Ingel_Riday wrote: »

Braffin wrote: »

Yes, I have no problems with LA weaving on lightning staff which weren't present on other staves too. Sure, on live you'll always achieve better results with a flamestaff, because of the passives which will be changed in U39. How these changes will work out will have to be tested on PTS over the next few weeks, but my first guess is, that lightning staves will replace flame.

Being kicked into a heavy attack is unfortunately still present, but all weapons are affected. You can simply blockcancel that.

On a sidenote: You're wrong with your "bug that's now a feature" attitude, as weaving is a consequence of the combat system itself. Animation cancelling is and always was an intended feature to ensure player can block, interrupt and dodge when needed without having to wait for the end of skill animations. The fact, that devs didn't realize this system of course works also with LA and HA doesn't make this oversight a bug. You may not like it (and of course you will deny my argument), but LA weaving has always been a feature, not a bug.

Not to derail the thread, but a feature is arguably something planned. Being able to cancel animations to block, dodge, and interrupt was planned. A feature to make combat more dynamic and let you de-commit from an offensive action to save yourself from a mace to the face. Animation canceling for LA and HA wasn't planned. It was a bug, or at the very least an unintended quirk, which the developers didn't remove because it became widely used by the community to boost dps and removing it would have resulted in riots and subscription cancels. So... it stayed. Looks awkward, isn't very fun to do, creates an awkward performance gap between veteran players who know about it and new players who would never imagine ".85 to .90 light attacks per second" being an intended gameplay mechanic (CLICK CLICK CLICK), and so on... but it stays. Too embedded into the community now.

Anyhoots, good to know about lightning LA weaving. I'm guessing that you're right that lightning staves will replace flame staves, since a 12% bonus to dots is far more appealing than 500 bonus damage to only the initial tick of burning... which makes me wonder what the goal of ZOS is here. DW still outperforms staves, and staves will go from two options (Flame for most everything and Lightning for heavy attack builds) to ONE viable option (Lightning for most everything and Lightning for heavy attack builds).

Why not fire for dots, lightning for aoe, and frost for single target? Just dump the frost staff tanking stuff that NEVER caught on and give each staff a very clear, very defined dps role. Won't happen, but eh.

Oi. *shrug*

Edit addition: as an addendum, if they did the Fire = Dots, Lighting = AOE, Frost = Single Target thing, I'd have reason to mix up staves on characters. The magicka dragonknight and magicka templar would probably want to stay fire, but my sorcerer and nightblade do a lot more single target and might like frost. I'd have some choices to make and theorycrafters to consult.

As is... all four of my characters use 2 flame staves, and after update 39 they'll likely all be stuck using 2 lightning staves... just to lessen the impact of this nerf. I'll wind up with slightly worse dps and the same lack of variety, but out 64 rosin. I should have known this update would smack me after Update 38 left me relatively unscathed. Guffaw.

tsaescishoeshiner wrote: »

Tannus15 wrote: »

so i've done some testing with a 1 pet mag sorc build.

this is the build:



flame staff parse


ice staff parse


I haven't done a lightning staff parse, though i should to see how much difference the sorc passive matters

but here is the real gem
bow parse


bow front bar is way stronger with the change to the bow passive. 5% to all damage with a passive crit bonus stomps all over extra damage for status effects

While I hope they adjust this further, it's reassuring that flame staff, frost, and bow are within 3k DPS of each other on a 100k+ parse. I wonder how dual wield compares, but those are pretty close margins.

There's probably always going to be 1 weapon that just slightly wins out for optimized DPS—but the weapons should offer different build options.