Upcoming PTS Combat & Balance Adjustments

Klingenlied

In regards to game balance and dps readjustments: That's what I like to hear! Now I really hope especially Warden gets some healthy adjustments, but guess will need to be patient for now

In regards to PvP and Nocturnals Ploy: I don't worry about this set on a personal level for the simple reason of the set not being effective in any way against permanent buffs. So to me it pretty much just does one single thing: It annihilates the current meta in terms of building for survivability. Thus is necessitates wearers of this set in group pvp settings and might as well necessitate counter play around oakensoul - even despite the upcoming nerf. Due to the simple fact that I dislike our current PvP meta - oh and disliked it for quiet some time now (primary Warden player here, so you might just understand), a major shakeup is nothing I would mind. I do, however, understand that players of 5 different classes can have a different perspective - well, even Warden players might have a different one. Anyway, if this set comes in a useable fashion, I will surely try it out on live.

Sync01

FeedbackOnly wrote: »

PingTheAwesome wrote: »

This is better. Thank you.

Healer's take: You still haven't said what you're doing to our heals. Additionally, while you're reducing the health of the bosses, you do not mention addressing the damage that they do now that you've made it clear you intend to also nerf heals.

This needs addressing.

Most of healing is still over healing. We are fine

We are not fine.
Overhealing occurs when a player is at 100% health, so yes a good chunk of a fight will be overhealing because dds don't always take a lot of damage, but that doesn't mean anything for mechanics where they do.
For example if a dd takes 20k dps for 1 minute, and healing is steady at 40k hps -> 50% is overheal, but if a dd suddenly starts taking 45k damage and healing is still at 40k they obviously die. The logs will still show a lot of overhealing but the healcheck failed.

Of course damage taken and healing fluctuates a lot more in reality but the same principle remains. This is just one more thing that will hit low & mid tier players more than high end players because while an inexperienced healer has issues keeping hots up reliably and knowing when/how to burstheal you also pair that up with dds who take a lot more damage than experienced ones.

xylena_lazarow

Sedare38 wrote: »

you didn't state why Caluurion's got a shadow nerf

It's still the strongest instant burst proc in the game, even after being nerfed in half, that's how insane it was.

PrincessOfThieves

Morimizo wrote: »

This one is simple Khajiit, but seems that what principally 'competes with the goal' of 'raising the floor' is the significant lowering of everyone's DPS and HPS. Unless this strategy is changed, no adjustment will ever accomplish the goal.

Yeah that whole idea doesn't make sense.
For example, I am not strong enough to do vDSR hardmode. Losing 25% dps would not make it more accessible, it would just make regular vet impossible for people like me.
Imo they should stop balancing things around 0.00001% of players. The number of people capable of doing "obscene" dps is so tiny it's unconsequential in the grand scheme of things. I don't get the obsession with them, someone killing a trial boss a bit faster than intended does not affect anyone outside of their team.

Jaraal

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

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.

They said they were raising the floor by making DOTs last longer, so they would be easier for lower tier players to keep track of. But what they ended up doing is creating two different classes of DOT timers (sticky and area), so now the DOT tracking requirements are doubled from Live.

nerfing dots to do less dmg also didnt really help from where they are on live either

I think "raise the floor" is just a catch phrase to keep people from focusing on the fact that everyone is losing damage (effectiveness.) But it would be nice if @ZOS_GinaBruno could elaborate on what exactly is raising the floor in their view.

Mr_Stach

While I think that this Patch is generally a train wreck, I would like Zos to do these end of the week recap or sneak-peaks consistently moving forward and maybe improve on them, this patch is a Damned if you do and Damned if you don't when it comes to responding to feedback but it's important to respond to feedback when it's good or bad I think, so rip off the band-aid.

Hesitantly interested on how Warden will be "Tweaked" next week, Zos has never been known for small adjustments.

Grandchamp1989

"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"

Question
Does this also apply to base game vet dungeons and trials?
So Fungal Grotto 1 and Aetherial Archieves will be easier also?

Savince

These are encouraging news. Thanks for listening and addressing some of the issues. While I can't test these on PTS (just a console owner) I will do some dummy testing before and after the update to finally see how my partical game chances.

spartaxoxo

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

Given the overwhelming response and the wealth of information we have collected, we felt confident that we could make these content changes in order to ensure that the game maintained the challenge players are used to without a major shift in difficulty.

And that's why these efforts failed before and will fail again. You guys have never been willing to do enough of a major shift in difficulty for mid-tier players to actually be included. So these major changes don't actually change much about how the playerbase is divided. It just makes players constantly have to relearn how to play and for builds to become less and less fun. And makes high end players in particular feel more and more punished merely for being good.

