It just occurred to me - We might be looking at the "floor/ceiling" issue completely wrong.

BlueRaven · July 2022

By now many of us have heard about the latests eso live where they wanted to "lower the ceiling, while leaving the floor alone" concept for combat changes.

And/or we may have seen the combat preview article that mentions something similar:

"Currently, to be truly effective in ESO’s combat, you need to learn to manipulate something that is known as “weaving,” which refers to the act of squeezing multiple actions into the global cooldown window. Doing so drastically increases your agency and output, and it is a staple of the game that we’ve come to embrace, as it helps our combat feel different and exciting to participate in once you learn the ins and outs. However, the impact of weaving leads to a massive gap in performance where players who cannot interact with it as effectively are left miles behind those who can. While this is partially unavoidable and an important part of what makes the mastery of ESO or any activity utilizing a similar system particularly satisfying, we want to do what we can to shorten that delta. The closer the gap between the low and high end, the easier it is to create content that can accommodate a wider audience, while making more natural progression points for those looking to improve."

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/62493

Now with the ceiling it's pretty obvious who they are talking about, the 125k+ dps crowd.

But maybe the "low end" they are referring to is NOT the 10k dps crowd.

We have been struggling to find a reason why Zos seems determined to lower the dps of the low end (10k-20k dps) group while stating they did not want to. But maybe the low end group they are referring to is the low end of regular vet content players.

Perhaps the "delta" they want to lower is between say the 125k dps groups and the 60-70k dps groups. Maybe these changes are not at all aimed at what we in the the community would refer to as the "floor" at all.

Knowing that lower end dps usually heavily relies upon light and heavy attacks, why nerf it? Maybe because that group is not actually being considered at all for these changes.

Just a thought.

ZiggyTStardust · July 2022

It's certainly possible but I don't really see how the changes will accomplish that.
Some of them certainly will help those players, like shortening jabs to 0.8 seconds, but nerfing Light Attacks will reduce their dps too.

MostlyJustCats · July 2022

Doesn't matter. The 60k to 70k group relies far more on LA damage than the 100k+ group does.

LA animation canceling is the most visible element of weaving but it's the easiest part to get the hang of. Left click immediately before you hit a skill - that's it.

Managing a 2-bar rotation is a bit harder.

Keeping consistent pace to within milliseconds of the global cooldown is the tricky part - and where you get that push into 100k+ territory.

Guess what keeps you doing decent damage as you improve at the hard part? LA damage and expanding/managing your rotation.

xylena_lazarow · July 2022

The nerfs to weaving and DoT dps will probably hurt the low end of vet content players the most. They go from barely completing vet content, to being unable to do so at all, and have to redo all their builds and rotations on top of that.

seventyfive · July 2022

I'm pretty confident you got it all backwards. The reason being that your original assumption is not in line with most players here at the forums. A lot of players I see market themselves as "below average" and somehow incompetent or disabled while complaining that their 50k+ damage has gone down significantly. But the truly in-need-of-help players are are indeed the 10-20k dps ones which they're indeed trying to help, from what I can tell. Those people extremely rarely vist the forums and are a large part of the combined playerbase, even though most players here would probably deny their widespread existence.

Holycannoli · July 2022

It's as simple as this:

You cannot help players' accessibility by nerfing their damage.

Nothing else needs to be said.

If anything it's that pesky "accessibility" that we might be misunderstanding. I'm defining it as accessibility to the game's content like dungeons, trials etc. The devs might be defining it as ease of combat mechanics - button pressing and all that - but nothing else.

VaranisArano · July 2022

seventyfive wrote: »

I'm pretty confident you got it all backwards. The reason being that your original assumption is not in line with most players here at the forums. A lot of players I see market themselves as "below average" and somehow incompetent or disabled while complaining that their 50k+ damage has gone down significantly. But the truly in-need-of-help players are are indeed the 10-20k dps ones which they're indeed trying to help, from what I can tell. Those people extremely rarely vist the forums and are a large part of the combined playerbase, even though most players here would probably deny their widespread existence.

Most of my random normal dungeons are done with DDs in the 5-20k range. If ZOS wants more people doing Veteran content like they said in ESO Live, they'd got to buff damage on the low end, not nerf it.

And the same goes for the middle group in the 30-75k range. If ZOS wants more people doing Vet progression content, they've got to buff DPS, not nerf it.

Yes, that might blow the roof off the ceiling in the process. Scorepushers are gonna scorepush. But if the goal is to get more people doing the content in the first place, the Devs can't keep nerfing everyone in an attempt to keep the ceiling down.

Troodon80 · July 2022

What they could do to raise the floor while leaving the ceiling alone is:

Increasing the duration for things like debuffs/buffs, without extending durations of AoEs/DoTs
Extend duration of AoEs/DoTs (already done and players didn't like it)

We keep seeing things in the patch notes about "sweaty uptimes" and such. Just taking a single example: One thing that often doesn't get used in lower-tier groups is Stone Giant. It adds somewhere between 2000~3000 extra DPS per player in the group on average. It stacks up to three times, but the debuff only lasts six seconds while the ability lasts 12. If this lasts 20 seconds, then it makes the debuff a bit more accessible with less overall downtime. End game tanks won't suddenly stop spamming it because it's also a DPS increase for them to use their GCDs; which is also part of what raises the ceiling in that respect, effective use of GCDs. With higher duration and fewer casts needed, you could also put it on a magDK (some already put it on a Z'en DK in past patches). But if the floor could keep it up then it would close at least the gap between people who cannot keep it up and those who aim for "sweaty uptimes," insignificant though that example might be. In this sense, the (potential) floor is raised and the ceiling more or less stays the same.

