RE: "Developer Deep Dive—ESO's Class Identity Refresh"

ESO_Nightingale

So i think that this post is nice and transparent, but given many years of mistakes from ZOS i have a little bit more of a cynical view.

There's 1 major problem with the information presented.

ZOS saying they want to make every class/roll combo "viable, not necessarily optimal". I'll say right now that i understand achieving optimal class balance is literally impossible, however, this 100% gives them an excuse for them to still not properly try to balance different class/role combos as has been done in the past. you might argue that they want to try since they want everything to be "viable" but realistically, zos's definition of viability doesn't actually mean anything due to how easy the game is at the moment.

to be frank i actually think this is pretty bad given zos's track record. Shouldn't the aim be to make different class/role combos as close to optimal with eachother as possible so there isn't 1 flat meta for multiple years? minus subclassing from the equation since we know a dps build taking green balance, restoring light and living death shouldn't do competitive damage due to the lack of tools it has.

i was wondering if you have some kind of rebuttal to my cynicism because i desperately want to be proven wrong. @ZOS_Kevin

Skorro

Not to be disrespectful, but why not post this into the thread itself? I assume that would be the most monitored from zos' side

ESO_Nightingale

Skorro wrote: »

Not to be disrespectful, but why not post this into the thread itself? I assume that would be the most monitored from zos' side

easier to get burried when i think this is a big issue. i considered it, but 1 thread dedicated to a big point of discussion like that isn't generally ideal.

MindOfTheSwarm

I concur that class identity is the main issue here. The current modus operandi of “plant a bunch of DoT’s, spam a single target burst the rotate”, is getting a little stale.

Warden and NB are my mains and although Subclassing has allowed more flexibility, I still think a few areas are lacking. To be honest a couple more scribing skills could fix this completely.

Warden Frost builds for example benefit the most from AoE DoT’s with high Chilled up time. The problem is that there are not enough ground DoT effects that deal Frost damage to really go all in on this style.

Yes, you can supplement such a playstyle with Frost Pulsar or Frost Soul Burst, but both of these are expensive and pale in comparison to Frost Reach. Yes, these skills are AoE, but you could get around this by granting a passive that increases Frost area of effect Damage to Chilled targets. This would allow a player to go for this play style and not be punished in DPS rotations. This would be fair as the player has to get close to the target to make it work.

Another option is that enemies in your Frost Ground/Aura DoT skills take more damage the longer they remain in the area, alongside a stacking snare and you would be a welcome sight in both PvE and PvP content.

A Ground DoT or aura DoT Scribing skill would be very welcome as would some kind of Pet Scribing Skill. That last one might be tricky, but you could simplify it by using a generic “Elemental Wisp” type model or use current in game enemy models such as Fire Atronach, Frost Atronach or Flesh Atronach for a Disease variant.

But some skills themselves such as Frozen Gate/morphs and Permafrost need an overhaul.

Permafrost for example could simply be exactly that… permanent uptime while in combat, but lower damage and no snare. Leaving Northern Storm the prime damage variant.

Example:

Permafrost: You can no longer activate this ability. Instead, whenever you apply Chilled to an enemy you summon a storm for 4 seconds that deals X Frost Damage every second to enemies in the area. While the storm holds you and your allies in the area gain Minor Protection. You are also considered as Bracing, but not Blocking while the storm holds, benefitting from passives and equipment that activate while Bracing. This effect can occur even when slotted on your second weapon bar.

With a short 4 second duration, you are incentivised to maximise your Chilled uptime as much as possible. The damage would be much lower than Northern Storm (slightly more damage than Winter’s Revenge), have a weaker defensive buff and offer no snare, but the advantage is that you can slot it on your back bar and benefit from another ultimate on your front bar, such as Ice Comet, Icy Rage, Eye of the Storm or the Bear. Eye of the Storm in particular would be incredibly thematic. Also since it deals Frost Damage itself, it could use its own Chilled applications to help its uptime.

Such a change would benefit Magic based Wardens more than Stamdens, but you can offset this by buffing the Stamina Bleed Bear and adding/buffing some Bleed passives.

It also would solve the problem of Permafrost as it stands in PvP, as its overpowering snare is very oppressive and abusable. So you kill two birds with one stone. Fix its unfun to play against in PvP issue, while boosting its general appeal across the board.


