Upcoming PTS Combat & Balance Adjustments

Sandman929

Rimskjegg wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

I'm concerned that so many of these changes are coming in the final PTS patch, including class abilities tweaks and the proposed boss health changes to Vet PVE content.

Players may be able to test in that final week, but that not a lot of time for the Devs to respond to reasonable feedback. Nor is there time to test further iterations and tweaks if more changes are needed. Realistically, it seems like there's two options: either the final week's version goes Live or the Live version has untested changes added that we're now "testing" in the main game.

We've all experienced what happens when the Devs lets something go Live so they can gather more data before adjusting it. It can be as small as an unbalanced set or as massive as Scalebreaker's combat changes that were promptly reevaluated three months later in Dragonhold.

I do understand that the Devs are between the rock and hard place of DLC launch deadlines and needing to get this patch out the door. I'm glad to see that changes are being made to the original plan in response to community feedback and testing. I'm not sure there's any way to take more much-needed testing time for the Update.

However, the rapid pace and drastic nature of changes here at the end of the PTS cycle leaves me worried that we're going to get an unfinished and thus unbalanced Live version. Even if what we get is better than the first iteration, that does not mean that what we'll get is good.

And I cannot think of much that would be more damaging to community morale than for this patch to get rushed out and then have the next update or two be spent "fixing" all the stuff the Devs didn't fix before rolling this patch out. Your community already has change fatigue. If the Devs expect that they can come back in over the next couple updates and clean up this messy rollout with small or large changes, that's only going to make the change fatigue worse.


I'm going to end on a brief note about the other MMO-style game I play: Warframe. Their recent update Angels of the Zariman was terribly buggy at launch. Worse, it's quest needed to be nerfed in the first couple days, and two major combat elements they reworked in the update needed to be rebalanced again in the first week or so. Here's what the new Creative Director Rebecca Ford had to say about it:

"I should've held it another week … But there were a lot of reasons we couldn't. And then I started to understand those reasons. Every little thing matters. You're making a hundred micro decisions a day and then they add up. We can't move this update. By the end of the [launch] week we had a more stable build, but that's what stung the most."

Interview: https://www.pcgamer.com/warframe-is-getting-into-the-time-loop-business-with-the-duviri-paradox/

So while I understand the rock and the hard place that ESO's Devs must be in right now, and understand that the Devs may have no choice but to push this Live on time whatever the changes are and fix it later no matter the cost to already fatigued players...I hope they aren't left saying "I should've held it another week."

We said! This post needs a Major Empower buff, we don't want it to be Major Prophecy!

Nocturnals Ploy removed both.

Sync01

While it is nice to see that you aren't ignoring all feedback it's just too little, too late. The damage has already been done and players have lost faith in the devs and the future of the game. A good chunk of the end game players I used to do trials with has left, and teams have disbanded in every high end guild I know.

Some people have already mentioned it, but you need to address healing. There is no point in scaling hp of bosses if you're not also scaling the dps ticks from bosses in certain trials, because now you're just shifting groups wiping due to failing dps checks to groups wiping due to failing hps checks.

mpicklesster

I'm confused by the following change: "[...] for Dungeons and Trials, we’ll be reducing the health of all bosses on Veteran difficulty and above in the final PTS patch to account for the overall DPS loss."

Wouldn't it just be simpler to leave combat untouched? The net result would be about the same as this arguably superfluous back-and-forth of nerf-then-buff.

Anyway--the cycle of changes in this PTS reminded me of this gif:

shadyjane62

This is all meaningless to me. I did not see the word Templar in all those words.

If I'm not getting my jabs back, it is irrelevant.

woe

Can we please make races, classes and sets feel like they do something again? Everything using the exact same gear, class and race is getting so boring. There SHOULD be advantages and disadvantages to playing certain things that also balance each other out. The homogeneous updating of classes and gear sucks.

Deanlolz

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

The Quote

A very erudite, handsome and articulate man summarized this post very well:

"we have realized that the knees were accurate" - kestenyi, Templar Main

Cyber10

Appreciate the feedback @ZOS_GinaBruno. However, DPS should not be nerfed as hard as it is. There is no need to nerf DPS if making the other changes this patch. How about focusing on LA and HA balance and leave any DPS adjustments until next patch.

Also, can the nerf to Dark Convergence only be active in PvP? There is no reason to change it for PvP.

