Update 36 Combat Preview

TaSheen

Oakiyo wrote: »

Since wardens tend to be tied to ice staff, why not switching all of their damage abilities to frost damage ? As it's requested for years now ?

Oh, please no! I'm not interested in ice/frost at all....

Firstmep

MrLasagna wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

MrLasagna wrote: »

Oakiyo wrote: »

Since wardens tend to be tied to ice staff, why not switching all of their damage abilities to frost damage ? As it's requested for years now ?

I main warden both as PvE dd and in PvP and never used iced staff.
And I see very few wardens using ice staff except for the role players ones.

It's more common than you think it is. However, melee weapons generally are just more damage for various reasons and thus are more often picked on most classes.

Maybe for casual play, but in PVP, trials and dung there are very few using ice staves, at least on PC EU.
But this is not the point, I don't care if people enjoy using ice staves but to punish all others that prefer othe weapons is just a dumb move.

In battlegrounds ice staff is very popular on mag warden( pc eu) especially with ice wall permaroot.
I've even seen some stam wardens backbar ice staff lately.

ForumBully

This sounds a lot like a double down on U35. I hope someone who makes decisions has at least seen the problems regarding Templars and Sorcs. [snip]

[edited for bashing]

ForumBully

Also...I've seen a few NBs, both mag and stam, with a frost staff...we should consider making that the only weapon they can use too. /s

YandereGirlfriend

MrLasagna wrote: »

Why again this thing on wardens? Why do we have to use a specific weapon to benefit from a passive?
Why are you alway doing this annoying things to people playing wardens????

SO much this.

Pigeon-holing a class into a single weapon is a terrible idea.

My guess for the passive will be:

Piercing Cold: Increases damage by 5%. This bonus is doubled when using a Frost Staff.

Advanced Species will probably be a measly 2% per skill.

Dangranma_Burgrukgad

Firstmep wrote: »

In battlegrounds ice staff is very popular on mag warden( pc eu) especially with ice wall permaroot.
I've even seen some stam wardens backbar ice staff lately.

magwarden in PvP? i think we are playing a different game ....
but again, this is not the point, if people want to use ice staves they are free to do so, but a passive that only works at it's fullest with a specific weapon is a terrible idea.
and why always wardens? why they always do this kind of things on wardens? Someone in the combat team must hate them for some reason.

PrinceShroob

If you're going to change Advanced Species again, you're going to have to explain why you changed it in the first place.

Glacial Presence already increases Critical Damage and it's a stat with a hard cap--like Penetration (and your menus are still misleading with regard to explaining the Critical Damage cap).

Piercing Cold also increases magic damage done, so if you remove that, you're doing another heavy damage nerf on Wardens with no explanation.

So, essentially, either 1. your combat team doesn't know what it's doing or 2. your team does know what it's doing, but their ideas are stupid.

Why are you trying to force Penetration and Critical Damage on a druid class when you already have Nightblades, who already have Critical Damage and Penetration passives that make much more thematic sense?

Veesk

Also here to ask if there is any news/word on changes for Jabs/Sweeps, especially reverting the animation?

CaptainVenom

This update won’t have any sweeping changes or themes; instead, the main focus is on bug fixing, as well as a few adjustments to targeted abilities, sets, and passives based on community feedback.

Whoa. This is excellent news indeed.

acastanza_ESO

Absolutely no comment on how absolutely F-tier non-pet/PVP sorcerers are in u35?

They need MAJOR changes urgently in U36, not U37 or some nebulous future update. Now.

To start:
Shields need to scale with damage not just max stats.
Attacks need to stop being so insanely telegraphed that someone with the reaction times of a dead turtle can dodge them every time.
The RNG on frags desperately needs to be increased or completely reworked so that sorcerer has a GOOD and RELIABLE in-class Magicka spammable.
Give us access to debuffs and status effects like other classes get (put major breach on something at least)
Make pets not need to be double barred and make them re-summon in 1 gcd or massively buff their health.
Fix the duration and damage on sklls like Mage's Wrath/Endless Fury so they compete with other executes as actually effective parts of the toolkit instead of just being killstealing.
Cramming all the pet damage into a 6 second (fake) DOT (a dot that doesn't even do any damage unless you let it completely run to it's end) was unacceptable, just move the damage back into the pets and give Curse Breach or Defile or anything else instead (see above about giving us any access to debuffs at all).

