Vahrokh wrote: »

Stacking shields is where ESO has gone wrong. Other games don't allow that and nobody complains if a shield lasts 6s or 10 or 15.

I don't have any difficulty killing stuff with as 6s shield, it's just forcing a spamfest.

Actually, since we have to spam it forever, the developers had to make a bad practice (resource inefficient spamming a spell) into game mechanics so that it's doable enough to clear any content.

Furthermore, when it lasted 20, most of the time I'd just forget it so I REALLY had recall to activate it when damage was incoming.

Now? It's just spammed as a regular rotation spell, it's obviously going to be up when damage will come, making the game too easy, nothing to recall, it's just "bottable".

You don't get it. Of course you are not going to have difficult killing mudcrabs in the open world, the point is that your DPS is significantly lower in top level PvE and PvP.

Heh, with all the addons you are not going to forget anything. Even if you refuse to use addons, if a person cannot remember a 20-second rotation, he surely is going to forget to cast shield in a 6-second rotation.

For me i don't get at all how having a shield coordinated into a rotation is a spamfest or is a bad thing over having a shield that lasts so long its forgotten by a presumably competent player.

its like buzzwords in search of a complaint.

As for this absolutism:
"In fact, they should make impossible to stack 2-3 shields at all. The game breaking imbalance comes from THERE, not from 1 shield lasting 6s or 7s."

That is certainly one school of thought and as i stated earlier it is certainly appealing for some for there to be more black and white "absolute cannot do" type restrictions in game designs. It is certainly an option every game designer faces many many times:

"Do we simply make it binary "can do this, cant do that" and keep it more about how you slot the limited numbers of "can do's" OR do we make it non-binary trade-offs where its more "you can do that but if you do you then get less of this other thing" where you have a lot more options that you can choose from and try and make work."

As they said when the cut to 6s shields as the norm, they wanted to go with the serious trade-offs option.

I am glad they went with that approach.

others may not be.

but consider - for stamina users there are some pretty strong options for "if i want to go amazing defense at the expense of offense for a while" approaches. the right gear and the right allocations and dodge/roll repeaters still gives you a fairly strong counter to lots of damage and of course the right gear and the right skills and the right allocations also give you blocks-on-going type capabilities. IIRC in PVP the most recent spate of "unkillable builds that still cause damage" were not from shield stackers but from heavy armor types some of which were using tons of blocks and block casting with proc sets etc.

The key is, like three shield stackers or even 2 shield stackers in the 6s shield world, they sacrifice a lot of damage output.

Seems like maybe they chose more dynamic restrictions in many different areas and just kept the same basic design idea - going extreme costs you a lot elsewhere - going when they changed shields to 6s base.

I like that they did it that way. I prefer games with more of those kinds of trade-offs better than the games which tend toward more absolute black and white.

In the other hand, it might be that so many people are against longer duration because they have found the same great thing that i have found.

Perma shield


By having it on your rotation, you are basically in god mode at least while you are soloiung stuff, still doing decent damage at the same time. There is no mana issue, with all points to magicka, the shield is strong and with good recovery sets and sets that add magicka and spell damage, you are pretty strong.

Some might like reactive gameplay, i do as well but i cant believe that anyone can really play reactive style in ESO efficiently.

Humbly requesting that this thread go away.

been discussed to death.

nothing is going to change because the changes and compromises have already been made.

Jacozilla wrote: »

bowmanz607 wrote: »

zaria wrote: »

EldritchPenguin wrote: »

Shields used to last 20 seconds. The big problem with that is that players could use them proactively; they could cast the shield at the beginning of the fight, and they'd be able to go full offense from there without ever really having to worry about their defense. And since shields scale off of offensive stats, they could stack the hell out of their offensive stats to create builds that were both extremely tanky and could hit like a freight train full of slightly smaller freight trains.

The short shield duration ensures that they are reactive defense instead of proactive defense. Now people have to decide between attacking and defending. It was absolutely a necessary change from a PvP standpoint.

