rainydayhype wrote: »

It comes down to picking an attribute. I have read other older posts that say we are pretty much confined to picking one stat and that putting points in other stats is pointless..

This remains true to this day for a single reason, Max stats actually do effect your damage. Hover your mouse over your magicka and stamina stats and you'll see what I mean as it says it effects the damage and effectiveness of skills that use that resource. Every 10 points of magicka equals 1 point of spell damage, and every 10 points of stamina equals 1 point of weapon damage. Piece this together and you can see why people pick one over the other. Increasing max magicka will improve the damage and healing done by every single ability you have that costs magicka, and vice versa with stamina.

Now as Taleof2Cities pointed out there are situations in which you want to build into other stats. Take for example my Magicka Dragonknight which is my main. I have all 64 points into magicka, all my glyphs giving me magicka, arcane on everything, and 3 spell damage glyphs on my jewelry. I hit like a truck with all my magicka abilities but if I get stunned I'd only have a 9k point stamina pool to break free with unless I ate some tri-food like Bewitched Sugar Skulls which then puts it at about 16k stamina.

That extra stamina can be the difference between life and death in this game, especially against players and certain bosses like Ysmgar. Stamina builds usually don't have issues with stamina and can dodge, block, and bash to their hearts content when built right, while magicka builds always have to keep stamina in mind. If a stamina build does in fact equip a magicka ability or two that doesn't scale off purely magicka stats they have to keep in mind how much magicka they're using if they want to use that ability often, or when its needed.

Another thing I'll add is thanks to the Mage's Guild magicka builds tend to gravitate into building max magicka, while stamina builds tend to build into more weapon damage thanks to the Fighter's guild. Reason being is Magelight has a morph called Inner Light which boosts max magicka by 5% on the bar its on, and the passive Magicka Controller that boosts your max magicka by 2% per mage's guild ability slotted. This means Inner Light alone is boosting max magicka by 7%. The Fighter's Guild has a passive that boosts weapon damage by 3% per Fighter's Guild ability slotted and has a morph of Dawnbreaker that gives you 300 weapon damage for 20 seconds. Not all builds use them of course but they are very popular choices.

Thanks, everyone for the reply!

@Taleof2Cities what do you think will be needed to create a hybrid playstyle? You seem well versed in ESO, so curious to hear your thoughts.

I have never played a game where like your max resources determine your proficiency in those skill lines. To be honest, it seems kind of superficial in terms of strategically planning your play style, and I can see where it pushes people to one side or the other. However, since there isn't any other "attribute" like dex, str, and stuff it makes sense as a limited player resource.

I really like how Pelinal's set adds: (5 items) Your Spell and Weapon Damage both become the highest of the two values. This seems like the only real drawback to the stats=proficency since many skills are unusable unless the appropriate stat is being used.

I really like melee with magicka back-up so it seems like a good fit. It's just some of the animations are fit well with certain weapons, so I end up avoiding skills that pull a random weapon out just for a skill, but maybe I'll get over that lol.

Oh well, exciting time for ESO regardless. I hope Hybrid is a viable option soon. Yay for weapon skills backed up class-dependent skills!

Thanks again!

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

rainydayhype wrote: »

@Taleof2Cities what do you think will be needed to create a hybrid playstyle?

ZOS could change gameplay in a number of ways.

The easiest and most obvious is to introduce new gear sets or weapons that promote hybrid builds (similar to Pelinal's).

Other (more radical) changes could be fundamentally changing gameplay where base attributes no longer scale a character's power ... or at least the attributes have diminishing returns on character power the more a player focuses on a single attribute.

CP is one of the largest problems for Hybrids, there is only so much points available and a pure build is only currently on the borderline of deminishing returns. You can put about 50-60 points in each of the major stars, of which there are only about 4-5. 60 points in a star is about 84% of the power for 60% of the investment.

Had the CP cap system continued beyond 810 cp to say.. 1100+, Hybrids would start hitting the borderline pure builds are at now, while pure builds would start to be heavily punished. Investing 20 more points into those 5 stars only nets like 10% more power, those same 20 points for hybrids would be much more valuable.

On the other hand, the CP system rework could begin to support hybrid builds much better. We're not sure how it will look like, but for example.. if penetration and crit damage/healing were combined, then hybrids wouldn't be forced to invest into 2 places.

I imagine the system will look completely different and I hope they move away from statistical bonuses for more flavour in the game, we should know soon (update 28-29 they said they'd reveal info for whats to come in 2021).

There are also a ton of double dipping sets that support Hybrid builds now that were not available previously. Hybrids work pretty well in no CP environments. Sets like New Moon, Stuhn's, Shacklebreaker, Dragonguard and Mechanical Acuity are some of the best sets in the game. Enchants like tri regen are now a thing giving you more bang for your buck, who knows if a double damage glygh could exist in the future. Malacath Band of Brutality is excellent for hybrids because earning double crit and crit damage from CP is a pain point, the ring completely negates that issue. Sugar Skulls is an extremely stat dense food and cheap.

So time will tell, hybrids are possible now, just not really good because of CP imo.