HOW TO BALANCE ESO AND MAKE HYBRID BUILDS MORE VIABLE

SRIBES · December 2014

Please hear me out on this one. I feel like zos kind of punishes hybrid builds or people that want to try different things in ESO. With some of the new undaunted passives they are taking the right step, but more work needs to be done.
What are somd of your ideas to balancs ESO? Here are some of my ideas:

•Make weapon damage and spell power scale off of just damage. This would allow players to be able to have more diversity with builds and make stamina and magika builds pretty much equal damage wise but more situation and play style based. This will hurt PvE and help PvP but with the champion system it should balance itself out in PvE.

•Don't make stamina AoEs blockable: This hurts stamina builds quite a bit in PvP and I don't think they should be blockable or magika AoEs should also be blockable.

•Better sets for medium and heavy armors: Magika builds seem to have all the best sets. Examples: Warlock,

•Buff heavy armor: Not sure how to do this.. But it needs to be done.

•Weapon and racial ultimates: It would add a lot more diversity into ESO. I think racial ultimates should mainly be something to do with the race lore wise or racial bonuses we have seen in other games. Example: Woodelf can calm an enemy that has less health than them, Dark elf can summon a ghost, Breton can take 50% less damage from spells for 10 seconds, they should be pretty minor things and be cheap. Weapon ultimates should resemble other weapon skills from that skills tree and be cheap costing like 50-100 ultimate but be unique. Example: Something like cleave but does 2x as much damage, is a 360 degree attack and knocks all enemies back it hits.

•Make some class skills cost stamina: I think MOST class skills should cost magika but I think some of the skills in classes should cost stamina

•Make armor/spell resistance debuffs less of a thing.

•Don't allow healing debuffs to stack, make them have a cap. Ex. Player can only have up to a 50% heal debuff on him/her.

•Try not to nerf things, buff things to be on par!

Barik · December 2014

I think a good idea would be to make the passive/skills for all "guilds" more specific to the role that guild has.

For example the below guilds that are and will be in the game should have skills and passives that are directly linked to increasing:

Fighters- Melee weapons/ heavy armour / sheilds / weaponsmithing/ sheild smithing
Mages- Staffs / Magic / Alchemy / Enchanting / Light Armour / Mana
Undaunted- Raiders/Boss Hunters - teamwork skills (they already doing well on this one)
Thieves Stealth /Gold Making (like more bag space or more money for sold items)/ Treasure (like increased loot chance or make treasure chest glow)
Dark Brotherhood- Medium Armour/Stealth/Bows and Daggers/ Solo Play

I recon although you should be able to join all the guilds, in order to unlock all the perks of a guild you need to "commit" to the guild.You should only be able to commit to 2 guilds (still be in the others but not able to get the advanced passives/skills) .I feel it will make your character more diverse from other people

Nihil · December 2014

AsweetRoll wrote: »

Please hear me out on this one. I feel like zos kind of punishes hybrid builds or people that want to try different things in ESO. With some of the new undaunted passives they are taking the right step, but more work needs to be done.
What are somd of your ideas to balancs ESO? Here are some of my ideas:

•Make weapon damage and spell power scale off of just damage. This would allow players to be able to have more diversity with builds and make stamina and magika builds pretty much equal damage wise but more situation and play style based. This will hurt PvE and help PvP but with the champion system it should balance itself out in PvE.

Interesting concept, although would also make Hybrid builds weaker in the future. With the removal of Soft caps with weapon damage and spell damage we will be in the same boat we are in now with their current system, maybe not to as extreme, but it would still be there.

•Don't make stamina AoEs blockable: This hurts stamina builds quite a bit in PvP and I don't think they should be blockable or magika AoEs should also be blockable.

Equality would be awesome

•Better sets for medium and heavy armors: Magika builds seem to have all the best sets. Examples: Warlock,

I do think we need some more variety. Right now the majority of "Stamina" sets are focused very heavily on crit, and their are less focused on non crit damage (like dreugh king would be nice in medium armor), and some sustain.

