beyond our standards O.o

It's very important that players keep buying dlcs or the access to them...

"Developer Comment:
Iceheart has long been a powerful defensive set that has become a staple for situations where you want to sacrifice damage for survivability, especially in instances such as Maelstrom Arena and no-death Trial runs. While we love the idea of this set helping in those contexts, the value of defensive and offensive potential this set provided was leagues beyond our standards when comparing it to other sets such as Brands of the Imperium or Phoenix." means "This set was great compared to useless sets so we decided to make it useless to be in line with the others. By the way, the new set in the new dlc is better. Go buy it!"

People bring up vMA. I am one of those players for whom vMA is borderline. When it came out, I couldn't do it. Years passed before I finally completed it during glyphgate. Then I thought: "Oh boy, with DOTs nerfed into the ground after Scalebreaker I won't be able to do this anymore". How wrong I was. I used to go in with 2x monster resistance pieces and still do on some classes. Take magplar, though, specifically my unmodified PvP build - New Moon, Amber Plasm, Grothdarr - and it steamrolls vMA. Going in with defensive setups has never been great for that arena. Steamrolling things before they become an issue is what you want to do. If a mid-level player wants to go in with the original Iceheart, why not? Maybe it helps with a no-death run, but you won't be posting a high score with it. It's one of those sets you just tend to grow out of.

redlink1979 wrote: »

It's very important that players keep buying dlcs or the access to them...

"Developer Comment:
Iceheart has long been a powerful defensive set that has become a staple for situations where you want to sacrifice damage for survivability, especially in instances such as Maelstrom Arena and no-death Trial runs. While we love the idea of this set helping in those contexts, the value of defensive and offensive potential this set provided was leagues beyond our standards when comparing it to other sets such as Brands of the Imperium or Phoenix." means "This set was great compared to useless sets so we decided to make it useless to be in line with the others. By the way, the new set in the new dlc is better. Go buy it!"

jokes on them, i won't buy *** if this change goes live. i wanna experience the story and i'm not gonna support this if i cant solo it

fred4 wrote: »

People bring up vMA. I am one of those players for whom vMA is borderline. When it came out, I couldn't do it. Years passed before I finally completed it during glyphgate. Then I thought: "Oh boy, with DOTs nerfed into the ground after Scalebreaker I won't be able to do this anymore". How wrong I was. I used to go in with 2x monster resistance pieces and still do on some classes. Take magplar, though, specifically my unmodified PvP build - New Moon, Amber Plasm, Grothdarr - and it steamrolls vMA. Going in with defensive setups has never been great for that arena. Steamrolling things before they become an issue is what you want to do. If a mid-level player wants to go in with the original Iceheart, why not? Maybe it helps with a no-death run, but you won't be posting a high score with it. It's one of those sets you just tend to grow out of.

It also was a FUN set to have, it was great for learning. It was called a carry set or a crutch, but IMO you have to consider the average player who also wants to play DLC dungeons and such. Iceheart helped a bit, but it did not win vMA for you. It was fun.. you could pair it with Permafrost which at least felt clever, it was a nice situational set. Now you would rather have something else. I am very disappointed with how the devs choose to continue this game. They really do not listen to their player base, they are very stubborn in their vision, and antagonise their fans with each patch. People are expecting improvements, not nerfs, new content, not messing around with the established sets, new mechanics and skills, not cheap changes that benefit none. What is the benefit of nerfing this set???

ethuiliel wrote: »

Okay so let me get this straight:

They butchered a decidedly defensive set in part because of its offensive potential (????) instead of just taking away the damage portion of the effect at least?

THE NEW MC SET IS STILL GARBAGE. Just because you make IH less attractive doesn't change the fact that MC's proc condition is HOT GARBAGE.

The damage wasn't an issue. Don't forget it's the only frost damage monster helmet in the game.

Just for Information/reference

Iceheart

LEVEL 50 CHAMPION 160

(1 items) Adds 833 Spell Critical
(2 items) When you deal Critical Damage, you have a 20% chance to gain a damage shield that absorbs 8600 damage for 6 seconds. While the damage shield holds, you deal 770 Cold Damage to all enemies within 5 meters of you every 1 second. This effect can occur once every 6 seconds.



