Hello everyone,
if you know me then you probably know that I am an experienced player, PC EU players might see me in open world or Battlegrounds aswell.
Those who ever saw me play will know that I'm a experienced Stamblade main who knows what he is talking about.
It came to my attention that Zenimax wants to fix the never ending Nightblade meta once and for all and I agree with it, its time to finally fix the Broken spec but what worries me is the fact that the Class Reps have nothing to say about any of the upcoming changes.
Zenimax can really mess up the spec if it doesn't take the right move and leave us with only Heavyblade being viable.
Therefor I decided to make a forum post explaining and giving suggestions how to nerf/fix the main issue of the spec which is Stamblade without ruining the class identity or suboptimal builds that do not rely on Skill trees that function as fixes for pidgeon holed Specs such as S&B, Heavy Armor and Dual Wield Bleeds.
Im gonna talk in this Post from a very competetive perspective of PvP and won't acknowledge the Problems an average Player might have with fighting Stamblades.


First what you need to know when it comes to Nightblades is that most tools which define todays PvP Meta can be obtained by Nightblades kit, such as Major Defile, Major Fracture and Minor Maim.
All specs besides Stamblades either go for one or the other thing to make them strong in PvP, Stamblades can combine all of these tools and add crazy DoTs on top of it making the Spec broken.
Their naturally high single target damage doesn't drop when Heavy Armor is in use. Their natural mobility and crutch tankiness just gets synergized with Heavy Armor passives.
While Medium Nightblade only crutches on Burst and Mobility, Heavy Armor Nightblades utilizes everything mentioned above and more.

Heavyblades passive healing from Leeching Strikes and their guaranteed Major Resistances uptime combined with immense DoT pressure enables them to never have to go on defense.


The biggest offenders that make Stamblades so effective on any build are:
Incapacitating Strike - Major Defile and Damage increase on everything including DoTs and bash attacks
Dark Cloak - Scales with health, a resource pool which is easily stacked nowadays without losing any damage. Makes a Stamblade with 31k+ HP seem almost unkillable to a solo player.


The changes that @ZOS_BrianWheeler talked about in his Combat Direction thread speculate of a Major Fracture removal from Surprise Attack and Major Defile removal from Incapacitating Strike.
While these changes would hit Medium Nightblades immensely, a spec which can be played very well yet is unreliable in the current Meta due to the endless counters available against them, Heavyblades wouldn't get affected by any of these changes.
Why?
Because Reverb also provides Major Defile.
And Ransack, a skill which Animation timings and secondary effects have been copy pasted from Surprise Attack, also provides Major Fracture, yet that skill cannot be nerfed due to PvE Tanking.
The removal of Minor Maim on shade would also only lead to Low Slash taking the place of another skill, which is already done nowadays anyway.

What would you end up with after the nerfs mentioned above is pidgeonholing another class into running Heavy armor + S&B without really nerfing it. A Build that is already the strongest thing out there.
Simply put you wouldn't fix the NB meta in PvP and PvE would stay untouched.


In Conclusion:
Heavy Armor Stamblades, including DW/2h Bleedblades and S&B/2h Bashblades make up the current Dueling and Soloplay Meta on PC as those are the strongest things out there.

How do you tackle the issue without nerfing the so loved Burst potential of a Stamblade retaining the Rogue identity and not forcing it to run Heavy Armor forever?
I have a couple Suggestions which every well respected Nightblade and Dueler whom I asked(Yes Magicka and Stamina) on PC EU agreed with and Class Reps Discords(including Templar Discord) loved.




SUGGESTIONS:
Incapacitating Strikes 20% Damage increase should only apply to Direct Damage excluding Bashes, Heavy Armor builds love stacking dots for artificial pressure to make up for the low Burst Damage such as Double-Dot Poisons, Bleeds, etc. Stamblades are the best at it because Incap increases all of that Damage. Changing that would be a significant nerf to Pressure builds on Stamblades which make up the Meta and magnify a Nightblades main feature which is huge Burst Damage output which you and your enemies could play around and predict.
The Major Defile secondary effect could also be reduced to 4seconds only so the Burst window would tighten making Bleedblades less effective.
A screenshot of a Heavyblade S&B/2h and it's damage output:



Surprise Attack should be swapped with Blur and end up in the Assassination Tree, Surprise Attack would finally stop proccing Major Resistance buffs and hit Builds that don't play around Stamblades main defensive tactics, aka. mobility(Cloak, Shade, etc.), which would lead to another significant Heavy Armor Stamblade nerf. On top of that Nightblade skill trees would start making sense again. "How is Blur even slightly related to assassinating a Target??"


Shadow Barrier passive should stop synergizing with Heavy Armor to strengthen the nerf mentioned above, it's already a very strong passive which doesn't need an additional effect.
That would force Heavyblades more often on Defense, and punishing them for trying to apply steady pressure on their Target which never seems to end which would result in them being forced to build more Burst damage so their opponent has to back off quicker. On top of that would force them to build more Magicka sustain. If they don't do that then the attacker would have 8% more damage against them.



Dark Cloak should not scale with Maximum Health or atleast be capped to 25k HP in PvP, I understand that this skill is a very important tool for NB Tanking in PvE, but in it's current state this skill is simply too strong.
ANOTHER SOLUTION: Make it scale off of missing health like Green Dragonblood.

Just to give you a slight perspective of how strong the Healing output of this skill is:
31000 HP Heavy Armor Stamblade uses it
31000 * 0,35 = 10850
10850 / 3,4 = 3191
Halved by Battle spirit: 3191/2 = 1596
1596 flat Healing tick which can crit based off of Spell Crit and gets amplified by all Healing passives.

Here is a screenshot of a Heavy Blade with 29335 HP and 37 Blessed 27 Quick Recovery.
He is still under the optimal minimum HP pool which is 31k. Remember that most people run around with 35k+ HP and 5,5k+ Weapon Damage



Reduce/Remove the Healing from Leeching Strikes.
As mentioned above Heavyblades passive healing is also very strong making them not have to go on defense even if their HoTs run out.


ADDITIONAL IDEA(Not necessarry as other ones mentioned above): Shadow Disguise duration should get halved and amplified to the current Duration by the Shadow Barrier Passive which would scale with Medium/Light Armor
(I only talk specifically about Shadowy Disguise morph and not Dark Cloak here)
FOR EXAMPLE:
Shadowy Disguise Duration: 1,5s
Shadow Barrier secondary effect: Wearing 5 or more Pieces of Light or Medium armor increases the duration of Shadowy Disguise by 100%.

With that change the Dark Veil Passive should not affect Shadow Cloak(Pre-morph) as investing points in the passive reduces the effectivness of Dark Cloak, which doesn't make sense anyway.





ENDING
Stamblades will always stay strong if Heavy Armor stays the way it is, so the simple solution to fixing Stamblades is to force them not to play it simple as.
Other specs who rely on Heavy Armor to be strong don't have to take a Nerfhammer to the face again just because Stamblade is hugely overperforming on it.
And Nightblades kit doesn't have to take a huge hit because of 2 very similar builds, the nerfs should be centered around the spec that truly overperforms.
And the speculated nerfs that have been more or less mentioned in the "Combat Direction Thread 22" will simply do no harm to the Stamblade Meta in PvP.
And people who play these overperforming builds mentioned above don't love the class nearly as much as players who don't.
Build for reference:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=115017


Sorry for no TL;DR as I really can't imagine a possible way of TL;DR'ing this post.

Here is a cute Furret for the Zenimax employees: