!!!Warning Long Post!!! This is basically an article so if you don't like long post's please don't leave a reply like TLDR, instead just move on to someone else's post thankyou. x
So on the 26th of September the developers released a news update talking about class identity and how each class is suppose to have a specific "power fantasy" and that they want to refine each classes tool kit to better portray that "power fastasy". While I am all for this process of giving each class more individuality I feel like there is quite a few elephants in the room, some sore thumbs so to speak that to me stick out and they haven't particularly addressed in there recent renditions of skills. My reason for making this post is not to complain but instead start an interesting dialogue with the rest of the community and also share a few idea's and general opinions I have about the current "class identities" and how they could potentially be better defined or otherwise changed. Bare in mind that all of the thing's I will be talking about here today while yes they will have an effect of play style and class synergy they are mainly an ascetic change focusing on animation form, element and colouring.
Lets Start with Dragon Knight I am sure for some this should be a good topic especially with the recent change to Stone Fist which has come to be known as throwing poop rather then its intended "stone" nature. So when it comes to dragon knight's to me there "class identity" is a little muddled, despite there name sake allot of there skills reflect a theme of fire, with lava weaponry and whips, fiery spikes coming out of there back and orbs of fire that follow them about like a certain little fairy in another beloved rpg series. However despite this very prominent fire theme the class seems to dip its proverbial toe into both poison and stone with only 3 skills in each of these. Now I have 2 suggestions for this strange class identity crisis, the first and more controversial suggestion would be to remove the poison theme to some of the stamina morph's of Dragon Knight's tool kit, the skills that would normally have done poison damage could then be shifted to instead dealing pure physical damage gaining a small damage boost to make up for the inability to apply the poisoned status effect. The visual effects of the poison skills could instead be replaced with a theme aimed to reflect molten rock or volcanic ash. by then slightly tweaking the visuals of the current stone based skills to better define them as "Molten" rock and not just regular stone the character could have a more unified "fiery" visual ascetic making skills like spiked armor and noxious breath look so juxtaposed from each other. The second and I think will be more liked option would be to make the theme of a Dragon Knight its name sake "Dragon", with magicka representing a fire dragon and stamina a poison dragon. Certain stamina skills could be changed in colour and general ascetic to better represent this poison draconic nature with skills like Take Flight being changed to poison damage and having large poison looking dragon wings as the user hurls toward there enemy, or Stone Giant being changed to some sort of poison orb or spikes, Spiked Armor could be changed so the base morph sends out fire spikes and each morph has a unique change, the magicka morph getting the damage shield and maybe the stamina morph getting some other useful tertiary effect with a more poison esc theme and colouring too it. When it comes to the earthen heart skill line in this case, I would suggest it be renamed Molten Heart and the skills made more pronounced in there suggested volcanic nature, because while some earthen heart skills are obviously volcanic, other skills just look to me atleast like you picked up a few rocks and called them a weapon.
Now lets move onto Sorcerer. With the dragonhold pts stam sorc at least received some interesting and in my opinion much needed changes, with the edition of the changed to bound armaments and unstable clanfear, to me at least the running two themes of a sorc have always been daedra and weather which is fine as both look very similar in there applied colouring and do not look garish when placed together like poison and fire with the Dragon Knight in my opinion. However I do think some small editions and changes to the sorcerer need to be made to better define its place in the game. For starters when it comes to magicka sorcerers there needs to be in my opinion allot more of a benefit to using shock damage, currently fire rains supreme when it comes to dps in pve and there for you will find the large majority of magicka sorc's using twin inferno staves and even a fire based monster set such as Zaan, this ruins the sorcerer "class identity" especially with healers being handed off the duty of lighting staff for off balance and concussion and just muddles magi sorc into being another fire mage just with a little lightning flare. IF Sorcerer passives actually gave more benefits to using exclusively shock and magic damage types we might actually see more use of lightning staves amongst the sorc dps player's. When it comes to stam sorc I feel like there just needs to be a few more editions in there class based tool kit, especially when it comes to ultimates sorcerer is lacking any semblance of a stam based skill. my suggestion to this would be too change 1 morph of Storm Atronach and 1 morph of Overload, the atronach would not even need to be changed in its appearance as there is already a stam focused set that is storm atronarch focused IE Storm Fist, the damage that the ultimate does simple would be changed to physical making it scale with stam CP distribution. The Overload skill on the other hand could have it's ascetics changed to blasts of wind from your hands and maybe wind around the users arms, if you really wanted to get super fancy with your animations an idea I think would look asceticly pleasing would be for the wind version to be kicks utilising the users legs instead of hands, with the player performing round house kicks or such creating blasts of wind, however I am not sure how possible or viable this is with the game models and may look odd if done incorrectly when weaved which partially animation cancels the attack. Other then this a few more class based skills that can be utilized by stam sorc's would be nice such as ether making mages fury scale with your highest offensive stat or otherwise an entire stam version so that stam sorc's have a class based execute option much like Nightblades.
