A real, non-salty answer for anyone that cares:

The reaction among most of my guildmates has been mixed, but not as bad as the forums would suggest.

The change to DPS is good - things were getting crazy and I honestly think the idea that AoE DoTs not be outperforming single target DoTs is a good thing.

As usual however there are some misteps on ZoS' part. For example - all single target DoTs should be doing roughly the same damage. The only reason to choose a DoT like entropy or soul trap over a class DoT like Cripple should only be the utility portion and never the damage portion. You want a little more resource return, you choose the soul line, you want more class related identity style skills and perhaps passives tied to it, then you choose the class skill. But if one does much more damage than the other, then there will really never be a real choice.

The changes to some of the heavy armor sets and S/B line is needed. That stuff is overperforming in PvP and won't effect PvE that much (despite some people upset about doing 'less' damage with S/B in pve).

The biggest change that most of us don't get is the changes to some of the healing meta. I can see the desire to shake things up, but if they switch the meta to encourage a setup with maybe 4 or more quasi-support/DPS builds and not need healers at all, then I think they will lose a lot of people from the game. There are a lot of players that only want to be tanks or healers and not some sort of mixed support class. And unfortunately, even if it isn't require, if the top handful of guilds go a certain direction, you'll see the 'meta' shift b/c 75% of the players in this game, even other decent raid guilds, simply parrot what they see the top guys doing.

I've seen a hint that maybe they will try and push the healers and tanks from just being buff monkeys and into actually healing and tanking (still not sure how the healer change encourages this however). It would be great to take DPS sets like Alkosh off the tanks IMO and I've enjoyed seeing other armor sets that are made for tanks offer interesting buffs. But they still should be careful of sets like Alkosh. As long as it's a group buff that can be pushed off on a support, it will be. It will always be better for a support to suffer in their role to give the DPS a boost in damage and let them go pure damage. So sets like Martial Knowledge - if that is a group buff of 10% bonus damage, then expect to see tanks and/or healers put into that set to make the group get a damage buff while letting them wear other gear. Sets like Alkosh and Martial Knowledge should really be self buff only IMO (even if DPS cry about losing pen or damage).

In the end, more of the changes look more good than bad. The healing changes are something they need to get a handle on. ZoS has a habit of making changes like this and not changing things in the game that need to be addressed. Going to take away the ability to spam AoE heal HoTs? Then you need to change the couple dungeons and trials that have mechanics that require it. Going to change how Springs works, then you need to not just make it a different style of HoT as you did, but make sure it's worth slotting over several other options since there are only 5 bar slots to use on each bar. In the end, what is the rotation for a player that mainly wants to be a healer going to look like? Those are all things that need to be considered and addressed by ZoS.

Biggest concern is what about all the other balance in the game? How long are we going to wait for stamina necro and orc to both be brought down and not over-tuned? (say what you want about the balance guys, but its stupid how many orc stamcros I saw pop up, so don't tell me something is balanced there) How long do we wait for stamplar or other classes to be buffed a bit. Or other races to be permitted to be better than 2nd or 3rd place in support roles and last in DPS usefulness? So when you bring down DPS, you just make stamcros even more desired in hard core content (which is not how you balance a game unless it's a pay-to-win game) and if you keep trying to use fighter's guild, mage guild and psijic to bridge the gap between class imbalance, then you are just taking away class identity.

Not everyone quit so far, some people want to see it go to live. However there's been discussing about the patch notes and generally they agree that zos should work on servers, performance problems and already existing bugs instead of this constant nerf roulette that nobody has asked for. The ones that quit with me started an FC / guild in Final Fantasy XIV and we're decorating our guild house while doing story to get to the new Shadowbringers expansion.

initial horror then re-read a few times, did some testing on PTS not as bad as i thought

The problem with these major patches with combat changes is they show how out of balance the game is currently and how extreme the devs must go each time to address these issues . Then the burden or re gearing and re grinding is put upon the unsuspecting player base . Not everyone reads forums .

This constant confusion and revamping of the combat system shows just how weak the system is . Competitive players seek more experienced game teams after reaching limits of frustration .

That's bad ZoS . This one shouldn't have to point out the obvious ....

Vercingetorix wrote: »

Rapid Maneuver change is killing any enjoyment my friends and I used to have for clearing Questing/Overland content. If this change goes through, my friends and I are leaving because there's no point in playing a game that makes the questing experience miserable. It's bad enough that traversing the map takes a long time, especially when you can't mount in delves or any other non-mountable location. This is the one change that never should have been made. I understand the changes aimed at stopping orb spammers and lowering trial dps, but Rapids wasn't hurting anyone - Rapids was ruined for no reason.

I mean I don't like this change either but your going to sit there and tell me you AND your friends sat around and made a pact to quit a game you have invested how much time and money into because you get a couple less seconds of major expedition that has nothing to do with combat.... I call BS that sounds ridiculous lol.. When I was on console we never used it at all because there was no addon to switch it and it was too much of a pain to switch it because you would be at your target location by the time you wasted time switching it and then back when you got there. ALSO overland content nothing is more that like 8 seconds away from any shrine anyways!!!!! so you're not losing *** just cast it again when there happens to be no shrine around!!!

Note: This is not an endorsement of the change IDK why they would do it. But his statement is too silly not to point out the obvious. not to mention you can actually use it IN combat now and run faster................... der

EDIT: now that I think about it there is more uses for the skill now besides horse simulator so Im warming up to the Idea, I will just have to cast it more in cyro

Some people are in total meltdown and saying the famous words “I’m going to leave the game if this goes live” They won’t.

Some are like me and over the initial shake and will wait to see what the final version is. I won’t leave the game but I may do other things. Fishing is always nice

Donny_Vito wrote: »

Friends....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Niu9Zmrx0p8

Also, my reaction: