Class-Weapons Skills and Winter's Revenge

LeonAkando · August 2022

For the uninformed,

Impaling Shards
Winter’s Revenge (morph): This morph now deals 30% more damage if you cast it with a Destruction Staff equipped, to help Magicka focused Wardens get some extra sustained damage.

Many people have posited that this is a preview of combat changes to come, as this has become a pattern for ESO combat changes.

May I get ahead of the discussion and mention that Class-Weapon Skills have some outstanding potential. The idea of abilities changing to operate around your current choice of weapon could open up a large swath of build options. I'll throw out some ideas.

What if Molten Whip from Dragonknight had the capacity to adjust to the weapon that the Dragonknight as wielding?
Whenever wielding a melee weapon, Molten Whip would behave exactly like it currently does.
Whenever wielding a staff, Molten Whip would become Extended Whip, giving it extra range and take on the damage stats of a ranged spammable version.
Whenever wielding a bow, Molten Whip would become Molten Arrow, giving it extra range and take on the damage stats of a ranged spammable version.

What if Lightning Flood from Sorceror was enhanced when utilizing a Lightning Staff?
Whenever wielding a Lightning Staff, dealing direct shock damage causes enemies inside Lightning Flood to burst with energy dealing X bonus shock damage to all nearby enemies.

Just two possible implications of how to either broaden an abilities use or enhance it within it's specialty as a design choice moving forward.

MashmalloMan · August 2022

Potential, yes.

ZOS, no.

I do not trust ZOS to implement any measure of this train of thought in a satisfying way. This is a sign of bad things to come if history serves correct. We're talking about a dev team that still struggles to make classes feel unique outside of the colour of their skills, 8 years after the launch of the game.

sbr32 · August 2022

Agreed. In the hands of a different development team that idea could have a huge amount of potential for cool stuff.

Mr_Stach · August 2022

I completely disagree.

This change flies completely against their main Mantra for ESO: "Play your Way"

Tying a skill directly to a weapon limits variety. You can basically ONLY use Winter's Revenge with Destro now, which for people who were already running it is no big deal, but for anyone else they do not have the choice, they either use destro, or they do not use Winter's Revenge.

I also don't think this implies anything for future development, i don't think they will lean into other weapon combos in the future.

Weapon Skills and Class Skills should work independently of each other. This was the same reason that when someone suggested that Warden have a passive that increased the effectiveness of Ice Staff, I advised a different direction because it should not be a classes job to patch up a weapons shortcomings and vice-versa.

Just let Winter's Revenge be good on it's own. It should not need a Destro Staff Hoop to jump through. I'm not opposed to the outcome, I'm opposed to the method and mindset.

Mr_Stach · August 2022

Now with all of that rant out of the way, the idea of altering Skills based on your class/weapon combo.

That would be really cool, I just don't think that either Zos or Eso are capable of that level of skill manipulation.

MashmalloMan · August 2022

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Now with all of that rant out of the way, the idea of altering Skills based on your class/weapon combo.

That would be really cool, I just don't think that either Zos or Eso are capable of that level of skill manipulation.

Exactly.. also, if the bonuses only applied to 1 weapon, then it would just do the same thing as Winter's Revenge now.

The only ideal way for that to work would be having each weapon give something unique, do we expect them to make 6 unique effects? Probably not..

Or for a spammable for instance.. "If using a ranged weapon do X, if using a melee weapon do Y"

There is a ton of different ways to do it, but the current way is just wrong on so many levels. All warden's are forced to use Destro back bar now.

Mr_Stach · August 2022

MashmalloMan wrote: »

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Now with all of that rant out of the way, the idea of altering Skills based on your class/weapon combo.

That would be really cool, I just don't think that either Zos or Eso are capable of that level of skill manipulation.

Exactly.. also, if the bonuses only applied to 1 weapon, then it would just do the same thing as Winter's Revenge now.

The only ideal way for that to work would be having each weapon give something unique, do we expect them to make 6 unique effects? Probably not..

Or for a spammable for instance.. "If using a ranged weapon do X, if using a melee weapon do Y"

There is a ton of different ways to do it, but the current way is just wrong on so many levels. All warden's are forced to use Destro back bar now.

Yeah for example in Ashes of Creation you can Multiclass. The Mage class has spell infusions that it can apply to the abilities of the new class, so like with Archer, instead of shooting a regular Arrow Ability, it can now be a Frost, Lightning, Fire, or Gravity(don't know what that'll do but sounds awesome) Arrow/Bolt.

I don't think Zos is capable of this level of Customization when it comes to Player Choice. It's hard enough to get them to let Lightning and Frost be viable in any sense of the word.

BahometZ · August 2022

Explicitly binding the efficacy of a CLASS skill to WEAPON type is so far out of the bounds of game philosophy that I don't even know where to begin. Another random thought that made its way into patch notes, despite there being hundreds of concrete improvements to skills/classes/passives/animations that could be made in its stead. What a ridiculous waste of time and resources.

Current live patch has so much going well for it, and just needs tweaks, I am heartbroken at the jumbled mess we are being served in the next patch.

MashmalloMan · August 2022

BahometZ wrote: »

Explicitly binding the efficacy of a CLASS skill to WEAPON type is so far out of the bounds of game philosophy that I don't even know where to begin. Another random thought that made its way into patch notes, despite there being hundreds of concrete improvements to skills/classes/passives/animations that could be made in its stead. What a ridiculous waste of time and resources.

Current live patch has so much going well for it, and just needs tweaks, I am heartbroken at the jumbled mess we are being served in the next patch.

Give them a break, the game is still in beta. /s

MashmalloMan · August 2022

Mr_Stach wrote: »

MashmalloMan wrote: »

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Now with all of that rant out of the way, the idea of altering Skills based on your class/weapon combo.

