Why I think Combat Changes in 33 are the best thing in years.

Sealish · February 2022

So there is a lot of mixed feeling on the forums about the combat changes in Update 33.
I think that they are amazing. Here is why, in quite possibly a bit of a long winded fashion:

1) It makes the game more fun for casual players
I play this game a lot more seriously than my friends, but more than that, I always enjoy the theorycrafting and mechanical aspects of a game FAR more than anyone else I regularly interact with. Because of that, I know how it works under the hood and how skills and stats interact quite well. My friends that I get to play with me now and again do not. And they don't really care to. And that isn't inherently a bad thing. Games are about having a good time. I have a good time diving into numbers and finding synergies in disparate systems. They have a good time hitting bad guys with swords and spells. So when the game punishes them for going "Oh, I like the idea of playing as a person who charges in and rains death down on people with my flaming sword" because their Sword skills and their Fire skills were reliant on competing stats, they get annoyed. In most MMOs with set classes, your damage will all scale together as a package so this is what they are expecting to happen here. It sucks to tell them "You have to choose between being powerful or using the skill combination you like." This update fixes that. Now they can use whatever skills they think are cool and the Magicka/Stamina choice is instead all about "Which skills do you want to be able to use most often."

This doesn't just apply to my friends either. It probably applies to the majority of "LOW DPS" people random in dungeons. They probably just picked things that they thought looked fun to use and didn't realize that they were picking incompatible skills and weapons. With this change, casual players can have fun without needing to really worry about stat/skill synergy. They can just have fun.

2) It stops the game from punishing people needlessly
I have seen some people over the years talk about how it makes sense for Magicka/Stamina Hybrid characters to be punished with lower damage because they are hybrids and hybrids SHOULD be weaker than pure characters. And I agree with part of that but not the other part. I agree that Hybrids should have lower efficiency when compared to a pure build... but I disagree that a "Magicka/Stamina Hybrid" is actually a hybrid build within the context of the game.

The game has three distinct roles. Healer, Tank, Damage. You could subdivide those into Single Target and AOE varieties as well as Burst and Sustained if you want, and what I am about to say still applies to those diversifications within a role. How you decide to do those things is all effectively cosmetic. Class, as well as Magicka/Stamina are effectively cosmetic options in ESO and this is by design. They wanted any character to be able to play viably as any role (this is something they are still working on with balance patches and whathaveyou but it IS the end goal). Being a hybrid of roles does and will continue to give you more utility at the cost of lower efficiency. A Healer/Tank will not be as good of a Healer or Tank as a pure but will be able to fill both roles to some degree (and depending on the content, they may be able to successfully fill both roles allowing an extra DPS in the group). Same with any other combination. But a Magicka vs Stamina vs Magicka/Stamina DPS? Why should your ultimately cosmetic choice be punished by lowered efficiency. You are not gaining any extra utility, your build is still focused exclusively on dealing damage. This change will fix that problem and allow you to use the skills you find are more fun to use. You won't loose efficiency because of cosmetic choices.

3) But won't this completely destroy endgame balance? No.
Endgame balance doesn't exist within the same parameters as the rest of the game.

Balance for 99% of the player base can be simply described as "Every player regardless of class choice has the tools that they need to be able to complete all the content in the game, and no class should have an easily noticeable advantage or disadvantage over the other classes in this respect." Players simply have to feel like they can choose whichever class they want, and this choice alone will not make them outperform or be outperformed by others.

Balance for the top 1% however is WAY harder to achieve. It is a constant game of tug-of-war between the developers wanting all classes to be represented in endgame content and players trying to figure out what the numerically most effective build possible (META build) for any given role is. No matter how hard the developers work, there will ALWAYS be a single best build for any role. Those that choose to compete with eachother (since at this point it isn't the game you are competing with anymore. You outperform all of the challenges by a very large margin) at this level have already decided that numerical efficiency matters more than the cosmetic component of building a character.

This change WILL shift the META builds and new ones for each role will appear. But anyone trying to complain that it will "take choice away at the highest level of play by forcing everyone to play a handful builds" is deceiving themselves that such a choice has ever really existed.

