ZOS_Gilliam wrote: »

Greetings everyone,

Today, the combat team would like to you officially welcome you to 2022 by giving you some insight on what’s coming to combat in the first update of the year! We’ve been keeping a close eye on all the adjustments we made over 2021 and we’re relatively happy with how the game has been evolving combat wise with character expression and freedom of build choices, and we are dedicated to continuing this work through and through where it matters most.

In Update 33, the changes are focused on making almost every player ability in the game scale dynamically with your highest offensive stats when applicable. Similar to what we’ve worked on with passives and item sets, we want to ensure you feel empowered to pick an ability or weapon based on the gameplay mechanics and expression they offer you first and foremost, with fewer restrictions. This means any ability that used to scale exclusively with Spell Damage and Max Magicka will now dynamically scale with Weapon Damage and Max Stamina, and vice versa. With this, we want to retain the identity of many playstyles by reinforcing ability cost as a limiting factor in how frequently you can engage with abilities, but with less concern as to how powerful that ability is based on what stat path you’ve chosen.

We’ll also be dual sourcing buffs on abilities and item sets like Major Prophecy with Major Savagery, with the same thing applying to Brutality and Sorcery. In the long term, we plan on simply merging these bonuses so there are fewer names and effects you need to worry about, but there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that will result from that; as such, it may take quite some time before we’re able to do that.

In addition to the continuation of hybridization, we’ve also gone through many abilities and cleaned up some of their functionalities, making sure the ones that aren’t used as often received some sprucing up to make them feel more up to par with abilities of their like. This is in addition to the usual bug fixing and back-end improvements and targeting of outlier abilities or sets for balance adjustments. Some of these are larger in adjustment, such as Power Bash’s new functionality of being treated as a Bash attack, or Piercing Javelin’s new functionality of living up to its name and piercing through block. Most of the adjustments are not as flashy or different but instead gain added quality of life improvements like increased durations for easier management or scaling adjustments. For example, the morphs of Lotus Flower giving you the choice of gaining more healing overall or a significantly longer uptime for less micromanagement.

That wraps up this update’s combat adjustments! While the number of changes is by no means small, with the hybrid work we’ve been doing in the past, we hope this pass is far less turbulent than things have been recently. The goal here is to open the door to more build freedom and diversity. For some players, we know such changes will instill a sense of needing to spend time and effort changing your loadouts, but we believe the long-term benefits will be worth it. Thanks for reading and we hope to see you all in Tamriel!

IronWooshu wrote: »

I like this change for abilities scaling off highest weapon or spell damage. I also hope this means that Templars and Dragonknights are the only classes with access to minor sorcery and minor brutality. Which I'm completely fine with sharing.

With the hybridization of skills tho you need to go back and look at races. Pure Magicka and pure Stamina races are killing the "play how you want to play" mantra. @ZOS_Gilliam

Deter1UK wrote: »

Seraphayel wrote: »

tomfant wrote: »

My crystal ball tells me that in update 34 or 35 we will have one resource for casting abilities (former magicka) and the other for movement and defense ie sprint, block, bash etc (former stamina). Buffs and debuffs will be united, eg weapon and spell power will unit into offensive power.

Honestly, that’s not too bad. As long as things like Bash, Sprint and Roll require Stamina and not another resource that’s neither Magicka nor Stamina, this system was sooner or later about to fail because it unfairly favorites always one of them.

Has always been my view. If you want to swing a greatsword it costs stamina. If you want the sword to do magic damage then get a +3 Sword of smashing or lightning or whatever and use the charge up but swinging the thing is still going to deplete your physical strength (unless it's magically assisted to counter that). Likewise spells or magical-like effects or assistance should just use magika.

Isn't that how it worked in Oblivion? Can't recall its been several years since I played it.

VarisVaris wrote: »

Seraphayel wrote: »

Araxyte wrote: »

ZOS_Gilliam wrote: »

In Update 33, the changes are focused on making almost every player ability in the game scale dynamically with your highest offensive stats when applicable.