Right now sorcerers have to coordinate half a dozen easily blockable and dodgeable skills and rely on nerfed RNG on frags proc to get the same (or, frankly worse since one will get blocked) damage as other classes (*cough*nightblade*cough*) get with just 1-2 skills, while getting completely shredded through our completely non-existent defensive toolkit.

We've gone over all the things that make sorcerer trash over and over. Please please please finally listen to us.

Chiaroscuro

First off, I wanna mention I've been back in the game to retry combat in case I was remembering it worse than it was.
Alas alas. Tried Cyro for a while too, as I could, and it is dead there bois. Dead and yet choppy.
But it seems significant to mention I've been active and spent a few hours earlier this week just to make sure I wasn't misremembering all this stuff.

So , to recap, it is looking like first nothing meaningful was taken in terms of feedback from the response from the U35 pts, and then from u35 live, and now here we go with whatever this is. After weeks of response.

• No proposed fixes to flurry or jabs. Timing, animation, none of it. This is especially galling when the animation change makes no sense and NPCs still have access to the original, superior, nonawful versions.
  - this isn't to say the solution is making theirs hideous and slow; just restore the skills to their original state. Didn't the redguard armor thing lead to a promise not to make any alterations like this?
• No proposed fixes to HoT/DoT issues
  - Combat will remain sluggish as a results of the above issues complainers will be shoveled at with a poolnoodle and/or flailed upon with twin mackerel until morale improves
  
• the adventures of Overtuned Sets continues with Maras Balm
• Speaking of oddly tuned, empowered.
  -The buff doesn't bother me, It's nice that heavy-attack builds are viable now. That is awesome. The nerf does a bit. Just why? Related, less awesome is that if you don't want to play a heavy build, combat feels noticeably worse than it used to. I don't like heavy-attacking. Don't force me into that playstyle just because I'm disabled? I enjoyed my trash tier dps just fine, because I felt *fast*.
  
• Dragon Knights can no longer whip it without weird sustain issues, is this going to remain this way then?
• Skills not firing. Whether this is because of reflexive attempted light-attack weaving or just how choppy the servers seem to be since this update I'm not sure but skills are really bad at firing since this patch.
  - I'll fully own to not being an expert on what may be causing this, but I'm wired LAN with a fairly ok ping (sits around 100 or so most of the time) so I don't think its that.
  
• I'm less familiar with the issues plaguing sorcs/wardens, but pets and shalks seem a pretty big topic so there's clearly something pretty bad going on there
  
• etc, more, misc along the lines of if it wasn't broken, don't "fix it", when there are plenty of longstanding bugs weapon surfing and lots of subtle balance issues that would benefit from resolving.
  Scalpels, not sledgehammers.

Y'aaaall. I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.
U36 hasn't dropped yet, there's still time.

In sum-

The problem with u35 isn't that it made the game harder - I mean one may argue it did, true, but if so it is only in the very limited sense that upping the difficulty on Skyrim does, in that it makes tedious combat take longer - if increased difficult is the aim there, I'd urge you to take the approach the original System Shock did, where it altered enemy AI more than anything from what I recall. Then it's more challenging than grinding and numbers, and much, much more engaging.

A bit too granular at scale, yes, but it's just an example. Wide, sweeping changes to combat are exhausting.

Oh. To end this on a positive though, I will say the Occult Overload change seems promising even if it was fun to go boom because it did make PVP a mess. That change should be linked to PVP though, so as to let it be cheesed for trash still.

Do appreciate the news update tho, even if it wasn't what I wanted to see.

edit bc no matter how well I try and preclean a post there will always be a stray formatting error... >.<;

SkaraMinoc

6 more months of tank meta. Joy.

pikHz

ZOS_Gilliam wrote: »

Advanced Species – a Warden passive – will be adjusted away from Penetration and instead will grant increased Critical Damage, as we’re noticing Light Armor-focused Wardens are down considerably more than their Medium Armor-clad cousins. Piercing Cold will also be moving away from enhancing specific damage types, and will instead enhance overall damage that will further increase when using an Ice Staff; the passive is currently hurting many morph options that are meant to offer damage, as the class has a myriad of damage types that are not being affected by the passive.

