ecru wrote: »

Necromancer

Tether abilities, such as Restoring Tether and Shocking Siphon, are now once again on the Global Cooldown, and have had their targeting improved furthermore.

First, this is a direct nerf to necro dps, which is already behind other magicka dps because of major prophecy not effecting Blastbones and Skeletal Arcanist, a bug (or feature now, I guess?) which hasn't been fixed for months. Second, players don't want to stand around wasting global cooldowns trying to get an ability to work, so not only is this a nerf, it's going to end up as yet another reduction in playability for the necro class in general. If the changes you make to class abilities end up with them going from being actively used to only being slotted for a passive effect, it might be a good time to rethink those changes. If you want to nerf necro for whatever reason, reduce the damage or healing of some abilities, don't do it by making the class more miserable to play than it already is.

Necro requiring corpses to do less damage than other magicka classes is already making it miserable to play. My ground AOE can't do as much damage as other classes ground AOEs unless I cast it on a corpse, which means I have to wait for blastbones to hit my target to reach the same damage as every other class. Tether shares the same requirement and I get zero damage out of it without a corpse to use, but at least it was off gcd. Now you expect me to waste two gcds or more to make my character spin around and tether a corpse in BFE? No other class has these strict requirements to use abilities that are equal or worse than abilities every other class has, so why is necro constrained by this requirement only to end up doing worse? At the very least, the corpse requirement should mean abilities are slightly better, since, you know, no one else has to deal with that requirement.

Can at least one person on the dev team play a necro for a week?

katorga wrote: »

It got nerfed because of braided tether on stamcros in pvp.

The damage tether is only good for dummy parses.

ecru wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

It got nerfed because of braided tether on stamcros in pvp.

The damage tether is only good for dummy parses.

I don't think it's that big of a heal, is it? Also I'm hearing siphon barely works on PTS.

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

I agree that Siphon back on the global cooldown is a terrible change. It’s targeting has not been fixed, and it still grays out when aiming at a corpse. Some have theorized that it’s a LoS issue with other players, pets, standards, etc. blocking targeting on the corpse. I’m not sure the cause of the problem, but until the skill works reliably when cast it should not be on the GCD.

I will point out that you are mistaken about Blastbones and Arcanist crit. They were previously 10% crit lower than another skills, but it was not caused by Major Prophecy. The issue was Light Armor passives not being applied to pet damage, and that was fixed yesterday with 6.0.0.

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

I agree that Siphon back on the global cooldown is a terrible change. It’s targeting has not been fixed, and it still grays out when aiming at a corpse. Some have theorized that it’s a LoS issue with other players, pets, standards, etc. blocking targeting on the corpse. I’m not sure the cause of the problem, but until the skill works reliably when cast it should not be on the GCD.

I will point out that you are mistaken about Blastbones and Arcanist crit. They were previously 10% crit lower than another skills, but it was not caused by Major Prophecy. The issue was Light Armor passives not being applied to pet damage, and that was fixed yesterday with 6.0.0.

I don't think this is correct regarding major prophecy. Before it was completely broken with the last change to blastbones, major prophecy used to work with blastbones if inner light was slotted, and on live it just no longer works on pets at all. I spent awhile testing this to confirm.

edit: You could be right, but I remember awhile ago swapping inner light on parses with degeneration and seeing my parses drop consistently because of the loss of crit. I still have those parses and blastbones' crit was consistent (actually higher in a few of them) with the rest of my abilities, this was back in january iirc.

When I go back and look through some trial nights in January when I had inner light slotted, with over 1k hits of each, blastbones' crit rate was within 1-2% of front bar abilities.

https://imgur.com/a/Om571A5

I went back and looked through some parses again on esologs. The first aggregate parse was from January, the second was from April. This is consistent with all of my recent parses. My bar setup hasn't changed. Now, I could definitely be wrong about which passive it is, but the noticeable drop in crit came with the most recent change to blastbones pathing. Trial parses this month show about a 7-9% difference, while parses from january were about 2%.

https://imgur.com/a/NDS0YL1

https://imgur.com/a/pFmHn8k

here are a few others. top two are in jan, bottom two are this month.

@ecru I’ve also had mixed results in trials, sometimes showing Blastbones in line with other skills, but sometimes 20-30% behind in crits. It’s hard to tell with the RNG involved, but a few weeks ago we managed to narrow it down by building for just over 100% crit using Necro passives so there was no RNG and were able to confirm that Prophecy worked fine, but Light Armor passives did not https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/518610/light-armor-passives-do-not-affect-pets-or-status-effects#latest

I was glad to see that they fixed Light Armor passives in the PTS patch notes yesterday, and one of my friends tested it out yesterday and confirmed that it seems to be fixed. Bloodthirsty also affects pets now, which has been a big for as long as I can remember. I guess you never know when a new issue can pop up though, so keep an eye on it and I’d be interested to hear if your results agree on PTS or when Greymoor goes live.

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

I agree that Siphon back on the global cooldown is a terrible change. It’s targeting has not been fixed, and it still grays out when aiming at a corpse. Some have theorized that it’s a LoS issue with other players, pets, standards, etc. blocking targeting on the corpse. I’m not sure the cause of the problem, but until the skill works reliably when cast it should not be on the GCD.

I will point out that you are mistaken about Blastbones and Arcanist crit. They were previously 10% crit lower than another skills, but it was not caused by Major Prophecy. The issue was Light Armor passives not being applied to pet damage, and that was fixed yesterday with 6.0.0.

