PTS Update 26 - Feedback Thread for Classes & Abilities

Maxdevil · April 2020

I would like if zos change balanced warrior passive forme Templar to give physical resistance too it’s weird to get only spell resistance . It would be nice to throw « WHILE AN AEDRIC SPEAR ABILITY IS SLOTTED » or « WHILE USING » to piercing spear or spear wall passive to allow multiple builds

Templar class identity need some rework to their Dawn's Wrath Skills
Templar: These traveling knights call upon the power of light and the burning sun... they pride themselves on steadfastly resisting occult forces, be they mage, daedra, or undead. Dawn's Wrath Skills Should have more fire damage skills for example radiant destruction is considered a mag damage but look at the contradiction « Burn an enemy with a ray of holy fire, dealing X Magic damage »?? Or look at nova « Call down a fragment of the sun, dealing X Magic Damage » ? Dawn wrath skill line is supposed to be a fire skill line..

Blynjubitr · April 2020

SidraWillowsky wrote: »

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

Stamina Warden:

While I generally approve of this patch, I love the new trial, I feel the bulk of the changes were in a positive direction, etc...it troubles me that Zos seems to continue to ignore just how abysmal Stamdens are in PVE atm. While the parse releases right now are absolutely insane due to the overtooled Vamp skills, particularly frenzy which only some classes can reasonably sustain while others lack the meaningful self-heals to work with, even without those you see a Stamina DPS class trailing well beyond Mag DPS, including their own Magden counterparts. Stamdens haven't really been higher than #3 at any point in their history, but since Elsweyr have continued to get pummeled down into complete and total irrelevance.

If you cruise over to ESOLogs and look through Stamden parses, of what few there actually are, I am typically the only one that's even remotely competitive, and it's still incredibly bad. I've played this class since release and work very hard to try to excel, but look at raptors, as an example, from vHOF. My best parse this patch on Stamden is 94.9k overall, which isn't horrendous. However, compared to the field of current ESOlog parses for that fight, I am sitting at...216th. I'm not some random scrub who picked up Stamden this patch and decided to get froggy.

Stamden has consistently struggled to stay in the meta, and the constant nerfs and 'retools' which just end up being nerfs are exhausting. I'm not asking for Stamden to be broken in PVP (because I don't actually PVP) or take over as the top Stam DPS, simply be competitive in the field. That's it. There's a litany of ways this could be accomplished without breaking Stamden in PVE. For example, here's a change i've proposed repeatedly to address two issues that plague Stamden: too much burst in PVP, and poor sustained damage in PVE.

Subterranean Assault:
Stir a group of Shalk that attacks after 3 seconds, dealing x Poison Damage to enemies in front of you, and an additional x Poison Damage damage over 2 seconds.
Enemies damaged are afflicted with Major Fracture, reducing their Physical Resistance by 5280 for 6 seconds.

This directly reduces their burst in PVP, their "pain point", as a percentage of damage can be moved from the burst portion to the over-time portion, while also allowing you to increase the overall damage of the main Stamina Warden DPS skill. Or just move the damage and buff other areas. The point is, i've suggested at least thirty ideas of various ways to put power back into Stamden's kits after the repeated sledgehammer to the dome they've received for the past year or so, including filtering ideas through class reps, but it seems Zos is content to let the class be terrible. That makes me so, so sad.

C'mon, guys. Don't let another PTS cycle go without even attempting to give Stamden some desperately needed love.

The issue with Stamden seems to be that it's one of the strongest PvP classes (I'm told, at least) but has become the new meme status class in PvE. Nerfs to balance it in PvP are likely going to make it even worse in PvE, and buffs to balance it in PvE will result in even more OP-ness in PvP. Rock and a hard place...

The Warden's class spammable is optimized at range, but this will only make a positive difference to DPS if you're using your bow bar, which kind of forces one into a Bowden.... which is in an abysmal state, and I don't want to play a Bowden anyway. I personally keep Dive on my DW bar, so I have to be close enough to be able to get my DW LAs in, which means I get no real bonus. But the bonus is this stupid and random Off-Balance "perk" that seems to have been forced upon us, and the stam morph is especially strange with its even-more-random bleed damage. Wouldn't poison damage make more sense given the nature-based class? And we won't even talk about how clunky Dive is to begin with...

