Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

Hello all! If you read the title and clicked this anyway, you probably know why, and won't care that there's no tl;dr (too long didn't read) snippets. I have done a lot of testing on the 1.6 PTS patches, and overall am pretty impressed with it. There are a huge number of things to cover, including bugs, balance oversights, and itemization here though, and while this is actually an abbreviated version of what I originally had been writing, it hits on the vast majority of ones I think are "important" or higher in terms of severity .

NOTE: This is an edited version of feedback given through a different channel to make it more readable, and protect the innocent .

Thoughts on a variety of 1.6 changes and additions from Attorneyatlawl:

Itemization and Equipment:


Glyphs and enchantments
Glyph values for jewelry and some weapons are, by and large, much worse in relative power as compared to 1.5 with the new stat system, and a few unique enchants have outright been removed from the game that could come on some dungeon drop items such as Shield of the Man-Bull (Auriel’s Shield enchantment, which was 5% chance for a moderate damage shield on all attacks, has been replaced with a standard +health enchant now on PTS). Pure stat glyphs for armor pieces themselves (ie +max magicka, +max health, etc.) are relatively a little weaker than live but only to a smaller extent, which is probably intended as far as balance goes.

The jewelry glyph change however is a heavy nerf and really leaves the only “good” jewelry glyphs as cost reductions, with only one other glyph being useful but only for a couple of very niche builds in pvp (health regen, even though its value is also comparatively worse). As an example, in the 1.6 patch you can get VR14 gold jewelry glyphs for 64 spell damage, while most set bonuses offer 177 spell damage rating at the same tier. However, in prior patches on live, it’s always been about even for a jewelry glyph versus a set bonus (i.e. a jewelry glyph gives 13 on live while a set bonus is 12). This of course lowers build varieties in gear for those slots significantly and renders a good number of glyphs nearly worthless to use.

I’ll include a quick list below of the ones I can think of off the top of my head affected in this fashion, all are jewelry glyphs:
-Health, Stamina, and Magicka regeneration
-Spell Damage and Weapon Damage
-Armor and Spell resistances (both values being far lower in provided mitigation compared to 1.5 and earlier live versions, as well as relative utility due to normal gear armor rating providing spell resistance too instead of just plain armor rating).
-Individual resistances such as fire, poison, and shock glyphs all provide much less mitigation as well since their values are close to the existing live ones numerically in resistance amount but with the stat system scaling, they’re about 1/10th as powerful as they used to be in actual damage reduction.
-Weapon glyphs have seen a nerf across the board, a handful of the most drastic examples include damage shield bubble enchantments which were scaled only a minor amount in proportion to average hitpoint pools people have & additionally already had twice the internal cooldown compared to damage type glyphs, along with other specials like armor debuffs that reduce enemy mitigation by a much smaller amount due to the numerical rating value not being scaled properly (example: numerical value doubled compared to live, but people have anywhere from 10-20 times the armor numbers-wise in the 1.6 patch, literally, than on their live characters, making the actual effect tiny). Pure damage type weapon glyphs are a little weaker relative to live, but negligibly so.

Potions and Food/Drink
-Regeneration bonuses on potions as well as the other buffs such as critical chance are largely wasted in 1.6 since they don’t stack with the numerous class abilities that already provide them now in most builds, whereas previously they would. (This was resolved in the 1.6.3 version patch notes. Thanks for pointing that out, Kazan!)

Set Bonuses
-Dropped sets have slightly lower bonuses for the core stats like health/magicka/stamina than crafted ones provide for equivalent piece numbers. Example: If a dropped set gives 980 max health, a crafted one of the same level and quality gives around 1050 max health, on the 1.6 PTS. On live and all other prior versions, these were equal.

-Critical Rating is a great idea and allows for finer granularity on what is provided. A lot of these bonuses (as well as passives in various skill lines) give less of a percentage chance boost compared to live, but I think that’s a good balance change when taking into account that impenetrable doesn't impact the chance now but reduces the damage instead, making 80-100%+ crit chance amounts unneeded and hypothetically very overpowered.

However, I'd recommend placing a percentage number in parentheses after the critical chance number in the tooltips, reflecting the change it’ll give to you on your character as a percentage chance. For example, a weapon’s precise trait says it gives 4% critical chance, but a set bonus might say it gives “2099 spell critical chance”. Change that to something like “2099 spell critical chance (9.5%)”, and it's much more user-friendly.