Thank you for calling out the Advanced Species passive right away as PvE Wardens are really hurting right now from the penetration change. While crit damage will end up being a bit better it would be nice if this passive could be tied to a stat that doesn't cap. On top of that Wardens already have a passive that increases crit damage, which makes me think about how - when the crit damage cap was introduced - Nightblades had Grim Focus moved off of increased crit damage to weapon/spell damage to give them some breathing room to avoid going over the cap.

As someone who *really* doesn't like Winter's Revenge having an increased damage condition tied to destro staff I'm actually feeling okay about this Piercing Cold change. I just hope my assumption is correct that Wardens will be balanced around the base number and the ice staff increase will solely function to bring ice staves up to the damage levels of other weapon types for us.

MashmalloMan

What ever happened to your first combat overhauls in regards to hybridization we're all still waiting on?

U33 combat preview:

We’ll also be dual sourcing buffs on abilities and item sets like Major Prophecy with Major Savagery, with the same thing applying to Brutality and Sorcery. In the long term, we plan on simply merging these bonuses so there are fewer names and effects you need to worry about, but there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that will result from that; as such, it may take quite some time before we’re able to do that.

U33 Patch Notes:

Note that player passives and consumables that grant the Minor versions of these have not been adjusted at this time, in order to preserve class unique power contribution for coordinated groups.

The changes you implemented half way have created a situation where DKs go all Weapon Damage and Templars go all Spell Damage, NB and Sorc do not have this luxary for their minor crit buffs. There is literally no unique difference between the 2, other than potions, poisons, jewelry enchants and mundus stones.. so it's a win/win for those 2 classes.

The game feels disjointed. Imagine being a new player and trying to understand the differences between these stats and buffs.

Finish what you started. Combine crit and damage like you did for resistance into armor and the resolve vs ward buffs.

At least 1 year by the time U37 comes around and 4 patches is too long to expect your playerbase to wait for changes you promised.

To top it off, you for some reason decided it was a great decision to create new combat overhauls with U35 which drove your playerbase away, instead of finishing what you started.

This type of mentality in your game design direction is what drives people away. It feels like you don't know what your doing, like there is no long term goal, the constant changes every 3 months that we're stuck with, the lack of follow through on what you tell us you plan is never completed in a timely manner.

I hope I'm wrong Monday, but it seems like something you would of mentioned in this preview so that isn't good news.

MashmalloMan

Also... The fact that you mentioned Backlash hybridization, but not Sorc shield hybridization spells more bad news for Sorcs.

This is a no brainer, max resource stacking hasnt been worth it since before race and cp 2.0 changes, damage is key. Mag Sorc is far behind and needs adjustments. Play as you want... Except mag Sorc which is stuck using sets like Fete and Alfiq for years.

Klingenlied

ZOS_Gilliam wrote: »

Greetings, everyone!


[*] Advanced Species – a Warden passive – will be adjusted away from Penetration and instead will grant increased Critical Damage, as we’re noticing Light Armor-focused Wardens are down considerably more than their Medium Armor-clad cousins. Piercing Cold will also be moving away from enhancing specific damage types, and will instead enhance overall damage that will further increase when using an Ice Staff; the passive is currently hurting many morph options that are meant to offer damage, as the class has a myriad of damage types that are not being affected by the passive.
[/list]

Thats interesting. The way critical damage values seem to be handled for calculating dps, we can say 4% crit damage equates 2% damage value what roughly equates 990 penetration. So a medium armor warden will gain 24% additional critical damage on top of medium armor bonus if we assume spreadsheet values - so will cap out in any raid environment.

Thus, the only smart way would be going for the 1%/2% treatment. The lost damage then needs be coming from piercing cold. 8%/16% for all weapons with a bonus of 3%/5% to ice staff.

That would work. I guess many Wardens will be "ok" with this. Then, I highly doubt we go this route.