Moving along, these next few things cover a couple of classes and are less visual effect issues but rather more in my opinion strange design choices when it comes to elemental distribution. Lets start with Necromancer's, these guys are a mess, like a real mess, its almost like ZoS couldn't figure out what element to give them since they already passed ice off to warden in the morrowind dlc, so instead Necromancer's are just lackadaisical thrown together like a complete disaster. Necromancer's while visually have a good solid class identity with very pleasing animation work and colouring, there mag abilities being a blue and black and stam being green with a dash of aubergine, however under the hood there an elemental nightmare, they have access to Magic, Frost, Shock, Flame, Disease, Poison AND Physical....... hell why not bleed to while we are at it ZoS? Might as well tick every box right *sigh* anyway you see my point, personally IF I was to assign an element to stam necro I would say they should be given disease and swap Nightblade to bleed damage to better fit there red ascetic but that's my opinion, when it comes to magi Necro I am not sure, maybe just raw magic damage as necromancy kinda IS there element so to speak, you don't see soul trap doing some form of elemental damage and that's necromancy. So since I touched on it stam nightblade, give them bleed damage, as it stands you have them half split between disease and physical and bleed would fit there theme better as the sudo sneaky vampire assassin class of eso, while we are at it can we have bleed damage actually just called that? I feel like allot of newer player's I speak to have a hard time understanding the difference between bleed and physical when you constantly put these two damage types side by side within the same skill. further more I have a small suggestion to make which is to add a bleed "status effect" so to speak, since you took away bleeds ability to ignore enemy resistances. My idea is that the status effect would be called "blood loss" and would act differently to other status effects, for starters instead of dealing it's damage over a period of time like poisoned and burning etc it would do all of its damage at once like a small burst of damage equal to roughly half the damage from burning after which applying an effect like main or similar to a weakening enchant for a brief period. The "blood loss" status effect unlike other status effect's would be applied after dealing a set amount of bleed damage attacks or dot ticks to a target with a small cool down per player meaning back to back procing of it would require more then 1 player, I think its an interesting concept, but hey *** what do I know.
Now to move onto the final two classes on our roster warden and Templar. Lets talk warden so this is in my opinion another case of clashing class identity and misplacement of "elemental" effect's, for starters the very class itself poses a clash of identity with both natures embrace and animal companion tree's both representing nature, yet winter's embrace in stark contrast representing the absence of nature. But ok, lets say we accept ice as part of the classes other very summer/spring feel and just say, well winter is part of the natural cycle, not to mention completely changing and scrapping an entire skill tree would be far far far out the question. The Warden primarily deals frost and physical damage yet strangely has 2 magic damage skills and a single poison skill. Lets start with the magicka side of warden, once again they suffer from the same elemental attrition that sorcerer suffered from, where as fire is king of the hill so there becomes little to no point in having a damage dealer focus in on frost damage, you might as well have 2 inferno staves and just take winters revenge, just because its another field you can stack with, I know that warden already has a passive to increase frost damage but this is no where near enough to make it the go to for player's and while the immobilization and slow might be very effective in PvP it suffers in the PvE dps space where crowd control is more considered the job of a tank, and on top of it all there is also the lack of a competitive level frost monster helm coupled with the frost status effect being maim which once again further pushes it out of dps contention. Now onto the other magic skills for Warden, while there colouring at least matches a little the ice skills of warden and I can semi accept them not dealing ice damage due to them being animals, Deep Fissure actually farts out blue flames which super clashes with the frost effects of Wardens Winter's Revenge tree, no other of the magic animal skills have blue flames, I understand there shalks which are fire beetles, but there somehow special turquoise shalks with blue flames that deal magic damage? I dunno, may not bug you but it bugs me pun intended. Only really have a few thing's to say about stam warden, A. please make living vines ether have a stam morph or scale of highest offensive stat, you nerfed stam healers enough as it is in scalebreaker, throw us a bone, B. Why does subterranean assault do poison damage and all other warden stam skills deal physical damage... common ZoS, consistency, ether make Wardens the poison class or let DK's have it pretty please, I am sure you could add a shockwave effect to the shalks in the skill instead of them pooping out DK's noxious breath skill, C. Can we do away with the glowing eyes and tattoo's on the bears please? cant you instead give us bear armor or something instead? anything less immersion breaking and silly looking thanks.
Last but not least lets talk about Templar. Templar is in a bit of a weird place in my opinion, there power is obviously the sun, and this is visually represented very well from the colour of there skills to the animation's used, there very luminous, holy looking with even some of there skills coming from the sky. However this is not represented very well in ether there elemental assignment or tertiary effects. For starters most of Templars magicka skills are straight up default magic damage, with only 1 of there skills being fire damage IE Sun Fire, despite the fact that many skills have a very "Sun Fire" esc theme and name such as explosive charge, Blazing Spear, Blazing Shield (btw great use of the word blazing twice in the same skill tree there zos), Solar Barrage and the list go's on. Now I can understand that they didn't want to make all of Templars skills do fire damage because that's Dragon Knight's thing right? Well if that is the case I feel we need a better way to portray that Templars are indeed using sunlight and not just flashy gold looking magic. My suggestion might be a little controversial however I personally think it may in fact have a very interesting effect on group composition for certain content. My idea is to give all templar skills a bonus amount of damage vs undead and daedra, much like the bonus given to the fighters guild skill's, this means while in PvE Templar tanks and dps's are currently unpopular usually being relegated to the default healer class, it may in fact be worth while taking a few along IF a vet dungeon or vet trial has allot of undead or daedra within it. You could potentially even make it so instead of having any skills deal fire damage that all Templar skills have a chance to cause the burning status effect on undead and daedra enemies, with these effects even possibly being applied to vampire or werewolf players. Now I am not saying this "will" be a game changer for Templars but I am just saying it is an interesting concept that I feel would help toward the better definition of Templars "sun magic".
Ok well anyway I could go on for days about this all and there is a few idea's and opinions I had that I didn't mention here today however I thought I would leave more for another time. So if you made it this far, I do thank you very much for reading, bellow is a link to the dev post if you are interested in giving it a read and I wish you all a good day. x
https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-gb/news/post/57025