Hey guys,
as we all know the recent patch notes for Morrowind made a majority of the playerbase very unhappy.
Me too, but not for the obvious reasons. There is more to it that bothers me than just sustain nerfs. There is an ongoing theme with the patches we've seen in the past year. Let me try to elaborate on this and tell you about the points that really disappoint me more and more with every patch.
Blanket Nerfs
ZOS tends to overdo some things. Too much damage, too much tankiness, too much sustain. Whatever it is, with every patch we get something that is just borderline broken. Then they ignore complaints about it for a couple months before they actually address it on the forums or on ESO Live. Then after 6 months they finally come up with a solution and push it to the live server. Not only is it inacceptable to let paying customers wait for such a long time, but their way of "fixing" the issue always misses the target.
Instead of figuring out where the actual problem is, they just nerf everything across the board. Which obviously doesn't solve the problem.
Here are a couple examples:Sustain nerfs: everyone gets hit by these changes, even the players that didn't even have much sustain to begin with. I - for example - have 755 magicka regen on my dk. That's only a tiny bit above the absolute minimum. I'm in light armor, so i get some cost reduction and i have some CP in cost reduction too. That's all i get for passive sustain. I have to actively work for the rest of my sustain, which involves heavy attacks, pots and battle roar.
Light armor has always been a risk/reward option for builds. You are very squishy, because you barely get any resistances through your gear (i don't even run impen), but you were rewarded with better sustain, due to the regen and cost reduction passives. Next patch even light armor users will have sustain issues, which means light armor is now a risk/risk option. Where is my reward for being squishy?
Let's look at the other end of the spectrum. There are sorcs and nbs with 3k+ regen. Why is it even possible to have so much regen while still being able to deal massive amounts of damage? So next patch these people will still be at 2.5k regen. Why are we not targeting mechanics that allow you to have so much regen first, before we ruin sustain for everyone?
You don't solve a balancing issue by nerfing everyone. This just leads to the same issue, just on a different level.
Blocking: Your blocking changes are also not targeting the actual issue. You basically made blocking twice as expensive, which seems nice at the first glance, but AGAIN you nerfed it for EVERYONE. The real victims of these blanket nerfs aren't the ones that are causing the problem, but everyone else. There are PVP tanks, that can face tank 10 people for 5 minutes straight. Next patch they can still do it for like 2-3 minutes. That doesn't fix the issue, ZOS! The problem is the damage reduction when blocking with sword and board. that needs to be looked at + maaaaaybe the cost of it. Cause that makes sword and board block tanks weaker without punishing everyone for blocking. Magicka builds without sword and board or an ice staff can't afford to block anymore, because they will run out of stamina within 3 seconds if this change goes live.
Reduce the damage reduction of sword and board, cause then you could take out tanks with a well timed combo from 2 players, instead of having 10 people beat on them for 20 minutes.
Proc Set Meta
We've had this before and it will come back. With the changes to sustain it is kinda obvious that a build with 3 proc sets is your best option for sustain and damage because you GET YOUR DAMAGE FOR FREE with light and heavy attacks. Don't see the problem yet? Alright, let's continue.
This passive ability now reduces the enemy’s Health, Magicka, and Stamina Recovery for 3 seconds when you damage them with a Light or Heavy Attack, instead of reducing the cost of your Magicka abilities.
So, not only do you get your damage for free, you can also debuff your targets sustain without spending any of your resources. Now put a poison of your choice on top of that... you see where this is going...
Dear ZOS, why do we promote skill-less gameplay? Do you really want us all to run the same builds? Is this your vision of this game? Boy, i hope not.
Missing Sorc Changes
This is something that annoyed a lot of people. Sorcs are inarguably the strongest magicka class in the game right now, and they are the only class that has been consistently on a very high level since 1.5 or 1.6. High ranged damage, mobility, sustain and tankiness is maybe a bit much and needs some adjustments. Now, we still have a little over a month left and i'm sure there will be some changes, but no one knows what it's gonna be and if it actually tackles the issues with this class.
There was this mini change to dark deal with the 0.2 second cooldown, which is - in case you don't know - 1/5 of a second. So just look at your watch and realize how short 1 second is and now imagine this "cooldown" could have happened 5 times in that 1 second. So yeah, that is absolutely nothing.
Sorcs will hate me for this, but since they already do, i'm just gonna say it:
Dark Deal needs to get its movement speed reduction back. it's ridiculous that you can use this ability at full speed. Because this makes it super hard to interrupt the channel. You can't even reach a fully speed buffed stam sorc with your bash, because he will always be faster than you. A speed reduction would take care of that. Easy.
Sneak Speed Stacking
I get that you don't want players to be super super speedy, which can be achieved by stacking vamp and shadow dancer and night's silence and nbs can even stack concealed weapon on top of that. i agree, that is a little much, BUT removing the option to stack sneak speed all together will hurt solo gameplay a lot.
Here is a little story for you:
My good friend
@JackDaniell made a Stamplar build called "ghost" way back in the day. This build made use of the fact that you could stack a speed buff on top of your mist form movement speed. That allowed him to effectively kite groups of players that were chasing him. Then, when the major and minor buffs were introduced, this wasn't possible anymore. So we figured out that you could use shadow dancer or night's silence to achieve the same effect and bring the "ghost" build back. If you remove this option, this build will be useless again. Which is a sad thing for many people in this community.
Here is the reason why i want to keep this mechanic: As a solo player, you are at a great disadvantage at all times. Zergs have more healing, more damage, more buffs, more debuffs, more everything. The only thing we solo players had to effectively get away from these groups was the clever use of movement and positioning. If you take this out of the game, you force players like me or
@JackDaniell to just stand still and let 20 people beat us to death.
Counterplay
Over the course of the past 3 years you have removed a lot of counterplay from the game, which lead to stupid dumbed down gameplay that punishes good players and rewards bad players. This can't possibly be what you want in this game.
Let me name a few things real quick: Soul assault (used to be bashable/cleansable/cloakable), Meteor (used to be reflectable), Wrecking Blow (used to be bashable) and probably some other things, but you get the point.
Please bring back some counterplay to this game instead of slowly removing it with every patch.
This brings us to my last point i wanna talk about:
Missing Bug Fixes
Stop pushing out more and more content, without fixing the bugs you introduce with every patch. This mainly affects PVP, since ZOS seems to have given up on actually fixing things in Cyrodiil.
Why do we still have bugs that have been around since the beta of this game? ZOS, it's been 3 years! Why aren't you fixing these bugs? The amount of bugs and glitches is getting outta hand. I'm not overexaggerating when i'm saying this: i am encountering at least 1 bug per minute when i'm playing PVP. This is inacceptable.
Just a quick list: can't activate objects like wayshrines and doors, can't swap weapons, can't use a pot, can't use skills, can't use ultimates, horse gets slowed down on even terrain, crit rushing into loadscreen, LOADSCREENS in general, bloodmayne quicksand, sliding down terrain in slowmo, no cc break, double ccs, magelight not working half of the time, etc...
Feel free to add to the endless list of PVP bugs.
Can we please have weekly bug fixes? You can't just pile buggy code on top of buggy code without cleaning out these bugs. How many more people do you want to lose because they're fed up with the bad coding you're doing? Stop pushing content, fix the bugs! DAMMIT.
Alright, that's it. I'm done. Have fun ripping this thread to shreds.