MartiniDaniels wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »LiquidPony wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.
No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.
I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.
Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.
Emma_Overload wrote: »MartiniDaniels wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »LiquidPony wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.
No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.
I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.
Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.
What do you mean "nobody objected"? People have been complaining about useless skills and morphs since the game launched, just like they've been complaining about all the useless gear that needs to be re-worked. "Reverting them to previous state" would be the most healthy move for who exactly? You? Not for me.
Just because the forums were full of crying about the buffed DOTs for a few weeks doesn't mean that everyone feels that way about them. Plenty of people are fine with the DOTs, even though I think they could be toned down a little without harm to anybody. A 2X spammable multiplier would be fine.
LiquidPony wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »MartiniDaniels wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »LiquidPony wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.
No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.
I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.
Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.
What do you mean "nobody objected"? People have been complaining about useless skills and morphs since the game launched, just like they've been complaining about all the useless gear that needs to be re-worked. "Reverting them to previous state" would be the most healthy move for who exactly? You? Not for me.
Just because the forums were full of crying about the buffed DOTs for a few weeks doesn't mean that everyone feels that way about them. Plenty of people are fine with the DOTs, even though I think they could be toned down a little without harm to anybody. A 2X spammable multiplier would be fine.
If DoTs are significantly more powerful than spammables (as they should be), and suddenly you've got 6-8+ DoTs that all do the same amount of damage, what's obviously going to happen? Everyone's going to run nothing but DoTs.
LiquidPony wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »MartiniDaniels wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »LiquidPony wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.
No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.
I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.
Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.
What do you mean "nobody objected"? People have been complaining about useless skills and morphs since the game launched, just like they've been complaining about all the useless gear that needs to be re-worked. "Reverting them to previous state" would be the most healthy move for who exactly? You? Not for me.
Just because the forums were full of crying about the buffed DOTs for a few weeks doesn't mean that everyone feels that way about them. Plenty of people are fine with the DOTs, even though I think they could be toned down a little without harm to anybody. A 2X spammable multiplier would be fine.
And what was the end result of complaining about "useless skills"?
More useless skills.
If DoTs are significantly more powerful than spammables (as they should be), and suddenly you've got 6-8+ DoTs that all do the same amount of damage, what's obviously going to happen? Everyone's going to run nothing but DoTs.
This is a real (and abundantly obvious) problem that apparently the people complaining about "useless skills", and ZOS, weren't able to foresee.
But here we are.
The game was in a much better state in Elsweyr than in Scalebreaker or on the PTS right now.
Only scrolled through the first two pages, so I apologize if it has been mentioned already. Edit: Just saw that jypcy mentioned damage per GCD already, on page two even....
@LiquidPony
You basically compare 9 Surprise Attacks versus 1 Rending Slashes which certainly paints a picture that supports your case, but because of that your analysis and conclusion "missed the mark" in my opinion.
If we just look at your Test 5 (no CP investment in DoTs):
A single cast of Surprise Attack deals on average 14672
A single cast of Rending Slashes deals 12125 (DoT) + 2x 4444 (direct) damage for a total of 21013
So a single cast of Rending Slashes deals ~43% more damage than Surprise Attacks.
Given that we have a limited amount of global cooldowns in a fight, what would you rather use, an ability that deals 21013 damage or one that deals 14672?
If we assume a fight length of 60 seconds and that we're only using Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes the second it falls off. That gives us 6 casts of full duration Rending Slashes, given the values above, we would deal 918366 damage versus only Surprise Attacks 880320 damage. Ignoring light attacks.
That's a difference of 38064 damage or 38064/14672 = 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks in the same amount of time.
If we would assume that Poison Injection deals the exact same amount as Rending Slashes, we would look at another 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks. If we also assume Soul Trap and Trap Beast would (assume a 10 second duration for simplicity) deal the exact amount as Rending Slahes we would look at another 5.18 extra Surprise Attacks over the 60 second period for a total of 10.36 extra Surprise Attacks.
So in 60 seconds with just those 4 DoTs we would deal the same amount of damage we would deal in about 70 seconds of pure Surprise Attack spam.
With the current state on PTS, the gap between someone who struggles to keep up DoTs and someone who has almost 100% uptime on every DoT on their bar is lower than prior to Dragonhold, but there is still a difference and someone who min/maxes their performance in PvE will definitely want to run a couple DoTs.
I'm not into PvP, but I'd defnitely want to run a couple DoTs to increase pressure while I attack with direct damage abilities in PvP as well.
(Also, your light attack damage from Test 4 to Test 5 seems off skewing results in favour of Test 4.)