On the PTS and subject to change

Mother Ciannait Set

LEVEL 50 CHAMPION 160

(1 item) Adds 1096 Max Magicka
(2 items) While in combat, casting an ability with a cast time or channeling an ability grants you a damage shield that absorbs 3000 damage for 10 seconds. This effect can occur once every 10 seconds.

robpr wrote: »

Whole design of Mother Ciannait is flawed.
It gives max magicka and proc of cast time/channel skills. So clearly it is intended for magicka characters. The problem is, only 2 classes have channeled/casted non-ult abilities, that is Templar's Sweeps/beam and Sorcs hard casted frags and dark deal. Magicka nightblade can proc it only on casting soul harvest. Magicka DKs, Wardens and Necromancers have no way to proc it...without another DLC, giving them Channeled Acceleration or using Vamp Drain that is utterly useless in PvE unless you want to quick charge your ult on dummy.
On other hand, stamina specs have Rapid Strikes, Wrecking blow, Snipe, allowing all kind of specs to use it reliably on cd but then the max magicka and magicka restore bonus is useless.

Can it be pvp intended shield set? With battle spirit it's 2500 shield. It's around Harness Magicka levels but again, magicka chars aside of Templars and Sorcs dont have abilities that would proc the effect.

Inevitable detonation should do the trick, but it puts you in a looooooong animation. In fact Inevitable Deto is better casted from ranged, when you need a shield. You will do much, much better with Light of Cyrodiil withou having to sacrifice a set. In fact, any smart magplar runs LoC + BS.

Besides that, it cannot be used with sets that proc on dmg.

every patch the destroy one of the good MS in the game... earthgore, ilambris, pirate skeleton, engine guardian, sentinel and iceheart now... what's next? bloodspawn? chudan? and then?

Didn't get chance to get on PTS earlier, which I will try to do today. I can provide a reference baseline from past testing.

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Damage

A few months ago, we ran a few vDLC dungeons with MagDK with Grothdaar and Magden with Iceheart otherwise same gear.
It worked out that Iceheart did about 30% the damage of Grothdaar in the logs.

That made sense:

Taking tooltip from ESO sets as I'm not sure what passives are active affecting in game.

Grothdaar is 1907 DPS with potential 50% uptime or 954 AOE DPS with a range of 8m
Iceheart is 770 DPS with potential 100% uptime or 770 AOE DPS with range of 5m
Adjusting for 39% surface area that is 300 or 31% of Grothdaar

Though Iceheart does more than 300 single target, the figure remained at 30% in content because the damage stops if the shield drops which happens when positioning to get the most damage. IE the uptime of IH was close to 70% in tests while Grothdaar was up closer to 45%.

So, we thought it was a fair trade: 1/3 damage in exchange for Crit over max Mag and a bit of sustain and DPS avoiding shield/heal casts. It seemed quite balanced with Grothdaar in content in our perspective.

From the patch notes it appears that IH's max DPS dropped from 770 to 250 (32% of 250)
Thus, IH would do approximately 10% (31%*32%) of Grothdaar in content; considering Elf Bane maybe 5%?

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Defense

There are no other LIVE shield monsters but healing and shielding skills in ESO are often balanced similarly so we can use healing sets as a proxy. The closest set to IH is this area would be a 40-50% single target heal or shield proc. Chokethorn fits perfectly.

Max Shield/Heal per second:
Chokethorn: 2,250
LIVE IH: 1,433 (63%)
PTS IH: 504 (22%)

One could argue that Choke is not a good comparable. PTS Iceheart vs Scourge, Earthgore, Crest of Cyro would respectively be 52%, 59%, and 27%.

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Summary

Live IH has 30% damage of a comparable full damage alternative and 63% of a (power budget) comparable defensive set.

PTS IH has 10% damage and 22% defense relative to other options.

This does not consider other important factors like usefulness of uptime etc. That's been covered by others. This is just my data findings.

Related Reference Info (I may have some wrong figure below. So, please check yourself before using)

Literally no one complains about Iceheart. It's a great defensive monster set that is really helpful for solo players, solo builds, no-death runs, and high-damage portions of trials or dungeons. No one is out here saying it's too strong or too common or too prevalent. No one. It's not a pain point. And yet you nerf it to oblivion. Like, you nerf every aspect of it. And no one asked for or indicated that a nerf was necessary. Because "standards". Like can’t we have a few sets that go outside your precious standards?? I’m so tired of hearing about these “standards”. They are placing everything under the 30-ton crushing machine of “stAnDardS” and grinding it all to dust and calling that “balance”. Well guess what? Mashing everything down to fit some subjective, capricious measuring stick means everything suddenly starts feeling like nothing stands out from anything else. It already feels like that now and they just keep pushing ahead. *** one size fits all standards. It doesn’t work in the real world and it doesn’t work in this one, either. It's bad enough with just skills, but it's much worse when it comes to equipment, and especially equipment that has been in the game as long as Iceheart has. Why now??? If the set has been "SO OP" why now?? Why are we just hearing about it now? It's been this way for years. C'mon ZOS.