Update 35; Good or Bad? (over 11,000 votes)

Rimskjegg

@merpins @Ghaleb Thanks both of you.

I totally understand his reasons. Unfortunately we've never needed the help more. The harm this downgrade is doing is worse than I thought.

master_vanargand

Veiled Strike had stun effect for eight years.
MMO tradition is broken now and it feels awful.
Surprise Attack has no surprises, and as a rogue class fan, I was disappointed.
Did you roll a 4 on the dice? This is the worst update ever.

Turtle_Bot

master_vanargand wrote: »

Veiled Strike had stun effect for eight years.
MMO tradition is broken now and it feels awful.
Surprise Attack has no surprises, and as a rogue class fan, I was disappointed.
Did you roll a 4 on the dice? This is the worst update ever.

Sorcs had a stun on frags for 6 years, that got removed as well, nb were the only class remaining to have a stun on their spammable, it was bound to be removed at some point, surprised it wasn't done earlier tbh.

Tommy_The_Gun

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

master_vanargand wrote: »

Veiled Strike had stun effect for eight years.
MMO tradition is broken now and it feels awful.
Surprise Attack has no surprises, and as a rogue class fan, I was disappointed.
Did you roll a 4 on the dice? This is the worst update ever.

Sorcs had a stun on frags for 6 years, that got removed as well, nb were the only class remaining to have a stun on their spammable, it was bound to be removed at some point, surprised it wasn't done earlier tbh.

Well, the result of Veiled Strike changes is that every one will probably run Concealed Weapon morph next patch (even stamina builds or those will swap to Dizzying Swing). I mean You can still have guaranteed crit with Cloak and if you have higher crit chance (most NBs have higher crit chance to take advatage of class passives, like at least 33% will do) then you crit pretty often anyways so, Surprise Attack crit every 4 seconds seems more like a wasted / flavour bonus. Also, Sundered effect can proc from any non LA/HA physical damage source, so again - you are not losing much.

Concealed Weapon does everything better for both PvE & PvP. It gives you permanent minor expedition and passive 10% unique dmg buff from all sources for 5 seconds that is very easy to proc and has a potential to have permanent uptime. Seems like a clear winner.

In general I don't like Surprise Attack changes. If they wanted to make it a morph for crit builds then there were better ways to balance it out. If "too much easy dps" was a problem, then they could for example decrease crit damage by X% for every consecutive hit and it would reset every X seconds (1st hit crits normally, next for X% less and so on etc, till certain time passes).

Arthtur

Just bad. I dont even know how to start complaining...

Changes in Week 1 made combat boring for me (using spammable 20 times in a row in some cases) and while they changed that a little (ground DoTs only), timers of skills are a mess now. So rotations become harder.
Sticky DoTs become a lot weaker and in many situations not worth using. AoE DoTs outperforming single target DoTs on single target? Do i need to say more about it?
I will not talk about classes (DK) that have to use sticky DoTs for passives or sustain...

There is many problems with classes like Warden, Templar and Sorc but others who have better knowledge about them showed that already.
Lets not talk about new sets for PvP...

Changes fatigue is real. With every patch ppl leave because of that. Combine this with bad patch and there is no reason to stay for much more players. And its after they said that there wont be any big changes...

Many complications after changes like: skills with empower werent adjusted, stamina self-heal (Vigor) is a lot stronger than magicka skill (Rapid Regen - i know it can heal others but the diffrence is too big), Stagger becoming weaker (sticky DoTs ticking every 2s = 50% nerf for Stagger here), passives that become weaker because DoTs were nerfed, content nerfed across the board instead of adjusting manually (some DLC bosses could use health buff instead of a nerf as its easy to overburn them while some have mechs that become harder because of DoTs changes) etc. etc.

Changes to Empower bringing back MA meta which is harder than LA weaving. So game become harder.

And i could still go on. But whats the point? From the entire PTS i saw 1 change that helps weaker players. PA radius and duration buff.

At the end i will say that after Week 3 i decided to not test new changes on PTS. At all. As im from EU, PTS is rly laggy for me. Even tho i was still trying to do basic testing to give my feedback on changes, but... it rly feels like feedback isnt wanted. Like they would still push the changes no matter what with bare minimum of adjustments. Or with adjustments that make things worse.
So i decided to not test stuff. And im not regreting anything. Well im even happy that i made this decision because looking at week 5, my time on testing would be just wasted.
The most sad thing about it is the fact that there were many players who gave amazing feedback and were ignored. Some of them left too. Its just sad...

