The True Light attack gap and why its bigger now than on live.

X_K · July 2022

There seems to be this misconception that this change is ment to close the Delta between Light attack weavers and non Light attack weavers. this post is ment to show how that delta has Increased

i did 3 parses of each spec. [it was very painful not light attacking for 4 minutes straight] and grabbed the ones with the most normalized crit

First Image is Almost perfect DOT uptimes with heroism pots with no light attacks. I swapped to Yandir over Rele to not be Disingenuous while testing

2nd image is a normal parse. with slightly undercasted dots but with light attacks.

as you can see even with "optimization" of the non light attack build. its still over 30k behind. what happened? where was this delta supposed to close? "Light attack weaving" should have only lost me 10-12k dps. how did I loose 30k with optimization and over 40k without. none of the changes proposed as of week 1 pts make any sense. or close the gap at all. they seem to do the opposite. and you just introduced 5 more light attack sets. the only solution to this problem is to tutorialise GCD and nonGCD actions
Players can help. but a very large portion of the population of any game looks at 0 content. we cant fix your problem for you.

Damage Nerfs are fine. and expected. but healing changes make some content near impossible. even content 2 years old at this point.
i have been playing this game on and off since week 1 of official pc release. i love it dearly. its the only game with combat as fluid and dynamic in both PvP and PvE.
it is unparalleled in the MMO scene and these DOT changes make the combat feel slow and repetitive.

X_K Out

RagedAvenger · July 2022

Important to make this clear. Light attacks do more than just Light attack damage. They are responsible for weapon enchants (can add up to like 5-8k damage) ultimate generation (unless a healer who is light attacking heals you) and procing certain sets.

Given that things like relequen and the maelstrom staff seem to be taking center stage because the procs didn't get nerfed with the dots, light attacks are more important than they were before.

Pevey · July 2022

@X_K, can you summarize the delta between weaving and not weaving on live vs the delta between weaving and not weaving on pts? Seems like the delta is higher on pts, especially in percentage terms since the overall damage is lower.

X_K · July 2022

@Pevey this is a friend of mines parse on live v pts with same gear. when the transmutes hit from 30 day camp ill recon yandir and rele and do it myself

BahometZ · July 2022

This is really helpful to see, thank you for your efforts. What a racket this patch is looking like.

If we didn't have dedicated people who were willing to put in the time to test sets, skills, parsing in the pts to determine how the game works we would be far worse off. And yet it's these people who Zenimax and many in the player base seem happy to marginalise or dismiss.

X_K · July 2022

just for further context. if i ran the exact same build with no light attacks. its over a 43k dps loss. i just swapped to mael bow and yandir so i wasnt in a build that was "designed for light attacks" so people wouldn't cry about it

supersonic_kitten · July 2022

can you do a parse with "bad" LA weaving, like just random LA spam? i think that would be a bit more genuine bc mose casual players just spam those, they don't outright ignore the left mouse button

supersonic_kitten · July 2022

tbh, 70k with NO light attacks at all does indeed look like raising the floor, bc currently mid tier players are struggling to hit 70k with bad weaving, not to mention NO weaving at all.

Pevey · July 2022

supersonic_kitten wrote: »

tbh, 70k with NO light attacks at all does indeed look like raising the floor, bc currently mid tier players are struggling to hit 70k with bad weaving, not to mention NO weaving at all.

People are doing more than 100k with no light attacks on live, and that would be 115ish on the new pts dummy with the dummy changes. So huge difference.

What X_K is showing here is that these patch notes do NOT diminish the importance of weaving in high-end dps. Quite the opposite. Zos intended to nerf weaving and tried to nerf weaving, but with all of the other changes, they accomplished the opposite.

Derra · July 2022

To be honest - if they really wanted to get rid of the gap for accessibility reasons the coding solution is rather simple:

Every keypress essentially has 3 phases:

1. Button down
2. Button hold
3. Button up

IF ZOS really wanted lightattack weaving accessible they could give an option to trigger light/heavyattack before skills on button down.
Charge heavyattacks on button hold and autorelease skill after full charge.
Fire skills on button up (for lights and mediums).

Essentially making it that normal button presses do a normal lightattack weave.
Holding enables to medium or fully heavyttack weave.

ESO currently already releases skills on button up. Button down and hold currently have no purpose except for blocking or doubleactions x + y to breakfree or such.

Done. Everyone can weave with just pressing skill buttons.

But then from a dev perspective do you really want to fix anything or do you want to shake up the meta and reset difficulty to keep content alive for longer?