So what would've been much more informative and would safe me some work on PTS later this week, would have been using a single Surprise Attack and a single cast of pretty much every DoT you would want to run on your bar. See which of those DoTs land above Surprise Attack and are by that metric better than casting a Surprise Attack in that global cooldown and which are not. Obviously the decision to cast a DoT in every given moment depends on whether or not it is already running and if it is likely it will run its entire duration. If it's already running or wouldn't run it's entire duration -> Surprise Attack.
In your original conclusion you also touched slotting another ability with a passive increase instead.
If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013.
You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.
DoTs also stick to a target, so in situations where the boss doesn't disappear and cleanses DoTs, but you e.g. have to swap targets the DoT would still deal damage while you're not in a situations to use Surprise Attack on it at all.
So in conclusion and in my personal opinion. I think 1.5x is a decent place for DoTs. The bigger issue is that not all DoTs hit that mark as far as I could tell from limited testing so far, e.g. Soul Splitting Trap's total damage per cast was less than a spammable.
I strongly disagree with the notion that DoTs "need to be significantly stronger". You also mentioned opportunity cost, but in my opinion the biggest resource in ESO is global cooldowns because stamina/magicka sustain is pretty much no issue at all. If it would be you would still want to look at total damage per cast vs cost of a cast to get damage per resource. Which would help you to cut out abilities that don't perform well given those constraints.
(Sorry if this post is quite all over the place, only had time to write a bit here and there and not in one session.)
If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013
LiquidPony wrote: »Only scrolled through the first two pages, so I apologize if it has been mentioned already. Edit: Just saw that jypcy mentioned damage per GCD already, on page two even....
@LiquidPony
You basically compare 9 Surprise Attacks versus 1 Rending Slashes which certainly paints a picture that supports your case, but because of that your analysis and conclusion "missed the mark" in my opinion.
If we just look at your Test 5 (no CP investment in DoTs):
A single cast of Surprise Attack deals on average 14672
A single cast of Rending Slashes deals 12125 (DoT) + 2x 4444 (direct) damage for a total of 21013
So a single cast of Rending Slashes deals ~43% more damage than Surprise Attacks.
Given that we have a limited amount of global cooldowns in a fight, what would you rather use, an ability that deals 21013 damage or one that deals 14672?
If we assume a fight length of 60 seconds and that we're only using Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes the second it falls off. That gives us 6 casts of full duration Rending Slashes, given the values above, we would deal 918366 damage versus only Surprise Attacks 880320 damage. Ignoring light attacks.
That's a difference of 38064 damage or 38064/14672 = 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks in the same amount of time.
If we would assume that Poison Injection deals the exact same amount as Rending Slashes, we would look at another 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks. If we also assume Soul Trap and Trap Beast would (assume a 10 second duration for simplicity) deal the exact amount as Rending Slahes we would look at another 5.18 extra Surprise Attacks over the 60 second period for a total of 10.36 extra Surprise Attacks.
So in 60 seconds with just those 4 DoTs we would deal the same amount of damage we would deal in about 70 seconds of pure Surprise Attack spam.
With the current state on PTS, the gap between someone who struggles to keep up DoTs and someone who has almost 100% uptime on every DoT on their bar is lower than prior to Dragonhold, but there is still a difference and someone who min/maxes their performance in PvE will definitely want to run a couple DoTs.
I'm not into PvP, but I'd defnitely want to run a couple DoTs to increase pressure while I attack with direct damage abilities in PvP as well.
(Also, your light attack damage from Test 4 to Test 5 seems off skewing results in favour of Test 4.)
So what would've been much more informative and would safe me some work on PTS later this week, would have been using a single Surprise Attack and a single cast of pretty much every DoT you would want to run on your bar. See which of those DoTs land above Surprise Attack and are by that metric better than casting a Surprise Attack in that global cooldown and which are not. Obviously the decision to cast a DoT in every given moment depends on whether or not it is already running and if it is likely it will run its entire duration. If it's already running or wouldn't run it's entire duration -> Surprise Attack.
In your original conclusion you also touched slotting another ability with a passive increase instead.
If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013.
You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.
DoTs also stick to a target, so in situations where the boss doesn't disappear and cleanses DoTs, but you e.g. have to swap targets the DoT would still deal damage while you're not in a situations to use Surprise Attack on it at all.
So in conclusion and in my personal opinion. I think 1.5x is a decent place for DoTs. The bigger issue is that not all DoTs hit that mark as far as I could tell from limited testing so far, e.g. Soul Splitting Trap's total damage per cast was less than a spammable.
