Champion Points and the direction they could take.

ESO_Nightingale · July 21

The Champion Points system has been out in its current state for a very long time now. and honestly, its very underwhelming. Back when the initial thing was being reworked, i'd have thought they were going to expand on it continually with new and interesting slottable nodes. however, we rarely ever see much iteration on them. one thing that really grinds my gears about them specifically is the blue tree, specifically for power. the options are completely and utterly basic with nearly no build expression within them. if i'm building a frost warden for example, i literally take exactly the same blue cp slottables as a stamina dragonknight because the system has exactly nothing that promotes specific builds.

i made a mockup of a class specific node tree that would differ based on the class your character currently is. In my case, that would be warden.

Corresponding Slotted Node examples can be found in this list:

Forest Spirits: Casting a Green Balance skill has a 10% chance to summon a Spriggan spirit that heals the lowest health ally around you for 10 seconds. Secluded Grove always summons 2.
Protective Vines: Natures Grasp now also applies a damage shield equal to 30% of your max magicka. Natures Embrace also applies Major Vitality to your target for 10 seconds.
Nature's Empowerment: When you apply a major or minor buff to an ally, you also grant them Minor Heroism for 6 seconds.
Lotus Walker: Lotus Flower now reduces the cost of healing skills by 20% while active.
Enchanted Spores: Fungal Growth's Conal Area is increased by 50%. Allies hit are granted Enchanted Spores for 6 seconds. Enchanted Spores heals them for x health over the duration and, the duration of all major and minor buffs you apply to them is increased by 50%.
Nature's Bargain: Nature's Gift's Resource Return is increased by 250 and you and the target you heal are granted 3 ultimate.
Netch Herder: Betty Netch now also removes a negative effect from up to 4 nearby allies every 5 seconds.
Protector of Nirn (passive node): Reduces the cost of warden abilities by 2.5% per stage. 5% max.
Nature's Call: Casting a Warden Skill grants you 1000 Max Resource for 10 seconds. Max Resource Granted based on skill line: Green Balance: Magicka, Winter's Embrace: Health, Animal Companions: Stamina.
Falcon Sprint: Reduces the cost of Falcon's Swiftness by 15%. Falcon's Swiftness also grants you Minor Expedition for 6 seconds. You can cast Falcon's Swiftness while sprinting.
Coordinated Attack: When you cast Scorch and then Dive while in combat, you gain Coordinated Attack for 10 seconds. Your next casted Direct Damage attack consumes Coordinated Attack to increase its damage done by 20%.
Bear's Aspect: Feral Guardian no longer summons a bear. Instead it is replaced by Guardian's Savagery which summons a spectral bear to claw your target. Cost is reduced by 5. The target now also takes x damage over 4 seconds after being hit.
Visceral Beetles: Scorch consumes up to 3 hemorrhaging stacks on a target to explode for x additional bleed damage increased by 50% per stack.
Mauling: For every bleed effect active on your target, they take 3% more bleed damage, up to 15%.
Mass Hemorrhaging: Hemorrhaging can stack up to 2 additional times on a target. Hemorrhaging from Animal Companions skills applies 2 stacks rather than 1.
Diamond Ice: Crystal Shield now protects you from all attacks. Damage Shield Strength capped at 60% of your Max Health. When the shield is damaged it will activate its effects up to once every 0.5 seconds when damaged.
Atmoran Winds: When you have Sleet Storm or at least 2 of (Frost Cloak, Impaling Shards and Arctic Wind) Active at the same time, you radiate frost damage in an area around you, dealing x frost damage every second while the effect persists.
Ice Portals: Frozen Gate can now pull multiple enemies caught in the trap at once. damage and non crowd control effects are applied to all enemies in the trap even if they cannot be pulled or immobilized.
Frozen Warrior: Your Light and Heavy attacks cause your target and enemies around them to take x frost damage and your martial weapon attacks deal frost damage.
Ice Lord: Sleet Storm's Duration can be extended by 0.5 seconds when you apply the chilled status effect. this effect can only occur once every 0.5 seconds and only once per tick of damage.
Hypothermia: Your Frost Damage abilities deal up to 20% more damage to enemies below 50% health.

I feel like having strong but specific options like these would elevate build archetypes to the next level. in addition, the nature of the Champion Point System is that they can be iterrated upon further down the line as well, leaving some room for future builds. of course, seeing as these ideas are all on paper and not testable in game, there's bound to be terribly weak and terribly overpowered ideas in here, but i can't really do anything about that. they're just examples.

Zodiarkslayer · July 21

I agree. The current CP system has the potential to be so much more and to elevate builds even further. And to have a class specific tree system is a genius idea. Seriously. The kind of lateral diversification you could achieve with it is exactly what this game needs!

More options means more choice.

