Elite gear revisited

I apologize again in advance for the lenght. MMO's are mathematically complicated and understanding the math is one of the necessary steps to improve. Explanations take time.

A few days ago the Noore guild had a meeting with Jessica, the community liaison. One of the things discussed in this meeting was the trials gear changes and general worthlessness in 1.6. Jessica told us that the devs were in discussion about changing this decision and so, pursuant to that, I would like to revisit the subject with a little more explanation and some suggestions.

First we should revisit why spell / weapon crit are not particularly desirable anymore. As I mentioned before, the number 1 reason we wanted it bin 1.5 was for ult generation. This was followed by the fact that it increased damage output in a way that was not capped. With the changes, crit no longer affects ult generation and damage from straight weapon and spell damage sources is no longer capped. Therefore, the only reason to have crit rating is pure damage. With the help of Hypertoxic I will now go into the math of why crit is not particularly good for that.

The math:
Hypertoxic did some testing with different gear combinations with Crushing Shock (which I am sad to see nerfed btw) and charted Max Magicka and Spell Damage to the stated tooltip damage for Crushing Shock. He found the coefficients that are used to calculate the damage for Crushing Shock. The calculations were performed on a V14 in absence of any Champion Points and were verified on various classes.

The formula that he discovered is: ((Spell Damage * 0.318571) + (Max Magicka * 0.031129)) * 3 = Crushing Shock Damage. This formula is linear and should be easily accurate within 1% on any character.

Now that we know the coefficients for Max Magicka and Spell Damage we can easily see which set bonuses contribute most to our damage output. 177 Spell Damage contributes 56.3871 damage to Crushing Shock directly and assuming a base 45% crit (not an unreasonable amount) another 12.687 from the crit on that increased base to total 69.074. 911 Magicka contributes 28.3585 damage to Crushing Shock and also another 6.3806 from the crit on that damage to total 34.7391. In testing Spell Critical Hyper found that gear that provides 664 Spell Critical Rating adds 3.5% Spell Critical to a V14 character. Considering that 3.5% Spell Critical gives a chance of doing a (unmodified) bonus of 50% damage when criting – what you will find is that 3.5% Spell Critical gives an average chance of doing 1.75% more damage per second.

Spell Critical is percentage based and if we want to compare it to our linear counter parts (Max Magicka and Spell Damage) we need to formulate a base damage for Crushing Shock. For this I selected my V14 Imperial DK with 31 points in Magicka and 31 points in Health. He is fully geared in 5 Infallible Aether and 2 Valkyn Skoria's and has 3 Wrath of the Imperium. This represents the live (1.5) average PVE spell damage DK build. On 1.6.2 his Max Magicka is 16290 and Spell Damage is 1519 this yields a Stated Crushing Shock damage of 991 * 3 = 2973. Now given that Spell Critical is 50% bonus damage 3.5% of the time, the average DPS increase would be 52.0275.

In the end it looks like Spell Damage has a dramatically greater contribution to damage than Spell Critical. It is better by about 21%

Spell Damage 177 (69.074 damage)
Spell Critical (52.02 damage)
Max Magicka 911 (34.7391 damage)

Now, lest you crafters get to excited we will examine what this means for set choice now vs in the past. You will find that the preferred sets do not suddenly become crafted but rather are just different, much easier to acquire drops.

The current preferred gear landscape:

Currently the most common (ideal as very few have it and I am not one of them) gear for magica dps is:

5 piece Infalable Aether:
2x spell crit, 1x spell damage buff, 1x weaksauce spell-pen buff, 1x 83 heavy attack buff
-Drops from Sanctum Ophida, very hard content, few people have 5 pieces let alone the 5 desirable ones since 3 of these are coffer only and so once a week per toon.

2 peice monster set of your choice:
Unique damage buffs, some quite powerfull
-Drops from dailies. Middle of the road content dificulty wise but the RNG is so brutal that after 78 gold keys I still don't have the shoulders I want in any weight or trait. Really, you just have to get lucky.

3 piece soleshine V10:
1x magica buff, 1x spell crit
-This is poor game design as this set is a green world boss drop that drops commonly to V10 players and can only rarely be aquired in the V10 zone by anyone else. There should have been better jewelry but the devs missed the boat on that.

Masters staff in precise:
1x powerful + magica buff, 1x buff to an attack no one uses.
-If you are lucky enough to have a precise masters staff good for you, use it. If you have any other trait it is not worth using your staff. Cry a little, there is only one good trait so great design choices there ZOS. Masters staffs are rare drops from the very hard vet DSA trial by the way.