I strongly disagree with the notion that DoTs "need to be significantly stronger". You also mentioned opportunity cost, but in my opinion the biggest resource in ESO is global cooldowns because stamina/magicka sustain is pretty much no issue at all. If it would be you would still want to look at total damage per cast vs cost of a cast to get damage per resource. Which would help you to cut out abilities that don't perform well given those constraints.
(Sorry if this post is quite all over the place, only had time to write a bit here and there and not in one session.)
@muh
I think you're making the same mistake ZOS apparently made. You're looking at the damage of a DoT over its duration in a vacuum compared to the damage of casting a spammable during that GCD. This doesn't actually consider all of the variables.
You're brushing aside opportunity cost as if it doesn't matter, but it does.
You say:If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013
... but that encapsulates about 1% of the point. You're not only applying that passive damage increase to the single cast of the spammable. You have to apply that passive damage increase to all damage.
So let's say you've got a DPS setup and you're doing 80k DPS on a 21m dummy with Rending Slashes included, and Rending Slashes is doing 5k DPS (which is generous at this point but we'll roll with it because it's a nice round number).
Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).
So we remove Rending Slashes, and assuming we literally just do nothing in the GCD where it was being used, we've still got +2,250 DPS just from the 3% passive DPS increase (0.03 * 75,000).
Then factor in that you're actually going to put those GCDs to use. Let's say you cast Rending Slashes 20 times in the 80k parse, and you replace 17 of those with Surprise Attacks that hit for 33k and 3 of those with Killer's Blades that hit for 88k (and these are actual average values for those skills taken from 21m parses I've done on PTS). That's ~3k DPS (17 * 33,000 + 3 * 88,000) / (21,000,000 / 80,000).
In total, our passive DPS gain of +2260 and our active DPS gain of +3000 exceed the total DPS added by Rending Slashes.
So it's not worth using.
And this is in a pretty favorable case for Rending Slashes, because Surprise Attack has minimal additional DPS utility in a raid buffed parse. Consider alternatives like Wrecking Blow, where you'd also have to consider a 40% damage increase to ~15 additional Light Attacks, or Cutting Dive where you've got the stacking bleed DoT to factor, or Biting Jabs and its Burning Light procs.
Beyond that, it is IMO utterly ridiculous that we're at the point where we literally have to quibble about whether maybe incorporating standard DoTs like Rending Slashes, Carve, and Poison Injection in a build is even worth doing at all. It shouldn't even be a question. Stacking up DoTs and adding complexity to a rotation should have a noticeable positive impact on DPS and it currently does not.
LiquidPony wrote: »Only scrolled through the first two pages, so I apologize if it has been mentioned already. Edit: Just saw that jypcy mentioned damage per GCD already, on page two even....
@LiquidPony
You basically compare 9 Surprise Attacks versus 1 Rending Slashes which certainly paints a picture that supports your case, but because of that your analysis and conclusion "missed the mark" in my opinion.
If we just look at your Test 5 (no CP investment in DoTs):
A single cast of Surprise Attack deals on average 14672
A single cast of Rending Slashes deals 12125 (DoT) + 2x 4444 (direct) damage for a total of 21013
So a single cast of Rending Slashes deals ~43% more damage than Surprise Attacks.
Given that we have a limited amount of global cooldowns in a fight, what would you rather use, an ability that deals 21013 damage or one that deals 14672?
If we assume a fight length of 60 seconds and that we're only using Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes the second it falls off. That gives us 6 casts of full duration Rending Slashes, given the values above, we would deal 918366 damage versus only Surprise Attacks 880320 damage. Ignoring light attacks.
That's a difference of 38064 damage or 38064/14672 = 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks in the same amount of time.
If we would assume that Poison Injection deals the exact same amount as Rending Slashes, we would look at another 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks. If we also assume Soul Trap and Trap Beast would (assume a 10 second duration for simplicity) deal the exact amount as Rending Slahes we would look at another 5.18 extra Surprise Attacks over the 60 second period for a total of 10.36 extra Surprise Attacks.
So in 60 seconds with just those 4 DoTs we would deal the same amount of damage we would deal in about 70 seconds of pure Surprise Attack spam.
With the current state on PTS, the gap between someone who struggles to keep up DoTs and someone who has almost 100% uptime on every DoT on their bar is lower than prior to Dragonhold, but there is still a difference and someone who min/maxes their performance in PvE will definitely want to run a couple DoTs.
I'm not into PvP, but I'd defnitely want to run a couple DoTs to increase pressure while I attack with direct damage abilities in PvP as well.
(Also, your light attack damage from Test 4 to Test 5 seems off skewing results in favour of Test 4.)
