@ZOS_Gilliam @ZOS_Kevin

I've spent over 20 hours testing the effects of the PVP changes in 1v1's on the PTS. I hope that this feedback will not go unnoticed.

Overall experience - The number one concern for myself and many players is the nocturnal's ploy set. This set fundamentally breaks how the buff/debuff system works in ESO, and will have a huge negative impact on PVP balance for many players if it goes live. The most impactful changes in this combat balancing patch were the ones to healing over time abilities, the changes to weaving damage, and the changes to dot damage. The healing changes seem totally justified, and fine in their current state. On live, healing over time is far overtuned and often allows people to be immortal with very little effort. With healing having a massive nerf across the board on the PTS, you would expect that in general we would have a less tanky patch. This is not the case. On the PTS the overall DPS feels significantly lower, and the burst damage has taken a massive hit. The main culprit of this is the weaving damage being reduced so heavily - it is very clear that this change was made in regards to PVE, with no consideration for the PVP side of things. Weaving makes up a massive portion of your PVP damage in 2022, and your bursts on live will often source anywhere from 25%-50% of their damage (depending on if you have OB/Empower) from light/medium/heavy attacks weaved into the 1-2 global cooldowns you deal your burst damage during. The flat value may work for PVE, but in PVP it is far too low and has resulted in the damage feeling totally neutered in comparison to live.

Nocturnal's ploy - This set has the potential to completely ruin the PVP experience for many players if it goes live. The buff system in ESO functions well because of the counterpart debuff system - nearly every buff you can achieve has a counterpart debuff to counter it's effectiveness. This set completely invalidates that system. Not only are you applying the counterpart debuffs to your opponent, but you are reducing their combat effectiveness even further by removing their buffs and forcing them to spend global cooldowns AND resources re-casting those buffs. To make this even worse, every player in PVP uses potions to augment their sustain and/or their damage/crit. This set has the potential to remove potion buffs that could then not be re-acquired for up to 40 seconds.

The 5 piece could effectively read: Once every two seconds, randomly remove 40% of your weapons WD/SD, 9k of your target's resistances, 15% of your target's % mitigation modifiers, 20% of your target's critical chance, 30% of your target's AOE mitigation (evasion), 45% of your target's movespeed (expeditions), 40% Of your targets magicka or stamina regen, etc. This is drastically overpowered.

As a PVP player with many hours fighting outnumbered, I have experienced the whole spectrum of the types of people in PVP. There are so many people that simply want to remove someone's ability to fight back - whether this is through numbers advantages, through spamming stuns/roots, through using overpowered proc sets like dark convergence or calurion's, or through building full support builds that negate your ability to kill anyone around them. This set is a godsend for these people. If someone runs this set and chooses to target a player they do not like, they can completely remove that player's ability to fight back, to sustain, to mitigation damage, to move effectively, etc. This is not healthy for the game.

Nocturnal's Ploy potential solution - This set should be scrapped entirely. If the set is not going to be scrapped, it needs to have a cooldown of 15-20 seconds and it needs to not be able to remove potion sourced buffs. I would also recommend applying a cooldown to players once they are hit by this set, so if there are multiple opponents using this they cannot continually strip the buffs from a player they are targeting.

Damage over time nerfs - It is hard to tell whether the damage over time nerfs will be fine in real PVP settings from the PTS tests. In 1v1's, the damage over time numbers we are currently seeing on abilities are generally too low to be worthwhile using. There is a chance this changes when it comes to larger scale PVP settings though, where many more of these effects will be piled on. I am hesitant to suggest buffing the single target DOTS with the reduced healing in mind.

Healing over time - The healing over time nerfs are justified. On live the healing over time is simply far too high, especially in cases where it overlaps from multiple players. We still need zenimax to adjust the ability to stack same morph heals, as it is egregiously imbalanced for groups to be able to have 6x radiating regens and 6x echoing vigors on every member simultaneously, but these nerfs are a good start.

Light, medium, and heavy attacks - The damage on weaving in PVP has been totally gutted on the PTS. We are seeing a fraction of the weaving damage that we had on live, which lowers both DPS and burst damage. These first two CMX reports are from duels without empower or off balance, using a standard PVP damage build that you would typically encounter in cyrodiil. As you can see, the light attack weaving damage is averaging around 1k, with a max hit of 1.8k with modifiers such as soul harvest, minor vulnerability, etc active. This setup also has a 96% critical damage modifier.





These next two CMX reports are on a high damage setup that I am currently using on the live server. This setup uses every modifier in the game that could affect your weaving damage apart from the blue CP node (which is a non factor for the upcoming patch). In addition to the stats that you can see in the panel, the setup has four offensive CPs that would affect my weaving damage (Master at arms, deadly aim, exploiter, and fighting finesse). It also has incap for a % modifier, minor berserk/minor vulnerability/EMPOWER from ambush, off balance from surprise attack, the dual wield slaughter/ruffian passives, and a 101% critical damage modifier. This is more or less the highest possible PVP weaving damage that you can achieve in U35 without wearing sets that specifically increase the damage of your light/heavy attacks, and it is only available in this manner to nightblade - no other class has access to these modifiers and will see significantly lower numbers on their weaving.







Weaving takeaway/suggestions - The nerf to weaving damage is far too much for PVP. We need a noticeable increase to these numbers or we will be entering into an extremely tanky meta, which shouldn't be the case in a patch where healing is receiving a (justified) nerf.