I've been playing nightblade tank since summerset PTS. This is the first nerf to nightblade tank after summerset. Nightblade tank is low-tier tank, like only a few use.

Minor/Major Evasion: These buffs no longer grant a passive chance to dodge. They now reduce the damage you take from area of effect attacks by 5/25%.

War Horn: This ability and its morphs no longer grant Minor Toughness.

The only advantage for nightblade over DK was its Ultimate generation from tava+evasion, and now you take this uniqueness away. Yes nightblade has burst healing support, but do raid group expect tank to be healer?

Fine, I give up. I'll go DK forever.

Path of Darkness: This ability no longer deals damage. It now grants Major Expedition to you and your allies on the path, and for up to 2 seconds after leaving it.


I'm not sure what the goal here is, but you're taking a skill that was useful and making it worthless. The AOE damage of this ability and both its morphs is important, Major Expedition for a few seconds is not. Having Twisting path do AOE damage and heal was the best thing about this.

The nerf to refreshing path is going to make it necessary for nightblades to slot an active healing ability to do the portal phase during vCR+3, is this intended? It seems a little unfair to make progression that much more difficult for groups still working on Cloudrest, since most are using magblades as dps because you made the trial impossible for melee. The problem with this is that nightblades don't have an active healing ability, so.. uh.. ?

edit: I guess dark cloak might work. Magblades can have fun slotting that for vCR, lol.

John_Falstaff wrote: »

@ecru, well, nightblades still have that ability. Except it's not doing damage anymore, that's the catch...

Yeah the nerf is going to force all progression groups to have their magblades slot dark cloak or something. Refreshing path is what makes magblade viable in that phase, without it or some other heal, you're way more likely to die. It seems a little dumb to nerf the self healing of a dps class when your newest trial requires enough self healing/shielding to mitigate potentially 15k+ damage hitting you at once every few seconds (damage from 3 orbs). The other issue is the dps loss from having to actively heal yourself throughout that phase, where the dps check is already extremely tight if you get unlucky with crystals and have to kill all of them.

I really don't see this going well for groups who are already struggling.

aeowulf wrote: »

Your tank just lost effective use of tava's with this patch - hope that wasn't one of your sets. Also minor vitality not sure of the reasoning for the latter?

My tavas tank is dead. They took away vitality because they want you to use that grabage heal they made a few patches ago instead for it.

After playing around a little bit on my good ol' stamina nightblade, I must say that Killer's Blade (Stamina morph of Assassin's Blade) feels surprisingly off.

I don't see why its cost was icnreased by 30%, its now far less reliable in close-call situations. It really feels like an unnecessary nerf that only made our Finisher all the more worse.

Assassin's Blade and its morphs are exclusively an Execute ability, its the Go To ability for taking down low-healthed enemies. It shouldn't be costly or difficult to cast, but something that we can always rely upon to get the job done.

After all, it is called Assassin's Blade or Killer's Blade, it should strike hard and effeciently against those low-healthed foes to finish them off.

Otherwise though, I felt like the changes are good. I feared at first that Piercing Mark would be ruined, but... no. Its surprisingly still very useful, even if the detection timer has been decreased so drasticly.

brandonbirg_ESO wrote: »

if this patch stays as is all endgame guilds are quiting so rip

Well if they cant adapt then are they that good?

iDeadly_CTSV wrote: »

I’m case anyone was wondering you absolutely cannot sustain a 6 mil dummy on a mag blade unless you use a recovery glyph

We've got three cost increases (if you include ele weapon) on PTS right now, so honestly it seems to me like zos doesn't want light attack builds in the game at all. The intention is obviously to force you to heavy attack at some point in your rotation, hence the grim focus change.

Thanks, but no thanks. Murkmire looks really underwhelming and the self-healing/shield changes are dumb, which will make vet trials dumb (especially vCR), so it might be time to shelve ESO.

edit: averaging 1800+ mag/sec usage while parsing, would be a bit higher with swallow soul. rip light attack builds.

I don't understand the nerf to killer blades. Can someone please explain to me? It seems so out of place I can't comprehend it. What purpose does it serve? I may be a bit drunk.

Can we have "Free" race change with this update as well? Looks like Redguard will be even MORE meta race for Stamblade.

Really, i am not that good in English, but......

