Current status effect probabilities and their implications

FrancisCrawford · July 2023

Base probability for a status effect is:

20% enchant proc
10% single-target direct damage skill
5% AoE direct damage skill
3% single-target DOT
1% AoE DOT

Light attacks don't give status effects.
Heavy attacks supposedly don't either (but if that's true I misread some of my parses).

Is that all correct?

The most famous buffs are:

+100% destruction staff passive
+365% Charged trait on a gold weapon
+60% champion points

In the past the destro staff passive has seemed multiplicative, while the others were additive.

What's the current story on that? What do the numbers work out to in practice?

Whatever the actual probability is for a direct damage attack, multiply that by 1500 to get the expected value of what the new passive will add to fhe damage of Force Shock (either morph), but only by 500 for most other single-target skills with a destro staff equipped.

Half of the latter figure gets added to your general tooltip for DPS if you have a typical damage enchant proccing every 4 seconds. (That's per-enchant if you have 2 or more of them.)

Is this part accurate?

Moving on, what are the special-case skills?

Winter's Revenge is sometimes said to give a 5% base proc chance instead of a 1% change.
Ditto the Volatile Familiar's special ability.
Umm -- do sorcerer pet basic attacks currently proc status effects? (It would be Concussion if they did.)
What else?

It's hard to think that the passive change is anything but a nerf except maaaaybe in very specialized builds, e.g. ones involving constant Force Pulse spam. (And even then the splash damage if any would be getting an overall nerf.)

Thoughts?

ZOS_Phoenix · July 2023

Greetings,

After review we have decided to move this thread to a category we think is more appropriate for this topic (Combat & Character Mechanics, as this thread is discussing combat mechanics).

Thank you for your understanding.

candyflippin · July 2023

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

It's hard to think that the passive change is anything but a nerf except maaaaybe in very specialized builds, e.g. ones involving constant Force Pulse spam. (And even then the splash damage if any would be getting an overall nerf.)

Thoughts?

Yup it is a nerf.

ZOS muddied the line between Magicka and Stamina so that there is more build diversity rather than specificity. In turn, hybridization made every build homogeneous and killed class identity / variety. Now, they are bottlenecking Fire Staff into a one-tool Force Pulse spammer. But the patch notes tell me it's for the sake of build diversity, promoting more prevalent usage of Lightning and Frost Staff.

In reality, they are limiting what is already an underwhelming weapon skill line into predetermined archetypes. With the new passives, there will only be 3 types of builds available to ranged Magicka DPS:

1 - Fire Staff Force Pulse Spam - DK / Nightblade / Arcanist
2 - Lightning Staff DoT Channel - Necromancer / Templar
3 - Frost Staff - Warden

FrancisCrawford · July 2023

Why not pet sorcerer for Force Pulse spam?

Quethrosar · July 2023

i live by crushing shock, i love the ranged interrupt, saved me and groups many times.

i REALLLLLYYY want to run the trial that gives you the staff for it.

FrancisCrawford · July 2023

Quethrosar wrote: »

i live by crushing shock, i love the ranged interrupt, saved me and groups many times.

i REALLLLLYYY want to run the trial that gives you the staff for it.

Yeah. I've often been tempted by builds with Charged to get a lot of status effects, turning the Force Pulse morph into a kind of little AoE. But the defensive utility of Crushing Shock has helped demotivate me from trying them out.

Indeed, one doesn't really even need Charged. And if one runs with a warden, Winter's Revenge can do some condition-spreading too. But again -- in some contexts, Crushing Shock is very nice to have.