A plea to ZOS devs to not kill Blood for Blood

rockreborn · August 2020

I'm not sure how many have posted about this, but I felt it necessary to post something myself just in case it might have some affect. In my opinion, there is no change more disappointing in the recent patch notes than the nerf to Blood for Blood. I think everyone could agree this skill was overpowered, so the nerf was in order. But the "cannot be healed by anyone for 5 seconds" to me is completely unwarranted and makes the skill useless for any content other than dummy parsing. In fact, there is no use for the entire Vampire skill line in PvE content without it. Why was this done?

This skill allowed for extremely fun play, having much better sustain as well as adding a new dimension we hadn't seen before, being able to damage enemies and having it cost health points. It sucks for such a great skill to be completely nuked.

So I'm posting this to plead with the ZOS developers to remove the healing debuff from this skill before this patch goes live!

BahometZ · August 2020

I agree the 5 second no external healing is overkill.

Reducing the damage scaling was enough, it's a risky skill that I wouldn't use unless I was confident in my healers, or running a front bar heal. Zos should also make it available to stam, because having more options is better than having another dead skill in the game.

Outside of vet PvE, I wouldn't say the whole line was completely useless.

An AoE mag stun.
An escape/damage mitigation skill.
Invisible sprinting.
The ulti doesn't bring me joy but not everything needs to.
The health drain is bad though, should be a longer vampiric DoT, not a channel.

rockreborn · August 2020

Yeah, what I said was that the vampire skill line has no use in PvE, but obviously has a lot of use in PvP. I am wondering what ZOS was thinking remaking the blood for blood skill to what it is now. What situations can it ever realistically be used in? Just another knee jerk reaction to an overpowered skill that ZOS has done repeatedly. Instead of balancing it, just nerf it out of existence.

Vevvev · August 2020

I have no idea rockreborn what they are wanting for this ability, or even the entire skill line for that matter. I feel like they want everyone to use vampiric drain and blood for blood but you couldn't have come up with a worse combo of abilities even if you tried. A channeled heal that heals missing health does not perform well in this fast paced game that requires immediate healing and punishes channeled abilities by opening them up to interrupts.

In PVP cross healing is what allows you to stay alive in large fights when 2 zergs clash, but with the lack of healing from others BfB is even more of a liability in PVP as well as PVE. I honestly see no use for this ability for anything but solo overland content on classes with significant offensive healing like magDKs with their Burning Embers skill.

DT-ARR · August 2020

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adilazimdegilx · August 2020

It shouldnt be viable for PVE in the first place simply beacuse it turns every single magicka character to same melee dps. Sustain problems should be solved in classes' own skill trees.
Only possible return case for BfB should be with a huge nerf to damage (~50%) so it can still be use as a sustain tool WITH another spammable.
Plus with Thrassian gone from PVE, BfB would make magDK too powerful between magicka dps, again (about 10k ish more dps).
In any case, ZOS intention with vampire changes was mainly limit its usage on PVE for passives only. Same thing happened with BfB only this time people used vampire for 1 active skill.
I play mostly on magicka dps and I'm quite happy with both BfB and Thrassian changes on PVE.

Kardrik · August 2020

Hopefully once they nerf BfB into uselessness they'll look at the vampire skill line and see that its mostly trash, especially since they made even Arterial Burst weaker than class spammables.

Arterial Burst: Better to use a class spammable
Frenzy: Useful extremely situationally for burst and in vamp ultimate.
Drain: Channel to do trash damage for meh healing? Hard pass
Mist: Okay to use as a defensive option I suppose. Elusive is too slow to get away from combat, and blood mist hits too softly to justify using it for damage
Hypnosis: A stun if the target is looking at you and it fully registers server side.
Vamp Lord: Its like the necro ult but costs more.

So Vampire makes all other abilities cost more and these cheaper, so that we use these instead of other abilities?
They're all trash though. Is the increased ability cost, reduction in health regen, and increase to fire damage worth using those abilities?
It is not, unless you are already roflstomping the content you are playing and want to nerf yourself a bit;.

Kolzki · August 2020

IMO the problem lies in the whole concept of health cost abilities. With the current blood for blood, healers are effectively providing 2k magicka per second. That’s a crazily large number compared to other sources of resource return.

