Spot on.

Meta flocking ruins everything

Derra wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Derra wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

I wouldn't mind Necropotence being reworked to be more pet oriented, but please don't compare Necropotence & Draugr.

1000 Stamina=+37 (+18.5 in PvP) health/second from Vigor
1000 Magicka=+480 Hardened Ward strength (+240 in PvP) or +483 Dampen Magic (7 light) strength (+241.5 in PvP)

That's without even accounting the fact that magicka bonuses have much more modifiers available to increase them - the only stamina modifier is Bound Armaments for stam sorcs only (+8%).


There's no comparison to be made, shields scale much, much better than anything stamina has to offer.

Now figure in that heals interact with block reducing all incoming dmg by atleast 50% (which is the drawback for stamina builds that can´t block - heals have to be balanced in mind for being used on characters that can).
Now figure in that the increase for vigor can´t be calculated by 1s you need to take the increase for the whole cast (as you do for shields) and has aoe potential.
Now figure in that heals do very much scale with weapon/spelldmg.

I´m not saying shields are fine. I´m just saying your assessment is highly biased and making biased statements does not help resolving imbalances.

That's a fair point regarding block, though it's more of a Heavy Armor/S&B thing.

With 17% medium armor mitigation (and no S&B), you reduce incoming damage by 58.5% by blocking, at the cost of 2160-8640 stamina/second.

Now, if we were to count what Vigor heals over 5 seconds... shields would still vastly outperform it in effectiveness.

1000 stamina would give you +185 health (+92.5 in PvP) over 5 seconds with Vigor, where as 1000 magicka would give you 480 (240 in PvP) to shield strength - more than double.

If we factor in crits with 50% crit chance & 180% crit modifier, you'd get +259 (129.5 in PvP) over 5 seconds - still almost half of what shield gives you instantly.

I know shields don't benefit from spell dmg like vigor does from weapon dmg, but you don't get those from sets like Necropotence & Draugr (which the op was comparing).

That said, I could compare 1k magicka to 100 weapon damage as well and see how things scale, and the result would be similar.


It's not really bias, it's just a mathematical fact that shields scale better than vigor (granted, you have to prioritize magicka over spell dmg).

Not arguing that they do scale better.
I´m not even arguing that they do scale too good. I think they do.

But there is a middleground for builds that don´t stack high magica where shields perform rather poorly compared to healing.
Stacking maxmagica isn´t the endall beall strategy in terms of builds - because those builds perform bad in open world settings.
Once you adapt your build to accomodate open world conditions you inevitably loose a lot of potential stats/shieldpotency.

The only way to adress this issue of shield overperforming in 1v1 scenarios with insane magica is to find reasonable hardcaps for the size of individual shields. Hence why i´m in favor of reworking healingward and giving shields a mechanic that does not allow them to surpass X% of HP pool.

*Stacks more health..

Biro123 wrote: »

Derra wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Derra wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

I wouldn't mind Necropotence being reworked to be more pet oriented, but please don't compare Necropotence & Draugr.

1000 Stamina=+37 (+18.5 in PvP) health/second from Vigor
1000 Magicka=+480 Hardened Ward strength (+240 in PvP) or +483 Dampen Magic (7 light) strength (+241.5 in PvP)

That's without even accounting the fact that magicka bonuses have much more modifiers available to increase them - the only stamina modifier is Bound Armaments for stam sorcs only (+8%).


There's no comparison to be made, shields scale much, much better than anything stamina has to offer.

Now figure in that heals interact with block reducing all incoming dmg by atleast 50% (which is the drawback for stamina builds that can´t block - heals have to be balanced in mind for being used on characters that can).
Now figure in that the increase for vigor can´t be calculated by 1s you need to take the increase for the whole cast (as you do for shields) and has aoe potential.
Now figure in that heals do very much scale with weapon/spelldmg.

I´m not saying shields are fine. I´m just saying your assessment is highly biased and making biased statements does not help resolving imbalances.

That's a fair point regarding block, though it's more of a Heavy Armor/S&B thing.

With 17% medium armor mitigation (and no S&B), you reduce incoming damage by 58.5% by blocking, at the cost of 2160-8640 stamina/second.

Now, if we were to count what Vigor heals over 5 seconds... shields would still vastly outperform it in effectiveness.

1000 stamina would give you +185 health (+92.5 in PvP) over 5 seconds with Vigor, where as 1000 magicka would give you 480 (240 in PvP) to shield strength - more than double.

If we factor in crits with 50% crit chance & 180% crit modifier, you'd get +259 (129.5 in PvP) over 5 seconds - still almost half of what shield gives you instantly.

I know shields don't benefit from spell dmg like vigor does from weapon dmg, but you don't get those from sets like Necropotence & Draugr (which the op was comparing).

That said, I could compare 1k magicka to 100 weapon damage as well and see how things scale, and the result would be similar.


It's not really bias, it's just a mathematical fact that shields scale better than vigor (granted, you have to prioritize magicka over spell dmg).

Not arguing that they do scale better.
I´m not even arguing that they do scale too good. I think they do.

But there is a middleground for builds that don´t stack high magica where shields perform rather poorly compared to healing.
Stacking maxmagica isn´t the endall beall strategy in terms of builds - because those builds perform bad in open world settings.
Once you adapt your build to accomodate open world conditions you inevitably loose a lot of potential stats/shieldpotency.

