Is stamcro really OP? (specifically in No-CP)

firestell · June 2020

All the time I see people commenting here how stamcro is currently a really strong class in PvP but I just don't see it. I did moderately well in BGs pre 50 but now I just get trashed aside, same as I did on my magplar. I know I'm bad so this could very well be a l2p issue, but I don't see other stamcros overperforming either. Most of my death recaps consist of weapon skills, and sometimes I get jabs, frags, and leaps to show up there, but It's been a really long while since I've seen a blighted blastbones pop up. I'm not trying to question everyone and say stamcro is weak, I'd just like to know If anyone else feels the same way.

Also, if you're one of the OP stamcros, is Dizzy + Blighted Blastbones + buffs all there is to it? Or is there another trick I'm missing?

Zekka · June 2020

They're good but overhyped, and a lot of it is due to people trying to downplay their own classes ("I may play magsorc/stamden but at least I don't play the completely OP stamcro, rite guize?!§"), I probably see more stamplars dueling in Wayrest than stamcros.
They're especially good in duels because they have direct access to Major Defile which with the recent healing nerf can be very oppressive, you can't kite them out of their Mortal Coil range, Spirit Guardian actually heals them and in 1v1s with no LoS/targetting issues Blastbone is reliable. But in more hectic fights like BGs you can see their limits, you constantly have to break your Mortal Coil to LoS or chase someone, half the time Spirit Guardian heals someone else and Blastbones becomes infuriating to use: skill not casting even with a target in sight, blastbones doing nothing because its bad pathfinding can't find the target, dying before it's even fully summonned in the AoEfests that BGs have become, dying before it can reach other stamina players with near max mobility or because it got snared/rooted etc...
I would take a reskinned Sub Assault over Blastbones any day of the week because Sub Assault is actually reliable and you can pre cast it without a target, if it wasn't for Major Defile (and the weird snare that isn't even mentionned in the tooltip) Blighted Blastbones would be a mediocre burst damage skill. In fact Blighted Blastbone without Major Defile and the snare exists, it's called Stalking Blastbones and it's a bad skill, barely more damage than Haunting Curse with all the flaws mentionned above.

Firstmep · June 2020

Imho in the context of bgs(and bgs only): No.

Stamden has a lot more group utility with aoe major protection and cross heals, its also easier to land shalks on a group where blastbones can still be very clunky.
Dont get me wrong stamcros are still very tanky, however, in no cp that tankiness isnt going to get you very far by itself.
Especially in bgs, if you are caught out of position, then youre pretty much done, at least without mobility.
Magsorcs are far more powerful in bgs, since they dont have to commit to fights, and get away from most bad situations and reset fights at will, while having a superior burst heal to literally every heal in the game.
On the stam side, stamsorc have the upper hand in terms of mobility, stamblades have more easily avalailable single target burst, stamplar have easier to apply pressure, stam dks have dots that actually hurt this patch.
Anyway, there arent a lot of stamcros in bgs right now, and its easy to see why, the complete lack of mobility in the current bg meta really hurts their offensive capabilities.

pieratsos · June 2020

They are not overhyped. They just have a higher skill cap compared to some other classes because of their corpse micromanagement and sometimes it may be a little frustrating to play them because they have some clunky skills.

Rhaegar75 · June 2020

My take on Necro:
1. I played one and got bored to death...is it necromancy? No, it’s just that I found the gameplay very repetitive.
I’m not an amazing pvpers but duels were ridiculously easy to win but dull and repetitive

2. Fighting necros is equally dull and repetitive regardless of the outcome

wheem_ESO · June 2020

Zekka wrote: »

They're good but overhyped, and a lot of it is due to people trying to downplay their own classes ("I may play magsorc/stamden but at least I don't play the completely OP stamcro, rite guize?!§"), I probably see more stamplars dueling in Wayrest than stamcros.

Indeed. The gap between Stamina Necromancer and other Stamina classes is drastically smaller than the gap between those other Stamina classes and Magicka Necromancer (which is probably the overall worst MMO-PvP class I've ever played in any game).