So what would've been much more informative and would safe me some work on PTS later this week, would have been using a single Surprise Attack and a single cast of pretty much every DoT you would want to run on your bar. See which of those DoTs land above Surprise Attack and are by that metric better than casting a Surprise Attack in that global cooldown and which are not. Obviously the decision to cast a DoT in every given moment depends on whether or not it is already running and if it is likely it will run its entire duration. If it's already running or wouldn't run it's entire duration -> Surprise Attack.
In your original conclusion you also touched slotting another ability with a passive increase instead.
If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013.
You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.
DoTs also stick to a target, so in situations where the boss doesn't disappear and cleanses DoTs, but you e.g. have to swap targets the DoT would still deal damage while you're not in a situations to use Surprise Attack on it at all.
So in conclusion and in my personal opinion. I think 1.5x is a decent place for DoTs. The bigger issue is that not all DoTs hit that mark as far as I could tell from limited testing so far, e.g. Soul Splitting Trap's total damage per cast was less than a spammable.
I strongly disagree with the notion that DoTs "need to be significantly stronger". You also mentioned opportunity cost, but in my opinion the biggest resource in ESO is global cooldowns because stamina/magicka sustain is pretty much no issue at all. If it would be you would still want to look at total damage per cast vs cost of a cast to get damage per resource. Which would help you to cut out abilities that don't perform well given those constraints.
(Sorry if this post is quite all over the place, only had time to write a bit here and there and not in one session.)
@muh
I think you're making the same mistake ZOS apparently made. You're looking at the damage of a DoT over its duration in a vacuum compared to the damage of casting a spammable during that GCD. This doesn't actually consider all of the variables.
You're brushing aside opportunity cost as if it doesn't matter, but it does.
You say:If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013
... but that encapsulates about 1% of the point. You're not only applying that passive damage increase to the single cast of the spammable. You have to apply that passive damage increase to all damage.
So let's say you've got a DPS setup and you're doing 80k DPS on a 21m dummy with Rending Slashes included, and Rending Slashes is doing 5k DPS (which is generous at this point but we'll roll with it because it's a nice round number).
Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).
So we remove Rending Slashes, and assuming we literally just do nothing in the GCD where it was being used, we've still got +2,250 DPS just from the 3% passive DPS increase (0.03 * 75,000).
Then factor in that you're actually going to put those GCDs to use. Let's say you cast Rending Slashes 20 times in the 80k parse, and you replace 17 of those with Surprise Attacks that hit for 33k and 3 of those with Killer's Blades that hit for 88k (and these are actual average values for those skills taken from 21m parses I've done on PTS). That's ~3k DPS (17 * 33,000 + 3 * 88,000) / (21,000,000 / 80,000).
In total, our passive DPS gain of +2260 and our active DPS gain of +3000 exceed the total DPS added by Rending Slashes.
So it's not worth using.
And this is in a pretty favorable case for Rending Slashes, because Surprise Attack has minimal additional DPS utility in a raid buffed parse. Consider alternatives like Wrecking Blow, where you'd also have to consider a 40% damage increase to ~15 additional Light Attacks, or Cutting Dive where you've got the stacking bleed DoT to factor, or Biting Jabs and its Burning Light procs.
Beyond that, it is IMO utterly ridiculous that we're at the point where we literally have to quibble about whether maybe incorporating standard DoTs like Rending Slashes, Carve, and Poison Injection in a build is even worth doing at all. It shouldn't even be a question. Stacking up DoTs and adding complexity to a rotation should have a noticeable positive impact on DPS and it currently does not.
You do know that a Fighter's Guild ability gives 3% increased weapon damage, which is not a 3% damage increase, right?
It's more like a 1.8% increase. At which point you would deal less damage without Rending Slashes with the values given in your example.
Yes, I can agree that it is indeed a fairly small difference, quite possibly too small. Still I wouldn't want to see them go much higher than 1.75x, for a 30% nerf compared to current live. It should be rewarding to opt into DoTs, but there is no reason that the difference between a DoT rotation and spammable rotation has to be 10k dps.
You, for the most part, seem to be focused on situations where you have perfect uptime on an enemy and never have to disengage to deal with mechanics. For example, running tombs on Lokkestiiz. Spammables won't deal any damage while you're frozen compared to more DoTs that continue to tick.
If all you care about is the portion of the PvE community that have Godslayer potential or have completed Godslayer, sure they're able to skip quite a few more mechanics and have higher uptime on the boss itself. Most other people however won't have that luxury and to stay with Lokkestiiz, might even opt to kill the Frost Atronachs that spawn during ground phase before pushing Lokkestiiz into flight phase.
There are situations where either setup can perform better, but if both are about equal with a little edge towards DoTs, I don't think that's a bad situation at all.