It sucks. I created a stamblade, stamplar, and stamden in the PTS and am by far the most comfortable on the stamden. Thanks to sub assault's major fracture and wings' minor berserk, I'm able to easily clear 50k on the 6 mil (though I have ot use freaking Rapid Strikes instead of Dive as my spammable if I want the highest DPS possible). With stamblade and stamplar, I have to slot Camo Hunter and parse behind the dummy if I'm self-buffing, which feels like cheating. However... stamblade and stamplar outperform the stamden on the 21 mil by a stupidly large margin.

Magwarden has pulled ahead largely, I think, because it has a small cult following lead by someone passionate about improving the class (especially the frost skills). His ideas have actually been implemented and have benefit the class quite a bit. I don't see people rallying around stamden the same way, especially in PvE, so I think it's just kind of been forgotten entirely.

Wardens have been nerfed in PvE intentionally(for reasons i really don't know and don't understand). PvP and PvE wardens depends on completely different skills and passives. But the part i don't understand, you make an expansion class to selll it and you nerf it so hard so nobody will ever play it or buy it, whatever. It is so sad.

and even when they had decent DPS numbers, they did not have any useful utility to bring into trials. Major fracture, tank already aplies, Minor vulnerability, healer already aplies. You have literally 0 utility to provide for your group. That's the problem.(As DPS ofc)

DustyWarehouse · April 2020

Regarding the bash changes... Not only is the 80% value a red flag (remember the proposed light attack change?), but what irks me even more is the developer comment:

The above changes were made to reduce the impact of bash weaving in a normal damage dealer's rotation, which was creating a huge rift between those who did and did not engage with the mechanic.

This is akin to saying those who don't engage in the pressing buttons don't do as much damage as those who do. Again, you fail to address the actual issue, which isn't that bash weaving is over-performing, but that less experienced players simply don't know about it or how to use the concept in their rotations.

The majority of what makes a less experienced player do less damage than a more experienced player is knowledge and practice, and the game doesn't do a good enough job at providing knowledge. Armed with knowledge, the player can make an active decision to either engage in the mechanic or not. If they choose not to, that's on them.

Go ahead and make the changes to bash, but that attitude fills me with dread for future patches.

Atherakhia · April 2020

DustyWarehouse wrote: »

Regarding the bash changes... Not only is the 80% value a red flag (remember the proposed light attack change?), but what irks me even more is the developer comment:

The above changes were made to reduce the impact of bash weaving in a normal damage dealer's rotation, which was creating a huge rift between those who did and did not engage with the mechanic.

This is akin to saying those who don't engage in the pressing buttons don't do as much damage as those who do. Again, you fail to address the actual issue, which isn't that bash weaving is over-performing, but that less experienced players simply don't know about it or how to use the concept in their rotations.

The majority of what makes a less experienced player do less damage than a more experienced player is knowledge and practice, and the game doesn't do a good enough job at providing knowledge. Armed with knowledge, the player can make an active decision to either engage in the mechanic or not. If they choose not to, that's on them.

Go ahead and make the changes to bash, but that attitude fills me with dread for future patches.

Perhaps that's the thing they're trying to fix?

There are certain mechanics in this game that are 'barriers to entry' for new players. Chief among them are things like bar swapping (because it's buggy and unreliable), light attack weaving/animation cancelling (because it's unintuitive), and bash spamming (because the only thing this game does to reinforce this behavior is specifically to spell interrupt). New or old player, veteran PVE or PvP player, these mechanics are just too unintuitive and too buggy to expect players to ever naturally pick them up.

It's clear ZOS wants to move the game away from these mechanics and put more emphasis on gear and general ability rotations and debuff/dot management. In the long run it's probably a reasonable change to make and trying to use these buggy/unintuitive mechanics as a kind of status symbol to separate the novice from the pro needs to go. The issue is if they can do it successfully or not and if the 'juice is worth the squeeze'. Time will tell.