The annoying thing is that they have an existing skill in the game that targets corpses and works perfectly - Repentance! Why can't they steal the corpse recognition code from Repentence and apply it to Siphon? I realize that Siphon is a persistent effect while Repentence is instant, but we have existing working functionality for persistent beam effects in things like Zaan and Malubeth. It is frustrating that just about everything siphon does works in other parts of the game but they cannot get it to work for Necro.

ecru wrote: »

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

I agree that Siphon back on the global cooldown is a terrible change. It’s targeting has not been fixed, and it still grays out when aiming at a corpse. Some have theorized that it’s a LoS issue with other players, pets, standards, etc. blocking targeting on the corpse. I’m not sure the cause of the problem, but until the skill works reliably when cast it should not be on the GCD.

I will point out that you are mistaken about Blastbones and Arcanist crit. They were previously 10% crit lower than another skills, but it was not caused by Major Prophecy. The issue was Light Armor passives not being applied to pet damage, and that was fixed yesterday with 6.0.0.

The annoying thing is that they have an existing skill in the game that targets corpses and works perfectly - Repentance! Why can't they steal the corpse recognition code from Repentence and apply it to Siphon? I realize that Siphon is a persistent effect while Repentence is instant, but we have existing working functionality for persistent beam effects in things like Zaan and Malubeth. It is frustrating that just about everything siphon does works in other parts of the game but they cannot get it to work for Necro.

Same story with Necrotic Potency. Great skill, fun to use, senses if there are corpses nearby and works every time. It must be something about having to actually aim at a corpse that causes the issue, probably due to the notoriously buggy targeting and LoS issues in this game, even around things like a plant or a rock. They could easily change the coding of Siphon to pick a nearby corpse just like Potency or Repentance, and place the ground AoE either at the cursor location (like every other ground AoE) or at the targeted enemy’s location (like the move that vHRC destroyers cast against players). Instead we have to deal with an extremely frustrating skill for an entire year, with numerous failed attempts to fix it. And now it’s going to be even worse, with targeting still broken and putting it back on the GCD so we can’t spam it simultaneously with other skills trying to get a lucky cast.

Yeah I still have LOS issues due to the smallest objects, one glaring example is the trash pack at the very start of Sunspire. If you're on the stairs and facing the cats, if the tank pulls the cats too far into the pool, the ledge or whatever it is that borders the pool is apparently "large" enough to cause LOS/targeting issues. I suspect things like this are part of the reason siphon never works properly and because of these issues, it just doesn't make sense to tie it to the gcd if it's functionality isn't substantially altered.

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

I agree that Siphon back on the global cooldown is a terrible change. It’s targeting has not been fixed, and it still grays out when aiming at a corpse. Some have theorized that it’s a LoS issue with other players, pets, standards, etc. blocking targeting on the corpse. I’m not sure the cause of the problem, but until the skill works reliably when cast it should not be on the GCD.

I will point out that you are mistaken about Blastbones and Arcanist crit. They were previously 10% crit lower than another skills, but it was not caused by Major Prophecy. The issue was Light Armor passives not being applied to pet damage, and that was fixed yesterday with 6.0.0.

The annoying thing is that they have an existing skill in the game that targets corpses and works perfectly - Repentance! Why can't they steal the corpse recognition code from Repentence and apply it to Siphon? I realize that Siphon is a persistent effect while Repentence is instant, but we have existing working functionality for persistent beam effects in things like Zaan and Malubeth. It is frustrating that just about everything siphon does works in other parts of the game but they cannot get it to work for Necro.

Same story with Necrotic Potency. Great skill, fun to use, senses if there are corpses nearby and works every time. It must be something about having to actually aim at a corpse that causes the issue, probably due to the notoriously buggy targeting and LoS issues in this game, even around things like a plant or a rock. They could easily change the coding of Siphon to pick a nearby corpse just like Potency or Repentance, and place the ground AoE either at the cursor location (like every other ground AoE) or at the targeted enemy’s location (like the move that vHRC destroyers cast against players). Instead we have to deal with an extremely frustrating skill for an entire year, with numerous failed attempts to fix it. And now it’s going to be even worse, with targeting still broken and putting it back on the GCD so we can’t spam it simultaneously with other skills trying to get a lucky cast.

Yeah I still have LOS issues due to the smallest objects, one glaring example is the trash pack at the very start of Sunspire. If you're on the stairs and facing the cats, if the tank pulls the cats too far into the pool, the ledge or whatever it is that borders the pool is apparently "large" enough to cause LOS/targeting issues. I suspect things like this are part of the reason siphon never works properly and because of these issues, it just doesn't make sense to tie it to the gcd if it's functionality isn't substantially altered.

Yep. The off-GCD siphon was a band-aid fix, that’s now being ripped off while the wound underneath remains the same (or possibly worse).

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

My Psijic powers have shown me a glimpse of one potential future:

1. These changes go through

2. Necros stop using the ability and instead slot it only for the 3% damage passive

3. Next patch ZOS says: "We don't like that Necros are only slotting this ability for the passives so we have removed them and have instead buffed Tether damage by *checks spreadsheet* 8.45%"

4. Necros drop the ability from their bars

5. Time passes, Magicka Blastbones still isn't fixed, and magCros move on to a different class

Really does make you wonder if they play their own game.