Casterial wrote: »

Sanctum74 wrote: »

My small group of 52 haven’t noticed any change at all, light attacks op 🤪

Which comes down to... Did they do this to empower zergs and weaken small scale? I find this being "server stability" change a lie.... Theres so many other options. While more expensive, would be less expensive in the long run than the constant iterations.

It seems most of the changes in the past year have been to empower zergs. Sadly I spend most of my in game time in the forums or zone chat because of the performance and so called balance changes. Miss the good ole days when there were small scalers, solos, and zergs all over the map. 3x the population cap and half the lag. What happened?

Did VBRP/HM for both the new dungeons today on my tank. Honestly, didn't notice a change on my end.

DPS didn't say anything, maybe they just didn't say it, but didn't seem to be some huge difference I think.

Casterial wrote: »

Am I the only one noticing how clunky combat is feeling? It feels way less fluid and some skills just do not go off now. Everything feels like it has a 0.01second cast time on it for the animation to play and sometimes if you block too quickly it just won't register the other skill at all now.... We went from a high skill cap with fluid combat to skill floor with clunky combat?

I know its a "learn to play" issue, but some parts of it just feel clunky and not working as intended.

~6years of ESO to finally see combat lose a lot of its fluid movement and feel its had since the start.

TLDR included at bottom, mainly a history rant of movement and how its poor changes lead to other poor changes

Movement as a whole was butchered back in murkmire, mainly due to swift jewelry being introduced into summerset. Before summerset movement speed/snares were not much of an issue. Here is the general history of how movement got so bad in eso.

The only problem back then (pre-summmerset) was that mag users did not all have a universal snare removal tool. In general, not everyone needed one though, sorcs had streak, dks could hold their own, templars purged, nbs could cloak and I believe had snare immunity on blur back then. Another issue back then was that shuffle cost too much and the immunity didnt last long enough. If a mag user wanted guaranteed movement they could elusive mist, and if they wanted a snare/root purge and major expedition all in one, they could pop mist then swap cancel it into sprint.(now removed) Major Expedition was also something that was a major choice in a buildpath, do you run movement speed pots and lose buffs like major savagery? A zerg that doesn't care about speed as much could technically have the leg up on you in combat by having that major buff that you chose to drop in order to maintain speed.

During summerset everyone ran swift, which brought any build close to the movement speed cap with 100% uptime. This brought up problems where two fighting players would be moving so fast in combat they would technically both be too far from each other. Even if some abilities were cast, the players would have moved so far away that by the time the server goes to calculate it thought they were out of range of the ability.

After Murkmire snare immunities and speed buffs were reduced to generally 4 seconds. Movement speed pots were reduced to a third the uptime, meaning it is a waste to make that choice for speed pots(pushing players to all run similar abilities to gain speed). Since players are now choosing to run 4sec speed abilities and have 4sec snare immunities you end up with the stop and go movement(I compare it to the kids game"red light green light"). Note you wont get the 4 secs, since casting the ability wastes a global cooldown. Then casting two in a row wastes 2 gcds. So if you pop a snare immunity>speed buff>sprint you will only get 2 secs of sprinting before you get snared/rooted again.(clunky feeling, where things feel like they are not working and have to keep getting reapplied). This feeling got really bad, when you had a zerg chasing you that can afford to spam snares/roots, but now you cant afford to keep dropping immunities, speed, and sprints. This also brought upon the frost warden meta, where one player could cause a group of players to come to a standstill.

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An example in detail of how this trickled along and caused further silly changes, TLDR included at bottom

Dizzy worked wonders pre summerset. It was an engaging ability to use since it required two direct aim checks on an enemy. It was a long cast so you needed to be good at using movement, reading if enemies were rapidly changing direction. It was rewarded with a heavy hit and a knockup which could be utilized to pick apart enemy groups near ledges. Counterplay was straight forward for both sides. The defender could block the hits and stun guaranteed by block cancelling abilities, or roll dodge the hit. The attacker would have to learn to cancel the cast and recast to try to trip up the rhythm that the defender was playing at with their block cancelling or roll dodging. Then the defender would have to resync to the rhythm. etc.

Now, since murkmire gutted speed and immunity to short buffs, players were only getting one dizzy off per the new movement rotation (immunity>speed>dizzy>snared again) at best you could get 2 dizzys off before you were snared/rooted again. All of a sudden the medium to low tier players who used dizzy could no longer utilize the ability. Zos responds by lowering the damage, making it a shorter cast, and removing the second aim check(Point and click easy spammable now). At the same time onslaught(arguably the strongest ult at the time) became a copy and paste of corrosive instead of its previously unique and fun playstyle. This leads to issues of players just doing a now easy to land dizzy into an insta kill onslaught, then if the player lived, one executioner hit as hard as onslaught did. This leads zos to remove the knockup which was the heart and soul of dizzy for a long time. Replacing it with a gimicky offbalance knockdown that is not linked to any animation(removing the rythm of counterplay from the game). We also get sliding bugs from the knockdown which feel terrible when your character wont break free for 1 or 2 gcds and is completely defenseless.

Along with the removal of the knockup was another damage reduction (now at 26% reduced damage) The intent of reducing the damage was that if a player spammed the dizzy over the course of a minute, due to the shorter cast they would net more damage. I would not count the offbalance extra damage into effect since alot of dizzy builds prior would use exploiter cp to have offbalance anyways. If anyone played dizzy however, most people have always played it as a one hit burst since movement was so trash that you only could land that one dizzy before going into buffs/defense again so being able to hit multiple dizzys was an issue. This leads to zos seeing that players are having trouble sticking to other players to land multiple hits, and since dizzy was now effectively losing 2/3 uptime on offbalance damage and stun they figure adding a snare would allow players to stick to their target to be able to spam easier. So essentially dizzy ended up losing 36% damage and a fluid knockup for a gimicky knockdown and snare on a braindead spammable.

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TLDR

Dizzy was once a skillful ability on both sides. Now it has been reduced to a brainless spammable to allow the lower tier players to be able to land the skill due to previous poorly thought out changes in the game that gutted the movement mechanics necessary to land the ability. All because zos introduced something that broke the game, instead of doing the smart thing and balancing what was added, zos decided to blanket nerf every source of the same mechanic aswell.

This trend of making a change that breaks the game, then blanket nerfing similar things that are perfectly fine in the game is what leads to terrible sense of balance and will never lead to a fun and engaging experience for anyone. Older and newer players constantly feel frustrated each patch when the patch by patch blanket nerfs lead to complete meta flops in gear/classes/abilities in order to stay relevant.

Examples talked about:
introduced swift> everyone is too fast> nerf every form of movement in the game...then nerf swift(not used in meta anymore)
reworked onslaught> players are getting one/two shot > heavily change the entire 2h playstyle that has been fun for years.

Agree, game feels clunky, slow and unresponsive. The rework to some animations and block cancelling makes the game feel slow. I'm aware of what changes was made to it and how it works so no need to link gilliams explanation, but even outside of that, many animations is super slow.

Tanking feels horrible, *** is hitting me through block, and break free (for example vFV 3rd boss where i run around getting spheres) sometimes just dont fire for 3 seconds spamming the buttons. And yes, i do have stamina while blocking.