Skulls are STILL very underwhelming. What gives?

CameraBeardThePirate

Necro skulls haven't been touched since release, despite seeing very little use in both PvP and PvE. The animation is janky and doesn't feel good to weave at all, the projectile is slower than a turtle in peanut butter, and the damage is just decent. Venom Skull at least gets the buff more often, but why slot it over something like Silver Shards, Snipe, Dizzy, or even Crushing Weapon? This spammable really needs some love, and not just a slight change but some actual TLC. At the very least the projectile needs to be sped up. Other nice things would be adding one of the many self buffs necro lacks in their kit.

Everest_Lionheart

The harder part of this skill and also blastbones is the precision required with getting your crosshairs on the target. Unlike other spamables where you just have to be in the neighborhood in order to fire them you actually have to get them someone close to your target for them to work consistently.

Or get really good at tab targeting where you have to get your crosshairs close one time but once you get your target highlighted both skills will fire and land more consistently, at least in a PvE environment.

dmnqwk

The biggest issue with skulls is it does next to nothing.

A lot of class spammables can feel very flat because of the way they're not elevated to be superior to other skill lines options... EVER.

Rapid Strikes (dw): 13k
Silver Shards (fighter): 10k plus 7.5k aoe

Cutting Dive (warden): 9500 (10500 with 100% uptime on bleed)
Surprise Attack (nightblade): 10k, plus autocrit every 4 seconds
Biting Jabs (templar): 14k plus 7k aoe plus brutality
Venom Skull (necro): 10k, every 3rd cast 20% buff.
Crystal Weapon (sorcerer): 9k, plus 4k secondary trigger.
*I've left DK off because of my lack of experience dpsing with them for a fair number comparison*

So, when we look at the 2 primary options for spammables open to anyone, we see the choice is either 13k dps (and slightly cheaper at about 1677 vs 1877 for other spammables) or a Spammable that buffs 3% weapon dmg for being slotted and has an aoe component.

Classwise, the spammables are extremely lacklustre for a lot of them:
Warden has an option that does less damage than Rapid Strikes' other morph, Bloodthirst (in case it being bleed damage matters since warden can have a fun bleed build)
Sorcerer has to jump through hoops and not use 2 Crystal weapons back to back to get the same damage
Nightblade has a decent option because it keeps up major resolve but otherwise it's poor damage at around 20% buff
Templar is the only one which has a superior class spammable, even after the nerfs
Necromancer gets to add 20% every 1.8 casts (based on other necro skills counting towards it) which is way below rapid strikes.

Overall, ZOS are bad at maths in that they screw you over when offering class spammables with such rubbish damage buffs.
Templar is the only class where it's a dps increase over Rapid Strikes, so it's not just Necromancer suffering from whoever is unable to add up properly.

Veinblood1965

I thought this was about the rewards from Plunder Skulls, have to agree if it was the rewards are under under whelming.

NordSwordnBoard

Voriak Solkyn RP denied.

YandereGirlfriend

It is strange that for the developers this skill (and like the NB Shadow ultimate) seemingly does not actually exist.

Prima facie underpowered but forever untouched.

JerBearESO

New effect!

Apply Cursed Skull to the target for 4s, stacking up to 5 times. When Cursed skull times out naturally, target receives 20% damage per stack (of original damage value).

Just an idea

Turtle_Bot

It seems to be range abilities in general, they got nerfed by 10% a few patches ago compared to melee options, but this was compounded with the nerf to ranged weapons in this game, which are so far behind the melee options and the fact that many of the range abilities have very long travel times and large dodge windows which makes them very unreliable. The fact that these additional factors never got compensated for when they reduced the base damage of ranged attacks, it resulted in ranged abilities basically getting triple nerfed when you try to run them as intended with ranged weapons.

tbh the skills value isn't as bad as it seems on paper, just from quickly looking at the base tooltip for the skill, it does about 13-15% less base damage (at 2160 base damage for both morphs) than snipe (2404 focussed aim, 2483 lethal arrow), with the tradeoff for this lower damage being that skull is an instant cast skill with a +20% increase in damage every 3rd cast leaving it overall about 9% less damage than snipe.

The main issue with skulls (and the same for majority of spammable range skills in the game, like frags/overload/dark flare/destructive reach/spec bow/warden bird/snipe) is the long travel time that gives those skills a very large dodge window and makes them very unreliable and clunky to use in combat, especially in lag.

A simple fix for a lot of the issues for range builds in general would be to heavily reduce the travel times of range skills as well as reduce the dodge window of those skills. Making range damage a lot more reliable by for example giving all the range skills the same travel time as silver shards would go a long way to make up for the fact that range skills have a 10% or more nerf to their base tooltips over similar melee skill options.

The other issue that ranged builds face (which is another topic entirely) is the fact that staves are hugely underpowered as a front bar option (particularly for pvp and lately in pve as well) meaning that to build for range you either go with melee weapons and lose the LA weave damage and resource restore or go with staves/bow and lose raw base damage on your abilities (including heals).