IZZEFlameLash

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

master_vanargand wrote: »

Veiled Strike had stun effect for eight years.
MMO tradition is broken now and it feels awful.
Surprise Attack has no surprises, and as a rogue class fan, I was disappointed.
Did you roll a 4 on the dice? This is the worst update ever.

Sorcs had a stun on frags for 6 years, that got removed as well, nb were the only class remaining to have a stun on their spammable, it was bound to be removed at some point, surprised it wasn't done earlier tbh.

Well, the result of Veiled Strike changes is that every one will probably run Concealed Weapon morph next patch (even stamina builds or those will swap to Dizzying Swing). I mean You can still have guaranteed crit with Cloak and if you have higher crit chance (most NBs have higher crit chance to take advatage of class passives, like at least 33% will do) then you crit pretty often anyways so, Surprise Attack crit every 4 seconds seems more like a wasted / flavour bonus. Also, Sundered effect can proc from any non LA/HA physical damage source, so again - you are not losing much.

Concealed Weapon does everything better for both PvE & PvP. It gives you permanent minor expedition and passive 10% unique dmg buff from all sources for 5 seconds that is very easy to proc and has a potential to have permanent uptime. Seems like a clear winner.

In general I don't like Surprise Attack changes. If the wanted to make it a morph for crit builds then there were better ways to balance it out. If "too much easy dps" was a problem, then they could for example decrease crit damage by X% for every consecutive hit and it would reset every X seconds (1st hit crits normally, next for X% less and so on etc, till certain time passes).

Sorry, what you propose would needlessly clip stamina focused NB dps specs needlesly. It is a spammable, so, cooldown is the right path to go.

Tommy_The_Gun

IZZEFlameLash wrote: »

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

master_vanargand wrote: »

Veiled Strike had stun effect for eight years.
MMO tradition is broken now and it feels awful.
Surprise Attack has no surprises, and as a rogue class fan, I was disappointed.
Did you roll a 4 on the dice? This is the worst update ever.

Sorcs had a stun on frags for 6 years, that got removed as well, nb were the only class remaining to have a stun on their spammable, it was bound to be removed at some point, surprised it wasn't done earlier tbh.

Well, the result of Veiled Strike changes is that every one will probably run Concealed Weapon morph next patch (even stamina builds or those will swap to Dizzying Swing). I mean You can still have guaranteed crit with Cloak and if you have higher crit chance (most NBs have higher crit chance to take advatage of class passives, like at least 33% will do) then you crit pretty often anyways so, Surprise Attack crit every 4 seconds seems more like a wasted / flavour bonus. Also, Sundered effect can proc from any non LA/HA physical damage source, so again - you are not losing much.

Concealed Weapon does everything better for both PvE & PvP. It gives you permanent minor expedition and passive 10% unique dmg buff from all sources for 5 seconds that is very easy to proc and has a potential to have permanent uptime. Seems like a clear winner.

In general I don't like Surprise Attack changes. If the wanted to make it a morph for crit builds then there were better ways to balance it out. If "too much easy dps" was a problem, then they could for example decrease crit damage by X% for every consecutive hit and it would reset every X seconds (1st hit crits normally, next for X% less and so on etc, till certain time passes).

Sorry, what you propose would needlessly clip stamina focused NB dps specs needlesly. It is a spammable, so, cooldown is the right path to go.

I am not expert and I might be wrong, but I was thinking that even for PvE DPS it might be better for stamina NBs to slot Concealed Weapon & play a side mini game to keep the buff up, just to have juicy flat 10% dmg bonus for all sources. Again, I am no expert on min-maxing but it seems like something that can be better than guaranteed crit every 4 seconds. This would require to use different weapon skill as a spammable & to free one additional space on skill bar though (so you can slot CW just for the passive).

Jazraena

If you can sustain it, then yes, Concealed Weapon is definitely better than Surprise Attack. Keeping the buff up shouldn't be too tricky with Twisting Path.

the1andonlyskwex

I think it's way too early to tell. Unlike a lot of people, I don't see nerfs as inherently bad, and we won't really know how these changes affect more casual players until a few weeks after they go live.

Snamyap

What bothers me the most is that I haven't read a single decent argument why all of this is necessary or where it's all headed. And, once again, it feels like my solo pve experience is taking a hit because of pvp issues that do not concern me. Trying to balance pve and pvp through the same ruleset is just asking for trouble and a disgruntled, divided playerbase.

Ragnarok0130

ramdrop wrote: »

This "knee jerk" reaction post from Rich who works as the creative director is appalling. There are dedicated players on here providing their time for free trying to work a solution around this and then something like that gets posted.

