A Proposed Rework of the Sorcerer Dark Magic and Daedric Summoning Trees, with Some Soul Magic

CasNation · September 2016

Introduction:

The pupose of this post is to examine and recommend changes for some current holes in the functionality of the sorcerer class, as well as exploit the currently barren soul magic world tree. Please keep in mind that these are only suggestions, and are meant solely to be thought-provoking and perhaps give the devs some ideas. They are not meant to be demands, and are not necessarily balanced in terms of the current meta. Also keep in mind that some of these ideas have been around for awhile, and aren't necessarily my original ideas. All I am proposing is a way to combine them. Now that out of the way, here's a TL;DR:

TL;DR: Rework the entire Dark Magic tree into a Frost Magic tree, move Negate Magic to Daedric Summoning, and move all of the summoning bits of Daedric Summoning to the Soul Magic tree.

The Dark Magic treea and Frost Magic:

The absence of good ways to utilize frost magic has long been a point of concern in ESO. I think that the Dark Magic tree is a perfect place to exploit this. Converting this tree frost would be very low effort when considering both animation changes, as well as balancing. Basically, just recolor, rename, and change the damage types of all abilities to cold instead of magic damage. The only outliers here are Negate magic (which I will cover later) and Dark Exchange. For Dark Exchange, we can leverage the fact that our characters have been exposed to Coldharbor and magic intrinsic to that plane. Simply rename the ability "Coldharbor's Sacrifice" and we have a lore working title. The passives I think are fine and really just need some renaming work to be more cold/Coldharbor centric according to the lore. These changes cement the sorcerer as a skilled elementalist, and allow an interesting avenue of play for those who wish to utilize frost magic, but don't want to be gimped. Now we have Negate Magic still that doesn't really fit. So we are going to drop Storm Atronach from Daedric Summoning and move Negate Magic there. Hear me out, we aren't done yet. Though we will need to come up with abother ultimate to fill the hole left behind by Negate Magic. I won't address that at this point. We'll put this down as development cost +1 ultimate ability.

Daedric Summoning and Soul Magic:

We all know that pets are very difficult to make work in endgame pve and pvp. Those that do work are very niche and hard to a complies by the average player. Some of us just want to get rid of them. But others love the pets. Unfortunately, the pets tree limits the endgame functionality of the sorcerer due to them being summons and simply taking up class ability slots that could be other more interesting abilities. So let's move them to the Soul Magic tree, a tree with only one normal ability that could accommodate up to 4 more new abilities. Soul trap and conjuration spells have always danced around each other in TES games, so I don't think this would be a problem lorewise. So we move the scamp and twilight to the Soul Magic tree, leaving us with two slots in the Daedric Summoning tree (which should be renamed) to be filled. We could even take the now dropped Storm Atronach and nerf it down to a normal ability level instead of an ultimate. I think that Curse, Ward, and Bound Armor are generally decent abilities, and should remain part of the sorcerer kit, though some morphs would need to be reworked to make up for the lack of pets. I also think these abilities tie thematically with Negate Magic the new ultimate for this tree. So for this move we have large development costs of +2 more skills, which could include stamina morphs even.

So, in total, besides the various minor animation and name adjustments, developers would need to incorporate and balance 1 ultimate, and 2 normal abilities. Not that bad in my opinion for a rework of this scale.

Please let me know your thoughts. I will be adding to and updating this post later on, perhaps going into detail in passive adjustments. I am on my phone at the moment, and am getting tired of trying to type on a tiny keyboard :P Cheers.

hrothbern · September 2016

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hrothbern · September 2016

CasNation wrote: »

Introduction:

The pupose of this post is to examine and recommend changes for some current holes in the functionality of the sorcerer class, as well as exploit the currently barren soul magic world tree. Please keep in mind that these are only suggestions, and are meant solely to be thought-provoking and perhaps give the devs some ideas. They are not meant to be demands, and are not necessarily balanced in terms of the current meta. Now that out of the way, here's a TL;DR:

TL;DR: Rework the entire Dark Magic tree into a Frost Magic tree, move Negate Magic to Daedric Summoning, and move all of the summoning bits of Daedric Summoning to the Soul Magic tree.

The Dark Magic treea and Frost Magic:

The absence of good ways to utilize frost magic has long been a point of concern in ESO. I think that the Dark Magic tree is a perfect place to exploit this. Converting this tree frost would be very low effort when considering both animation changes, as well as balancing. Basically, just recolor, rename, and change the damage types of all abilities to cold instead of magic damage. The only outliers here are Negate magic (which I will cover later) and Dark Exchange. For Dark Exchange, we can leverage the fact that our characters have been exposed to Coldharbor and magic intrinsic to that plane. Simply rename the ability "Coldharbor's Sacrifice" and we have a lore working title. The passives I think are fine and really just need some renaming work to be more cold/Coldharbor centric according to the lore. These changes cement the sorcerer as a skilled elementalist, and allow an interesting avenue of play for those who wish to utilize frost magic, but don't want to be gimped. Now we have Negate Magic still that doesn't really fit. So we are going to drop Storm Atronach from Daedric Summoning and move Negate Magic there. Hear me out, we aren't done yet. Though we will need to come up with abother ultimate to fill the hole left behind by Negate Magic. I won't address that at this point. We'll put this down as development cost +1 ultimate ability.

Daedric Summoning and Soul Magic:

We all know that pets are very difficult to make work in endgame pve and pvp. Those that do work are very niche and hard to a complies by the average player. Some of us just want to get rid of them. But others love the pets. Unfortunately, the pets tree limits the endgame functionality of the sorcerer due to them being summons and simply taking up class ability slots that could be other more interesting abilities. So let's move them to the Soul Magic tree, a tree with only one normal ability that could accommodate up to 4 more new abilities. Soul trap and conjuration spells have always danced around each other in TES games, so I don't think this would be a problem lorewise. So we move the scamp and twilight to the Soul Magic tree, leaving us with two slots in the Daedric Summoning tree (which should be renamed) to be filled. We could even take the now dropped Storm Atronach and nerf it down to a normal ability level instead of an ultimate. I think that Curse, Ward, and Bound Armor are generally decent abilities, and should remain part of the sorcerer kit, though some morphs would need to be reworked to make up for the lack of pets. I also think these abilities tie thematically with Negate Magic the new ultimate for this tree. So for this move we have large development costs of +2 more skills, which could include stamina morphs even.

So, in total, besides the various minor animation and name adjustments, developers would need to incorporate and balance 1 ultimate, and 2 normal abilities. Not that bad in my opinion for a rework of this scale.

Please let me know your thoughts. I will be adding to and updating this post later on, perhaps going into detail in passive adjustments. I am on my phone at the moment, and am getting tired of trying to type on a tiny keyboard :P Cheers.

The pets are a toggle using up slots, forcing the special overload ultimate mechanics that creates a third bar, to have at least some place for long duration buffs and less used abilities.

That means that the Soul Magic tree as it is now has to disappear completely.

I think it is easier to tweak improve the current daedric line of the Sorcs.

CasNation · September 2016

hrothbern wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

Introduction:

The pupose of this post is to examine and recommend changes for some current holes in the functionality of the sorcerer class, as well as exploit the currently barren soul magic world tree. Please keep in mind that these are only suggestions, and are meant solely to be thought-provoking and perhaps give the devs some ideas. They are not meant to be demands, and are not necessarily balanced in terms of the current meta. Now that out of the way, here's a TL;DR:

TL;DR: Rework the entire Dark Magic tree into a Frost Magic tree, move Negate Magic to Daedric Summoning, and move all of the summoning bits of Daedric Summoning to the Soul Magic tree.

