Thoughts on 11.0.1 combat changes and looking forward

rustudah · April 22

First of all, I appreciate, rather I believe the community appreciates that the feedback is being heard and I personally liked the Developer Comments on the changes.
This is only 2nd week of PTS so its a little early to jump the gun and say that subclassing is gonna go live, then again all signs point that way.

The combat changes in 11.0.1 makes me think that the Devs are aware of the immense cross-healing that can stack over and over, making some of the play styles really potent. I hope that they are also aware of the high levels of DPS/Tankiness that subclassing is bringing. In lines of this, I think we may need some toning down of skills or passives that the subclassing is gonna bring to the table. Question is, which of them deserve the modifications so that we have a relatively balanced game while most players won't be at the bitter end of it.

I understand that until we have separate skills for PVP and PVE, it is very very hard to get balance right on both ends. But we can certainly hope for a 'close to balance' situation and I look forward to the changes in the coming weeks of pts.

What I think of changes...

Subclassing Passives: Many people including myself think that some of the Class passives are too overpowered when combined with the others. This made sense when there is no subclassing because the skill lines within the same class complemented each other. Now we may need new standards (just like the standards we have to balance the power of a Set or skills based on whether it is single target, aoe, damage over time etc.) if we are going to continue to import the entire skill line to another class rather than just skills or just passives. This is by far, the biggest concern of subclassing from players who have frequent combat interaction.

Nightblade - Grim Focus: I like that the raw power of the stacks is lowered compared to 11.0.0. There isn't a dev note for this, but I think the Devs are trying to make the passive power for having the stacks vs. using the ability to be relatively close. This may work in PVE situations, but in PVP the dynamic is different because PVP revolves around trading blows and without a (virtual) cooldown on this skill makes for a terrible interaction for the receiving end. A simple solution for PVE or PVP is to lower the stacks to 7 or 8 down from 10. That way, players wont be able to rapid fire spectral bows while also limiting the overall power of the stacks.

Sorcerer - Daedric Summoning: I like the change and the dev comment.

Warden - Winter’s Embrace - Arctic Wind: I like the change. Based on the dev note, this ability is mostly intended towards a Tanky playstyle. So I was thinking why dont we add another aspect of tanking to this ability to further finetune its power because most people know that this is slightly overperforming in PVP and will be even more pronounced with subclassing. So in order to get full power of this ability, it should also require us to stack armor along with health, that way the overall power of the build is balanced. Most PVP builds have decent armor anyway, so it will only be a slight nerf.

Cross healing: With subclassing here, everyone can have access to "Extended Ritual". This is a very very powerful ability even though it has lost some attention recently as number of templars in PVP dwindled. Imagine if good portion of the population uses this ability, we would have such a bad PVP experience as the healing keeps stacking. This is just one of the abilities, there are other skills with potent power, for example Spirit mender which auto heals lowest health target (imagine a full group using this). There are some solutions that come to mind -

Place harsh AOE caps on healing abilities in PVP.
Reduce cross healing amount by 30%.
Limit group size to 6 in open world PVP until we know exactly what subclassing is capable of on live server.
Put a virtual cooldown on skills that cross healed a player recently in PVP so that they dont get healed from 10 sources of the same skill in an instant. (similar to how we have 1 sec cooldown on all skills)

Elephant in the Room: Major Savagery and Prophecy. These are by far the most underrated and difficult buffs to get in PVP without sacrificing a skill slot (meaning the slot becomes passive). Thanks to scribing, this problem is partly solved. But with subclassing there are so many other skills that we want to use. Some good skills like shadowy disguise and Inferno which provide these buffs while also providing great utility. But we cannot use these skill lines in every build. I just wanted to know the long term solution for this. Are we going to have Magicka/Stamina/Savagery and Magicka/Stamina/Prophecy potions (with only minor intellect and minor endurance) in future?

I understand that everyone wants to have fun, whether it is solo or groups. But it is also equally important for the game to be healthy where it would motivate all sorts of players to enjoy the depths of the game.