You guys really should either accept that the playerbases current divisions and stop trying to change it. Or just rip-off the bandaid and decrease the difficultly enough/buff the damage of mid-tier players enough for it to actually matter.

mlee3141

This is a good start, ZoS, but what about scaling boss damage down lower to account for the massive nerfs to healing? A whopping 40% nerf to Radiating Regen means it is neigh impossible to heal party members through multiple, overlapping dots in highly mobile fights where it is not possible to have everyone stack in all the ground HoTs.

One example is Coral Aerie final boss Hard Mode, where the Tether mechanic makes it impossible for all 4 members of the party to stack as a group. Instead, when tethered, the tethered DPS or Healer must move to the tank, while the other 2 untethered members must move away. In that fight it is vital to focus on healing the two tethered people with ground HoTs while Radiating (With a burst heal like combat prayer now and then) keeps the 2 people who are not tethered up through Boss DoTs like Coalescing Shadows (Which is one of the hardest hitting, unavoidable dungeon DoTs, if not the hardest hitting one).

With a 40% nerf to Radiating Regen, the only viable solution would be to constantly spam burst heals on the two untethered people, which is not sustainable and quickly leads to a group wipe if the healer runs out of magicka at any point. Which they will, because burst heals like Enchanted Growth or Combat Prayer are extremely expensive, and sticky HoTs have been nerfed to such a point as to be almost useless in highly mobile fights with lots of incoming damage.

While reducing the health of vet trial and dungeon bosses is a good step towards narrowing the gap between newer players and more skilled players, it means nothing if DPS cannot stay alive through heal check mechanics such as in Coral Aerie final boss Hard Mode. Even if you shaved 10 mil health off the boss in that fight, more often then not, someone will die because Radiating just isn't enough to keep a DPS that must be separated from the main group alive anymore, and one missed combat prayer or enchanted growth means a group member death.

Please consider nerfing the damage of heal check mechanics to better match the new, nerfed healing output values, especially in highly mobile fights where it is not possible for the entire group to stack in multiple, overlapping HoTs. A few more examples would be Death Touch in Bahsei HM, Possession in Foreman Braddigan HM during the flesh atro phase, the DoT the Lurcher add puts on the tank in Nazaray HM in Shipwright's Regret, and the fire DoT in Stone Garden final boss HM.

Nebs

I'm really delighted to hear about the readjustments to Light/Heavy Attacks. Attacks scaling just feel so much better.

Less health on bosses and less damage means that the floor and ceiling are closer together. So if the fights on average will last just as long as they do now, more teams will be finishing the fight around that average time. I really appreciate that. This also means that our normal content might be more interesting, and I think that's cool, too.

I'm really curious if this means the Bloodmoon set will be keeping the planned flat damage boost adjustment over the existing 55% buff in live. I really like the 55% boost is currently has, especially because I haven't seen anyone wreck with the set in PVP or post silly high numbers with it. I'm also curious what this means for Empower.

I really appreciate this news. Thanks for the update!

xaraan

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

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

Well, considering $$ are the biggest piece of feedback they would listen to, I wouldn't doubt they've seen some impact. I know I've already closed my eso+ personally, as well as a couple friends. A few others in my circle that were starting to play more now that lag was improved (though I dont think they had resubbed yet) and looks like they are just not going to continue to get back into it. The prog trial team I was on will probably shut down b/c of losing too many players. I know Nefas has mentioned a few other instances (he sees a lot more community wise than I would) with large numbers of raid leads leaving their discord and quitting. He also mentioned how the pricing of gold mats has already started dropping because of less players at end game buying stuff for upgrades. There is obviously some impact and I believe they are more likely listening because of that than just because of feedback in general (anecdotal or numbers based).

If they want trust, they should try earning some. Someone should step up and say, "we messed up" but they rarely, if ever, admit to making mistakes. At this point I think they will roll enough of it back to stop the hemorrhaging, smooth over things with those players left and keep coasting on that sweet elder scrolls name that has carried them this far.

Nemeliom

Thanks you @ZOS_GinaBruno and Zenimax Team for listening to your players!! 😁😁😁

Faltasë

Interesting. Will you guys be reverting the Wardens Advanced Species change? It needs to go back to damage increase. That is one of the smaller gripes, but determines the viability of Wardens in Trials. Without the advanced species on live, the class is substantially weaker.

I don't plan on coming back to the game, but hearing some feedback on that would be a great reason for me to continue following the updates.

Faltasë

spartaxoxo wrote: »

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

Given the overwhelming response and the wealth of information we have collected, we felt confident that we could make these content changes in order to ensure that the game maintained the challenge players are used to without a major shift in difficulty.

And that's why these efforts failed before and will fail again. You guys have never been willing to do enough of a major shift in difficulty for mid-tier players to actually be included. So these major changes don't actually change much about how the playerbase is divided. It just makes players constantly have to relearn how to play and for builds to become less and less fun. And makes high end players in particular feel more and more punished merely for being good.