DustyWarehouse · April 2020

Atherakhia wrote: »

DustyWarehouse wrote: »

....

Perhaps that's the thing they're trying to fix?

There are certain mechanics in this game that are 'barriers to entry' for new players. Chief among them are things like bar swapping (because it's buggy and unreliable), light attack weaving/animation cancelling (because it's unintuitive), and bash spamming (because the only thing this game does to reinforce this behavior is specifically to spell interrupt). New or old player, veteran PVE or PvP player, these mechanics are just too unintuitive and too buggy to expect players to ever naturally pick them up.

It's clear ZOS wants to move the game away from these mechanics and put more emphasis on gear and general ability rotations and debuff/dot management. In the long run it's probably a reasonable change to make and trying to use these buggy/unintuitive mechanics as a kind of status symbol to separate the novice from the pro needs to go. The issue is if they can do it successfully or not and if the 'juice is worth the squeeze'. Time will tell.

I agree that bash weaving for damage output is unintuitive, and I'm not against the change per se. My issue is that they're generally trying to address the gap between low and high damage output by reducing the high end, when they could be doing a much better job of informing low end players how to reach that high end.

Bash weaving is a bad example, because as I say, it is unintuitive. A better example would be light attack weaving - I disagree with you about it being unintuitive - if you add extra attacks between your skills, you'll do more damage. That's quite obvious. But other than a hint on a load screen, the game doesn't teach this to an aspiring DD.

I also don't think bar swapping is a barrier to entry. The game informs players they can have a second bar when they reach level 15, though I still don't think it goes far enough to teach a player the full value of having two bars and swapping between them. And if bar swapping is buggy and unreliable then it should be fixed, but the concept is fine. ZOS have a propensity for making changes to things to address bugs rather than fix those bugs. Animation cancelling is a topic in its own right, so let's not get into that here.

Moving away from player skill (acquired through learning and practice) to relying solely on gear leaves little room for progression. Especially when you consider the changes to arena weapons in this update. Handing a player the tools to do more damage won't necessarily make them a better player, but the experience of going through challenging content will.

Sitja · April 2020

Magicka Necromancer, Mystic Siphon issues in Trial content

I went to Veteran Kyne's Aegis and we completed every bosses. We were two Magicka Necromancers in the group.

I noticed that the Mystic Siphon spell is available all the time when there is a corpse somewhere -> There is an improvement of the ability to cast it.

However, there is still a major issue in my opinion. This issue happens when there is more than one Necromancer in the group.
It becomes almost impossible to achieve to cast the Mystic Siphon spell. You can press the button, we see that the spell is toggled on the ability bar, but the cast fails. You have to spam it if you want to achieve casting it.
I think the issue is related to corpse overlapping when there are multiple Necromancers Blastbones on a target.

Putting the spell to a global cooldown is in my opinion a mistake if you cannot fix the bug of "fail to cast when multiple Necromancers are in the group using Blastbones".

I really hope this bug could be fixed because casting Siphon in raid is a real pain. And Siphon is in theory a super cool ability to increase dps, and tons of players get very frustrated about that.

To put the spell "off GCD" was just a temporary fix as it allowed the players to "spam the button" without hurting their dps. But if the spell is back in the GCD then every bug related to it should be fixed or this spell will become useless, as it is already the case for some players.
Today Siphon is already a pain when not in PTS, and with the current changes it will become a bad spell to use for multiple-Necromancers-groups.

xAlucardx92 · April 2020

So Overall I would like to see some Changes off the Ideas for Light & Heavy Attacks in Combat, some of them were actually not bad.

• All Light, Medium, and Heavy Attacks now scale with your highest offensive stats.
• All weapon-based Light Attacks will restore 90 Stamina or Magicka per hit, depending on what Stat is higher.
• Only fully charged Heavy Attacks stun a target which is off balance.

Morphs from Weakness to Elements
• Remove the “Minor Magickasteal” and redesign this skill and reduce the Cost for the most Magicka Skills (for me is this Skill the reason why all Magicka Skills are more expensive, compere to Stamina Skills).

Some Ideas for Magicka DK (PVP)

Overall increase the Dot Damage about 10%! The current Dot Damage in PVP is too low.