Everyone likes to talk about the Spirit Guardian like it's some kind of ultra-overpowered spell that totally carries whomever is using it...but it doesn't carry Magicka Necromancer. And while the Stamina morph of Blastbones is far and away superior to the Magicka morph (and usually hits harder even on Vampires, thanks to itemization), it's not like the Magicka side of the class would suddenly become crazy OP if the secondary effects were switched. We/they would still be lacking a worthwhile stun, have worse mobility, less self healing/blocking/dodging, lower overall damage, etc...

What really elevates Stamina Necromancer so much is that the baseline/generic Stamina toolkit is so vastly superior to its Magicka counterpart. When you combine that overpowered baseline kit with Blastbones' Major Defile (and bugged snare that ZOS doesn't seem to care about) it becomes something that gets noticed by even other overpowered setups.

Rhaegar75 · June 2020

wheem_ESO wrote: »

Zekka wrote: »

They're good but overhyped, and a lot of it is due to people trying to downplay their own classes ("I may play magsorc/stamden but at least I don't play the completely OP stamcro, rite guize?!§"), I probably see more stamplars dueling in Wayrest than stamcros.

Indeed. The gap between Stamina Necromancer and other Stamina classes is drastically smaller than the gap between those other Stamina classes and Magicka Necromancer (which is probably the overall worst MMO-PvP class I've ever played in any game).

Everyone likes to talk about the Spirit Guardian like it's some kind of ultra-overpowered spell that totally carries whomever is using it...but it doesn't carry Magicka Necromancer. And while the Stamina morph of Blastbones is far and away superior to the Magicka morph (and usually hits harder even on Vampires, thanks to itemization), it's not like the Magicka side of the class would suddenly become crazy OP if the secondary effects were switched. We/they would still be lacking a worthwhile stun, have worse mobility, less self healing/blocking/dodging, lower overall damage, etc...

What really elevates Stamina Necromancer so much is that the baseline/generic Stamina toolkit is so vastly superior to its Magicka counterpart. When you combine that overpowered baseline kit with Blastbones' Major Defile (and bugged snare that ZOS doesn't seem to care about) it becomes something that gets noticed by even other overpowered setups.

Some good points here.

In this patch especially we have the mixture of characters having less healing whilst having to contend with an almost constant major defile.
If on top of that you add the typical (and rather boring) Stam kit....there you go...stamcro superiority explained

katorga · June 2020

Firstmep wrote: »

Imho in the context of bgs(and bgs only): No.

Anyway, there arent a lot of stamcros in bgs right now, and its easy to see why, the complete lack of mobility in the current bg meta really hurts their offensive capabilities.

No stamina build has a "Complete lack of mobility".

Zahirr · June 2020

So with skills like deaden pain, spirit guardian, and mortal coil, a stamnecro can be healing for 4k every second, as well as having a total percent mitigation of 43%, if i remeber correctly. 43% of all damage is mitigated, for what? Casting good abilities on corpses. God forbid they run the psyjiic ultimate for another 8, or shuffle? 76% mitigation on those jabs that you cant do anything about. Or your grothdar, or DOT ultimates? 91% reduction. And, with their passives they heal for 17% more (eat your heart out stamDK at 12%). And dont even get me started on how ZOS nerfed Snipe down from major to minor defile, but insta added it back onto stamcro.
Stamcro is, class wise, the most BROKEN thing I have ever seen, and I played when stamdk had a skill that reflected all ranged attacks.
Also blastbones costs 500 stamina. Its one of the cheapest, hardest hitting skills in the game.