After 16. the sets of choice will be:

4 peice Martial Knowledge:
2x spell damage buff, 1x magica buff
-Ironically the set that shares a motif with Infalable Aether, Martial Knowledge is one of the most common sets in the game. It drops in V11 from lower Craiglorn trash mobs, V13 from the same mobs in upper and V14 from somewhere I am not telling you because I don't want a mob of people there as I try to farm it. In proper game design these green drop sets are supposed to be less powerful than crafted which are less powerfull than raid gear. after 1.6 this set will be king though.

2 piece monster which we already discussed

2 piece band or ring of Cyridiils light:
1x spell damage
-Yes, PVP players can simply buy their gear from the elite gear vender with AP instead of trying to endlessly RNG for it. They can also sell it, and less you cry for them about PVE gear, they can get the formally best PVE gear (masters and sanctum) from top 2% rewards. On the bright side, you can buy this jewelry from your favorite DK, I mean PVP player for a reasonable sum. It is purple and makes much more sense for endgame gear than soulshine.

2x Adroitness:
1x spell damage
- This is a middle of the road set that drops purple V12 from vet dungeon bosses. It is an uncommon but not rare set and can be sold.

Masters staff in precise:
Already discussed.

All in all we see that Jewely in the new landscape has been somewhat improved as the garbage drop that was Soulshine departs the scene to be replaced by PVP elite gear and a good dungeon drop. The problem is that a trash drop green set is now worth more than the hardest to acquire gear in the game.

What to do:

The question you now have to ask is if restoring the enchants, spell pen, and heavy attack damage on Infalable will even make it competitive in the new landscape. Realistically, I don't know. Spell pen is so screwy to calculate and heavy attacks have changed substantially in 1.6 so I'm really not sure how it would all work out. It is my contention that rather than try to work this out it would be much easier to rebalance the trials gear by replacing all spell crit will spell damage on trials gear and all spell damage with spell crit. This would make Aether yield 2x spell damage, Infallible yield 2x spell damage and 1x spell crit. and Vicious yield 2x weapon damage and 1.5x weapon crit. Crit was the candy everybody wanted and trial gear had it. Now it is damage that we want so give us that instead. It is not hard to figure out.

On an added note, you should also add a necklace to Cyridill's light as using Infallible Aether with monster heads would leave that slot unfilled with good gear in the event infallible is restored. It is probably not a bad idea that this PVP Elite set is desirable and salable to PVE players. You may not have noticed but PVP players don't have much gold.

A note on Stam gear:

I have done this largely from a Magica standpoint because Stam gear is much more complicated. Since there is no magic hit button get stamina for health ability, cost reduction and regen have value for stam users adding complexity to the calculations. 1.6 Changes stamina greatly my removing the ultimate generation differences and making stamina morphs to some abilities. Up until this point, few serious end game theory crafters have dug into stam much. This makes it hard to even get good insights. Simply put, except for very specific cases (like sorcerers lack of any compelling ultimate and single good endgame PVE class ability buffing weapon attacks), prior to 1.6 stamina was just generally bad.

The way I currently expect stam to play out is that Vicious will probably be used by those who have it even nerfed. It will probably be reasonably comparable to the other options. I don't really see anybody actually doing trials for it though as using Hundings or Morag Tong will be more or less comparable and why do to a bunch of work to get likely wrong traited gear that is negligibly different than stuff you can craft just right in 5 min. The Celerity Ophidian stuff from AA is worthless now and will be just as worthless in the future. This set was crap from day 1 just like the heavy armor from AA. Two of the Jewelry / Weapon sets from AA, Two Fanged and Advancing Yekuta, were good already and will continue to be so as they currently are after 1.6. So the landscape for trials from a stamina perspective is a bit better in that some folks may be willing to run AA and Hel-ra once a week for a shot at stam jewelry. They won't have any magica users to help them but maybe trial groups will still form of all stamina users. I don't see stam users being much more interested in Sanctum than Magica users though as the gear rewarded might be usable but isn't particularly appealing relative to the effort involved in getting it.

