double post

_Salty_ wrote: »

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.

Healthy offering is anything but garbage, it isnt used by tanks or for solo nb, and it gives minor mending not minor vit.

exeeter702 wrote: »

_Salty_ wrote: »

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.

Healthy offering is anything but garbage, it isnt used by tanks or for solo nb, and it gives minor mending not minor vit.

Healthy offering? He/she is talking about swallow soul.

ankeor wrote: »

exeeter702 wrote: »

_Salty_ wrote: »

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.

Healthy offering is anything but garbage, it isnt used by tanks or for solo nb, and it gives minor mending not minor vit.

Healthy offering? He/she is talking about swallow soul.

Read their comment again......

As primarily a NB PVE tank, here's what happened since the game went from v14/16 to CP and beyond:

When I started tanking on a NB< NB tanks had brokenly OP sustain (via SA + Caltrops), were able to evade a lot of damage passively, and had top-tier ultigen thanks to potion passives. Sap tanking was everywhere.

SA proccing off every tick of caltrops got nerfed, rightly, but NB tanks still had great sustain because SA procced off direct damage attacks plus LA/HA and restored both stam and mag. Still able to evade a lot of damage, and, with, the introduction of Tava's meta, best ulti gen amongst tanks. Sap tanking was pretty dead, but we could get stuff done, kind of. Zero group utility beyond the insane ultigen.

Morrowind destroyed NB tank sustain by removing our only source of stam regen while blocking, and NB tank was basically in the toilet endgame-wise, but still fun in dungeons with nerd niche builds like Tava's/War Machine/Bloodspawn, running incap instead of Warhorn for crazy major slayer uptime. Useless in most pug situations, but fun. Evasion and ultigen (together and separately) came to form the NB tank identity. Still no group utility that a NB DPS (which was now strong and always welcome in raids) can provide.

Summerset brought NB tanks back to be able to manage most endgame with a decent heal that, while not burst, does really well in just about everywhere; combined with Vigor and Meditate it's very strong - I can tank backroom Ozara forever, and for the first time I could easily solo backroom Serpent in vSO -- that had always been a pain point before Dark Cloak + Meditate (which, while not a class skill, hell, I'll take it). I don't know if these things are going to be possible without that passive dodge chance -- probably, but it'll be much harder, and it'll feel a lot more pointless.

Because after taking away our sustain and the whole "sap tank" identity, you've now taken away the "avoid the damage" part of our identity. NBs are all about stealth and shadows and avoiding damage, healing preemptively via HoTs and dodging passively rather than have an "oh crap" button and shields. Now you've gone and thrown that in the trash -- sure, we still have our HoTs, and now we can stand in stupid for 3 seconds longer, but it's meaningless. SA returning more resources on heavies -- big whoop, you try doing a gotdamn heavy attack when you have 6 axes on you in vAA; not every trial group in this game has 300K+ DPS, not every group can. And the only Path morph useful for tanks lost its damage portion, which means NBs will have to find another AOE - caltrops, most likely - to maintain axe aggro because why the hell not, am I right? For everything outside that fight, there's Meditate, which is behind a paywall and isn't a NB skill. Siphoning Strikes/Attacks/whatever the hell has been off my bar since before Morrowind, and good riddance.

Other than the superior ultigen (which is still the best in the game thanks to infused traits on jewels + potion cooldown glyphs), there's nothing, no sense of doing something different from the other classes, something that isn't just "stand in one place and don't die" because you sure as hell haven't given us a single way to help a group beyond that.

What are you going to do next? Remove the Shadow Barrier passive and our potion passive and put all crafting skills in the Living Shadow skill advisor? You might as well get it the hell over with and put that in your next incremental.

reprosal wrote: »

LittlePinkDot wrote: »

John_Falstaff wrote: »

@LittlePinkDot , not enough by far, not compared to redguard. At base 1000 regen, wood elf has about 110 equivalent regen over other non-redguard races. Redguard's Adrenaline Rush is equivalent of a hefty ~350 regen or roughly two jewelry regen glyphs (and redguard already has 9% regen boost in passives in addition to that). So, other races are at huge disadvantage when it comes to PvE DPS.

