The one and only nerf shields needed

TimeDazzler · September 2018

All they had to do was make shields critable without being able to crit themselves. All the other changes with max health capping, armor resist integration, and cast times is silly. Who cares if shields are OP in pve, at this point if they want to balance pve they should rework CP, not abilities. Plus with how high inpen gets in PvP it wouldn't have even been that big of a nerf, again thanks to CP. Just rework the system or stop increasing points like I suggested 6 months ago.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/393394/drop-the-cp-cap-to-600-and-thats-it-until-the-system-is-reworked/p1

"B-but muh feeling of progression" ya.. okay..

VaranisArano · September 2018

Except for the teeny tiny fact that the devs wanted to nerf shields in PVE too, and made that perfectly clear.

PVE bosses dont do crit damage, ergo, that doesnt work.

Strider__Roshin · September 2018

"who cares if shields are OP in PvE"

Zenimax cares, that's who. Damage shields being too powerful in PvE is the main inspiration behind the shield nerfs. Your feelings on its importance is irrelevant.

TimeDazzler · September 2018

Daus wrote: »

"who cares if shields are OP in PvE"

Zenimax cares, that's who. Damage shields being too powerful in PvE is the main inspiration behind the shield nerfs. Your feelings on its importance is irrelevant.

That's the problem. All Zenimax balances for is pve, they don't care or even consider what their PVE balance will do in PVP.

Galarthor · September 2018

ZOS tackles the balancing from the wrong angle.

1) They should balance classes around PvP since this is where inter-class balance is the most important.

2) They should then use factors that improve damage against NPCs (they already exist in the game) to adjust the damage of the PvP-balanced builds to PvE.

3) Lastly, take a look at how the PvP-balanced builds are performing in terms of survivabiltiy & healing and adjust the values so that they are balanced in PvE, and then use Battle Spirit to get them to their original values in PvP.

Steps 2) and 3) should / can be complemented with changes to the NPCs, which can be easily done since NPCs don't care about balance and will take whatever they are given.

BOOM. Balance in PvE and PvP.

ak_pvp · September 2018

I still think the only penalty needs to be if recasting the same shield when up already, sorcs can still stack it, but need to time it a bit better alternating them.
PvE you can still use them instantly, but its limited, and since no one uses multiple its a harder nerf to it. Shields size wise are quite small, but tards with no skill who spam harness repetitively for free tilt me.

Revert every other change.

Massacre_Wurm · September 2018

Galarthor wrote: »

BOOM. Balance in PvE and PvP.

Balance is a myth. Hasn't seen a single MMO without qq-ing about balance.

JPcrazysquirrel3 · September 2018

I shall rename my tanky PvP Argonian berserker "Shields-Don't-Stack".

Mystrius_Archaion · September 2018

VaranisArano wrote: »

Except for the teeny tiny fact that the devs wanted to nerf shields in PVE too, and made that perfectly clear.

PVE bosses dont do crit damage, ergo, that doesnt work.

Actually, shields got a buff in pve.

I can definitely say that the majority of players, not the less-than-1% doing vet hard modes and high dummy parses, were not using shields because they were just too weak compared to self healing with lower stats and just being more resistant and blocking.
Tanks really weren't using many damage shields themselves either due to the tendency to be able to block through the damage that is a risk and having a healer or more dps to burn the enemy while the tank self-sustains. Dragonknights can self heal really well, for example.

Shields actually needed a buff to be more desirable to the more hybrid majority of players who really don't get close to top dps. They got that buff with resistances finally helping them. Resistances affecting shields is a straight up buff in pve when the shields were mostly not nerfed, other than the ones sorcerers stacked most often with super high magicka.

I think the reason sorcerers seemed targeted by this, and actually were but only by coincidence, is because they are the only class with a decent max-magicka-based shield. Every other class has either no class shields or has them already health based so as to be truly encouraged for tanking, as they always should have been but not benefitting from resistance killed that before it could really start.

Mystrius_Archaion · September 2018

Massacre_Wurm wrote: »

Galarthor wrote: »

BOOM. Balance in PvE and PvP.

Balance is a myth. Hasn't seen a single MMO without qq-ing about balance.

I disagree. I don't remember really any complaints about balance in City of Heroes. If nothing else, it was very little because the game was pretty well balanced and definitely didn't matter in pve as much when everybody grouped with anybody and was able to complete even the most difficult endgame content with any group that was max level or because of the revolutionary(at the time) "sidekick system" that leveled group members up or down to the leader of the group very well. It was the precursor to "battle-leveling" and "one tamriel" here but did so a hell of a lot better.

Edit:
FYI, City of Heroes actually did have "skills" perform differently in pve and pvp, with tooltips that automatically changed in pvp zones to show pvp specific info, but all gear stats were percentage based so they scaled exactly the same in pve and pvp so didn't need changing in that way either.
They were ahead of their time.

Also, City of Heroes actually had much more common control, for/from players, in pvp and pve. Players could actually lockdown npc enemies for an entire fight in pve, even self-stacking to stun the toughest bosses, and still could do the exact same to players but less consistent due to "control magnitude" where players were not immune but more resistant to controls than npcs. Also, npcs rarely applied control to players and only when they were higher rank, not the lowest rank minions like ESO does, which is where ESO makes a huge mistake and causes pve to be less fun by far.