This is just an example, but you get the point. The play styles in all classes need to be stretched apart, not brought closer. Otherwise you end up with the same class with just different visuals.

skinnycheeks

Agreed. I had a similar thought when I read over that line. It leaves them a lot of wiggle room to fall quite short on balance. I think instead of saying "viable", they should say they are "striving for as equally optimal as possible, even though it won't ever quite achieve perfect equality."

MincMincMinc

A big problem I see is that they "standardized" so hard that everything is clear as day numerically what is better or worse. Do you run dizzy swing or surprise attack? Well surprise attack is clearly vastly better and has no downsides.
Alot of skills over the years also lost their uniqueness like how darkdeal became more like warden's netch......why not just run netch now? Which has just lead to every class or skill choice feeling the same with different skins.

Then there is also the balance philosophy. Because of the hard simplistic standard there are very few (usually exploits now) combinations of sets and skills that can do something unique. Back in the day you would have more combos like crit surge with no cooldown pairing with more dot heavy choices. Or more crit chance builds.

We also lost counters. Like right now we are in a crit damage meta because impen does not counter crit damage equally. Having sets like old fury as a counter against crits would serve as a balancing force. (old fury used to grant wd stacking each time you were hit with a crit) Now it was hard standardized out with a terrible timed window for mediocre damage.

Zos literally dug themselves a balance nightmare by not thinking of systems that soft balanced themselves with the available choices.

ESO_Nightingale

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

I concur that class identity is the main issue here. The current modus operandi of “plant a bunch of DoT’s, spam a single target burst the rotate”, is getting a little stale.

Warden and NB are my mains and although Subclassing has allowed more flexibility, I still think a few areas are lacking. To be honest a couple more scribing skills could fix this completely.

Warden Frost builds for example benefit the most from AoE DoT’s with high Chilled up time. The problem is that there are not enough ground DoT effects that deal Frost damage to really go all in on this style.

Yes, you can supplement such a playstyle with Frost Pulsar or Frost Soul Burst, but both of these are expensive and pale in comparison to Frost Reach. Yes, these skills are AoE, but you could get around this by granting a passive that increases Frost area of effect Damage to Chilled targets. This would allow a player to go for this play style and not be punished in DPS rotations. This would be fair as the player has to get close to the target to make it work.

Another option is that enemies in your Frost Ground/Aura DoT skills take more damage the longer they remain in the area, alongside a stacking snare and you would be a welcome sight in both PvE and PvP content.

A Ground DoT or aura DoT Scribing skill would be very welcome as would some kind of Pet Scribing Skill. That last one might be tricky, but you could simplify it by using a generic “Elemental Wisp” type model or use current in game enemy models such as Fire Atronach, Frost Atronach or Flesh Atronach for a Disease variant.

But some skills themselves such as Frozen Gate/morphs and Permafrost need an overhaul.

Permafrost for example could simply be exactly that… permanent uptime while in combat, but lower damage and no snare. Leaving Northern Storm the prime damage variant.

Example:

Permafrost: You can no longer activate this ability. Instead, whenever you apply Chilled to an enemy you summon a storm for 4 seconds that deals X Frost Damage every second to enemies in the area. While the storm holds you and your allies in the area gain Minor Protection. You are also considered as Bracing, but not Blocking while the storm holds, benefitting from passives and equipment that activate while Bracing. This effect can occur even when slotted on your second weapon bar.

With a short 4 second duration, you are incentivised to maximise your Chilled uptime as much as possible. The damage would be much lower than Northern Storm (slightly more damage than Winter’s Revenge), have a weaker defensive buff and offer no snare, but the advantage is that you can slot it on your back bar and benefit from another ultimate on your front bar, such as Ice Comet, Icy Rage, Eye of the Storm or the Bear. Eye of the Storm in particular would be incredibly thematic. Also since it deals Frost Damage itself, it could use its own Chilled applications to help its uptime.

Such a change would benefit Magic based Wardens more than Stamdens, but you can offset this by buffing the Stamina Bleed Bear and adding/buffing some Bleed passives.

It also would solve the problem of Permafrost as it stands in PvP, as its overpowering snare is very oppressive and abusable. So you kill two birds with one stone. Fix its unfun to play against in PvP issue, while boosting its general appeal across the board.


This is just an example, but you get the point. The play styles in all classes need to be stretched apart, not brought closer. Otherwise you end up with the same class with just different visuals.

interesting idea, we do really lack some kind of payoff skill for frost damage builds, doesn't matter what form.