My stamblade is a pvp woodelf sniper. Shes got the best sustain out of all my characters.
I can do normal dugeons just fine just by switching the skills. No sustain issues.
Im making a magblade to try vet dungeons.

The way Zos is going. Its stam for pvp and mag for pve. To do otherwise is just shooting yourself in the foot.

When boss fights last longer than 30 seconds sustain is a huge issue.

All they need to do is make monster helmets and trial rewards drop in normal. Then you wont need to do vet dungeons at all. The only reason to do vet anything is for the drops, its not like its fun.
Thats why theres "fake tanks" and "fake healers" because nobody wants to be there anyway, so they're not going to bother to change their build. 30 seconds is perfect, it means it will be over sooner.

I suppose ZoS could give trial weapons/sets to the golden vendor in cyrodiil instead of everything dropping in normal dungeons making vet useless on top of its already boring not fun existence.

efster wrote: »

As primarily a NB PVE tank, here's what happened since the game went from v14/16 to CP and beyond:

When I started tanking on a NB< NB tanks had brokenly OP sustain (via SA + Caltrops), were able to evade a lot of damage passively, and had top-tier ultigen thanks to potion passives. Sap tanking was everywhere.

SA proccing off every tick of caltrops got nerfed, rightly, but NB tanks still had great sustain because SA procced off direct damage attacks plus LA/HA and restored both stam and mag. Still able to evade a lot of damage, and, with, the introduction of Tava's meta, best ulti gen amongst tanks. Sap tanking was pretty dead, but we could get stuff done, kind of. Zero group utility beyond the insane ultigen.

Morrowind destroyed NB tank sustain by removing our only source of stam regen while blocking, and NB tank was basically in the toilet endgame-wise, but still fun in dungeons with nerd niche builds like Tava's/War Machine/Bloodspawn, running incap instead of Warhorn for crazy major slayer uptime. Useless in most pug situations, but fun. Evasion and ultigen (together and separately) came to form the NB tank identity. Still no group utility that a NB DPS (which was now strong and always welcome in raids) can provide.

Summerset brought NB tanks back to be able to manage most endgame with a decent heal that, while not burst, does really well in just about everywhere; combined with Vigor and Meditate it's very strong - I can tank backroom Ozara forever, and for the first time I could easily solo backroom Serpent in vSO -- that had always been a pain point before Dark Cloak + Meditate (which, while not a class skill, hell, I'll take it). I don't know if these things are going to be possible without that passive dodge chance -- probably, but it'll be much harder, and it'll feel a lot more pointless.

Because after taking away our sustain and the whole "sap tank" identity, you've now taken away the "avoid the damage" part of our identity. NBs are all about stealth and shadows and avoiding damage, healing preemptively via HoTs and dodging passively rather than have an "oh crap" button and shields. Now you've gone and thrown that in the trash -- sure, we still have our HoTs, and now we can stand in stupid for 3 seconds longer, but it's meaningless. SA returning more resources on heavies -- big whoop, you try doing a gotdamn heavy attack when you have 6 axes on you in vAA; not every trial group in this game has 300K+ DPS, not every group can. And the only Path morph useful for tanks lost its damage portion, which means NBs will have to find another AOE - caltrops, most likely - to maintain axe aggro because why the hell not, am I right? For everything outside that fight, there's Meditate, which is behind a paywall and isn't a NB skill. Siphoning Strikes/Attacks/whatever the hell has been off my bar since before Morrowind, and good riddance.

Other than the superior ultigen (which is still the best in the game thanks to infused traits on jewels + potion cooldown glyphs), there's nothing, no sense of doing something different from the other classes, something that isn't just "stand in one place and don't die" because you sure as hell haven't given us a single way to help a group beyond that.

What are you going to do next? Remove the Shadow Barrier passive and our potion passive and put all crafting skills in the Living Shadow skill advisor? You might as well get it the hell over with and put that in your next incremental.