Pevey · July 2022

Derra wrote: »

To be honest - if they really wanted to get rid of the gap for accessibility reasons the coding solution is rather simple:

Every keypress essentially has 3 phases:

1. Button down
2. Button hold
3. Button up

IF ZOS really wanted lightattack weaving accessible they could give an option to fire lightattacks before skills on button down.
Charge heavyattacks on button hold and autorelease skill after full charge.
Fire skills on button up (for lights and mediums).

Essentially making it that normal button presses do a normal lightattack weave.
Holding enables to medium or fully heavyttack weave.

ESO currently already releases skills on button up. Button down and hold currently hold no purpose except for blocking or doubleactions x + y to breakfree or such.

Done. Everyone can weave with just pressing skill buttons.

I think this is a good idea. I heard it from someone in Discord, as well. A lot of games have auto attack options. Could set it at a default of 0.5 weave rate or something like that, so players who want to manually weave and get good at it still have incentive. Maybe also have sets or items that can increase the rate from 0.5 to something a little closer to 1. This single setting would raise the floor by A LOT. Light attacks are not really about the damage from light attacks. They are about proccing enchants, building ultimate, interactions with certain sets. This change would be huge and would not require a compete redesign of the game combat like what is being proposed.

supersonic_kitten · July 2022

Pevey wrote: »

People are doing more than 100k with no light attacks on live, and that would be 115ish on the new pts dummy with the dummy changes. So huge difference.

with like heavy attack builds? i don't see a live/pts LA-less parse comparison here in this thread, the 100k parses posted here are done with LA weaving. were the 100k parses with zero light/heavy attacks posted somewhere else? i'm curious to see

also the new dummy buffs don't matter and i don't understand the focus on them. you will have them in content if you have a zenkosh and your rojo heal is not sleeping. if the dummy had them now on live, people who pull 120-130k dps would have 140k. don't tell me that number doesn't look ridiculous.

full disclosure - i'm not trying to protect the patch, there are a ton of things that i thing should not go live. but some tests feel disengenuine and like they are made just to fuel drama. like that nefas molten whip parse video where the only reason he pulled 94k was because he was using health food for some reason. "*heavy sigh* i could probably push that to a hundred, maybe" yeah mhm :P

Pevey · July 2022

Those parses were posted in the combat preview thread, I think. Before the pts went live. They were to show that high dps is possible on live without weaving.

The focus on the dummy changes is to try to normalize for comparison purposes. It’s not apples to apples between live and pts if you don’t.

The number may look ridiculous to you, but that is because the dummy is giving you a lot of buffs that could be available to you in a theoretically optimized 12-man group. For true comparison, you can use the 3m or 6 m dummy. When people quote old numbers like 35k for vmol, they are referring to those old dummy parses. That would be like 90k on the pts dummy.

Most of the power creep comes from a few sets and one over performing backbar weapon. Stampede should have been nerfed, no doubt about it. That would bring top dps down by about 10k right there.

The other reason for the creep will not be nerfed for commercial reasons. ZOS wants to sell the content that drops the sets. Zos needs a must have mythic (kilt) to sell that whole thing. So because of that everyone must be nerfed? Sus.

It’s also these numbers that the most recent trials and dungeons have been balanced around.

Lalothen · July 2022

Most players are capable of some light attacking even if it's nowhere near perfect weaving (an average player who's done enough trials to have relequen can usually keep the stacks up with a little bit of practice), so comparative parsing with that in mind is important. Gear standardisation between parses is still important too; you're adding variables by using different back-bar maelstrom weapons, etc.

X_K wrote: »

@Pevey this is a friend of mines parse on live v pts with same gear. when the transmutes hit from 30 day camp ill recon yandir and rele and do it myself

Is this post missing some images, or are we comparing your friend's live parses to the parses you put in your original post? I ask because if it's the latter, then the difference between the two zero-LA parses on PTS vs. Live is negligible (as is the difference between the weaving parses, looking at it) - though obviously there are variables involved. Looking forward to seeing your live parses though - and thanks for taking the trouble. I'm hoping to get some time for my own PTS vs Live parsing this weekend.

It is obvious that one thing the devs need to account for with this patch is that top sets like Rele, Kinras, etc, do rely on steady LA weaving to maintain high uptime. That's solvable though by standardising the stack timers at 10s (which is what Rele used to be at anyway), which still encourages people to learn how to weave but offers more leeway.

prof_doom · July 2022

supersonic_kitten wrote: »

tbh, 70k with NO light attacks at all does indeed look like raising the floor, bc currently mid tier players are struggling to hit 70k with bad weaving, not to mention NO weaving at all.