If we instead go the "spreadsheet value balancing" in a way Warden would benefit regardless of mag / stam, it should be this way:

Advanced Species. Increases critical damage and critical rate by 1% / 2%.
Piercing Cold. Increases damage dealt by 5%/10%. When using a frost staff, this bonus is increased by 3%/5%

In theory, the optimal solution. If someone things the value for frost staff damage is "low" - in all honesty, as much as I love the Idea of frost warden, I am an advocate for balance and choice in builds. With this bonus alone, Frost would be the "hybrid" staff to use for magden to boost ae / single target damage just 5% less then their respective counterparts while still retaining it's defensive value. That alone is insane - and might already be too much actually for PvP. But if this value would proof to high, one can always bring it down.

The reason why I'd go with a mixture of crit damage / crit chance is very simple here: Capping out will be so much less of a problem! Mag wants more crit damage, stam wants more crit rate. Actually however, going full crit rate would, for the warden class a as a whole, be more beneficial than going full crit damage. The reason, once again, is very simple. While we could easily cap 100% crit rate, gearing choices do allow us to move to lower crit rate in favor of more damage. The crit damage cap on the other hand is too low, thus no matter what you do when you go for medium armor, you get capped easily.

But be that as it will - in the end, there is a lot of choice in regards to class tweaks for Warden. I don't need Warden to be "overpowered". But I not only want Warden to be fun again, I want to be needed in more roles then just heal or tank.

TheTuSiK

MrLasagna wrote: »

Oakiyo wrote: »

Since wardens tend to be tied to ice staff, why not switching all of their damage abilities to frost damage ? As it's requested for years now ?

I main warden both as PvE dd and in PvP and never used iced staff.
And I see very few wardens using ice staff except for the role players ones.

I played ice staff in 4 man content. Magden, Magsorc, Templar tank and Warden healer. We got magicka boost to crit and dmg but no engulfing flames or encratis. Since Warden has passives that boost ice dmg and can easly apply brittle I chose that and it worked pretty well. That was in u34 tho, I stopped playing warden since u35.

Edit: I forgot to mention that although I like the idea of being able to play ice staff more or less effectively I don't like and don't support the idea of tying ice staff to warden to increase damage of certain skills. I'd love those skills to be equally effective with any weapon.

Razorback174

ZOS_Gilliam wrote: »

Advanced Species – a Warden passive – will be adjusted away from Penetration and instead will grant increased Critical Damage, as we’re noticing Light Armor-focused Wardens are down considerably more than their Medium Armor-clad cousins. Piercing Cold will also be moving away from enhancing specific damage types, and will instead enhance overall damage that will further increase when using an Ice Staff; the passive is currently hurting many morph options that are meant to offer damage, as the class has a myriad of damage types that are not being affected by the passive.

[snip] I was already miffed about the abhorrent animation changes to templar and flurry in the disastrous U35, but this just compounds it.

This completely and fundamentally goes against the whole "play how you want" mantra. Tying class passives to a certain weapon is a good way to shoehorn a class into only using a single weapon or build type. Hell, let's just restrict armor weights and weapon types to certain classes and be done with it then. Maybe they'll have an easier time balancing things and might even be able to bring some semblance of class identity back into the game.

[Edit for Bashing.]

Nser

No one ask for this... Dont change it otherwise increase the penetration to 1.5k passive or damage done

Nser

Dont tying the ice staff with warden... Not everyone play warden with ice staff...

Tannus15

Nser wrote: »

Dont tying the ice staff with warden... Not everyone play warden with ice staff...

it's about making frost warden frost staff decent without making non frost staff over perform. you'll no doubt still out perform frost staff with an inferno staff

ExoY

I like that you give some love to frost oriented wardens.
Please also make one of the bear-ulti morphs deal frost damage

FluffyReachWitch

ExoY wrote: »

Please also make one of the bear-ulti morphs deal frost damage

Okay, I love that idea. They could even make it a magical Snow Bear to differentiate it visually.

Nser

Klingenlied wrote: »

ZOS_Gilliam wrote: »

Greetings, everyone!


[*] Advanced Species – a Warden passive – will be adjusted away from Penetration and instead will grant increased Critical Damage, as we’re noticing Light Armor-focused Wardens are down considerably more than their Medium Armor-clad cousins. Piercing Cold will also be moving away from enhancing specific damage types, and will instead enhance overall damage that will further increase when using an Ice Staff; the passive is currently hurting many morph options that are meant to offer damage, as the class has a myriad of damage types that are not being affected by the passive.
[/list]

Thats interesting. The way critical damage values seem to be handled for calculating dps, we can say 4% crit damage equates 2% damage value what roughly equates 990 penetration. So a medium armor warden will gain 24% additional critical damage on top of medium armor bonus if we assume spreadsheet values - so will cap out in any raid environment.