Thanks

xaraan

We'll see when we see the actual PTS notes. The preview last week was not enough and not sure if this will be. I've lived through many bad looking patches before, but this one had very little in it that looked worthwhile. I think best case is this just shifts it from the worst patch (or one of them) to just a bad one.

The response of zos with the "trust" us when you act anything but trustworthy was just icing on the cake. Between some intentionally shady actions or just the fact that none of your changes accomplished any of the listed goals you stated in PTS1 for reasons you were making the changes. So I'm not sure if I cannot trust you b/c of incompetence or dishonesty, though it feels like a mix of both to be honest. And don't expect us to not have knee-jerk reactions or anecdotal feedback when some of us have been right 90% of the time with those responses in every patch over the last 8 years.

1. You really shouldn't need players to test and figure out that when nerfing all power in the game, maybe you should also adjust content that can already only be completed by .1% of players. The fact that you are just now making some adjustments (changes that can't be testing in time and were probably over tuned even on live) was a huge waste of time on both your and players parts. Why was this not obvious to your team from the start?

2. You really shouldn't need anyone to tell you that nerfing everyone isn't "raising the floor/lowering the ceiling" - you've literally never just lowered the ceiling. And I have a feeling your ending changes will still screw over the players in the middle the most - the ones that actually care to learn to play the game and push for progs in harder content. If you can't lower the ceiling only, without lowering everyone under it, including those just a bit under it, then your changes are not the right ones.

3. Dot/Hot changes? Any further balancing of that? Originally it was stated you were making the gameplay easier to manage for players, but now they are even more mixed up than before. And applied dots and hots may not even be useful in many situations in short fights or pvp as weak as they are.

4. Having LA scale with abilities wasn't the source of the problem IMO. You want to "raise the floor" and "lower (only) the ceiling"? Then stick with the flat rate, but a higher flat rate. Then the top group is flattened out, but every group under it will now do the same damage as they do with LA's despite their build. If this is worrisome b/c of PvP, then it should have been stated in dev comments instead of only trying to paint things withe a pretty brush to spin bad news). And frankly, the gap is still there b/c again, only the top groups will have perfect uptime on empower and be making the best use of stuff like MA staves in every dps build.

5. Are you just insistent on pushing through these changes in some form to save face b/c you think it would look back to admit you were wrong and scrap most the changes outright? Sounds like I silly question, but I've seen you guys argue about changes and push them through before only to slowly revert things as time goes on or make changes a few patches later. This goes to trust. If you can't admit you were wrong and do what's best for the game, then no use asking people to trust you.


At this point in the game, you shouldn't be completely reworking combat or anything else. Every patch should just have minor tweaks and balance changes and that's all that was needed now. Some classes are a bit over or under-tuned (or some abilities) and needed adjusting. If you want to nerf light attacks, you could use one patch to do that and only that and see how it effects everything else, instead of also changing hots/dots and abilities and not truly knowing how it will play out in in-game situations (something that spreadsheets alone don't tell you). Small changes each patch could have been used to finish hybrid changes, polish racial changes that were never truly balanced, work on CP (and maybe return some Quality of Life aspects players lost from the changes where we ended up losing quality of life features even with 3x the applied CP). And frankly, some of the end game trials needed adjusting for vet and HMs even without any nerfs to the the power level if you truly want your content "more accessible".

Faded

Ok. Thanks for the update.

I don't envy any of you your jobs.

Destai

@ZOS_GinaBruno Thanks for the explanation, glad to see your team recognizing this is not a viable solution as-is.

We need folks like @ZOS_Finn and @ZOS_Gilliam to demonstrate how this is achieving increased accessibility. Demonstrate - not explain in a forum post. Once your changes are completed in response to our feedback, I think we all want to see how this plays out and how it achieves that previously stated goal. Play some veteran content, like trials or dungeons on HM. If it's so good, show us.

I think we're all a bit fuzzy on the overall vision of the game and its combat. So while you're beholden to doing this change for the long-term health of the game, we need to know why. How exactly does lowering the ceiling, and not raising the floor, help players complete content?

I look forward to see further adjustments more in-line with the overwhelming response these changes have received.

And hopefully, the next time someone from ZOS asks for trust, it's not a prelude to something that will engender this level of heat for you guys. Trust is earned.