That sounds good, until you realize that people had already done 90K+ no-LA parses on live. So yeah, even doing no light attacks you lose 20K damage.

francesinhalover · July 2022

From what i see light attacks are 11% of you dps, what z could do is make poisons useful again so ppl that don't light attack proc those with skills more easily.

So without the nerfs you were doing around 120k right? that's a awesome rotation

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/540221/poison-and-weapon-enchantments-mechanics

from what i see buffs need light attacks to be applied right? that means the wep dmg 5 sec buff everyone uses on bow bar doesn't work without light attack weaving right?

could you do a rotation like the one you did without light attacks, but with poison on the backbar?

carlos424 · July 2022

X_K wrote: »

There seems to be this misconception that this change is ment to close the Delta between Light attack weavers and non Light attack weavers. this post is ment to show how that delta has Increased

i did 3 parses of each spec. [it was very painful not light attacking for 4 minutes straight] and grabbed the ones with the most normalized crit

First Image is Almost perfect DOT uptimes with heroism pots with no light attacks. I swapped to Yandir over Rele to not be Disingenuous while testing

2nd image is a normal parse. with slightly undercasted dots but with light attacks.

as you can see even with "optimization" of the non light attack build. its still over 30k behind. what happened? where was this delta supposed to close? "Light attack weaving" should have only lost me 10-12k dps. how did I loose 30k with optimization and over 40k without. none of the changes proposed as of week 1 pts make any sense. or close the gap at all. they seem to do the opposite. and you just introduced 5 more light attack sets. the only solution to this problem is to tutorialise GCD and nonGCD actions
Players can help. but a very large portion of the population of any game looks at 0 content. we cant fix your problem for you.

Damage Nerfs are fine. and expected. but healing changes make some content near impossible. even content 2 years old at this point.
i have been playing this game on and off since week 1 of official pc release. i love it dearly. its the only game with combat as fluid and dynamic in both PvP and PvE.
it is unparalleled in the MMO scene and these DOT changes make the combat feel slow and repetitive.

X_K Out

Incoming Rele nerf

jaws343 · July 2022

I think you all are conflating the light attack changes with the overall DPS nerf of the patch.

A player who spends 2 mins on a dummy, and hits a light attack perfectly each second is going to be far more impacted from the light attack nerfs than the person who spends 2 minutes on the dummy and only does half, or, more likely, far far less. The light attack nerf is bridging that gap between top and bottom, because, from a light attack perspective, the bottom is seeing minimal loss from the nerf compared to the top.

The problem is, the patch also added the DOT nerf. Which hits everyone pretty hard. The DOT nerf was not something they said would bridge the gap between players from a DPS standpoint, the combat preview said it was intended to make things easier. Clearly they were trying to bring down overall DPS with the change.

So, the light attacks are doing exactly what they said they would, the problem is, the DOT changes are doing more to bring down DPS than the light attack changes are doing to bring the bottom closer to the top.

It's two separate issues here that are being pushed by the forums as a failure for the light attack nerf.

JustAGoodPlayer · July 2022

This patch is just a DPS lose, a lot of strange changes was made.

A lot of ninja fixes.

It do not help to make difference betwin players less.

Some skills are not standartised and dots of 20 seconds duration not feels realy good.

The changes that was made to HA i dislike.

LA damage lose - good change ))) Even including the fact i use part of rotation as LA in my build.

But in summ - big dps lose of all players, balance looks worse than before. Sets and skills are not balanced and if it will be put on live in such way it will make game worse.

To much must be reworked to make this work, and it do not feels good as i think. Starting from sets as Elf bain, sets that empower small hits of dots, work on some proc and etc. Because part of old sets will be dead.

And it is not possible to balance fast.

And no reason in it.

So dislike this changes.

KMarble · July 2022

supersonic_kitten wrote: »

can you do a parse with "bad" LA weaving, like just random LA spam? i think that would be a bit more genuine bc mose casual players just spam those, they don't outright ignore the left mouse button

I can do that. It won't be on a dummy though, as I get bored easily and mess things up (more than I normally do).

I don't think I weave perfectly, so doing a "bad" weaving is my default mode. I also don't reach high damage numbers, so the combat metrics might give a better idea of how a low/mid level player will perform if this patch goes live.

X_K · July 2022

jaws343 wrote: »

I think you all are conflating the light attack changes with the overall DPS nerf of the patch.

A player who spends 2 mins on a dummy, and hits a light attack perfectly each second is going to be far more impacted from the light attack nerfs than the person who spends 2 minutes on the dummy and only does half, or, more likely, far far less. The light attack nerf is bridging that gap between top and bottom, because, from a light attack perspective, the bottom is seeing minimal loss from the nerf compared to the top.

