Balancing things never meant a complete overhaul of the system (ie, removing soft caps and bringing in CP system). Doing that completely screwed the balance even more than it already was. Some things needed changing, like bringing up the effectiveness of stamina skills, but instead they nerfed things into the ground (ball of lightening for example) and removed the system meant to keep things in check for balance purposes (soft caps).

Comparatively, I enjoyed the game far more with soft caps in place even though I was a heavy armoured stam build on one of my mains for a long time. Heavy armour IMO worked better, survivability was higher, build diversity was far more manageable because you couldn't stack any single attribute to the heavens and the skill bar was at a higher level no matter the class you played because you had to think not only about how you built your character, but the way you played it. Now it's all about the FOTM builds and you either stack shields or damage making fights last an hour of standing around spamming shielding or half a second of OP damage, proper fights don't exist anymore where someone actually wins by skill and if that means that to play the game properly that I have to run in a ball group and spam steel tornado I'd rather play something else and before anyone says anything about duelling and skill in the current meta, I am a part of a duelling guild and I stand by what I said. As far as I'm concerned duelling has been completely *** over by some of these changes and no amount of skill in some cases can overcome this.

I have run the OP shield stacking build for sorc and I never died with it, but it's boring as ***. I'm currently running a destro/sword and board set up on a sorc because I'd rather die quickly against the FOTM builds (I usually don't bother trying to play properly against them because I'd rather just let myself die and move on rather than spamming damage at a shield stacker, that to me is the epitome of boredom) and spend my time finding proper PvPers and not brain dead shield stackers or FOTM NBs. If there wasn't such a stupidly high damage output from some players, something like that would play well, more diverse play styles would be far more viable.

This is the most boring and unbalanced the game has been in both PvP and PvE to date.

TheBull wrote: »

RinaldoGandolphi wrote: »

My biggest gripe with the CS is the bonuses it gives are far too large...25% on this, 13% on that, its HUGE its far too large.

As for Caps, they need to come back because ZOS has proven they can't balance this game...and perhaps its good they are not balancing the game for 1v1, but since they obviously are not balancing the game for that, Caps need to come back.

If arena's are in the works, you will have players with builds that will be impossible to kill 1v1 with the CS and the current lack of caps, and will require a complete and total reset of everything, and how many of you have confidence they will get this right after the 1.6 reset....we have already been there. I understand they don't want to balance the game for 1v1 because if they do it removes some of the flavor and variety from the game.

But with the way the CS, and skills and such work in this game, I don't see this game, nor arena's for that matter working on the games current course.

@Xylena is right, this game needs softcaps back in the worst way,.

they already tried re-inventing the wheel when they completely re-down the game with 1.6 and brought the Cs and that didn't work, soft caps actually did work for the most part...the current system pigeonholes too much into speciliaztion in 1 area, kills hybrid builds, and overall reduces the amount of playstyles that are viable..softcaps will bring back hybrids and variety and i think more variety is good for the game.

Go watch some Legend duels then com back and tell us what you think about "game balance" (w/etf that is). Skill wins. No excuses. Make excuses and you will will lose forever.


edit- Wrobel has nothing to do with Cyrodiil. Leave him to his screwing up stuff like itemization, and making everything BoP.

Wrobel has arguably more to do with Cyrodiil than Wheeler, he oversees the entire combat system of the game.

Teargrants wrote: »

Agreed, some form of soft cap is desirable compared to what Wrobel did to dodge roll/streak/block in 2.0. See, as stupid as things became for 6 months with 1.6 and no soft caps, the thing is it was both offensive and defensive play that benefited from 'infinite sustain'. That is, your endless dodge rollers, bolt escapers, blockers, sprinters, cloakers. No soft cap meant that people could use those abilities/mechanics to counter play people stacking max dmg and spamming dps.

Then Wrobel came and destroyed defensive mechanics in 2.0 with arbitrary cost restrictions (addressing the symptom instead of the root ailment as @Ezareth puts it). And it's not only that, he also pushed things even further to stacking max dmg as the only viable meta with all the additional gear sets allowing ppl to stack dmg higher than ever and V16 gear let ppl stack base resource pools higher - which combined with the new battle spirit nerf basically forces people to do so.

