Light Armor Passives Do Not Affect Pets or Status Effects

WrathOfInnos · March 2020

A few of us were tired of seeing various skills constantly showing a lower crit rate, so we did a lot of testing and managed to pinpoint the issue. I have data specifically for 4 skills:
- Stalking Blastbones (Necromancer Grave Lord pet)
- Skeletal Arcanist (Necromancer Grave Lord pet)
- Burning (status effect)
- Concussion (status effect)

To verify this, I set Spell Crit to 101.9% (41.9% while fighting a test dummy below 25% health, and using the Necromancer passive with 6 Grave Lord abilities to gain 60% Spell Crit). As you can see, the 4 abilities I listed all managed to land non-crit hits, despite the crit chance being over 100%.

Finding exactly which source of crit was causing the issue took some more time and testing. Thanks @wills43b14_ESO, @GulmarAvocado, @xxcurs3dxx, and @jayfillet for all the help. What we eventually found was that if we remove the Light Armor passives (by wearing 4 pieces instead of 5) and again bring the crit rate to just over 100%, then everything works fine. Here is an example with no LIght Armor passives, and 100.9% crit chance. You can see that now every ability shows the correct 100% crit chance.

I suspect the other status effects are also affected, but did not specifically test them. I also have a strong suspicion that Sorcerer's Greater Storm Atronach is experiencing the same bug since it is always lower crit than other abilities, but it is more difficult to test conclusively on Sorcerer since they do not have a crit passive to reach 100%. I do not know if any stamina variants are affected, or if the Medium Armor Weapon Crit passive works for Blighted Blastbones, Skeletal Archer and Poisoned status effect, someone else will have to test those.

If anyone is curious, we also checked the Precise weapon trait, various armor sets including Mother's Sorrow, the Spell Precision Champion Point, the base character 10% spell crit, and Major Prophecy (from Inner Light, potions, or both), and all of these sources seem to be working correctly. It is just the 10% Spell Crit from Light Armor Prodigy that is bugged.

WrathOfInnos · March 2020

So after seeing these results, we started wondering if any of the Light Armor passives affect these pets. @wills43b14_ESO first tried the Necromancer Arcanist and Blastbones under various levels of Spell Penetration, and determined that they do not benefit from the 4884 Spell Penetration from the Concentration Passive.

I then did a similar test using a Sorcerer and the Greater Storm Atronach. Setting Spell Pen to just over the cap on the Iron Atronach dummy (5850 Spell Resistance), I tested the Atro's damage with the Lord Mundus Stone (does not affect damage, control data) and compared it to that of the Lover Stone (should not affect damage since any additional penetration is over the enemy's armor). All gear and buffs were kept constant between the two tests, with 9 points in Spell Erosion. The results showed a 9.3% damage increase on the Storm Atronach's Zap attack, corresponding to the 4.2k additional Spell Pen given by the Lover Stone (beyond the target's Spell Resistance if the Light Armor passives were working correctly). This proves the Storm Atro damage is not affected by the 4884 Spell Penetration from the Concentration passive.

Here is a side-by-side of the Storm Atro's damage with the Lord Stone and the Lover Stone:

It's also worth noting that the Light Attacks in those 2 screenshots prove that the target's spell resistance was fully debuffed. With both the Lord or the Lover stone the maximum Light Attack was exactly the same 13472 damage. The Twilight Tormentor appears to be working fine with Light Armor passives as well, since it's max hits were very similar at ~10.6k in each test.

I'm still having a difficult time proving that the Storm Atro does not gain the 10% Spell Crit from Prodigy (since I can't reach 100% crit on Sorc, and any other testing has RNG built-in), but after showing that it is missing Concentration this seems extremely likely.

Skjaldbjorn · March 2020

So Stam Necro's Blastbones and Archer have the same crit issues.

wills43b14_ESO · March 2020

The pen passive is clearly not working.

In these screenshots (first without the concentration passive, which adds 4884 spell pen). You can see my stats and stat changes as well as blastbones hits:

Here with the Concentration passive:

The difference here is a factor of 4884 pen on a 6m skeletal dummy (0 buffs or debuffs), which SHOULD affect blastbone dmg but does not.

For comparison, here are the same things but with skulls and bbs. WIthout Concentration:

With Concentration:

If we ignore the one skull weave that did crit, the max hits of Riochet Skull clearly increased, whereas the blastbones damge did not.

Setup (no CP) for reference. Note I never switched to back bar and I never had more than a 2 pc bonus.

wills43b14_ESO · March 2020

It's very probably Shade for nightblades has the same problems.

Skjaldbjorn · March 2020

Doesn't seem to be affecting Warden bear for crit as far as I can tell. Not sure on penetration. Haven't tested magden yet.

wills43b14_ESO · March 2020

@Skjaldbjorn it doesn't affect permanent pets (sorc matriarch/tormentor, clanfear/familiar, warden bear)

Skjaldbjorn · March 2020

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

@Skjaldbjorn it doesn't affect permanent pets (sorc matriarch/tormentor, clanfear/familiar, warden bear)

Ah gotcha. That makes some level of sense.

Skjaldbjorn · March 2020

Anyone tested Maw of the Infernal? lul

wills43b14_ESO · March 2020

@Skjaldbjorn we need to test pen on it, but it can't crit so the other part can't be seen.

wills43b14_ESO · March 2020

Allegedly the burning procced via bb isn't getting the passives either. We will try to confirm this.

WrathOfInnos · March 2020

wills43b14_ESO wrote: »

Allegedly the burning procced via bb isn't getting the passives either. We will try to confirm this.

Interesting, it's possible that the Burning and Concussion that were not getting the crit were sourced from the Blastbones and Arcanist in my testing. In that case, other sources of these status effects may benefit from the Light Armor Spell Crit and Spell Pen. Sounds difficult to test, but believable.

wills43b14_ESO · March 2020

I believe he's console, so he doesn't have a CMX, but I can get a CMX later if need be too.

WrathOfInnos · March 2020

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Gilliam @ZOS_RichLambert Could you take a look at this issue? I think we’ve got the problem pretty well defined: armor passives for crit and penetration are not applying to temporary combat pets (Blastbones, Skeleton Archer/Mage, and Storm Atronach) or the status effects they apply.