Well the faith you want in the community will never be yours until you start interacting with your community on a serious level.

I agree and as someone who's been in corporate America for 17 years after a career as a military officer I wouldn't tolerate such interactions with my paying customers by my employees. First offense would have been a very serious counseling with a permanent filing in the employee's record. Second offense would have been "I hope your LinkedIn profile is up to date". The number of devs I see actively antagonizing their customers on social media from many different studios is simply mind boggling.

I get it, players can be "passionate" and often it's not acceptable at how "passionate" they can be but if devs don't want to put up with player interaction make a private social media account unconnected with your job and keep your circle closed. However it seems that many devs want the celebrity status associated with their job on social media and none of the responsibility as representatives of their company when they add their job to their social media profile. Simply adding "opinions are personal and not representative of my employer" doesn't give one a free pass and can still get you updating your LinkedIn after a spicy post.

GloatingSwine

I think the big red flag on the update was when the idea that the stat called "weapon strength" should not apply to hitting an enemy with your weapon made it into the test build not past the "we were all incredibly drunk and tired when we brainstormed that one let's just pretend nobody mentioned it ever" phase of whittling down ideas.

Pretty much all the changes since, which have led us to the dark place of MA weaving with restoration staff being how to damage for at least a patch cycle, have kinda felt like reactionary flailing to just how shockingly bad the first test build was received.

Lalothen

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

I think it's way too early to tell. Unlike a lot of people, I don't see nerfs as inherently bad, and we won't really know how these changes affect more casual players until a few weeks after they go live.

I disagree: for casual DPS their damage output is going to go down, for casual healers their healing output is going to go down, and casual tanks are going to find themselves taking as much damage as before whilst fights will likely be longer - that's in spite of the 10% off vet boss health - and that healers are less able to mitigate things like stacking uncleansable DoTs, etc. As a result, individuals and groups may well find they're no longer capable of completing content that they were fine with prior to U35.

Normal mode dungeon/trial bosses haven't had their HP reduced, so those fights are going to take longer too - and encounters taking longer also means greater strain on resources over time. This is of particular relevance to more casual players who don't optimise their resource in vs. resource out ratios, and groups where support roles like healers aren't optimising their builds to yield regular resource boosts to their group in addition to keeping everyone alive.

Some casuals find overland encounters like Harrowstorms and world bosses something of a challenge; now they'll be doing less damage and potentially less healing during those encounters - and if they were using Oakensoul, then outside of HA-themed builds they can expect to see a yet-larger decrease in power.

Casual PvPers are going to face a double whammy of sticky DoTs that are too weak to place any real pressure on more seasoned PvPers, whilst simultaneously having to deal with enemy sticky DoTs being on them for twice as long - which will be especially taxing for classes without a class cleanse. Then there are the new PvP-themed sets to contend with, which are inevitably going to be in the hands of seasoned PvPers first - and they'll run around making life even more of a nightmare for the casual PvP crowd who are already contending with ridiculous ballgroups, dark convergence cancer builds, unkillable tanks, double-tap stealth gankers and all the rest.

It's not hard at all to extrapolate what's going to happen - and I haven't even mentioned the individual class changes/nerfs that players are going to have to deal with on top.

In essence U35 is a gatekeeping update - and demographics of casual players across content types are going to find that the gateposts have been moved and they're now potentially on the wrong side of them.

starkerealm

GreatGildersleeve wrote: »

As a console player I can’t pts but the patch notes are not encouraging.

ZoS is lucky. The player base being so up in arms about U35 means people still care about the game. If it ever gets to a stage where people respond with ‘yeah, whatever’ then ZoS is really in trouble. Apathy is much more worrisome than rage.

Yeah, the apathy is something to worry about. A lot of people do still care, but I've also been seeing a lot of people who really are just going, "meh, whatever," and canceling their subs. This PTS has promoted a degree of apathy. Though, understandably, it is way more difficult to quantitatively measure apathy with self-selection, because if you don't care, you don't self-select.

Necrotech_Master

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

I think it's way too early to tell. Unlike a lot of people, I don't see nerfs as inherently bad, and we won't really know how these changes affect more casual players until a few weeks after they go live.

i think the problem is how big of the nerf

as some would say "nerfing with a scalpel" would be like a 2-10% reduction on dmg, or increase in cost of a skill

"nerfing with a sledgehammer" is what they did to sticky dots, reducing the tick rate to 2 sec and then hammering the dmg by 40% in most cases reduced them from a "standard" 1000-1500 dps to 500-750 dps (effectively a 50% decrease, that is not "minor" nerf in any way)

they have walked back some of nerfs, but honestly i still dont see why a vast majority of these changes were done in the first place especially to this heavy of a degree

Jazraena

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

I think it's way too early to tell. Unlike a lot of people, I don't see nerfs as inherently bad, and we won't really know how these changes affect more casual players until a few weeks after they go live.