OBJnoob · June 2020

Wow I think I just had my eyes opened. Is it weird that I read all of that but when I found out blastbones only cost 500 stamina it’s when I really got mad? Holy crap. N...neer... nah, not gonna say it.

katorga · June 2020

Zahirr wrote: »

So with skills like deaden pain, spirit guardian, and mortal coil, a stamnecro can be healing for 4k every second, as well as having a total percent mitigation of 43%, if i remeber correctly. 43% of all damage is mitigated, for what? Casting good abilities on corpses. God forbid they run the psyjiic ultimate for another 8, or shuffle? 76% mitigation on those jabs that you cant do anything about. Or your grothdar, or DOT ultimates? 91% reduction. And, with their passives they heal for 17% more (eat your heart out stamDK at 12%). And dont even get me started on how ZOS nerfed Snipe down from major to minor defile, but insta added it back onto stamcro.
Stamcro is, class wise, the most BROKEN thing I have ever seen, and I played when stamdk had a skill that reflected all ranged attacks.
Also blastbones costs 500 stamina. Its one of the cheapest, hardest hitting skills in the game.

Ballpark I subtract 1% for each source of % damage reduction to account for diminishing returns. It is close enough. On my necro, I always have some mixture of 3%, 8%, 10%, 30% (and 25% aoe if I'm playing stam) damage mitigation up around 60% of the time in group pvp. All of that plus a 800 cost BB, ~3k heals per second, and magcro is STILL bottom tier. 25K gold and 10 minutes to swap my Dark Elf to stam and it is glorious.

Warden is still better though.

firestell · June 2020

Zahirr wrote: »

So with skills like deaden pain, spirit guardian, and mortal coil, a stamnecro can be healing for 4k every second, as well as having a total percent mitigation of 43%, if i remeber correctly. 43% of all damage is mitigated, for what? Casting good abilities on corpses. God forbid they run the psyjiic ultimate for another 8, or shuffle? 76% mitigation on those jabs that you cant do anything about. Or your grothdar, or DOT ultimates? 91% reduction. And, with their passives they heal for 17% more (eat your heart out stamDK at 12%). And dont even get me started on how ZOS nerfed Snipe down from major to minor defile, but insta added it back onto stamcro.
Stamcro is, class wise, the most BROKEN thing I have ever seen, and I played when stamdk had a skill that reflected all ranged attacks.
Also blastbones costs 500 stamina. Its one of the cheapest, hardest hitting skills in the game.

Theory crafting like this is good but it just doesn't play out this way. I also though deaden pain was broken until I tried it, and at least for me it's useless. Also, if you search for pvp stamcro guides, none of them slot it. The major protection only lasts for 2 seconds per corpse consumed, and you lose at least half a second until the skill animation ends. In a BG environment your only "reliable" way to get corpses is through Blighted Blastbones but that skill is so clunky that it takes a while for the corpse to finally generate. It's also consuming corpses you need for mortal coil.

Under perfect conditions you could get 6 seconds of major protection every 20 seconds, if you manage to consume
summoner's armor + spirit guardian + blighted blastbones corpses. You can't even use Blighted Blastbones more than once in that time frame.

Just tried mortal coil and spirit guardian on No-CP IC. Spirit guardian healed for 497 every 2 seconds, and mortal coil healed for 133 per second and a 199 on a crit. My Blighted blastbones tooltip says it costs 1972, it can be reduced to 986 after the first one. I get that it's cheap but it's not like you can spam the skill anyway, because it takes a while before it goes off.

I'm not saying the class is weak, but it's not as broken as you make it out to be (at least in No-CP). As myself and others have mentioned, there aren't that many necros in battlegrounds.

Sergykid · June 2020

Zekka wrote: »

blastbones doing nothing because its bad pathfinding can't find the target

i don't get it why they added pathfinding to this. It's just a projectile, why it had to "look for target". It could simply have been a delayed projectile that looks like a skeleton and the delay would have been the summoning animation. No pathfinding, just flying to the target.

Fawn4287 · June 2020

You can literally CC the blastbones until it disintegrates, deaden pain is almost useless unless you zerg and have 3+ corpses to consume every time you use it, it has no class based reduce cost and requires a myriad of healing skills to cope with the healing nerfs, it is however very strong for group play, aoe major defile on its delayed damage is what needs to be nerfed and the self synergy on graveyard (or harmony) needs to go, even the most potato tank build can run around and drop major defile on you with a ~50% uptime + major venrability on colossus, harmony magcros literally run around with a 3 button combo to wipe groups and are tankier than most other magica builds, making it the easiest and only non glass bombing option.