And currently it would actually be a decision to use one setup over the other, because both perform about equal. If it gets changed to heavily favour DoTs again that decision would once again be made for you.
LiquidPony wrote: »Only scrolled through the first two pages, so I apologize if it has been mentioned already. Edit: Just saw that jypcy mentioned damage per GCD already, on page two even....
@LiquidPony
You basically compare 9 Surprise Attacks versus 1 Rending Slashes which certainly paints a picture that supports your case, but because of that your analysis and conclusion "missed the mark" in my opinion.
If we just look at your Test 5 (no CP investment in DoTs):
A single cast of Surprise Attack deals on average 14672
A single cast of Rending Slashes deals 12125 (DoT) + 2x 4444 (direct) damage for a total of 21013
So a single cast of Rending Slashes deals ~43% more damage than Surprise Attacks.
Given that we have a limited amount of global cooldowns in a fight, what would you rather use, an ability that deals 21013 damage or one that deals 14672?
If we assume a fight length of 60 seconds and that we're only using Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes the second it falls off. That gives us 6 casts of full duration Rending Slashes, given the values above, we would deal 918366 damage versus only Surprise Attacks 880320 damage. Ignoring light attacks.
That's a difference of 38064 damage or 38064/14672 = 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks in the same amount of time.
If we would assume that Poison Injection deals the exact same amount as Rending Slashes, we would look at another 2.59 extra Surprise Attacks. If we also assume Soul Trap and Trap Beast would (assume a 10 second duration for simplicity) deal the exact amount as Rending Slahes we would look at another 5.18 extra Surprise Attacks over the 60 second period for a total of 10.36 extra Surprise Attacks.
So in 60 seconds with just those 4 DoTs we would deal the same amount of damage we would deal in about 70 seconds of pure Surprise Attack spam.
With the current state on PTS, the gap between someone who struggles to keep up DoTs and someone who has almost 100% uptime on every DoT on their bar is lower than prior to Dragonhold, but there is still a difference and someone who min/maxes their performance in PvE will definitely want to run a couple DoTs.
I'm not into PvP, but I'd defnitely want to run a couple DoTs to increase pressure while I attack with direct damage abilities in PvP as well.
(Also, your light attack damage from Test 4 to Test 5 seems off skewing results in favour of Test 4.)
So what would've been much more informative and would safe me some work on PTS later this week, would have been using a single Surprise Attack and a single cast of pretty much every DoT you would want to run on your bar. See which of those DoTs land above Surprise Attack and are by that metric better than casting a Surprise Attack in that global cooldown and which are not. Obviously the decision to cast a DoT in every given moment depends on whether or not it is already running and if it is likely it will run its entire duration. If it's already running or wouldn't run it's entire duration -> Surprise Attack.
In your original conclusion you also touched slotting another ability with a passive increase instead.
If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013.
You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.
DoTs also stick to a target, so in situations where the boss doesn't disappear and cleanses DoTs, but you e.g. have to swap targets the DoT would still deal damage while you're not in a situations to use Surprise Attack on it at all.
So in conclusion and in my personal opinion. I think 1.5x is a decent place for DoTs. The bigger issue is that not all DoTs hit that mark as far as I could tell from limited testing so far, e.g. Soul Splitting Trap's total damage per cast was less than a spammable.
I strongly disagree with the notion that DoTs "need to be significantly stronger". You also mentioned opportunity cost, but in my opinion the biggest resource in ESO is global cooldowns because stamina/magicka sustain is pretty much no issue at all. If it would be you would still want to look at total damage per cast vs cost of a cast to get damage per resource. Which would help you to cut out abilities that don't perform well given those constraints.
(Sorry if this post is quite all over the place, only had time to write a bit here and there and not in one session.)
@muh
I think you're making the same mistake ZOS apparently made. You're looking at the damage of a DoT over its duration in a vacuum compared to the damage of casting a spammable during that GCD. This doesn't actually consider all of the variables.
You're brushing aside opportunity cost as if it doesn't matter, but it does.
You say:If we assume the question would be Rending Slashes or a 3% increase from a Fighters Guild ability (let's assume it's a flat 3% damage increase for simplicity), that would bring up Surprise Attack to ~15112, which is still quite a bit lower than 21013
... but that encapsulates about 1% of the point. You're not only applying that passive damage increase to the single cast of the spammable. You have to apply that passive damage increase to all damage.
So let's say you've got a DPS setup and you're doing 80k DPS on a 21m dummy with Rending Slashes included, and Rending Slashes is doing 5k DPS (which is generous at this point but we'll roll with it because it's a nice round number).
Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).
So we remove Rending Slashes, and assuming we literally just do nothing in the GCD where it was being used, we've still got +2,250 DPS just from the 3% passive DPS increase (0.03 * 75,000).