The Dark Magic treea and Frost Magic:

The absence of good ways to utilize frost magic has long been a point of concern in ESO. I think that the Dark Magic tree is a perfect place to exploit this. Converting this tree frost would be very low effort when considering both animation changes, as well as balancing. Basically, just recolor, rename, and change the damage types of all abilities to cold instead of magic damage. The only outliers here are Negate magic (which I will cover later) and Dark Exchange. For Dark Exchange, we can leverage the fact that our characters have been exposed to Coldharbor and magic intrinsic to that plane. Simply rename the ability "Coldharbor's Sacrifice" and we have a lore working title. The passives I think are fine and really just need some renaming work to be more cold/Coldharbor centric according to the lore. These changes cement the sorcerer as a skilled elementalist, and allow an interesting avenue of play for those who wish to utilize frost magic, but don't want to be gimped. Now we have Negate Magic still that doesn't really fit. So we are going to drop Storm Atronach from Daedric Summoning and move Negate Magic there. Hear me out, we aren't done yet. Though we will need to come up with abother ultimate to fill the hole left behind by Negate Magic. I won't address that at this point. We'll put this down as development cost +1 ultimate ability.

Daedric Summoning and Soul Magic:

We all know that pets are very difficult to make work in endgame pve and pvp. Those that do work are very niche and hard to a complies by the average player. Some of us just want to get rid of them. But others love the pets. Unfortunately, the pets tree limits the endgame functionality of the sorcerer due to them being summons and simply taking up class ability slots that could be other more interesting abilities. So let's move them to the Soul Magic tree, a tree with only one normal ability that could accommodate up to 4 more new abilities. Soul trap and conjuration spells have always danced around each other in TES games, so I don't think this would be a problem lorewise. So we move the scamp and twilight to the Soul Magic tree, leaving us with two slots in the Daedric Summoning tree (which should be renamed) to be filled. We could even take the now dropped Storm Atronach and nerf it down to a normal ability level instead of an ultimate. I think that Curse, Ward, and Bound Armor are generally decent abilities, and should remain part of the sorcerer kit, though some morphs would need to be reworked to make up for the lack of pets. I also think these abilities tie thematically with Negate Magic the new ultimate for this tree. So for this move we have large development costs of +2 more skills, which could include stamina morphs even.

So, in total, besides the various minor animation and name adjustments, developers would need to incorporate and balance 1 ultimate, and 2 normal abilities. Not that bad in my opinion for a rework of this scale.

Please let me know your thoughts. I will be adding to and updating this post later on, perhaps going into detail in passive adjustments. I am on my phone at the moment, and am getting tired of trying to type on a tiny keyboard :P Cheers.

The pets are a toggle using up slots, forcing the special overload ultimate mechanics that creates a third bar, to have at least some place for long duration buffs and less used abilities.

That means that the Soul Magic tree as it is now has to disappear completely.

I think it is easier to tweak improve the current daedric line of the Sorcs.

I am not sure I follow your logic. What do the pets being toggles have to do with the soul magic tree not working? And how does Overload factor into this since the sorc class would still have access to both overload and pets with this system?

Foxic · September 2016

This is a selfish reason. But as a dunmer pve sorcerer, I finally feel dunmer is the min Max race for pve sorcerer. And adding ice magic would shift favor back to altmer.

However shifting sorcs magic damage to frost damage would be a general dps increase so I'm conflicted.

hrothbern · September 2016

CasNation wrote: »

hrothbern wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

Introduction:

The pupose of this post is to examine and recommend changes for some current holes in the functionality of the sorcerer class, as well as exploit the currently barren soul magic world tree. Please keep in mind that these are only suggestions, and are meant solely to be thought-provoking and perhaps give the devs some ideas. They are not meant to be demands, and are not necessarily balanced in terms of the current meta. Now that out of the way, here's a TL;DR:

TL;DR: Rework the entire Dark Magic tree into a Frost Magic tree, move Negate Magic to Daedric Summoning, and move all of the summoning bits of Daedric Summoning to the Soul Magic tree.

The Dark Magic treea and Frost Magic:

The absence of good ways to utilize frost magic has long been a point of concern in ESO. I think that the Dark Magic tree is a perfect place to exploit this. Converting this tree frost would be very low effort when considering both animation changes, as well as balancing. Basically, just recolor, rename, and change the damage types of all abilities to cold instead of magic damage. The only outliers here are Negate magic (which I will cover later) and Dark Exchange. For Dark Exchange, we can leverage the fact that our characters have been exposed to Coldharbor and magic intrinsic to that plane. Simply rename the ability "Coldharbor's Sacrifice" and we have a lore working title. The passives I think are fine and really just need some renaming work to be more cold/Coldharbor centric according to the lore. These changes cement the sorcerer as a skilled elementalist, and allow an interesting avenue of play for those who wish to utilize frost magic, but don't want to be gimped. Now we have Negate Magic still that doesn't really fit. So we are going to drop Storm Atronach from Daedric Summoning and move Negate Magic there. Hear me out, we aren't done yet. Though we will need to come up with abother ultimate to fill the hole left behind by Negate Magic. I won't address that at this point. We'll put this down as development cost +1 ultimate ability.

Daedric Summoning and Soul Magic:

We all know that pets are very difficult to make work in endgame pve and pvp. Those that do work are very niche and hard to a complies by the average player. Some of us just want to get rid of them. But others love the pets. Unfortunately, the pets tree limits the endgame functionality of the sorcerer due to them being summons and simply taking up class ability slots that could be other more interesting abilities. So let's move them to the Soul Magic tree, a tree with only one normal ability that could accommodate up to 4 more new abilities. Soul trap and conjuration spells have always danced around each other in TES games, so I don't think this would be a problem lorewise. So we move the scamp and twilight to the Soul Magic tree, leaving us with two slots in the Daedric Summoning tree (which should be renamed) to be filled. We could even take the now dropped Storm Atronach and nerf it down to a normal ability level instead of an ultimate. I think that Curse, Ward, and Bound Armor are generally decent abilities, and should remain part of the sorcerer kit, though some morphs would need to be reworked to make up for the lack of pets. I also think these abilities tie thematically with Negate Magic the new ultimate for this tree. So for this move we have large development costs of +2 more skills, which could include stamina morphs even.

So, in total, besides the various minor animation and name adjustments, developers would need to incorporate and balance 1 ultimate, and 2 normal abilities. Not that bad in my opinion for a rework of this scale.

Please let me know your thoughts. I will be adding to and updating this post later on, perhaps going into detail in passive adjustments. I am on my phone at the moment, and am getting tired of trying to type on a tiny keyboard :P Cheers.

The pets are a toggle using up slots, forcing the special overload ultimate mechanics that creates a third bar, to have at least some place for long duration buffs and less used abilities.

That means that the Soul Magic tree as it is now has to disappear completely.

I think it is easier to tweak improve the current daedric line of the Sorcs.

I am not sure I follow your logic. What do the pets being toggles have to do with the soul magic tree not working? And how does Overload factor into this since the sorc class would still have access to both overload and pets with this system?

The logic is that moving 2 pet abilities ends up in moving 4 abilities:

The pets need the Sorc Ward because that shield protects caster and pets.
If only the two pet abilities are moved over to the Soul Magic tree, other classes will have no practical benefit from the unprotected pets.
=> nice for the Sorcs.... and no real value for other classes

If the two pets AND the Ward are moved over to the Soul Magic, all classes can use it, and all classes will suffer from the problem that they lose on all bars two toggle slots for the pets and on one or two bars a slot for the Ward.
But this will hurt the Sorc much less than the other 3 classes, because the Sorcs have the special mechanics of the Overload Ultimate, that creates a third bar.
=> nice for the Sorcs..... and other classes, without a third bar, have less slots when they use the pets than a Sorc.

To get that amount of slots disparity away, you could/must move over Overload as well to the Soul Magic tree, including the third bar mechanics.

=> to keep the classes balanced, moving two pet abilities ends up in moving 3 Daedric and 1 Storm Calling Ultimate.

Technical feasible,
also a big change of the unique Sorc class character and the indeed now somewhat empty Soul Magic character.