The solution for both bfb and and frenzy has been to disable healing from allies. That basically confirms that skills with heal costs, particularly toggles and spammables, don’t function well within the game mechanics.

Perhaps it would help to replace the 100% reduction in healing from allies with a reduction that scales depending on vampire level. It would still be extremely hard to balance the healing reduction with effective resource return. In pve we spend little time in the area between 100% heath and 0% health.

Shantu · August 2020

Or how about designing a Vampire class that's actually meaningful beyond providing a piece of skill cheese for parse monkeys. In that regard, BFB needed a nerf. But the problem goes far beyond one skill. I've been a fan of Vampires since I was a kid. But the implementation in ESO holds zero appeal. Far too many negatives to be worth the effort.

MashmalloMan · August 2020

Too late. Any concern regarding this and especially the concerns around proc sets and malacath will only be adressed in the next update... 3 months from this one as usual, it was pretty much decided as of week 2 when nothing changed.

They have a clear history of doing this for most larger concerns brought up on the pts. Larger in the sense that it would probably take a lot of time to fix or change.

Plus. If they have plans to work on something for the next patch that counters what may be a problem this patch, why change it now? For example, if proc sets are too strong, maybe next patch they plan on addressing the dot standard of 1.5x a spammable, so why adjust proc sets this patch when they like where it's at with future changes in mind.

In Scalebreaker it was 2.5x and ended up being too strong, many agree 1.5x is too weak. A middle ground might serve the game well and push proc sets out a little since your skills would scale better with damage stat investments again.

Xebov · August 2020

BahometZ wrote: »

I wouldn't use unless I was confident in my healers

This might be the exact reason why the they changed the skill. All skills require the player using them to maintain their resources. You can get resources from the outside but they are always supplements. For health this is different as most of it is usually coming from outside sources. In many situations this skill does not require any maintenance by the player using it because any healer can easily outheal it. Even i can outheal it on a friend with my Necro Tank. This however partially shifts the gameplay because the maintenance is now the job of others. Changing the skill in the way they did is now forcing the player using it again. My feeling is that tehy dont have a better solution yet because their toolkit has nothing suitable for this as Health using abilities are already rare. If im not misstaken this is even the first ability that generates damage by using health.

Kardrik · August 2020

It wouldn't be as much of a problem if Vampires weren't terrible at regenerating their own health!
But instead we barely have any selfhealing in tree, and even as stages go on our passive health regen gets gutted.

I think the BfB change would be a step in the right direction, IF vampires had a good bit off self healing they can slot.

At the time of writing, all they really have is bood mist, swarming scion, and drain. Blood mist and drain hit like a wet noodle, and they barely heal.

Make vampires better at siphoning health from their enemies then the BfB changes won't seem so bad at all

MellowMagic · August 2020

Drain should be a semi weak dot with a strong self heal. That way if you run bfb you can also slot drain to keep your health up. Sacrificing an additional slot and a weak dot for an infinite sustain spammable.

Sahidom · August 2020

I hope the change doesn't go live.

I share the disappointment in the skill changes - novel idea but poorly implemented. Vampires, being same as the WW have deadric origins. Its sad they couldn't make them unique enough than copycat modern day vampire folklore.

Vevvev · August 2020

And the changes went live. R.I.P. vampires.

SlimeBro1 · August 2020

Sahidom wrote: »

I hope the change doesn't go live.

I share the disappointment in the skill changes - novel idea but poorly implemented. Vampires, being same as the WW have deadric origins. Its sad they couldn't make them unique enough than copycat modern day vampire folklore.

Well, I have some pretty bad news for you..
.

Vevvev · August 2020

I am suddenly tempted to slot Blood for Blood now just to troll healers. Wonder how far I can get before someone notices and makes a thread here on the forums complaining about the further uselessness of healers in ESO.
And... I can't even bring myself to use the ability since the DPS is similar to everything else due to the fact I have to heal every so often.

Cronopoly · August 2020

I cleansed 4 of my Vamps... I only use my Bosmer Vamp in Cyr... basically they gutted it for what I would call usefulness for what i considered fun....sigh. We all understand downsides, but the current downsides WAY Overshadow what might be useful.