[snip]

Seeing as its week 3, there probably won't be any more "big" changes. I'll find something better to spend my time and money on.

[edited for bashing]

PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ THIS

Warden
Winter’s Embrace
Impaling Shards:
Returned the duration and tick rate of this ability and its morphs to 10 seconds and 1 second, rather than 20 seconds and 2 seconds.
Reduced the cost to 3240, down from 3780.
Gripping Shards (morph): Reduced the cost of this morph to 2970, down from 3510.

Arctic Wind
Arctic Blast (morph):
Increased the duration of this morph to 20 seconds, up from 10 seconds.
Increased the damage per tick by approximately 9%.
This morph now stuns once immediately upon cast, rather than based on the number of ticks you're on, for more active and deliberate gameplay.


Arctic Blast is excellent change.

but Winter's Revenge?

Returned to 10 seconds? Since when? I seem to remember very clearly it being 12 seconds. I don't mind 10 seconds. That's not the point. The point is this...

.... THIS IS DEFINITIVE PROOF THAT WHOEVER IS DOING THESE CHANGES DOES NOT PLAY THE GAME!!!

You can't even get a return to previous duration right? Someone who played the game would not make this mistake. And still, the 33% per tick nerf remains?

Again, let me reiterate. The community DOES NOT want ability standardization. Why does it always feel like two steps back and one step forward? Every time. And you wonder why your community gets so frustrated? I say this with all due respect to everything you get right and the hard work you put in.

Ground DoT's didn't need nerfing they needed BUFFING and still need buffing in order to be remotely viable in PvP. Either that, or some kind of set needs to be added to make them worthwhile in a PvP scenario without it being some silly cooldown gimmick like Dark Convergence or Draugrkin.

Something like this:

Rapid Decay:

2 Items: Critical Chance
3 Items: Spell and Weapon Damage
4 Items: Critical Chance
5 Items: Reduce the duration of your applied single target, and ground damage over time abilities by 75% and increase their tick rate to once every 0.5 seconds, but reduce the overall damage of all your abilities by 50%. This does not affect Ultimate abilities, status effects, Light Attacks or Heavy Attacks.


Here is a bit of math to understand it.

DoT natively deals about 20000 damage over 12 seconds. Resulting in 1666 damage per second.

With above set suggestion the same DoT will deal 9999 over 3 seconds. Resulting in 3333 damage per second.

Another example:

20 second DoT deals 18000 over duration = 900 per second.

Above set changes this to 5 second DoT deals 9000 over duration = 1800 per second.


Effectively doubling the DPS of DoT's but quartering the duration.


With such a set dedicated DoT builds could work, but with the down side of having a very short up time thus making it niche and not part of standard rotations. It would not affect Aura DoT, such as Mystic Orb or Hurricane etc. and yes no ultimates either. Also, no effect on status effects to stop Burning from instantly killing players while allowing other status effects to keep doing good damage. No effect on Light and Heavies is for a similar reason allowing some direct damage but not letting Lightning staff or Resto staff do silly damage in one second.

Also, it would nerf all other direct damage with exception to the above examples, so that it would not become oppressive in PvP to prevent players from combining bursty DoT’s with burst skills. It would also nerf Jabs and Flurry. Jabs due to it being non-ground and non- single target and Flurry would be an exception and simply need to receive the penalty. Jesus Beam would also receive the damage penalty without the duration decrease to keep it balanced.


Alternatively, if 2.5 seconds is too short, you could change it to a 60% duration reduction. This would result in a 4 second DoT for 10 seconds, 4.8 (4.5 in practice but could be rounded up to 5) for 12 seconds and 8 second DoT from 20 seconds. But in this case you need to reduce the overall damage reduction and cost to about 30% to compensate.


I hope this kind of points to something. This is what a TRUE DoT build feels like, SACRIFICING direct damage for increased damage over time per tick. It would not even have to be a set, this could be incorporated into the CP tree as an OPTION. The loss on direct damage and the shorter duration of the DoT's would be the trade off and balance it out. It would be impossible to maintain more than 4 DoT's at time with such an option. But that would be fine, those that don't want it, don't take it.