However, both of these cases are flawed because it still relies on people actually using those abilities. I made a note of this in the feedback thread for someone else who wasn't using any AoEs/DoTs, instead primarily using two-handed Wrecking Blow/Dizzying Swing. If they won't use those abilities, then the floor stays the same and nothing much changes. But you potentially lessen the gap between mid-tier and obscene-tier.

It's my belief that you cannot lower the ceiling and leave the floor alone without doing one of the following two things:

Setting caps for how damage or healing is derived from stats, without capping the stat/resource itself, much like armour rating
Similar to #1, setting caps on damage/healing output from abilities as "Ability does up to X amount of damage, your current damage will be: Y." This is different from #1 as each ability would have its own cap rather than a general cap based on stats; this is similar to how various sets work

The only way damage/healing at the ceiling can be brought down while leaving the floor alone, or raising the floor while leaving the ceiling alone, is to introduce minimums and maximums. Which I doubt most people would enjoy, either. People are generally not too enthusiastic about such things.

As the current update goes...

Decreasing light attack damage hits light attack spammers and players doing perfect weaving alike.
Decreasing heavy attack damage hits those players with heavy attack builds, especially those with one bar builds who might find it difficult -- for whatever reason -- to follow meta rotations with good weaving.
Decreasing AoE/DoT damage hits everyone. Decreasing overall HPS in the same way also hits everyone.

The current update doesn't bridge that gap in any way, and as a ratio of floor to ceiling... that number won't change.

The thing is, ZOS hasn't actually specified who the delta is between. As you've rightly pointed out, maybe it's between the 80k to 90k, while the top is 120k+. They quote floor and ceiling, and one can fairly easily surmise that the "floor" is the 10k DPS (or less) random normal DDs and ceiling is the "obscene" DPS. We cannot know unless they state that. I think it's also fair to say that they're not just using ESO Logs to look at target dummy parses, but have statistics for everything in the game. The backend statistics would be much more reliable and in-depth, too.

Without us knowing the metric being used*, we can't calculate much.

* For example, we already know from previous comments that Gina, Gilliam, et al, have made regarding APM also includes any form of moving, crouching, dodge rolling, jumping, synergy use, potion use, as well as light attacks and abilities; which isn't really a valid metric as anyone who spams WASD but uses abilities infrequently will naturally do low DPS despite having hight APM. Which is also why a lot of the end game community meme about it and don't take it seriously. It's flawed right from the start. The definition of APM works in other MMOs because, for example, let's say FFXIV where a lot of abilities are channels and thus cancel when you move to get out of an AoE, something that you will want to do, doing one action may interrupt doing another. In ESO, you don't really have that. You can heal or do damage while moving. So you very much need to know what metric they're using and the definition of that metric.

Dagoth_Rac · July 2022

Holycannoli wrote: »

It's as simple as this:

You cannot help players' accessibility by nerfing their damage.

Nothing else needs to be said.

If anything it's that pesky "accessibility" that we might be misunderstanding.

A mid-tier group did Vet Cloudrest + 0 on the PTS. It was a long slog of low damage but they eventually cleared. And they started at vCR + 1 but even that one miniboss slowed things down and caused such a problem that they gave up.

But the best DPS in group? A Nightblade whose rotation was 1 Wall of Elements, 19 Killer's Blade, bar swap, repeat.

I feel like ZOS is heavily focused on combat accessibility and not so much on content accessibility. I think they are overlooking that, yes, the frantic nature of ESO DPS turns a lot of players off. Combat in ESO is kind of like Guitar Hero if every song was "Through the Fire and Flames". But having simpler combat that results in fights that take forever, if you can even clear the content, is a big turn off, too.

fiender66 · July 2022

Since 2016 I tried a lot of things in ESO (being in guilds, vet/trial content, tanking, healing, all classes, you name). Now I only play solo and only PVE, for this is what I like(d) best.

I never parse and will never do it, so I cannot produce figures, instead I made some comparison between my mains (magplar and stamplar) on the same content in Live and PTS.

The difference was perceptible: even after making some useful tweaks the feeling was similar to that of running a delve with a heal tank (the stamplar was that affected worse). Soloing some simple stuff like FG1 has become a PITA taking at least twice the time needed before, and this without having any more fun or interest, for the enemies were the same, only my blades had become blunt.

I cannot even imagine what a serious vet dungeon has become.

MudcrabAttack · July 2022

The low end vet crowd could be weaving light attacks between skills at 1.3-1.8 seconds. The light attacks were only contributing 10-15% of their total dps, assuming they were missing a few

After practicing weaving without light attacks I saw my timing between skills go from 1.1 seconds to 1.03 seconds. I can easily imagine someone else with a 1.8 second weave improving their weave by 0.4 seconds by just leaving out most light attacks, only applying one occasionally to keep up ultimate regeneration. That would be like a big damage buff to them.