Duane

Chef42 wrote: »

I just got very confused by something here. Gina said "We ultimately want to help raise the floor and....", what has actually been done to raise the floor? This is a serious question. I have seen nothing on the PTS that raises the floor at all.

Back on week 1 of the PTS using the same toon, gear, CP, food, pots, I lost about 20% of my damage dropping from 54K on live to 44k on the PTS. If your raising the floor, with that same setup I should be hitting more than 54k on PTS now? What change made this happen?

Once again, I am not being sarcastic. I would really like to know.

because the floor they are referencing is timmy from day installing the game

Treeshka

Last week changes comes almost two weeks before the actual release. So we will have tons of time to test. But seeing the exact numbers of boss health in the patch notes would be nice because not everyone has a group or time to try each dungeon and trial.

FantasticFreddie

Well.

I don't love it.

But, I'm happy to see that you guys are doing SOMETHING. The entire concept of U35 was bad, and it's still bad-- you never needed to bring the ceiling down in first place, and that you have such an obsession with it is ridiculous. But, once you made the choice to put U35 on pts, realistically, you were never going to be able to pull an uno reverse and just scrap it, no matter how much we wanted you to, so I guess this is the best we are going to get. It's a compromise that leaves no one happy, but it sounds better than it was.

Tyrobag

Okay but reducing enemy health still didn't address the massive unnecessary nerf to healing, or the fact that last week's "fix" made rotations impossible. Are these going to be taken care of?

Necrotech_Master

xaraan wrote: »

5. Are you just insistent on pushing through these changes in some form to save face b/c you think it would look back to admit you were wrong and scrap most the changes outright? Sounds like I silly question, but I've seen you guys argue about changes and push them through before only to slowly revert things as time goes on or make changes a few patches later. This goes to trust. If you can't admit you were wrong and do what's best for the game, then no use asking people to trust you.


At this point in the game, you shouldn't be completely reworking combat or anything else. Every patch should just have minor tweaks and balance changes and that's all that was needed now. Some classes are a bit over or under-tuned (or some abilities) and needed adjusting. If you want to nerf light attacks, you could use one patch to do that and only that and see how it effects everything else, instead of also changing hots/dots and abilities and not truly knowing how it will play out in in-game situations (something that spreadsheets alone don't tell you). Small changes each patch could have been used to finish hybrid changes, polish racial changes that were never truly balanced, work on CP (and maybe return some Quality of Life aspects players lost from the changes where we ended up losing quality of life features even with 3x the applied CP). And frankly, some of the end game trials needed adjusting for vet and HMs even without any nerfs to the the power level if you truly want your content "more accessible".

i think this nails it on the head

its kind of almost feeling like we are getting more communication due to the massive blowback

zos would have internal numbers to people who are pre-emptively canceling their subs at a minimum and im getting the feeling like they had some kind of internal meeting that was like "we got to do something"

combat is in a pretty decent spot right now and should only need adjustments to fix problem areas, blanket nerfing us, and now including the blanket nerf on enemies (at least partially) feels like its unnecessarily massively swinging the game balance

as others have noted just the fact they even put these massive changes out there is already leaving a bad taste in players mouths and its not even live yet

its like using a sledgehammer to put the final nail in a birdhouse, you might get the nail in the wood but your going to destroy the birdhouse in the process

neferpitou73

Adjusting the content is definitely a step in the right direction.

Although if the decrease is proportional to the lost DPS this just feels like a lot of unnecessary work. in order to get the balance you want you now have to adjust two things: DPS and Boss health. It would be much easier to *slowly* reduce DPS over the course of several patches rather than try to get everything done at once.

I don't know, this still gives off the air of "We don't want to admit we're wrong so we're just going to re-adjust the entire game around our bad ideas"

MageCatF4F

Chef42 wrote: »

I just got very confused by something here. Gina said "We ultimately want to help raise the floor and....", what has actually been done to raise the floor? This is a serious question. I have seen nothing on the PTS that raises the floor at all.

Back on week 1 of the PTS using the same toon, gear, CP, food, pots, I lost about 20% of my damage dropping from 54K on live to 44k on the PTS. If your raising the floor, with that same setup I should be hitting more than 54k on PTS now? What change made this happen?

Once again, I am not being sarcastic. I would really like to know.