Summary
So yeah... I think it is a great change. It will make the game better for 99% of players and it will shake the game up for the other 1% and force them to try completely bonkers things that they have never had to do before. Neither of those is a bad thing. And if you liked the build you have and want to keep playing it? Go ahead! This change isn't taking that away from you (unless you are in that 1%, but even then, every balance patch has the potential to do this) and your build will be just as good as it was before.

francesinhalover · February 2022

My issue is that i thought they would buff o rework skills that no one uses, yet they barely did it.
Almost all of dual wield skills are bad and no buffs.
Rapid strikes is garbage.
Shrouded used to be so good but got nerfed over a arena set that no one uses anymore anyways.
Rending slashes is lackluster
Steel tornado is useless because whirlwind blades exists.
Quick cloak is garbage

Flying dagger is a pvp skill that got buffed. Hurray for pvp!

divnyi · February 2022

francesinhalover wrote: »

Flying dagger is a pvp skill

wat

Sealish · February 2022

francesinhalover wrote: »

My issue is that i thought they would buff o rework skills that no one uses, yet they barely did it.
Almost all of dual wield skills are bad and no buffs.
Rapid strikes is garbage.
Shrouded used to be so good but got nerfed over a arena set that no one uses anymore anyways.
Rending slashes is lackluster
Steel tornado is useless because whirlwind blades exists.
Quick cloak is garbage

Flying dagger is a pvp skill that got buffed. Hurray for pvp!

I think that their plan is to make the switch and then see how everything plays out first without reworking the skills so that they can see which ones really need it instead of just guessing and destroying a lot of pure magicka/stamina builds in the process.

Then the next patch will have a ton of skill rebalancing.

Ideally they would use the PTS as this "Test and See" phase but they don't really do that very often and instead wait for things to hit live.

ESO_Nightingale · February 2022

francesinhalover wrote: »

My issue is that i thought they would buff o rework skills that no one uses, yet they barely did it.
Almost all of dual wield skills are bad and no buffs.
Rapid strikes is garbage.
Shrouded used to be so good but got nerfed over a arena set that no one uses anymore anyways.
Rending slashes is lackluster
Steel tornado is useless because whirlwind blades exists.
Quick cloak is garbage

Flying dagger is a pvp skill that got buffed. Hurray for pvp!

There will be growing pains. 2h is too strong as a pve backbar. There's no reason not to use stampede. I wish they'd go through and reduce stampede a little bit while turning unstable wall of frost into a pure dps morph which is good, buffing shock wall, deadly cloak and endless hail

VarisVaris · February 2022

Saying that 99% of the players don't care about meta or about how their build performs is simply wrong.

If only a very minor portion of the playerbase cared people like Alcast, Nefas or others had no relevance and I wouldn't be able to sell certain gear sets for millions although they are only slightly better than other sets.

Also those Changes affect every single PvP player heavily and in most cases negatively as they make balance worse.

Meanwhile any content that "Casuals" actually take part in has been dumbed down so much that you can do it with unoptimized builds just fine already.

This change only helps the lowest of low skilled players which struggle against mud crabs in stonefalls while forcing a new and much more limited meta onto everyone else.

Snamyap · February 2022

I'm just happy I can start using blood for blood on stamina characters.

Tommy_The_Gun · February 2022

Tbh. The thing I like about those changes is that it opens soo maany possibilities in terms of build options that previously were unavailable. It is good for the game & build diversity. While there will still be 1 - 2 "bis" builds, there would certainly be more creative builds that are "viable".

lolo_01b16_ESO · February 2022

I'm not convinced this change will do much good.
If I casually play any rpg, I generally assume that a light armour, a staff and lots of magicka allow me to cast powerful spells while high weapon damage and a big melee weapon allow me to do high martial damage.
But next patch an orc warrior with lots of weapon damage will be a better spellcaster than a breton mage with lots of magicka. Isn't that going to be super confusing for many players?

And from the endgame pov I don't like that this patch will raise the damage ceiling once more. Top players already do crazy amounts of damage, why increase that again?

