Sorc, DK, WW - Understanding the issues that lead to unhealthy gameplay & how to approach fixes

evLRise

In order to properly fix a problem, we first need to understand it. Complex systems cannot be improved by addressing only their most visible symptoms; we need to understand what is actually causing the problem, why it exists, how different parts interact, and what consequences potential solutions may have. This post is my attempt to explain these issues as comprehensively as possible, simply because I want to open a patch notes post one day, read through it, and think “Gods, finally, for once it makes sense.”, maybe actually look forward to playing rather than getting annoyed.

In U50 PvP, the common denominator among all the top-tier classes - and the factor that separated them by a huge margin from everything else - was sustain. Unfortunately, U51 PTS fails to address this issue at its root. In some cases, such as DK and Sorc, the issue is effectively ignored altogether. In the case of Werewolf, the change simply slaps a large, dirty bandage over the problem without addressing the underlying cause.

Why is having near-infinite sustain such a big issue? Let's do a little exercise. Rather than looking at the current wording of Conservation of Energy sorc mastery, imagine for a moment that it said:

You gain 7500 Armor, 5000 Magicka, 5000 Stamina, 1200 Heal per Second, 800 Stamina Recovery, 800 Magicka Recovery, and another 10% buff that you can distribute wherever you want - 10% damage, 10% healing, or split between the two however you see fit.

It's rather obvious that, if this was the actual wording, the community would lose its mind. (Well, technically, they already are.) But here's the problem: this is effectively happens in-game. Sustain isn't simply a resource-management convenience. When a build can maintain its resources indefinitely, it is effectively receiving a massive collection of defensive, offensive, and healing advantages simultaneously. It can continuously block, dodge, heal, cast defensive abilities, maintain buffs, and use expensive offensive skills without having to make the resource-management decisions that other builds are forced to make. At that point, sustain stops being a supporting stat and becomes a massive source of power in its own right.

Now, let's understand where exactly these numbers mentioned above come from.
- 7500 armor - Since I don't need sustain, running tripots is rather pointless, so I'd rather go for armor pots for +6000 armor. The last 1500 armor comes from fortified CP, which I added just for simplicity, but in truth it's 6000 armor + a "free" orange CP of choice.

- 5000 magicka & stamina - Since I don't need sustain, I'm not stuck with orzorga's for food, so I can simply go bewitched for 4250 *1.16 ( 10% max stats from dark magic and 6% from undaunted CPs ). For comparison - Crafty Alfiq - a set which was actually quite common not too long has a 2550 mag as the 5-piece bonus.

- 1200 Heal per Second. Conservation of Energy procs your Blood Magic passive everytime you use an ability with a cost, rather than when you cast a Dark Magic skill.

For context here's the Blood Magic passive text:

When you cast a Dark Magic ability with a cost, you heal for 1600 Health if you are not at full Health. This portion of the ability scales off your Max Health. If your Health is full, the higher of your Max Magicka or Stamina is increased by 10% for 10 seconds.

Now, what a lot of people don't know, is that abilities with a cost are not restricted to skills. They also mean core combat abilities ( dodge, break free etc. ) and therefore you can proc this passive multiple times in the same GCD window. So rather than 1600 ( 800 in PvP ), I simply gave it a 50% buff to bring it closer to a realistic scenario, for a total of 1200 HPS, as it will proc significantly more often than 1/s. This already sounds pretty strong - to some degree maybe even reasonable, but if we think even more about it, the heal equivalent is roughly 1/3 of a Vigor. Now, the important mention here is, a 100% uptime Vigor will eat 20% of your Total Casts. Conservation of Energy, on the other hand, consumes none of your casts. You simply play normally and receive roughly 1/3 of a Vigor passively, while retaining the 20% of your casts that would otherwise be spent maintaining Vigor. In other words, you're getting a significant portion of a Vigor's healing with zero rotational opportunity cost.