That would be really cool, I just don't think that either Zos or Eso are capable of that level of skill manipulation.

Exactly.. also, if the bonuses only applied to 1 weapon, then it would just do the same thing as Winter's Revenge now.

The only ideal way for that to work would be having each weapon give something unique, do we expect them to make 6 unique effects? Probably not..

Or for a spammable for instance.. "If using a ranged weapon do X, if using a melee weapon do Y"

There is a ton of different ways to do it, but the current way is just wrong on so many levels. All warden's are forced to use Destro back bar now.

Yeah for example in Ashes of Creation you can Multiclass. The Mage class has spell infusions that it can apply to the abilities of the new class, so like with Archer, instead of shooting a regular Arrow Ability, it can now be a Frost, Lightning, Fire, or Gravity(don't know what that'll do but sounds awesome) Arrow/Bolt.

I don't think Zos is capable of this level of Customization when it comes to Player Choice. It's hard enough to get them to let Lightning and Frost be viable in any sense of the word.

This is what I was hoping CP 2.0 was going to be.. instead, they just shifted from multipliers of X amount to multipliers of Y amount. It is better, but it's nowhere near what I thought it could be when it comes to carving out a niche playstyle. Your examples are exactly what I thought they'd focus the new system on.

Aldoss · August 2022

As others have mentioned, I'm not inherently against this idea as a concept, but I am against the implementation of such an idea IN THE FINAL PATCH OF THE PTS.

This concept is a pandora's box of extraordinary proportions. To push this live with such little testing is obscene. This is something you put into the game with a x.x.0 note, then it get's tested over 4 weeks, and hopefully by x.x.5 it's been properly vetted and tweaked (or removed entirely if it can't be properly implemented/balanced).

This is just another example in a sea of examples that ZOS is flinging at us with U35 proving that their management team is horrendously ill-prepared to manage this title and has no idea what they're doing. They a throwing ideas out left and right and saying "come what may". They deserve zero trust from us.

I'm sure some people love this amount of chaos. I'm not one of them.

I'm voting with my wallet. We'll see who wins in the long term.

WrathOfInnos · August 2022

As someone who prefers magden with a destruction staff, I like the outcome for gameplay, but I dislike the implementation. It goes against everything we just got from the hybridization effort. Limiting a class skill to one weapon type is worse than just returning it to scale with Spell Damage/Magicka (and not Weapon Damage/Stamina).

A much better solution would have been to make Winter's Revenge slightly underpowered (10-15%) then give destruction staff a passive that increases elemental AoE DoT damage by 10-15%. This would encourage the use of a Destruction Staff on Magden with Winter's Revenge (along with Sorcerer with Lightning Splash, Necro with Boneyard and DK with Eruption), without removing the option for stamina builds or magicka builds with daggers, bow or greatsword to use the skill.

Firstmep · August 2022

I like it, let's have more of this.
Like one every class, templar gets a bonus to blazing spear if they are using an actual spe... erm staff.
Could be interesting.
Also dual wield is way too meta rn, staves for sure could use some love.

Stx · August 2022

This is a very restricting change, and ultimately this change was just a band aid to fix a problem created by hybridization.

Firstmep · August 2022

Stx wrote: »

This is a very restricting change, and ultimately this change was just a band aid to fix a problem created by hybridization.

Wait you are telling me you dont like to use the exact same skills and weapons on both "mag" and "stam" ?

ToRelax · August 2022

Firstmep wrote: »

Stx wrote: »

This is a very restricting change, and ultimately this change was just a band aid to fix a problem created by hybridization.

Wait you are telling me you dont like to use the exact same skills and weapons on both "mag" and "stam" ?

Well I don't do that, whether my "dominant resource" is green or blue depends on which one I have the bonus from Bound Armor. So that's one skill that's different between them.

Urzigurumash · August 2022

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

As someone who prefers magden with a destruction staff, I like the outcome for gameplay, but I dislike the implementation. It goes against everything we just got from the hybridization effort. Limiting a class skill to one weapon type is worse than just returning it to scale with Spell Damage/Magicka (and not Weapon Damage/Stamina).

A much better solution would have been to make Winter's Revenge slightly underpowered (10-15%) then give destruction staff a passive that increases elemental AoE DoT damage by 10-15%. This would encourage the use of a Destruction Staff on Magden with Winter's Revenge (along with Sorcerer with Lightning Splash, Necro with Boneyard and DK with Eruption), without removing the option for stamina builds or magicka builds with daggers, bow or greatsword to use the skill.

Simpler, give Destro a unique buff to all Magical Damage, give 2h/DW/Bow a unique buff to all Martial Damage? Not so strong as to necessarily preclude a "mismatch" in an optimized build but something to gently guide players back towards an "archetypical" build.

I agree with the idea of some "soft dehybridization", but I can see how this change is bothersome to PvE StamDens - even if I very much like it for PvP MagDen.

Minor Brittle already gently recommends the use of Destro with Winter's Revenge, but I understand if that's not quite relevant in PvE Groups where Brittle can be sourced elsewhere.

This would re-introduce some of the discrepancy between Destro and 2h/DW with the higher base damage of 2h/DW, but, Mag is outperforming Stam right now for the most part right? Warden, NB, and Sorc in PvP excepted.

Urzigurumash · August 2022

To clarify what I mean by not precluding a mismatch but gently recommending an archetype: I think the following would be different from both Pre-Hybridization and Post-Hybridization, correct me if I'm wrong:

- On StamDen, Winter's Revenge would be stronger than Caltrops
- On MagDen, Winter's Revenge would be stronger than on StamDen
- On StamDen, Caltrops would be stronger than on MagDen