Is that really necessary ?
I think not.

Jar_Ek · September 2016

Dark magic going to Frost... pretty much agnostic mechanically, but like it thematically.
Changing the summons tree I think would be alot harder than it first appears as Overload 3rd bar is predicated on multiple toggles, ward protects and curse buffs pets plus 1/2 the passives are pet related.

If summons moved to its own world tree with soul magic, pets would need to be reworked to be usable by stamina or magicka, be survivable, and the tree would need appropriate pet passives.

The gaps in daedric summoning would need to be filled with suitable abilities as well - I'm guessing one class spammable would be desired, and maybe a debuff.

However if you're going to mix it up, then move dark conversion into the ex-summons tree and add a frosty ability into the new frost tree... maybe swap ward in and make it a frost based shield.

But based on how zos change things... don't hold your breath on it all.

CasNation · September 2016

hrothbern wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

hrothbern wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

Introduction:

The pupose of this post is to examine and recommend changes for some current holes in the functionality of the sorcerer class, as well as exploit the currently barren soul magic world tree. Please keep in mind that these are only suggestions, and are meant solely to be thought-provoking and perhaps give the devs some ideas. They are not meant to be demands, and are not necessarily balanced in terms of the current meta. Now that out of the way, here's a TL;DR:

TL;DR: Rework the entire Dark Magic tree into a Frost Magic tree, move Negate Magic to Daedric Summoning, and move all of the summoning bits of Daedric Summoning to the Soul Magic tree.

The Dark Magic treea and Frost Magic:

The absence of good ways to utilize frost magic has long been a point of concern in ESO. I think that the Dark Magic tree is a perfect place to exploit this. Converting this tree frost would be very low effort when considering both animation changes, as well as balancing. Basically, just recolor, rename, and change the damage types of all abilities to cold instead of magic damage. The only outliers here are Negate magic (which I will cover later) and Dark Exchange. For Dark Exchange, we can leverage the fact that our characters have been exposed to Coldharbor and magic intrinsic to that plane. Simply rename the ability "Coldharbor's Sacrifice" and we have a lore working title. The passives I think are fine and really just need some renaming work to be more cold/Coldharbor centric according to the lore. These changes cement the sorcerer as a skilled elementalist, and allow an interesting avenue of play for those who wish to utilize frost magic, but don't want to be gimped. Now we have Negate Magic still that doesn't really fit. So we are going to drop Storm Atronach from Daedric Summoning and move Negate Magic there. Hear me out, we aren't done yet. Though we will need to come up with abother ultimate to fill the hole left behind by Negate Magic. I won't address that at this point. We'll put this down as development cost +1 ultimate ability.

Daedric Summoning and Soul Magic:

We all know that pets are very difficult to make work in endgame pve and pvp. Those that do work are very niche and hard to a complies by the average player. Some of us just want to get rid of them. But others love the pets. Unfortunately, the pets tree limits the endgame functionality of the sorcerer due to them being summons and simply taking up class ability slots that could be other more interesting abilities. So let's move them to the Soul Magic tree, a tree with only one normal ability that could accommodate up to 4 more new abilities. Soul trap and conjuration spells have always danced around each other in TES games, so I don't think this would be a problem lorewise. So we move the scamp and twilight to the Soul Magic tree, leaving us with two slots in the Daedric Summoning tree (which should be renamed) to be filled. We could even take the now dropped Storm Atronach and nerf it down to a normal ability level instead of an ultimate. I think that Curse, Ward, and Bound Armor are generally decent abilities, and should remain part of the sorcerer kit, though some morphs would need to be reworked to make up for the lack of pets. I also think these abilities tie thematically with Negate Magic the new ultimate for this tree. So for this move we have large development costs of +2 more skills, which could include stamina morphs even.

So, in total, besides the various minor animation and name adjustments, developers would need to incorporate and balance 1 ultimate, and 2 normal abilities. Not that bad in my opinion for a rework of this scale.

Please let me know your thoughts. I will be adding to and updating this post later on, perhaps going into detail in passive adjustments. I am on my phone at the moment, and am getting tired of trying to type on a tiny keyboard :P Cheers.

The pets are a toggle using up slots, forcing the special overload ultimate mechanics that creates a third bar, to have at least some place for long duration buffs and less used abilities.

That means that the Soul Magic tree as it is now has to disappear completely.

I think it is easier to tweak improve the current daedric line of the Sorcs.

I am not sure I follow your logic. What do the pets being toggles have to do with the soul magic tree not working? And how does Overload factor into this since the sorc class would still have access to both overload and pets with this system?

The logic is that moving 2 pet abilities ends up in moving 4 abilities:

The pets need the Sorc Ward because that shield protects caster and pets.
If only the two pet abilities are moved over to the Soul Magic tree, other classes will have no practical benefit from the unprotected pets.
=> nice for the Sorcs.... and no real value for other classes

If the two pets AND the Ward are moved over to the Soul Magic, all classes can use it, and all classes will suffer from the problem that they lose on all bars two toggle slots for the pets and on one or two bars a slot for the Ward.
But this will hurt the Sorc much less than the other 3 classes, because the Sorcs have the special mechanics of the Overload Ultimate, that creates a third bar.
=> nice for the Sorcs..... and other classes, without a third bar, have less slots when they use the pets than a Sorc.

To get that amount of slots disparity away, you could/must move over Overload as well to the Soul Magic tree, including the third bar mechanics.

=> to keep the classes balanced, moving two pet abilities ends up in moving 3 Daedric and 1 Storm Calling Ultimate.

Technical feasible,
also a big change of the unique Sorc class character and the indeed now somewhat empty Soul Magic character.

Is that really necessary ?
I think not.

Hmm. I completely disagree with this logic.

My primary reason for disagreeing is because I think that pets need a complete rebalancing anyways, and part of the reason they have been so hard to balance is because of their interactions with Ward and Curse. If we buffed up their health, then with Ward they would be too hard to kill. If we buffed up their damage, then they are overperforming when someone uses the pet morph of curse. By moving the pets and NOT those two abilities, we make the pets much easier to balance since they are able to perform in isolation of abilities that explicitly buff them. This isn't really a thread about how to balance pets though. That is another topic entirely. The goal of this post is to propose an idea that makes pets easier to balance, adds flavor to the sorc class, and allows for space to add a couple new exciting abilities with limited developer effort.

This also begins to alleviate the issues with overload, since as you say, if you run a pet build, you essentially need that 3rd bar in order to have enough slots since you HAVE to run curse and ward to make the pets remotely useful. So, we can assume from this that the pets themselves are useless, without their crutches, and that they would remain so if moved to the Soul magic tree without any other conditions. Given your arguments about needing to move other abilities to compliment them, I think you would agree. And I would argue that them being underpowered is completely fine. For now. The idea is to get them to a place where balancing is easier, as I mentioned above. Those who want to use them can use them, and have fun for the time being on any class. Those that want to be competitive with them will have to wait for the second step, which is to balance pets. This idea would have to be taken in a few stages. I would personally be okay going from a situation where none but a few use pets because they suck, to a situation where no one being serious uses pets because they suck, but everyone can play with them if they feel like it to have fun.

To move onto your comments about overload, that only holds true if we are talking about trying to build a pure pet build, which isn't really seen that often. people are free to just use one pet if they want, and none of the other fluff. They will be weak for a time, but as I mentioned above, stage 2 in the process would be to balance pets to perform without outside abilities influencing their performance. Sorcs WOULD still remain the class best able to utilize the pets due to their Overload bar...and that is fine too I think. It helps keep that uniqueness of the sorc class while still allowing others to access the line. If the sorc is better able to utilize the skill line because of overload, that doesn't mean we need to give overload to everyone.

I guess I just don't see a problem with pets being relatively underpowered for a bit, since they already are. This isn't a complete idea yet, and I am looking forward to seeing what others have to add to it.