I can already tell that I have to significantly rework most of my characters, that some of their changes have several disastrous unmitigated side effects and that the result directly opposes their stated goal of accessibility. I was able to tell this from the written patch notes, and confirmed this after seeing the changes in effect on the PTS and the various reports other people posted from there.

What is too early to tell is the full extent of side effects we haven't spotted yet, which is why many people, myself included, have asked to postpone these changes since even the effects we have spotted already are a bloody mess.

But please, enlighten us how that's not the case.

merpins

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

IZZEFlameLash wrote: »

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

master_vanargand wrote: »

Veiled Strike had stun effect for eight years.
MMO tradition is broken now and it feels awful.
Surprise Attack has no surprises, and as a rogue class fan, I was disappointed.
Did you roll a 4 on the dice? This is the worst update ever.

Sorcs had a stun on frags for 6 years, that got removed as well, nb were the only class remaining to have a stun on their spammable, it was bound to be removed at some point, surprised it wasn't done earlier tbh.

Well, the result of Veiled Strike changes is that every one will probably run Concealed Weapon morph next patch (even stamina builds or those will swap to Dizzying Swing). I mean You can still have guaranteed crit with Cloak and if you have higher crit chance (most NBs have higher crit chance to take advatage of class passives, like at least 33% will do) then you crit pretty often anyways so, Surprise Attack crit every 4 seconds seems more like a wasted / flavour bonus. Also, Sundered effect can proc from any non LA/HA physical damage source, so again - you are not losing much.

Concealed Weapon does everything better for both PvE & PvP. It gives you permanent minor expedition and passive 10% unique dmg buff from all sources for 5 seconds that is very easy to proc and has a potential to have permanent uptime. Seems like a clear winner.

In general I don't like Surprise Attack changes. If the wanted to make it a morph for crit builds then there were better ways to balance it out. If "too much easy dps" was a problem, then they could for example decrease crit damage by X% for every consecutive hit and it would reset every X seconds (1st hit crits normally, next for X% less and so on etc, till certain time passes).

Sorry, what you propose would needlessly clip stamina focused NB dps specs needlesly. It is a spammable, so, cooldown is the right path to go.

I am not expert and I might be wrong, but I was thinking that even for PvE DPS it might be better for stamina NBs to slot Concealed Weapon & play a side mini game to keep the buff up, just to have juicy flat 10% dmg bonus for all sources. Again, I am no expert on min-maxing but it seems like something that can be better than guaranteed crit every 4 seconds. This would require to use different weapon skill as a spammable & to free one additional space on skill bar though (so you can slot CW just for the passive).

It is better because Path of Darkness procs the spammable since it gives Major Expedition. ZoS hints at that with the last sentence of the change of concealed weapon, so in PVE, it's not difficult to keep up 100% of the time.

Styxius

Interesting that Skinny got a almost rude reply from a developer as he mentions in the linked video. I do wish they would've provided us as much details as we have provided them significantly more.

MidniteOwl1913

Lalothen wrote: »

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

I think it's way too early to tell. Unlike a lot of people, I don't see nerfs as inherently bad, and we won't really know how these changes affect more casual players until a few weeks after they go live.

I disagree: for casual DPS their damage output is going to go down, for casual healers their healing output is going to go down, and casual tanks are going to find themselves taking as much damage as before whilst fights will likely be longer - that's in spite of the 10% off vet boss health - and that healers are less able to mitigate things like stacking uncleansable DoTs, etc. As a result, individuals and groups may well find they're no longer capable of completing content that they were fine with prior to U35.

Normal mode dungeon/trial bosses haven't had their HP reduced, so those fights are going to take longer too - and encounters taking longer also means greater strain on resources over time. This is of particular relevance to more casual players who don't optimise their resource in vs. resource out ratios, and groups where support roles like healers aren't optimising their builds to yield regular resource boosts to their group in addition to keeping everyone alive.

Some casuals find overland encounters like Harrowstorms and world bosses something of a challenge; now they'll be doing less damage and potentially less healing during those encounters - and if they were using Oakensoul, then outside of HA-themed builds they can expect to see a yet-larger decrease in power.