- ~800 Stamina & Magicka Recovery - While technically this isn't Recovery but rather flat resource sustain - which is actually beneficial because you don't lose it while blocking, sprinting etc. - the reasoning is largely the same as with the HPS. Conservation of Energy returns 240 Magicka and Stamina per proc. Sustain in ESO is calculated every 2 seconds, so 240 Magicka and Stamina per second is effectively 480 sustain. Since it can frequently proc more than once per GCD, we again apply a 50% increase to bring the number closer to a realistic scenario, which is ~750-800.

- 10% buff to whatever you want - This comes from the opportunity cost of sustain skills such as Dark Deal. Not having to press Dark Deal, which would generally represent 1 cast out of 10 skills, means those casts can instead be used for damage or healing. More importantly, you can dynamically allocate that “10%” based on what you actually need at the time. If you're healthy, you can use those casts for damage. If you're under pressure, you can use them for healing or defense. So this isn't literally a 10% damage or healing buff. It's arguably more powerful in practice: it's 10% more of your available actions that can be dedicated to whatever the current situation demands.

How do we translate all of this into actual power levels? It means that, from one passive alone, my opponent effectively has the equivalent of:

* Fortified Brass - ~6500 Armor
* Wretched Vitality - ~520 sustain
* Almalexia's Mercy - an equivalent source of HPS from the Blood Magic procs
* Almost a full Crafty Alfiq + Draugr Hulk - ~6000 Magicka + ~6000 Stamina
* And a 10% buff of their choice, which they can dynamically allocate to damage, healing, or split between the two.

And this is all coming from one passive, or, in the case of DK, one skill. Even if my opponent decided to fight me completely naked, they would technically still have more effective itemization than I do.

After finally putting all of this into perspective, we can see why Werewolf was performing so well. It's not that the Werewolf skill line itself was weak by any means. Rather, these kinds of power spikes are what allowed Werewolf to compete with the other top-tier classes in the first place. Werewolf was able to compensate for the weaknesses of its skill line through the enormous amount of effective power gained from sorc class masteries. That sustain wasn't just keeping the form functional - it was basically providing tons of additional defenses, resources, healing, and offensive uptime that allowed Werewolf to compete.

By adjusting Werewolf sustain in the way it has been handled during the current PTS cycle, the likely result is not a healthier or more balanced Werewolf. It is a rather underpowered spec when played on anything other than Sorc, where it remains borderline playable. The main issue wasn't necessarily that Werewolf was too OP on it's own. The problem is where that power is coming from, which the current changes fail to acknowledge and address.

Core of Flame on DK represents the exact same issue as Conservation of Energy. It is a skill that naturally fits into the DK rotation while simultaneously filling so many gaps that it gives the build an enormous amount of freedom to invest more heavily into damage, healing, tankiness, or utility. Rather than repeating the exact same numbers and calculations for Core of Flame, the underlying principle is the same: when a skill naturally covers multiple resource and sustain requirements, the power it frees up elsewhere becomes the real benefit.

Now, I doubt much will change. There is way more to be said, and more issues to be tackled, such as HP scaling heals / shields, but the post is getting rather lenghty. Hundreds of similar complaints have already been made, yet they appear to have had little to no impact on the current PTS patch notes. Still, it is incredibly disheartening to see that even the most basic numerical adjustments seem so difficult to implement. Bringing the classes a little more in line - through targeted, incremental nerfs to the problematic skills ( which don't take more than half a year to implement ), combined with some positive adjustments, if even temporary, to the sustain provided by abilities such as Netch, Siphoning Strikes, Templar Rune etc. - would go a long way toward addressing the actual problem.

None of this requires some massive rework of the game. In some cases, the solution could quite literally be as simple as changing a single value on an existing ability. It simply requires acknowledging where the excessive power is coming from and making reasonable numerical adjustments. But once again, it feels like too much to ask. And as long as it continues to feel that way, I'll be perfectly happy to remain on the sidelines rather than engage with the game, as I'm sure many others are doing.

IncultaWolf

Using better scoreboard add-on to show everyone's class in a battleground. This is what you'll see repeatedly. Solo queue

dark_hunterxmg

IncultaWolf wrote: »

Using better scoreboard add-on to show everyone's class in a battleground. This is what you'll see repeatedly. Solo queue

Go to Stormhaven and you'll see more of the same. Sometimes the sorcs are werewolves (not many) since it's the only class that can perform well.

