Wow. People will defend everything ZOS does no matter what, even going so far as to insult people who put forward very well thought out ideas.

Okay I have been reading more of the forums and I am realizing that they are not adding active skill lines to Thieves and Assassins. So I am going to express my thoughts on this in great detail here.

Launch of the game you have the following classes: Dragonknights, Sorcerers, Templars, and Nightblades. Lets break down the backgrounds of these classes.

Dragonknights are a warrior based class focused around fire being their thing. Fighters Guild gives them a nice set of options to expand on a player's build options.

Sorcerers are a magicka based class focused on using magicka to form shields against damage and magicka to produce vast amounts of damage. The mages guild is a natural set of extra options for the mage to use.

Templars are a combination of Healers and Fighters. They can use both fighters guild and mages guild to add extra options for their builds.

Vampires skill line is a great skill line for magicka based sorcerers and Templars because it gives them magicka bonuses and some hiding bonuses. It does not work well for stamina based Nightblades however.

Werewolves skill line is great for the stamina based fighters and Templars because of the stamina bonuses, however it adds very little to the Nightblade stealthing as they need to stay in hiding to deal their best damage and that option is not possible in werewolf form.

The Undaunted offer skills that are useful for both the spell casters and hand to hand fighters but lends nothing to stealth based Nightblades.

So now lets talk about the Nightblades a bit. They have been around since the start of the game. The main thing behind their playability is stealth. So what things help a player stealth? Well there is the potion of invisibility which is available to all classes and is only effective if you don't attack. There is Leather Armor which you must wear 5 of in order to reduce your visibility radius as much as possible. There is two races who get bonuses for stealth, Khajiit and Bosmers, however they are both on the same alliance unless you buy the any race option on any alliance.

Let's talk about stealthing basics. First ANY class can stealth and get the same bonuses applied to it as the Nightblade whose class is based on stealth. Next ANY class can attack a prone target (someone with their back to you) and gain the critical stun bonus. The stealth attack though does allow the Nightblade to strike without being seen though right and then they can pop back into shadow? Um NO once you attack a mob even with a bow from a distance with only the one target your attacking visible the rest of the mob will come out from behind the rock and still come and attack you. If you use the active cloak ability you still have to run from combat and get out of agro range even though there is no way the mob could have seen you duck back into stealth after the attack.

For two years I have waited for active skills that would benefit my Stealthing Nightblade. Two very long years of rolling and rerolling my nightblades and perfecting my fighting style with what I had to work with. The ESSENCE of a stealth based character is being able to remain unseen.

Oh and lets add insult to injury and give everyone access to a cheap skill to toggle that reduces the stealthing range by 30 meters and a potion that reduces it even more making the idea of stealth almost completely moot.

Next lets release the two guilds that would benefit this play style the greatest after the two year wait but not give them any actives just passives. A passive skill defined is a skill that only adds to or removes from the effect of current mechanics. An active skill produces an effect of its own.

The only passives this stealthing player is interested in seeing is ones that decrease his visibility radius, keeps mobs who are not in visible range from attacking after you slip back into hiding (without having to disengage the mob). The pocket picking and such was taken care of with ledgermain.

I am thankful for there being a thieves guild and having a reason to steal. I am just PRAYING that the skills your going to have me working toward will be worth my time. The same will go for my vision of the Assassins guild and its effects on DPS.

I still love this game. It is still the best game on the market. I am still a $15 per month subscriber. I still run a $30 per month website devoted to this game. I am still working toward building my final Guild within ESO.

Please just hear me on the fact that the game right now is very slanted against STEALTH based combat and characters and these are the type of characters I love to play.

Only passives in the TG update unfortunately..

Passives that benefit thieving so probably more sneakiness.

Zenimax need to balance out the skill's they have already got.

I see this as a bad sign, hopefully this isnt the beginning of the end, everything sounds right the game is almost 2 year old, how long they are going to keep investing into it. IC and Orsinium were good because development started when this game had tons of players. Thief and Dark Brotherhood are definitely started alot later.

petraeus1 wrote: »

Enodoc wrote: »

I watched ESO Live but I must have missed that bit about no skill lines for TG and DB. What exactly did they say?

To a question about new skill lines in general, Matt said (my paraphrasing): we wanna, but not now, get what's in-game at the moment right first (in terms of balance and performance), before adding potential complicating additions.

When they add Arena, they get balance issues for 2 year minimum.

There is one backdoor in bangkorai. That's the only one i've seen though. You can enter the delve from two directions.