Then factor in that you're actually going to put those GCDs to use. Let's say you cast Rending Slashes 20 times in the 80k parse, and you replace 17 of those with Surprise Attacks that hit for 33k and 3 of those with Killer's Blades that hit for 88k (and these are actual average values for those skills taken from 21m parses I've done on PTS). That's ~3k DPS (17 * 33,000 + 3 * 88,000) / (21,000,000 / 80,000).
In total, our passive DPS gain of +2260 and our active DPS gain of +3000 exceed the total DPS added by Rending Slashes.
So it's not worth using.
And this is in a pretty favorable case for Rending Slashes, because Surprise Attack has minimal additional DPS utility in a raid buffed parse. Consider alternatives like Wrecking Blow, where you'd also have to consider a 40% damage increase to ~15 additional Light Attacks, or Cutting Dive where you've got the stacking bleed DoT to factor, or Biting Jabs and its Burning Light procs.
Beyond that, it is IMO utterly ridiculous that we're at the point where we literally have to quibble about whether maybe incorporating standard DoTs like Rending Slashes, Carve, and Poison Injection in a build is even worth doing at all. It shouldn't even be a question. Stacking up DoTs and adding complexity to a rotation should have a noticeable positive impact on DPS and it currently does not.
You do know that a Fighter's Guild ability gives 3% increased weapon damage, which is not a 3% damage increase, right?
It's more like a 1.8% increase. At which point you would deal less damage without Rending Slashes with the values given in your example.
Yes, I can agree that it is indeed a fairly small difference, quite possibly too small. Still I wouldn't want to see them go much higher than 1.75x, for a 30% nerf compared to current live. It should be rewarding to opt into DoTs, but there is no reason that the difference between a DoT rotation and spammable rotation has to be 10k dps.
You, for the most part, seem to be focused on situations where you have perfect uptime on an enemy and never have to disengage to deal with mechanics. For example, running tombs on Lokkestiiz. Spammables won't deal any damage while you're frozen compared to more DoTs that continue to tick.
If all you care about is the portion of the PvE community that have Godslayer potential or have completed Godslayer, sure they're able to skip quite a few more mechanics and have higher uptime on the boss itself. Most other people however won't have that luxury and to stay with Lokkestiiz, might even opt to kill the Frost Atronachs that spawn during ground phase before pushing Lokkestiiz into flight phase.
There are situations where either setup can perform better, but if both are about equal with a little edge towards DoTs, I don't think that's a bad situation at all.
And currently it would actually be a decision to use one setup over the other, because both perform about equal. If it gets changed to heavily favour DoTs again that decision would once again be made for you.
Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).
WrathOfInnos wrote: »Also, on the note of Sunspire dragons, every time they fly away you lose the remaining damage of every DoT applied.
LiquidPony wrote: »... but you'll have an equal number of times where Lokke is going to fly off and your DoTs are going to cease ticking midway through their duration. In those cases, you're going to skip your DoT casts because you're better off just hitting a spammable for the last ~6 seconds or so before he takes off, so you're not going to get near 100% practical uptime on DoTs anyway.
You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.
WrathOfInnos wrote: »DoT rotations are more affected by mechanics than spammable rotations. If you are running 10 different 10s DoTs and spend 5s in one of Lokke’s Ice Cages you are going to lose 5s uptime on every one of those DoTs. If you are using a spammable rotation with only 2-3 DoTs then it’s easy to time your rotation so that your DoTs never fall off and you only miss out on 5 spammable casts (less impactful).
Also, on the note of Sunspire dragons, every time they fly away you lose the remaining damage of every DoT applied. Every time the dragon lands again, DoT rotations take several seconds to ramp up to their maximum damage again. Spammable rotations lose less then the enemy becomes invulnerable, and are back up to their maximum DPS almost instantly when it returns.
I already wrote that I agree that the margin might be too small, sorry I distracted you with my obviously marked jab at your argument.LiquidPony wrote: »Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).
But I have to disagree with the general idea.
If we're at the point where ground DoT + Minor Force + spammable gets you to 95%+ of the DPS ceiling, the game has been dumbed down to a parody of itself.
Which is the issue I was referring to going into this discussion.LiquidPony wrote: »And this is just the case for Rending Slashes and PI, which are *strong* comparatively. Stuff like Consuming Trap and Growing Swarm are laughably weak (the DoTs are the same strength but they lack the DD component).
