On Class Identity

MotokoHutt · October 2019

!!!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

ealdwin · October 2019

Great points. Certainly, if ZOS is going through these class audits, the type of damage that each class deals should certainly be considered in that audit. For instance, look at Incapacitating Strike and Impale, which deal Disease Damage. It honestly would make more sense for skills in a tree called Assassination to deal Poison Damage. A decent bit of class identity could be added simply by making sure that the damage types each class did better reflected the class.

For Example (how classes could be defined):

Dragonknight:
- Magicka: Fire Damage w/ emphasis on DoTs
- Stamina: Physical Damage (molten) w/ emphasis on DoTs via Bleed Damage

Nightblade:
- Magicka: Magic Damage w/ emphasis on Single Target burst (shadowy assassin)
- Stamina: Poison Damage w/ emphasis on Single Target burst

Sorcerer:
- Magicka: Shock Damage w/ emphasis on AoE burst (like lightning)
- Stamina: Physical Damage w/ emphasis on AoE burst (like blast of wind)

Templar:
- Magicka: Magic Damage w/ emphasis on constant AoE
- Stamina: Physical Damage w/ emphasis on constant AoE

Warden:
- Magicka: Frost Damage w/ emphasis on ? (couldn't figure this one out)
- Stamina: Physical Damage w/ emphasis on ? (couldn't figure this one out)

Necromancer:
- Magicka: Magic Damage w/ emphasis on ? (couldn't figure this one out)
- Stamina: Disease Damage w/ emphasis on ? (couldn't figure this one out)

Other random ideas I had (that could be unpopular or overpowered):

1. Introduce Sun Damage for Templars. This damage would scale off of highest offensive stat (making it useful for both mag and stam). This damage could have increased damage against undead/daedra. Or, it could have a chance to apply the Blinded status effect, causing the affected target to miss X% of their attacks for 4 seconds. Or, Blinded could reduce the affected targets movement speed by 30% for 4 seconds. (sidenote: this would be interesting, and could replace all of the Templar's current snares, still giving them a method of snaring but would require them to keep dealing damage.)

2. Make Oblivion Damage a Magicka Damage type similar to Frost/Shock/Fire, and give it either Magicka NB (Shadow) or Magicka Necromancer (Grave Lord) to add more identity. Oblivion Damage could apply the Cursed status effect, decreasing the target's Health Recovery by X% for 4 seconds.

Just a few ideas. Back to the original point, class identity could certainly be better reinforced if the type of damage was better defined and utilized/buffed for each class, so that each lent into a more unique play style revolving around their respective damage type.

CambionDaemon · October 2019

I have never worked out why the Dragon Knight is DoT class, makes no sense to me, it would make more sense if the DoT class was the Nightblade.

Nightblade should have poisons and bleed alongside the current magic damage.
Necromancer could have something else alongside the current ice and disease.
Not sure what you could do with the Dragon Knight apart from just having lots of Physical damage bonuses.

Oblivion damage would go better with Sorcerer, seeing that they already have the Daedric line.

Class identity has disappeared over the last few patches and it looks like it is going to get worse. I have always thought that each class should bring ONE major buff to the group, and it is the only way to get said buff.

the1andonlyskwex · October 2019

CambionDaemon wrote: »

I have always thought that each class should bring ONE major buff to the group, and it is the only way to get said buff.

While I like the idea of each class bringing something unique to the table, I don't really like this solution. Specifically, I'm thinking about the current group minor buff passives. The specific problem is that in solo and small (pug) group content you can't rely on having the buffs that are relevant to your build unless you bring them yourself. If you extended this to major buffs, magicka characters of classes with stamina buffs would be at a significant disadvantage, and vice versa.

Sahidom · October 2019

Dragon Nights originally had a "Rosetta stone" identity, being highly resilient and deprived their power from the volcanic elements of molten fire and earth. The Draconic skill names were given cliche names that themed along the class name, and it's there were the delusion begin. Their power fantasy are ironclad elementalists and masters of attrition warfare: that, in a nutshell, is their power fantasy. Their offense was meant to be weaker than other classes because their class kit favors attrition fights. Unfortunately, the forum posters want to move the class away from this specialty.