Disclaimer:

Though I am an experienced endgame player with the #1 NA AA time, #2 NA Hel-ra time, and #4 NA Sanctum time, more than 75 daily gold keys spent, and a bunch of VDSA completes, I do not have Infallible shoes, precise masters destro staff, or the monster shoulders I want. Perhaps that is an RNG discussion for another day as it is pretty ridiculous that I am in this state. However, I have already acquired all pieces of gear necessary save the masters staff and self same monster shoulders for the post 1.6 magica DPS dream set. I should be happy as my gear will be more complete but I am not as it is very broken that this is the case and I don't anticipate anyone doing trials in the future. I have all the stam gear mentioned except Morag Tong. I suspect Zenimax knows I am a Magica DPS and the drop rates are adjusted accordingly as I have all the best stam dps gear, tanking gear, and healing gear, most in duplicates, but am missing 3 out of 4 elements of the best Magica dps gear.

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

woodsro wrote: »

Just an fyi but vet14 Martial Knowledge sets can be farmed from ANY delve in cyrodiil. All chests in Cyrodiil delves scale to your level all the way up to Vet 14.

I was the one who put up the thread about this on these forums a few months ago, and did the initial tests, leg work, and verified it. I don't want this information to be secret,so anyone who wants a vet 14 Martial knowledge set can go to any cave in Cyrodiil, red ruby cave, kingcrest cavern, and farm chests. All these chests in these delves have a reasonable respawn rate.

I gave away a 5 piece vet 14 set the other day to a pug, you gotta give back sometimes. So if you want a vet 14 martial knowledge set, go to any cyrodiil cave and farm chests in delves until you get the set, it wont take very long.

Does martial knowlege set sell for a lot now? It used to cost around 300g/piece and drops like a fly.

It shouldn't since its easily acquired by farming chests in any cyrodiil delvr and the chests drop pieces frequently.

I put up a thread awhile back but martial knowledge wasn't popular then, I still like to share my findings on this kind of stuff though which I did. It was a community effort, but still public knowledg re.

I want to echo the astute analysis given by f047ys3v3n.

I think it is a HUGE problem and oversight by ZoS that there is no real choice regarding gear diversity for Magicka DPS. Those folks who value DPS highly will all wear 4 pieces of Martial Knowledge, 2 Torug's Pact, 2 Undaunted, and the same Cyrodiil Light rings. This is not only boring, but will create an undesirable gap in DPS between those folks who don't study or research all the gear and trust ZoS to ensure the 5 piece sets like Shalidor's Curse or Torug's Pact are competitive with the ex vendor trash from Craglorn known as Martial Knowledge.

ZoS could take a big step to restoring some interest in other sets if they adequately rewarded players for investing their precious 8 non-jewelry slots in the same armor. It is unfortunately a prevalent theme of ESO armor that typically the more pieces of armor you wear, the worse off you are. Wear two pieces of Torug's Pact, you get a very potent spell damage bonus. Wear 5 pieces, you get a worthless 1 second cooldown on an insignificant weapon proc glyph. The most extreme example relates to another piece of "reward" high-end gear: the Burning Spellweave set from City of Ash. You are objectively worse off for wearing a complete set of this difficult set than 4 pieces of the ever present Martial Knowledge:

Martial Knowlegde:
2 piece: +933 magicka
3 piece: +177 spell power
4 piece: +177 spell power

Burning Spellwarve:
2 piece: +933 magicka
3 piece: +177 spell power
4 piece: N/A (weapon crit is worthless for magic fire casters)
5 piece: some number less than 103 average spell power (you have a 20% to proc +207 spell power for 8 seconds. This effect has a 15 second cooldown. At best [100% proc] it is 8 seconds on, 15 off, i.e. roughly half the time).

ZoS really ought to seriously evaluate just about every 5 piece bonus to ensure they are at least competitive. Many of these are really bad: Ashen Grip, Elegance (a Sanctum drop!), Oblivion's Foe, Burning Spellweave to name a few off the top of my head. Unfortunately, with the announcement that we aren't getting anything new until "after the console release dies down," we are stuck with unimaginative gear for months.

I have 6 million AP...I am going to make a lot of money selling Cyrodiil Light rings. I foresee ZoS's "solution" is to nerf this set of jewelry and leave us with no appealing choices rather than adjust some of the existing rings that might actually make itemization an interesting topic for discussion.

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

Gear (either dropped or crafted) and the bonus sets they provide are going to be trivial (in both PvP and PvE) vs the gains and bonuses given by the champion system.

