Khajiit racial passives in endgame PVE

Drako_Ei · April 2023

I will start by saying that I have been working really hard to push past the 115k DPS barrier on my magDK, on normal days I usually get 110k, and that is optimizing as much as I can the critical damage cap at 125%. But since characters got copied to PTS, out of curiosity, I race changed to dark elf. I made a test parse with the same setup, and I was surprised when I broke the 125k dps barrier. I even made a lot of mistakes.

After reviewing the passives of khajiit vs dark elf:

Khajiit:
Increases your experience gain with the Medium Armor skill line by 15%. Increases your chance to successfully pickpocket by 5%.
Increases your Health, Magicka, and Stamina Recovery by 90.
Increase your Maximum Health, Magicka, and Stamina by 915.
Increases your Critical Damage and Critical Healing by 12%. Decreases your detection radius in Stealth by 3 meters.

Dark elf:
Increases your experience gain with the Dual Wield skill line by 15%. Reduces your damage taken from environmental lava by 50%.
Increases your Max Magicka and Max Stamina by 1910.
Increases your Flame Resistance by 4620.
Increases your Weapon and Spell Damage by 258.

The problem is the damage passive they get:

Increases your Critical Damage and Critical Healing by 12:
- Does not have percentage multipliers, its a flat 12% increase
- Currently capped at 125%, just by wearing medium armor you can hit the cap and this 12% become useless past 125%
- Locks away sets and the upcoming mythic item, it takes away your light attack damage in exchange for a flat damage increase and... 15% critical damage, useless on khajiit
- Locks away sets that are currently being used by meta, like kilt, and the alternatives like mora's whispers are underperforming compared to them.
- Critical damage is one of the most easier to get stats, if you play khajiit, there is a good chance you are over the critical damage cap, rendering this passive completely useless.

I dont think the passive is bad. They did a good job at adjusting the racial passives on previous updates, and they brought everyone in line with a 5% difference on performance on everyone, that was awesome!

But with the changes to critical damage, and the introduction of the infamous critical damage cap, they indirectly nerfed this race for pve content.

from 110k dps to 125k dps there is a 13.6% difference between khajiit and dark elf and the difference between every race is not the intended ±5% anymore.

I would like to request ZoS to review the current peformance on races one more time, and suggest... the ability to pay crowns to make races cosmetic, so we can play any character we want, but peform the role we want to play. Make it expensive even... I would still buy. I know race passives have been a part of TES for a long time, but its no different than playing a race, and hiding it using a polymorph, let us do the same with races, I'm sure there are a lot of people that would appreciate and would be happy to buy these "Racial Passive Swap token" in the crownstore.

As a disclaimer, I don't want our fellow elves to get nerfed, I would be happy to be 5% below the master race of DPS.

Thank you for reading me.

Drako_Ei · April 2023

@ZOS_GinaBruno I'm sorry for tagging you.

Can I add a "Racial Passive Swap Token" to my crownstore wishlist?

Treeshka · April 2023

Parsing as Khajiit in dummy is very handicapping compared to actual content. Because dummy has one hundred uptime on Major Force and Elemental Catalyst, and in actual content none of these are hundred percent up. So basically while parsing on dummy with a medium armor you waste that Feline Ambush passive completely but not always in actual content.

But still in optimized groups Dark Elf or High Elf depending on your dominant resource will always pass Khajiit, but in non optimized group where you get to utilize Feline Ambush passive things can be different or similar.

El_Borracho · April 2023

So if you're over the crit cap with the Kilt, don't wear the Kilt and wear Markyn instead to up your weapon/spell damage. I also agree with @Treeshka, the dummy is nice for practice, but it is not a predictor of actual gameplay

I don't know if "only" being able parse 110K, and not 125K, is a reason to undo all racial passives, to the point of making the entire game cosmetic.

Drako_Ei · April 2023

Thanks.

Yes I agree this problem shows up only when parsing on dummy, or when playing in high optimized groups. At that point people ditch everything for every inch of DPS they can get.

I guess I'm avoiding bitting the bullet, since I'm one of those players that enjoy these groups, but also dont want to change the character I've been playing with for years.

So I'm a little biased, yes, this problem only emerges for a very small playerbase, but there are a lot of other problems that emerge from racial passive skills. But since I'm stuck between the dillema of deleting the character I've been using for years vs a free 10% boost to my performance in these groups I felt the need to share it on the forums.

On my groups, I'm usually at 137% crit damage, using Mora's whispers, no kilt. I could try running less medium pieces I guess but then I lose weapon damage. It's a dillema other races dont have to deal with.

Thank you for your thoughts, I shall try Markyn when I get home. I've been using mora's as alternative.

Kusto · April 2023

At least you can change the race but us Wardens have no options. The new necklace mythic will be also useless along with current Kilt. I'm talking about the advanced species passive which gives 4% crit dmg per animal skill slotted. Bear, shalks, bird, fletcher all must skills.

WrathOfInnos · April 2023

True, and Khajiit Warden is the worst, with 16% class + 12% racial crit damage. Templar, Nightblade and Arcanist all have 10-12% crit damage as well. Tbh DK is one of the lest bad options for Khajiit, along with Sorc and Necro.

