Something i just touched is
4. Lack of offensive CCs
Over the past year we lost many very important offensive stuns which also worked as defensive stuns which is needed as there's simply no bar space to support both.
The removal of the stun on destructive reach and the whole removal of the stun for lightning staves has made the situation very rough for magicka build who don't have a viable ranged and instant stun in their toolkit which are all of them bar Dragonknight which has access to fossilize and Templar with spear which isn't optimal due to how magplar plays and how it knocks people out of your range which leads us back to the issue of minimum time to deal your damage. This leaves five of 6 magicka classes without a CC that can be used to guarantee hits without having to rely on the enemies generosity to stand in your AoE or not dodge your skills.
What about magblade you may ask, well the issue here is that fear doesn't guarantee a hit with strifes minimum traveltime of 450ms and the casttimes on each of the ults which are being used by nightblades.
For stamina specs things look kinda similar after the removal of dizzying swing's CC and the unreliability of DBoS with the cast time and the overall superiority of Onslaught which again has a casttime. There is an universal stamina CC however it doesn't guarantee hits of your ultimates as people can still dodge/block due to travel times and casttimes but it also brings us back to our rock paper scissors game because people can simply avoid being stunned by it by simply walking away. With the off balance changes stamina loses its last reliable option of an offensive CC so things look even worse in the future.
Something i just touched is
4. Lack of offensive CCs
Over the past year we lost many very important offensive stuns which also worked as defensive stuns which is needed as there's simply no bar space to support both.
The removal of the stun on destructive reach and the whole removal of the stun for lightning staves has made the situation very rough for magicka build who don't have a viable ranged and instant stun in their toolkit which are all of them bar Dragonknight which has access to fossilize and Templar with spear which isn't optimal due to how magplar plays and how it knocks people out of your range which leads us back to the issue of minimum time to deal your damage. This leaves five of 6 magicka classes without a CC that can be used to guarantee hits without having to rely on the enemies generosity to stand in your AoE or not dodge your skills.
What about magblade you may ask, well the issue here is that fear doesn't guarantee a hit with strifes minimum traveltime of 450ms and the casttimes on each of the ults which are being used by nightblades.
For stamina specs things look kinda similar after the removal of dizzying swing's CC and the unreliability of DBoS with the cast time and the overall superiority of Onslaught which again has a casttime. There is an universal stamina CC however it doesn't guarantee hits of your ultimates as people can still dodge/block due to travel times and casttimes but it also brings us back to our rock paper scissors game because people can simply avoid being stunned by it by simply walking away. With the off balance changes stamina loses its last reliable option of an offensive CC so things look even worse in the future.
Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.
If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).
Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.
Something i just touched is
4. Lack of offensive CCs
Over the past year we lost many very important offensive stuns which also worked as defensive stuns which is needed as there's simply no bar space to support both.
The removal of the stun on destructive reach and the whole removal of the stun for lightning staves has made the situation very rough for magicka build who don't have a viable ranged and instant stun in their toolkit which are all of them bar Dragonknight which has access to fossilize and Templar with spear which isn't optimal due to how magplar plays and how it knocks people out of your range which leads us back to the issue of minimum time to deal your damage. This leaves five of 6 magicka classes without a CC that can be used to guarantee hits without having to rely on the enemies generosity to stand in your AoE or not dodge your skills.
What about magblade you may ask, well the issue here is that fear doesn't guarantee a hit with strifes minimum traveltime of 450ms and the casttimes on each of the ults which are being used by nightblades.
For stamina specs things look kinda similar after the removal of dizzying swing's CC and the unreliability of DBoS with the cast time and the overall superiority of Onslaught which again has a casttime. There is an universal stamina CC however it doesn't guarantee hits of your ultimates as people can still dodge/block due to travel times and casttimes but it also brings us back to our rock paper scissors game because people can simply avoid being stunned by it by simply walking away. With the off balance changes stamina loses its last reliable option of an offensive CC so things look even worse in the future.
If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).
Something i just touched is
4. Lack of offensive CCs
Over the past year we lost many very important offensive stuns which also worked as defensive stuns which is needed as there's simply no bar space to support both.