Returning to 1.5 combat mechanics would be a vast improvement to what we have now. Saying soft caps are too easily reached is a meaningless objection, soft caps is just a conceptual idea, it's not tied to any specific number. Softcaps can be implemented that are scaled to take current gear and the CP system into effect. These types of coding changes should be simple and in fact are the kinds of things that should be fine tuned with each update to take new gear ect into account in order to maintain game balance.

Here's some 1.5 nostalgia goggles.

I have to disagree here.

Many things were changed in 1.6 along with the removal of softcaps. Those things were *never* correctly balanced.

Abilities became far cheaper relative to 1.5 with the scaling they did. Champion points made them even cheaper yet.

Drinks were buffed to insane amounts.(I'd say about 25% too high) and then they were buffed *again* shortly after 1.6 was released which had me shaking my head.

Health was nerfed to the point it is a 100% worthless stat, made moreso now with additional damage reduction battle spirit buff.

What I'm getting to is the entire game was basically rewritten with the release of 1.6 and it was never balanced correctly. Many people look back to 1.5 and think it was the softcaps that were what kept the game balanced but that just doesn't hold up under scrutiny. There were always ridiculous metas and builds that the top tier players utilized to destroy the uninformed. That hasn't changed, only there are less options now so we see hordes of players using copycat builds and strategies.

I'll reiterate, softcaps are a bandaid to balance. Balance all the *choices* with each other and you will find far more balance in this game. I still remember feeling like a damn God in 1.6 compared to 1.5 simply because of infinite resources. Make abilities cost more across the board. Make health equal to stamina and magicka. Balance damage with survivability and sustain ( a complex thing to achieve).

Do these things and the game will be drastically improved.

Teargrants wrote: »

True there are other items as well, but soft caps vs no soft caps is a big deal in and of itself because no soft caps simply rewards stacking everything in one direction (max mag/mag regen/spell dmg) more rewarding than spreading stats over other resources that don't correspond with primary dmg and primary sustain.

Back in 1.5 I ran 3k health, about 2.4k mag and 1.8k stam with 3 stam regen glyphs.

My point was that soft caps act as a stop gap to run away 'power creep' that results from things like ever increasingly powerful gear sets, higher beta lvls, more CP, ect. Obviously soft caps aren't the 'solution' to those balance issues, but their presence would keep the meta from becoming as extreme as 1.6 was in regards to resources for instance (depending where the soft caps / hard caps are at, of course). The other big big thing is it would hopefully encourage Wrobel to look at tweaking caps to balance things like dodge rolling/blinking/blocking instead of doing what he did do and gutting those important defensive mechanics on a skill by skill basis arbitrarily.

I hear what you're saying, I just disagree. The intent on the part of ZoS was to allow players to stack the stats of their choice. Play as you want etc. The problem is, with a lack of balance there is no "choice" everyone stacks damage because it's the best option. If people want to stack nothing but damage, fine by me. But it should have significant tradeoffs. The alternative is a far more homogeneous mess where everyone has similar builds and strats.

In group play for example, templar can refill your stats with shards and repentance so why bother building sustain or regen? You want to balance, make it so that all resource return abilities are scaled off the amount of regen you have. I think all know hitpoints is just not beneficial enough to put points into beyond achieving a certain level of survivability to avoid burst scenarios. Make some things scale on your hitpoints. Make tri-stat pots scale off your base stats etc.

The issue now (Well one of the many) is that certain builds trump all other builds. That's not a problem with stacking its a problem with math!

Again I don't think 1.5 was the balanced game that everyone seems to recall. There were plenty of things that had no soft cap like cost reduction. I was getting 52% cost reduction on my lightning spells in addition to 3 Cost Reduction enchants on my rings. With 2400 magicka my ball of lightning cost me 60 magicka! I also had the soft cap of Hitpoints, Magicka and magicka regen.

Soft caps or not, I think ESO needs to find long term solution and stick with it. That's the main issue - constant balancing process full of changes. This is not normal. Hopefully they realize this and with next major update bring us some stability.

I dont know if anyone remembers but at the concept stage of the CS system people were invited to ZOS to see the pie chart on how damage and mitigation would be divided up and capped. Nothing changed to my knowledge.

To me the argument isn't about softcaps or hardcaps.
They are just synonyms for a concept.
The concept of a damage that ranges from a mimimum value to a maximum one.