• Seething Fury (Molten Whip) should only be “consumed on use” when you have 3 Stacks of it, not when you have 1 or 2. Reduce the time for the Stack to 4sec.

• The heal from Burning Embers should always heal you for 75% Dmg of the Dot tick, not when the Effect ends.
• Inferno change to: " Upon activation you gain Major Prophecy".

• Passiv “World in Ruin” change the 6% off Flame area dmg buff to some kind off; “Fire Damage Deals up to 10% more damage to enemies with less than 50% Health.

• Mag Dk need a source for Major Evasion (we are a melee Class in light Armor, but still a Knight so this should fit in the Class role). For that you should redesign the skill Protective Scale and his Morphs. The Animation should look like “Lightning Form” but surround by fire.

Cinbri · April 2020

Vampiric Drain & Radiant Destruction:
After overhaul of Vamp Drain it became as ranged beam just like templar beam but it works exactly how templar beam should work, i.e. it don't have empty channel on cast, that crippling templar beam.

^^As it shown Drain is ticking since 0.0sec while templar beam ticking after 0.3sec after cast.

As result for Drain it prevent skill from having problems related to empty channel:

^^ It doesn't loosing its function of dealing damage and can be anim cancelled like rest of skills.

But for Radiant Destruction it works completely different:

^^as it seen this 0.3s empty channel create entire pool of problems:
1. Skill can't be used with animation cancelling like other skills, because it proc passive, draining magicka, apply channel debuff, aggro opponent, even playing animation of attack but it stop doing its damage of even 1st tick. We have a weird problem of skill draining its mana cost but not dealing damage with playing misleading animation.
2. Empty channel preventing templar beam from fulfilling its role of execute. Because when execute activated at the beginning of gcd wont deal scaled damage based on % of target hp at this moment, instead it will grant opponent another 0.3s to counter to either completely evade execute by losing/cloaking like this:

or use damage shield or heal, i.e. scaling of execute bonus by default lower than it should be when execute button was pressed to execute Order 66 target.
3. Empty channel heavily negatively impacted by ping spikes. It is especially visible during prime time when coz high ping this 0.3s empty channel preventing skill to deal damage for seconds after activation.
4. Empty channel create an unique bug of skill being force-casted on already dead target and play its full animation. This is caused when beam activated but target died within 0.3s of empty channel, that is not auto cancel beam.

5. It grant additional options of counter channeled execute by bashing or cleansing. So execute despite being used against target wont deal damage but incase of interrupt will also apply negative consequences for caster.

Recap: this empty channel is exact reason why this execute cant fulfill its role of execute in PvP, as it have serious drawbacks caused by empty channel and for this reason empty channel must be removed. so it will function as fluidly as Vampiric Drain.
To retain its 1.8 channel time but with ticking since 0.0 it can get higher frequency but lower damage ticks to be scattered along its 1.8s but turn its from 0.7-0.8s ticks into 0.450s ticks that turn it from 3 ticks into 5 ticks:
0.000 - 1st tick
0.450 - 2nd tick
0.900 - 3rd tick
1.350 - 4th tick
1.800 - 5 tick

P.S.: Having empty channel on channeled ability is like having additional cast-time on ability with cast-time.

This_0ne · April 2020

I am disappointed by the lack of skills or sets with the summon of the gargoyle. Really looking forward to something like this, I hope for a future appearance.

Deathlord92 · April 2020

Please zos I’m begging you buff nb the community has giving you some amazing ideas as to what you can do in past posts. I just want that assassin feel it’s what I personally love playing and will only play.

Nicalas · April 2020

Bash: I don’t understand these changes. You already nerfed s&b bash into the ground when you gutted the skill line after bash necro came out. Bashing adds only roughly 2k dps in a parse bit is an unique and fun part of rotations. Some people can’t get the timing and that allows some separation.

Necro Tether: with bash changes and this skill now costing a gcd both stam and mag have lost considerable amount of dps. It’s too many skills to cast and rotations don’t line up. Either ramp the damage and add a skill cost or revert the change. they also still randomly target the archer or mage turning ur character 90 degrees.