You can drop the Kilt for Mora's Whispers, but that trades 10% crit damage for 2% crit chance.

There are a couple fights where you can reliably use Sea Serpents Coil and perform reasonably well (Reef Guardian, Lokkestiiz), but for the vast majority of trials Khajiit remains terrible.

This would be incredibly easy to fix by simply changing their 12% crit damage to 6% crit chance, as it was many years ago. That would instantly put Khajiit within about 0.1% of the DPS Dunmer and Altmer deal. 3 viable races, no downside.

Soarora · April 2023

I actually enjoy Khajiit Warden because I don’t have to run backstabber or fighting finesse. Can’t say I do 125k, or even 115k, (I do 100k) but I don’t have to worry about staying on the flank except for healer reasons. But the races shouldn’t have a big DPS difference, yet they do.

Drako_Ei · April 2023

Soarora wrote: »

I actually enjoy Khajiit Warden because I don’t have to run backstabber or fighting finesse. Can’t say I do 125k, or even 115k, (I do 100k) but I don’t have to worry about staying on the flank except for healer reasons. But the races shouldn’t have a big DPS difference, yet they do.

No race is running backstabber at the moment. Check how much critical damage (not chance) you have.

Anything over 125% is wasted, with the setup you described there is a good chance you are around 150%

Drako_Ei · April 2023

I think the problem is all about the critical damage cap they implemented.

Nobody is using shadow mundus anymore, khajiit is unreliable, axes are non existant in PvE.

They need to raise it a little bit too...

Quethrosar · April 2023

why is it a problem ? wear stuff that doesn't increase crit damage % then? wear light armor for penetration?

Jaimeh · April 2023

H

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

True, and Khajiit Warden is the worst, with 16% class + 12% racial crit damage. Templar, Nightblade and Arcanist all have 10-12% crit damage as well. Tbh DK is one of the lest bad options for Khajiit, along with Sorc and Necro.

You can drop the Kilt for Mora's Whispers, but that trades 10% crit damage for 2% crit chance.

There are a couple fights where you can reliably use Sea Serpents Coil and perform reasonably well (Reef Guardian, Lokkestiiz), but for the vast majority of trials Khajiit remains terrible.

This would be incredibly easy to fix by simply changing their 12% crit damage to 6% crit chance, as it was many years ago. That would instantly put Khajiit within about 0.1% of the DPS Dunmer and Altmer deal. 3 viable races, no downside.

Any idea so far how will Khajiit Arcanist fare? I haven't had a chance to look at their passives yet.

Roylund · April 2023

Why is this a problem? Yeah you parse lower than Dark Elves and High Elves by a bit but in exchange you're tankier and have better sustain. Maybe the numbers could be tuned a bit but I think conceptually it's okay to have a race that has a bit lower DPS in exchange for being a bit beefier and having better sustain.

MerguezMan · April 2023

Nonsense.

If you expect to maximise your build, you're supposed to balance things around.

Khajiit has an innate crit damage bonus, so you should pick sets than increase raw damage and crit chance.

Dark Elf has an innate raw damage bonus, and from there you may invest either in crit damage and crit chance, or raw damage and penetration. As for High Elf and Orc, btw.

There is a 5%-ish damage difference between races at base. Consider this value is when character is naked, no active bonuses and no other modifier. Adding up multipliers to this difference does increase the gap on an unbalanced setup.

Ofc just changing race, and not touching sets, armor types and mundus is not getting you to an optimised setup.

Also, the parsing dummy is nowhere near to an in-combat test regarding sustain and survivability.

BasP · April 2023

Jaimeh wrote: »

Any idea so far how will Khajiit Arcanist fare? I haven't had a chance to look at their passives yet.

The Fated Fortune passive adds +12% Crit Damage when gaining or spending Crux, so as a Khajiit in Medium Armor you'll reach the crit cap without any CP or Mythics boosting Crit Damage. As a side note, I had an uptime of 85% to 95% of the buff during the few parses I've done thus far.

Drako_Ei · May 2023

MerguezMan wrote: »

Nonsense.

If you expect to maximise your build, you're supposed to balance things around.

Khajiit has an innate crit damage bonus, so you should pick sets than increase raw damage and crit chance.

Dark Elf has an innate raw damage bonus, and from there you may invest either in crit damage and crit chance, or raw damage and penetration. As for High Elf and Orc, btw.

There is a 5%-ish damage difference between races at base. Consider this value is when character is naked, no active bonuses and no other modifier. Adding up multipliers to this difference does increase the gap on an unbalanced setup.

Ofc just changing race, and not touching sets, armor types and mundus is not getting you to an optimised setup.

Also, the parsing dummy is nowhere near to an in-combat test regarding sustain and survivability.

I would agree, the problem Is that I'm hitting the 135% critical damage in my group who is doing vSS hm progs with out anything boosting my critical damage on my part.

So basically the passive only gives me 2% critical damage instead of 12%

If they raise the critical damage softcap, then there would be a 5% difference. between khajiit and dark elf.

I would love to see a 118k parse on khajiit you could share, since that would account for 5% less damage than dark elf.