Light attacks do much much much more damage than just light attacks. the damage of light attack / not light attacking on live is less than PTS due to the the fact that mael 2h is good. to get good numbers on PTS you are forced to use maelstrom inferno and relequins and other light attack sets. which makes the gap on PTS bigger than the gap on live.

you need to use light attack sets to recover damage lost from the patch. and if your *** at weaving. you cant use those sets to full effect. so your damage will drop even more.
the damage gap between weavers v non weavers is increasing. i am not looking at overall dps. am looking purely at the ratio.

supersonic_kitten · July 2022

prof_doom wrote: »

That sounds good, until you realize that people had already done 90K+ no-LA parses on live. So yeah, even doing no light attacks you lose 20K damage.

people keep saying that, and yet i don't see the links to those parses. sounds like he-said-she-said to me at this point, considering how unhappy people are and how much panic and drama is floating around. please link those 90-100k no-LA live parses if you keep using them as a point in a conversation. the burden of proof is not on me here.

i speculate, but in all likelihood those "no-LA" parses, if they exist, were done by normally very skilled players who know what they are doing in terms of how combat works, which skills to choose, what gear to choose - an enormous part of increasing your damage output is not just that mechanic or this mechanic, but understanding the game and making those mechanics work to your advantage. somehow i do not see 90k no-LA parses from beginners who come to discord for advice on how to improve dps and learn weaving. It's more like 40k in crafted/overland gear, or 60-70k if the player has relevant skills/gear that provides minor slayer.

Krym · July 2022

X_K wrote: »

Light attacks do much much much more damage than just light attacks. the damage of light attack / not light attacking on live is less than PTS due to the the fact that mael 2h is good. to get good numbers on PTS you are forced to use maelstrom inferno and relequins and other light attack sets. which makes the gap on PTS bigger than the gap on live.

you need to use light attack sets to recover damage lost from the patch. and if your *** at weaving. you cant use those sets to full effect. so your damage will drop even more.
the damage gap between weavers v non weavers is increasing. i am not looking at overall dps. am looking purely at the ratio.

if you can't weave to keep those sets up it makes no difference, unless you want to imply those same people can weave perfectly on live and can't LA once in 5 seconds on the PTS. also rele has been used for YEARS on live, ofc people use it on the PTS for the same reason.

ZOS stated intention for years has been to reign in top damage via weaving, the easiest way is to cap the damage, people who can weave perfectly will still do more damage but people who don't won't drop as hard. being able to weave still gets rewarded with bigger numbers (and higher uptime), but the the difference isn't as big.

KMarble · July 2022

Sorry for taking so long to get back to this. I posted on another thread about my findings and will post my combat metrics numbers here later.

KMarble wrote: »

Theoretically I'm the type of player ZOS is trying to help. In practice though, I'm not. I have the knowledge and means to get better (and that was the plan until this year's updates began to be applied. I decided my time and money were better spent learning to play another game).

I don't do better DPS because 1. I'm lazy, 2. it is (so far) not necessary, 3. keeping a rhythm is both boring and hard for me.

I fought the WB near Hammerdeath Bungalow yesterday. I did 14k and change on live. Then I used the same character, without changing anything on the PTS and repeated the fight. 11k and change on PTS.

A few things that I think are relevant:
1. I haven't been playing much, so I'm rusty. Fighting that boss on live was the first thing I did yesterday. My brain needs to "warm up" so I can push the right buttons at the right time. I made way more mistakes than I'd normally do because I of that.
2. By the time I got to the PTS my brain and fingers were in agreement about what to do. I even managed to get some animation cancelling on a few of my heavy attacks which isn't something I do often.
3. The boss on live spawned 2 batches of mobs. On PTS there were no mobs nor crabs.

From my little test yesterday I lost about 22% of my DPS.

I'll post the combat metrics details on the PTS thread later today when I get to my desktop.

One last thing. In the combat preview thread it was said that the devs want to make combat better so players don't need to be looking at their bars and instead concentrate on the fight.
I seldom look at my bars on this character because I'm very well acquainted with how combat happens and what I need to do when playing her. I'll be forced to look at her bar if this change goes live (for example, I know when to reapply my wall of elements because I see it explode. When I do my rotation right, it explodes just in time for me to re-apply it. On PTS I cannot tell anymore when it is about to explode*).

Here you go. The experience of a filthy casual who enjoyed almost all aspects of the game and was planning, until last January, to finally git gud.

*Yes, I know. It's a matter of remembering how long it will last. But if you read the reason 1 why I don't do better DPS you'll see that I'm lazy.