CasNation · September 2016

Jar_Ek wrote: »

Dark magic going to Frost... pretty much agnostic mechanically, but like it thematically.
Changing the summons tree I think would be alot harder than it first appears as Overload 3rd bar is predicated on multiple toggles, ward protects and curse buffs pets plus 1/2 the passives are pet related.

If summons moved to its own world tree with soul magic, pets would need to be reworked to be usable by stamina or magicka, be survivable, and the tree would need appropriate pet passives.

The gaps in daedric summoning would need to be filled with suitable abilities as well - I'm guessing one class spammable would be desired, and maybe a debuff.

However if you're going to mix it up, then move dark conversion into the ex-summons tree and add a frosty ability into the new frost tree... maybe swap ward in and make it a frost based shield.

But based on how zos change things... don't hold your breath on it all.

I commented on my disagreements with the logic on ward, overload, etc. above, so I won't repeat it here.

I definitely agree that pets moving to soul magic would mean they have to be reworked (which I think is needed regardless), and making them usable with stam would definitely be on the list. As I mentioned above, I think that this move would actually make them easier to balance than they are now.

I really like your idea of moving dark conversion over, and coming up with a new frost themed ability instead. Or even swapping it with ward. Good thoughts!

I am certainly not holding my breath for these changes, and recognize that they may never come. The primary purpose of this post is to be thought provoking and get people thinking about how things could move around to wok better, without necessarily requiring a lot of work. If the devs incorporate zero of these changes, but look at them and get the idea to do something else cool, then this post has done its job.

Thanks for the feedback!

Gothren · September 2016

CasNation wrote: »

Introduction:

TL;DR: Rework the entire Dark Magic tree into a Frost Magic tree, move Negate Magic to Daedric Summoning, and move all of the summoning bits of Daedric Summoning to the Soul Magic tree.

The Dark Magic treea and Frost Magic:

Daedric Summoning and Soul Magic:

We all know that pets are very difficult to make work in endgame pve and pvp. Those that do work are very niche and hard to a complies by the average player. Some of us just want to get rid of them. But others love the pets. Unfortunately, the pets tree limits the endgame functionality of the sorcerer due to them being summons and simply taking up class ability slots that could be other more interesting abilities. So let's move them to the Soul Magic tree, a tree with only one normal ability that could accommodate up to 4 more new abilities. Soul trap and conjuration spells have always danced around each other in TES games, so I don't think this would be a problem lorewise. So we move the scamp and twilight to the Soul Magic tree, leaving us with two slots in the Daedric Summoning tree (which should be renamed) to be filled. We could even take the now dropped Storm Atronach and nerf it down to a normal ability level instead of an ultimate. I think that Curse, Ward, and Bound Armor are generally decent abilities, and should remain part of the sorcerer kit, though some morphs would need to be reworked to make up for the lack of pets. I also think these abilities tie thematically with Negate Magic the new ultimate for this tree. So for this move we have large development costs of +2 more skills, which could include stamina morphs even.

im against everything you said about daedric summoning. my vote is to keep it.

greylox · September 2016

I have multiple sorcs and two pet sorcs and don't have much of a problem as it is, all skills have their uses and I personally don't think it needs to drastically change (I'd like to see more variety of pets, more control etc). That said, I really think another line, Ice magic, should be added. It should be an equivalent to the other lines, nothing special that people moan about...just a cleverly 'adjusted for ice spells' skill line because the elder scrolls needs it!

Pinja · September 2016

CasNation wrote: »

hrothbern wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

hrothbern wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

Introduction:

The pupose of this post is to examine and recommend changes for some current holes in the functionality of the sorcerer class, as well as exploit the currently barren soul magic world tree. Please keep in mind that these are only suggestions, and are meant solely to be thought-provoking and perhaps give the devs some ideas. They are not meant to be demands, and are not necessarily balanced in terms of the current meta. Now that out of the way, here's a TL;DR:

TL;DR: Rework the entire Dark Magic tree into a Frost Magic tree, move Negate Magic to Daedric Summoning, and move all of the summoning bits of Daedric Summoning to the Soul Magic tree.

The Dark Magic treea and Frost Magic:

The absence of good ways to utilize frost magic has long been a point of concern in ESO. I think that the Dark Magic tree is a perfect place to exploit this. Converting this tree frost would be very low effort when considering both animation changes, as well as balancing. Basically, just recolor, rename, and change the damage types of all abilities to cold instead of magic damage. The only outliers here are Negate magic (which I will cover later) and Dark Exchange. For Dark Exchange, we can leverage the fact that our characters have been exposed to Coldharbor and magic intrinsic to that plane. Simply rename the ability "Coldharbor's Sacrifice" and we have a lore working title. The passives I think are fine and really just need some renaming work to be more cold/Coldharbor centric according to the lore. These changes cement the sorcerer as a skilled elementalist, and allow an interesting avenue of play for those who wish to utilize frost magic, but don't want to be gimped. Now we have Negate Magic still that doesn't really fit. So we are going to drop Storm Atronach from Daedric Summoning and move Negate Magic there. Hear me out, we aren't done yet. Though we will need to come up with abother ultimate to fill the hole left behind by Negate Magic. I won't address that at this point. We'll put this down as development cost +1 ultimate ability.

Daedric Summoning and Soul Magic:

We all know that pets are very difficult to make work in endgame pve and pvp. Those that do work are very niche and hard to a complies by the average player. Some of us just want to get rid of them. But others love the pets. Unfortunately, the pets tree limits the endgame functionality of the sorcerer due to them being summons and simply taking up class ability slots that could be other more interesting abilities. So let's move them to the Soul Magic tree, a tree with only one normal ability that could accommodate up to 4 more new abilities. Soul trap and conjuration spells have always danced around each other in TES games, so I don't think this would be a problem lorewise. So we move the scamp and twilight to the Soul Magic tree, leaving us with two slots in the Daedric Summoning tree (which should be renamed) to be filled. We could even take the now dropped Storm Atronach and nerf it down to a normal ability level instead of an ultimate. I think that Curse, Ward, and Bound Armor are generally decent abilities, and should remain part of the sorcerer kit, though some morphs would need to be reworked to make up for the lack of pets. I also think these abilities tie thematically with Negate Magic the new ultimate for this tree. So for this move we have large development costs of +2 more skills, which could include stamina morphs even.

So, in total, besides the various minor animation and name adjustments, developers would need to incorporate and balance 1 ultimate, and 2 normal abilities. Not that bad in my opinion for a rework of this scale.

Please let me know your thoughts. I will be adding to and updating this post later on, perhaps going into detail in passive adjustments. I am on my phone at the moment, and am getting tired of trying to type on a tiny keyboard :P Cheers.

The pets are a toggle using up slots, forcing the special overload ultimate mechanics that creates a third bar, to have at least some place for long duration buffs and less used abilities.

That means that the Soul Magic tree as it is now has to disappear completely.

I think it is easier to tweak improve the current daedric line of the Sorcs.

I am not sure I follow your logic. What do the pets being toggles have to do with the soul magic tree not working? And how does Overload factor into this since the sorc class would still have access to both overload and pets with this system?

The logic is that moving 2 pet abilities ends up in moving 4 abilities:

The pets need the Sorc Ward because that shield protects caster and pets.
If only the two pet abilities are moved over to the Soul Magic tree, other classes will have no practical benefit from the unprotected pets.
=> nice for the Sorcs.... and no real value for other classes

If the two pets AND the Ward are moved over to the Soul Magic, all classes can use it, and all classes will suffer from the problem that they lose on all bars two toggle slots for the pets and on one or two bars a slot for the Ward.
But this will hurt the Sorc much less than the other 3 classes, because the Sorcs have the special mechanics of the Overload Ultimate, that creates a third bar.
=> nice for the Sorcs..... and other classes, without a third bar, have less slots when they use the pets than a Sorc.