For PvP the short duration makes perfectly sense as you say. In PvE 15-20 seconds makes more sense.
Another reason to have skills work a bit differently in PvP and PvE.
It would make the game much easier to balance.
No it will not confuse players, playstyle in PvP and PvE is very different anyway.
The real downside would be if you got more PvP / PvE morphs.

What 15-20 is fine for pve? Or so a sorc should be able to keep up full defense while.in a fight and not have to worry about getting hit real hard while pulling top end dps. Don't think so. Sorry.

your own triggered response contradicts what you say - whether 15-20 sec is a long duration or not is relative; whether sources need to 'worry about getting hit real hard' is precisely the issue which you say but clearly do not realize what that means.

no matter how long a shield lasts, if a sorc gets 'hit real hard', then that shield evaporates. Your issue then would be how large the shield can be, not how long the shield can stay up.

balance mechanic already existed before, and still exists now - in pre, raw damage is the nail to pierce the sorc shield. In pvp, playing against the sorc strength (e.g. trying to break their shield), is just dumb. Whether that shield lasts 6 sec or 20 sec, you lower yourself to fight the sorc on their terms if you try and bash away at their shield and just keep whacking till it goes down.

you attack a sorc at his stamina pool; once you break their limited stamina pool, cc them and game over.

so in pvp, sure - larger shields and duration play a factor, which is why it was nerfed to half reduction and 6 sec. What made no sense is changing it for pve. This was yet again another pvp borking of pve for absolutely no reason.

It should return to 20 sec for pre because as much as players like you will cry about it, there is no 'balance' to speak of - it is pve. In pve right now, tanks can stack enough mitigation and have enough sustain where they are de facto invulnerable to pve. Sure this makes killing slower, but they still kill at reasonable speed and pretty much live through anything. Should that be nerfed? No. Why? Because it is pve. If you like that ability, then roll a tank.

Nanny state players like yourself are a cancer on this game. Instead of saying 'omg, this is OP.......so I will roll that XXX build too!', you cry foul and say 'I want no one else to play a build / style that I don't like'. Don't think so. Sorry. Grow up and stop being a man child.

leave PVP to balance PVP, and leave PVE well enough alone.

Pretty much exactly this.

"Lets say the shield had a cooldown of 1 minute. "

So shield not up - hit by cc then about 30k dps for the second and a half to escape - reaction dead.

OR..

get shield up in time. Enemy block/dodge cast CC for the short duration of the shield and then hits the unshielded caster with 30k DPS and reaction is dead.

The game is not balanced for any character to have a primary defense down for even 20s much less a minute.

What you are describing is a power that is filling some other role than what shields in ESO are meant to be.

Basically you are describing some part of some other game where shields were not vital to moment to mone tsurvival but say where the baseline resistance still applied and baseline health and resistance for functional mages was higher.

In this game, shields are a primary defense, not a sudden boost. The sudden boost are seen in say some ultimates where your damage taken gets reduced to very low for a short period or capped at a low percentage.

They fit your role of the sudden defense surge.

Vahrokh wrote: »

I came back to the game, just to find out I can clear a *group* public dungeon boss together with a nearby public dungeon boss and a pair of NPCs spawns between the two with barely a sweat. And trials are not in a much better state.
Oh, and my "ESO now = dead easy game" discovery did not come on a CP 600 character, but on my 2014 CP 250 with 2014 gear.

So...group dungeon or public dungeon? Group dungeons are designed for teams of 4 and often have mechanics impossible(...or near impossible, anyway. There're workarounds) to complete with just one person(which doesn't mean they can't be soloed, it just does take some effort). Publics are pretty much solo content with moar mobs and that one annoying puzzle in Bangkorai that requires 2 people to stand on tiles. Well, originally intended to be a kind of casual non instanced dungeon kind of thing I think but now it's just another long soloable delve pretty much.

Spacemonkey wrote: »

all shields should scale off of hp. make hp useful for a change.

There's Blazing shield and Bone shield for that. They work but only for very specific builds.