Snamyap · February 2022

lolo_01b16_ESO wrote: »

I'm not convinced this change will do much good.
If I casually play any rpg, I generally assume that a light armour, a staff and lots of magicka allow me to cast powerful spells while high weapon damage and a big melee weapon allow me to do high martial damage.
But next patch an orc warrior with lots of weapon damage will be a better spellcaster than a breton mage with lots of magicka. Isn't that going to be super confusing for many players?

But the orc will be out of magicka really fast while the breton can keep going.

Sealish · February 2022

VarisVaris wrote: »

Saying that 99% of the players don't care about meta or about how their build performs is simply wrong.

If only a very minor portion of the playerbase cared people like Alcast, Nefas or others had no relevance and I wouldn't be able to sell certain gear sets for millions although they are only slightly better than other sets.

Also those Changes affect every single PvP player heavily and in most cases negatively as they make balance worse.

Meanwhile any content that "Casuals" actually take part in has been dumbed down so much that you can do it with unoptimized builds just fine already.

This change only helps the lowest of low skilled players which struggle against mud crabs in stonefalls while forcing a new and much more limited meta onto everyone else.

I am not saying that 99% don't care. I am saying that they don't play content at a high enough competitive level for meta builds to be the only viable ones for them (and the meta builds are probably not actually the best builds for them if you really think about it. Those players that make those builds straight up say that they are optimized for very specific group compositions and very tight coordinated playstyles from the entire group. Most players do not play under those circumstances and hove the skills to use a build like that effectively).

1% is actually still a large amount of players though and even if they WERE the only ones who cared about build performance or the meta at all, that would still be enough for you to sell your sets and for Alcast, and Nefas to be popular. ESO has over 20 million registered accounts and peaks at about 600k concurrent players. Given that not all 600k of them are the same people (some percentage is always cycling in and out, and some only play on certain days) the total number of people that play the game in a given month is larger than the total number of active players. That 1% of people may represent as many as 10k-15k people. Given that only ~3300 characters are even listed in the rankings on ESO Logs for competitive raiding, it may even be less than the top 1% that actually participates in competitive raiding at the level where needing to use META builds in order to be considered viable becomes important.

I agree that PvP has it worst here since the change allows for tankier builds easier which can easily create situations where neither side can kill the other. PvP really need to be looked at as a whole and have its own pool of exclusive skills that are PvP only and when in PvP you can only use them. Like alternate versions of each class and players needing to make a "PVP Build". This would be a lot of work, but it is the only way to balance for both PvP and PvE.

Yes you CAN complete casual content just fine with things as they are most of the time, but it still sucks to be in a dungeon (Normal or especially Veteran since Veteran content still falls under this category) with people that aren't doing enough damage because they are using skills that don't synergize with their damage setup, and they are doing this because the marketing for the game says that you can play the game your way with the skills you like and it will be effective. Most MMOs are pretty clear about each class being designed to be played a certain way and have certain rotations. ESO is more unique in that it is very heavily advertised as the opposite. It is advertised as the game where you can play in the way that you find fun and still be able to clear content and contribute to your group in a meaningful way. This change is just finally making good on that claim.

Sealish · February 2022

Snamyap wrote: »

lolo_01b16_ESO wrote: »

I'm not convinced this change will do much good.
If I casually play any rpg, I generally assume that a light armour, a staff and lots of magicka allow me to cast powerful spells while high weapon damage and a big melee weapon allow me to do high martial damage.
But next patch an orc warrior with lots of weapon damage will be a better spellcaster than a breton mage with lots of magicka. Isn't that going to be super confusing for many players?

But the orc will be out of magicka really fast while the breton can keep going.

Exactly. The Orc will still have that massive burst of brutality, be it in physical or magical prowess. But if you build that Orc to be based on Weapon Damage and Stamina (since they are paired attributes), you will have no magicka sustain and will have to still be primarily a martial fighter. You just get the perk of channeling your rage into a deadly burst of magic if you really want to now and again. This is a pretty "Elder Scrollsy" feeling character if you ask me.