To get that amount of slots disparity away, you could/must move over Overload as well to the Soul Magic tree, including the third bar mechanics.

=> to keep the classes balanced, moving two pet abilities ends up in moving 3 Daedric and 1 Storm Calling Ultimate.

Technical feasible,
also a big change of the unique Sorc class character and the indeed now somewhat empty Soul Magic character.

Is that really necessary ?
I think not.

Hmm. I completely disagree with this logic.

My primary reason for disagreeing is because I think that pets need a complete rebalancing anyways, and part of the reason they have been so hard to balance is because of their interactions with Ward and Curse. If we buffed up their health, then with Ward they would be too hard to kill. If we buffed up their damage, then they are overperforming when someone uses the pet morph of curse. By moving the pets and NOT those two abilities, we make the pets much easier to balance since they are able to perform in isolation of abilities that explicitly buff them. This isn't really a thread about how to balance pets though. That is another topic entirely. The goal of this post is to propose an idea that makes pets easier to balance, adds flavor to the sorc class, and allows for space to add a couple new exciting abilities with limited developer effort.

This also begins to alleviate the issues with overload, since as you say, if you run a pet build, you essentially need that 3rd bar in order to have enough slots since you HAVE to run curse and ward to make the pets remotely useful. So, we can assume from this that the pets themselves are useless, without their crutches, and that they would remain so if moved to the Soul magic tree without any other conditions. Given your arguments about needing to move other abilities to compliment them, I think you would agree. And I would argue that them being underpowered is completely fine. For now. The idea is to get them to a place where balancing is easier, as I mentioned above. Those who want to use them can use them, and have fun for the time being on any class. Those that want to be competitive with them will have to wait for the second step, which is to balance pets. This idea would have to be taken in a few stages. I would personally be okay going from a situation where none but a few use pets because they suck, to a situation where no one being serious uses pets because they suck, but everyone can play with them if they feel like it to have fun.

To move onto your comments about overload, that only holds true if we are talking about trying to build a pure pet build, which isn't really seen that often. people are free to just use one pet if they want, and none of the other fluff. They will be weak for a time, but as I mentioned above, stage 2 in the process would be to balance pets to perform without outside abilities influencing their performance. Sorcs WOULD still remain the class best able to utilize the pets due to their Overload bar...and that is fine too I think. It helps keep that uniqueness of the sorc class while still allowing others to access the line. If the sorc is better able to utilize the skill line because of overload, that doesn't mean we need to give overload to everyone.

I guess I just don't see a problem with pets being relatively underpowered for a bit, since they already are. This isn't a complete idea yet, and I am looking forward to seeing what others have to add to it.

Ya man, I kinda with @hrothbern on this one. The whole concept seems pretty wordy & unnecessary + u left holes in it.
Not to mention ya kinda just ripped off @TheDarkRuler 's Frost Nightblade idea, which seems cooler & more practical a suggestion then the one you laid out for sorcs.

CasNation · September 2016

Gothren wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

Introduction:

TL;DR: Rework the entire Dark Magic tree into a Frost Magic tree, move Negate Magic to Daedric Summoning, and move all of the summoning bits of Daedric Summoning to the Soul Magic tree.

The Dark Magic treea and Frost Magic:

Daedric Summoning and Soul Magic:

We all know that pets are very difficult to make work in endgame pve and pvp. Those that do work are very niche and hard to a complies by the average player. Some of us just want to get rid of them. But others love the pets. Unfortunately, the pets tree limits the endgame functionality of the sorcerer due to them being summons and simply taking up class ability slots that could be other more interesting abilities. So let's move them to the Soul Magic tree, a tree with only one normal ability that could accommodate up to 4 more new abilities. Soul trap and conjuration spells have always danced around each other in TES games, so I don't think this would be a problem lorewise. So we move the scamp and twilight to the Soul Magic tree, leaving us with two slots in the Daedric Summoning tree (which should be renamed) to be filled. We could even take the now dropped Storm Atronach and nerf it down to a normal ability level instead of an ultimate. I think that Curse, Ward, and Bound Armor are generally decent abilities, and should remain part of the sorcerer kit, though some morphs would need to be reworked to make up for the lack of pets. I also think these abilities tie thematically with Negate Magic the new ultimate for this tree. So for this move we have large development costs of +2 more skills, which could include stamina morphs even.

im against everything you said about daedric summoning. my vote is to keep it.

I'm curious as to why. I understand that the Daedric summoning skill line is divisive, and I would like to understand where people are coming from who want to keep it. What kind of content are you using it for? Why do you like it? Do you have different suggestions you would like to make it better other than the ones I suggested?

CasNation · September 2016

greylox wrote: »

I have multiple sorcs and two pet sorcs and don't have much of a problem as it is, all skills have their uses and I personally don't think it needs to drastically change (I'd like to see more variety of pets, more control etc). That said, I really think another line, Ice magic, should be added. It should be an equivalent to the other lines, nothing special that people moan about...just a cleverly 'adjusted for ice spells' skill line because the elder scrolls needs it!

I am curious as to how you use the petsn and what kind of content you complete with them? I ask because I personally don't really like them, and am interested in hearing others points of view on why they enjoy pets, and how they feel they fit into the endgame at the moment.

That said about pets, yeah I really want to get frost magic in somehow. It is so underrepresented in ESO, and I think it has a lot of potential, especially for PvP.

CasNation · September 2016

Pinja wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

hrothbern wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

hrothbern wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

Introduction:

The pupose of this post is to examine and recommend changes for some current holes in the functionality of the sorcerer class, as well as exploit the currently barren soul magic world tree. Please keep in mind that these are only suggestions, and are meant solely to be thought-provoking and perhaps give the devs some ideas. They are not meant to be demands, and are not necessarily balanced in terms of the current meta. Now that out of the way, here's a TL;DR:

TL;DR: Rework the entire Dark Magic tree into a Frost Magic tree, move Negate Magic to Daedric Summoning, and move all of the summoning bits of Daedric Summoning to the Soul Magic tree.

The Dark Magic treea and Frost Magic:

The absence of good ways to utilize frost magic has long been a point of concern in ESO. I think that the Dark Magic tree is a perfect place to exploit this. Converting this tree frost would be very low effort when considering both animation changes, as well as balancing. Basically, just recolor, rename, and change the damage types of all abilities to cold instead of magic damage. The only outliers here are Negate magic (which I will cover later) and Dark Exchange. For Dark Exchange, we can leverage the fact that our characters have been exposed to Coldharbor and magic intrinsic to that plane. Simply rename the ability "Coldharbor's Sacrifice" and we have a lore working title. The passives I think are fine and really just need some renaming work to be more cold/Coldharbor centric according to the lore. These changes cement the sorcerer as a skilled elementalist, and allow an interesting avenue of play for those who wish to utilize frost magic, but don't want to be gimped. Now we have Negate Magic still that doesn't really fit. So we are going to drop Storm Atronach from Daedric Summoning and move Negate Magic there. Hear me out, we aren't done yet. Though we will need to come up with abother ultimate to fill the hole left behind by Negate Magic. I won't address that at this point. We'll put this down as development cost +1 ultimate ability.

Daedric Summoning and Soul Magic:

We all know that pets are very difficult to make work in endgame pve and pvp. Those that do work are very niche and hard to a complies by the average player. Some of us just want to get rid of them. But others love the pets. Unfortunately, the pets tree limits the endgame functionality of the sorcerer due to them being summons and simply taking up class ability slots that could be other more interesting abilities. So let's move them to the Soul Magic tree, a tree with only one normal ability that could accommodate up to 4 more new abilities. Soul trap and conjuration spells have always danced around each other in TES games, so I don't think this would be a problem lorewise. So we move the scamp and twilight to the Soul Magic tree, leaving us with two slots in the Daedric Summoning tree (which should be renamed) to be filled. We could even take the now dropped Storm Atronach and nerf it down to a normal ability level instead of an ultimate. I think that Curse, Ward, and Bound Armor are generally decent abilities, and should remain part of the sorcerer kit, though some morphs would need to be reworked to make up for the lack of pets. I also think these abilities tie thematically with Negate Magic the new ultimate for this tree. So for this move we have large development costs of +2 more skills, which could include stamina morphs even.