Completely and utterly 100% agree, except i'm not sure NB have the best ultigen anymore in the tank role. Was going to make a post about the path change being awful for tanks because of no longer keeping agro from damage - seems to have been overlooked elsewhere. Honestly i'm getting to the end of my tether with badly thought out some changes are, I am getting more convinced only the tooltips are looked at and not the whole story. Path is in the 'tank' line after all, and it is now clearly dps OR healing. Path should be granting minor vitality to those stood in it, or better yet immovable. NB are meant to be mobile right?

ankeor wrote: »

Your goal should have been making other classes reach to the point where Nightblades are. But look at what you have done. You did not fix anything by nerfing nightblades. You just ruined another class.

Ruined? What is ruined? Our damage hasn't changed at all. The only thing that has changed is the sustain for both Magblade and Stamblade and the healing on Magblade. And I highly doubt that you'll notice any sustain difference in raids or in PvP just because the bow proc will cost 1k resources or because the execute will cost 400 more resources per cast. Sure a couple of changes are weird and unnecessary, but Nightblades are under no circumstances ruined.

The piercing mark change is way too much


From 30 to 5 seconds is HUGE. Should be at the very least 10 seconds or its another NB skill that's going into the vault of not being used.

Izaki wrote: »

ankeor wrote: »

Your goal should have been making other classes reach to the point where Nightblades are. But look at what you have done. You did not fix anything by nerfing nightblades. You just ruined another class.

Ruined? What is ruined? Our damage hasn't changed at all. The only thing that has changed is the sustain for both Magblade and Stamblade and the healing on Magblade. And I highly doubt that you'll notice any sustain difference in raids or in PvP just because the bow proc will cost 1k resources or because the execute will cost 400 more resources per cast. Sure a couple of changes are weird and unnecessary, but Nightblades are under no circumstances ruined.

Do you know why nightblades are popular? Because they are fun to play. If they reduce the damage a bit it would be ok. But sustain and diversity?.. It takes all the fun. I'm not a pvp expert so i will list the problems about pve.

Stamblade - Redguard or go home. Are you a khajiit pve'er? Better pay for race change.

Magblade - You will the difference when you watch the videos of them parse with worm cult + orbs + ele drain yet run out of resourses. They deserved the healing nerf in my opinion but those nerfs do not effect only magblades, look below.

Healblade - Only reason you would pick a nb healer over any heal class would be that you can deal a bit of damage while healing. New version refreshing path is weak and has a very small area compared to any other aoe healing ability. Funnel health was unreliable on healing allies anyway and with its new version it doesn't work as a spammable barely deals damage. In fact if they completely remove the the damage from this skill, aplply life steal on target and also heal up to 4-6 people at the same instead of 2 it could be a great hot skill but NO. They had to ruin those morphs i guess. There is not even one single reason to play nb healer, there is nothing left to choose them over any other healing classes under any circumstances.

Tankblade - Got rekt with the minor vitality removal from swallow soul and evasion rework. If this goes live tell everyone who use Tava's and Nocturnal's Favor to deconstuct those sets. What is the point of using them? Should they roll dogde around the boss like monkey? Why do poeple like playing a tankblade rather than a tank dk or warden? Because it's is a different experience. But with these changes they lost what made them unique. No one asks for nb tank to be better tank compared to other tank classes. It was niche and that's okay. You may even need to convince people that you tank the content in a 4 men dungeon as a nb tank. Right now you can't even convince yourself to play it. Because again not one single thing left nb tanks can do better than any other tank class so there is no any reason to play it.

+1 to all of what @efster said. My main character since ESO launch (literally my first character created on the first day of the 5-day early access) has been an Argonian NB tank, so I'm right there with you.

The Summerset changes (Dark Cloak's self-heal and Silver Leash's pull) have been awesome, putting NB tanks on very nearly same level as DKs. However, the removal of passive dodge from the game (somehow you can only dodge while you are somersaulting, uh, ok...) and minor vitality from Swallow Soul feels like a reversal of this progress. Like @efster said, it undermines the unique flavor that is (and always has been part of) NB tanking.