Vaqual

IncultaWolf wrote: »

Using better scoreboard add-on to show everyone's class in a battleground. This is what you'll see repeatedly. Solo queue

Revolting. With all the work that has gone into the current combat meta, some of these ungrateful barbarians still pick templar?

smh

IncultaWolf

Vaqual wrote: »

IncultaWolf wrote: »

Using better scoreboard add-on to show everyone's class in a battleground. This is what you'll see repeatedly. Solo queue

Revolting. With all the work that has gone into the current combat meta, some of these ungrateful barbarians still pick templar?

smh

The rare templar is almost always a healtank that spams the prayer ultimate.

Urzigurumash

Vaqual wrote: »

IncultaWolf wrote: »

Using better scoreboard add-on to show everyone's class in a battleground. This is what you'll see repeatedly. Solo queue

Revolting. With all the work that has gone into the current combat meta, some of these ungrateful barbarians still pick templar?

smh

Maybe they were queued for both modes, remember 4v4 is still a contest of Healers.

Urzigurumash

Great post OP, nice to see some real analysis.

aLi3nZ

Meanwhile go visit waywrest dueling spot and you won’t be able to beat the top templars like Rainbow and Prodigy.

And there is some crazy good wardens and nightblades that can easily stand against Sorcs and DKs as well.

I don’t think I see necro there much at all though to be fair but Templar is very competitive in duels and bg PvP as damage dealers from what I’ve seen. Wardens and good night blades as well.

DK dominates the play field. The only reason sorc is doing ok is due to decent class masteries. Please stop calling to nerf Sorc and throwing them in there alongside DK.i don’t think they deserve to be nerfed in their current state.

Besides sorc ww using conservation of energy and static reverb. That needs to be removed. Get rid of ww using class masteries at all and if anything give them their own class masteries.

Zyaneth_Bal

Ww fans rly are WILD ngl

Urzigurumash

@aLi3nZ when was Burstplar not a top tier duelist? And Necro is forbidden from dueling outside of Fargrave and the Hollow City that's one reason it's so unpopular.

I say that about Plar just to LESSEN excuses for DK's state, I agree in general, Sorc only needs a slight tamping down of the Masteries.

hoangdz

Fun fact: Did you know that Conservation requires proccing rank 2 of Blood Magic to work? If you put 1 point into that passive, it wouldn't proc lol.

Anyways, there are 3 solutions for this:

1) Introduce a cooldown for the passive
2) Reduce the value of either the heal or the sustain
3) Remove either the heal or the sustain (but also buffing the remaining value)

Personally, I would pick option 3 and remove the heal while keeping the sustain. Sorc has always been difficult to play because it lacked healing compared to other classes, so giving it a permanent 2-4k HPS removes that drawback. The sustain gives you better build diversity, so keeping it is actually good for the class.

Aces-High-82

evLRise wrote: »

In order to properly fix a problem, we first need to understand it. Complex systems cannot be improved by addressing only their most visible symptoms; we need to understand what is actually causing the problem, why it exists, how different parts interact, and what consequences potential solutions may have. This post is my attempt to explain these issues as comprehensively as possible, simply because I want to open a patch notes post one day, read through it, and think “Gods, finally, for once it makes sense.”, maybe actually look forward to playing rather than getting annoyed.

In U50 PvP, the common denominator among all the top-tier classes - and the factor that separated them by a huge margin from everything else - was sustain. Unfortunately, U51 PTS fails to address this issue at its root. In some cases, such as DK and Sorc, the issue is effectively ignored altogether. In the case of Werewolf, the change simply slaps a large, dirty bandage over the problem without addressing the underlying cause.

Why is having near-infinite sustain such a big issue? Let's do a little exercise. Rather than looking at the current wording of Conservation of Energy sorc mastery, imagine for a moment that it said:

You gain 7500 Armor, 5000 Magicka, 5000 Stamina, 1200 Heal per Second, 800 Stamina Recovery, 800 Magicka Recovery, and another 10% buff that you can distribute wherever you want - 10% damage, 10% healing, or split between the two however you see fit.