Soul Magic (main story quest skill line)
-The Soul Shatter passive tweak is a good change and makes it a nice skill but not unfair or just plain overpowered (such as you dying to a low-health enemy and they get killed with the damage as a result alongside you in beta!).
-Soul Assault may scale a little too high with damage-heavy builds, becoming capable of killing many players on its own from full health if they don’t break line of sight or interrupt it (can’t block or dodge it on live). For example, my PTS Dragon Knight (this would be true of any class, though), who is missing what would be an extra 177 spell power on live, has his Soul Assault tooltip for over 30,000 damage, while many players are currently running 20-30k health while some are going heavy tank more rarely with 40-50k health. While it should be a very high damage ability and punishing to take the full charge from, it probably shouldn’t be able to kill some people with just the one cast, fun as it would be, if taken by surprise.

Alliance War, Weapon, Mage/Fighters’ Guild, Soul Magic, and Undaunted skill lines

-For the Alliance War, it’s a good thing, in my opinion, to have abilities like Vigor and Inevitable Detonation higher in the paths to earn with alliance rank. It will encourage people to play in Cyrodiil more than they otherwise might, and gives more meaning to the otherwise by-and-large aesthetic ranks. I would like to see Alliance Ranks become shared account-wide like the champion ranks will be, but with more abilities added or other passive benefits for higher levels (the Alliance War line is maxed out by the time you hit rank 24 or so, which is 7.84 million alliance points). This will allow people to bring what their group needs or just switch things up to stay interesting themselves out in PVP, similar to how armor and items can be shared from raids to your other characters by banking them.

-With 50 ranks available going all the way up to 68.7 million points earned currently, it is absolutely essential to longer-term pvp health in Cyrodiil and the Imperial City that you still get something for earning them, and adds to the fun factor too! However, and I’ve mentioned this before, be careful to provide the most important bonuses or skills that are critical to pvp gameplay earlier in the line, the existing skill lines for Assault and Support being good examples at just around 10% of the maximum Alliance Rank points needed to earn. Having Purge be at maximum rank though for example, would be a bad move and leave a large power gap being such a key skill in PVP!

-The Undaunted line taunt should cause an enemy target to deal less damage to any enemy in pvp except the person who taunted them, unless purged like any other debuff, for the same length of time as it would normally force a pve mob to attack you. Basically the “taunt” mechanic from Warhammer Online, providing protection to allies at times such as “taunting” an enemy aoe bomber making them deal 30% less damage to anyone else while affected. It currently is worthless in PVP, and could provide some extra depth with this change.

-Mage’s Guild skills are quite desirable in 1.6, but it feels like the Spell Symmetry and its other versions are set at a poor rate of return for the health cost and taking a full skill global-use timer to cast (plus its other effects and healing debuff). On a character with 33,000 magicka and 20,500 health, it costs ~25% of my health to gain back 7.5% of your magicka! This should probably be proportional to your max magicka, keeping around the standard 2 to 1 ratio of health cost to magicka on most characters, restored as a percentage instead.

-The change to the Fighters’ Guild ultimate (Dawnbreaker) is nice! It’s now actually useful and does reasonable damage instead of sitting there, never activated, for the weapon damage buff passive alone.

One Hand and Shield:
-Reverberating Bash is a competitive skill for pvp at this point in 1.6 between the healing debuff it applies (albeit a little weaker than the live 1.5 version) and the crowd control immunity changes. The disorient happening afterwards so long as the stun lands seems much more reliable.
-Deep Slash and Heroic Slash are both great morphs and each have a good tradeoff between them. Heroic providing the Minor Heroism ultimate regeneration buff is absolutely great, but Deep allowing it to hit 3 people instead of 1 for the snare, damage, and outgoing damage debuff is also interesting.
-Pierce Armor is much less interesting for a build now since it is classified as a Major Breach debuff, therefore no longer stacking with debuffs of the same type that many builds will already have elsewhere. Its only other effect is a moderate damage amount that taunts pve monsters. It's now become a weak skill without adding a secondary effect, unless the suggestion above in the Alliance War section or something similar regarding making taunt a useful effect in pvp combat is implemented.


