Who wants this new generic skill meta?

SeaUnicorn · July 2019

Class skills should remain at least a little stronger than generic skills.

i think class and generic skills should be on par and complement, rather than being one stronger or the other.

Finedaible · July 2019

Class skills should remain at least a little stronger than generic skills.

At the very least, Class skills which have a "generic" version should be equal in power to each other. That way you would at least get the small benefits from slotting one of your class skills due to class passives. The only skill i think is fine this patch is Soul Trap, which at least gives starting characters something they can use effectively while leveling and won't be completely useless on stamina builds.

Spell-crafting is completely dead btw. They said as much about a year or more ago.

blnchk · July 2019

Class skills should remain at least a little stronger than generic skills.

Who needs classes? We'll all just be accomplished Mages or Fighters Guild members come next patch!

MashmalloMan · July 2019

Class skills should remain at least a little stronger than generic skills.

I really don't think Spellcrafting is difficult to introduce with the standardization now. Nor would it be detrimental to pvp or lower the skill cap (I don't even understand that statement) as long as they stick to little to no hard CC's. Here's my idea for what could work:

Rule: You can only craft 5 different spells, each one is an ability type. This fits their current skill tree system and ensures you can't use spell crafting to add 5 dots or 5 "vigor's" to your build, I don't think they should introduce an ultimate here.

Single Target Offensive
AoE Offensive
Self Buff
AoE Support/Defense/Utility
Single Target Support/Defense/Utility

Alternative if 5 is too much, is 3 abilities.

Single Target/aoe Offensive
Self Buff
Single Target/aoe Support/Defensive/Utility

Single Target Offensive:

Choose Range - Melee / Range (Melee +10% more damage (5m) or ranged (28m))
Choose Damage Function - Direct (spammable 2700 cost) / dot (10 seconds, ___ cost, not sure what they use)
Choose Damage Type - (Decides resource, stam -15%) Physical / Poison / Disease / Magicka / Flame / Shock / Frost (Status effect options do -4% less damage)

After those 3 choices, utility can be introduced with 2 more options. Your previous choices decide what's available. If they don't want ranged skills to have CC, they simply don't include it as an option. Frankly I'd prefer if Hard CC was completely removed from the equation.

Ranged + Direct + Flame:

Option 1 Base Augment:

Heal yourself for 20% of the direct damage dealt.
Increase Damage by +10%
Reduce Cost by 10%
On hit, provides minor intellect for 10s
On hit, provides minor endurance for 10s

Option 2 | Augments based on the chosen damage type (Flame):

20% chance for combustion, damaging enemies within a 5m radius for ____ direct fire damage.
Every 3rd cast sets the target on fire.

Ranged + Direct + Poison:

Option 1 Base Augment:

Heal yourself for 20% of the direct damage dealt.
Increase Damage by +10%
Reduce Cost by 10%
On hit, provides minor intellect for 10s
On hit, provides minor endurance for 10s

Option 2 | Augments based on the chosen damage type (Poison):

Applies infection, increasing all poison status effect damage by 30% for 4s.
Opon cast, restore 300 stamina over 4s.

Passives:
Should be on the weaker side since they're applied to possibly 100+ different permutations of abilities, psijic order/mages/fighters guild are pretty good models here:

Spell crafted abilities slotted offer regen. 4% sta regen for Stamina cost, 4% mag regen for Magicka cost, 6% hp regen for health cost.

Runefang · July 2019

My hope, maybe my dream even, is that this is the stable balance platform used to create more class identity than ever.

Even before the Great Homogenization of Scalebreaker there really wasn't much class identity from a PvE perspective. Every DPS rotation felt basically because they are all built around dots with spammable fill-ins when no dots need to be recast. The rhythm of just about every class is already identical, both stam and magicka, and this patch isn't making it worse. Wardens and Necromancers feel slightly different due to the 3 second rhythm they get with Shalks/Blastbones but it's still really just dots + spammables with a slight variation.

Now with a stronger balance foundation they *should* be able to start working on giving each class its own rhythm. There are so many other ways MMO builds can work other than the way they do today. Combo style where sequenced skill usage unleashes burst windows. Slow dot build up. All direct damage with no dots. Stacks of other "resources" build up unlocking other skills.

Altyrann · July 2019

Are people actually dropping class skills or just dropping things like the equally generic elemental weapon spammable?

msalvia · July 2019

This feel a lot like ZOS saying "have your cake and eat it too." They desperately want to preserve the "any class can do anything" philosophy, and apparently what that now means is to make class skills less essential/less frequently used. Depending on perspective, this can either be a way to make the game more vanilla and strip the classes of their unique identities, or a way to "balance" the game in a way that truly any class can use the "best" abilities in the game.

As someone who pines for a MORE RESTRICTIVE class/role system, where classes are more clearly suited for certain roles, I am much more the former than the latter. But I can totally see this being popular with a more casual fan base, vs a more competitive fan base, since these groups have different priorities. Casual players want no restrictions, and want to use the best abilities regardless of whether they choose to roll a Bosmer Ice Mage / Bow hybrid. Competitive players (like most of us on forums) like unique abilities and tradeoffs for class/role choices. Neither is necessarily right, but I certainly fall more with competitive players on this one.

blnchk · July 2019

Class skills should remain at least a little stronger than generic skills.

