Pirate Skeleton is poop. How about this for an alternative?

Alucardo · October 2016

So I tried this set out for a while on my tank, and quite frankly I wasn't very pleased. Does it look awesome? Hell yeah it does, but is it useful? No, not really. I was far more tankier in Malubeth than I was wearing Pirate Skeleton, and just found the utility much better with Malubeth also.

I've been playing around with some other ideas. I wanted to make Pirate Skeleton helpful to tanks, but also give it some utility that could potentially help your group, and came up with this..

Basically you get your tankiness from the healing and increased health, and the group utility comes from the AOE root. This sounds a lot better over 30% protection and self inflicted minor defile. I prefer the health on the 1pc too.
Before you ask, no it's not another Malubeth. You're not getting mending bonuses or anything, though it does scale with your max health, so this set would be near useless on a DPS or healer.

Alucardo · October 2016

You know the funny thing? Nobody has had any criticism (bad or good) in regards to this request. Do you know why? No one gives a crap about this set.
Compared to every other new undaunted piece, this one is definitely at the bottom of the barrel. plsbuff

Asardes · October 2016

Just like the croc & clannfear heads: 1 CP150 base material + 1 purple temper

Alucardo · October 2016

Asardes wrote: »

Just like the croc & clannfear heads: 1 CP150 base material + 1 purple temper

Lol basically yeah. I mean, this set sounded really good on paper before I tried it. After running it yesterday I looked amazing, but it didn't feel amazing when my TTL was 30 seconds, compared to being unkillable when wearing older sets.
People are doing so much damage in PVP now, so 30% protection every now and then isn't helpful in the slightest.
Changing it to a utility set that scales from max health would be a lot more beneficial to tanks.

Enslaved · October 2016

This set would be much better if one piece bonus would give you like 5% more healing received.

Alucardo · October 2016

Enslaved wrote: »

This set would be much better if one piece bonus would give you like 5% more healing received.

I don't think that would make much difference when the set also gives you minor defile when it procs xD

Bigevilpeter · October 2016

didnt it use to turn you into skeleton with 30% reduced damage and 30% less healing?

Paulington · October 2016

That's an interesting idea although immobilise isn't all that useful in PvE and 3% of your max health is likely going to be around 750 damage, basically negligible.

I believe my suggestion on the PTS was this:

(2 items) When you drop below ~25% health you transform into a skeleton and gain Major Protection and Minor Defile for 12 seconds. This effect can occur once every 60 seconds.

It basically turns into a mini-Magma Shell, is reliable in PvP and PvE (no RNG) however there are better sets to help with supporting the group if that is your focus.

The set definitely needs some type of change, fairly lacklustre as it currently stands.

Dymence · October 2016

You'd be surprised at how useful this set can be to negate bursts in duels.

Enslaved · October 2016

Alucardo wrote: »

Enslaved wrote: »

This set would be much better if one piece bonus would give you like 5% more healing received.

I don't think that would make much difference when the set also gives you minor defile when it procs xD

-15% is bad, but that 5% would help a bit. And also, would be a great one piece.

Alucardo · October 2016

Dymence wrote: »

You'd be surprised at how useful this set can be to negate bursts in duels.

I was dueling a typical viper, tremorscale, black rose guy and the skeleton would rarely proc. He ate through my HP like it was candy.
When we tried again when I had Malubeth, he could barely get me below 90% health.

Though I did notice Pirate Skeleton performed pretty well when I had a healbot with me. It was probably the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in PVP.

covenant_merchant · October 2016

That actually would be interesting. Same as replacing the Slimecraw 1-piece bonus with any Max stat. Even max health would do, to make it viable for both stam and magicka.

I tried both Pirate Skeleton and Slimecraw in duels on my magicka sorc. I thought that, since you know "magicka sorc", the defile debuff wouldn't matter, but in the end, the procs aren't that regular and the damage mitigation isn't that great. Seems to me like Guard is actually mitigating more damage than this set (might be just an impression though).

Alucardo · October 2016

Paulington wrote: »

That's an interesting idea although immobilise isn't all that useful in PvE and 3% of your max health is likely going to be around 750 damage, basically negligible.

I believe my suggestion on the PTS was this:

(2 items) When you drop below ~25% health you transform into a skeleton and gain Major Protection and Minor Defile for 12 seconds. This effect can occur once every 60 seconds.

It basically turns into a mini-Magma Shell, is reliable in PvP and PvE (no RNG) however there are better sets to help with supporting the group if that is your focus.

The set definitely needs some type of change, fairly lacklustre as it currently stands.

That's quite interesting. One of the problems I'd have was that the set would not proc at times, so you're just stuck with its average 1pc bonus. So having it fire off when you really need it (low health) would be a lot more beneficial. I'm still not keen on the 30% protection though

Alucardo · October 2016

kasa-obake wrote: »

That actually would be interesting. Same as replacing the Slimecraw 1-piece bonus with any Max stat. Even max health would do, to make it viable for both stam and magicka.