The only way to adress this issue of shield overperforming in 1v1 scenarios with insane magica is to find reasonable hardcaps for the size of individual shields. Hence why i´m in favor of reworking healingward and giving shields a mechanic that does not allow them to surpass X% of HP pool.

*Stacks more health..

Which would be fine because you´d either have to sacrifice magica (dmg) or other stats (regen/spelldmg) to gain it.

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It would need something like +299 spell damage (or more) on the 5pc to be relevant.

+20% pet damage doesn't buff your non-pet ability damage, while +4000 magicka did.

The intent of my suggestion was to keep Necropotence focused on empowering pets as intended, rather than be a BiS build for any class that has a pet available (or uses something like Shadowrend in future).

Necropotence is only being nerfed AT ALL because it buffed shields AND offense for all magicka builds, with the pet requirement just seen as "the one tradeoff". Warden and NB's had no real tradeoff, with Shades/Betty being unkillable timers.


It was never designed to be a set any magicka character should slap on completely ignorant of pets, since recently it has been primarily used to buff all other skills other than the pets at this point. But that's what the Sorc pets scaled off when it was designed so here we are...

Transairion wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

It would need something like +299 spell damage (or more) on the 5pc to be relevant.

+20% pet damage doesn't buff your non-pet ability damage, while +4000 magicka did.

The intent of my suggestion was to keep Necropotence focused on empowering pets as intended, rather than be a BiS build for any class that has a pet available (or uses something like Shadowrend in future).

Necropotence is only being nerfed AT ALL because it buffed shields AND offense for all magicka builds, with the pet requirement just seen as "the one tradeoff". Warden and NB's had no real tradeoff, with Shades/Betty being unkillable timers.


It was never designed to be a set any magicka character should slap on completely ignorant of pets, since recently it has been primarily used to buff all other skills other than the pets at this point. But that's what the Sorc pets scaled off when it was designed so here we are...

You don't know that.

People keep posting the reason for the nerf as if its fact.. but we don't know. ANd until we do know, I'm gonna keep posting alternative reasons..

Perhaps it was nerfed to balance this:

Any monster summoned by an Item Set proc now inherits any bonuses you have. The most notable bonuses are damage done and healing done from passive abilities, Major/Minor buffs, or the Champion System.

I'm not saying it was or wasn't. I'm just saying we don't know and shouldn't pretend that we do. :-)

I guess I don't understand the necro nerf at all. This really confused me.

First, you do have to keep uptime on pets. Although some don't require much work/thought to run (warden/magNB), neither of those classes are generally discussed when we talk about OP things in PvP. I think magicka wardens doing well sometimes in PvP - which I rarely see them when I have been maining mine - because folks don't know how to play well against them. MagNB is constantly discussed as one of the weakest PvP specs right now as well.

From a PvE perspective I don't know too much, but I was under the impression that in the new meta it's going to be more mother's sorrow-focused than anything else. Even still, the only class that would use necro in PvE (I believe that sorc has much better options currently, but I'm not an expert by any means) is magwarden and we all know that they're incredibly lackluster from a DPS perspective.

@ZOS_GinaBruno , I think the community would appreciate a little explanation of these changes just because it genuinely doesn't seem like necro is overperforming in any game instance besides duelists bemoaning pet builds (which do feel degenerate, but honestly bleed builds feel just as strong).

One kind of irony is:

Gold necro not the easiest to get... Ran with blue and purple jewelry...

Now I bought the gold versions...

The nerf puts me exactly where I was....

Hrm...

You don't know that.

People keep posting the reason for the nerf as if its fact.. but we don't know. ANd until we do know, I'm gonna keep posting alternative reasons..

Perhaps it was nerfed to balance this:

Any monster summoned by an Item Set proc now inherits any bonuses you have. The most notable bonuses are damage done and healing done from passive abilities, Major/Minor buffs, or the Champion System.

I'm not saying it was or wasn't. I'm just saying we don't know and shouldn't pretend that we do. :-)

Have the devs ever explained their reasoning for nerfs on a case by case basis? Especially a set that has remain essentially the same, "all max magicka" since it was first introduced back when the game was in infancy? It's a rough nerf for something that seemingly been "acceptably balanced" for all this time.

It clearly wasn't nerfed due to the 1-4 peice changes (since again, everything was blanket buffed with those changes and Draugr Hulk's 5 peice was also buffed. 40 stamina is still a buff). And it wasn't nerfed to balance "Monster item set procs inherting bonuses" when Max Magicka/Stamina does not affect them. You eventually start to run out of things you can blame for the nerf.

Way tl;dr

Cannot compare destruction mastery max magicka to necro max magicka as OP did since DM isn't a max magicka set. It has spell damage and spell crit.

Basically add another 1400 magicka to compensate for the spell damage and don't know what the equivalent would be for the crit. When I saw such a bad comparison I stopped reading.

You didn't pay enough attention to what little you did read then, since I didn't even compare Necro to Destruction Mastery... I compared DM to Draugr Hulk and how it's laughable that Hulk has no requirement and DM does, but DM gives almost 2000 less resources. That's a pretty glaring difference for primarily resource-stack sets.

Disappointing Giles, I held you in higher regard than this.