Templars were originally considered the heavy armor users with the power fantasy centered around divine favor and retribution. Their class kit was about supplementing their outgoing damage by reflecting the opponent's damage against them e.g. blazing shield, backlash, eclipse, and a few other skills that turned an enemies offense against on them: retribution power fantasy, at it's finest moments. In parallel, their restoration tree define their divine favor that enables them to be superior healers in the game. None of that, drawing power from light and the burning sun crap. That's so belittling of the class.

Sorcerers are spell casters that wield dark magic and field destructive spells to crush their enemies. They use to, long long time ago, relied on absorbing magic to regain their magic pool - the sacrifice for wielding stronger spells than the average mage. In ESO, however, their "destructive spells" changed to being lightning elementalists with some dark magic spells detailed in both Dark Magic and Summoning trees. Here's the truth about Stamina "sorcerers," they're actually Battle Mages that should have their own power fantasy. Attempting to create this subclass into Sorcerers will fragment the class kit with incomplete power fantasies for both.

Necromancers, I'd rather not discuss this class. I believe the statement, "...Game of Necromancers," from the developers says enough about this subject.

Wardens, is a fractured class with poor design and definition.

Nightblades, here I maybe too biased in favor of Nightblades since it's my favorite class to play (and angry it's been torn apart by so many forum complaints). So, I'll let someone else discuss it.

ESO_Nightingale · October 2019

MotokoHutt wrote: »

!!!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

"The Warden primarily deals frost and physical damage yet strangely has 2 magic damage skills and a single poison skill."

warden does not primarily deal frost damage, it primarily deals magic damage with less emphasis on frost i think that's what you meant to say. if you look at it's main damage skills which are in the Animal Companions skill line. not Winter's Embrace.

"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."

Stamina Warden already has enough of Magicka Warden's skills. While i think it's okay that you want stamina healing to be better, the focus should probably be on Stamina Warden's existing healing skills such as Soothing Spores and Green Lotus(which doesn't even scale correctly right now) and Nature's Embrace(which needs several bug fixes ) which effects both Magicka and Stamina Warden. Though not to mention that Stamina Warden's defence is already considered one of the best of the classes. What warden needs right now is more options for Magicka Warden in terms of damage skills to help separate the 2 subclasses and to give Magicka Warden a frost "power fantasy" and at the same time, a skill that works with it's Scorch "play pattern" as those 2 things are what ZOS is intending.

Jabbs_Giggity · October 2019

Sahidom wrote: »

Dragon Nights originally had a "Rosetta stone" identity, being highly resilient and deprived their power from the volcanic elements of molten fire and earth. The Draconic skill names were given cliche names that themed along the class name, and it's there were the delusion begin. Their power fantasy are ironclad elementalists and masters of attrition warfare: that, in a nutshell, is their power fantasy. Their offense was meant to be weaker than other classes because their class kit favors attrition fights. Unfortunately, the forum posters want to move the class away from this specialty.

Templars were originally considered the heavy armor users with the power fantasy centered around divine favor and retribution. Their class kit was about supplementing their outgoing damage by reflecting the opponent's damage against them e.g. blazing shield, backlash, eclipse, and a few other skills that turned an enemies offense against on them: retribution power fantasy, at it's finest moments. In parallel, their restoration tree define their divine favor that enables them to be superior healers in the game. None of that, drawing power from light and the burning sun crap. That's so belittling of the class.

Sorcerers are spell casters that wield dark magic and field destructive spells to crush their enemies. They use to, long long time ago, relied on absorbing magic to regain their magic pool - the sacrifice for wielding stronger spells than the average mage. In ESO, however, their "destructive spells" changed to being lightning elementalists with some dark magic spells detailed in both Dark Magic and Summoning trees. Here's the truth about Stamina "sorcerers," they're actually Battle Mages that should have their own power fantasy. Attempting to create this subclass into Sorcerers will fragment the class kit with incomplete power fantasies for both.

Necromancers, I'd rather not discuss this class. I believe the statement, "...Game of Necromancers," from the developers says enough about this subject.

Wardens, is a fractured class with poor design and definition.

Nightblades, here I maybe too biased in favor of Nightblades since it's my favorite class to play (and angry it's been torn apart by so many forum complaints). So, I'll let someone else discuss it.