You guys really should either accept that the playerbases current divisions and stop trying to change it. Or just rip-off the bandaid and decrease the difficultly enough/buff the damage of mid-tier players enough for it to actually matter.

I also dont really get how lowering the HP of stuff changes anything. It's kind of bringing us to the "problem" they already had with the game lol. The 1% will still absolutely destroy this game, so I don't really understand changing damage at all. I agree with your point. They need to leave the tiers of the playerbase alone and just let people have fun. At this point it still feels like a job, and also im still relatively salty from the combat devs being antagonistic towards their player base. I think they should address that, too.

honestaly

Tar000un wrote: »

Sync01 wrote: »

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.

So much for Tanks... 20s heals that tick every other second means your tanks are going to struggle, especially as the healers are mostly there to keep the heals on DPS and buff the DPS. Not heal the Tank. Tanks are supposed to be self-reliant... but you're not going to see many tanks slamming down AOE heals for themselves.

ManDraKE

So...that means we will have yet another light/heavy attack rework in 2023.

Do you guys plan to have the core combat mechanics defined and stable before the game reach 10 years old or it's too much to ask?

renne

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Note that the focus of these adjustments will be on Magicka-based Nightblades, Wardens, and Sorcerers.

So you're still just finish off deleting templars from the game, then, since we bring literally nothing to group comp as is, by nerfing the hell out of jabs and burning light and making the class utterly useless.

Cool, cool, okay, cool.

silentxthreat

@ZOS_GinaBruno this is a great step in the right direction but I would like to follow up with class adjustments. As of now we are taking away from class uniqueness with some of the proposed nerfs.

Example jabs will no longer be our best spamable for templar with jab and burning light changes and will need to use something like flurry instead.

Dk dot damage nerf is going to really hurt them in pvp.

Wardens feel clunky with new 4 sec delay on scorch and still have little self heals.

Sorcs well rip sorcs

MetallicMonk

Good news but I hope nocturnal's receives more than just a cooldown adjustment because the mechanic it introduces in general just isn't made for ESO PvP in my opinion.

Also for magicka sorcerer adjustments while you have to be careful not to overtune it, it does need more than just a single change, it lacks offensively and defensively. Exploitation should be changed to match hemorrhage that nightblade has. They're the same exact passive for minor prophecy/minor savagery, except nightblade has 10% crit damage on theirs and sorc does not. There might have been a time where 10% crit damage might have made sorc overperform in PvE but that time has passed and there is no reason exploitation shouldn't have that 10% crit damage as well. Sorc and nightblades are both the crit/burst class but making a crit damage magsorc build in PvP is challenging because medium armor makes it more powerful and medium armor guts your sustain on a mag build.

Also it needs something to adjust their shields, or a more reliable burst heal. Currently even with an insanely high max mag build your hardened ward is slightly over 12k, in this current meta every single other class burst heal consistently heals for more than this and also costs less than a shield. On top of this shield stacking builds normally end up lacking damage as well. Changes like reducing shield cost, making them scale off spell damage instead of max magicka, giving magsorc a better burst heal, perhaps making shields unable to be crit, something that could lessen the gap of making them so much weaker defensively than other classes as well.

Iron_Warrior

So dot timers are all over the place (like live)
LA and HA scale again (like live)
And now, you want to reduce the enemy's health so the fight would last as long as live.

What's the point of this patch? It feels like we are back to the square one. Isn't it better to just leave the game as it is, go back to the drawing board and figure out a better way to raise the floor? (For starters, not nerfing the oakensoul to the ground, your best attempt at raising the floor EVER, helps.)

VolrathStormborn

Hey ZOS!

Appreciate the information for sure. With a lot of focus on Light and Heavy attacks is there any chance that the buggy Heavy attacks will have a fix? Those posts (which I’ll spare you on the links to them) have gone unanswered and not even acknowledged.

May not be a huge issue on PC or maybe even xBox but on PlayStation it’s rather nasty. The last couple patches have also caused issues with all action queuing. Pots, Ultimates, and even skills not firing. We have to spam some actions, and with skills there are times where they do work but fire off 2 or 3 times in a row since we have become accustomed to having to hit them multiple times just in case.

I’d agree with others that this patch should just remain bug fixes only and allow time for all of the intended changes to be fully tested.

I’m a Program Engineer and Developer so I know how the Agile model works, how patch cycles work, the “Sprints” that are held, and there always end up with bugs or unintended code interactions that sneak through QA.

Also a valid point on sets and buffs/debuffs not being adjusted to account for all of the changes. If you have plans to makes those changes later down the line then it goes against your stance on Continuous Sweeping changes each patch.