Destruction Staff:
-The changes to Wall of Elements and its morphs are welcome, especially the faster damage ticks happening every half a second as opposed to once a second like on live. Relative damage stays close proportionally, but this gives more chances at weapon procs, element effect procs, and affects enemies more reliably that are passing through and then out of the skill’s area once cast.
-Force Shock and its morphs remain competitive damage-wise, with the added elemental effect chances and it doing three hits both helping it stay a strong skill. The three hits means more stamina drained in pvp on enemies, and for both pvp and pve means more chances for your weapon’s enchantment to proc (which then gets procced again more quickly after its own internal cooldown is up, raising the overall number of procs over a given timespan).
-Weakness to Elements and its morphs: Excellent changes all around here. It no longer having a cost is a big deal towards making it a good utility skill, and the tradeoff between the morphs of either having to spend time re-casting it every so often since it wears off but gaining magicka back per-hit with the right damage types, or choosing to have it automatically refresh on damage instead but not getting magicka restored, is a real decision.


Champion System
-Don’t implement daily caps on earned xp per day. I’ve seen this suggestion a handful of times, and it would serve no positive purpose. One thing it would cause is making people feel as though they’re losing out if they don’t earn the capped amount every day since they can’t spend extra time later to catch back up. Another major problem with the suggestion is it also would punish people who want to play the game more than whatever amount of time allows them to get the capped amount, since they’d be leaving a lot on the table continuing at that point instead of just finishing what they wanted to do once it had reset.

-The whole Enlightenment idea currently in 1.6 is probably the best solution here as it accrues over a few days before topping off and gives a strong bonus to champion experience earned while active, diminishing the pool proportionately.

-The champion system overall is well-balanced, but you need to better communicate to players the severity of the diminishing returns for higher investments in any given passive as there are concerns over the power gap between none and maxed, but the truth is between 1/6th of the way through (~600 total champion points earned) and all the way through to the maximum (3600 champion points earned) the gap is much smaller and pretty fair given the time and effort taken to earn points to max them. Spreading your points into moderate investments across a bunch of passives is by design much more beneficial than stacking 100 points into just one or two, which I think isn’t something most people realize.

EDIT to add in a full explanation of this:
All of the champion passives are placed in one of five scales for its bonus scaling. Here's how it breaks down for each group at a few different point investment amounts:

Click for full-size: http://i.imgur.com/6VHGAVI.png

10 points invested: A: 2.5%, B: 3.6%, C: 4.0%, D.: 4.9%, E: 5.0%

30 points invested: A: 3.9%, B: 6.6%, C: 7.7% D.: 10.5%, E: 10.8%

50 points invested: A: 4.7%, B: 8.8%, C: 10.5% D.: 14.9%, E: 15.4%

100 points invested: A: 6.3%, B: 13.0%, C: 15.8%, D.: 24.0%, E: 25.0%

To break this down, with 10 points (a minimal investment) you get a small bonus in any of these. When you go to 30 points by placing three times that amount into it total (so 2x more past your original points spent), you gain only a 56% benefit for category A, 83% benefit for category B, a 92% benefit for category C, a 114% benefit for category D, and a slightly better 116% benefit for category E. That is for spending an extra 200% of champion points, after already having had 10 in them initially.

Once you go to the 50 point level, it gets even steeper a curve. For A you get a relative boost of 20% for spending another 67% of champion points. For B that becomes a 33% boost for spending the extra 67% of points. In category C, you're only netting yourself 36% in gains over the 30-point level for spending another 67% in champ points. On category D, it improves to 42%, and category E gains the same amount, both of course for an extra 67% investment.

Pop over to the 100 point maximum for them, and the numbers just get worse on the bang for your buck . Given that most of the champion abilities don't apply to all builds, you can buy the 30 point tier of the ones that are important for you pretty quickly, gaining generally around 1/2 to 2/3 of the buff someone who spent 100 points in that same passive gets for categories A, B, and C, while a little under half for categories D and E, which are mostly less-significant bonuses to boot. That's despite them spending 3.3 times the number of points, or 333% the investment on each one.

-Some of the unlocked effect passives are very weak, such as Critical Leech which grants a paltry 400ish health return for critically striking an enemy with a 5 second internal cooldown. Either shorten that to 1 second for example, or raise the health return value, to make it desirable and useful. There are a few other ones similarly of little use.