So, in total, besides the various minor animation and name adjustments, developers would need to incorporate and balance 1 ultimate, and 2 normal abilities. Not that bad in my opinion for a rework of this scale.

Please let me know your thoughts. I will be adding to and updating this post later on, perhaps going into detail in passive adjustments. I am on my phone at the moment, and am getting tired of trying to type on a tiny keyboard :P Cheers.

The pets are a toggle using up slots, forcing the special overload ultimate mechanics that creates a third bar, to have at least some place for long duration buffs and less used abilities.

That means that the Soul Magic tree as it is now has to disappear completely.

I think it is easier to tweak improve the current daedric line of the Sorcs.

I am not sure I follow your logic. What do the pets being toggles have to do with the soul magic tree not working? And how does Overload factor into this since the sorc class would still have access to both overload and pets with this system?

The logic is that moving 2 pet abilities ends up in moving 4 abilities:

The pets need the Sorc Ward because that shield protects caster and pets.
If only the two pet abilities are moved over to the Soul Magic tree, other classes will have no practical benefit from the unprotected pets.
=> nice for the Sorcs.... and no real value for other classes

If the two pets AND the Ward are moved over to the Soul Magic, all classes can use it, and all classes will suffer from the problem that they lose on all bars two toggle slots for the pets and on one or two bars a slot for the Ward.
But this will hurt the Sorc much less than the other 3 classes, because the Sorcs have the special mechanics of the Overload Ultimate, that creates a third bar.
=> nice for the Sorcs..... and other classes, without a third bar, have less slots when they use the pets than a Sorc.

To get that amount of slots disparity away, you could/must move over Overload as well to the Soul Magic tree, including the third bar mechanics.

=> to keep the classes balanced, moving two pet abilities ends up in moving 3 Daedric and 1 Storm Calling Ultimate.

Technical feasible,
also a big change of the unique Sorc class character and the indeed now somewhat empty Soul Magic character.

Is that really necessary ?
I think not.

Hmm. I completely disagree with this logic.

My primary reason for disagreeing is because I think that pets need a complete rebalancing anyways, and part of the reason they have been so hard to balance is because of their interactions with Ward and Curse. If we buffed up their health, then with Ward they would be too hard to kill. If we buffed up their damage, then they are overperforming when someone uses the pet morph of curse. By moving the pets and NOT those two abilities, we make the pets much easier to balance since they are able to perform in isolation of abilities that explicitly buff them. This isn't really a thread about how to balance pets though. That is another topic entirely. The goal of this post is to propose an idea that makes pets easier to balance, adds flavor to the sorc class, and allows for space to add a couple new exciting abilities with limited developer effort.

This also begins to alleviate the issues with overload, since as you say, if you run a pet build, you essentially need that 3rd bar in order to have enough slots since you HAVE to run curse and ward to make the pets remotely useful. So, we can assume from this that the pets themselves are useless, without their crutches, and that they would remain so if moved to the Soul magic tree without any other conditions. Given your arguments about needing to move other abilities to compliment them, I think you would agree. And I would argue that them being underpowered is completely fine. For now. The idea is to get them to a place where balancing is easier, as I mentioned above. Those who want to use them can use them, and have fun for the time being on any class. Those that want to be competitive with them will have to wait for the second step, which is to balance pets. This idea would have to be taken in a few stages. I would personally be okay going from a situation where none but a few use pets because they suck, to a situation where no one being serious uses pets because they suck, but everyone can play with them if they feel like it to have fun.

To move onto your comments about overload, that only holds true if we are talking about trying to build a pure pet build, which isn't really seen that often. people are free to just use one pet if they want, and none of the other fluff. They will be weak for a time, but as I mentioned above, stage 2 in the process would be to balance pets to perform without outside abilities influencing their performance. Sorcs WOULD still remain the class best able to utilize the pets due to their Overload bar...and that is fine too I think. It helps keep that uniqueness of the sorc class while still allowing others to access the line. If the sorc is better able to utilize the skill line because of overload, that doesn't mean we need to give overload to everyone.

I guess I just don't see a problem with pets being relatively underpowered for a bit, since they already are. This isn't a complete idea yet, and I am looking forward to seeing what others have to add to it.

Ya man, I kinda with @hrothbern on this one. The whole concept seems pretty wordy & unnecessary + u left holes in it.
Not to mention ya kinda just ripped off @TheDarkRuler 's Frost Nightblade idea, which seems cooler & more practical a suggestion then the one you laid out for sorcs.

The idea of the concept is not necessarily to be implemented, but rather to get people thinking about the possibilities, and talking about the skill lines in a constructive way. I know it has problems, and things to overcome. That is part of the point. So, I will ask you: how would you do things differently? Besides being wordy, what particular aspects would you change? Do you play with pets and enjoy them? If so, why?

As for ripping off the frost nightblade idea, that post was indeed the impetus that made me want to finally write this idea up. However the idea of implementing a frost skill line, and indeed incorporating frost magic into an existing class skill line, has been around for ages, and that post most certainly isn't the first to suggest it. You can check my post history from about 9 months back if you want confirmation on that.

TheDarkRuler · September 2016

The idea of the concept is not necessarily to be implemented, but rather to get people thinking about the possibilities, and talking about the skill lines in a constructive way. I know it has problems, and things to overcome. That is part of the point. So, I will ask you: how would you do things differently? Besides being wordy, what particular aspects would you change? Do you play with pets and enjoy them? If so, why?

As for ripping off the frost nightblade idea, that post was indeed the impetus that made me want to finally write this idea up. However the idea of implementing a frost skill line, and indeed incorporating frost magic into an existing class skill line, has been around for ages, and that post most certainly isn't the first to suggest it. You can check my post history from about 9 months back if you want confirmation on that.

To be honest,
i dont see a problem here.
Why can't two classes have frost based magic?
Templars and Dragon Knights have fire as well so why Sorcerer and Nightblade cannot have Ice.

CasNation · September 2016

TheDarkRuler wrote: »

The idea of the concept is not necessarily to be implemented, but rather to get people thinking about the possibilities, and talking about the skill lines in a constructive way. I know it has problems, and things to overcome. That is part of the point. So, I will ask you: how would you do things differently? Besides being wordy, what particular aspects would you change? Do you play with pets and enjoy them? If so, why?

As for ripping off the frost nightblade idea, that post was indeed the impetus that made me want to finally write this idea up. However the idea of implementing a frost skill line, and indeed incorporating frost magic into an existing class skill line, has been around for ages, and that post most certainly isn't the first to suggest it. You can check my post history from about 9 months back if you want confirmation on that.

To be honest,
i dont see a problem here.
Why can't two classes have frost based magic?
Templars and Dragon Knights have fire as well so why Sorcerer and Nightblade cannot have Ice.

I agree!

My idea is simply another method of achieving an interesting avenue of frost magic that isn't currently supported in the game.

I hope you didn't take my previous post as claiming yours was "unoriginal" or anything. That was not the intent.

Gothren · September 2016

CasNation wrote: »

Gothren wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

Introduction:

TL;DR: Rework the entire Dark Magic tree into a Frost Magic tree, move Negate Magic to Daedric Summoning, and move all of the summoning bits of Daedric Summoning to the Soul Magic tree.