Absolutely this.

ealdwin · October 2019

Wardens are certainly in an interesting area in terms of power fantasy & class identity. They boast good damage and survivability and can fill a variety of roles, but there's little cohesion between their skill lines in terms of identity. Are they wielders of the frost, using it to harm and slow allies while defending their allies as Winter's Embrace would suggest. Or are they masters of the wild, summoning the power of beasts to deal damage to enemies as Animal Companions would suggest. Or, are they mystic druidic healers, calling forth the power the green to heal their allies?

If you consider the other class in addition to what Sahidom said, no other class feels like this. Templars in each role are some variant of a holy knight, wielders of the might of the aedra. Dragonknights in each role are some variant of an attrition warrior, channeling draconic martial tradition. Nightblades in each role are some variant of death itself, masters of the shadows and crippling opponents. Sorcerers in each role are some variant of mages, honing ancient powerful magic. Even Necromancers, being the most recent class have some identity, filling each role by defying death and channeling the power of the unholy magics. (Please correct me if I got any of these class identities wrong.)

Wardens on the other hand aren't variants of one solid identity in each role, but rather have a different identity for each role. Healers are plants, DPS are birds and exploding bugs, and Tanks are ice. (a bit of oversimplifications). The class lacks some of the cohesion across skills that other classes have.

MotokoHutt · October 2019

ealdwin wrote: »

Wardens are certainly in an interesting area in terms of power fantasy & class identity. They boast good damage and survivability and can fill a variety of roles, but there's little cohesion between their skill lines in terms of identity. Are they wielders of the frost, using it to harm and slow allies while defending their allies as Winter's Embrace would suggest. Or are they masters of the wild, summoning the power of beasts to deal damage to enemies as Animal Companions would suggest. Or, are they mystic druidic healers, calling forth the power the green to heal their allies?

If you consider the other class in addition to what Sahidom said, no other class feels like this. Templars in each role are some variant of a holy knight, wielders of the might of the aedra. Dragonknights in each role are some variant of an attrition warrior, channeling draconic martial tradition. Nightblades in each role are some variant of death itself, masters of the shadows and crippling opponents. Sorcerers in each role are some variant of mages, honing ancient powerful magic. Even Necromancers, being the most recent class have some identity, filling each role by defying death and channeling the power of the unholy magics. (Please correct me if I got any of these class identities wrong.)

Wardens on the other hand aren't variants of one solid identity in each role, but rather have a different identity for each role. Healers are plants, DPS are birds and exploding bugs, and Tanks are ice. (a bit of oversimplifications). The class lacks some of the cohesion across skills that other classes have.

See I think the animal companion and Green Balance tree's fit well together. One could theoretically connect them both to the forests and jungles, the power of nature made manifest, but the Winter's Embrace tree "personaly" always felt in contrast to that. As the quote un-quote tank skill line (despite being used by dps's in pvp and pve) I can understand they wanted a sturdy element, something harsh and sharp and sturdy to fill this roll ie ICE, plus I am sure people where at the time itching for a class with Frost focus to make ice builds, but I dont feel that itch has been scratched with the warden for the mainstream anyway but thats beside the point. My point is that if they wanted a cohesive theme and we want to take say Wardens as "wardens" of nature, then they could have made a quote un-quote tank tree by using the same elements found in both green balance and animal companion, IE bugs have hard shells and tree's have hard bark, a patch of spikey ice could easily have been instead a patch of thorns or toxic flora.

MotokoHutt · October 2019

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

"The Warden primarily deals frost and physical damage yet strangely has 2 magic damage skills and a single poison skill."

warden does not primarily deal frost damage, it primarily deals magic damage with less emphasis on frost i think that's what you meant to say. if you look at it's main damage skills which are in the Animal Companions skill line. not Winter's Embrace.

"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."

Stamina Warden already has enough of Magicka Warden's skills. While i think it's okay that you want stamina healing to be better, the focus should probably be on Stamina Warden's existing healing skills such as Soothing Spores and Green Lotus(which doesn't even scale correctly right now) and Nature's Embrace(which needs several bug fixes ) which effects both Magicka and Stamina Warden. Though not to mention that Stamina Warden's defence is already considered one of the best of the classes. What warden needs right now is more options for Magicka Warden in terms of damage skills to help separate the 2 subclasses and to give Magicka Warden a frost "power fantasy" and at the same time, a skill that works with it's Scorch "play pattern" as those 2 things are what ZOS is intending.

