How is magic nightblade sustain in Murkmire?

weedgenius · October 2018

Console player wondering about title.

I'm worried about Murkmire because I see cost increases on skills I use often in my rotation:

Assassin’s Blade: Increased the cost of this ability and its morphs by approximately 30%.
The spectral bow proc is no longer free, and costs half the amount of a regular Grim Focus.
Elemental Weapon (morph): Increased the cost of this morph by 10%.

I'm not great at dps and I don't have some flawless, locked down dummy parse. Sometimes I get confused with all the buff markers and accidentally recast abilities too soon or spam buttons too fast and my bars don't swap. Basically I waste magicka sometimes but I found my build to be very forgiving and rewarding for a casual PVE player. Am I going to have to re-imagine what I've been doing?

Side note: I see that dev comments say these skills were "too productive" and nb performance was more "effective" "than intended" and I see that they were frequently used in harder content. What I don't understand is why the solution for the devs is to calculate a way to make it harder for nightblades to do well instead of thoughtfully considering how other classes can be improved to perform at that level that they deemed "better than intended."

erlewine · October 2018

because bringing every other class "up to" the power of nightblades would kinda ruin the game. NBs were accounting for half of raid healing, and still doing more damage than other classes. Just because they made a mistake with NBs doesnt mean they should just continue it along to other classes.

Their sustain is slightly worse, but still fine. You can use an Absorb Magicka glyph if you want, or weave in heavy attacks. Or be part of a good group with high orb uptime.

Oakmontowls_ESO · October 2018

erlewine wrote: »

because bringing every other class "up to" the power of nightblades would kinda ruin the game. NBs were accounting for half of raid healing, and still doing more damage than other classes. Just because they made a mistake with NBs doesnt mean they should just continue it along to other classes.

Their sustain is slightly worse, but still fine. You can use an Absorb Magicka glyph if you want, or weave in heavy attacks. Or be part of a good group with high orb uptime.

Nightblades didn't run funnel health in most trials, nor was the healing from it doing much more than keeping everyone topped off.

yodased · October 2018

It's pretty simple. Having multiple people pulling 55-60k in a raid will allow you to simply ignore mechanics, and with nightblades passive and active healing, the actual heal role can utilize a stronger buff bar.

It comes down to the fact that the development team spends countless hours designing encounters and mechanics, and having players ignore those mechanics because they can kill the boss faster than they appear was directly against the ethos of design.

Soooooooo you have two choices in that situation, increase the difficulty or tweak the timing of raid bosses, (aka make it even harder for lower end players to get into them) or reduce the effectiveness of the top tier outliers of damage, namely magica nightblades.

If everyone were to be brought up to that level of DPS, then you would just walk through all raids, it would be pointless to even have mechanics after a certain point because no-one other than the lowers tier players would see them and that would be punishing them.

weedgenius · October 2018

@yodased That makes a lot of sense to me, I didn't think about it in that way. Thanks for your post.

erlewine wrote: »

Their sustain is slightly worse, but still fine. You can use an Absorb Magicka glyph if you want, or weave in heavy attacks. Or be part of a good group with high orb uptime.

Thanks, I'll think about swapping glyphs when I test it out. I don't really know how to weave in HAs but I guess it's probably pretty self explanatory.

usmcjdking · October 2018

Eh, I just run Moondancer. Moondancer literally solves all issues ATM for me.

BigBadVolk · October 2018

not much just put an absorb magicka enchant on backbar and use the gold food or witch mother

LiquidPony · October 2018

Sustain is fine with Absorb Magicka on the backbar and regen food.

These changes weren't that bad.

The really awful changes were the gutting of Refreshing Path and Strife. I guess that's just our quarterly reminder that Wrobel hates us and doesn't want anyone to actually have fun.

erlewine · October 2018

Oakmontowls_ESO wrote: »

erlewine wrote: »

because bringing every other class "up to" the power of nightblades would kinda ruin the game. NBs were accounting for half of raid healing, and still doing more damage than other classes. Just because they made a mistake with NBs doesnt mean they should just continue it along to other classes.

Their sustain is slightly worse, but still fine. You can use an Absorb Magicka glyph if you want, or weave in heavy attacks. Or be part of a good group with high orb uptime.

Nightblades didn't run funnel health in most trials, nor was the healing from it doing much more than keeping everyone topped off.

Thanks for your input. Here is a screenshot of me playing group healer in a vCR+3 group 35/36 vitality kill with 8 nightblade DPS. Please direct your attention to the amount of total group healing I did: 30.7%. This is typical. 30-35% from group healer, 15-25% from kite healer, and the remaining half from the magblade DPS.

Similarly, here is a screenshot of my healing done as a Magblade DPS on a vCR+3 kill. I direct your attention to the fact that I did 17% of the group healing, as a regular, full blown dps. This is a tad on the high end, but I think we only had 4 or 5 NBs using Funnel in that group.