Okay it sounds like some of you think the current skills for nightblades are fine where they are at. Lets talk about the playing of a nightblade through their skill line.

Assassins Blade - decent strike requires you to be in AOE of zerging sorcerers
Teleport Strike - great strike against 1 opponent however puts you in the AOE of zerging sorcerers
Blur - adds defense which is useless unless you wish to stay toe to toe
Mark Target - reduces enemy armor causing greater damage for 1 strike against 1 opponent
Grim Focus - increases damage against 1 target

Shadow Cloak - Make yourself invisible for 2.5 seconds (however you can not return to shadows you must flee from battle and totally disengage to re-enter shadow.

Veiled Strike - Single strike if used from shadows has extra effect. Good Skill but note only good from shadows.
Path of Darkness - AOE cone effect deals moderate damage and has option to heal allies.
Aspect of Terror - AOE causes enemy to flee effects are week and trap version can be by-passed with charge attacks.
Summon Shade - Version of a pet for Nightblade has weak attacks but can confuse players in PvP.

The following skills I consider vampire crap what it's doing in a roguish class is beyond me. However they are the most powerful attacks a nightblade has. You can play an argonian nightblade healing tank with this build and fairly much walk through the game but this style is not my style of play.

Strife - a healing attack that you can select to just heal you or you and party members
Agony - a stunning attack that deals damage if attack is broken
Cripple - immobilizes and damages enemy
Siphoning Strikes - reduces your weapon's damage to regain stamina and magicka (why would I do that?)
Drain Power - Power up that allows you to deal more damage with a weapon. (like what this skill does.)

Okay so in review the Nightblade class has 1 AOE attack that is weak, has 1 AOE defense skill that can be bypassed, has a weird siphoning thing going on that has very little to do with the trickery that the nightblade class claims. Its most powerful skills requires you to be directly behind the target (IN SHADOWS) without being seen, and those skills are good for only 1 attack.

In PvE being directly behind a mob and going toe to toe with one leaves you surrounded by the rest of the mob after killing the first one. To go back into hiding you must use shadow cloak and run away disengaging the enemy to get back in hiding to repeat the process because you can not simply use shadow cloak and crouch again to re-enter shadows.

In PvP there are two tools which make it nearly impossible for Nightblades to sneak up on players those are the Mages guild Detect Skill and the potion of Detection. Not to mention the fact that your strongest attacks require you to enter the Zergs AOE of doom.

The Skill Lines themselves if viewed were meant to be built up for one grand attack with quick light attack finishers to finish off an enemy but without having the ability to re-enter shadows skills like: Teleport Strike, Mark Target, Veiled Strike, are completely useless.

That leaves the damage dealing skills of Path of Darkness, Grim Focus, Strife, Agony, Cripple, and Siphoning Strikes as primary striking skills which will only get you killed in a toe to toe fight with any of the other classes.

Take a look at your guilds on how many nightblades are playing right now. Half that number after Thieves guild and Assassins guilds newness wears off and that is how many people will be playing the class.

Also you talk about them worrying about hiding things behind Pay to Win. How many new armor set effects are going to be released in DLC? What about those special prizes that can only be won in certain dungeons and so on and so forth. Bottom line in order to keep the game new and fresh for the players you have to add greater and more powerful items, and you must leave room for characters to advance into more powerful roles. So no matter what they do there will be people complaining that the game is Pay to Win because they don't want to spend the $15 a month for a subscription. I believe most of these players who do not have a subscription are going to be kids without jobs and with short attention spans. This will be their game of the moment and 2 months or six months later they will have forgotten the game and moved onto the next great thing.

I have been playing this game for 2 years I have been playing the same class the class I love for the whole of that two years. This class has had the same issue for the whole of that 2 years. I have pointed to these problems over and over. The answers I would hear is wait until the Thieves Guild and Assassins Guild releases a lot of those things will be fixed. Justice system was supposed to fix some of the mob agro issues when attacking from shadows but it's still the same thing.

My question is who do you feel you should be more loyal to? Someone who has paid $15 per month for the last 2 years, whose wife has spent $15 per month for 1 year, who has bought 3 ESO games, who has bought a lot of crowns for specials, who has just started a website dedicated to the ESO game paying $30 per month, who has no plans in leaving the game do to his love of the game.

Or is the person who refuses to have to pay anything to play the game, who goes to online sites to buy cheap versions of the game, and who sits in the chats of the starter towns for two months complaining about how the game is not worth what they paid for it, or complains that there is no good TWINK builds.

Where do you think loyalties should be vested?