1. Why we don't need AoE damage mitigation (the replacement for dodge):

• Tanks in general already hit the steep diminishing returns on overall damage mitigation. With maxed (or nearly maxed) resistances, CP passives, class/weapon passives, and block, the AoE mitigation from Blur will just be added multiplicatively with other forms of mitigation and thus will not provide much real-world difference for tanks. The Major Protection from VoB/Bolstering Darkness will further diminish the actual mitigation from new change to Blur.
• Dodge helps NB sustain. Dodging saves stamina (don't have to block), as well as magicka for you or your healer. The saving of stamina is especially crucial given Leeching Strikes's 20-second tick (which can be agonizingly slow in difficult content). It also prevent interrupts, which can be make or break when your resources are low, or all hell breaks loose (or you're in a PUG) and you need to rez. Additionally, the added resource return to Siphoning Attacks does not make up for this combined loss of sustain, utility, and damage avoidance (see #2 below).
• Dodge enables NB to uniquely take advantage of sets that proc off dodge, namely Tava's and Nocturnal. This synergy between the only class with Major Evasion buff and sets that proc'd off dodge was cool and fun to build around, and accentuated what made NB tanks different from DK tanks. And frankly the fact that these sets weren't addressed in the patch notes seem indicative that this is not a well thought-out change (any dodge-based set is now essentially an inferior roll-dodge-based proc set because they don't just trigger when you roll-doge, but when you actually dodge an attacking while roll-dodging). Also, while I'm at it, Minor Toughness was removed from Warhorn so Warden's could keep their unique buff, but then NB's unique buff get's removed from the game completely? If NB's unique buff is now speed, then please remove it from Rapid Maneuver (apologies for the sarcasm, but you get my point).

2. The additional resources returned from heavy attacking with Siphoning Attacks doesn't help anything:

• Similar to the AoE mitigation issue described above, the new additional resources gained from heavy attacks with Leeching Attacks looks OK on paper, but in actual gameplay falls flat. It's risky enough to block-cancel a light attack during difficult vet content, but relying on heavy attacks to gain back stamina we will lose by not dodging is far too risky for tanks.
• Assuming my math is right, the doubled stamina returned from a heavy attack with Leeching Strikes active is 212 stamina. So roughly the cost of 1 block. Again, the reward is not worth the risk of a wipe, and definitely doesn't make up for the loss of sustain, utility, and damage avoidance of being able to dodge. And it definitely doesn't help put NB tanks on-par with DKs.

3. Removing Minor Vitality from Swallow Soul is unnecessary:

• From a tanking perspective, the calculus with Swallow Soul vs Funnel Health was one of selfishness: 'do I want to help myself (Swallow Soul) or my group (Funnel Health).' With the changes, the calculus changes to 'do I want to do more damage or do I want more heals.' As tanks, our damage is already laughable, so the choice is easy. But now with this change, that heal from Strife and all others will be weaker due to the loss of the Minor Vitality.
• Since our class doesn't have access to Major Vitality or damage shields, the Minor version of the buff provided a way to make NB tanks easier to heal. Similar to dodge, stacking healing done/received has been a core, if smaller, part of NB tanking. Before the Major/Minor buff system, and when combined with Argonian racial passives, our class potion passive made health potions extremely strong and fast (anyone remember the 15 second cooldown we could get it down to?). Removing Minor Vitality undermines yet another part of what made NB tanks unique and competent, and also removes another of the checkmarks from NBs in their comparison to DKs.

I guess all in all, this feels like a reversal of the progress NB tanks made with Summerset, and I just don't see why they are removing passive doge from the game completely (a move which disproportionately affects NBs and isn't offset by any other changes), nor do I understand why removing Minor Vitality will solve any potential imbalances with the class.

Recommendations:

• Keep Strife and Blur as they are (seriously, where are these changes coming from?)
• If that's not possible, move Minor Vitality to something tanking-specific, adequately buff Siphoning Attacks to make up for the sustain loss (don't try to get tanks to heavy attack please), and provide a source of damage avoidance that isn't penalized/undermined by steep diminishing returns of mitigation.

I appreciate making heavy attacks restore more resources because of leeching strikes. My StamBlade's resource pool will enjoy that.

I'm pretty sure ZOS new tactic is to put out incredibly bad decision on the PTS, then immediately take them back so there will be less complaining about the changes they actually intend to make.

For example, people would be outraged at a 10 second mark, but less so if it was almost 5.

People will be made about critting shields, but less so if we almost put a cast time on it.
Remeber the changes aren't live yet, but that's my hunch.