A. Warden does primarily deal frost damage not magic, we are talking a volume number here not a primary dps skills question, I count 5 Frost skills that deal damage to 3 magic damage skills, 4 IF one is to count the damage there pet deals as there own damage which I personally don't I consider it damage done by proxy.

B. Warden Stam healer NEEDS something, with the changes to Echoing vigor making it in any practically sense useless now, and with how small the effect radius is of circle of preservation Stam warden needs all the potential heal over times it can get, while nature's grasp was an "ok" and I do say "OK" addition as the skill has many flaws, its only single target and applies no usefull tertiary effects like Leeching vines.

C. Yes I do agree Green Balance on a whole needs a rework and Soothing Spores "extra healing when a ally is close" really doesnt cut it tbh, this forces stam healer not only to direct the heal just as magicka warden healer but also chase allies around to gain maximum effectiveness which might require them taking there eye off of other allies in the party, not to mention the fact the magicka morph giving minor intelect and endurance is far more usefull for a group scenario.

D. I know its not likely to happen but I am personally all for the frost element being removed from warden completely and give them a third nature themed tree so they have a cohesive "power fantasy" over both magicka and stamina. I would personally give the frost damage to Necromancer potentially as they already have several frost skill's, wouldnt take much to rework there other skills to ice damage could call the blue flames "cold fire" for example and hey presto you have your ice mage since NPC necro's are constantly seen using Ice anyway.

E. On that same vein of giving magicka people more options though I am at the same time all for ZoS adding more magicka based weapons IE maybe weaponry that taps into the schools of Alteration and Illusion, so magicka user's can have shadow spells, earthy spell's and even water etc.

Iskiab · October 2019

MotokoHutt wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

"The Warden primarily deals frost and physical damage yet strangely has 2 magic damage skills and a single poison skill."

warden does not primarily deal frost damage, it primarily deals magic damage with less emphasis on frost i think that's what you meant to say. if you look at it's main damage skills which are in the Animal Companions skill line. not Winter's Embrace.

"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."

Stamina Warden already has enough of Magicka Warden's skills. While i think it's okay that you want stamina healing to be better, the focus should probably be on Stamina Warden's existing healing skills such as Soothing Spores and Green Lotus(which doesn't even scale correctly right now) and Nature's Embrace(which needs several bug fixes ) which effects both Magicka and Stamina Warden. Though not to mention that Stamina Warden's defence is already considered one of the best of the classes. What warden needs right now is more options for Magicka Warden in terms of damage skills to help separate the 2 subclasses and to give Magicka Warden a frost "power fantasy" and at the same time, a skill that works with it's Scorch "play pattern" as those 2 things are what ZOS is intending.

B. Warden Stam healer NEEDS something, with the changes to Echoing vigor making it in any practically sense useless now, and with how small the effect radius is of circle of preservation Stam warden needs all the potential heal over times it can get, while nature's grasp was an "ok" and I do say "OK" addition as the skill has many flaws, its only single target and applies no usefull tertiary effects like Leeching vines.

Sounds to me like you haven’t optimized your stamwarden. Are you playing pve or pvp?

Circle of protection needs a little larger area and be targeted rather then always at your feet. Other then that they’re basicly on par with mag healers.

MotokoHutt · October 2019

Iskiab wrote: »

Sounds to me like you haven’t optimized your stamwarden. Are you playing pve or pvp?

Circle of protection needs a little larger area and be targeted rather then always at your feet. Other then that they’re basicly on par with mag healers.

PvE, if I was playing PvP I would not be using Echoing vigor and instead use resolving which IS actually good. However with my current PvE group healer that I was running on Summerset threw to Scalebreaker when the nerf hit I was using perfected Olorime, Powerful Assault with a combination of different monster sets depending on group composition and scenario.

Using duel weild and bow I use to be able to continuelly pump out enough heals to keep an entire group never dropping bellow 90% hp while also pulling 20k or so dps. Now my Echoing Vigor barely heals for the same per second as a single magicka HoT which are far more readily available.