The removal of the stun on destructive reach and the whole removal of the stun for lightning staves has made the situation very rough for magicka build who don't have a viable ranged and instant stun in their toolkit which are all of them bar Dragonknight which has access to fossilize and Templar with spear which isn't optimal due to how magplar plays and how it knocks people out of your range which leads us back to the issue of minimum time to deal your damage. This leaves five of 6 magicka classes without a CC that can be used to guarantee hits without having to rely on the enemies generosity to stand in your AoE or not dodge your skills.
What about magblade you may ask, well the issue here is that fear doesn't guarantee a hit with strifes minimum traveltime of 450ms and the casttimes on each of the ults which are being used by nightblades.
For stamina specs things look kinda similar after the removal of dizzying swing's CC and the unreliability of DBoS with the cast time and the overall superiority of Onslaught which again has a casttime. There is an universal stamina CC however it doesn't guarantee hits of your ultimates as people can still dodge/block due to travel times and casttimes but it also brings us back to our rock paper scissors game because people can simply avoid being stunned by it by simply walking away. With the off balance changes stamina loses its last reliable option of an offensive CC so things look even worse in the future.
Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.
If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).
Those skills (and others nerfed over time) were the game for a long, long time with 75% of the classes having zero counter play, and every one seemed to do just fine.
Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.
If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).
From the experience of the current Dragonhold patch, there's a fundamental issue with offence that almost any spec is affected by.
The issue in general is bland combat with a lack of options and a really high Time to Kill.
The reasons for this vary across the different classes and specs but share some key points.
1. Health ValuesA huge part of the current combat balance is due to the high health pools which on Pc EU average at just above 29k in the CP campaign.
Average health ranges above 25k have been around for some time but they haven't been that much of an issue but certain changes have pushed them much higher and other changes have further influenced them to take a turn for the worse.
One big contribution to them was brought to use with the Murkmire patch when the overall health increased by 1-2k depending on which race you play and other factors which started the trend of increasing health pools.
With nerfs to camoran throne and witch mother along with changes in the overall game, that made sustain a lot easier and regen less attractive like wider access to off balance and therefore double the resource gain from heavy attacks but also the buffs to cost reduction, tri stat food and tri stat glyphs became a lot more common and they offer a lot more stat density than single glyphs which increased health by up to 4k when you swapped from camoran throne and stam glyphs to tristat food and prismatic glyphs while also granting 6k offstat resources (same goes for magicka ofc).
The opportunity cost was pretty low as even the damage loss from going prismatic glyphs is negligible due to camoran throne offering less stam anyway and sustain is easy enough due to the changes mentioned above.
Those inflated health pools get further increased by percentage buffs offered from class passives (NB, Warden, Sorc) and other passives like Heavy armor or Undaunted.
If your regularly PvPing you'll feel a 2k health increase a lot, you're less vulnerable to burst, survive situations you haven't before and notice how often you'll sit at 5-10% health which are those extra HP you gained.
With that in mind you'll get an idea what 6k extra health do to the game and how it plays, you're now not sitting at 5-10% but rather 20-25% which is just 1 healing tick short of being above execute range again.
This leads us to the next key part of our problem which is negatively influenced by the health pools
2. HealingEven before scalebreaker we saw an increase in healing output on every class due to various changes which got topped by the buffs to Hots in Scalebreaker which almost doubled the healing output of them. With the situation described above we'll survive and then get more powerful Hots on us than before to heal up again along with new healing abilities for all specs, all magicka classes got access to a viable hot, something which previously held them in check and forced them to play in a unique way or made sure they're not able to rely on preemptive healing to survive but rather reacte to incoming damage.
For stamina specs like Stamplar and stamdk saw an increase in their healing due to purge and cauterize now scaling with the highest attribute rather than mag only.
Those heals wouldn't be as much of a problem if the next point on the list wasn't as relevant.
3. Damage spike durationWith the introduction of casttimes on ultimates and lengthened traveltimes on certain skills the minimum timeframe of your burst has been increased over the past, this has been worsened by the removal of offensive CCs which are now extremely rare or simply non existent for many specs. What this means is that not only do people survive your damage with more health than ever before but their chance of getting a saving healing tick or reacting to your damage is also a lot higher and in a game of high reactive healing on many specs and strong hots those extra seconds will make it impossible to ever get a kill as your playing rock paper scissors against someone who can choose to wait for you to take your pick but can then only choose the same thing and stall the fight as long as he wants.