WrathOfInnos wrote: »Also, on the note of Sunspire dragons, every time they fly away you lose the remaining damage of every DoT applied.LiquidPony wrote: »... but you'll have an equal number of times where Lokke is going to fly off and your DoTs are going to cease ticking midway through their duration. In those cases, you're going to skip your DoT casts because you're better off just hitting a spammable for the last ~6 seconds or so before he takes off, so you're not going to get near 100% practical uptime on DoTs anyway.
Yes?You also mentioned that there are fights where DoTs just stop working, which means you have to pay attention to when the phase transition happens and stop refreshing DoTs appropriately.WrathOfInnos wrote: »DoT rotations are more affected by mechanics than spammable rotations. If you are running 10 different 10s DoTs and spend 5s in one of Lokke’s Ice Cages you are going to lose 5s uptime on every one of those DoTs. If you are using a spammable rotation with only 2-3 DoTs then it’s easy to time your rotation so that your DoTs never fall off and you only miss out on 5 spammable casts (less impactful).
Also, on the note of Sunspire dragons, every time they fly away you lose the remaining damage of every DoT applied. Every time the dragon lands again, DoT rotations take several seconds to ramp up to their maximum damage again. Spammable rotations lose less then the enemy becomes invulnerable, and are back up to their maximum DPS almost instantly when it returns.
I never said either extreme is good (or bad for that matter). I've not been talking about 10 DoT rotations anywhere.
From what LiquidPony communicated so far pretty much no DoT is worth running right now. They basically called Rending Slashes and PI trash, so they'd not run those. I think it would be fair to assume that their setup wouldn't involve much more than Barbed Trap and Endless Hail, since ... PI is hot garbage and that excludes the use of Master's Bow obviously.
When I was talking about a DoT rotation I was primarily talking about a setup similar to what you'd run on live right now and even with 3-5 DoTs you should be able to keep almost 100% uptime during tombs.
And yes, DoT rotations have a ramp up time, but also a higher sustained DPS after DoTs are applied, and I already mentioned that DoTs should have a slight edge over spammable focused rotations, just not as huge a gap as it is on live right now.I already wrote that I agree that the margin might be too small, sorry I distracted you with my obviously marked jab at your argument.LiquidPony wrote: »Now let's say we're going to remove Rending Slashes and make some modifications that result in a 3% damage increase (slotting a Fighters Guild ability and moving some CP around).
But I have to disagree with the general idea.
If we're at the point where ground DoT + Minor Force + spammable gets you to 95%+ of the DPS ceiling, the game has been dumbed down to a parody of itself.
Edit: Just to increase the level here.
To me it doesn't really matter much if I press 123451234 and call it my rotation or if I press 123111111. ESO compared to almost every other games has only very limited rotational complexity, but with weaving and weapon swaps it's more mechanically challenging and that is mostly unaffected by which abilities you use.Which is the issue I was referring to going into this discussion.LiquidPony wrote: »And this is just the case for Rending Slashes and PI, which are *strong* comparatively. Stuff like Consuming Trap and Growing Swarm are laughably weak (the DoTs are the same strength but they lack the DD component).
It seems like they looked at abilities like Rending Slashes and Poison Injection and made their total damage per cast about 1.5x a spammable, made a blanket pass on every ability with their newly chosen adjustment, 20% this time around, and called it a day.
I think the DoT component should deal 1.5x of a spammable and if it has a direct damage component to it, that's on top, not part of it. That would mean abilities like Consuming Trap and Growing Swarm actually perform at a level where they are options.
The game has been out for how long and they are still learning to measure DoT strength just before 2020 rolls?
This is actually happening?
Feel like I'm playing a beta game still.
LiquidPony wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »MartiniDaniels wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »LiquidPony wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.
No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.
I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.
Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.
What do you mean "nobody objected"? People have been complaining about useless skills and morphs since the game launched, just like they've been complaining about all the useless gear that needs to be re-worked. "Reverting them to previous state" would be the most healthy move for who exactly? You? Not for me.
Just because the forums were full of crying about the buffed DOTs for a few weeks doesn't mean that everyone feels that way about them. Plenty of people are fine with the DOTs, even though I think they could be toned down a little without harm to anybody. A 2X spammable multiplier would be fine.
And what was the end result of complaining about "useless skills"?
More useless skills.
If DoTs are significantly more powerful than spammables (as they should be), and suddenly you've got 6-8+ DoTs that all do the same amount of damage, what's obviously going to happen? Everyone's going to run nothing but DoTs.
This is a real (and abundantly obvious) problem that apparently the people complaining about "useless skills", and ZOS, weren't able to foresee.
But here we are.
The game was in a much better state in Elsweyr than in Scalebreaker or on the PTS right now.
That means, slotting skills with passive buffs instead of DoTs seem to be the intended trade-off for limiting DoT dominance.