I tried both Pirate Skeleton and Slimecraw in duels on my magicka sorc. I thought that, since you know "magicka sorc", the defile debuff wouldn't matter, but in the end, the procs aren't that regular and the damage mitigation isn't that great. Seems to me like Guard is actually mitigating more damage than this set (might be just an impression though).

Totally. I wanted to use Slimecraw myself because berserk is one of the sexiest things ever. I then saw the 1pc and never bothered. I guess the useful thing about Slimecraw is, it's 100% uptime on the second bonus. Pirate Skeleton barely ever procs when you need it, and its 1pc isn't that great. It's a waste of 2 item slots.

Wollust · October 2016

I actually liked the set on my templar. Though I dislike the 1 piece bonus. I'd prefer anything over spell and physical resistance.

Enslaved · October 2016

Alucardo wrote: »

Paulington wrote: »

That's an interesting idea although immobilise isn't all that useful in PvE and 3% of your max health is likely going to be around 750 damage, basically negligible.

I believe my suggestion on the PTS was this:

(2 items) When you drop below ~25% health you transform into a skeleton and gain Major Protection and Minor Defile for 12 seconds. This effect can occur once every 60 seconds.

It basically turns into a mini-Magma Shell, is reliable in PvP and PvE (no RNG) however there are better sets to help with supporting the group if that is your focus.

The set definitely needs some type of change, fairly lacklustre as it currently stands.

That's quite interesting. One of the problems I'd have was that the set would not proc at times, so you're just stuck with its average 1pc bonus. So having it fire off when you really need it (low health) would be a lot more beneficial. I'm still not keen on the 30% protection though

That would be op af if you are a vampire.

covenant_merchant · October 2016

Well I tried Slimecraw because it seemed more reliable against every type of build in duels than Infernal Guardian (useless against ranged mana nbs or sorcs) or Grothdarr (mitigated by heavy armor and requiring you to go melee all the time). Thing is, while my stats weren't disgusting per se, and my frags had a 13k tooltip unbuffed, which was glorious, I still had to fit Inner Light in my bar to compensate for the lack of max stats lost.

No matter ZOS' willingness to introduce more and more "health regen" builds, it just isn't working. I know there are some viable health regen builds, but those are rare and situational, and in the end, max stats trump them.

Same goes for Pirate Skeleton. The 1-piece 1kish extra resistance isn't worth it since every class has skills already increasing their resistances: Volatile Armor for DK, Boundless/Hurricane for Sorc, Double Take or w/e it's called for NB, and Rune for Templar. And by extension, these skills also make Mighty Churdan superfluous, despite the devs' best efforts to "buff" it.

Paulington · October 2016

Alucardo wrote: »

Paulington wrote: »

That's an interesting idea although immobilise isn't all that useful in PvE and 3% of your max health is likely going to be around 750 damage, basically negligible.

I believe my suggestion on the PTS was this:

(2 items) When you drop below ~25% health you transform into a skeleton and gain Major Protection and Minor Defile for 12 seconds. This effect can occur once every 60 seconds.

It basically turns into a mini-Magma Shell, is reliable in PvP and PvE (no RNG) however there are better sets to help with supporting the group if that is your focus.

The set definitely needs some type of change, fairly lacklustre as it currently stands.

That's quite interesting. One of the problems I'd have was that the set would not proc at times, so you're just stuck with its average 1pc bonus. So having it fire off when you really need it (low health) would be a lot more beneficial. I'm still not keen on the 30% protection though

Absolutely, and in the feedback we gave on the PTS we sought to eliminate as much RNG as possible on these items. The huge bugbear I have in this game is RNG on items.

For example the Moondancer set is utterly useless as a five-piece because half the time you will get a useless benefit (magicka regen). Getting rid of these "% chance to proc" and replacing them with "when <x> occurs, but with a cooldown" is a more reliable system and would be what I'd like to move towards.

You just can't rely on RNG things like this to save you in PvP. It may work sometimes, but not all the time and so you're building luck into your setup, not nice.

Asardes · October 2016

Alucardo wrote: »

Enslaved wrote: »

This set would be much better if one piece bonus would give you like 5% more healing received.

I don't think that would make much difference when the set also gives you minor defile when it procs xD

Minor defile for tank is plainly bad, it's like shooting yourself in the foot. It will be like fighting Velidreth for the whole 30 minutes it takes to finish a veteran dungeon. And I hate the guts out of that boss. Really a nightmare to tank because of that ability - looks like the meat bag catapult in the death recap - and the DoT.

IMO Bloodspawn is still BiS for tanks, and some of the other new sets are useful as well, especially for the non-DK tanks. For example Swarm Mother substitutes chains. I've thought it over and there's simply no use for Pirate Skeleton 2 piece. One piece is decent though if you want to reach the mitigation cap.

Peekachu99 · October 2016

Proc needs to be higher for this to be of any value whatsoever. Like a 10% chance. And give it a max health % bonus, like they did with Chudan.