It's rather obvious that, if this was the actual wording, the community would lose its mind. (Well, technically, they already are.) But here's the problem: this is effectively happens in-game. Sustain isn't simply a resource-management convenience. When a build can maintain its resources indefinitely, it is effectively receiving a massive collection of defensive, offensive, and healing advantages simultaneously. It can continuously block, dodge, heal, cast defensive abilities, maintain buffs, and use expensive offensive skills without having to make the resource-management decisions that other builds are forced to make. At that point, sustain stops being a supporting stat and becomes a massive source of power in its own right.

Now, let's understand where exactly these numbers mentioned above come from.
- 7500 armor - Since I don't need sustain, running tripots is rather pointless, so I'd rather go for armor pots for +6000 armor. The last 1500 armor comes from fortified CP, which I added just for simplicity, but in truth it's 6000 armor + a "free" orange CP of choice.

- 5000 magicka & stamina - Since I don't need sustain, I'm not stuck with orzorga's for food, so I can simply go bewitched for 4250 *1.16 ( 10% max stats from dark magic and 6% from undaunted CPs ). For comparison - Crafty Alfiq - a set which was actually quite common not too long has a 2550 mag as the 5-piece bonus.

- 1200 Heal per Second. Conservation of Energy procs your Blood Magic passive everytime you use an ability with a cost, rather than when you cast a Dark Magic skill.

For context here's the Blood Magic passive text:

When you cast a Dark Magic ability with a cost, you heal for 1600 Health if you are not at full Health. This portion of the ability scales off your Max Health. If your Health is full, the higher of your Max Magicka or Stamina is increased by 10% for 10 seconds.

Now, what a lot of people don't know, is that abilities with a cost are not restricted to skills. They also mean core combat abilities ( dodge, break free etc. ) and therefore you can proc this passive multiple times in the same GCD window. So rather than 1600 ( 800 in PvP ), I simply gave it a 50% buff to bring it closer to a realistic scenario, for a total of 1200 HPS, as it will proc significantly more often than 1/s. This already sounds pretty strong - to some degree maybe even reasonable, but if we think even more about it, the heal equivalent is roughly 1/3 of a Vigor. Now, the important mention here is, a 100% uptime Vigor will eat 20% of your Total Casts. Conservation of Energy, on the other hand, consumes none of your casts. You simply play normally and receive roughly 1/3 of a Vigor passively, while retaining the 20% of your casts that would otherwise be spent maintaining Vigor. In other words, you're getting a significant portion of a Vigor's healing with zero rotational opportunity cost.

- ~800 Stamina & Magicka Recovery - While technically this isn't Recovery but rather flat resource sustain - which is actually beneficial because you don't lose it while blocking, sprinting etc. - the reasoning is largely the same as with the HPS. Conservation of Energy returns 240 Magicka and Stamina per proc. Sustain in ESO is calculated every 2 seconds, so 240 Magicka and Stamina per second is effectively 480 sustain. Since it can frequently proc more than once per GCD, we again apply a 50% increase to bring the number closer to a realistic scenario, which is ~750-800.

- 10% buff to whatever you want - This comes from the opportunity cost of sustain skills such as Dark Deal. Not having to press Dark Deal, which would generally represent 1 cast out of 10 skills, means those casts can instead be used for damage or healing. More importantly, you can dynamically allocate that “10%” based on what you actually need at the time. If you're healthy, you can use those casts for damage. If you're under pressure, you can use them for healing or defense. So this isn't literally a 10% damage or healing buff. It's arguably more powerful in practice: it's 10% more of your available actions that can be dedicated to whatever the current situation demands.

How do we translate all of this into actual power levels? It means that, from one passive alone, my opponent effectively has the equivalent of:

* Fortified Brass - ~6500 Armor
* Wretched Vitality - ~520 sustain
* Almalexia's Mercy - an equivalent source of HPS from the Blood Magic procs
* Almost a full Crafty Alfiq + Draugr Hulk - ~6000 Magicka + ~6000 Stamina
* And a 10% buff of their choice, which they can dynamically allocate to damage, healing, or split between the two.

