oziebanks_ESO wrote: »

I will save my rant about the non-working skills and passives for the end of this post, frankly we all know the issues with the NB skills.

The real issue that most people just don't talk about, is that NB is meant to be an assassin class. Save your "play the way you want" talk, we all know that the second the class system was implemented, the roles were cast. Now some players have made some very unique modifications to their classes and excel in roles you wouldn't think about. But the hard and simple fact is that NB is meant to be a single target, glass cannon. Well we got the glass part, but where is our cannon?

I have leveled NB to VR10 using DW, and sometimes off spec'ing my bow on some bosses. Ambush, concealed weapons, and stealth are fine, but to be completely honest, after the initial strike, NB become almost useless. We have no real powerful attacks that even qualify us at assassins. Yeah mark target is ok but the weakness is tossed right back at us. The siphon skill line is ok but to be honest that screams mage to me, not assassin. In fact, the bow line is the only thing that I have ever seen that really makes a NB almost one-shot someone short of using Soul Shred from stealth (which, again... nerfed).

Long story short, you gave us *** skills for our class, and very little REAL survivability. You made ALL class skills rely on magic, but you were not consistent on how our damage scales. How is it that our main armor set boosts stamina regen, but we rely on magic?!? And screw weapon attacks and skills, those are not NB skills, they are weapon skills. On top of that, Blur is only for a 15% chance to dodge! That sounds more like a 2 skill point passive then an active skill. That is terrible! We have other near useless skills like Summon Shade, which isn't even a real summon, its just a debuff. Yes its true using something like healing paths and sap we can sustain our health and ive seen the video of the NB tank soloing tons of mobs, but most of us don't play that way. We are medium armor assassins with have no room on our bars for survivability AND damage.

You either need to A) completely overhaul our class (unlikely I know), or Seriously boost the damage output of the classic NB build. There is no need to boost any of the healing we have, we aren't meant to be healers, but our damage it nothing, single target or otherwise.

Now, the rest of the rant. (Spoiler alert, a lot of this has been said 1000 times)

ZOS... you give us a broken class on launch... ok fine, its a new game. This patch was supposed to fix some issues with our class, mainly passives... Well the passives you fixed are next to useless so no help there... You broke 3 skills in this patch... ok, first real big update, ill let that slide too.

I can let all of the above go ZOS, all of it. BUT ILL BE DAMNED, if you not only increase the difficulty of all the mobs in the veteran zones, almost giving them 50% more health AND damage output, but you have the gal to tell us that the NB fixes will come in 4-6 weeks?!?!? 4-6 weeks of a class that was barely holding it together solo as it was now having the added insult of MORE broken skills, against STRONGER monsters!!! You have literally made NB's almost useless, and more than a liability in ANY group content!

Ill be very frank here. You fix the NB issues ASAP. Not in 4-6 weeks, but as soon as you have a fix for an issue, you patch it. You listen to the players, and you respond to them more often! You explain to the players, WHY you decided to make the changes to vet content that you did with so much still broken, and you take into account player input on a class that honestly, needs a complete overhaul. After that you need to give out free one time respecs to all players to they can rebuild around the fixes and changes you have made. Offering respecs will not hurt your profits in anyway. this is yet another issue I have seen in forums over and over again yet I have not even seen a Dev get on and say anything about it.

And lower the mob strength until you get this stuff fixed!!!

Edit: Ok, I did not make my point on a couple of issues and for that I apologize. First, the NB itself did not get nerfed this latest patch. Aside from a couple more skills breaking, the NB overall POTENTIAL strength is the same. What happened, is the veteran enemies got a HUGE boost to damage and HP. Enemies of only vet7 are hitting me for 700 damage at a time, through medium armor. That is 3 hits and your dead. So no nerf to the NB, but we are at a disadvantage because while enemies were made stronger, we were not fixed, and our power remained the same.

On the issue of being forced into a role, I do not only mean Tank/Healer/DPS. I mean the skill trees as well. 90% of the people who have posted that are doing fine with their NB still, are using the siphon skill tree. Leeching strikes, sap, and the Shadow skill Refreshing Path seem to be the main thing that people are using to merely SURVIVE with the net patch. I say again, to those that like that playstyle, great. Use it, nobody is bashing you for using it. but there are two more skill trees that are DESIGNED for a solo playstyle, with high damage. The fact remains that the Shadow tree, and Assassin tree, are FAR too underpowered (forgetting that they are also broken, as I said ill let broken skills and passives slide for now) to be of any real use.

Finally. I have to be very blunt here. The NB is a class that is meant to do high single target DPS. It CAN be made to aoe, or be a caster, but the fact that it has two skill trees called Shadow (meant for stealth attacks, and burst damage) and Assassinate (for high single target damage out of stealth), means that it is supposed to have overwhelming single target potential. Between completely useless moves like blur (again, the 15% dodge chance sounds more like a passive then an active), Summon Shade (again, not a true pet that can hold agro), Mark (a move that literally makes you AND your target hit each other harder which pretty much negates its usefulness IMO), and Haste ( increases weapon speed by 30%, which is honestly not enough to be worth it in current state of game), we NB's are forced down the Siphon Skill tree in some way or another.

It is not that we cant still DPS, its that we cant DPS using two out of three of our trees. The two main trees for fast, ST DPS simply do not work, are completely underpowered, and are honestly a sick joke.

cigarsmoker wrote: »

williams226 wrote: »

BUT Shadow Cloak is dropping after a split second pretty much all the time. I think its the Blood Craze but as I only just started back on this character I am still working it out. So I have had to drop Shadow Cloak.

Instead of blood craze why not use blinding flurry or rapid strikes? Damage is still decent and you don't get the DoT effect to break Cloak.
Unless you need blood craze to keep up the HoT and survive. Then I'm not sure what to tell you.