Runefang wrote: »

My hope, maybe my dream even, is that this is the stable balance platform used to create more class identity than ever.

If only they'd just, you know. Tell people what their vision is. Or something. That'd be nice.

WillhelmBlack · July 2019

What's a meta?

Is it like brexit?

charley222 · July 2019

SidewalkChalk5 wrote: »

This incoming generic skill meta looks really awful to me. Everyone is going to be running the same boring non-class skills like Soul Trap and Entropy in the place of class skills. Honestly, I LOVE the general idea of the dev's direction of standardizing skill cost-to-power ratio (such changes are a prerequisite to a balanced Spellcrafting system, which I think is the hidden purpose behind them), but personally I think class skills should have a standard across-the-board bonus to make them a little higher than the base standard.

3min video sorry for my poor english this is why i make video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BcrQDeTdJ4&t=15s

eol · July 2019

Marshall1289 wrote: »

The game has been out for what, 5 years now? This is the first time a great deal of these frankly USELESS abilities are able to be used in people's builds, the fact that we have options now. The fact that you actually have trouble filling your bar space, the idea of choosing lower aoe dps for higher single target dps is how the game should of always been balanced.
They're not done here. I wish this was the end all be all patch, but it isn't. The past 3 or so major updates have been leading to their overall combat vision and I appreciate finally having dev's that have some inclination of where they want the combat balance of the game to go.
...
The previous combat team were tripping over themselves patch to patch with skills and passives that were fundamentally flawed from a programming and design point of view and these audits have fixed a lot of those issues, with more to come.. Weird rules like mundus stones and 5 pc bonuses not being affected by the 20% from cp, etc. Racial changes moving from % to static numbers. Removal of mandatory front bar Flawless DB for 8% WPD. Standardization of cost/damage on abilities.

There is just so much to this game with 100s of sets that it's impossible for them to do this perfectly, so I have mad respect that they're actually doing something for the better future health of the game. Wrobel seemed to have no vision for the future and worked patch to patch. Wheeler came hot and heavy and is flipping everything on it's head, fixing the mess of the past 3+ years.
….
Despite what you may read on the forums, I guarantee ZOS knows Spellcrafting would be an extreme selling point for most of the player base. Casual players make up most of the population and nothing sounds more interesting than being able to create your own abilities in an MMO. Chapters are a way to re-release the game and pull in new players and reinforcing the "play as you want" motto with spell-crafting is 1 hell of a way to do that.

TLDR: Overall combat balance isn't done, sucks that it takes so much time, but I support the new dev team and their vision, feels like good changes are on the horizon and I applaud mixing up the combat since things have become incredibly stale and stagnant. Class abilities should still feel stronger than universally equivalent abilities, but they know this given the fact that they plan on reworking Cruel Flurry which just made every Stam dps close to the same.

You can't please everyone, but they're making meaningful changes and I can appreciate that. The forums are mostly a vocal minority to begin with, passionate, but not representative of the entire player base.

Agreed. They are doing the best they can now with the situation they inherited. We want them to provide balance and fix broken skills but then folks complain when they try. I have long suspected that the reason they don't fix some key issues (lag, etc) is because they cant do it easily, there is code added on top of code added on top of code that they need to fundamentally re-do in order to better optimize the game. The same goes for balance, there were so many different skills that worked in different ways that they had to streamline them and make them more comparable across classes if they ever wanted to make balance easier.

I do not however agree with spellcrafting. It sounds like the most broken thing ever added to a MMORPG. I agree it is appealing in theory but no matter how they design it and balance it, people are going to find broken things that then propagate across the player base as the new meta. It happens all the time with builds and I see no reason it wouldn't happen with spellcrafting, which really defeats the whole purpose of building your own special abilities.

Also, any time taken away from fixing the current game IMO is bad. I understand there need to be new dungeons and new lands, but please no new systems until the old ones are fixed, or at least optimized as much as possible if they cant be totally fixed.

Red_Feather · July 2019

In PvE people will swap to their entropy + soul trap builds when they enter a room with a single enemy target that takes 5 minutes to kill. The rest of the time they'll be handicapping themselves running such builds.

katorga · July 2019

Generic skills go hand in hand with the Nerf Everything meta.

Saril_Durzam · July 2019

Class skills should remain at least a little stronger than generic skills.

To me, general skills must show "standard" ways to heal, sustain and DPS, while class skills must fit the playstyle of each class.

Massacre_Wurm · July 2019

What's a meta?

Sure , because you are all doing competitive score runs. Cry me a river.

f047ys3v3n · July 2019

Class skills should remain at least a little stronger than generic skills.

I have talked to zero trials people excited with the changes. Most see it as destructive to the unique elements of the build they have created and as basically a nerf to significantly good and powerful abilities to be made up for by new so/so abilities that they will have to remove any utility from their bar to jam in. This, at precisely the time they expect heals to get weaker and to therefore need what little utility they currently have on their bar that they will have to drop.

Browiseth · July 2019

Generic meta FTW! Everyone casting the same skills repeatedly will be awesome.

why make this a poll when you make your bias so obvious?