Bound arms is total trash. Give stam sorc a real skill. Crystal slap idk. As long as it’s not a ranged stam spammable.

On that note. Stop making stamina spammables channels or ranged attacks. Birds, silver shards, skull, stone fist. These are all horrible designs. They don’t proc bleeds and with bash damage nerfs you either run wrecking or channeled. No other option.

The stamina morph of imbue weapon is complete garbage the animation is clunky and you lose a gcd on the first cast. Make it work differently or make it work like elemental weapon.

Everytime players find a new mechanic and make it popular you drastically change its function and make it unusable. Stop doing this.

evaldas92 · April 2020

Necromancer

Flame Skull, Ricochet Skull
Projectile travel time is too long and can be dodged out of too easily.

Blastbones morph Stalking Blastbones

Morph is not useful and not fun to play with.Either enemies run too fast/too far for blastbones to catch up to enemy within 8 seconds, or blastbones just decides to stand idle doing nothing.
As such, morph almost never comes into play, whereas morph Blighted Blastbones can be utilized much more reliably, especially because used by melee stamina builds, meaning 8 seconds duration is usually more than enough.
Blighted Blastbones should instead remove/reduce the delay until blastbones jumps to make it more responsive.

Shocking Siphon, Mystic Siphon, Detonating Siphon

Siphon is still unreliably in terms of positioning and targeting making it less useful and not fun to play with. Instead, Shocking Siphon should connect to a living enemy with the same effect.
Mystic Siphon morph could then consume a nearby corpse (near the target) to restore magicka.
Detonating Siphon morph could consume a nearby corpse (near the player) to explode after spell ends.

Restoring Tether. Braided Tether, Mortal Coil

Tether is still unreliable in terms of positioning and targeting, making it less useful and not fun to play with.
All three abilities should connect with enemies. Morphs would consume nearby corpses with same effects

Thanks.

Blynjubitr · April 2020

DustyWarehouse wrote: »

Regarding the bash changes... Not only is the 80% value a red flag (remember the proposed light attack change?), but what irks me even more is the developer comment:

The above changes were made to reduce the impact of bash weaving in a normal damage dealer's rotation, which was creating a huge rift between those who did and did not engage with the mechanic.

This is akin to saying those who don't engage in the pressing buttons don't do as much damage as those who do. Again, you fail to address the actual issue, which isn't that bash weaving is over-performing, but that less experienced players simply don't know about it or how to use the concept in their rotations.

The majority of what makes a less experienced player do less damage than a more experienced player is knowledge and practice, and the game doesn't do a good enough job at providing knowledge. Armed with knowledge, the player can make an active decision to either engage in the mechanic or not. If they choose not to, that's on them.

Go ahead and make the changes to bash, but that attitude fills me with dread for future patches.

Bash weave adds 3k dps on DUMMY with CP spend on bash. CP SPEND ON BASH COST !!! So do not come here and tell me that bashing adds 3k dps to your rotation in any trial or dungeon. If you are stam and using it for any other reason then execute or proccing maarselok you have dps loss due to oversustaining. If you are magicka, well we are in elder stamina online, play stam.

DustyWarehouse · April 2020

Blynjubitr wrote: »

DustyWarehouse wrote: »

Regarding the bash changes... Not only is the 80% value a red flag (remember the proposed light attack change?), but what irks me even more is the developer comment:

The above changes were made to reduce the impact of bash weaving in a normal damage dealer's rotation, which was creating a huge rift between those who did and did not engage with the mechanic.

This is akin to saying those who don't engage in the pressing buttons don't do as much damage as those who do. Again, you fail to address the actual issue, which isn't that bash weaving is over-performing, but that less experienced players simply don't know about it or how to use the concept in their rotations.

The majority of what makes a less experienced player do less damage than a more experienced player is knowledge and practice, and the game doesn't do a good enough job at providing knowledge. Armed with knowledge, the player can make an active decision to either engage in the mechanic or not. If they choose not to, that's on them.

Go ahead and make the changes to bash, but that attitude fills me with dread for future patches.

