Siege Shield Changes

Turelus · July 2014

Siege Shield: This ability now gives you an armor and resistance bonus instead of reducing all damage taken.

Would it be possible to get some more information on what this change will be?
Right now most players in PVP are close to if not at the soft-cap for armour and resistance and will still suffer excessive damage from a siege weapon. The only viable way to lower this damage is to use the Siege Shield skill. Even with the use of this skill an organised group using focused fire will drop a player instantly (as it should be) with the merge of the campaigns and the increase in populations across the campaigns it the above situations will become much more likely.

Q: Will the morph Siege Weapon Shield's 90% damage reduction also become armour and spell resistance.

Q: Will armour and Resistance have a bigger (if any) impact on defence vs siege weapons?

To use some actual numbers.
Add-ons used: FTC, Soft-Info

I'm playing a Dunmer Nightblade using Heavy Pact Armour (legendary), Lover Mundas Stone and a 600 Resistance enchant on my necklace.

Final stats are

Spell Resistance 1990+396/1660
Armour 1924+306/1660
Fire Resistance: 1575
20% Reduced Damage from Siege Weapons (Bastion of the Heartland)

Fire Ballista Damage received was 300 no matter on my armour/resistance ratings
Using both Ring of Preservation and Unstoppable adding 1650 additional armour and resistance (subject to soft-cap diminished returns) I was still taking 300 damage.

Siege Weapon Shield and base stats reduced the damage to 220

Turelus · July 2014

Bumping to first page again.

If there is anyone on the PTS who has the Siege Weapon Shield morph could you let me know if they changed the entire thing to armour/resistance.

Right now I can only see this skill becoming a joke and not used if it become yet another armour/resistance skill.

Domander · July 2014

I wanted to find this out the day the pts patch notes about it hit. I couldn't get in to pvp at the time, so I'm curious as well. It is an overall nerf to the base ability, probably so that it has diminishing returns.

but

logically Siege weapon shield *should* keep it's 90% or it would be a useless morph.

Turelus · July 2014

Bumping again with more points on why this isn't a great idea.

Current most casters have a very high focus level meaning they're able to punch right through any spell resistance a player might have. As I stated previously most players in PVP are running high in regards to spell resistance and armour making the new shield bonus worthless as it's going to be wasted in diminishing returns of softcaps.

Added to this that from the numbers I gave above unless changed armour and spell resistance seems to have no real effect vs a siege weapon making the basic shield pointless, and if changed the Siege Weapon Shield morph just as pointless.

The static % damage reduced might be somewhat powerful but it's also working, people use these shields commonly because they're good vs siege weapons, if the idea is to reduce the effects of DR vs players will the 20%/90% still apply from siege weapon damage.

Turelus · August 2014

Seeing as this ships Monday now and there was never an answer to this it seems we will be facing having worthless siege bubbles.

For those not aware right now Spell Resistance does nothing to aid you in PVP vs anyone in light armour (thread about it on the Alliance War section).

demonlkojipub19_ESO · August 2014

Definitely sounds like a nerf. I don't think armor or spell resistance has any effect against siege damage, at least it doesn't appear to on live servers. Won't be much of a siege shield then...

Turelus · August 2014

demonlkojipub19_ESO wrote: »

Definitely sounds like a nerf. I don't think armor or spell resistance has any effect against siege damage, at least it doesn't appear to on live servers. Won't be much of a siege shield then...

I did testing on live to see if Spell Resistance and Amour helped vs siege weapons and it did nothing so unless they have changed it for 1.3 tomorrow (the question asked in this thread and not answered) then the shield is essentially useless.

@ZOS_BrianWheeler any information on this? As it's making it live now.

PBpsy · August 2014

I am a little curious what is the difference from the Ring of Preservation is now considering that ROP is easier to get, level and cost a lot less stamina which is not very useful in sieges.

Comaetilico · August 2014

PBpsy wrote: »

I am a little curious what is the difference from the Ring of Preservation is now considering that ROP is easier to get, level and cost a lot less stamina which is not very useful in sieges.

the area of effect... ROP is much smaller...

but that doesn't make the buble usefull... they are both bad... or better to say almost useless...

siege weapon bypass armor/resist...

armor/resist penetration is bugged so that everyone with a sharpened weapon can easily bypass armor resist far above the softcap...

what really make me laugh... is the fact that over the past 2 months we've seen a few skill/passive that increased armor/spell resist being turned into damage reduction (nord racial and the templar aedric spear ultimate are 2 such example...) because they were almost useless in their previous incarnation... and now we see the exact opposite done... the buble that was a moderately usefull skill (it still had quite the high cost making it only usable during long range siege since the caster will be at least with half magika after the cast) get turned into a totally useless skill by turning its damage reduction into a resist/armor buff... really I can't understand how the mind of the one who thought this works -_-'

Turelus · August 2014

I think the most annoying part about this is that we posted and gave feedback, and nothing changed or answers given as to why the change was made.
Kind of makes me want to give up putting effort into testing things.

Kiljaz · August 2014

I'm a little confused as to what the point of spell resistance even is. It's like a blanket resistance that has very low effect it seems.

It does not apply to fire, poison, magic, lightning, etc...

If you stack fire resistance for instance, you will take less damage from a fire ballista, but if you have 800 spell resistance, you take the same damage from a fire ballista as you will if you have 1900 spell resistance...