The Breton Mage in that example will still be the better spellcaster overall.

lQrukl · February 2022

Best thing in years is account-wide achive system.

Mixing stamina and magica skills without properly balancing them just halves amount of possible builds. It's worst, not best.

Ask Mordrak who overcame as stamplar in meta of magica for years, just because he liked it and he could realize stamina benefits even in magica group. And even he tells now that stamina is dead after this changes.

For now, all stamina benefits open to mag groups. There no stamplar, stamwarden or stamsorc anymore, as well as mages.
Now you have choice between right morph/weapon skill and way worse morph/weapon skill, no matter what is costs, stamina or magica.

There will no variativity with this approach.

EF321 · February 2022

lQrukl wrote: »

For now, all stamina benefits open to mag groups. There no stamplar, stamwarden or stamsorc anymore, as well as mages.
Now you have choice between right morph/weapon skill and way worse morph/weapon skill, no matter what is costs, stamina or magica.

There will no variativity with this approach.

Since there is no perfect balance, hypothetical one absolute best damage build™ exists right now. Yet people play different things.

Ythotha · February 2022

I like this change but as with everything when it comes to zos, they roll out a carpet change to see how things work out and "fix" it 6 months later and we are all expected to suffer in the meantime before they can figure things out...

rymere83 · February 2022

What does this mean exactly? Will I be able to use vamp skills that are all magika based but on a stamcro?

axi · February 2022

Hardly disagree with point number 3 and summary. It completly doesn't take PvP under consideration and even for PvE it's wrong.

unholy_nox · February 2022

Making expansion about Bretons and making them obsolete in the same time via hybridisation (and other non-hybrid races), truly , the best thing happened in years.

etchedpixels · February 2022

rymere83 wrote: »

What does this mean exactly? Will I be able to use vamp skills that are all magika based but on a stamcro?

Yes and no. Most skills scale with the highest resource but your resource pool does not. So you can put 64 in stamina and magicka skills will scale in effect but you'll still have a small magicka pool limiting your ability to use them. You still can't put half in stam/half in magicka because they've kept the broken scaling on highest resource rather than sum of stam/magicka ("Play as you want" is still just a slogan)

Everyone is about to become more like an ESO tank build where you mix pools effectively in order to survive. With that kind of build you put more long cast time/cheap magicka skills on your stamina toon and you can even backbar an ice staff to block with magicka, regen magicka with heavy attacks and probably use exploding wall a bit. Hel Ra is going to be an awful lot easier for stam toons now they can magicka block.

It also means that stamina toons now have access to all the healing oomph magicka ones did, but with a smaller pool.

This is why the Breton comment is I think wrong. The clunky game mechanics still require you slot 64 stam or 64 magicka for a DD, and that means the only way to drive the other pool strongly is regen, which means a Breton actually makes sense for more stamina builds than before because your small magicka pool doesn't matter for damage value and your regen helps make the pool size irrelevant - at least in PvE where burst isn't that important.

tonyblack · February 2022

Well, top players already hitting 10-20k more on pts than on live. When those changes go live we get yet another power creep for old content, requirements for joining groups would raise and those who are not willing to adapt would be excluded. Returning and mid tier players will be hit the most, as usual, while hardcore adapt and casuals ignore all changes entirely. I don’t even want to think what will it do to already questionable pvp balance, i’m just glad i’ve done all my achievements there and it add one more reason to ignore it entirely.

Zatox · February 2022

I hate only one thing in the current PTS PVE meta: Magicka characters using dual wield/twohanded looks ugly.
In the previous patch, we have one meta build for mag and one for stam. Now only one "proper" build

etchedpixels · February 2022

Sealish wrote: »

or the meta at all, that would still be enough for you to sell your sets and for Alcast, and Nefas to be popular. ESO has over 20 million registered accounts and peaks at about 600k concurrent players.