Bash weave adds 3k dps on DUMMY with CP spend on bash. CP SPEND ON BASH COST !!! So do not come here and tell me that bashing adds 3k dps to your rotation in any trial or dungeon. If you are stam and using it for any other reason then execute or proccing maarselok you have dps loss due to oversustaining. If you are magicka, well we are in elder stamina online, play stam.

Did you quote the wrong person?

Extinct_Solo_Player · April 2020

Would have been nice if you didnt pigenhole people into using one spammable due to nerfing other weapon skill line spammables. I remember the time 2H, SNB and DW were all viable for offense but now people are forced to run 2H for a spammable because there are no other options that deal enough damage. I won't even go into class spammables because you clearly can't make a useful one for stam dk, stam sorc etc. So much for build variety.....

Baraber · April 2020

Looks like there are some class changes after all!
magicka nightblade is getting a nerf in the form of a new/returning bug:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/523466/magicka-flood-nightblade-passive-is-not-working-on-the-pts

Alucu · April 2020

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/451765/templar-tanks-self-healing-needs-a-fix/

This remains true, im aware its complicated because of the current self healing templars currently have, but templar PvE tanks remain fairly inviable without this tweak

SodanTok · April 2020

I dont have any numbers or evidence, but I am sure there is plenty and impossible to ignore, so my feedback is very simple:

I dislike balancing team 'decided' they are done with class balancing the same time (over half year ago) they made Stamina Warden in PVE clearly inferior (and every evidence supports that) to other stamina builds. In a way this ruined ESO for me more than any other decisions in its 6 year history as for the first time I am getting feeling (and devs action and behavior support it) that the class balancing job is done and this is their vision for class balance.

If i am to assume no changes enter later stages of PTS patches then expected time of nearest possible patch is August, making this about 10 months - the longest period without class balancing to ever happen in ESO yet also one of more imbalanced periods ESO had. Incredibly disappointing year of ESO.

ArcVelarian · April 2020

Please for the love of Talos remove the cast time from Stone Giant. There's absolutely no point to it.

Hamboot · April 2020

I think it would be cool if the tp shade of the Nb skill line had a sound notification at the end of it when it's about to die so we can easily keep track of it, the second thing that would be cool is to ease up the magblade burst combo currently magblade's burst combo is way too complicated and takes too much time to set up (5 light attacks is just too long, in the past even with this we used to have minor berzeck by just activating the skill to compensate for the fact that we couldn't do big boy dmg immediately) which makes this class particularly mediocre for game modes like Bg, a rework of grim focus would be a great idea, it would be cool if the impale execute had a shorter range in favor of it working at 50%, I think this class is very tanky but really not reliable in small scale pvp which is a shame (least reliable spec to play in BG in fact it's almost useless sometimes), magblade in bg feels pretty much like a super clumsy and awkward ninja.

kalunte · April 2020

nightblade. cast times that are listed every week. delays and so one. not adressed but keeps on ruining the fun.

Princess_Ciri · April 2020

PvE changes feedback specifically relating to magicka dragonknights/magicka class balance:

The nerf to the perfected asylum staff has hit magicka dragonknights the hardest. I have found on the pts if I want to keep the same amount of damage + sustain I have on the live server, I have to use whip (which is a shame because it's melee - the big advantage of the asylum staff for magdk (and to some extent magplar) was that you were not forced into melee range when using your 'spammable' attack.

MagDK damage is now worse than ranged magicka classes like magicka nightblade - but it also has less versatility and sustain. I have found that the only way to match magicka nightblade damage is to use the vampire spammable attack 'blood for blood' but I expect that this ability is going to be nerfed before live anyway because it is extremely strong.

I think that if a magicka class is forced to play melee (like magdk will be), it is unfair to also make them do less damage (therefore more likely to be replaced by a stamina class in trial groups) as well as having worse sustain compared to their ranged counterparts.

However if the vampire spammable's damage isn't nerfed then I guess it doesn't matter because all magicka classes will play melee to use that ability!