Just trying to point out, that alternative play styles are addressed with similar options. Cost and Benefit tradeoffs that result in vastly different play styles that remain effective in all content.

You could even do something similar for status effect where they deal more damage at the cost of something else.

But if anything, listen to what your players are asking you for. We DO NOT WANT STANDARDIZATION. We want our classes to feel different from others beyond aesthetic difference. We want within those classes a multitude of different play styles. All classes should be able to either play DD full burst, full DoT or a hybrid of the two and all should be effective in their own way in both PVE and PVP. This is alongside their Tank and Healer potential. Bottlenecking everything into a handful of skills is NOT the direction you should be taking. You said it yourselves, it's about choice. SO CREATE MORE CHOICES.

As I thought from the preview comments, these changes are not enough IMO.

I'm not sure if the dev comments in the original changes were just for show or those are actual goals, because very few of the changes actually meet those goals.

Overall lowering of damage just to try and hurt the ceiling is the wrong approach to take IMO. Because it's bringing everyone down. Lowering LA damage and dot damage isn't just bringing the ceiling down. And the GAP between high and low tier dps still exists same as ever.

i.e. which groups/players will have perfect uptime on empower and all have MA staves boosting LA damage? So mostly a flat light attack damage (set at where its at now) will hurt mid-tier the most. It won't hurt players that don't weave at all, but it will hurt everyone that actually tries to learn how to play the game the most efficiently.

If you really want to close the gap, then make it easier for players to maintain some of those rare buffs and add more sources, or make those buffs less powerful. Boost the flat LA damage up and lower empower and MA LA damage boosts - then you are raising everything but the ceiling at that point, which makes the game more accessible.

The dps reqs aren't going to change to get into trial teams, that is based on the trial, not the average dps of players. So a lot less players will be able to get into trial teams (that are sticking around).

And all the dev talk about making it easier to keep up with dots and hots and buffs by making times uniform/longer. You have adjusted the times for ground dots/hots back a bit and that only dealt with about 1/3 of the major complaints of the changes. It looks like dots are even more confusing now to players. Certainly there are ways to make things uniform but also maintain some class identity, personally just making the dots a couple seconds longer than they are on live now would have given a little more breathing room to players to spam an ability/weave a bit between reapplications. Making sticky dots now do so little damage makes them a lot less useful in pvp or even some uses in PvE.

Damage overall is still being lowered, but I'm not seeing any big enough adjustments, or any, made to trials and dungeons to compensate for this change. So you are essentially making content less accessible to players.

Which brings me back to questioning the dev comments - they feel more like someone making up good excuses to sell a change, than a real reason for the change because none of those goals stated are really being met.

This PTS doesn't change the gap much. Doesn't make content more accessible. Doesn't make gameplay more accessible/less confusing for new players.

I also have an issue with the attempt to make class balance changes while also changing the overall basic way combat works. It means that no real balance will be done because you can't see the effect of those class changes and it will just be one big shake up that means a bunch of different stuff will just be out of balance now. Frankly, class balance should have been the only pass done. No overall dot/LA changes should have been made at the same time.

And none of that addresses the concern of just change fatigue. It really seems like zos just changes stuff for the sake of changing it all the time. We've never achieved any real balance. Which I don't even think is truly possible, but what is possible is to keep making tweaks to get as close as you can, but that isn't being done. Instead it's always just more sweeping changes to just move the lack of imbalance around. (Even the easiest thing in the game - racials - only ten races with 3 passives each - hasn't been tweaked a bit more attempt to close that balance gap. I won't get into details here, that's a different discussion, but let's face it - most players don't complain at this point because it's the smallest problem and at this point 'good enough' - not because it's actually balanced).

Honestly, this patch should have just been some class balance and item balance tweaks. It would have been less work for you guys and players would have overall been happier (though sure, some players will always get upset by balance even if needed). Now you have players leaving the game that don't want to leave - that should tell you all you want right there.

Faulgor wrote: »

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Elsonso wrote: »

blktauna wrote: »

My question is, what constitutes no anecdotal feedback?

