of players. None of these U35 changes are really going to do that. And I am not convinced many of the forum suggestions are going to do that, either.

What is really needed is more control by group leaders over content difficulty.

My suggestion? Decouple enemy health, damage, and mechanics. And let group leader put them back together as they desire.

Enemy Health = Normal, Veteran, Veteran Hard Mode
Enemy Damage = Normal, Veteran, Veteran Hard Mode
Enemy Mechanics = Normal, Veteran, Veteran Hard Mode

All of these things already exist in game! But players cannot control them individually. Add that individual control. And let loot and achievements be based on lowest setting of the three.

So you could, for example, do a Maw of Lorkhaj with Normal Enemy Health, Normal Enemy Damage, but Veteran Enemy Mechanics. This would still be a "normal" run by loot and achievement standards, but it would bump up the difficulty to something like Normal+. And group leaders could mix and match these three variables in different ways to achieve the best result for their group. Something that is not too easy but not too hard. And that could change over time as group gets more experience and more skill.

I think this could both re-invigorate progression and training guilds, because it gives clearer milestones and more opportunities for "small victories". Going from Normal Enemy Health, Normal Enemy Damage, and Veteran Enemy Mechanics, to Normal Enemy Health, Veteran Enemy Damage, and Veteran Enemy Mechanics would be a noticeable step up on difficulty. Veteran bosses hit a lit harder than Normal bosses! But it is unlikely to feel as discouraging and non-linear as the current leap, where your only choice is going from Normal Enemy Health, Normal Enemy Damage, and Normal Enemy Mechanics, to Veteran Enemy Health, Veteran Enemy Damage, and Veteran Enemy Mechanics.

Ultimately, the time and effort to go from Normal Enemy Health, Normal Enemy Damage, and Normal Enemy Mechanics, to Veteran Enemy Health, Veteran Enemy Damage, and Veteran Enemy Mechanics may be the same time and effort as current leap from Normal to Veteran. But having more gradations of difficulty along the way, more moments of group triumph, could make the time spent more enjoyable and satisfying for the players.

This would not make any content easier or more difficult. It would not make any players weaker or more powerful. You would still need to practice and get better to go farther. But it would make the concept and implementation of "progression" more inviting and engaging and player friendly.

And it would not involve wholesale rewriting of the game. Split one difficulty flag into three difficulty flags. Have the calculation of boss health, damage, and mechanics look at new individual flags not the current single flag. Beyond that, you are mostly putting it in the hands of players and group leaders to engage in a kind of "self service" to find the difficulty and challenge most appealing to them.

not a terrible idea, but for simplicity i think they should allow you to enable hard modes on normal difficulty, this would give boss fights an "in between" difficulty while still letting you experience the HM mechanic without it being too punishing

FluffyReachWitch

Pevey wrote: »

I wish more people with this playstyle and damage level would come here and provide feedback, because these are the people who will be most affected by this patch. But so many of this large class of players don't focus on pts, which is fair. It is just not their thing.

This reply actually encouraged me to download the PTS again. After Summerset, I stopped having the spoons and hard drive space to do that. Well, I have the hard drive space now, and I can pace myself. So today I dug up my silly dungeon playlist, enlisted my loyal Karthspire coney, and marched into solo Veteran Vaults of Madness on live and PTS.



(Yes. Yes I did.)

Live: About as tricky as I remember, but doable with a little patience.

PTS: The fact that my damage over time only ticked once every 2 seconds made the majority of my skills weaker and made my Critical Surge-based heals unreliable, so every fight was painfully drawn out and I spent much more time on the defense. My growing frustration during the final boss led to me using DPS tactics I normally wouldn't consider outside of vMA or trials. Ironically, this increased my DPS somewhat compared to the more relaxed run on live, though the battle still took 50% longer. The only boss fight that was easier was the Cursed One, since his damage reflection beam had less damage to turn against me.

Could I have changed my build for an easier time on PTS? Probably, but then it wouldn't have been a fair comparison.

My hands hurt now.

Conclusion: If this goes to live I might actually become scared of Doshia again.

xaraan

Amazing write up pointing out the real issues with the patch. I scrolled back up at the end to see who wrote it up and of course, it was code. Lucky to have you playing at the moment, hopefully the devs listen more than they have in the past.

Vahndamme

This was a good read, well said, thorough thinking and research done. Probably more than the patch notes itself?

tim77

shadyjane62

Thank you Code. I cry when I read your post because you understand it, and they don't and they have the control.

casparian

I would pay the cost of a year's subscription to read an in-depth investigative article about the ZOS combat team's development process. Just how is it so consistently off-base? Why do their changes so consistently fail to achieve their goals? There's a fascinating story here about design and management, I'm sure.

Pevey

casparian wrote: »

I would pay the cost of a year's subscription to read an in-depth investigative article about the ZOS combat team's development process. Just how is it so consistently off-base? Why do their changes so consistently fail to achieve their goals? There's a fascinating story here about design and management, I'm sure.

I definitely think there should be an incident review to thoughtfully reflect on how this happened, why the proposed changes were so poorly received, why the true root causes of the "obscene" damage at the high end were not properly identified, why such an overly complex "solution" was proposed that fails to address the true root cause when a much simpler solution would have been more effective, and how this can be prevented going forward.

This is what would happen in my day job.

