Interesting combat changes concept....

Sparxlost

First thing i want to talk about is damage shields..
Damage shields are fleeting in eso and i feel that in most cases except in the cases of some ultimates underperform as a defensive tool.. so here is what i would like to test gameplay wise...

all Damage shields now have the same amount of phys/spell resistance.. 30k (the reason for this is because damage shields get destroyed fairly easily and are basically useless to cast in a lot of situations.)
Damage shields will last A LOT longer but cost more resources.. group shields (excluding ultimates) will have cast times, slow the caster, and be interruptible...
all castable damage shields excluding health costing shields (maybe some others) will scale exclusively and better with healing buffs (healing power healing recieved etc.)
Damage shield sets will mostly stay the same except for the durations and resistance changes but will probably need adjusted and fixed values for balancing reasons.

With these changes.. damage shields become a preemptive support ability rather than a trash attempt at negating damage... Making them cost more resources would make it a burden to cast during combat so it shouldnt be a huge issue except in cases where someone is obviously pooring their entire build into being able to upkeep defense in which case should be possible build to me.. (just target them)

The other thing i wanted to talk about was health recovery...
health recovery in this game is BAD.... so here is what i think would make it more balanced with less potential to need nerfs in the case of people building to have a lot of it...

Health recovery is constant within the character but the values are reduced to almost nothing without modifiers...
Defile effects stop health recovery completely for their duration and will probably need to be adjusted to become the perfect tool for destroying those whose regeneration is high enough to be annoying.. like say a blood mage with superpowered regen or just your average tanky boi with the will to press on...

If i had to gues i would say that the most recovery one could have should be around 2k per second and if that is consistent then it would provide proper defense and open up more variety for health recovery builds without being a terrible buff....

I have another post on my suggestable combat changes so i guess this can just be an add-on to that..

phaneub17_ESO

You add cast time, more people will use them less.

Tigeracer

Damage shields are actually extremely strong in some builds right now. Look at arcanist in pvp.

chessalavakia_ESO

My impression was health recovery tended to be on the weaker end of the spectrum PvP wise.

I believe health recovery is every 2 seconds not every second.

Defile isn't exactly rare and with your changes would cripple the builds that go health recovery entirely. Additionally, keep in mind that Render Flesh gives the user Defile.

As someone with a few vampire chars, losing the recovery isn't the most impactful thing but it does get to be annoying having to pop a heal rather than just regening. I wouldn't enjoy having it on all my PvE chars.

I think you'd hit the issue that having a cast time is going to put a damper on some of the current styles of using damage shields either to boost players survivability right before a big hit or to use it right after a big hit to keep them up.

You might also find that it might lead to some boring/unintended gameplay where people cast shields then dps till the shields drop than cast shields again in PvE content.

In PvP, you'd possibly be running a thin line between useless because it's too much of a hassle to get up and mandatory because the added survivability is so high.

Sparxlost

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

My impression was health recovery tended to be on the weaker end of the spectrum PvP wise.

I believe health recovery is every 2 seconds not every second.

Defile isn't exactly rare and with your changes would cripple the builds that go health recovery entirely. Additionally, keep in mind that Render Flesh gives the user Defile.

As someone with a few vampire chars, losing the recovery isn't the most impactful thing but it does get to be annoying having to pop a heal rather than just regening. I wouldn't enjoy having it on all my PvE chars.

I think you'd hit the issue that having a cast time is going to put a damper on some of the current styles of using damage shields either to boost players survivability right before a big hit or to use it right after a big hit to keep them up.

You might also find that it might lead to some boring/unintended gameplay where people cast shields then dps till the shields drop than cast shields again in PvE content.

In PvP, you'd possibly be running a thin line between useless because it's too much of a hassle to get up and mandatory because the added survivability is so high.

health every two seconds is terrible because it doesnt really provide much offensive benefit... but with the constant heals you would at least get some value out of healing i would think...
just think if you were at low health and had just below the number of your enemies attack but died before you got a health recovery tick, robbing you of what very easily could have been a survivable hit. This would be unlucky and might even make some dislike current health recovery as it could be better...
now picture instead youve been attacked and have almost enough health to survive the final blow and the sheer consistency of health recovery managed to top you off in time to make more use of your life.. Now health recovery is actually good for something rather than being semi-reliable...

i always thought that vamps losing recovery was a dumb thing unless they gained it back by feeding and i guess if it were up to me i would probably have changed it, but this is about health recovery and not vamps' lack thereof..

Ults will still be good for boosting survivability.. this would actually be better for pvp as you could cast shields on your group before a battle and have an easier time healing or whatever else you decide to do as, at least for a few seconds, you wont have to worry too much about someone getting one shotted to half health.. i didnt specify how long new shields last but it would be minutes and the costs of shield skills would be more a large percentage of max mag rather than a small amount..

this makes it so if you had enough resource recovery you could abuse the benefits of a consistent shield generator but hopefully at the cost of making yourself an easy target..

hopefully shielding in combat would be enough of a burden to stop them from doing any real damage...

