Merciless Resolve change in 11.0.1 recreates the same problem the Devs were trying to solve

Teeba_Shei · April 22

For those who don't know, Grim Focus and its morphs were changed in the latest PTS to increase your spell damage per stack by a smaller amount, so the total spell damage gained is now lower overall.

Grim Focus: Reduced this ability and the Merciless Resolve morph's Weapon and Spell Damage per stack to 30, down from 45.
Relentless Focus: Reduced this morph’s Weapon and Spell Damage per stack to 40, down from 60.

Dev Note:

We're allowing for over-generating stacks for this ability, so missing activation on the final stack doesn’t severely reduce its effectiveness—which adds up over the course of a fight. Now, it allows for more wiggle room, letting you chamber up to two shots if you reach max stacks. This also opens up more creative use. As such, we're slightly reducing the passive power of this ability when used the same way as before—firing a shot every 5–6 seconds—while increasing the passive power if you wait to use it back-to-back. This should help the ability fit more playstyles, especially for Heavy Attack builds that previously lost a stack every time they hit the cap.

The latest change makes the skill more punishing if you fire it before reaching 10 stacks, because you’ll now have much lower spell damage. Originally, the skill was changed to 10 stacks so that it would be less punishing if you didn’t fire it off exactly at 5 stacks.

The new problem is that the most min/maxed way to use the skill is still to fire it at 10 stacks, due to the way the Weapon and Spell Damage bonus is implemented. My suggestion would be to revert the bonuses to what they are in the current patch, but cap the Weapon and Spell Damage at 5 stacks instead of 10. That way, if you fire it at 8 or 9 stacks, you don’t lose much of the bonus—and you’re not punished for it.

Stx · April 22

Should just allow it to stack up to 7 so you can’t fire back to back arrows but you still have some room to overcap your stacks. I would also be okay with a ‘gain X weapon damage while you have any stacks’ instead of a stacking damage buff.

Tannus15 · April 22

What are talking about?
It’s better in every way compared to live
If you only fire at 10 stacks your weapon damage sits between 200 and 400 instead of 0 and 400 and you have the option of firing 2 bow procs after impale.
The skill has been significantly buffed.

Faint_One · April 22

they don't want RF&MC same like seething fury whip，so why not gain WD by Proc an arrow

Estin · April 22

The high W/S damage it gives with each stack is only a problem because of subclassing. Instead of properly nerfing subclass skills, they decided to fix the issue by making the skill weaker overall.

Turtle_Bot · April 22

All it needed was to reduce the max stats from 10, down to 6. This means HA builds don't lose that last stack and prevents the biggest issue with the current PTS version of bow being the ability to double cast it for unmatched burst damage in PvP.

AlterBlika · April 22

Why even change the cap in the first place?

Turtle_Bot · April 22

AlterBlika wrote: »

Why even change the cap in the first place?

According to the ZOS dev notes, heavy attack builds were losing out on 1 stack when they got to the 5 stack cap due to gaining 2 stacks per heavy attack.

Teeba_Shei · April 22

Tannus15 wrote: »

What are talking about?
It’s better in every way compared to live
If you only fire at 10 stacks your weapon damage sits between 200 and 400 instead of 0 and 400 and you have the option of firing 2 bow procs after impale.
The skill has been significantly buffed.

It takes longer to build the stacks for the weapon damage.

Zyaneth_Bal · April 22

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

Tannus15 wrote: »

What are talking about?
It’s better in every way compared to live
If you only fire at 10 stacks your weapon damage sits between 200 and 400 instead of 0 and 400 and you have the option of firing 2 bow procs after impale.
The skill has been significantly buffed.

It takes longer to build the stacks for the weapon damage.

Even without the passive damage boost it’s scaling alone makes the hardest hitting ability in the game, so imo complaining that it takes a few sec longer to get some measly 200 damage is not very relevant. It might be not optimal in theory but in actual content you will literally never notice the difference.

So revert the ability to what it is on live, raise the number of stack to 6, seems easy and straightforward.

SolarRune · April 22

Can it not just be made to stack damage up to the 5th and then hit the max and from that point provide no additional increase in damage? Surely in trying to make this ability more forgiving of missed fires of the shot, that's what is really wanted.