But, of course, we know ZOS will not do that.

p00tx

Nefas wrote: »

code65536 wrote: »

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?”.

I had my eyes glued to the PTS skill bars more than I do with Live skill bars on a dummy YEP.

Same. In testing yesterday, I had to be hyper focused and vigilant on my skill timers (and player health bars) to make sure I had enough healing going out to counter mechanics, and it made it way harder to keep all of the balls in the air.

Wolfkeks

On point, Code!

Csleia

I think code is correct. That's why nothing he suggested will be implemented.

colossalvoids

Great summary as always code, it's greatly appreciated that you're still using your voice in a community to bring something positive out of a mess that as always occurs here.

LukosCreyden

Edit: very well said. I must say I agree with practically all you have said.

Pardon the original post, thought I was in a different thread lol.

Mr_Stach

LukosCreyden wrote: »

I only play one class nowadays.
However, that one class is uh, necromancer. Sadly, necromancer has a very strong ulti and a self synergy, which basically means that it will only ever receive nerfs whilst these two gimmicks are as strong as they are. Any buffs and everyone would cry op. A shame, I love necro but it really needs help in other areas.
I have considered switching to magblade, but magblade is not magcro and I love magcro.

I just want necro to be a well-balanced and fun class, instead of forcing myself to play something else.

You could always come play Warden, be not as powerful, not have powerful ult or self synergy, but still get nerfed..... for some reason....... but we do have a Bear and some slightly annoying pigeons.

Troodon80

Honestly, every time something like this comes up and Code does a writeup, I don't know why ZOS doesn't just reach out and hire them. Or maybe they have and it has been declined.

On point, as ususal.

Supreme_Atromancer

@code65536

I acknowledge that you've said that resistance against weaving is the weakest, but since its listed at all, I wanted to question the assumption that ZOS is even thinking about Light Attack Spammers at all.

I think its reasonable to assume that ZOS still intends this game to be skill-based to some degree, and I don't think they are making these changes so that LA Spammers can complete content. If this is true, the objection seems irrelevant.

I think that all of the arguments are based on the assumptions that the current difficulty level (particularly dps checks) will remain the same, but it seems unlikely it would be the case that changes go through, no one is able to complete content and they refuse to adjust those benchmarks. That doesn't seem likely at all.

Since this seems to be the most significant concern of the community, it might be good diplomacy for ZOS to address those concerns in particular.

Whiskey_JG

I think the underlying culture at Zos is that LA weaving is still seen as a sort of "exploit" rather than a unique feature.

So they keep making changes to remove the effectiveness of LA weaving, so they dont have to incorporate a combat tutorial.

Krym

Whiskey_JG wrote: »

I think the underlying culture at Zos is that LA weaving is still seen as a sort of "exploit" rather than a unique feature.

So they keep making changes to remove the effectiveness of LA weaving, so they dont have to incorporate a combat tutorial.

there have been plenty of tutorials in and out of the game for 8 years. yet you still get four-digit CP players who can't interrupt or do basic mechanics. the same players who die from standing in something red and keep doing it. you can't teach people who don't want to learn.

if they remove weaving (what quite a few people are asking for and proposing as a "better solution" btw), the same people that consider 20s dots boring would probably claim they'd fall asleep at a dummy.

it also doesn't matter what zos thinks about weaving (and keeping it in the game says as much), since it's here and people are used to it. people like to claim U35 IS MAKING EVERYONE QUIT!!111, what do people think is gonna happen if they remove weaving altogether?
nerfing LA is pretty much the only way they can go - making it a less crucial part of the overall damage and removing some of the "stress" of having to weave perfectly, while still keeping it in and rewarding the players who actually can.
players who are less stressed about weaving and needing it for their "damage" (on top of having to keep track of several ticking dots and buffs with different timers) will also have an easier time to do mechanics - like interrupting and not standing in stupid for example. dead dps doesn't do dps.

with the current changes you have to look at more than just damage, the same way flat out buffing lower player's damage wouldn't make them godslayers or fix the issues why they do low damage.

Supreme_Atromancer wrote: »

@code65536
I think that all of the arguments are based on the assumptions that the current difficulty level (particularly dps checks) will remain the same, but it seems unlikely it would be the case that changes go through, no one is able to complete content and they refuse to adjust those benchmarks. That doesn't seem likely at all.

Since this seems to be the most significant concern of the community, it might be good diplomacy for ZOS to address those concerns in particular.

yet at the same time "the community" assumes ZOS didn't test those changes internally at all before putting them in the patch notes. the same community who also thinks a stationary dummy is a valid representation for current dps checks in encounters, and "bursting through encounters to skip mechanics" is the intended way to play.

besides, dps checks have been adjusted in the past often enough, if ZOS' metrics show less players are completing the content than should (same metric who shows the gaps in the difficulty progression, there's a reason they're doing these changes in the first places) this will get amended, you can bet on it. and even if they haven't been adjusted those checks, inevitable powercreep will take care of it on it's own.

JustAGoodPlayer

tim77 wrote: »

For 3 years each update is dissapoitment because of balance !

For me all other is good or OK, but combat is worse each update !

I think too, that combat team is not doing well.

If just base balance on LOR and normal human logick and just balance it a little game can become great again !

JustAGoodPlayer

Programmists can do mistake, they can even do not play. But people who plan such balance and check it - is responsible for this.