BXR_Lonestar

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

So i think that this post is nice and transparent, but given many years of mistakes from ZOS i have a little bit more of a cynical view.

There's 1 major problem with the information presented.

ZOS saying they want to make every class/roll combo "viable, not necessarily optimal". I'll say right now that i understand achieving optimal class balance is literally impossible, however, this 100% gives them an excuse for them to still not properly try to balance different class/role combos as has been done in the past. you might argue that they want to try since they want everything to be "viable" but realistically, zos's definition of viability doesn't actually mean anything due to how easy the game is at the moment.

to be frank i actually think this is pretty bad given zos's track record. Shouldn't the aim be to make different class/role combos as close to optimal with eachother as possible so there isn't 1 flat meta for multiple years? minus subclassing from the equation since we know a dps build taking green balance, restoring light and living death shouldn't do competitive damage due to the lack of tools it has.

i was wondering if you have some kind of rebuttal to my cynicism because i desperately want to be proven wrong. @ZOS_Kevin

This is literally impossible IMO. The ability to subclass has given them more possibilities to try to balance in a game where they weren't/aren't able to balance the game with only 7 pure classes available previously. IMO, balance shouldn't really be the goal here. What they need to do is each character should be viable in any role, but should be OPTIMAL in only 1-2 roles at most. Beyond that, in order to create some semblence of balance in the game so that there is not 1 meta that dominates, there should be favored and disfavored opponents, meaning you get increased damage done to your favored opponent, and less damage done to your disfavored opponent. That way, no single class can dominate because there are classes out there that will win more times than they lose simply because they're a disfavored opponent. THAT will help break up the meta.

For instance, who cares if a base nightblade brawler is strong if they will always struggle to kill, say Templars and DK's (and excel at killing, say Sorcs)?

ESO_Nightingale

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

So i think that this post is nice and transparent, but given many years of mistakes from ZOS i have a little bit more of a cynical view.

There's 1 major problem with the information presented.

ZOS saying they want to make every class/roll combo "viable, not necessarily optimal". I'll say right now that i understand achieving optimal class balance is literally impossible, however, this 100% gives them an excuse for them to still not properly try to balance different class/role combos as has been done in the past. you might argue that they want to try since they want everything to be "viable" but realistically, zos's definition of viability doesn't actually mean anything due to how easy the game is at the moment.

to be frank i actually think this is pretty bad given zos's track record. Shouldn't the aim be to make different class/role combos as close to optimal with eachother as possible so there isn't 1 flat meta for multiple years? minus subclassing from the equation since we know a dps build taking green balance, restoring light and living death shouldn't do competitive damage due to the lack of tools it has.

i was wondering if you have some kind of rebuttal to my cynicism because i desperately want to be proven wrong. @ZOS_Kevin

This is literally impossible IMO. The ability to subclass has given them more possibilities to try to balance in a game where they weren't/aren't able to balance the game with only 7 pure classes available previously. IMO, balance shouldn't really be the goal here. What they need to do is each character should be viable in any role, but should be OPTIMAL in only 1-2 roles at most. Beyond that, in order to create some semblence of balance in the game so that there is not 1 meta that dominates, there should be favored and disfavored opponents, meaning you get increased damage done to your favored opponent, and less damage done to your disfavored opponent. That way, no single class can dominate because there are classes out there that will win more times than they lose simply because they're a disfavored opponent. THAT will help break up the meta.

For instance, who cares if a base nightblade brawler is strong if they will always struggle to kill, say Templars and DK's (and excel at killing, say Sorcs)?

I think i need to further clarify what i mean to you. Everything that already exists is viable. Zos doesn't need to try at all here to achieve that. I also more than understand that achieving any semblance of balance is hard given their past track record as I've been here a very long time. With all of this being said. I'm talking about their philosophy and ideals. Them saying they want to make everything "viable but not necessarily optimal" to me is essentially the same as saying "we want an excuse not to balance anything". You know, as they basically have already done in the past.

I don't at all expect them to even come close to optimal balance but what i really want is for them to make repeated frequent attempts. They've claim they'll have more time for this kind of stuff now that they've dropped the chapters thing so thats what i want to see i want to see them attempt it.

I'd also be less concerned about balancing subclassing to be optimal. I'd rather them make attempts to make full base classes optimal first and foremost.