Have you tested this to see if it is an issue with the Advanced Stats screen? Unfortunately that thing has never been without its bugs, such as selectively reflecting different sources of movement speed/sprint speed and needing your character to move before it updates sneak speed, among other things. I would be curious if this is yet another UI issue or whether the ice staff passive is really not working. My partner tested it on Olms this morning and did not see a difference in actual blocking mitigation.

You will likely need to max out resistances to test it properly, since the shield adds resistances that the ice staff does not.

Billium813 wrote: »

So this may be more of a UI bug then an actual gameplay bug? It's difficult to verify these sort of bugs for the average player; we generally have to rely on the UI to tell us so I would consider this UI bug worth fixing, even if that's what it ends up being

Yes, even a UI error should definitely be fixed. I’m glad they added that Advanced Stats page, but I have to say I’m disappointed by the number of bugs it’s had and how many have persisted since it was introduced. If I remember right, although I’ll have to check tomorrow to confirm, Defensive Posture also has an issue with being properly reflected in the Advanced Stats menu but actually works as described.

It does take a few minutes to verify, for sure, but it shouldn’t be all that difficult: stack resistances to reach cap so the shield’s armor value doesn’t interfere (or use white level 1 weapons and take off all other pieces of gear to minimize resists), then take the same hit from the same mob on each bar. CMX and/or encounter logs, if available, will help confirm (and are what my partner used), but the native in-game text for incoming damage should show it clearly too. For cleaner results you can drop all skills and CP. It won’t be a perfect 10% damage mitigation difference (the 20% blocking mitigation is halved to 10% because it is 20% of the base 50%), even naked, due to our 10% base damage resistance, but the difference should be clear enough no matter the target. If wearing heavy armor, there is an additive 1% block mitigation per piece to consider as well.

Ideally ZOS would investigate and fix this in a timely manner, no matter what the exact issue turns out to be. That said, in the past they have sometimes claimed things to be UI errors that were demonstrably not (like a stam drain bug that was prevalent for a while), so it is not always the case that we get the right information from them while they are in the process of investigating the issue. Either way it will take them at least weeks, if not months, to develop, test, and publish a fix. In the meantime it would be helpful for players to be able to know for sure whether or not it impacts combat.