Suggestion: Buff the arcanist portals

sparxys · June 2023

I wrote a whole thing about it and why ZOS should do it and how, but I lost all writing process due to a bug so I'll keep it short this time 😭

1. They should increase the range for the base portals and the morphs.
2. They should allow the portals to be placed anywhere if it's not the morph that allows group members to teleport. To offset the clear advantage that the other morph would have in this instance, they could make it so the portals give some sort of group buff to the morph, alongside increasing the duration of the portals.
3. Make the other morph THE movement/mobility ability in the game. The other morph should be the mobility skill that outshines all other mobility skills BUT has no combat benefits. Streak and mist form would still be better in PvP since they're more versatile, but the arcanist portals should be the better mobility skill. It should make arcanists harder to catch, and it should be a skill that makes it easier and exciting to traverse the world and to explore.
4. Talking about exploration, the solo morph (ie. The one that gives you a move speed buff now) shouldn't have placement restrictions, if you mess up the placement of your portal you may get stuck, or fall to your death, and I think that's fine. You want to have a portal that goes straight up and will make you fall down to the ground and die? Go ahead, have at it. If not that, they should at least make it more forgiving to players that are trying to place the portal on uneven terrain and on ledges.
5. They should improve the verticality of the portals by making it easier (and again more forgiving) to place portals on top of things or on terrain that's on higher elevation and they should increase the range to all versions of the ability. Rn it feels like it's too short and clunky. Unless the terrain is perfectly flat, there's no way to know if your portal will actually spawn or if you'll just get an annoying message saying "invalid location". As it stands, streak and mist form offer more mobility and more unique exploration options, so it would be nice to have the portals be better or at least on par with these other two abilities in terms of unique movement potential and exploration possibilities.

Those are my thoughts about it, do y'all agree or have any other ideas?

TLDR: implement point 5 PLEASE ZOS I am on my knees begging you 🥺🙏

Necrotech_Master · June 2023

the reason they limit vertical movement (for ALL movement abilities and gap closers) is to prevent abuse in cyrodiil to prevent people from scaling the walls without sieging

thats why you dont see stuff like DK leaps up onto the walls anymore lol

sparxys · June 2023

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the reason they limit vertical movement (for ALL movement abilities and gap closers) is to prevent abuse in cyrodiil to prevent people from scaling the walls without sieging

thats why you dont see stuff like DK leaps up onto the walls anymore lol

Couldn't that be prevented by making cyro structures untargetable?
I get that it would also affect the portal when you're the person on the wall, but I feel like that'd be a small sacrifice.

Plus they showed the verticality of the ability in the teaser for the expansion, so you'd think it wouldn't be SO restrictive. They should at least make it better at latching onto edges and increase the range.

They'll need to do changes to the ability regardless since as is the portals feel too clunky to use, and they'll have to patch some bugs too like only spawning one portal and the weird crashes the portal can cause. So if they're going to do that, it would be nice to also add a buff or make some changes to better differentiate between the portals and something like streak. The only truly unique aspect is the fact that your group can use them, but that's only available with one morph so changes would definitely be needed.

I'm curious as to how you would change the ability though? Aside from the technical stuff (the bugs and clunkiness)

Necrotech_Master · June 2023

i havent made an arcanist yet so i dont personally know how i would change the ability, but to compare it to a similar ability the vampire reworked mist form

you can place the circle on a higher elevation, but your character wont go "up" or "down" it goes straight horizontally (if you were trying to go up, you just hit the wall, if you were trying to go down, you instead are left floating in the air and then drop down, potentially taking fall dmg)

in terms of gap closers those ones physically move you to the enemy position if they were up or down, but most of these skills specifically have a 22 meter range so they are not buffed by the "reach" passive in the cyro skill lines (adds +5 meter max range to anything with cast of 28+ meter when near a keep or outpost)

one of the only skills i know that can kind of circumvent that is the NB shadow image, you can use it to "jump" back up to the wall, but you would have to have been on the wall to cast it in the first place

im not sure of more detailed suggestions because i havent actually made an arcanist yet, but i know a lot of the reason for elevation limitation is due to pvp lol

sparxys · June 2023

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i havent made an arcanist yet so i dont personally know how i would change the ability, but to compare it to a similar ability the vampire reworked mist form

you can place the circle on a higher elevation, but your character wont go "up" or "down" it goes straight horizontally (if you were trying to go up, you just hit the wall, if you were trying to go down, you instead are left floating in the air and then drop down, potentially taking fall dmg)

in terms of gap closers those ones physically move you to the enemy position if they were up or down, but most of these skills specifically have a 22 meter range so they are not buffed by the "reach" passive in the cyro skill lines (adds +5 meter max range to anything with cast of 28+ meter when near a keep or outpost)

one of the only skills i know that can kind of circumvent that is the NB shadow image, you can use it to "jump" back up to the wall, but you would have to have been on the wall to cast it in the first place

im not sure of more detailed suggestions because i havent actually made an arcanist yet, but i know a lot of the reason for elevation limitation is due to pvp lol

I just want the ability to be more useful as a movement ability cuz as it stands mist form or streak are a lot more useful than the portals.

One thing that the portal has is the "cool" factor, which makes sense cuz there's a lot more pizzazz with the effects and animation, but that's it.

I'll try to describe how the ability functions so you can get a better grasp on it as someone who hasn't made an arcanist yet, but imagine it being like the base unmorphed version of mist form that you can't spam, and that is a lot less reliable since you can't use it on small ledges or on thin surfaces and such.

Idk but I hope they find a way to at least make it more reliable and more intuitive to use.

Also you can use mist form and streak to absolutely break some delves and to get to places you're really not supposed to be in so if I can at least do that with the ports I'll be happy 😆🤣

Necrotech_Master · June 2023

ive seen some videos/gifs of the portal so not entirely blind with it lol

the closest skill it seems to copy is mist form, with the main difference being longer range and a forced cooldown, so im assuming anywhere you could use mist form, you could use the arcanist portal lol

i think the thing that makes the arcanist portal more limited as a movement ability is actually the forced 7 sec cooldown before you could place another one

sparxys · June 2023

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

ive seen some videos/gifs of the portal so not entirely blind with it lol

the closest skill it seems to copy is mist form, with the main difference being longer range and a forced cooldown, so im assuming anywhere you could use mist form, you could use the arcanist portal lol

i think the thing that makes the arcanist portal more limited as a movement ability is actually the forced 7 sec cooldown before you could place another one

Thing is, you can't use it as you would mist form, simply because there needs to be enough space in front of you and at the second portal location and the terrain has to be flat.

You can use mist form on uneven terrain, on platforms, on fences, and anywhere else you have vision on.

You need quite a lot of space and flat terrain for the portals to even spawn, so it's a lot more annoying to use 😶

Necrotech_Master · June 2023

so when your placing the portal its like an 8 meter targeting ring instead of like the 1 meter one that mist form uses? yeah that could make things quite difficult with placing especially if it requires that area to be fairly flat too

im not sure why they included all of the extra restrictions on this ability (the 7 sec cooldown, the increased difficulty with placement)

i can understand restrictions with say past a certain elevation to not cause issues in other areas of the game, as i think that was the thing that most people had issues with was the arcanist portals in cyrodiil

etchedpixels · June 2023

It's the Warden gate with slightly different artwork/effects if you look at how it behaves. There were a whole array of ways to abuse that historically so I can't imagine them changing it back.

It's fairly useless on wardens too except for rescuing people stuck in holes in the map or a few quest sneaky shortcuts.