.Nightblades on the other hand don't even have a class DoT,
LiquidPony wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »MartiniDaniels wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »LiquidPony wrote: »Emma_Overload wrote: »Nerfing dots like Soul Trap is not the answer. Just because players weren't making threads about it every day on the forums doesn't mean that we should go back to having a bunch of useless spells that nobody uses.
No one is asking for Soul Trap to be nerfed. It was already nerfed.
I'm talking about all the people asking ZOS to "revert to Elsweyr". That would be a big nerf to Entropy and Soul Trap versus what we have on the Live server or the PTS. I get the feeling these same people don't want their class dots nerfed, of course.
Everybody lived without soul trap and with utility enthropy for years and nobody objected. Reverting them to previous state will be most healthy move. Enthropy was a decent ability before.. now with this U24 nerf it is just useless PoS.
What do you mean "nobody objected"? People have been complaining about useless skills and morphs since the game launched, just like they've been complaining about all the useless gear that needs to be re-worked. "Reverting them to previous state" would be the most healthy move for who exactly? You? Not for me.
Just because the forums were full of crying about the buffed DOTs for a few weeks doesn't mean that everyone feels that way about them. Plenty of people are fine with the DOTs, even though I think they could be toned down a little without harm to anybody. A 2X spammable multiplier would be fine.
And what was the end result of complaining about "useless skills"?
More useless skills.
If DoTs are significantly more powerful than spammables (as they should be), and suddenly you've got 6-8+ DoTs that all do the same amount of damage, what's obviously going to happen? Everyone's going to run nothing but DoTs.
This is a real (and abundantly obvious) problem that apparently the people complaining about "useless skills", and ZOS, weren't able to foresee.
But here we are.
The game was in a much better state in Elsweyr than in Scalebreaker or on the PTS right now.
I'm a bit puzzled by this. Making skills so bad they are unattractive to use can't be an acceptable solution for developers or players. When having more useful skills in the game is detrimental to the gameplay, something else is fundamentally broken.
But I don't think it is, because you talk about it yourself in the OP: There's always an opportunity cost. Even if there were 100 amazing DoTs in the game, you still only have 10 skill slots, and can't cast an unlimited number due to global cooldown. Every skill is competing for a slot on your bar and in your rotation.
That means, slotting skills with passive buffs instead of DoTs seem to be the intended trade-off for limiting DoT dominance.
Admittedly I don't have the numbers (PTS is laggy as hell for me), but in theory what you laid out in the OP should allow for a choice between dedicated direct damage builds (with a CP-focus in Master-at-Arms, passive stat boosts and possibly 1-2 class DoTs on their skill bar) and dedicated DoT builds (with a CP-focus in Thaumaturge and as many DoTs as they can fit on their skill bar). Personally, that would seem like a reasonable choice to me.
What we probably won't get back to are builds that can slot all available DoTs and still rotate a spammable for all the reasons you laid out. Focusing on one or the other just seems more viable - hybrids really can't catch a break.
But if that's ZOS' intent, there are some issues I foresee without even checking the actual numbers.
1. Not all classes have DoTs with built-in passives. Specifically looking at stamina, Sorcerers don't make a huge trade-off when slotting Hurricane and Bound Armor instead of a Fighter Guild ability (2% from Expert Mage vs 3%), so they can keep using their class DoTs even in spammable rotations. Same thing for Wardens and their new stam Swarm. Nightblades on the other hand don't even have a class DoT, which means their rotations are going to be especially lackluster. DoTs without passives, like Poison Injection, Rending Slashes and Soul Trap, can't cut it without focusing on DoTs exclusively (if even), and NBs don't have anything also to use in their stead. So it's spammable or bust for them. For that reason, Surprise Attack and Rending Slashes might actually be a poor choice of comparison - ZOS doesn't intend for those skills to compete against each other. Cliff Racer / Swarm or Stonefist / Venomous Claw might yield more favorable results for (class) DoTs.
2. I have yet to see how this pans out for magicka builds. There is nothing like the Deadly Strike set or vMA daggers for them (even if those are still lackluster).
WrathOfInnos wrote: »Unfortunately this thread is still relevant in 5.2.5, now on live. It should now be obvious to everyone on PC how poorly balanced DoTs are. Any changes planned?
LiquidPony wrote: »I mean, the best parses I've seen are basically ...
Endless Hail, spam Wrecking Blow
LiquidPony wrote: »
lol right?
I mean, the best parses I've seen are basically ...
Endless Hail, spam Wrecking Blow
Endless Hail, spam Snipe
Endless Hail, spam Jabs
I honestly can't believe they went live with this. Well, I guess I can believe it, but it's pretty ridiculous.