4. Lack of offensive CCsOver the past year we lost many very important offensive stuns which also worked as defensive stuns which is needed as there's simply no bar space to support both.
The removal of the stun on destructive reach and the whole removal of the stun for lightning staves has made the situation very rough for magicka build who don't have a viable ranged and instant stun in their toolkit which are all of them bar Dragonknight which has access to fossilize and Templar with spear which isn't optimal due to how magplar plays and how it knocks people out of your range which leads us back to the issue of minimum time to deal your damage. This leaves five of 6 magicka classes without a CC that can be used to guarantee hits without having to rely on the enemies generosity to stand in your AoE or not dodge your skills.
What about magblade you may ask, well the issue here is that fear doesn't guarantee a hit with strifes minimum traveltime of 450ms and the casttimes on each of the ults which are being used by nightblades.
For stamina specs things look kinda similar after the removal of dizzying swing's CC and the unreliability of DBoS with the cast time and the overall superiority of Onslaught which again has a casttime. There is an universal stamina CC however it doesn't guarantee hits of your ultimates as people can still dodge/block due to travel times and casttimes but it also brings us back to our rock paper scissors game because people can simply avoid being stunned by it by simply walking away. With the off balance changes stamina loses its last reliable option of an offensive CC so things look even worse in the future.
This sums up the biggest issues we have but there's more and more individual issues.Specs like magden and magnecro have extremely one dimensional offence which consists of a mediocre or bad spammable, a delayed burst ability and a single dot along with a very costly ultimate and as mentioned above no offensive CC and no real execute on both specs. This makes them extremely unreliable in solo play as they have to break through their enemy in one burst or otherwise are doomed to fight eternally as the enemy always has 3 seconds between burst to heal up again and the necro/warden has no way of forcing any further damage as their spammables are dodgeable, the dots in general don't offer enough pressure and they don't have any other offensive class skills because they both have a single skill line that has to satisfy both PvE and PvP which simply isn't possible.
This brings them to the extremely horrible situation of them only being viable when you give them every existing major and minor buff along with even more damage multipliers which then leads to a huge issue with skills like Vampire drain or being forced to be limited to group play to be viable.
There's a lot more issues that can be talked about but this post has to end at some point so the last thing to be touched here is the existence of extremely powerful defensive sets with the likes of BRP DW/Resto, pariah, impreg, armor master and many offensive sets mainly stamina ones which highly benefit tanky players over more squishy ones the sets which come to mind are of course warrior's fury and NMA but also the two upcoming sets in titanborn and unchained aggressor as they become a lot stronger with the bigger offensive windows.
5. Summary
I explained how we ended up in the current state of the game and i think it's pretty clear that it currently isn't a really good one to be frank.
From the things I've talked about there's many appropriate changes that could be done from this point on to make things better again like
- more offensive CCs for everyone
- removal of casttimes on ultimates
- reduction of minimum traveltime
- buffs to camoran throne and witch mother
- removal of the 10% stat increase of health bonuses compared to magicka/stamina
- reduction of the stat density of tri-glyphs and tri food
- rework of the offence for Warden and Necromancer
- reasonable reductions to healing
Just to be clear the addition of more overall damage or access to major defile will not fix the underlying issues but will just make things even worse.
@BohnT2
One "agree" isn't enough!Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.
If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).
@Xvorg
Were reach / clench really to strong or were they only OP together with a master staff?
Every time I saw someone ask if you should use the skill without the master staff, the answer was no!!!
@BohnT2
One "agree" isn't enough!Just to remember everyone around, the nerf to reach and to scatter shot (ranged CC) came after the nerf to wings; without wings around there was no counterplay to those skills, and the skills were, naturally, overperforming.
If we want them back, then ZoS should provide some sort of counterplay, which already had in wings, even if that implies tweaking wings to avoid shutting down classes like sorcs or NBs (the 15mts range idea was pretty good).
@Xvorg
Were reach / clench really to strong or were they only OP together with a master staff?
Every time I saw someone ask if you should use the skill without the master staff, the answer was no!!!