CameraBeardThePirate

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

It seems to be range abilities in general, they got nerfed by 10% a few patches ago compared to melee options, but this was compounded with the nerf to ranged weapons in this game, which are so far behind the melee options and the fact that many of the range abilities have very long travel times and large dodge windows which makes them very unreliable. The fact that these additional factors never got compensated for when they reduced the base damage of ranged attacks, it resulted in ranged abilities basically getting triple nerfed when you try to run them as intended with ranged weapons.

tbh the skills value isn't as bad as it seems on paper, just from quickly looking at the base tooltip for the skill, it does about 13-15% less base damage (at 2160 base damage for both morphs) than snipe (2404 focussed aim, 2483 lethal arrow), with the tradeoff for this lower damage being that skull is an instant cast skill with a +20% increase in damage every 3rd cast leaving it overall about 9% less damage than snipe.

The main issue with skulls (and the same for majority of spammable range skills in the game, like frags/overload/dark flare/destructive reach/spec bow/warden bird/snipe) is the long travel time that gives those skills a very large dodge window and makes them very unreliable and clunky to use in combat, especially in lag.

A simple fix for a lot of the issues for range builds in general would be to heavily reduce the travel times of range skills as well as reduce the dodge window of those skills. Making range damage a lot more reliable by for example giving all the range skills the same travel time as silver shards would go a long way to make up for the fact that range skills have a 10% or more nerf to their base tooltips over similar melee skill options.

The other issue that ranged builds face (which is another topic entirely) is the fact that staves are hugely underpowered as a front bar option (particularly for pvp and lately in pve as well) meaning that to build for range you either go with melee weapons and lose the LA weave damage and resource restore or go with staves/bow and lose raw base damage on your abilities (including heals).

Something to keep in mind about snipe (and bow abilities in general) is that if you are light attack weaving, all bow abilities will be 25% stronger than the listed tooltip thanks to the bow passives. Then on top of this, they get an extra damage boost from being at range (up to 12%).

So snipe is actually quite a bit stronger, once ramped up, than skulls' strongest hit.

Jarl_Ironheart

I've wanted to make a awesome death knight necro for the longest time, even had a awesome outfit made, but everytime I try it absolutely feels clunky as hell. I also stay faarrrr away from the skull skill. It's a shite spammable. Scythe is actually a really good spammable now, especially the stamina version.

Turtle_Bot

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

It seems to be range abilities in general, they got nerfed by 10% a few patches ago compared to melee options, but this was compounded with the nerf to ranged weapons in this game, which are so far behind the melee options and the fact that many of the range abilities have very long travel times and large dodge windows which makes them very unreliable. The fact that these additional factors never got compensated for when they reduced the base damage of ranged attacks, it resulted in ranged abilities basically getting triple nerfed when you try to run them as intended with ranged weapons.

tbh the skills value isn't as bad as it seems on paper, just from quickly looking at the base tooltip for the skill, it does about 13-15% less base damage (at 2160 base damage for both morphs) than snipe (2404 focussed aim, 2483 lethal arrow), with the tradeoff for this lower damage being that skull is an instant cast skill with a +20% increase in damage every 3rd cast leaving it overall about 9% less damage than snipe.

The main issue with skulls (and the same for majority of spammable range skills in the game, like frags/overload/dark flare/destructive reach/spec bow/warden bird/snipe) is the long travel time that gives those skills a very large dodge window and makes them very unreliable and clunky to use in combat, especially in lag.

A simple fix for a lot of the issues for range builds in general would be to heavily reduce the travel times of range skills as well as reduce the dodge window of those skills. Making range damage a lot more reliable by for example giving all the range skills the same travel time as silver shards would go a long way to make up for the fact that range skills have a 10% or more nerf to their base tooltips over similar melee skill options.

The other issue that ranged builds face (which is another topic entirely) is the fact that staves are hugely underpowered as a front bar option (particularly for pvp and lately in pve as well) meaning that to build for range you either go with melee weapons and lose the LA weave damage and resource restore or go with staves/bow and lose raw base damage on your abilities (including heals).

Something to keep in mind about snipe (and bow abilities in general) is that if you are light attack weaving, all bow abilities will be 25% stronger than the listed tooltip thanks to the bow passives. Then on top of this, they get an extra damage boost from being at range (up to 12%).

So snipe is actually quite a bit stronger, once ramped up, than skulls' strongest hit.

For sure, snipe definitely gets much stronger with the bow passives, that's why I specifically made the comparison using base values (no passives/cps/weapons equipped) and at base value it has comparable values for the differences in cast times on the 2 skills.

But I do agree, once the passives etc are taken into account it does fall much further behind, same with a lot of other ranged skills.

Cazador

I honestly just wish the animation was a bit better. It actually looks nice in first person but the game really isn't very first person friendly.