Though a group in pvp WOULD have the realistic edge i dont think it would be impossible or even difficult for a group without a shield caster to prevail... open world pvp is more about strategy when you think about it and in battle if you have more skilled individuals then it would really show with how they handled the slight handicap.. damage shields would be useful but not abusable as a sort of "preemptive heal"...

Zodiarkslayer

Shields do not give resistances. They give an extra "amount of health" and the damage calculation remains the same. Is that supposed to change as well?

I mean, 30k resistances is 5 times as strong as Major Resolve. That is craaaaaaaajjjssy overpowered.

One mechanic to counter balance damage shields is the fact that they use them selves up. If they'd stay up over the entire duration, they need to be scaled back in strength to a point where they are almost useless.

All in all I'd say these are very unbalanced changes.
Verdict: Rejected!

CameraBeardThePirate

Shields are very strong right now though - the reason being Undeath.

Undeath is incredibly powerful and applies its mitigation to Damage Shields (for some filly reason). This makes damage shields incredible strong.

Sparxlost

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

Shields do not give resistances. They give an extra "amount of health" and the damage calculation remains the same. Is that supposed to change as well?

I mean, 30k resistances is 5 times as strong as Major Resolve. That is craaaaaaaajjjssy overpowered.

One mechanic to counter balance damage shields is the fact that they use them selves up. If they'd stay up over the entire duration, they need to be scaled back in strength to a point where they are almost useless.

All in all I'd say these are very unbalanced changes.
Verdict: Rejected!

damage shields use the individual players' resistances... so if a player naturally has 40k resists then his damage shield would actually have less resistances than his normal health.. or if soemone is squish and has 20k resists then the damage shield would have more resists than their normal health.... damage to shields is calculated separately from health damage so it doesnt doesnt actually change that much that youd be able to tank one or two hits better than you usually could as a dps benefitting from a damage shield...

you do not actually know what you are talking about and have to right to "reject" something based on false assumptions... damage shields last longer But they still wouldnt be overpowered...

Sparxlost

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Shields are very strong right now though - the reason being Undeath.

Undeath is incredibly powerful and applies its mitigation to Damage Shields (for some filly reason). This makes damage shields incredible strong.

well this post is meant to be an add-on to my other post which nerfs healing and makes a number of other changes...

so it wouldnt really be as much of an issue as it currently is in the game and would still be quite good without being overpowered... because if you had to run light armor to get decent heals then damage mitigation would only help you so much ya know??

otherwise id just say that some shields could be better balanced (sorcerers) and oh idk they could give shields their own resistances rather than using the casters

Nihilr

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

Shields do not give resistances. They give an extra "amount of health" and the damage calculation remains the same. Is that supposed to change as well?

Damage shields don't have armor resistances, but they DO have critical damage resist if I remember correctly... Like, critical attacks don't work on damage shields, only the base damage.

CameraBeardThePirate

Nihilr wrote: »

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

Shields do not give resistances. They give an extra "amount of health" and the damage calculation remains the same. Is that supposed to change as well?

Damage shields don't have armor resistances, but they DO have critical damage resist if I remember correctly... Like, critical attacks don't work on damage shields, only the base damage.

Both incorrect.

Shields were changed 2-3 years ago. They inherit the resistances of the user, so they effectively just act as extra health with the same amount of damage mitigation.

What damage shields don't inherit is block mitigation. If you are blocking while shielded, incoming damage will not be reduced until your shield is broken.

Zodiarkslayer

Sparxlost wrote: »

you do not actually know what you are talking about and have to right to "reject" something based on false assumptions... damage shields last longer But they still wouldnt be overpowered...

No. I reject your proposals, because they are massive changes to every players game experience and to which they would have to adopt to. You meddle and change some of the most basic mechanics of the game. You must know that.

You would be basically subjecting everyone to your whims. Make them play your game. Wether they want it or not.

And that I do not like.

Sparxlost

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

Sparxlost wrote: »

you do not actually know what you are talking about and have to right to "reject" something based on false assumptions... damage shields last longer But they still wouldnt be overpowered...

No. I reject your proposals, because they are massive changes to every players game experience and to which they would have to adopt to. You meddle and change some of the most basic mechanics of the game. You must know that.

You would be basically subjecting everyone to your whims. Make them play your game. Wether they want it or not.

And that I do not like.

i dont know what you are talking about... hardly anyone uses damage shields consistently as a major defensive part of their build... but damage shields ARE in the game so maybe they should be viable means of defense for not just sorcs?? Ults are okay but 90% of damage shield skills and sets in the game are absolutely useless to the playerbase.... its not MY game i want people to play but the game we have that i wish to play better realistically.... Get over yourself you literally have to adapt everytime they add something new to this game anyway so why not let people who want other playstyles enjoy the game too???

RaptorRodeoGod

Sparxlost wrote: »

group shields (excluding ultimates) will have cast times, slow the caster, and be interruptible...

They tried that ages ago. Everyone hated it so they reverted it.