The Nightblade class, in general, has always been known as the class with one of the top tier classes in eso. This is mainly due to the high burst damage it can put out as opposed to the other classes that mostly relly on DoT, except, of course, magicka sorcerers. They excel in both pve as well as pvp mostly due to their passives as well as the ability to go into stealth. If the changes in elsewyr stay, it is my firm belief that the nightblade will once and for all be completely ineffective in a PvP setting.
Firstly, the most obvious reason that nightblades perform so well in pvp is the access to major defile through an ultimate known as incapacitating strike for stamina based and soul harvest for magicka based nicjgblades. With access to this debuff, a nightblade has been able to compete with high heal builds such as a Templar. If this was to be taken away, it would make it nearly impossible for a nightblade to kill or even damage a build like this. The changes do not even come close to making up for this loss.
The changes from major defile to minor defile + minor mangle is practically useless. Minor defile only negates 10% of healing received. Sure it sounds good on paper but this is very easily countered through cp placement. The minor mangle is just completely useless. Especially since you have to build up 120 ultimate to have access to it. The average player runs about 22-23k health in cyrodil which they would only be losing 2.2-2.3k health. The only reason this would be viable is inside of a pve setting but even then, flawless dawnbreaker + ballista are the main ultimates used. All in all, the changes to incapacitating strike as well as soul harvest are frankly rediculous and must be looked at again as it will completely render the Nightblade useless in pvp.
Secondly, in regards to the changes to suprise attack, you have effectively killed the nightblades offence. The reasoning behind the loss of major fracture is highly offensive in nature. Yes, we do have access to two sources of major fracture but one of them is a useless skill.
Mark target is only used by nightblades who exploit the snipe lag. That is to say they can shoot multiple snipes in rapid succession to cause the server to lag which results in all 5 arrows hitting you at once. Aka only 10% of the nightblade population. The rest of the nightblades literally don’t have room on any of our bars to slot this skill. Without access to major fracture, stamblades will notice a big difference when facing high resistance builds. To be frank, there is really no reason to use this skill anymore as dizzying swing hits way harder then surprise attack does (up to 25k physical damage on the right build).
Thirdly, with the changes to dark cloak, there will no longer be an option for people, such as myself, to run a heavy armour magicka nighblade as we will no longer have access to a heal. To be honest, this is the only healing ability that a nightblade has. It’s not quite a burst heal(like dragons blood) but it’s not quite a HoT like winters embrace. The tool tip states that you only heal for 32% of your health for every second for 3 seconds. To really benefit from this, you need a minimum of 27k health which translates to 8640 health per second but in reality, due to the 50% healing received, means that you only get 4320 health per second. Honestly, it’s not that big of an issue as the only ones who reap the benefits are heavy mag builds and is you only source of damage mitigation. This skill is also very important to nightblade tanking in pve. It gives us access to a HoT to use alongside of the other sources of healing.
The nightblade is a class that is in a very vulnerable position if the proposed changes stay come elsewyr. It is going to be the worst class as well as the class that is the hardest to learn on. With no fear of major fracture or defiles, everyone will just make high healing builds with as much resistances as possible thus becoming unkillable and ruining any previous attempts at “class balancing.” During these next few weeks please reconsider these changes so that the player base who play nightblades can continue to play nightblades.