The Dark Magic treea and Frost Magic:

Daedric Summoning and Soul Magic:

We all know that pets are very difficult to make work in endgame pve and pvp. Those that do work are very niche and hard to a complies by the average player. Some of us just want to get rid of them. But others love the pets. Unfortunately, the pets tree limits the endgame functionality of the sorcerer due to them being summons and simply taking up class ability slots that could be other more interesting abilities. So let's move them to the Soul Magic tree, a tree with only one normal ability that could accommodate up to 4 more new abilities. Soul trap and conjuration spells have always danced around each other in TES games, so I don't think this would be a problem lorewise. So we move the scamp and twilight to the Soul Magic tree, leaving us with two slots in the Daedric Summoning tree (which should be renamed) to be filled. We could even take the now dropped Storm Atronach and nerf it down to a normal ability level instead of an ultimate. I think that Curse, Ward, and Bound Armor are generally decent abilities, and should remain part of the sorcerer kit, though some morphs would need to be reworked to make up for the lack of pets. I also think these abilities tie thematically with Negate Magic the new ultimate for this tree. So for this move we have large development costs of +2 more skills, which could include stamina morphs even.

im against everything you said about daedric summoning. my vote is to keep it.

I'm curious as to why. I understand that the Daedric summoning skill line is divisive, and I would like to understand where people are coming from who want to keep it. What kind of content are you using it for? Why do you like it? Do you have different suggestions you would like to make it better other than the ones I suggested?

because i like summoning and it belongs in sorc class. they will introduce frost magic if they ever introduce necromancy skill line. im using it strictly for pvp and love the changes the devs made to it. I dont want it to be moved into a useless forgotten skillline that the devs will not pay attention to. frost magic skills will come just have a little bit of patience without tearing apart the sorc class.

Natas013 · September 2016

.

SirMewser · September 2016

Pets should have a proximity zone to the player where they should ignore combat (let's say 38 meter radius), forcing the pet to attack a valid player.

They should also have a passive debuff/buff benefit instead of just flat DoTs.

Scamp applies minor breach for 3 seconds on normal attack.
Clannfear applies minor maim for 3 seconds on normal attack.
Winged Twilight Matriarch should have her passive heal (but not as strong as it was originally and allow it to affect other allies in party).
Storm Atronach normal attack deals splash damage to surrounding targets of the primary target.

They need to react to damage hence they have health.

Scamp gains a buff at a 10% chance when damaged that lets 15% damage of melee attacks be reflected for 6 seconds.
Clannfear charges forward knocking down targets at a 10% chance when damaged.
Winged Twilight will push target by 2 meters after doing two consecutive melee attacks.
Winged Twilight Tormentor will also push but follows up with a channel that snares target by 60% for 3 seconds with a DOT.
Storm Atronach should have the charged atronach morph ability but only performs it when receiving 3 melee attacks within a 5 second window.

The passives.
Rebate: Why would I want my summons to die? The magic regain is so little...
Power stone is great but doesn't really have anything to do with summoning.
Daedric Protection is fine, the current Rebate effect could be thrown into this.
Expert Summoner: Currently only the player and Clannfear's active ability benefit from this.

Scamp grants 3/5% max magic.
Clannfear grants 3/5% max health.
Twilight grants 5/10% magic recovery.
Storm Atronach grants minor force for 6/9 seconds.

Additional ideas:

Bound Armor should have an active ability.
Scamp could charge a ranged lightning attack if chasing a target for more than 10 seconds.
The Clannfear's active ability could be a 1.5 second channel heal every .5s instead of instant but also grants minor protection to both player and pet making its heal effective situationally and unique to the twilight's healing effect.
Twilight tormentor should also increase the attack speed by 1.5x so it's not useless for technically half the battle.

If pets could be responsive in combat (at least by RNG chance) and passively support my allies, this would make ESO my favorite TES title for Conjuration.

As for Dark Magic, I personally am fine with it in terms of magic builds.

I would love to see Soul Magic expanded to have more Coldharbor themed skills.

Jar_Ek · September 2016

@SirMewser I have no idea what your proximity comment means, but the rest seem like steps in the right direction.

In particular, Rebate is utter garbage and should be replaced. It could help with resummoning speed or cost instead... or be un-pet related (my preference).

Vaoh · September 2016

ZOS always intended for our player classes to encompass all damage types. In Elder Scrolls games, there is typically Fire/Frost/Shock/Magic/Physical as the main ones.

Each class is made to have a general focus. This is why Dragonknights are fiery and dragon-like, Sorcs are blue/purple and spout lightning, Nightblades are red/black, and Templars are yellow whilst bursting with light.

Class Focuses:
Dragonknight: Fire - Also utilizes dragon-like and earth-like magic
Sorcerer: Lightning - Also utilizes dark magic and summons.
Nightblade Damage Health Magic - Also utilizes shadow magic, lifestealing magic and stealth
Templar Light Magic - Also utilizes Sun-like damage and healing/restoration magic
Warden Cold - Also utilizes Nature magic and summons
Necromancer Undead - summons, was supposed to do Cold, but it seems this class is totally scrapped now, with its Cold damage moved over to the Warden never gonna happen

Wait for the Wardens to come back, and you'll have your Ice spells.

I patiently await them as well. We have like 6-12 months to go

CasNation · September 2016

Gothren wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

Gothren wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

Introduction:

TL;DR: Rework the entire Dark Magic tree into a Frost Magic tree, move Negate Magic to Daedric Summoning, and move all of the summoning bits of Daedric Summoning to the Soul Magic tree.

The Dark Magic treea and Frost Magic:

Daedric Summoning and Soul Magic:

We all know that pets are very difficult to make work in endgame pve and pvp. Those that do work are very niche and hard to a complies by the average player. Some of us just want to get rid of them. But others love the pets. Unfortunately, the pets tree limits the endgame functionality of the sorcerer due to them being summons and simply taking up class ability slots that could be other more interesting abilities. So let's move them to the Soul Magic tree, a tree with only one normal ability that could accommodate up to 4 more new abilities. Soul trap and conjuration spells have always danced around each other in TES games, so I don't think this would be a problem lorewise. So we move the scamp and twilight to the Soul Magic tree, leaving us with two slots in the Daedric Summoning tree (which should be renamed) to be filled. We could even take the now dropped Storm Atronach and nerf it down to a normal ability level instead of an ultimate. I think that Curse, Ward, and Bound Armor are generally decent abilities, and should remain part of the sorcerer kit, though some morphs would need to be reworked to make up for the lack of pets. I also think these abilities tie thematically with Negate Magic the new ultimate for this tree. So for this move we have large development costs of +2 more skills, which could include stamina morphs even.

im against everything you said about daedric summoning. my vote is to keep it.

I'm curious as to why. I understand that the Daedric summoning skill line is divisive, and I would like to understand where people are coming from who want to keep it. What kind of content are you using it for? Why do you like it? Do you have different suggestions you would like to make it better other than the ones I suggested?

because i like summoning and it belongs in sorc class. they will introduce frost magic if they ever introduce necromancy skill line. im using it strictly for pvp and love the changes the devs made to it. I dont want it to be moved into a useless forgotten skillline that the devs will not pay attention to. frost magic skills will come just have a little bit of patience without tearing apart the sorc class.

It seems our disagreement stems from the fact that you are content with the ways in which pets function, and I am not.

I would argue that the Soul Magic line is not forgotten by the devs, given their most recent adjustments to Soul Strike, and the addition of pets to it would certainly draw it into focus more.

I would also argue that brand new active combat skill lines are not coming anytime soon, based both in developer comments and the recent history of DLC based skill lines. I believe that incorporating frost magic into an existing skill line would be the most efficient way to implement it. And, it doesn't even need to impact pets at all, since the point of my post was not to change everything about the sorc class. Personally I think you could just change dark magic damage to frost and call it done if we are being lazy.

The rest of your post is obviously personal opinion, and I can't argue against your feelings.

CasNation · September 2016

@SirMewser

Very cool ideas! I am also not quite sure what you mean by proximity, but your other ideas seem to all point towards pets having more agency and utility, which I completely agree with.

And please ZoS just change rebate. It is such an outdated passive.

