waitwhat wrote: »

@Derra , @Joy_Division

What are thoughts on this:

Reconfigure Dark Exchange and its morphs to cost health scaling with max health size (or not, discuss)?

1. It would be more of a "blood mage" ability as it were, which fits the whole Dark Magic theme (not the most important, but at least it isn't lore-stupid).
2. To prevent--or perhaps enable?--sorc tanks, the scaling of health spent per cast could scale proportionally to max health pool (linearly, or exponentially after a certain threshold? Get creative while we're thinking about it).
3. The first morph restores smaller amounts of both stam and magikca (useful perhaps to a lower-level player or one not particularly invested in the skill line).
4. The other two morphs would then cost similar amounts of health, but then restore only stamina or magicka, as the player prefers.

The health cost shouldn't be too crippling such that the ability cannot be regularly used in a rotation for sustain, but you do want the health cost large enough to force the player to only use it extremely judiciously in a pinch (it had better be worth it).

Dark Exchange and morphs don't appear to have been spammable currently since the costs are too high, and certainly don't seem to be spammable with the proposed changes in the Patch Notes.

However, there is anxiety among the community that a paradigm shift towards sustain will unduly favor sorcs, given that these abilities remain unthouched, while other abilities that perform this function for the other DPS class has been nerfed in its resource return (e.g. Siphoning Strikes).

I'm largely concerned about sorcs in a PvE context, relative to nightblades. We're told we have the best burst, or that we're supposed to be a high damage class, and yet it seems vet trials group leaders have all concluded that sorcs are, categorically, preferable to nightblades in PvE content due to their high damage output (even in burst damage) and low maintenance. Perhaps those group leaders are idiots, but it would nice to see surviviability trade-offs with sorcs in PvE relative to nightblades, stamblades in particular. Otherwise, people will start talking about sorc damage nerfs, or stamblade damage buffs.

waitwhat wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

waitwhat wrote: »

@Derra , @Joy_Division

What are thoughts on this:

Reconfigure Dark Exchange and its morphs to cost health scaling with max health size (or not, discuss)?

1. It would be more of a "blood mage" ability as it were, which fits the whole Dark Magic theme (not the most important, but at least it isn't lore-stupid).
2. To prevent--or perhaps enable?--sorc tanks, the scaling of health spent per cast could scale proportionally to max health pool (linearly, or exponentially after a certain threshold? Get creative while we're thinking about it).
3. The first morph restores smaller amounts of both stam and magikca (useful perhaps to a lower-level player or one not particularly invested in the skill line).
4. The other two morphs would then cost similar amounts of health, but then restore only stamina or magicka, as the player prefers.

The health cost shouldn't be too crippling such that the ability cannot be regularly used in a rotation for sustain, but you do want the health cost large enough to force the player to only use it extremely judiciously in a pinch (it had better be worth it).

Dark Exchange and morphs don't appear to have been spammable currently since the costs are too high, and certainly don't seem to be spammable with the proposed changes in the Patch Notes.

However, there is anxiety among the community that a paradigm shift towards sustain will unduly favor sorcs, given that these abilities remain unthouched, while other abilities that perform this function for the other DPS class has been nerfed in its resource return (e.g. Siphoning Strikes).

I'm largely concerned about sorcs in a PvE context, relative to nightblades. We're told we have the best burst, or that we're supposed to be a high damage class, and yet it seems vet trials group leaders have all concluded that sorcs are, categorically, preferable to nightblades in PvE content due to their high damage output (even in burst damage) and low maintenance. Perhaps those group leaders are idiots, but it would nice to see surviviability trade-offs with sorcs in PvE relative to nightblades, stamblades in particular. Otherwise, people will start talking about sorc damage nerfs, or stamblade damage buffs.

If you make Dark Exchange scale off Health, it might as well be the Mage's Guild skill Spell Symmetry.

I don't think you need to worry about sorcerers in a PvE context. There is a reason on the NA server a 500K weekly score in vMA wont even get you on the leaderboards

I'm glad that you feel that way, but you are also the first person to tell me not to worry about sorcs in PvE, and all the people telling me the opposite in voice chat are sorcs, with one templar. Granted, that templar probably wasn't very bright, but all the sorcs said I wasn't allowed in vet trials as a stamblade.

I'm not worried about vMA because I don't care about leaderboards and it's some demi-daedra that would tell me no and he doesn't care. In vMA I can die as many times as I like. Not so in vMoL.

IzakiBrotherSs wrote: »

Derra wrote: »

Sorc shieldstacking is harshly affected by the removal of cost increase.

Harness will barely be able refund it´s own cost and the current situation of harness paying for hardened and harness both will be basically impossible to achieve.

^ basically this.

Hardened Ward with no CP or cost reduction passives costs: 3590 magicka
Harness Magicka with no CP or cost reduction passives costs: 4590 magicka
Healing Ward with no CP or cost reduction passives costs: 4590 magicka

Thats 13 130 magicka to cast 3 shields. Basically 1/3 of the magicka pool of the usual Sorc (39k-40k magicka). Put in the 10% cost reduction from Light Armor (5 Light, 1 Medium, 1 Heavy) and 5% from Sorc passives, that's still 11160 magicka for 3 shields. Put in the magicka return from Harness (which will most definitely be nerfed in a future PTS patch) which is roughly 1.2k magicka (that's with 42k max magicka) for 3 hits which equals to 3.6k restored magicka. So total cost for stacking 3 shields = 7530 magicka. On live, it costs about 60% of that.

Not much right? Now think about how you're going to have to spend that every 3 seconds (at best, aka if there isn't too much pressure on you). A shield lasts 6 sec and takes 1 second to be applied, thus taking 3 seconds to apply all three shields, leaving you only 3 seconds to go on the offensive/escape. So the magicka drain for shield stacking just got real.