Iskiab · October 2019

Ah okay, you went the hybrid route. Couple things I do that helps:
- DW daggers for the crit: MH Nirn, OH powered
- Symbiosis and Green Lotus have a synergy. If you light attack weave Symbiosis it’ll proc Green lotus every GCD. It also changes the DW LA to ranged so you can stay behind melee
- I love crit as a healer. Powerful assault is a no brainer, but it might be better to combine it with Leviathan or Hircine

You have more experience then me playing a stamwarden healer in pve. I approached it purely from a PvP perspective and tried pve once, that’s it.

For pve how do you apply minor magic steal? That’d be what I would be most worried about. Destro back bar seems weird to me, or do you use a resto for Siphon spirit?

jcm2606 · October 2019

ealdwin wrote: »

Necromancer:
- Magicka: Magic Damage w/ emphasis on ? (couldn't figure this one out)
- Stamina: Disease Damage w/ emphasis on ? (couldn't figure this one out)

I actually kinda like games/material that depict necromancers as masters of corruption and debuffing, so ESO's Necro could be a debuffing machine, kinda like how Warden is our buffing machine. Just stack on a slew of debuffs, maybe even have some buff corruption akin to GW2's Necro (corrupt Major Sorcery/Brutality to a new debuff that reduces weapon/spell damage for a duration, forcing the target to recast the buff).

CambionDaemon wrote: »

I have never worked out why the Dragon Knight is DoT class, makes no sense to me, it would make more sense if the DoT class was the Nightblade.

Nightblade should have poisons and bleed alongside the current magic damage.
Necromancer could have something else alongside the current ice and disease.
Not sure what you could do with the Dragon Knight apart from just having lots of Physical damage bonuses.

Oblivion damage would go better with Sorcerer, seeing that they already have the Daedric line.

Class identity has disappeared over the last few patches and it looks like it is going to get worse. I have always thought that each class should bring ONE major buff to the group, and it is the only way to get said buff.

Dragonknight is meant to be the go-to tanky/brawler class, and these sort of archetypes usually win battles through attrition, or simply out-sustaining your opponent. That is done through constant pressure via DoT stacking, and so Dragonknight is the go-to DoT class, by extension of their design.

Nightblade could also be a DoT class, as assassin's could use poisons to set up assassinations well before they take place, but since Dragonknight already acts as a DoT class, Nightblade is the go-to upfront burst class.

Iskiab · October 2019

@MotokoHutt

Sorry if this is derailing the thread, but I'm curious to pick your thoughts about this spec for pve. I haven't taken my stamwarden out for a spin in pve for a while, and talking about stamwarden PvE healing got me curious, do you think this would work and how should I tweak it?

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=186506

P.S. - with all the Templar buffs I wonder if stamplar healing would work too. It’d likely be strong as well.

Davadin · October 2019

ealdwin wrote: »

Great points. Certainly, if ZOS is going through these class audits, the type of damage that each class deals should certainly be considered in that audit. For instance, look at Incapacitating Strike and Impale, which deal Disease Damage. It honestly would make more sense for skills in a tree called Assassination to deal Poison Damage. A decent bit of class identity could be added simply by making sure that the damage types each class did better reflected the class.

For Example (how classes could be defined):

Dragonknight:
- Magicka: Fire Damage w/ emphasis on DoTs
- Stamina: Physical Damage (molten) w/ emphasis on DoTs via Bleed Damage.

This is much better than poison. Hell, i'll take Earth before poison too.

But just a little 2c: I've been a loud voice to challenge the dev deep dive on it, asking where's my fire and fury as a DK....

... but now with Molten Armaments a good option even for stamDK, and poop- Stonefist a decent spammable, i'm actually liking what they've done so far.

at least as far as DK is concerned.

again, talking about "identity" here, not so much performance or functionalities.

CambionDaemon · October 2019

@jcm2606

If the DragonKnight is supposed to be a brawler archetype then it should be the burst class, as brawlers throw everything to finish a fight quickly. That is what I meant by not understanding why the DragonKnight is the DoT class rather than the Nightblade, they are the wrong way round. But that cannot be changed now.

Anyway this is not on topic, overall I personally think that all of the classes need an overhaul to actually give them an identity, because what we have nowadays is the beginning(or middle) of them all becoming the same, and I find the idea of that extremely boring.