So for me the problem isn't the fact the maximum value is crazy.
The problem to me is that the minimum value isn't substantial enough in comparison.
ie. The range between the weakest and the strongest is too great.
People need to adjust the range form 75% damage ~ 100% damage rather than 25% ~ 100% damage
This minimum value is what determines how far apart everyone ends up on the competitive DPS scale.
Much like you end up with quite a resource pool even though you have 0 point in the attribute concerned.
Would you have 0 points in Health if that actually meant you had 0% health ?

Consider direct damage and direct mitigation.
Direct damage on one side of the equation....passive armour + dynamic shield on the other side of the equation.
We have armour that can be bypassed and shields that block most damage.
The passive mitigation and armour is useless with stacked penetration and armour cap.

Direct damage = 100%
Heavy.. Armour = 75% passive mitigation and shield = 25% dynamic mitigation (magical OR physical combined)
Medium.. Armour = 50% passive mitigation and shield = 50% dynamic mitigation (magical or physical combined)
Light.. Armour = 25% passive mitigation and shield = 75% dynamic mitigation (magical or physical combined)

The above makes heavy armour garbed players much harder to kill in an X vs 1 situation where you shoudlnt be able to block everyone all the time as you cant see everyone all the time.
Regardless the heavy armour wearer shouldn't be able to out mitigate incoming damage so must lose dynamic mitigaiton.

The lower the static mitigation the better the dynamic mitigation needs to be.
Everyone has the same combined mitigation...just that one is more dynamic than the other.
Hardened ward acts too much like static mitigation and not enough like dynamic mitigation.
It is held up for too long....and yet blocking was nerfed for specifically this reason.

Imagine if hardened ward was only 1 block = 1 cost and the cost was determined by how much it absorbed.
Imagine if you had to ward or block when you was actually being attacked instead of permanently and it dropped on hit.
Imagine if a cost multiplyer stacked the longer you had the ward or block up.
Regen is a fickle thing to mess with in lag, latency and ping.
Rather than messing with the regen which effects every single skill use you only actually penalise the cost of blocking or ward for spamming/holding block or ward.

Emma_Eunjung wrote: »

No, no, no and NO! Please stop trying to gimp my build because yours is weak.

Furthermore, I didn't spend HUNDREDS of hours of my life grinding CP just to see my progress stolen away by PvP whiners!

What about when Zos pulls the plug? Thousands of hours wasted.

xylena wrote: »

the softcap system wasn't perfect - optimal builds for all 4 classes were pretty much the same light armor 1h/s perma block thing, and many players were hitting nearly every key softcap possible - that said, softcaps really prevented the gap between "optimal" and "pretty good" from scaling out of control, to where players felt like they could "play like they want" and remain competitive

the second softcaps were removed, "play how you want" went out the window and became "minmax or die" since it created a HUGE gap in performance between a minmaxed build and a balanced or hybrid build... and we see in the current patch how inconsistently different abilities scale with endgame gear (e.g. flame lash being flame trash, surprise attack and wrecking blow severely outpacing all other damage sources)

many have already mentioned how removing softcaps also removed most resource management from combat, which is what i miss most about earlier versions... there's also the consequence of racial passives making a massive combat difference all of a sudden, but only if you rolled the right combination (cough bosmer stamblade cough)... if we're gonna cap anything at this point, cap ALL racial passives at no more than 3% or something like the breton cost reduction, they should be "nice" but not game changing, none of this 20% stam regen nonsense (larger than a drink buff on many builds)

ramble over, i'm barely even playing until the next balance changes hit the PTS

I feel like racial passives and the Champion passives should all hit the same soft caps. If my bosmer stamina regeneration is 30%, it should just mean that getting more stamina regeneration out of the system will be significantly harder to acquire. This would mean the bosmer would instantly want to go into things like boosting sprint speed, lowering the cost of stamina abilities, dodging, etc. That is how I think they should balance racials to champion passives, and it would make it a lot more feasible for a non mage race to be a mage, and a mage race to play as a stamina build. This is something I think a lot of people could get on board with.

I like soft caps and diminishing returns. I don't think you should be able to redline everything, but I do think optimization choices should be more than raising one variable, and that is the big flaw in the current system. I also think they utterly killed the health attribute (and tanking), and don't seem to actually care about doing anything with it, at least by Dev statements I've seen lately. I love the game so I'm not all doom and gloom, but I definitely think they need to take a hard look at the underlying systems. I'm sure they'll get it right eventually. Every MMO I've ever played has entered this goofy phase where system changes have upended the game.