I don't run cmx anymore and I don't hump dummies. I went out onto the PTS with my toons and simply did the stuff I usually do with ease, and discovered it was no longer easy. I was unable to solo several dungeons I can do easily on live.

That's not an anecdote.

That is exactly an anecdote, and it is similar to what I did.

I didn't provide them with numbers, parses, or combat logs. I just told them what I thought from direct testing. How the game feels. What I am able to do, and how I feel about the changes.

How I **feel** about the game combat is what will determine whether I continue to play, and if I do, to what degree. If my DPS is down 10% but the game feels good, I am happy. If the game feels like a microwaved turd from the back yard, then I am much less happy, even if my DPS is higher.

This is one way that I feel that the development team is off in a direction that I am not interested in. I really don't care about ESO at the mathematical level. If the math works, great, but I am here for the fun. Update 35 PTS Week 1 and Week 2 are not fun, even if they have some sort of mathematical perfection.

ZOS has always taken pride in their data-driven development.
I'd prefer it being fun-driven.

Pride goes before the fall.

Warden still has the awful Scorch timing changes - PLEASE REVERT THIS.

Twohothardware wrote: »

If you actually want to reduce the skill ceiling and improve the feel of the game for the average player then undo all the nerfs you’ve done to class, food, and CP recovery and increase base recovery for everyone.

Players aren’t struggling because of not being able to perfectly light attack weave, they’re struggling because they run out of resources. Resource management is where the biggest skill gap is, not light attack weaving.

Heck, I'd be happy with just the second half of your post.

CleymenZero wrote: »

Please rethink the values of your coefficients, they need to be increased.

Also for the sake of PvP where DoT skills are already underpowered and underused on live.

Please leave Oakensoul the way it is on Live for PVE. Add Battle Spirit adjustments to balance PVP.

Why is jabs still trash? What is the value to ZOS of nerfing the most iconic spammable out of the game?

With the week 3 changes you actually decreased accessibility even more. With week 1 changes you nerfed damage, that's fine, as most players had some overhead. Dot timers being 20sec allowed newer players actually to have a rotation and some even gained dps thanks to being able to keep up buffs. But now it's even worse than live. So many abilities and buffs have different timers. Static rotations are no longer viable, only dynamic and way more complicated. Low apm players are penalized even more than on live.

What I dont understand is how after nearly 8 years, ZOS thinks its necessary to completely overhaul combat like its some sort of year 1 of a beta game.

Minor changes and adjustments are understandable but if you cannot decide on how combat should look like after nearly a decade, something is wrong.

1. Who asked to increase dot times?
2. Who asked to nerf wall?
3. Who asked to practically ruin sorcs and wardens?
4. Who asked to destroy healing?
5. Who asked to come up with a random idea of sticky and other dots?

6. What is the reason? You said accessibility.

7. How is increased dot times more accessible?
8. How is less dps more accessible?
9. How is no class identity more accessible?
10. How is more complicated healing more accessible?
11. How is maintaining multiple dot times more accessible?

12. Who comes up with these ideas?
13. Are you being dishonest in explaining your true motivations?
14. Do you listen to any feedback?
15. Are you doubling down on the changes you saw so much backlash on only because of a false sense of ego?

16. Why do you think it is okay to antagonize the community?
17. Why do you think power creep is a bad thing?
18. Why is there no communication?
19. Why do devs refuse to test changes in actual content?
20. Why did you parse on dummies and not go try your own trial trifectas?
21. Why is it considered a problem to do more dps?
22. Why shouldnt we be able to clear things if we put in more effort than someone else?

You are practically destroying the one thing ESO has better than any other game, its combat.

Kusto wrote: »

With the week 3 changes you actually decreased accessibility even more. With week 1 changes you nerfed damage, that's fine, as most players had some overhead. Dot timers being 20sec allowed newer players actually to have a rotation and some even gained dps thanks to being able to keep up buffs. But now it's even worse than live. So many abilities and buffs have different timers. Static rotations are no longer viable, only dynamic and way more complicated. Low apm players are penalized even more than on live.

The community does not want static rotations.