I was going to write a compilation of my current thoughts through imperial city. This would include thoughts on the state of the game, class and resource balance, content, gear, and whatever else struck my fancy. It got really long to here I will only address the state of the game and the stampion system.

I have been quite critical of the decisions made by ZOS in the past as the employees reading this know. I am currently banned by ZOS from the ZOS / guild TS meetings on pain of the whole guild will not get to meet with ZOS if I show up. I am unapologetic. I said what needed to be said about bad decisions being made. I am much happier now though because I feel many of the changes recently made have been quite good. Some that I thought were bad or just plain lazy and likely to backfire have worked well. I will elaborate. I think that for the first time in a year or so this game is on the right track and getting better every week.

First off, imperial city is better than I expected. I have hated the boardom and monotony of PVP in ESO with the riding and the long sieges and the lack of action punctuated by a lag fest before more riding. Imperial city is so much different than this. It is lag free and horse free with areas of reasonably near respawns for near constant battles in very atmospheric surroundings. If there are no enemy scrubs to impale there are also NPC’s to kill. Oh so much fun, and the telvar stones seem to have just the right amount of sting when you loose them or elation when you steal them. With imperial city I am reliably enjoying PVP in ESO. I should also include here a thank you to ESO for the anti hacker counter measures that are preventing certain folks from basically being invulnerable. That being said, it is my understanding these measures are causing the nightmare load screens. This may be fixed with Orsinium as the load screens did seem shorter there. Another fix is only to use those counter measures in PVP and trials. Who cares if people cheat in Auridon and how would you be able to tell when you are near invulnerable in quest zone content and can one hit anything anyway.

I would also like to congratulate ZOS on class balance in general. I think this is the first time that really all classes in ESO are viable. Furthermore, most classes can even be rolled stam or magic with viability in PVE (really no one can be viable with magica in PVP).
This brings us to the big champion point cap. Having 5 max toons, and well over cap in CP, I should probably be against this but I feel that it is necessary, well implemented (you don’t loose your points you just can’t use them until the cap is raised), and will make ESO a better game in that power levels will be closer to competitive and new players will be less discouraged. The truth is that the need for this should have been foreseen day 1 and certainly after the crazyness 3 months ago with elite players in the red alliance getting to 1,500 in a few weeks off of the 5 finger grind it should have been implemented. Better late then never.

Before I leave CP though I must address the biggest problem for balance in the game today and that is some of the choices made in the specific points. Or, better termed, why I call it the Stampion system. Perhaps some new players are not aware but constellations exist for the direct mitigation of 25% off all sources (elements, magic) of magica based damage as well as a single constellation that yields an additional 25% to spell resistance (this is a percent of a percent and therefore far less interesting) and a constellation for mitigating 25% of DOT damage. Since almost all Magica AOE’s, Fire ring, Blazing Shards, Puncturing Sweep, Liquid Lightning, talons, and probably more, are DOT’s. It is easy enough to see that it will not be uncommon for Stamina players to have hard capped at 50% their resistance to magica damage even when magica users spell penetration is considered. Frankly, I don’t even think spell pen is part of the equation with these direct mitigations. This has been my experience in playing. Groups that contain experienced players with CP, the groups that leave you with only spinning blades and detonation on your death recap, take very little damage from any magica AOE’s. On the other side of this, the only mitigation that exists for physical damage for a magica user is a percent of a percent based on your armor’s physical resistance and strangely divided by armor weight. For a light armor using mage this is entirely useless as all 25% of the increase would only be around 5% mitigation and, since it is a boost to armor rating, would be obliterated by your enemies armor penetration anyway. You would get probably less than 1% resistance. This is easily demonstrated by 8.4k spinning blade hits on the recap (yes, that actually happened.) Although stam AOE is better in PVE it is not overly unbalanced and the better healing and ranged DPS of magica users balances out the resource types. In my experience PVE players are split fairly evenly magica vs stam. Because of these champ point choices though magica vs stam cannont be balanced in PVE and PVP because the magica damage will be twice in PVE what it is in PVP. This must be addressed if any balance of magic vs stam is to be had. I suggest adding a direct physical damage mitigation and making the DOT and other mitigations not stack for direct player damage though probably still stack on siege damage.

On the other side of the equation, the damage output side, in the end all builds will get an equal damage boost. This will consist of a major boost of +25% to direct damage (Physical, magic, poison, or elemental), a heavy attack boost of +25%, and two indirect boosts (crit, and penetration.) All told this adds up to around +40% with the meat of this being the 25% direct boost. Now that we have a cap this is very important as stamina users (other than bow) will get that whole direct 25% boost to all their damage but most magica users (sorcs, NB, and Templar) will not as their damage is split between elemental and magica which are two different constellations. You see, while the total power increase is the same for magica and stam because of the split damage types of magica users theirs requires 300 more champion points to realize. This is also true with some bow builds but less so. With a cap of 501 it is no dice on this. The magica builds will simply loose 15% or so of potential damage output when compared to Stam builds. The solution to this balance problem with regard to damage output at 501 CP is simple. Currently the Thalmaturge star boosts poison, disease, and magic damage. This is a strange and haphazard combination since no one actually does those three damages. One is done principally by mages, another archers, and the last by siege. Clearly magic should be in the elemental in the tree for magic damage, poison should be with physical damage in the tree for stamina damage and siege damage should probably have a star that boosts only it with the other stars not contributing to siege damage regardless of source.

To summarize, though great strides have been made in class balance the specific make up of the stampion system is the greatest current impediment to better balance. Mitigation and output considered stamina toons should be expected to be probably 40% stronger in PVP than their balance relative to magic in PVE preventing any global balance in the game. The specific solutions to this are, on the output side to split the thalmaturge star placing its magic damage in elemental, poison in physical, and changing the existing star to affect all siege damage. On the mitigation side, magic mitigation and elemental mitigation should be put together in a star and the other star made a direct, regardless of armor rating, physical damage mitigation. The direct DOT star should also be changed to not stack with the direct mitigation stars.

I hope this leads to some beneficial changes. For now, it’s stam sorc for me, in PVP. The beauty of 5toons is that, at the end of the day, I can run whatever works for the moment.

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