Strife: Reduced the damage done by this ability by half, but it now also heals for 50% of the damage done and can now target you or any ally. The total healing amount remains unchanged.
Swallow Soul (morph): This morph now doubles the damage, but decreases the heal to 35% of the damage done and can only target you. The passive Minor Vitality effect has been removed.
Funnel Health: This morph will now always heal you in addition to an ally.

The old desciption sais something like

Steal an enemy’s life force, dealing 742 Magic Damage and healing you for 25% of the damage inflicted every 2 seconds for 10 seconds.

I use swallow soul as my main spammable. But if i read it right.... my damage will stay the same (strife is half en swallow doubles it again = the same)

The old description sais you heal 25% of the damage done every 2 secs for 10 secs.

Now it sais you heal 35% of the damage done.

So i get now each time i hit 35% heal of damage done instead of 25% every 2 secs for 10 secs?

So if i spam every second i would get eventually more heals because of 35% every second is more then 25% every 2 seconds?

Darkmage1337 wrote: »

Update 20 / Murkmire PTS Patch changes: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/435633/pts-patch-notes-v4-2-0

Nightblade
Assassination
-Mark Target
Piercing Mark (morph): "Decreased the duration of the detection effect to 5 seconds from 30 seconds. The duration of the Major Fracture and Breach effects remain unchanged."

---

A bit overkill, don't you think? 10 or 15 seconds would have been good enough. 30 seconds was too long, sure, but 5 seconds is way too short. Where is the middle-ground?

ESO balance does not believe in "middle ground" when you nerf a class, it should be nerf to the ground levels of nerfing lol

From stamina dd perspective it's quite sad.

Rotation is sustainable if we have one infused absorb stamina glyph, one stamina regen glyph AND being a Redguard at the same time. With other races I personally wasn't able to sustain execute at all, new killers blade cost and grim focus one made it clunky and unreliable. Changes was unnecessary and will hurt new players more. I guesses that the goal was to bring other classes to stamblade level and not nerf them for others to feel better.

Others got their sustain (but not stamsorcerer for some reason) but nb's lost their(if not meta race used), if thats intentional then I have no more words really.

I guess I can shelf my NB tank for good now. Not that I played much PvE anyways, but still. As if Morrowind hasn't done enough to those builds. If I stay, I respec that to pvp stamblade. This must be the worst patch I've witnessed.

From a devils advocate point of view i understand why they nerfed the sustain of NB, if you had the option to make 1 class more in line with the others or raise all other classes to the level of one good one what would you do? They should have raised the others but from a quick fix prospective it makes more sense to nerf one instead of buffing all others, not saying i agree with what they did at all but i thought it was worth putting out there.

That being said it seems they kinda shot from the hip in certain areas. The killers blade cost increase make no sense, unless what ever tests they used showed that it was over preforming at it's current cost but 30% seems wayyyy off to me to start. if you really wanted to raise it 10-15% would have been a better starting point but 30% is a tad harsh.

The grim focus change is kinda okish in my mind because the main pain points other non NB classes have pointed out have been addressed in a non super aggressive way, still think it should have been used as a model for other skills but again its easier to nerf 1 then buff all

the overall dodge changes really get me from a NB tank perspective. My main is a argo stam NB that i dps/tank/pvp with (no cp pvp so i don't have to swap champ points all the time) and it seems the last thing unique to NB tanks has been removed with passive dodging going away. I dont get the logic either as they claim that it doesn't feel right when you passively dodge? Many other mmo's have some form of passive dodge or another and there are no complaints there (there are but not enough that its a rallying cry for a boycott or anything). I see it as mainly a nerf for PVP as dodging is a strong way to avoid damage and a rng passive can be frustrating to go against but its not a high % (the old one was procing wayy too much but the numbers we have had for a while seemed fine). It seems that all they really should have done was change the way dodge functioned like they way they did with the projectile dodge change but the passive dodge needed to go why? Were there many people complaining about passive dodge or am i missing something there? Anyway with the passive dodge removal now NB tanks can have a 100% up time on 25% less aoe damage....which seems useless as most aoe's as will almost all pve damage is either nothing or a one shot so now i really don't know what uniqueness i can bring with my NB stam tank.

Cant comment on the mag skill changes other then the path changes seem unnecessary, again where were the complaints/testing done that shows that this skill needed changed?

again it seems as a whole this patch is *** poor overall for the health of the game play and were going to have to suffer 3 months to see if they are willing to roll back something or go all the way and screw everyone again, and again, and again

P.S. i know its just PTS as of right now but with their track record what we see now is more than likely is what we are going to get stuck with.