Drain Essence change

MartiniDaniels · January 2020

Overall this ability is example of bad design. 3 seconds length channel for PVP, sorry what? Ability basically useless against S&B bar blockers, but works great against roll-dodge builds. So it is just brainless counter to 15% of builds vs being useless against 85% of builds. It needs complete re-work, which I guess will be made in the summer...

Lucky28 · January 2020

oh look, another great change that reminds me why not to buy DLC or pay for subs. cool ty ZoS.

SORjosh · January 2020

I've got some screenshots of death recaps that will make you LOL. There are ball groups running around spamming this ability in cyrodiil on ps4 NA right now. I've never asked for a nerf to a skill, but IMO this skill needed adjustment and I'm not upset in the least that it's catching a nerf. Just my opinion, though.

Baphomet · January 2020

On my end the stun happens at the same time as the damage. But with latency, the target might experience a difference.

However I don’t find drain anymore clunky to break than many other stuns.

Fear effects in particular are way harder to break rapidly.

It’s a mid-range channel that can be interupted, unlike dizzy or jabs, so it absolutely needs to have an initial stun to be effective!

Stop this nonsense with breaking things that are working fine.

Casterial · January 2020

The skill is a channel and yet it did it's stun and damage is front loaded, no other channel did.

This is a good healthy change for channeled abilities. A better fix would be only stun while channeling.

But I'll take it.

Casterial · January 2020

Baphomet wrote: »

On my end the stun happens at the same time as the damage. But with latency, the target might experience a difference.

However I don’t find drain anymore clunky to break than many other stuns.

Fear effects in particular are way harder to break rapidly.

It’s a mid-range channel that can be interupted, unlike dizzy or jabs, so it absolutely needs to have an initial stun to be effective!

Stop this nonsense with breaking things that are working fine.

I find Vamp Drain, Dear, and knockbacks extremely buggy.
More than likely animations getting stuck.

Vampire Drain is a meta skill right now that is mainly used to deal with Dodge rolls, but also in the same category as instant gcd stuns, which is weird for being a channel.

xylena · January 2020

StShoot wrote: »

potatoes cant kill a player, potatoes complain, zos swings the nerf bat, the stacks of high dps chars grow.

You mean like all the SnB abusers complaining they can't zerg down solo tower humpers because of BRP DW?

High damage players aren't a bad thing though, and never have been. A damage meta rewards playing to win, and punishes stalling. In the Tank Meta, all the initiative and agency belong to the player stalling, but tanky healbots still do not actually win anything. They do not kill me or beat me. They stall the fight until one side gets big enough to zerg down the other, and nobody on the ground really has much control over whose zerg shows up first, making the whole process blatantly uncompetitive, on top of how tedious it is repeatedly watching players of all skill levels block heal back to full after making obvious mistakes.

katorga · January 2020

Stibbons wrote: »

This skill is now waste of slot.

Every patch they add to the list of useless skills, oh well, that is par for the course in MMO.

My guess is that over time, all CC will be removed to make the game easier. As soon as the nerf on, the forums start in wanting nerfs on the next one. Break free being unreliable in all CC instances is the root problem.

Stibbons · January 2020

Just useless as stun. Really 3 seconds time to react to not get stunned

Seem more like magic cannot have anything nice because of the stamina meta.

tsaescishoeshiner · February 2020

In its current state, the skill is being abused in PvP for having a janky stun - breaking free from it is unreliable. This change to the stun might be a way of fixing that

UppGRAYxDD · February 2020

I’m still kinda annoyed with this change... magicka PvP players now will have “1” decent non class stun available, which requires a flame staff. I agree that the stun was aggressive, but honestly it’s no better then fear or turn evil. The dmg could have been turned down and it would have been fine...

MartiniDaniels · February 2020

UppGRAYxDD wrote: »

I’m still kinda annoyed with this change... magicka PvP players now will have “1” decent non class stun available, which requires a flame staff. I agree that the stun was aggressive, but honestly it’s no better then fear or turn evil. The dmg could have been turned down and it would have been fine...

Sometimes I think that Gilliam or somebody else from combat team mains templar and nerfs everything that irritates templar. This ability is templar's bane because you are obviously non blocking when you jab and so you receive hard cc on cooldown. CC which costs twice less then other similar CCs, does some pressure, heals and grants minor expedition.

Fur_like_snow · February 2020

Brian wheeler mains Templar but the last time I saw him PvP on the live stream he ran around a pillar hitting purge for five min straight. Although he did manage to SS someone down by the end. Draw your own conclusions.

wheem_ESO · February 2020

I've actually never had trouble breaking the stun on Vamp Drain - certainly nothing like fears or the old Stun + Major Defile shield bash that like 97.3% of Stam builds ran.

Maybe Vampire will be worth it after the rework in 5-7'ish months, but if this change goes live as-is, it'll be atrocious for PvP in the meantime. Mist Form is, in almost all cases, drastically inferior to Race Against Time, this version of Vamp Drain is utterly worthless, and the passives aren't worth the extra damage intake from Fire and Fighters Guild skills.

The only "generic" stun available to Magicka builds being tied to fire staves also stinks for the two classes that need it the most - Necromancer and Warden. Not only does it generally lower the killing power of both classes to use fire staves over lightning ones, but it also causes you to sometimes help your opponent by outright countering your own burst (ie, knocking them out of the line of fire of Shalks, or out of a Graveyard self-synergy...which is already finnicky enough. It might also cause issues with Blastbones if done during his leap? Haven't tested that though).

Obviously, any and all bugs/issues with break free need to be addressed - that's a huge deal for PvP and should apply to every skill in the game. But surely that doesn't necessitate completely ruining the only "viable" offense-oriented stun that my Magicka Necromancer has.