Here are a few of the bonuses you can get with 500 Champion points

• -10.5% Stamina or Magicka Costs Spells/Abilities
• +25% Physical damage
• -14.5% Poison/Disease/Magic damage taken
• -14.5% Flame/Frost/Shock damage taken
• +33% chance on Bash to reduce enemy Movement Speed by 20% for 3 seconds
• Major Heroism after falling below 20% Health, +3 Ultimate every 1,5 seconds for 8 second duration. Can only occur every 30 seconds
• Restore X Magicka when taking Flame, Frost, Shock, Magic, Earth, or Oblivion Damage equivalent to 30% of your maximum Health. Can only occur every 10 seconds.
• -80% Stamina Costs after Break Free for 3 seconds

If any SINGLE ITEM on the list above was introduced as a five piece bonus for a new crafted gear about two patches ago, it would have been considered an extremely strong and desirable set.

Any one of those items looks a lot better than the 5 piece bonuses of most of the Existing Sets out there

A few examples:

• The seducer set only gives you 8% reduction of magicka costs and it is very popular and well used in both PvP and PvE but now you can get 10% mag or stam reduction with CP.
• Hunding's rage gives you 20 weapon damage which doesn't even result in a 25% physical damage increase.
• People would be clamoring to figure out which was better, the Way of the Arena Set or the "80% Stamina Cost reduction after Break Free set" and hoping one of them had jewelry so they could be stacked. "That would be super OP right? Those two sets together? WOW I would rock in PvP with those!!" Well, anyone with 500CP can "stack" those now, and every other Champion bonus on top of it.

When testing the PTS with 3600 champion points I had so many effects randomly proc on me that I couldn't keep track of them. Granted this is a long way off, but there is no harm in reading the writing on the wall for where this game will be eventually.

They joy of theory-crafting right now is picking between which set bonuses you want and trying to figure out which set bonuses your opponent is using. You fight someone that knocks you back or gets a damage shield when he is low health? Must be using Death's wind or whitestrakes, heals for days? Malubeth set + masters sword.

Just try to figure that out after you are wiped off the map in PvP by someone with a ton of Champ points. Or, for PvE, if you start seeing "Raid group LFM, must have X number of Champion Points."

Here is the key point:

Set bonuses and special effects are only valuable when you have to choose carefully between them and make compromises in your build to obtain them. With so many bonuses available at once from the Champion system, Gear Set bonuses no longer become unique, special, or valuable - thus the time needed to grind dungeons to obtain valuable gear becomes no longer valuable..

What used to be special will just become part of the Meta of the game. For example, after a certain amount of time when a critical mass of people get 500 Champion Points, you will know that everyone's stamina costs will be reduced after break free, every time you are bashed you have a 30% potential to be snared.

The learning curve, especially for PvP, increases dramatically for new players and "champion players" are placed on a higher tier than everyone else. Anyone playing since beta remembered how futile it was as a level 40ish to fight a VR10. This will no different.

I'd hate to be the one that inspired a huge nerf of the champion system but it seems like having so many effects active at one time is detrimental to the metagame and kills the fun and uniqueness of what is now set and build theorycrafting. Perhaps you should be limited to one passive (not the incremental ones) from one tree. People with twice born star could pick two trees as well as two mundus. That would make the twice born star set more valuable and theorycrafting more interesting. You can always just buff gear and crafted sets to compensate but you can only get so godlike with so many particle effects and abilities before the game gets boring.

My guild discussions have gone similar to yours. The CP bonuses are not a small but noticeable progression but rather an almost doubling of character power. I agree that, in the future, should any trials groups form, which I currently doubt, the cut will be decided based purely on CP #. Noobs will be even more torched in Cyridiil, grinders will have a huge advantage over questers and, ironically, those who do the amazingly low XP paying endgame content as well as PVP. The CP system is, in short, a hugely overscaled disaster. There is a reason MMO's have level caps and while an endless progression system seems enticing because it appears to lessen the need to produce new content to keep players interested it will backfire, powerfully given the scaling it currently provides. I expect perhaps ZOS will realize this 2 years down the road when ESO cannot get new users as it will have a reputation for being impossible for new users to be competitive in. At that point, they will have to contrive an entirely new progression system and reset XP. Perhaps they will multiply values by 10x to hide it and come up with a clever name like say "winner points" which they will award only say 70 of to existing players regardless of their current progression. Sound familiar? Seriously, ZOS, you thought V14 was a hard mountain to clime and new players complained that they did not have a chance in Cyridiil. You just wait 6 months.

I had not considered your insightful take on the effect of CP endgame gear though. You are certainly right that relatively CP will dwarf gear and leave it a minor part of character build. Grinding CP will be much more efficient than doing endgame content for building character power and will have the added benefit of sidestepping the atrocious RNG.

So many things about 1.6 are a terrible idea. It will be nice to have stamina morphs of skills as well as stamina competitive in ult regen. Not worth it though, not even close.