Casual PvPers are going to face a double whammy of sticky DoTs that are too weak to place any real pressure on more seasoned PvPers, whilst simultaneously having to deal with enemy sticky DoTs being on them for twice as long - which will be especially taxing for classes without a class cleanse. Then there are the new PvP-themed sets to contend with, which are inevitably going to be in the hands of seasoned PvPers first - and they'll run around making life even more of a nightmare for the casual PvP crowd who are already contending with ridiculous ballgroups, dark convergence cancer builds, unkillable tanks, double-tap stealth gankers and all the rest.

It's not hard at all to extrapolate what's going to happen - and I haven't even mentioned the individual class changes/nerfs that players are going to have to deal with on top.

In essence U35 is a gatekeeping update - and demographics of casual players across content types are going to find that the gateposts have been moved and they're now potentially on the wrong side of them.

Yup! They will know *something* is wrong.

While it's hard to tell from the forums (because these are not your average players by and large) what the general base will think. They may not know what's up at first. They may think that they just got a run of fake healers/tanks. They may think that something they are having a bad day/days. They may blame lag or other hardware issues. But most of them will eventually look online to see wtf is up and then I think the poo will really hit the fan. We will all find out in a few weeks.

Jaimeh

The thing is I'm not sure there's time to change anything at this point even if they were willing to because of the Stadia process.

merpins

Styxius wrote: »

Interesting that Skinny got a almost rude reply from a developer as he mentions in the linked video. I do wish they would've provided us as much details as we have provided them significantly more.

Right? I don't understand it.

francesinhalover

i'm not sure why a pve game without that much popularity compared to other mmorpgs, has to punish the players like this with nerfs constantly... at this point i wish z would create a esport game so they can focus all their lightsaber nerfs on that game and leave eso alone with slight changes here and there.

merpins

francesinhalover wrote: »

i'm not sure why a pve game without that much popularity compared to other mmorpgs, has to punish the players like this with nerfs constantly... at this point i wish z would create a esport game so they can focus all their lightsaber nerfs on that game and leave eso alone with slight changes here and there.

It's at the point in the game's life where there shouldn't be any huge sweeping nerfs or changes to combat. If there are any sweeping changes, it should only be when ZoS finally decides to separate PVE and PVE balancing.

merpins

Jaimeh wrote: »

The thing is I'm not sure there's time to change anything at this point even if they were willing to because of the Stadia process.

It's unfortunate, they probably can't really change anything at this point. That's why they shouldn't do such a big update with only a couple weeks for players to critique it. Better to do things slowly, or have the PTS open at all times to test these things over longer periods.

prof_doom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omw7ibDd0Zs&ab_channel=NefasQS
Some more reflection on how the community has responded to this patch.

Vahndamme

Books were written, video's made, opinions formed. Yet most of it seems ignored. Putting money where your mouth is. That's all one can do.

Vahndamme

You didn't even add https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/614016/should-the-combat-changes-for-u35-be-rolled-back/p1

Heh..

sabresandiego_ESO

All these results show is that the masses can’t handle the idea of change. Yet the masses also get bored when no changes are made. So in order to keep a game fun, you have to anger the masses and make changes. But anger is more fun than indifference, so the masses actually play more than if no changes were made

merpins

Vahndamme wrote: »

You didn't even add https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/614016/should-the-combat-changes-for-u35-be-rolled-back/p1

Heh..

Good catch! Adding it to the front page now, thank you.

merpins

sabresandiego_ESO wrote: »

All these results show is that the masses can’t handle the idea of change. Yet the masses also get bored when no changes are made. So in order to keep a game fun, you have to anger the masses and make changes. But anger is more fun than indifference, so the masses actually play more than if no changes were made

When a good portion of the change cause people to quit, it's not a good change. And 90% of the playerbase is in agreement; we don't want the changes.

This game is nearing 10 years old. There shouldn't be huge sweeping change, unless that change is to balance PVE and PVP separately in one big change. That's the only exception since that's what's going to halt these big sweeping changes.

A year and a half ago, ZoS did a 180 and changed the direction they were taking the game, and did some big sweeping changes. A year before that, they did the same thing. At this point in the game's live, there shoulddn't be any big changes in the first place unless it's new classes or new mechanics, or revamping old skills or adding new skills. Balance should come in small, incremental changes that are released weekly or biweekly, and not come all at once unless it's a big update adding a lot of content, and/or changes were tested extensively over several months.

Lasstly, players are fatigued by this kind of broad sweeping change tactic they've been doing pretty regularly, especially after the devs have promised that they're done with big changes like this. This isn't League of Legends. We shouldn't need to revamp every single build every 3 months. The game isn't on a rotation of things we can and can't use.