Teeba_Shei · April 22

Zyaneth_Bal wrote: »

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

Tannus15 wrote: »

What are talking about?
It’s better in every way compared to live
If you only fire at 10 stacks your weapon damage sits between 200 and 400 instead of 0 and 400 and you have the option of firing 2 bow procs after impale.
The skill has been significantly buffed.

It takes longer to build the stacks for the weapon damage.

Even without the passive damage boost it’s scaling alone makes the hardest hitting ability in the game, so imo complaining that it takes a few sec longer to get some measly 200 damage is not very relevant. It might be not optimal in theory but in actual content you will literally never notice the difference.

So revert the ability to what it is on live, raise the number of stack to 6, seems easy and straightforward.

I was simple responding to the claim, "It’s better in every way compared to live", and pointing out that it wasn't true.

SolarRune wrote: »

Can it not just be made to stack damage up to the 5th and then hit the max and from that point provide no additional increase in damage? Surely in trying to make this ability more forgiving of missed fires of the shot, that's what is really wanted.

That's what I was trying to suggest.

Tcholl · April 22

Is it serious that someone has the audacity to complain about the double pump grim focus? Even with this small adjustment, this will be one of the most sought after skills for subclassing and was already OP before any changes.

ForumBully · April 22

They weren't trying to fix anything. They were just doing something to avoid dealing with their initial ridiculous idea for an already ridiculously strong skill.

SolarRune · April 22

'We're allowing for over-generating stacks for this ability, so missing activation on the final stack don’t severely reduce the effectiveness of this ability - which adds up over the course of the fight. '

Above is what was said in the initial patch notes, I'm not saying I agree with it, just it was changed to fix something ZoS perceived as an issue.

Teeba_Shei · April 22

ForumBully wrote: »

They weren't trying to fix anything. They were just doing something to avoid dealing with their initial ridiculous idea for an already ridiculously strong skill.

They were trying to avoid something. Read the original dev note.

Teeba_Shei · April 22

Tcholl wrote: »

Is it serious that someone has the audacity to complain about the double pump grim focus? Even with this small adjustment, this will be one of the most sought after skills for subclassing and was already OP before any changes.

I was simple pointing out an issue I saw with the changes. I don't think this rises to the level of be an audacious point to bring up.

Tcholl · April 22

I am only joking @Teeba_Shei . Of course, you and all others can and should bring points that you see as valid to create a healthy discussion. This is the proper channel to do that and I am sure most of us here just want to provide feedback to improve the game.

Your post is welcome.

kojou · April 22

I think I would have rather they gave us max damage at 5 stacks, but still let the count of stacks go to 10.

AdmiralDigby · April 22

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

For those who don't know, Grim Focus and its morphs were changed in the latest PTS to increase your spell damage per stack by a smaller amount, so the total spell damage gained is now lower overall.

Grim Focus: Reduced this ability and the Merciless Resolve morph's Weapon and Spell Damage per stack to 30, down from 45.
Relentless Focus: Reduced this morph’s Weapon and Spell Damage per stack to 40, down from 60.

Dev Note:

We're allowing for over-generating stacks for this ability, so missing activation on the final stack doesn’t severely reduce its effectiveness—which adds up over the course of a fight. Now, it allows for more wiggle room, letting you chamber up to two shots if you reach max stacks. This also opens up more creative use. As such, we're slightly reducing the passive power of this ability when used the same way as before—firing a shot every 5–6 seconds—while increasing the passive power if you wait to use it back-to-back. This should help the ability fit more playstyles, especially for Heavy Attack builds that previously lost a stack every time they hit the cap.

The latest change makes the skill more punishing if you fire it before reaching 10 stacks, because you’ll now have much lower spell damage. Originally, the skill was changed to 10 stacks so that it would be less punishing if you didn’t fire it off exactly at 5 stacks.

The new problem is that the most min/maxed way to use the skill is still to fire it at 10 stacks, due to the way the Weapon and Spell Damage bonus is implemented. My suggestion would be to revert the bonuses to what they are in the current patch, but cap the Weapon and Spell Damage at 5 stacks instead of 10. That way, if you fire it at 8 or 9 stacks, you don’t lose much of the bonus—and you’re not punished for it.

It's almost like trying to balance multiclassing is going to create problems lmao...

ZOS NB buffs were good. Just make a debuff it you multi class.

For every tree you swap out you do -10% dmg. Something like that. % could be changed. 15% may be better