Probably unpopular opinion but here goes. Seeing a big stamina orc using magic skills and wielding a staff... c'mon. I feel like the whole combat system, which has hugely contributed to the success of the game, is just being completely torn down and re-built to the point where class, race and sets don't matter anymore. I can also imagine this making PvP even more unstable. I miss the days of needing to make a new character and class to be able to fit into a specific play style. Did we really ask for something this extreme?

This isn’t extreme. It’s the core of Elder Scrolls. The issue is, that ESO is a multiplayer game and therefore classes need to be balanced and competitive.

It’s still the quintessence of ESO to be able to mix and match playstyles and make them work - this helps and is by no means a bad change. It just doubles the options for each spec when you can all of a sudden use Magicka abilities as Stamina and Stamina abilities as Magicka.

It might double the options on paper in practice it will result in completely removing specs from the game, we're going down from 12 specs to 6 classes which will have 1 single Bis build and that's it for the diversity this creates.

Musax wrote: »

Maybe i am misunderstanding something, bit isn't this the opposite of hybridisation?

This encourages stacking only one thing to an extrem and be great at everything.
Everything always scaling with your highest stats punishes anyone who "wastes" anything on being hybrid

VaranisArano wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I'm not really looking forward to skills costing even more they are already a pain to manage for lower and high skill players. Seems like this widen the skill gap to me, which is already unhealthy wide

Are they increasing skill cost?

I understood this to mean that the cost of skills relative to your off-stat is the limiting factor for how frequently you can use the newly empowered off-stat skills.

Like, max mag builds spamming stamina skills is going to chew through their small stamina pool quickly. Likewise a max stam build spamming magicka skills will use up their small magicka pool.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't see anything about skill cost increases for everyone.

Resource management of the off-stat is about to become more of a skill, admittedly. That's probably a good thing in terms of training players to be ready for end game group content and PVP, though. That sort of sustain management has always been necessary, but this makes it a little more obvious because if you don't manage both resources, you just won't be able to cast/attack when you want to. I know I didn't learn to manage my stamina until I went to PVP and suddenly there were real consequences for running out of stamina.

With this, we want to retain the identity of many playstyles by reinforcing ability cost as a limiting factor in how frequently you can engage with abilities

spartaxoxo wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I'm not really looking forward to skills costing even more they are already a pain to manage for lower and high skill players. Seems like this widen the skill gap to me, which is already unhealthy wide

Are they increasing skill cost?

I understood this to mean that the cost of skills relative to your off-stat is the limiting factor for how frequently you can use the newly empowered off-stat skills.

Like, max mag builds spamming stamina skills is going to chew through their small stamina pool quickly. Likewise a max stam build spamming magicka skills will use up their small magicka pool.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't see anything about skill cost increases for everyone.

Resource management of the off-stat is about to become more of a skill, admittedly. That's probably a good thing in terms of training players to be ready for end game group content and PVP, though. That sort of sustain management has always been necessary, but this makes it a little more obvious because if you don't manage both resources, you just won't be able to cast/attack when you want to. I know I didn't learn to manage my stamina until I went to PVP and suddenly there were real consequences for running out of stamina.

I read it as they would be increasing skill costs so that if someone decides to use an off-resource skill they would be at even larger disadvantage cost wise than they are now, as a way to offset this change. Ofc I see that as ignoring that increasing skill cost increases the cost across the board and not just for people using an off-resource skill.

I know beyond just lacking skill in weaving, one of the largest dps losses that cause the gap is managing skills can be hard and many people refresh skills too soon resulting in losing to much of their primary resource and having to heavy attack too much to get it back. Thus skill cost increases generally result in the skill gap widening.

That's my concern after reading that anyway.

With this, we want to retain the identity of many playstyles by reinforcing ability cost as a limiting factor in how frequently you can engage with abilities

I could be reading too much into the phrase "reinforce" though.

TL:DR

I read "reinforcing ability cost as a limiting factor" to mean that they are acknowledging this is already a limiting factor but want to increase it's effectiveness as a limiting factor by increasing ability cost.