{quote]•Buff heavy armor: Not sure how to do this.. But it needs to be done.[/quote]
They might be covering this in the next update, (depending on how they balance skills). With it being impossible for light armor users to reach the same armor level as heavy armor, and heavy armor being slightly behind in spell resistence, it could be that heavy armor will be looked for more after 1.6, specially with the current influx of archers.

•Weapon and racial ultimates: It would add a lot more diversity into ESO. I think racial ultimates should mainly be something to do with the race lore wise or racial bonuses we have seen in other games. Example: Woodelf can calm an enemy that has less health than them, Dark elf can summon a ghost, Breton can take 50% less damage from spells for 10 seconds, they should be pretty minor things and be cheap. Weapon ultimates should resemble other weapon skills from that skills tree and be cheap costing like 50-100 ultimate but be unique. Example: Something like cleave but does 2x as much damage, is a 360 degree attack and knocks all enemies back it hits.

I would say be careful how to balance the racial ones if they did... People are already up in arms about their race... ultimates might just add to it now.

•Make some class skills cost stamina: I think MOST class skills should cost magika but I think some of the skills in classes should cost stamina

I thought I read that some morphs were getting changed to stamina in the next patch

•Make armor/spell resistance debuffs less of a thing.

I would say make it more active skills rather then passives that are debuffs. magicka has to many that passively increase it, while stamina needs to have active skills to bypass armor (or specific sets)

•Don't allow healing debuffs to stack, make them have a cap. Ex. Player can only have up to a 50% heal debuff on him/her.

Personally agree

•Try not to nerf things, buff things to be on par!

There will always be nerfing, buffing other classes, or creating abilities to counter other abilities is counted as a nerf to some people. It is a delicate balance, where they do need to buff things but at the same time need to still be willing to go back and weaken other areas or else they will eventually back themselves in the corner. (my friends left TERA because they buffed to much, specially lancer, and never really nerfed when it was hard to argue that specific abilities were to strong).

Radolfus · December 2014

I agree with you on the racial Ultimates curvy... To be able to have class Ultimates really make the game more diverse. But I feel if they give Stamina Buillds a buff Stam Aoe can easily be OP. (Unblockable , looks good!) some class abilities need to consume stamina also... Everything is based on magika these days I havent seen anyone use a stamina ability but rapid maneuver for 2 days

If Stam is given the right attention we could be looking at a revolutionary era of hybrid builds for all classes.

Tavore1138 · December 2014

Simple really, to balance ESO remove classes. Return to TES style of play where you could use any skill tree you were willing to invest time & points into...

Instant goodbye to qq about a class being overpowered or underpowered becuase anyone who wants talons, or ambush, or blt escape or pumturing strikes can have them, you can have all of them at once even.

The risk - OP synergies... The mitigation - anyone can use them until they get tweaked...

Personally I'd love to mix and match abilities from multiple trees and game play would be great necause you would mever be sure what ability would be thrown at you next.

I never understood why ZOS bothered introducing classes when freestyle chatacter creation would have removed a lot of their problems.

DeLindsay · December 2014

AsweetRoll wrote: »

Please hear me out on this one. I feel like zos kind of punishes hybrid builds or people that want to try different things in ESO. With some of the new undaunted passives they are taking the right step, but more work needs to be done.

ZoS has nothing at all to do with PLAYERS who won't allow you or others into their group because you don't choose to play the FOTM build for your Class. There's nothing ZoS can do about this as it's deeply rooted in the minds of some players that you can't be this without that. It wouldn't matter if you could do 200 DPS more than them wearing a mix of all 3 armor types and 1H/Shield, if they don't like what you're doing they're gonna boot you from group. This happens in EVERY MMO and no matter what game devs do to remedy it the cycle continues.

There's also nothing wrong with the Heavy armor tree now that Zos HAS tweaked it. And much of what you are asking for will be part of the Champion System and beyond. The whole game is changing from it's roots up.

tplink3r1 · December 2014

*Remove damage increase based on Stamina/Magicka.

whiteshadow711jppreub18_ESO · December 2014

AsweetRoll wrote: »

racial ultimates: It would add a lot more diversity into ESO. I think racial ultimates should mainly be something to do with the race lore wise or racial bonuses we have seen in other games. Example: Woodelf can calm an enemy that has less health than them, Dark elf can summon a ghost, Breton can take 50% less damage from spells for 10 seconds, they should be pretty minor things and be cheap.