KMarble · July 2022

Re-posting from another thread.

FYI for those still willing to test: According to the patch notes released this morning for the LIVE SERVERS, the dummies weren't giving the right numbers.

Fixed an issue that caused training dummies to report inflated DPS values.

Emphasis mine. https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/612045/pc-mac-patch-notes-v8-0-8#latest (scroll down to housing)

I like to remind you all that I saw a drop of 22% between live and PTS while fighting a World Boss. I did not parse on a dummy.

Make of this info what you will.

prof_doom · July 2022

KMarble wrote: »

Re-posting from another thread.

FYI for those still willing to test: According to the patch notes released this morning for the LIVE SERVERS, the dummies weren't giving the right numbers.

Fixed an issue that caused training dummies to report inflated DPS values.

Emphasis mine. https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/612045/pc-mac-patch-notes-v8-0-8#latest (scroll down to housing)

I like to remind you all that I saw a drop of 22% between live and PTS while fighting a World Boss. I did not parse on a dummy.

Make of this info what you will.

Except that anyone testing on the PTS is on PC. And 99% of them are using CMX... which has been reporting the right numbers all along.

Marto · July 2022

I'm not super keen on the math, but your testing methodology seems really flawed from the start.

Your parses are not an apples-to-apples comparison, since both Relequen and Yandir are sets with effects that are activated by performing more attacks and damage ticks.

If you really want to test and measure the difference you need to use a gear setup that does not exponentially increase in power the more light attacks you perform.

X_K · July 2022

Marto wrote: »

I'm not super keen on the math, but your testing methodology seems really flawed from the start.

Your parses are not an apples-to-apples comparison, since both Relequen and Yandir are sets with effects that are activated by performing more attacks and damage ticks.

If you really want to test and measure the difference you need to use a gear setup that does not exponentially increase in power the more light attacks you perform.

the whole point of it was to show how the meta shifted straight back to light attack buffing / sets that require light attacks to proc. again, endgamers will adapt to these changes, likely run the exact build i used in most single target trial content. but the overall nerfing of damage REQUIRES Moving back to proc sets instead of Stat sets like coral, to regain a portion of the damage lost.
lower end players get hit full force by the nerfs in general. whereas people who can weave well will swap to maelstrom inferno, Rele, kinras, and kjalnar if they are a crit dmg class, and loose much less damage overall.
the math is flawed completely if my intention was to do apples to apples. but its to show how the meta build is so reliant on light attacks now more than on live. that the whole point of this update was negated instantly by their half baked attempt at solving a problem that would require an entire combat overhaul to "fix"

Tannus15 · July 2022

rele & kinra

vs

julianos and orders wrath

it's not as bad as you'd expect, but it's pretty noticable.

Sluggy · July 2022

supersonic_kitten wrote: »

tbh, 70k with NO light attacks at all does indeed look like raising the floor, bc currently mid tier players are struggling to hit 70k with bad weaving, not to mention NO weaving at all.

They are struggling because they don't have a good enough understanding of how to make a build or rotation nor how to execute it effectively.

Honestly it's really quite annoying when people point to light attacks as being 'too much damage' and then point to 20% as the source of their opinion. It's 20% because you are using them between EVERY skill! On average they are being cast between 5 and 12 times more frequently than anything else.

By themselves they are quite weak. And this is why on live no body bothers with sets that provide bonuses to light attacks nor do they bother with CP that increases their damage (at least not unless they are making a niche build with light attacks specifically meant to be the main source of damage). Those slots could instead go to other stats that effect ALL damage including that D-Swing that with an 18k tooltip.

StarOfElyon · July 2022

Pevey wrote: »

Those parses were posted in the combat preview thread, I think. Before the pts went live. They were to show that high dps is possible on live without weaving.

The focus on the dummy changes is to try to normalize for comparison purposes. It’s not apples to apples between live and pts if you don’t.

The number may look ridiculous to you, but that is because the dummy is giving you a lot of buffs that could be available to you in a theoretically optimized 12-man group. For true comparison, you can use the 3m or 6 m dummy. When people quote old numbers like 35k for vmol, they are referring to those old dummy parses. That would be like 90k on the pts dummy.

Most of the power creep comes from a few sets and one over performing backbar weapon. Stampede should have been nerfed, no doubt about it. That would bring top dps down by about 10k right there.

The other reason for the creep will not be nerfed for commercial reasons. ZOS wants to sell the content that drops the sets. Zos needs a must have mythic (kilt) to sell that whole thing. So because of that everyone must be nerfed? Sus.

It’s also these numbers that the most recent trials and dungeons have been balanced around.

It's painfully obvious.