Thus, the only smart way would be going for the 1%/2% treatment. The lost damage then needs be coming from piercing cold. 8%/16% for all weapons with a bonus of 3%/5% to ice staff.

That would work. I guess many Wardens will be "ok" with this. Then, I highly doubt we go this route.

If we instead go the "spreadsheet value balancing" in a way Warden would benefit regardless of mag / stam, it should be this way:

Advanced Species. Increases critical damage and critical rate by 1% / 2%.
Piercing Cold. Increases damage dealt by 5%/10%. When using a frost staff, this bonus is increased by 3%/5%

In theory, the optimal solution. If someone things the value for frost staff damage is "low" - in all honesty, as much as I love the Idea of frost warden, I am an advocate for balance and choice in builds. With this bonus alone, Frost would be the "hybrid" staff to use for magden to boost ae / single target damage just 5% less then their respective counterparts while still retaining it's defensive value. That alone is insane - and might already be too much actually for PvP. But if this value would proof to high, one can always bring it down.

The reason why I'd go with a mixture of crit damage / crit chance is very simple here: Capping out will be so much less of a problem! Mag wants more crit damage, stam wants more crit rate. Actually however, going full crit rate would, for the warden class a as a whole, be more beneficial than going full crit damage. The reason, once again, is very simple. While we could easily cap 100% crit rate, gearing choices do allow us to move to lower crit rate in favor of more damage. The crit damage cap on the other hand is too low, thus no matter what you do when you go for medium armor, you get capped easily.

But be that as it will - in the end, there is a lot of choice in regards to class tweaks for Warden. I don't need Warden to be "overpowered". But I not only want Warden to be fun again, I want to be needed in more roles then just heal or tank.

Not every warden want to use ice staff. Why forcing them to use frost staff to activate thier passive.
This things should be added in destro staff it self passively as additional.

MetallicMonk

React wrote: »

I would like to suggest that all 5 meter range melee abilities receive a 2 meter range buff. Balance wise this does not change anything, but in terms of the quality of combat, this is a massive boon for anyone using these abilities. Since the server based location desync is likely something that is here to stay, this change seems logical as one that would improve the combat experience for many players.

I agree with other things you said and most of your ideas normally but not sure I fully agree with this, especially if this is extended to dragonknights. Kiting as ranged is already annoying due to the ease of access to so much movement speed very easily for the average pug, and also seems to be a foreign mechanic that eso players don't even know exists.

I really don't agree with the statement that it doesn't change anything balance wise, dragonknight would basically have full melee damage on me from range as a melee class, one of the only counters to them is kiting. Not really a fan of having a melee class having full melee damage on me from almost 10 meters away, takes what little reward there is from skillfully kiting a class like that and throws it away.

I don't have another good alternative I wish the positional desync in the game wasn't as bad as it is but that is indeed a direct nerf to ranged classes.

GreatGildersleeve

ZOS_Gilliam wrote: »

Greetings, everyone!

This time around, we are keeping things short and sweet since we’re continuing to evaluate many of the adjustments made to the game over the past few updates.

How have the past few updates affected player retention? That’s really the only metric worth looking at at this stage but unfortunately ZoS doesn’t release that info.

K9002

I'll have to wait and see the detailed patch notes. Whether the Backlash rework is an improvement depends entirely on the specific numbers, like what will be the multiplier from accumulated damage. I don't like that it will have some guaranteed baseline damage, it just makes it more similar to Daedric Curse.

rexagamemnon

Im not going to hold my breath on changes to templar after what they did in U35.
Expect the worst, hope for the best at this point in time

Xandreia_

ZOS have been all about build diversity but if you are going to tie skills to certain weapon types you might as well take away everything you guys said about wanting players to be able to play as they like, forcing people to use a certain weapon type to be optimized will 100% backfire. i just wish the combat team would listen to the player base and not just run with random ideas that are just not going to work!

Felkara

I play a frost warden and hit pretty good damage with it already, so I am very excited for these changes to make it a more widely viable option.