When they were first making the game they were going to have racial Ultimates

Khajiit was going to get Eye of Fear, the Bosmer was going to be able to summon a Bear, Breton's were going to get one were they could absorb all spells cast at them for like 5+ sec's, Orc's were going to get Berserker Rage, and so on.

But...

They decided against it and folded the Ultimates into some of the abilities we have now, Eye of Fear became Aspect of Terror for the Nightblades, the Breton ability became Light armors Annulment /Harness Magicka..

I always thought the Orc's got the raw deal, no Berserker Rage..

david.haypreub18_ESO · December 2014

I agree with the OP on almost everything.

--Some class skills should cost stamina rather than magicka. The Templar's Biting Jabs and Javelin, for example. There is also no reason not to have weapon ultimates (I've been saying that since beta).

--Heavy Armor needs to be buffed. It is mostly just for PvE tanking nowadays (and Light Armor is arguably better even for that).

But most importantly:

--Don't make skills scale off max magica or stamina. This alone would make hybrid builds much more viable.

Ommamar · December 2014

SuraklinPrime wrote: »

Simple really, to balance ESO remove classes. Return to TES style of play where you could use any skill tree you were willing to invest time & points into...

Instant goodbye to qq about a class being overpowered or underpowered becuase anyone who wants talons, or ambush, or blt escape or pumturing strikes can have them, you can have all of them at once even.

The risk - OP synergies... The mitigation - anyone can use them until they get tweaked...

Personally I'd love to mix and match abilities from multiple trees and game play would be great necause you would mever be sure what ability would be thrown at you next.

I never understood why ZOS bothered introducing classes when freestyle chatacter creation would have removed a lot of their problems.

It is interesting when people say that TES had no classes where that change really only took shape in Skyrim. Of course I always went with the custom class but it was also fun at times to try and play with in the framework of a class.

That being said with the skill point system I agree a more Skyrim type of system would work well. You would have a "class" but it would be one you built and I agree would add a lot of surprises to a fight particularly in PVP. I do think if they kept the design of the skills there would be those more commonly used by the majority. So the community might self impose classes on itself, then those who liked to try different things would be in the same place they are now.

Tavore1138 · December 2014

Ommamar wrote: »

SuraklinPrime wrote: »

Simple really, to balance ESO remove classes. Return to TES style of play where you could use any skill tree you were willing to invest time & points into...

Instant goodbye to qq about a class being overpowered or underpowered becuase anyone who wants talons, or ambush, or blt escape or pumturing strikes can have them, you can have all of them at once even.

The risk - OP synergies... The mitigation - anyone can use them until they get tweaked...

Personally I'd love to mix and match abilities from multiple trees and game play would be great because you would mever be sure what ability would be thrown at you next.

I never understood why ZOS bothered introducing classes when freestyle chatacter creation would have removed a lot of their problems.

It is interesting when people say that TES had no classes where that change really only took shape in Skyrim. Of course I always went with the custom class but it was also fun at times to try and play with in the framework of a class.

That being said with the skill point system I agree a more Skyrim type of system would work well. You would have a "class" but it would be one you built and I agree would add a lot of surprises to a fight particularly in PVP. I do think if they kept the design of the skills there would be those more commonly used by the majority. So the community might self impose classes on itself, then those who liked to try different things would be in the same place they are now.

I suppose they always had the major/minor/other skills approach before Skyrim but it never stopped you learning a skill just made you select ones you'd be better at learning.

I think you would find some skills and builds would initially dominate (just as they do now) but the difference is no-one would be denied access to them because they clicked the 'wrong' box in the character creation screen before knowing the game.

I would guess that it would also make it easier for the devs to monitor which skills everyone was using and possibly focus on them to tweak/nerf.

Even then because the group content needs players to fill certain roles and points are not infinite you would get some diversity.