Skjaldbjorn · April 2020

SodanTok wrote: »

I dont have any numbers or evidence, but I am sure there is plenty and impossible to ignore, so my feedback is very simple:

I dislike balancing team 'decided' they are done with class balancing the same time (over half year ago) they made Stamina Warden in PVE clearly inferior (and every evidence supports that) to other stamina builds. In a way this ruined ESO for me more than any other decisions in its 6 year history as for the first time I am getting feeling (and devs action and behavior support it) that the class balancing job is done and this is their vision for class balance.

If i am to assume no changes enter later stages of PTS patches then expected time of nearest possible patch is August, making this about 10 months - the longest period without class balancing to ever happen in ESO yet also one of more imbalanced periods ESO had. Incredibly disappointing year of ESO.

I feel this pain. Stamden is just god awful in so many ways and it breaks my heart. I've been fighting the good fight since last patch about this, but Zos doesn't seem to care.

YandereGirlfriend · April 2020

I would like to call for a buff to Lacerate, the DW ultimate.

At present, the Lacerate morphs suffer from being weaker numerically than the Bow and Destruction Staff ultimates, which hurts in PvE, while also lacking any form of burst, which substantially weakens it in PvP when compared to the 2H ultimate.

I do enjoy the DoT-based nature of the skill and it feels thematically true to the savagery of a DW attack, but this initial appeal is also its greatest drawback. Especially for PvP, simply dealing damage will never make it attractive to run over the 2H ultimate, as players can simply heal through the damage as it slowly comes in.

As such, it needs to do something extra in order to justify its lack of burst, something like providing heal absorption or Major Defile. Giving Thrive in Chaos (the shorter morph) one of these enhancements would immediately make it desirable in the high-healing PvP environment.

As for Rend (the longer morph), there is a straightforward solution to its PvE viability and that is simply increasing the overall damage done, as weapon ultimates are balanced to give you raw damage rather than providing group utility or passive buffs like the guild and class ultimates do.

Make Rend the PvE morph and buff its damage by 25%-50%, dropping the self-heal if need be in order to free up "power budget" and further differentiate it from the PvP morph.

Make these two changes and players will begin slotting the DW ultimate again.

eovogtb16_ESO · May 2020

Syphon shouldn't be on a GCD. This absolutely kills the magcro and makes it not a good choice for endgame raids. Also feels really bad on the stamcro. Also blastbones is still bugged on the PTS same issue that has plagued it for the last 6 or so months when you have to constantly swap bars in order to be able to use the skill.

Also, becuase syphon is on the GCD now it makes it virtually impossible to use if you have more than a couple necromancer in the group. You are unable to actually cast it.

shrekt4303 · May 2020

I propose normalizing all executes to 33% health.
2h execute at 50% is stronger than dw execute at 25%.
Dual wield ultimate needs to be like 75 ultimate or it needs to be buffed. Rend is useless in pvp because it can be out healed or cleansed. Make rend 8 seconds and the other morphs 4 seconds but keep the damage the same. Have it heal for 100% of damage done to offset the healing debuff in pvp.

Have light armor also reduce the cost of break free per piece worn.

Have Deadric Tomb be a stamina morph.

Centurionax · May 2020

Necro

Blighted blastbones still to powerfull
Maybe just change the major defile into minor

And give the magica morph a better side affect a additional snare or something

But dont hit it with the sledgehammer pls

Hooded_1 · May 2020

I was testing BRP dual wield on the back bar with axe/dagger and noticed that deadly cloak/quick cloak does NOT proc axe bleeds. This is inconsistent with other skills like Stampede, rapid strikes, rending slashes, wrecking blow, executioner etc. This is probably a bug

Alchimiste1 · May 2020

After dueling on the pts for a bit, I'm of the opinion the the surprise attack changes feel more like a nerf. What people were saying about it affecting your burst is correct. The random stunning on people is a huge pain and it makes it much harder to actually go for a burst combo when you want. Please remove the stun from surprise attack, leave the off balance though, that would be nice. Cloak still broke btw.

olsborg · May 2020

olsborg wrote: »

Same setup on both tests, thats with master dualwield. Its roughly 30% more dmg on twin slashes compared to surprise attack and thats not even counting in the ~10k dot afterwards on twin slash. Why even bother playing a nightblade or use any class skills for dmg?