If, however, we have to stick with a single CP tree system for all classes, then I don't know if it is good to have too specific CP nodes. It would already be a big improvement, if we'd get slottable damage bonuses for a specific damage types, or to a specific status effect and its percentage to proc.

But, imo, the combat team is rather timid with balance changes. Or overly cautious, if you dont like "timid".
You can see that in how they approached scribing.

_Ahala_ · July 21

Well this is certainly one way to reintroduce the concept of subclasses that was all but obliterated with the introduction of hybridization. Wonder what it would look like for other classes?

Finedaible · July 21

I have had similar feelings ever since Champion system 2.0. The only things they added to the system since the rework were like two generic nodes and one of them already existed before the rework so they were just putting it back in really.

CP would have been interesting if it allowed us to specialize into different build types like say poison or frost, with special effect perks for investing into them. Something akin to what Skyrim had but suited to ESO. Imagine if there were slottable perks which gave you specific status immunity to make up for the nerfing of racial passives years ago. That would make swapping perks more tactical and meaningful when faced with a challenging encounter and would also allow for that lore roleplay they butchered with the nerfing of racial passives.

But yeah, devs are overly "timid" with any changes to combat and I think they greatly underestimate how boring this strict adherence to spreadsheet balancing is. This is why ESO will never grow any more, there's too much fear of taking chances. Or maybe turnover is just so high and nobody knows how the code works anymore.

notyuu · July 22

Finedaible wrote: »

But yeah, devs are overly "timid" with any changes to combat and I think they greatly underestimate how boring this strict adherence to spreadsheet balancing is. This is why ESO will never grow any more, there's too much fear of taking chances. Or maybe turnover is just so high and nobody knows how the code works anymore.

The entire reason why the Devs are being "timid" as you put it is that before they used to make big sweeping changes to combat balance every patch and the people would complain about it, heck the last major sweeping patch was U35 and if you cant find even once person that thought that patch was good

BXR_Lonestar · July 22

Yes, class specific champion point nodes would be awesome to have. I have always said there should be additional class passives - or passives that better define the class than what we have now. But you could do this through the champion point system too.

But if they add these in, there needs to be some caveats:

1. They should not count against your slottable champion point perks.
2. We should have multiple class champion point perks available to us in specific trees - tanking, damage, and support.
3. The point investment for class-specific champion point perks should be relatively low - 5-10 points IMO.
4. You have to commit to one of the three class-specific trees (i.e., commit to a role - tanking, damage, or support/healing) so that you can't mix/match perks from the other trees. (You SHOULD, however, be able to get those points refunded and reassign them so you can experiment without being stuck).

Some great class specific perks I'd like to see:

Sorc - Arcing attacks - all lightning attacks arc between enemies standing within 5 meters of each other or closer, causing additional damage.

Templar - Outnumbered - Increased defensive/offensive stats (depending on how you selected your perks) based on how many unique monsters/players you have been hit by.

Dragon knight - melting point - increased fire/flame damage by 2% per fire damage ability slotted.

ESO_Nightingale · July 29

notyuu wrote: »

Finedaible wrote: »

But yeah, devs are overly "timid" with any changes to combat and I think they greatly underestimate how boring this strict adherence to spreadsheet balancing is. This is why ESO will never grow any more, there's too much fear of taking chances. Or maybe turnover is just so high and nobody knows how the code works anymore.

The entire reason why the Devs are being "timid" as you put it is that before they used to make big sweeping changes to combat balance every patch and the people would complain about it, heck the last major sweeping patch was U35 and if you cant find even once person that thought that patch was good

The only reason the sweeping changes are bad is because community feedback is regularly ignored and changes that not a single person asked for are implemented for arbitrary reasons that benefit no-one. That doesn't have anything do with my post since this is more of a personal wish but in general, a lot of their changes are genuinely baffling.

valenwood_vegan · July 29

I seem to remember that they actually specified that part of the point of the CP rework was that they would be able to add to / expand it in future updates. But then like many things, it seems like it was abandoned.

fedouva · July 30

At first glance it looks like a variation system, but in reality everyone puts points into the same thing and there are a lot of garbage stars. The biggest sadness is that when zos introduce some innovation they do not follow how well it fits in and how it works. There it is and that's good enough for them....

Stafford197 · July 30

Totally agree! The foundation for CP 2.0 was really cool, but they just abandoned it after.

Really a shame tbh.

LittlePinkDot · July 31

CP star for Nightblade..reduces the cost and increases the duration of shadowy disguise.😊

If there's class specific CP stars I want Weapon specific CP stars... Like reduce the cast time of snipe... Or increases damage with bows...

I think one of the main reasons they haven't touched CP in awhile is because the power creep of it just discourages new players.

Isnt the whole reason battlegrounds are no CP is because barely anybody dies.