Hate to bother pinging you too but the basic core functions like Heavy Attacks, skill queuing, and controller inputs need to be acknowledged and communicated.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin

silentxthreat

Veesk wrote: »

Please reverse the Templar Sweeps/Jab changes. Not only are the nerfs lowering the floor but the new animation is largely disliked. It feels like this is also taking away from Templar class identity.

@ZOS_GinaBruno pretty much

Falcon_of_light

taking stun off surprise attack is most *** thing ever, all nb possibility to kill something is being behind what impossible without constant cc. u need to do *** load of buffs to assasin nb after this change. NB just to weak to openly fight tanks and bruisers, and guaranteed crit is just too good for pve and useless in pvp if nb must chose between cc and execute...

silentxthreat

SeaUnicorn wrote: »

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

Hey Folks, one note regarding the content changes. I previously stated we wanted to gather as much information as possible to gauge the impact of combat changes on the content in the game. This is a multipronged approach which is a collaboration between the Combat, Dungeon and QA Teams as well as player feedback, logs and captures.

Given the overwhelming response and the wealth of information we have collected, we felt confident that we could make these content changes in order to ensure that the game maintained the challenge players are used to without a major shift in difficulty.

Again, thanks to all the community members that have logged on to PTS, played, reported and provided feedback, logs and video captures.

What about the trial Healers? Especially mobile fights and healing check mechanics? There is still 40% nerf to mobile HOTs, they are still weird durations (10s on Radiating, 16s on Vigor) but lower power. Please don't forget about Healers!

I better nerf would be not letting heals stack with the same kind of heal instead of a %nerf

Toxic_Hemlock

You can tweak the health and revert LA/HA all you want as I don't use them as intended anyways...

But if you don't revert some of the oakensoul nerfs you will lose this casual of all casual players. IDK if you remove heroism completely as I don't use my ulti either, as I use/need the extra health recovery from the CP star. But the protection/extra damage we get on live is REALLY useful for facing some tougher fights; you know the reason for making this ring in the first place!

If it is so bloody OP in PvP then maybe see the other threads on your own forums here to see options for making it less powerful there.

ClevaTreva

My take:
A solution looking for a problem.

Living_Tribunal

I'll probably be shutting off my combat metrics mod. I'm already sad my dps is 20-30k and seeing it go lower, knowing the enemies hp has also been lowered, is still going to bum me out.

PrincessOfThieves

silentxthreat wrote: »

SeaUnicorn wrote: »

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

Hey Folks, one note regarding the content changes. I previously stated we wanted to gather as much information as possible to gauge the impact of combat changes on the content in the game. This is a multipronged approach which is a collaboration between the Combat, Dungeon and QA Teams as well as player feedback, logs and captures.

Given the overwhelming response and the wealth of information we have collected, we felt confident that we could make these content changes in order to ensure that the game maintained the challenge players are used to without a major shift in difficulty.

Again, thanks to all the community members that have logged on to PTS, played, reported and provided feedback, logs and video captures.

What about the trial Healers? Especially mobile fights and healing check mechanics? There is still 40% nerf to mobile HOTs, they are still weird durations (10s on Radiating, 16s on Vigor) but lower power. Please don't forget about Healers!

I better nerf would be not letting heals stack with the same kind of heal instead of a %nerf

True, if pvp healing is a problem, they could just make it so you can't stack more than 2 instances of the same heal. So no more than 2 rapid regens etc.

Medicate

I really fail to see the point in these changes anymore.

The last 2 years i played ESO i experienced a constant power creep. with dps breaching 100k and now far beyond.
And with your encounter design team always going for the top 0,1% or whatever players when designing new HMs it is really helpful to do what you plan?

reducing dps and reducing boss health seems much like a failing attempt to bring balance to something that does not need it.
with raising numbers in raid dps older HM content or trifectas like TTT become more accessible and while most "veterans" already got those, they still got challenges ahead in current raids. I wouldnt care if newer players have it easier to achive these. it's older content you maybe ran a hundred times before.

in my eyes it keeps the way of newer players refilling free slots is far more achievable this way. no matter what you try to implement currently, it will not close any power or mindset delta between mid-game and end-game players. i still have a hard time to see myself endgame.
i might progress GS but im not good enough for vRG HMs f.e. SS is 3 years old. it's supposed to be a bit easier, ain't it?

and to deal with the power delta, you would do easier closing with the mindset delta between those. the game never teaches you [snip] for what you need in a vet raid and these groups. nothing even closely related to it.
there has to be some kind of mid-game tutorial where players get informed over rotation, light attacks and how to manage these in a fight. your game should not be about an endless night of using a spammer. it's the most challenging and fun combat play i ever found in any MMO and what keeps many players like me here.

sorry, that escalated again.

[Edited for Censor Bypass]