Ragnarock41 · October 2019

I disagree about Dk. To me DK identity is:

Magicka : fire dragon
Stamina : poison dragon.

And its as simple as that. No generic physical dot will ever look or feel as amazing as venomous claws/noxious breath. I'm not against having more physical abilities, But this ''Earth theme pepega'' is nothing but a bad meme.

Also stamsorc and stamden are already physical damage classes that are ''better, faster, stronger'' than stamDk. How do you plan to make stamDk stand out when you removed the only last interesting part about it?

MotokoHutt · October 2019

Iskiab wrote: »

Ah okay, you went the hybrid route.

For pve how do you apply minor magic steal? That’d be what I would be most worried about. Destro back bar seems weird to me, or do you use a resto for Siphon spirit?

For starters I would not really call my Warden build hybrid since it has very little magicka, it uses a light set but only 1 piece light being the Olorimes belt for maximum stats from the undaunted passive. Secondly I don't use minor magicka steal on the stam healer, the way I see it is if the team is struggling for resources a better investment would be to use a set like Symphony of Blades rather then having to reduce my builds self utility by using a resto staff instead of a bow, since using a infused bow allows for a very high up time of a 2 handed weapon damage glyph. IF I was running a trial it wouldnt be hard for the other healer to take elemental drain or siphon spirit and if I am in a dungeon I am sure 1 dps or the tank could do so.

Iskiab wrote: »

@MotokoHutt

Sorry if this is derailing the thread, but I'm curious to pick your thoughts about this spec for pve. I haven't taken my stamwarden out for a spin in pve for a while, and talking about stamwarden PvE healing got me curious, do you think this would work and how should I tweak it?

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=186506

P.S. - with all the Templar buffs I wonder if stamplar healing would work too. It’d likely be strong as well.

I looked over your build and also tested it on PTS, while yes your build could get you threw most content I honestly have a few qaulms about it.

Point 1. Your Echoing Vigor hits for 1,816 per second, which considering I could get 2k out of a single magicka hot leaves me feeling it's lack luster in comparison, however this could be boosted slightly by swapping your stam recovery glyph over to a 3rd weapon damage one which might JUST get you up to 2k this leads me to my second point.

Point 2. You have far too much stam recovery, more then you could ever need, the sheer stam recovery you have would only be needed if you where spamming soothing spores out every few seconds which is not something you should be doing, stam can be conserved with inteligent play to burst heal spam threw mechanics while also not needing this much stam recovery.

Point 3. Stam healer still suffer's with the fact Ring of Preservation is fundementally useless unless your entire team is stacking on a single location which while thats fine for SOME very specific mechanics like say Halls of Fabrications Asembly General boss, this is not going to be the case in most scenario's. This is no fault of your own, its just a flaw with the skills size and need to be placed under the caster.

Point 4. While Symbiosis is a very smart way to proc Green Lotus... it serves no other purpose and if you plan to use ring of preservation you may need to be rather close to the boss if your team is anyway, unless your running all ranged DD's within your group. While I applaud you for the inventiveness, I would also consider just taking a bow and that would give you acess to venom arrow to supply ranged interupts for your group, or Focused Aim to provide minor fracture.

Point 5. This brings me on to the case of Energy Orb and Siphon Spirit, while I dont view them as needed for a stam Healer as there are other ways you could provide synergies if your DPS needs them... whatever floats your boat, just seems a little wasteful.

Point 6. I am not actually a big fan of Sentinel of Rakugamz, we are talking personal preference here but I would go with Symphony of Blades as it has potential the largest group stats return currently in the game.

Point 7. Your missing several vital buff's that most healer's are expected to bring to the group. While this may not be an issue if your running with a group that is ok to not have those buff's, it may uneededly make challange runs more dificult due to general lower group dps, The buff's I am talking about are Minor Berserk, Minor Resolve and Major Courage. These buff's are not redily available to most build setups and in regards to Minor Berserk, Combat Prayer as far as I am aware atleast is the only group utility for that buff in the entire game.

Like I said these are all relative, as your build probably would get you threw most content, even vet dlc content GIVEN that your group is aware of how your character play's and its limitations.