I have to agree with this well written observation. This player is actually not on the floor, they are halfway up a short step ladder.

I'm on the floor, or maybe a little kiddee stool just above the floor. I lost 3000 dps between live and the latest PTS
with the same skills, armor, "rotation", weapons and etc. Assuming the dummies are synchronized now between live and PTS - who knows?

If you are raising the floor, like the person above noted, I should be doing 3000 dps more shouldn't I?

Or do I simply have to get new armor and weapons, gold the weapons, invest in new skills, and come up with a new "rotation"?

You know what? I'd rather you didn't try to "raise my floor" at all. To employ a metaphor, I'd rather just keep trying out new kiddee stools on my own, at my own pace, until I find a higher one that I like.

Thanks, but really, no thanks.

Sandman929

Confidence is just skyrocketing now...maybe one of the dev could come here and point to the spot on the floor that gets raised...literally none of us can find how that happens.

Jazraena

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone,

We wanted to take a minute to give you some insight into some additional changes coming to the PTS affecting combat and balance.

As we’ve continued reading through your feedback from testing these changes, we determined that some of our goals were actively competing with each other and not reaching the target audiences in ways we intended. We ultimately want to help raise the floor and reduce the ceiling in regard to DPS output, while simultaneously improving class balance in some problematic areas. So far, this has led to competing changes that have hurt some groups of players despite us stating we didn’t want to actively harm playstyles with any particular change; we are committed to following through with additional ways to mitigate these issues while still meeting our intended goals.

With all that said, in next week’s PTS patch you’ll find that we will be re-evaluating some of the adjustments to Light and Heavy Attacks so they are a bit less drastic. Light and Heavy Attacks will once again scale with your stats, just to a lesser extent than before. Overall, there will still be a nerf on Light Attack damage, but this will allow us to give a lot more love to Heavy Attacks and will be less stark of a difference.

There will also be a handful of tweaks to some class abilities in next week’s PTS patch, based on the feedback we’ve received, but the majority of these will come in the final PTS patch. Note that the focus of these adjustments will be on Magicka-based Nightblades, Wardens, and Sorcerers.

Additionally, for Dungeons and Trials, we’ll be reducing the health of all bosses on Veteran difficulty and above in the final PTS patch to account for the overall DPS loss. For Trials specifically, we’ll be reducing the health of all Champions and Bannermen on Veteran difficulty and above. The reduction in health for each boss will vary from encounter to encounter, but the results should be that each Dungeon and Trial boss fight will provide a similar challenge to what is on Live currently. The Trial bannermen and Champions provide a challenge in their own right so we felt additional adjustments were warranted.

We recognize there has been a lot of concern surrounding the combat changes currently on the PTS, and we truly believe with some continued adjustments and iterations, this is the best course of action for the long-term health of the game. We’re also working on a brief Q&A that should help address some of the more general questions surrounding these changes. Thanks for reading and, of course, taking the time to provide so much in-depth and valuable feedback.

Thank you Gina, and the team. I do like where this might be leading and that issues are recognized.

However, I still strongly, strongly suggest you consider dropping these changes altogether, return to the drawing board and return with a more refined idea next update. The chances of any large scale adjustments being well-thought out, thoroughly tested and refined in the remaining timeframe is slim, and I'd be surprised if any of the developers on your team disagreed with that assessment.

If you do go through after all, I'll have to echo others here that DoT/Buff Durations and Damage need to be reevaluated again in particular in terms of duration harmonization and class / skill line passives and sets like Elf Bane and Deadly Strike.

pklemming

I'd have honestly preferred delaying the whole patch for at least one more cycle, or just a total rework. I just feel we are going to end up with something pushed no one wants, and that will be just as bad as what we had, with expectations not living up to reality.

neferpitou73

I honestly don't know why the haven't just looked at raid buffs. Revaluating Major Force, Courage, PA etc is going to reduce the DPS of the higher tier players more than the mid-tier ones. Because the damage pretty much increases exponentially when you stack those buffs, especially the percentage multiplier ones.

ARAL_TFORC

why not just undo any of these changes, fix already known bugs and improve the gaming experience by adding more playable features? like make a new pvp map, create more dungeons/trials per years, also add more classes and cool skill line, give spells animations updates. plenty of things to do, why waste time on something that no one asks for.