CasNation · September 2016

Vaoh wrote: »

ZOS always intended for our player classes to encompass all damage types. In Elder Scrolls games, there is typically Fire/Frost/Shock/Magic/Physical as the main ones.

Each class is made to have a general focus. This is why Dragonknights are fiery and dragon-like, Sorcs are blue/purple and spout lightning, Nightblades are red/black, and Templars are yellow whilst bursting with light.

Class Focuses:
Dragonknight: Fire - Also utilizes dragon-like and earth-like magic
Sorcerer: Lightning - Also utilizes dark magic and summons.
Nightblade Damage Health Magic - Also utilizes shadow magic, lifestealing magic and stealth
Templar Light Magic - Also utilizes Sun-like damage and healing/restoration magic
Warden Cold - Also utilizes Nature magic and summons
Necromancer Undead - summons, was supposed to do Cold, but it seems this class is totally scrapped now, with its Cold damage moved over to the Warden never gonna happen

Wait for the Wardens to come back, and you'll have your Ice spells.

I patiently await them as well. We have like 6-12 months to go

Very interesting ideas, but one big question:

What makes you so certain the warden is coming back? Not disregarding your claim, but would be interested to hear your reasoning as to why you think this is coming.

I also feel that frost magic could be used in multiple classes, like fire is.

SirMewser · September 2016

Jar_Ek wrote: »

@SirMewser I have no idea what your proximity comment means, but the rest seem like steps in the right direction.

In particular, Rebate is utter garbage and should be replaced. It could help with resummoning speed or cost instead... or be un-pet related (my preference).

CasNation wrote: »

@SirMewser

Very cool ideas! I am also not quite sure what you mean by proximity, but your other ideas seem to all point towards pets having more agency and utility, which I completely agree with.

And please ZoS just change rebate. It is such an outdated passive.

Sorry, I mean if a pet is more than X meters away from the summoner, they should drop whatever target they are focusing on and return to the summoner or focus on a target in less than X range of the summoner. This would resolve having to recall pets and wait to prevent them from running away into the distance in pvp.

Vaoh · September 2016

CasNation wrote: »

Vaoh wrote: »

ZOS always intended for our player classes to encompass all damage types. In Elder Scrolls games, there is typically Fire/Frost/Shock/Magic/Physical as the main ones.

Each class is made to have a general focus. This is why Dragonknights are fiery and dragon-like, Sorcs are blue/purple and spout lightning, Nightblades are red/black, and Templars are yellow whilst bursting with light.

Class Focuses:
Dragonknight: Fire - Also utilizes dragon-like and earth-like magic
Sorcerer: Lightning - Also utilizes dark magic and summons.
Nightblade Damage Health Magic - Also utilizes shadow magic, lifestealing magic and stealth
Templar Light Magic - Also utilizes Sun-like damage and healing/restoration magic
Warden Cold - Also utilizes Nature magic and summons
Necromancer Undead - summons, was supposed to do Cold, but it seems this class is totally scrapped now, with its Cold damage moved over to the Warden never gonna happen

Wait for the Wardens to come back, and you'll have your Ice spells.

I patiently await them as well. We have like 6-12 months to go

Very interesting ideas, but one big question:

What makes you so certain the warden is coming back? Not disregarding your claim, but would be interested to hear your reasoning as to why you think this is coming.

I also feel that frost magic could be used in multiple classes, like fire is.

Those three skill lines I mentioned (Winter's Embrace, Green Balance, Animal Companions) were added into ESO for us to dig up and datamine on the One Tamriel PTS

It is brand new info. That's as clear cut as it gets.

hrothbern · September 2016

Vaoh wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

Vaoh wrote: »

ZOS always intended for our player classes to encompass all damage types. In Elder Scrolls games, there is typically Fire/Frost/Shock/Magic/Physical as the main ones.

Each class is made to have a general focus. This is why Dragonknights are fiery and dragon-like, Sorcs are blue/purple and spout lightning, Nightblades are red/black, and Templars are yellow whilst bursting with light.

Class Focuses:
Dragonknight: Fire - Also utilizes dragon-like and earth-like magic
Sorcerer: Lightning - Also utilizes dark magic and summons.
Nightblade Damage Health Magic - Also utilizes shadow magic, lifestealing magic and stealth
Templar Light Magic - Also utilizes Sun-like damage and healing/restoration magic
Warden Cold - Also utilizes Nature magic and summons
Necromancer Undead - summons, was supposed to do Cold, but it seems this class is totally scrapped now, with its Cold damage moved over to the Warden never gonna happen

Wait for the Wardens to come back, and you'll have your Ice spells.

I patiently await them as well. We have like 6-12 months to go

Very interesting ideas, but one big question:

What makes you so certain the warden is coming back? Not disregarding your claim, but would be interested to hear your reasoning as to why you think this is coming.

I also feel that frost magic could be used in multiple classes, like fire is.

Those three skill lines I mentioned (Winter's Embrace, Green Balance, Animal Companions) were added into ESO for us to dig up and datamine on the One Tamriel PTS

It is brand new info. That's as clear cut as it gets.

Really exciting

We have to wait and see ofc

Winter's Embrace as Ice DD line
Animal Companions as a full pet line (like Daedric) and perhaps again with pets that can die ?
Green Balance: Resources ? Heals ? Drains ?

CasNation · September 2016

SirMewser wrote: »

Jar_Ek wrote: »

@SirMewser I have no idea what your proximity comment means, but the rest seem like steps in the right direction.

In particular, Rebate is utter garbage and should be replaced. It could help with resummoning speed or cost instead... or be un-pet related (my preference).

CasNation wrote: »

@SirMewser

Very cool ideas! I am also not quite sure what you mean by proximity, but your other ideas seem to all point towards pets having more agency and utility, which I completely agree with.

And please ZoS just change rebate. It is such an outdated passive.

Sorry, I mean if a pet is more than X meters away from the summoner, they should drop whatever target they are focusing on and return to the summoner or focus on a target in less than X range of the summoner. This would resolve having to recall pets and wait to prevent them from running away into the distance in pvp.

Ah yes I agree then. That is a major downside of pets. They really enjoy larking off on their own.

CasNation · September 2016

Vaoh wrote: »

CasNation wrote: »

Vaoh wrote: »

ZOS always intended for our player classes to encompass all damage types. In Elder Scrolls games, there is typically Fire/Frost/Shock/Magic/Physical as the main ones.

Each class is made to have a general focus. This is why Dragonknights are fiery and dragon-like, Sorcs are blue/purple and spout lightning, Nightblades are red/black, and Templars are yellow whilst bursting with light.

Class Focuses:
Dragonknight: Fire - Also utilizes dragon-like and earth-like magic
Sorcerer: Lightning - Also utilizes dark magic and summons.
Nightblade Damage Health Magic - Also utilizes shadow magic, lifestealing magic and stealth
Templar Light Magic - Also utilizes Sun-like damage and healing/restoration magic
Warden Cold - Also utilizes Nature magic and summons
Necromancer Undead - summons, was supposed to do Cold, but it seems this class is totally scrapped now, with its Cold damage moved over to the Warden never gonna happen

Wait for the Wardens to come back, and you'll have your Ice spells.

I patiently await them as well. We have like 6-12 months to go

Very interesting ideas, but one big question:

What makes you so certain the warden is coming back? Not disregarding your claim, but would be interested to hear your reasoning as to why you think this is coming.

I also feel that frost magic could be used in multiple classes, like fire is.

Those three skill lines I mentioned (Winter's Embrace, Green Balance, Animal Companions) were added into ESO for us to dig up and datamine on the One Tamriel PTS

It is brand new info. That's as clear cut as it gets.

That's fantastic news! I hadn't seen that yet. Do you happen to have a link? I would love to look into it more.

Jar_Ek · September 2016

God I fear for wardens if sorcerers pets are anything to go off....