Where did you get the 600k concurrent player data from ? What official measurement or source ?

rymere83 · February 2022

I just want to play an effective necro/vamp lol

Dalsinthus · February 2022

tonyblack wrote: »

Well, top players already hitting 10-20k more on pts than on live. When those changes go live we get yet another power creep for old content, requirements for joining groups would raise and those who are not willing to adapt would be excluded. Returning and mid tier players will be hit the most, as usual, while hardcore adapt and casuals ignore all changes entirely. I don’t even want to think what will it do to already questionable pvp balance, i’m just glad i’ve done all my achievements there and it add one more reason to ignore it entirely.

Yeah I think is is pretty spot on.

The PvP meta is not looking great with very high heals causing increased tankiness. There will be a lot of dual weird and resto staffs out there in Cyrodiil.

At some point soon ZOS will likely nerf damage and healing across the board because they’ve allowed power creep to get out of hand. Which will hurt the middle tier and casual players that aren’t capitalizing on the combos opened up with these changes.

There will also be weird things where all dd sorcs and templars should stack spell damage whereas all dd dragon knights and nightblades should stack weapon damage, regardless of whether their builds are stamina or magicka. This way they are able to always take advantage of their class passive minor buffs for brutality, sorcery, prophesy, and savagery regardless of group composition or their preferred build. At which point ZOS needs to just homogenize these buffs into damage and critical.

I get what the devs trying to do and why, I just don’t see signs that they’ve considered the ramifications in a game as big and complex as ESO.

Drdeath20 · February 2022

Wroble destroyed this game. He was the lead combat designer that was instrumental in the push for a stamina/magicka divide. The more of wroble’s vestiges we remove the better this game will be.

Tannus15 · February 2022

Dalsinthus wrote: »

tonyblack wrote: »

Well, top players already hitting 10-20k more on pts than on live. When those changes go live we get yet another power creep for old content, requirements for joining groups would raise and those who are not willing to adapt would be excluded. Returning and mid tier players will be hit the most, as usual, while hardcore adapt and casuals ignore all changes entirely. I don’t even want to think what will it do to already questionable pvp balance, i’m just glad i’ve done all my achievements there and it add one more reason to ignore it entirely.

Yeah I think is is pretty spot on.

The PvP meta is not looking great with very high heals causing increased tankiness. There will be a lot of dual weird and resto staffs out there in Cyrodiil.

At some point soon ZOS will likely nerf damage and healing across the board because they’ve allowed power creep to get out of hand. Which will hurt the middle tier and casual players that aren’t capitalizing on the combos opened up with these changes.

There will also be weird things where all dd sorcs and templars should stack spell damage whereas all dd dragon knights and nightblades should stack weapon damage, regardless of whether their builds are stamina or magicka. This way they are able to always take advantage of their class passive minor buffs for brutality, sorcery, prophesy, and savagery regardless of group composition or their preferred build. At which point ZOS needs to just homogenize these buffs into damage and critical.

I get what the devs trying to do and why, I just don’t see signs that they’ve considered the ramifications in a game as big and complex as ESO.

I think they have considered the ramifications, I just think they are ok with things being unbalanced between updated 33 and 34 as they identify the problems and will look to address balance issues based on data instead of theory crafting. But hey, maybe i'm just overly optimistic.

Honestly I think they could spend hours and hours trying to foresee every problem with this change and still end up with huge problems, or they can just make the change as clean as possible and then start a list of things to fix.
That's how I would have done it.

MudcrabAttack · February 2022

lQrukl wrote: »

Best thing in years is account-wide achive system.

Mixing stamina and magica skills without properly balancing them just halves amount of possible builds. It's worst, not best.

Ask Mordrak who overcame as stamplar in meta of magica for years, just because he liked it and he could realize stamina benefits even in magica group. And even he tells now that stamina is dead after this changes.

For now, all stamina benefits open to mag groups. There no stamplar, stamwarden or stamsorc anymore, as well as mages.
Now you have choice between right morph/weapon skill and way worse morph/weapon skill, no matter what is costs, stamina or magica.

There will no variativity with this approach.

But how is stamina dead? I saw the posted stam warden and stam necro with 130k each. They each use a couple magic class skills, but that’s really no different than what a stamblade has been for a while now.

