essence thief - let's finally make this set usable

Browiseth · February 2020

so i've been seeing a lot of changes to this set from zos over the months, most recently there's an extremely minor buff to the essence itself's visibility up on the pts at the moment - fair play, i'm very fond of the idea and i really want it to be a good set. unfortunately with how things are looking, these small tweaks and quality of life changes just aren't going to make it useful or practical.

SO. i suggest a complete overhaul of its functionality. currently, the essence thief set has the following bonuses:

2 pc: stamina or weapon damage or something
3 pc: stamina or weapon damage or something
4 pc: stamina or weapon damage or something
5 pc: when you hit a dude with a light attack, a thing pops out of them and spawns a couple feet away from the enemy's position. using your wasd keys to stand on the essence restores (decent amount) stamina and provides a 10% damage boost, this effect can occur once every 6 or 10 seconds i forget

sounds good on paper right? maybe it does. i don't know. in practice it's still as unwieldy as ever, even after they removed the proc chance last year.

so here's my proposition; instead of the essence requiring you to collect it, hitting an enemy with a light or heavy attack spawns the essence underneath you, creating a small, restorative ground aoe at your feet for 6 or 10 seconds or whatever. standing inside the aoe restores 400 (or so) stamina to you every second and boosts all damage by 10% (maybe boost the damage bonus a bit to account for the fact you have to remain stationary now to receive it)

Yellow_Monolith · February 2020

Essence thief will be in a good place after the update. Having to stand stationary in a ground rune for a bonus is horrible for pvp speaking from a stamplar restoring focus user. Nobody should be standing still especially in medium armor for pvp.

Browiseth · February 2020

Cactus316000 wrote: »

Essence thief will be in a good place after the update. Having to stand stationary in a ground rune for a bonus is horrible for pvp speaking from a stamplar restoring focus user. Nobody should be standing still especially in medium armor for pvp.

does the set see use in pvp? i actually wrote this thread from the perspective of pve use

Freakin_Hytte · February 2020

I don't know, standing still isn't really an ideal way to play eso. Sure for overland you can stand still, but this would count as a hard nerf to the set for dungeons, trials and especially pvp imo. Standing still in a vet trial or vet dungeon for 6-10 sec wouldn't be possible for a lot of bosses. In pvp it would be completely useless, look at turn undead which also gives passives standing in it, no one stands in it and it's only used for the fear (in pvp). its mostly a pvp set, so it would probably create a situation where no one wants to use it.

I like essence thief the way it is, it's one of those niche sets that works well for certain play styles and now they are tweaking it to make it a bit easier to see making it better.

Sergykid · February 2020

that set is very underestimated. U can keep up a 100% uptime of 10% damage, which is already more than a generic set. On top of this, it also gives 400 stam per second (4k in 10 seconds) which is equal to 800 recovery, which again is more than most sets too. Oh, also heals.

if i line them up i would say the set is overpowered, giving 800 recovery and 10% damage. If it becomes popular amongst the masses, u'll start seeing nerf threads.

Ankael07 · February 2020

Its not meant to be wieldy in the first place. Thats why the buff is so powerful

Nemesis7884 · February 2020

it seems like a hassle in pve to juggle mechanics and chasing after the globes

FierceSam · February 2020

This is currently an interesting and fun set. Highly situational and very unusual.

Making the essence spot spawn on the player would reduce it to being just another buff set.. and what would be the fun in that.

Is it ever going to be BiS? I doubt it, but at present it is Stupid Fun in Slot.

MaxJrFTW · February 2020

A lot of people use Essence Thief in PvP...

xaraan · February 2020

This set is already good and useful, and I believe got some improvement tweaks for next patch. Making it so automatic to use would just result in the power of it being nerfed to not be stronger than other sets. The trade off of having something require some work to deal with is letting it be a bit stronger than something that is just automatic.