Class Skill lines (briefer notes and bugs)


Dragon Knight:
-While the ultimate generation changes have a disparately large impact on the Dragon Knight as compared to other classes partially due to their reliance on Battle Roar for resource regeneration (raising the amount it restores per ultimate point spent a little may be needed), it is best for balance’s sake and helps even the field with the other classes more readily on ultimates.
-Removing the secondary effects on Igneous Weapons/Molten Armaments on light/heavy attacks like extra fire damage, it is much less useful for pvp as it requires heavy attacks and nothing else. While you can partially-charge them, it feels less effective since you can’t weave abilities this way like you normally would with light attacks. Spending the magicka and time to cast it generally seems like a waste for PVP, and may not be worth it even in PVE for Trials, though I’d need to do further testing to determine that part.
-The “Elder Dragon” passive in the Draconic Power skill line isn’t always behaving consistently with how it applies its effect, resulting in less benefit when adding in the ultimate ability from that line (Dragon Leap) compared to the regular skills.

Sorcerer: The pets’ on-death effects are very nice on the Unstable Clannfear and Unstable Familiar! In some builds with enough max magicka, the Rebate passive synergizes well and makes them cost-efficient, with the mechanic then being when to dismiss and/or resummons them (or leave them on one bar only so they automatically cause their effects from being desummoned when you swap weapon sets).

However, I would like to to see the Restoring Twilight and Twilight Matriarch pets be instant casts like the Unstable ones are, both for usability and because they don’t have particularly good secondary effects. Making them instant casts would bring them up to being competitive since their attacks have higher damage, and wouldn’t penalize you for using them on one of your bars instead of all of them since you don’t have to do a long cast while vulnerable to interrupts to get them back (which is how the Unstable pets work). This would overall help ease the "too many toggles" problem with sorcs until broader changes might be made.

Templar: Eclipse and its morphs: I’ve seen a handful of complaints regarding this ability not being effective, but I personally feel it is a very underrated skill that’s quite solid as it is effectively an analog to the Dragon Knight’s reflection spell but has some important differences that are both pro and con in comparison, giving each a more unique effect.

derpsticks wrote: »

If we had a formula we could simply take its derivative and plot it to view the rate of change or I guess we can plot the differences between consecutive points of data

DDuke wrote: »

• When killed, heal Allies within 8m by X
• 50% reduced Gathering times
• Better items from Treasure Chests
• 15% chance to return X damage to attacker when blocking a melee attack, 5 second cooldown

Potions and Food/Drink
-Regeneration bonuses on potions as well as the other buffs such as critical chance are largely wasted in 1.6 since they don’t stack with the numerous class abilities that already provide them now in most builds, whereas previously they would. (This was resolved in the 1.6.3 version patch notes. Thanks for pointing that out, Kazan!)

DDuke wrote: »

wraith808 wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

• When killed, heal Allies within 8m by X
• 50% reduced Gathering times
• Better items from Treasure Chests
• 15% chance to return X damage to attacker when blocking a melee attack, 5 second cooldown

These are point in time single time benefits. Thus they are not valid to include in a linear progression discussion. In essence you are basing the bulk of your argument around a single data point, and then couching it as if it is a generic point on the graph. If you take the same discussion of two points in time that didn't bisect that particular data point, you'd get a more relevant argument- and one that would disprove your imbalance statement.

I am simply comparing the difference of 500 & 750 CPs based on how I would spend them as a stamina player.
What you just quoted are far from being the "bulk of my argument".


This is the bulk of my argument:
-5.3% Stamina Costs Spells/Abilities - almost equal to a 5-set bonus
+4.5% Stamina Regeneration - huge, and compounds with other % increases
+5.1% more Healing Reduction
+5.8% Light/Heavy Attack Damage
+9% Physical Critical Strike damage - this alone is 5% DPS boost
+5.9% Armour Penetration
+1.2% Spell Resistance
-6.9% DoT damage taken
-5% Poison/Disease/Magic damage taken
-5% Flame/Frost/Shock damage taken.

Rune_Relic wrote: »

CP vs Percent
CP = 1 ~ 100
Percent = 0.617+(SIN(CP/100*90)*(25-0.617))
% / CP @ 1CP = 1%
% / CP @ 10 CP = 0.44%
% / CP @ 30 CP = 0.39%
% / CP @ 50 CP = 0.36%
% / CP @ 100 CP = 0.25%

Denidil wrote: »

That's a bug!

Paging @ZOS_GinaBruno and @ZOS_ShannonM

Fixed an issue where potion buffs were not being applied when you had an ability active that applied the same buff.

Fixed an issue that prevented drinking a potion if you already had the same buff or effect that the potion would provide. Now, you will drink the potion and receive any benefit from it that your character doesn’t already have. Drinking a potion will also refresh the same type of buff or effect if the remaining duration is shorter than what the potion will apply.