Bow damage is already range dependent by way of the passives. Should not be too difficult to treat light attack bow and staff damage in a similar way.

Alternatively: Give mag finally a melee weapon line (e.g. elemental weapons with similar animations as stam weapons to simplify implementation). Would be a nice addition for the next chapter to give mag builds more flexibility.

Firstmep wrote: »

Staves and bows already provide less damage than melee weapons.
Literally 0 reason for this change.

The heavily mag compositions in trials?

They’re preferred due to survivability, cleave and range.

Parse 90k on live, parse 85k on PTS, MagDK

idk wrote: »

OP is making it sound like Zos changed LAs for magicka only and left Stam alone.

That's because Mag DPS does about twice as much damage with light attacks so they're twice as affected.

Pen bonuses from breach don't really help Mag DPS, now the light armor buff is pretty useless but super helps Stamina with the medium armor buff.

So while they didn't leave their light attacks alone itself the damage is made up with the Pen on their light attacks.

Elwendryll wrote: »

That will definitely help with performance and reducing server calculations...

Otherwise I like the concept. Melee should have more damage.

I agree, but what about mag melee? Scaling off highest stat isn't enough for dual wield, the passives don't help, they don't proc burning. And don't say having a staff equipped makes me ranged, spamming LA from a distance isn't going to do me any favors.

idk wrote: »

OP is making it sound like Zos changed LAs for magicka only and left Stam alone.

Bow LA doesn't deal a lot of DMG anyway, not like stamDPS is relying heavily on it as opposed to magDPS.
Sure stam would lose a bit, but wouldn't notice much.

i would of hit harder than that. I would of took away all light attacks ability to crit and proc since they have no associated cost. I would of instead give them the regen that was tested a while back.

free attacks should be focused on regen not damage.

It can be something simple with only 2 tags, within 5 meters and further than 5 meters for example

EDS604 wrote: »

It can be something simple with only 2 tags, within 5 meters and further than 5 meters for example

Except for DKs which have an effective melee range of 7 meters, but yes I agree in principle.

I fully disagree with making stamina doing more damage than magicka, but I strongly agree with making melee doing more damage than ranged.

Risk of going melee should be rewarded. Therefore, while the change to ranged LAs is fine, I feel like they forgot about magicka melee which were using ranged light attacks from melee range. Magicka melee always had the problem with not being invited over stamina melee and this is the issue that now raises and ZoS should take care of it.

Adaptive scaling on LA/HA damage helps nothing, because heavy attacks still return stamina on magicka characters and damage is still lower thanks to not being buffed by Engulfing Flames.

Magicka melee should be able to compete with stamina melee.

Oh and don't forget to do something with blastbones. You can't cast blastbones as every third spell when going ranged which diminishes magnecros dps greatly and pidgeonholes him to melee.

Shantu wrote: »

I totally agree melee combat should have its rewards. However, if my MagSorc is standing toe-to-toe with stam toons fighting the dragons of Sunspire, why should my LA's be doing 10% less damage? Or on any boss, if a mag toon moves into melee range, they are now taking the same risks and should be allowed the same rewards.

Common sense tells you a "ranged" attack should be defined by proximity the to target, not by weapon type.

It's not just the distance that mag have that makes them more favourable. During Thrassian, all mag DDs in trials, taking crazy damage (in Lokke HM for eg.) but having a shield = problem solved. I still played stam during the Thrassian-pocalypse despite hitting like a wet noodle compared to 120k parses, because I liked the playstyle, despite its associated grievances. This whole thread reads like spoiled children

Olupajmibanan wrote: »

I fully disagree with making stamina doing more damage than magicka, but I strongly agree with making melee doing more damage than ranged.

Risk of going melee should be rewarded. Therefore, while the change to ranged LAs is fine, I feel like they forgot about magicka melee which were using ranged light attacks from melee range. Magicka melee always had the problem with not being invited over stamina melee and this is the issue that now raises and ZoS should take care of it.

Adaptive scaling on LA/HA damage helps nothing, because heavy attacks still return stamina on magicka characters and damage is still lower thanks to not being buffed by Engulfing Flames.

Magicka melee should be able to compete with stamina melee.

Oh and don't forget to do something with blastbones. You can't cast blastbones as every third spell when going ranged which diminishes magnecros dps greatly and pidgeonholes him to melee.

@Olupajmibanan

Problem with that thinking is that every time magicka melee can compete with stamina melee(including now), stamina gets outright deleted from the end game. If you check esologs, you will see that over the last three patches around 86% of successful vet trials completions has been on magicka builds with only 14% being mainly stamcros. The extra cleave that magicka brings to the table makes them much better.

Also even if magicka melee can compete with stamina melee, stamina ranged simply does not compare to the traditional ranged magicka builds like magblades or magsorcs. If you look at this patch, ranged magblades are outdpsing all melee builds even. Bow based stamina ranged builds are nothing like they were in between Summerset to Elsweyr, when they were competing with magicka ranged options. Every single skill/gear in their kit from hard hitters like Trapping Webs, Endless Hail, Caltrops, vMA Bow were nerfed significantly to the point they are again back to being a meme.

Currently magicka raids are dominating not only in the top end of spectrum for score pushing due to their similar single-target DPS as stamina but much higher AoE DPS but also in the mid-range and lower, due to their higher survivability and general ease of access. A lot of things actually contribute to this, from having to many more damage increasing sets for the entire group to having more group buffs/de-buffs across all classes as well as 5k more pen making it easier for the group to shred boss resists to zero. Also magicka classes synergize well with each other with almost all classes bringing something to the table. On the other hand, for stamina apart from stamcro, the rest either have good DPS but zero utility like stamblade or decent utility at the cost of ***-poor DPS like stamDK.