And this is all coming from one passive, or, in the case of DK, one skill. Even if my opponent decided to fight me completely naked, they would technically still have more effective itemization than I do.

After finally putting all of this into perspective, we can see why Werewolf was performing so well. It's not that the Werewolf skill line itself was weak by any means. Rather, these kinds of power spikes are what allowed Werewolf to compete with the other top-tier classes in the first place. Werewolf was able to compensate for the weaknesses of its skill line through the enormous amount of effective power gained from sorc class masteries. That sustain wasn't just keeping the form functional - it was basically providing tons of additional defenses, resources, healing, and offensive uptime that allowed Werewolf to compete.

By adjusting Werewolf sustain in the way it has been handled during the current PTS cycle, the likely result is not a healthier or more balanced Werewolf. It is a rather underpowered spec when played on anything other than Sorc, where it remains borderline playable. The main issue wasn't necessarily that Werewolf was too OP on it's own. The problem is where that power is coming from, which the current changes fail to acknowledge and address.

Core of Flame on DK represents the exact same issue as Conservation of Energy. It is a skill that naturally fits into the DK rotation while simultaneously filling so many gaps that it gives the build an enormous amount of freedom to invest more heavily into damage, healing, tankiness, or utility. Rather than repeating the exact same numbers and calculations for Core of Flame, the underlying principle is the same: when a skill naturally covers multiple resource and sustain requirements, the power it frees up elsewhere becomes the real benefit.

Now, I doubt much will change. There is way more to be said, and more issues to be tackled, such as HP scaling heals / shields, but the post is getting rather lenghty. Hundreds of similar complaints have already been made, yet they appear to have had little to no impact on the current PTS patch notes. Still, it is incredibly disheartening to see that even the most basic numerical adjustments seem so difficult to implement. Bringing the classes a little more in line - through targeted, incremental nerfs to the problematic skills ( which don't take more than half a year to implement ), combined with some positive adjustments, if even temporary, to the sustain provided by abilities such as Netch, Siphoning Strikes, Templar Rune etc. - would go a long way toward addressing the actual problem.

None of this requires some massive rework of the game. In some cases, the solution could quite literally be as simple as changing a single value on an existing ability. It simply requires acknowledging where the excessive power is coming from and making reasonable numerical adjustments. But once again, it feels like too much to ask. And as long as it continues to feel that way, I'll be perfectly happy to remain on the sidelines rather than engage with the game, as I'm sure many others are doing.

Blood Magic has a ICD of 0.8 sec

evLRise

aLi3nZ wrote: »

Meanwhile go visit waywrest dueling spot and you won’t be able to beat the top templars like Rainbow and Prodigy.

And there is some crazy good wardens and nightblades that can easily stand against Sorcs and DKs as well.

I don’t think I see necro there much at all though to be fair but Templar is very competitive in duels and bg PvP as damage dealers from what I’ve seen. Wardens and good night blades as well.

DK dominates the play field. The only reason sorc is doing ok is due to decent class masteries. Please stop calling to nerf Sorc and throwing them in there alongside DK.i don’t think they deserve to be nerfed in their current state.

Besides sorc ww using conservation of energy and static reverb. That needs to be removed. Get rid of ww using class masteries at all and if anything give them their own class masteries.

I'm like 5W-30L on my NB for duels in U50, which is my best class by a huge margin.
I started playing DK for the first time and I'm 110W-8L-5 stalemates.

I'm sure that NB is doing great when played well when my DK winrate is only 550% higher despite barely started playing DK vs years on X'ing and dueling on NB.

ItsNotLiving

I will not debate but in my experience sorcerer is just as strong as dragonknight if not stronger because of streak. Simply my experience in game. Sorcerer players don’t think the is the case because DK can cast a buff to reduce Sorcerer damage by 50% so the second most common class just walls sorcerer.