PTS Update 38 - Feedback Thread for Classes & Abilities

SeaUnicorn

Nightblade Lotus Fan has DOT duration 20s, but Minor Vulnerability de-buff of 10s. It is one of the very few abilities remaining after re-work that have buff/de-buff duration mismatched with the duration of the primary DOT/HOT.

acastanza_ESO

Once again, WHERE IS SORCERER'S SELF-ACCESS TO MAJOR BRESERK?
DK's got this, NB's have an unnamed 10% damage buff, Sorcerers - the class that you steadfastly REFUSE to do anything about the survivability for because you insist they're intended to be a damage first class - are still saddled with NOTHING. Unless you're going to give us the ability to take our own atro synergy, the changes for Sorcerer in this patch continue to be a complete slap in the face. WE ALREADY HAD NEARLY PERFECT UPTIME ON MINOR BRESERK AND MINOR FORCE. Putting them on Dark Deal is NOT a buff, it is LITERALLY NOTHING. And here are todays patch notes with AGAIN LITERALLY NOTHING.

Give Sorcerers Major Berserk and Major Breach. Until you do this you are only proving that DKs and NBs are the only classes that are worth playing.

Szalord

Hello!

As a follow up to the 9.0.3 changes to Dark Talons and Acid Spray, i was the one who pointed out how clunky these abilities became (unable to reapply the dot portion of the abilities if the dot was already present on the target), and i'm very surprised and pleased by the last changes in this week's patch. Very nice ZOS!

Cheers!

acastanza_ESO

Giving Arcanists heals on their shields - shields that can also be applied to allies, and making Arcanist big damage ability uninterruptable when Shielded is patently unfair to Sorcerers. Sorcerers are supposed to be the defensive shields class, and you have repeatedly used this to justify not giving Sorcerers reasonable access to healing abilities. Now with Arcanist you're giving them access to both healing and shielding and making their shields completely protect their main channeled damage ability so it becomes actually usable, it is completely unfair. You MUST address Sorcerers now.

One thing you could do is make Sorcerer's channels similarly uninterruptable when under the effects of a damage shield, and make one of the shield morphs (regenerating or whatever) have a similar HOT although stronger since it is only single target instead of a group shield like Arcanist gets. Sorcerers have been saddled with a channeled main damage ability forever with NOTHING done to make it a viable skill in PVP. Arcanists get a unique mechanic invented to protect their channeled damage ability before the class even goes live. And have access to MULTIPLE shields to stack on top of it, including one that is also a heal. Sorcs get none of it. I'm actually furious here.

TechMaybeHic

I appreciate the adjustment to backlash. Will have to test it out

LukosCreyden

Templars straight-up out of copium:

Intentionally keeping their burst ability weak?

Still not addressing the jabs animation.

master_vanargand

I don't think the game creators are looking at this place.
At least I feel ignored except for what say about the Arcanist.
The requests I have made many times in the past have been simple.

[Nightblade's wish]
"Concealed Weapon" has "your damage done is increased by 10%" and "increasing your Movement Speed by 15%".
"Surprise Attack" has "the Sundered status effect".
Don't you feel "game balance is bad" comparing these two?

This is too unfair.

Need move Concealed Weapon "your damage done is increased by 10%" to Veiled Strike (base skill).
I want the human rights of Stamina builds to be guaranteed.

Cloudrest

Changes to Arcanist and Templar feel pretty good, and address a lot of the feedback concerning their pain points. Thanks ZOS-- y'all did good.

MudcrabAttack

Acid Spray (morph):
The Damage over Time from this morph will now always apply to the target, rather than only when they do not already have the DoT active.

There weren't any notes about why the change happened, but the change is causing none of the DOT to hit enemies if acid spray is recast consecutively every second. This looks pretty bad for PVE trash fights, where running into an archer is already like finding a unicorn. Were bows overperforming somewhere else with acid spray spam, like PVP?

Solariken

Undeath is way too strong, vampire curse is basically a necessity to be competitive in PvP. I'd suggest reducing to 20℅.

Healing is way too strong (especially 3rd party healing). I'd suggest making 3rd party heals get mitigated by crit resist in the same way as damage (but not self heals). This would tone healing down in PvP without affecting PvE.

Additionally, Major/Minor Defile should be increased to 30℅/15%. Defile should be a bit stronger than Mending to be at all impactful especially since healing can't be countered outside of extreme burst damage.

YandereGirlfriend

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

Given the radius increase for non-DK melee, it's time to revisit the radius of heals and other beneficial effects. Many of them are weak enough that there's little point in using them unless they at least hit the melee group around the boss.

Often, the precise radius isn't stated in the tooltip. When it is, it can be as low as 5 meters. (E.g. Sentinel of Rkugamz.) Most of these effects should have radius exceeding the melee radius. In some cases such as the one I cited, there's a case that they should work across the melee diameter (i.e. 2x the melee radius).