Tannus15 · February 2022

MudcrabAttack wrote: »

lQrukl wrote: »

Best thing in years is account-wide achive system.

Mixing stamina and magica skills without properly balancing them just halves amount of possible builds. It's worst, not best.

Ask Mordrak who overcame as stamplar in meta of magica for years, just because he liked it and he could realize stamina benefits even in magica group. And even he tells now that stamina is dead after this changes.

For now, all stamina benefits open to mag groups. There no stamplar, stamwarden or stamsorc anymore, as well as mages.
Now you have choice between right morph/weapon skill and way worse morph/weapon skill, no matter what is costs, stamina or magica.

There will no variativity with this approach.

But how stamina is dead? I saw the posted stam warden and stam necro with 130k each. They each use a couple magic class skills, but that’s really no different than what a stamblade has been for a while now.

people are still defaulting to what they know. i know i've been testing "mag sorc" because my character is an altmer, but i really need to consider trying a stam sorc range build to see how that feels

Vevvev · February 2022

Sealish wrote: »

So there is a lot of mixed feeling on the forums about the combat changes in Update 33.
I think that they are amazing. Here is why, in quite possibly a bit of a long winded fashion:

1) It makes the game more fun for casual players
I play this game a lot more seriously than my friends, but more than that, I always enjoy the theorycrafting and mechanical aspects of a game FAR more than anyone else I regularly interact with. Because of that, I know how it works under the hood and how skills and stats interact quite well. My friends that I get to play with me now and again do not. And they don't really care to. And that isn't inherently a bad thing. Games are about having a good time. I have a good time diving into numbers and finding synergies in disparate systems. They have a good time hitting bad guys with swords and spells. So when the game punishes them for going "Oh, I like the idea of playing as a person who charges in and rains death down on people with my flaming sword" because their Sword skills and their Fire skills were reliant on competing stats, they get annoyed. In most MMOs with set classes, your damage will all scale together as a package so this is what they are expecting to happen here. It sucks to tell them "You have to choose between being powerful or using the skill combination you like." This update fixes that. Now they can use whatever skills they think are cool and the Magicka/Stamina choice is instead all about "Which skills do you want to be able to use most often."

I disagree with this primarily for one reason alone, it doesn't fix the fact stuff still scales off your highest stat. A true casual who has no idea what in Oblivion is going on might build too much health, or try to split between mag and stam, and then scratch their heads wondering why they're so weak.

It doesn't fix the underlying issue of how damage is calculated in this game, and it leads to further issues like Stamplars and MagDKs getting buffed thanks to this change. Why are they getting buffed you might ask? Minor Sorcery and Minor Brutality. A magDK is going to be building weapon damage and max magicka, while a stamPlar is going to be building max stamina and spell damage. They just straight up got a 10% buff to their damage stats because all the sets award both spell and weapon damage, as well as all abilities that give Major Brutality or Sorcery now granting them both this upcoming patch. Just flip the jewelry glyphs and enjoy your new damage buff.

Iron_Warrior · February 2022

I'm one of those people that hate these changes, but at the same time i wish someday they go all out and combine stamina and magicka and turn it into one resource pool, "the offensive pool". Then turn the third bar into "heal and shield pool", so basically all heals and damage shields would scale from that pool. No more putting everything into wd/sd and also getting big shield and heals. but it's a wild idea and i don't think it will ever happen.

Tannus15 · February 2022

Iron_Warrior wrote: »

I'm one of those people that hate these changes, but at the same time i wish someday they go all out and combine stamina and magicka and turn it into one resource pool, "the offensive pool". Then turn the third bar into "heal and shield pool", so basically all heals and damage shields would scale from that pool. No more putting everything into wd/sd and also getting big shield and heals. but it's a wild idea and i don't think it will ever happen.

this is largely what they have done with proc sets. max resource scales the heals and max damage scouts the damage. i wouldn't be surprised to see this sort of split come into effect, though i don't know how much impact it will have since there is no reason not to stack 64 attributes and a max stat food to one side or the other anyway...