Yamenstein wrote: »

So what's the deal ? I know ZOS has come out and said they are keeping this morph as is, supposedly it deals 10% more damage when used at range.

Not to take away from other skills that need to be looked at but this skill is pretty lackluster when it comes to what it does. Damage is good. But unless the NPC decides to run away it won't really add much.

Is it now just a PvP skill? Used for when another player decides to run away.

Nah. They just wrecked the skill for no good reason.

ecru wrote: »

They haven't commented on it at all as far as I can tell. With the crit bug that lowered the overall dps of magcro to below every other magicka class, the broken passive, and now blastbones bugging out on bosses with large hitboxes, necro is pretty much the worst mag dps you could bring to a trial, with the only thing we really have to offer being major vuln.

It really sucks having put as much time as I have into my magcro only to see it's main skill become completely unusable and unreliable in trials after it's supposedly "fixed". We had four weeks of PTS and who knows how much internal dev time on this fix and no one bothered to test the skill on a boss with a large hitbox like the dragons in Sunspire? No one bothered to think about how the passive would function with the change?

????

The only comment was the one that was in the dev note from the Patch Notes.

My biggest concern is that the most likely situation will be them changing it in the next major increment. So we will have to wait until May for them to fix this.

Baphomet wrote: »

In PvE stalking must be absolutely useless over the base ability.

In PvP it "stalks" once in a while when players LoS or run away - but you never reach the 50% damage bonus.

It should be changed to doing minor vulnerability or minor main to the target.

While i agree that it needs to have a debuff applied I don't think zos will add either of these debuffs because necromancer already has them available in other abilities

I posted an idea in another thread....

What if they changed stalking to a corps res where you target a fresh corps and res it for some amount of Magicka per HP of whatever was killed. That corps would then return as a skeletal version of what was killed and fight until it was killed (couldn't be healed and would have no health regeneration).

Thats actually what I envisioned a necro doing before they were added anyway.

ecru wrote: »

They haven't commented on it at all as far as I can tell. With the crit bug that lowered the overall dps of magcro to below every other magicka class, the broken passive, and now blastbones bugging out on bosses with large hitboxes, necro is pretty much the worst mag dps you could bring to a trial, with the only thing we really have to offer being major vuln.

It really sucks having put as much time as I have into my magcro only to see it's main skill become completely unusable and unreliable in trials after it's supposedly "fixed". We had four weeks of PTS and who knows how much internal dev time on this fix and no one bothered to test the skill on a boss with a large hitbox like the dragons in Sunspire? No one bothered to think about how the passive would function with the change?

????

Wait, what are these things? Crit bug? Broken passive?

I had definitely been noticing that my magCro DPS lags well behind my other Magicka characters for like double the effort but I had just assumed that it was due to me not having mastery over the rotation yet (that's still probably a reason, TBH).

I was aware of our Blastbones morph not working, but what are these other problems?

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

They haven't commented on it at all as far as I can tell. With the crit bug that lowered the overall dps of magcro to below every other magicka class, the broken passive, and now blastbones bugging out on bosses with large hitboxes, necro is pretty much the worst mag dps you could bring to a trial, with the only thing we really have to offer being major vuln.

It really sucks having put as much time as I have into my magcro only to see it's main skill become completely unusable and unreliable in trials after it's supposedly "fixed". We had four weeks of PTS and who knows how much internal dev time on this fix and no one bothered to test the skill on a boss with a large hitbox like the dragons in Sunspire? No one bothered to think about how the passive would function with the change?

????

Wait, what are these things? Crit bug? Broken passive?

I had definitely been noticing that my magCro DPS lags well behind my other Magicka characters for like double the effort but I had just assumed that it was due to me not having mastery over the rotation yet (that's still probably a reason, TBH).

I was aware of our Blastbones morph not working, but what are these other problems?

The crit bug which was introduced with the most recent patch prevents Blastbones and Skeletal Arcanist from getting 10% extra crit from Major Prophecy.

I made a post about it here: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/512158/magcro-dps-nerfed-blastbones-and-skeletal-arcanist-no-longer-benefiting-from-major-prophecy#latest

I tested it on live (last post in the thread) to confirm it was bugged/not fixed, so every magcro's dps went down this patch regardless of skill.

The passive which increases the damage of blastbones the longer it's active no longer seems to have any function at all. The patch notes suggested it may still work if blastbones has to get line of sight on it's target, but I have no idea what that means and can't reproduce that.

On top of all of this, if you're just slightly out of melee range, blastbones goes to the 4th gcd now instead of the 3rd like it used to, which on it's own is a fairly substantial nerf to dps. The crit bug is about a 3% dps loss, and Blastbones going to the 4th gcd may be another 5% loss, which puts magcro well behind every other mag dps if you're even slightly out of melee range, and slightly behind if you are in melee range (and blastbones can be casted every 3rd gcd).

As far as your rotation goes, it's important to remember that Necro is balanced with other mag dps only if you can cast blastbones every 3rd gcd. Even before this patch, if you cannot cast it every 3rd gcd, you will fall way behind everyone else. This means that necro was always behind other mag dps at medium/long range, besides magden.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

@ecru

Oh my, that is worse than I could have imagined. Is it only Major Prophecy that is bugged or would Minor be as well? That'd be 16% Crit you'd be missing out on for them in a typical raid with a magSorc.

I had also noticed your observation about the flaky nature of the Blastbones animation and it often messes up my rotation when it fails to detonate on-schedule. I figured that this was just a "feature" of the class rather than a new issue.

I recall that the patch notes admitted their error with fixing Stalking BB but said that it should give a base 10% increase in damage versus the Stamina morph even in its broken state, is this also not the case? That would be outrageous if they allowed Stalking to go live as a de facto morph-less version of the skill.

This is a good point that I hadn't considered. I wonder if there's any combination of gear to test minor prophecy. I'd have to be at or over 100% without major prophecy, which should be doable with the right gear setup. If this is true and I'm losing 16% cirt in raid, I will not be happy, heh.

Also, it seems like the issues with blastbones being completely unreliable after the patch are mostly tied to the buggy combat sync issues that are happening, and are instance dependent. In a good instance, blastbones works as expected, but in a bad one, it's extremely unpredictable.

edit: looking at one of my parses from last night, I'm seeing 46% crit on blastbones, 43.6% crit on deathbolt (arcanist), with everything else in the low to mid 60s. Doesn't look good. Might just be an unlucky parse as the rest of mine seem to have blastbones and skeletal arcanist roughly 10-12% behind.

I tested minor prophecy, with 102.2% effective crit for blastbones/skeletal arcanist including minor prophecy, which would gone down to 96.2% if it wasn't working, and blastbones/skeletal arcanist still crit 100% of the time. Looks like minor prophecy works, and major prophecy doesn't.