If the minimum radius for heals and buffs were set to 8 meters, I'm not aware of anything that would become overpowered. 10-12 meters would make me happier yet.

This is an excellent point!

SeaUnicorn wrote: »

Nightblade Lotus Fan has DOT duration 20s, but Minor Vulnerability de-buff of 10s. It is one of the very few abilities remaining after re-work that have buff/de-buff duration mismatched with the duration of the primary DOT/HOT.

It also has a hidden target cap of 6 enemies.

That should, of course, be lifted.

ebix_

did you guys forget about dark cloak? this skill is just bad and needs a rework right now!
there is also a gap between stamblade and magblade just because of concealed weapon being much better than surprise attack. I would drop that garanteed crit for 10% damage any day.

mmtaniac

Merge Templar passive Illumate and prism into one thing. DK have those two bonuses in one ,why templar must have it in two, and give us some usefull passive in this place. You can remove radiant aura passive effect and put it here. Radiant aura with those tree minors will finally be usefull and activate after casting Dawn's Wrath ability giving us some unique thing and our team.
This way radiant aura will become free slot for new templar ability ,that can be something defensive or 100% selfish templar burst healing with stamina and magicka costs. Repentence can be changed too something usefull for me this thing not exist in current form and probably for many people too.

Turtle_Bot

Feedback on 9.0.3 changes:

Plar:
change to backlash looks good, while it doesn't fix the issue of battle spirit double dipping, or issues with jabs, it at least makes it possible to reach those top end numbers when building for it. (not a fix, but a good temp solution).

DK:
affects PvE (maybe), DK will still reign supreme for traditional dps builds and remain unchanged in PvP. Biggest change here is perhaps plar being somewhat threatening again bringing it back into the meta which will provide a natural check to majority of DK.

Arcanist:
While I like the changes in a vacuum, they do solve the issues with shields and have given something to arcanist for PvP to not end up like U36 plar), the fact that the class was given all these changes that sorcerer has been begging for something similar for years now that would have helped to make sorc easier to balance and would have gone a long way to solving sorcs issues is a real slap in the face of sorc players.

Sorc:
Still no changes, you have the feedback from countless sorc mains, you have the data from countless hours of play, next patch (U39) will likely be it for many sorcs, expect a lot of sorcs to leave en masse if nothing changes to the class to make it viable in PvE outside of pets/HA and to make magsorc viable in PvP without crutching on sets like Mara's Balm to allow it to live long enough to string more than 1 ability together.

Ratzkifal

Very disappointing balance cycle. We've been waiting for good news in the patch notes for 9 months now and yet here we are, still suffering from update 35's nerfs that made the game less fun. From the looks of it, I won't be coming back for Necrom after all. There are other games I could be playing.

Buff Templar jabs' damage over all and Stamplar's in particular. What's the point in having a class spammable if the only half-decent spammable is a weapon skill that every other class is already using anyway? I want to play a Templar. That should mean something. It's super boring if every single class uses the exact same skills because you are too scared of actually buffing something.

But I am shouting into the void here anyway. I'm sure "the data" can tell you exactly how much fun players are having, right? Fun is such an objective metric that's so easy to measure after all, which is why feedback can be safely ignored as data is the only thing that matters. /s

SkaiFaith

With the end of the PTS cycle I renew my thanks to Zos, sending love to devs Thank you so, so much for not touching further our beloved saviour combo named "Oakensoul Lightning Heavy Attack"! Really appreciated.

To everyone else: have fun with Arcanist and the new sets, folks! Enjoy the Shadow over Morrowind~

x99KungFuTacosx

Results of this PTS cycle:
- Arcanist will be meh on launch. (I care least about this, I didn't want it to be OP).
- Dragonknight will still be extremely over-powered in PvP, meta class for everyone to play.
- Stealth nightblades are dead (even 43m detect pots are ridiculous. Should have extended the duration not range). Invisible vs stealth distinction is negligible when the invisibility skill is expensive and only lasts for 3 seconds (if you're lucky).
- Sorcs get an already easily- sourced buff for slightly more damage but still do not have a reliable burst heal. like every other class has, which they've been asking for ZoS to implement for ages.
- Templars may be slightly better off than live servers due to the backlash change. Radiant oppression is still extremely overpowered while the rest of their toolkit remains lackluster.
- Necromancers got nerfed into oblivion after harmony/grave robber nerfs. Necro currently weakest PvP class because blastbones wanders off to get a hotdog half the time. They need love.

Dissatisfied and disappointed with this cycle to say the least.

Zastrix

master_vanargand wrote: »

I don't think the game creators are looking at this place.
At least I feel ignored except for what say about the Arcanist.
The requests I have made many times in the past have been simple.