Sambucca1973

Additionally, for Dungeons and Trials, we’ll be reducing the health of all bosses on Veteran difficulty and above in the final PTS patch to account for the overall DPS loss. For Trials specifically, we’ll be reducing the health of all Champions and Bannermen on Veteran difficulty and above.

While I understand that vet trials have been a serious concern, it seems this ignores casual players.

Will normal dungeons, delves, and overland bosses get any adjustment? Or will doing dailies and RND just become a monotonous slog for casual players?

Honestly, the idea of players spending more time doing repeatable content that players have already done seems ill-conceived. Different mechanics and hidden bosses did a lot to increase difficulty and variety, IMHO. But, again, I’m a filthy casual who enjoys an occasional vet run but usually prefers normal daily challenges. But it is discouraging and is only likely to get me to play less.

Arthtur

So instead of scrapping those changes u will still push it through with some "adjustments"? And players will have to test it for 3rd time but there wont be any time left for yet another "adjustments"? So even if this will be worse it will go live...
Why do i even care at this point...

willymancer69

Will there be an adjustment to healing?

Week one PTS, our bread and butter heal skill, Illustrious, was nerfed. The new Illustrious morph on PTS extends the skill uptime versus having increased healing (live). With the 2s HoT being reverted, we did not see a reversion of this HoT morph in parallel.

Will this be changed? Radiating got nerfed, which is a staple of dungeons and mobile trial bosses. Will the Radiating nerf be reverted?

Healing and harder content will continue to be less accessible until one off, high impact changes like theseare reverted.

UrQuan

Treeshka wrote: »

Last week changes comes almost two weeks before the actual release. So we will have tons of time to test. But seeing the exact numbers of boss health in the patch notes would be nice because not everyone has a group or time to try each dungeon and trial.

Time to test the changes? Yes.

Time to do in-depth data-driven analysis of the results of all the testing on the PTS, come up with changes/adjustments to address remaining concerns, and then test those changes to make sure they have the desired effect? No.

Tsunahmie

I'm glad I stuck around on the forums to read this post @ZOS_GinaBruno
This is an extremely good response and I look forward to seeing what the team can come up with to achieve the intended goals now.
It has been a dark few weeks for many in the ESO community, myself included, but here's to a brighter 2 weeks and a more enjoyable PTS!

On the fly tho, pls fix PCEU for Midyear Mayhem, it's been rather unsatisfactory what with smashing a skill button 6+ times until the intended skill fires.

Tar000un

Sync01 wrote: »

While it is nice to see that you aren't ignoring all feedback it's just too little, too late. The damage has already been done and players have lost faith in the devs and the future of the game. A good chunk of the end game players I used to do trials with has left, and teams have disbanded in every high end guild I know.

Some people have already mentioned it, but you need to address healing. There is no point in scaling hp of bosses if you're not also scaling the dps ticks from bosses in certain trials, because now you're just shifting groups wiping due to failing dps checks to groups wiping due to failing hps checks.

Rollback of hots to 10s is adressing that afaik, but I didnt test healing on PTS, I mean self heal is sticky heal and got 20s duration. While main aoe hots are back to 10s.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Additionally, for Dungeons and Trials, we’ll be reducing the health of all bosses on Veteran difficulty and above in the final PTS patch to account for the overall DPS loss. For Trials specifically, we’ll be reducing the health of all Champions and Bannermen on Veteran difficulty and above. The reduction in health for each boss will vary from encounter to encounter, but the results should be that each Dungeon and Trial boss fight will provide a similar challenge to what is on Live currently. The Trial bannermen and Champions provide a challenge in their own right so we felt additional adjustments were warranted.

I wonder the % of the change ie the final numbers, but it's very nice to see that you finally ajust the content to the nerfs.

LeBrenn

Finally a statement that is not only meant to passive-aggressive offend your player base.

Don't know why keep any of the changes if you're admitting that the results does not match the goal, though.
This step back is a good start, but the eternal cycle of tweaking this and that because of an unnecessary change is a huge part of the reason everybody is upset.

And please reconsider Oakensoul nerf. It feels like a huge betrayal, specially after how you advertised it.
Leave as it is or listen to one of the many suggestions your great community gave you.

This community is one of biggest reasons this game is great, please continue to listen to it.

Sandman929

Maybe Monday will reveal how exactly a single floor anywhere got raised.