[Nightblade's wish]
"Concealed Weapon" has "your damage done is increased by 10%" and "increasing your Movement Speed by 15%".
"Surprise Attack" has "the Sundered status effect".
Don't you feel "game balance is bad" comparing these two?

This is too unfair.

Need move Concealed Weapon "your damage done is increased by 10%" to Veiled Strike (base skill).
I want the human rights of Stamina builds to be guaranteed.

This! The easiest way to make stamina and magicka similar without affecting class passives!

Lumenn

Nm

Lumenn

Edit:I'm blind, nm

Hagrett

Is there going to be a pass for pbaoe skills following the range increase on melee abilities?
Seems a little half-baked to leave these aoe skills with a smaller radius then the standard melee range.

Cleave: 6m
Whirlwind/Whirling blades: 6m
Impulse: 6m
Sun shield (lol): 5m
Lightning form/Boundless Storm: 5m
Impaling shards: 6m
Arctic Blast: 6m

etc.

katorga

Solariken wrote: »

Undeath is way too strong, vampire curse is basically a necessity to be competitive in PvP. I'd suggest reducing to 20℅.

Healing is way too strong (especially 3rd party healing). I'd suggest making 3rd party heals get mitigated by crit resist in the same way as damage (but not self heals). This would tone healing down in PvP without affecting PvE.

Additionally, Major/Minor Defile should be increased to 30℅/15%. Defile should be a bit stronger than Mending to be at all impactful especially since healing can't be countered outside of extreme burst damage.

Nerfing Undeath will make the strongest class even stronger in relation to the others.

Overall class healing is not a huge problem except for a few classes that need skills to be directly nerfed and some sets that need to be removed. Groups stacking multiple instances of HOTs should be directly addressed. Blanket nerfs to everyone' healing is too much, and again only makes the strongest class even stronger in relation to the others.

Defile should not have been nerfed in the first place. The nerf was a kneejerk response to forum complaints and has been rendered obsolete by changes in the game after the nerf.

LukosCreyden

So, to sum up,
DK is looking good.
Warden is still weird, nobody knows what this class even is.
Nightblade is kinda okay i guess but lol stealth.
Sorcerer is crying with a gun pointed to its head, the devs telling it that it is just fine the way it is. Take this useless buff and shut up.
Templar is laying next to sorcerer, bleeding, after being forced to dig its own grave with its magical glowy shovel.
Necromancer, meanwhile, has long since rotted away and its blastbones has JUST NOW decided that it has found its target and needs to attack.

Meanwhile, Arcanist is mediocre in strength whilst also giving people headaches, vertigo, travel sickness and probably also seizures with its spinny, flashy, blinding visual effects. The arcanist players gently froth at the mouth whilst the writers feverishly try to write lore to explain that it is in fact NOT a Daedra worshipping cultist class.

This is the impression I have gotten, having not played PTS myself. Is this somewhat accurate?

rpa

Arcanist visuals could take at least a hefty brightness nerf. I guess circling cruxes still would be an issue to some (possibly including me), dunno how to fix that.
Visuals aside, I can only say template Arcanist in PTS in one bar HA build was not too bad with 220-999+ lags. Better give it buff if the class turns be lacking on live than release it so OP it have to be heavily nerfed.

Also I'd suggest putting the Arcanist class purchaseable in PTS Crown store, so the slowpokes also can take a peek.

Suna_Ye_Sunnabe

LukosCreyden wrote: »

So, to sum up,
DK is looking good.
Warden is still weird, nobody knows what this class even is.
Nightblade is kinda okay i guess but lol stealth.
Sorcerer is crying with a gun pointed to its head, the devs telling it that it is just fine the way it is. Take this useless buff and shut up.
Templar is laying next to sorcerer, bleeding, after being forced to dig its own grave with its magical glowy shovel.
Necromancer, meanwhile, has long since rotted away and its blastbones has JUST NOW decided that it has found its target and needs to attack.

Meanwhile, Arcanist is mediocre in strength whilst also giving people headaches, vertigo, travel sickness and probably also seizures with its spinny, flashy, blinding visual effects. The arcanist players gently froth at the mouth whilst the writers feverishly try to write lore to explain that it is in fact NOT a Daedra worshipping cultist class.

This is the impression I have gotten, having not played PTS myself. Is this somewhat accurate?

Entirely accurate.

Slidell_70458

The 75% AEO reduction in Tri Focus for Lightning Staves is too much. It was good the way it was; this change should be backed out.

Suna_Ye_Sunnabe

Slidell_70458 wrote: »

The 75% AEO reduction in Tri Focus for Lightning Staves is too much. It was good the way it was; this change should be backed out.

Heavy agree. This is a terrible change.