Compiled List of Confirmed Combat Ability Bugs

randconfig · May 22

I'm working to compile a list of bugs that I am able to reproduce in the game, and that have not been acknowledge or addressed by ZOS since being reported on. If you have a detailed post on a bug with a combat ability, please share below and I'll attempt to reproduce it in-game, and if I can I will add it to the list. Please do not flame ZOS/get the thread locked, the goal is to make the game better by helping organize and validate existing problems with game abilities, so that hopefully the game dev team can more quickly identify the problems in the code and fix them.

Necromancer Summons Fail To Summon
Known since 4/13/2025; 1) PvP pet limit set to 5 despite Necromancer having 6 summons in their kit, devs never talked about this. 2) The combat pet limit with corpses in PVP and PVE environments prevents summoning 4 Blastbones (Animate Blastbones + Blastbones), in addition to causing issues summoning skeletal mage and spirit mender.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/676232/pts-update-46-feedback-thread-for-classes-abilities/p1
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/678437/surprise-surprise-blastbones-and-animate-blastbones-ulti-are-unusable-in-pvp-now/p1
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/681375/necromancer-summons-are-still-bugged-in-pts-11-1-3-despite-the-flame-skull-bug-fix#latest

Fighters Guild Torchbearer + Evil Hunter Interaction Fixed in U47
Known since 5/5/2025; the Torchbearer scribing ability does not benefit from the Evil Hunter buff that states, "increases the damage of your Stamina costing Fighters Guild abilities by 25%."
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/677403/evil-hunter-and-torchbearer#latest

Arcanist's Tentacular Dread + Inspired Scholarship Interaction Appears to have been fixed in U47 or U46 despite not being mentioned in patch notes
Known since 3/3/2025; fails to grant either a 33% bonus damage from consuming a crux or to generate a crux when you have none:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/674297/bug-arcanist-tentacular-dreads-33-not-applying-when-inspired-scholarship-generates-a-crux/p1?new=1

Sorcerer's Daedric Mines Failing To Activate
Known since 2/21/2025; only one random mine will trigger at a time, so you have to run around all the mines to find it, which is not how the ability is supposed to work:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/673673/bug-daedric-mines-only-proc-a-single-time-against-enemies#latest

Sorcerer's Power Overload Ultimate Light Attacks & Bow's Focused Aim Ability Cause Broken Animations & Enemy Desyncs (Both In PvE & PvP)
Known since 4/27/2025, possibly since 2015; currently if you light attack weave with the Focused Aim ability while Power Overload ultimate is active, the bow sniping animation appears to malfunction with the bow weapon model being invisible, and more importantly, dealing enough damage to kill an enemy in either PvE or PvP causes them to desync (e.g. enemies in PvP will appear to stop moving for a few seconds, while remaining targettable but undamageable, with their current health not reducing on impact, and then after a few seconds, their healthbar updates to empty and they appear on the ground dead).
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/677071/has-the-overload-ultimate-light-attack-into-snipe-animation-been-fixed-on-the-pts#latest
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/215445/sorcs-power-energy-overload-light-attacks
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/550844/sorcerer-overload-health-desync

Force Pulse Does Not Hit Nearby Enemies If The Initial/Target Enemy Dies When Hit
Known since 1/21/2025;
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/672280/bug-force-pulse-does-not-hit-nearby-enemies-if-the-target-enemy-dies#latest

randconfig · August 20

After this year's U46 and U47:
ZOS did fix the bug between Evil Hunter and Torchbearer. Striked that from the list.

Appears that Inspired Scholarship + Tentacular Dread's crux interaction has been fixed, despite not being in patch notes, and Tentacular Dread now correctly deals 33% more damage when Inspired Scholarship procs and you had no crux. Striked from the list.

Necromancer summons failing to be summoned introduced to the game since U46 PTS. Added to the list.

MincMincMinc · August 21

Just to touch on your desync comment. Alot of the time the issue with desync is that one of the 3 ongoing calculations veers off.

Your client
The server
The enemy client

A while ago there was a seemingly 100% mitigation bug but what was actually happening was that your client was doing 2x the damage on cast timed skills. Or the server was only saying the damage was 1/2 of what it was supposed to be. Since the server controlled player death it never wanted to kill the player.

Usually the typical desync people refer to is when the client shows they have 20% hp, but for some reason the server dictates that they are dead already. In this case the client did not calculate the same amount and was slave to whatever the server says. Now this may have changed over the years but supposedly when desyncs happen the server sometimes will ignore all healing that was supposed to happen that tick. Meaning if you can force a desync you can ensure a player will die with enough damage.

It is also not just restricted to HP. With inconsistent code there are also regen and restore desyncs. If you try a permablock build in pvp you will notice that you can sustain a group of players forever. All of a sudden your recovery just goes fubar with no other changes by the enemies

The other major desync I know of involves light and heavy attack transitioning. Its very noticeable with all of the light attack and heavy attack proc sets. Aswell as skills like crystal weapon or imbue. Basically what I think is happening is you have to hold your light attack button for an extra 0.001s for it to start doing the heavy attack charge code. Except the server only counts you as doing a light attack. So the divergence happens there. Obviously I cant look at the code or what the server is seeing, but its my best guess.

Id think nothing should happen until the client finishes their input. However for anticheat reasons the server may be trying to pay attention to how long the button is held for and count on its own. Normally light and heavy attacks are so inconsequential so in 2014 who cared about this issue. However now adays you will see people flop over in pvp all the time because your enchants triggered off the light/heavy attack and the enemy got desync'd by enough damage the server decided they were dead. Combine enchants, multiple proc sets, triggered skills like crystal weapon and suddenly you can stack up beyond ultimate levels of damage.

randconfig · August 29

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Just to touch on your desync comment. Alot of the time the issue with desync is that one of the 3 ongoing calculations veers off.

Your client
The server
The enemy client

A while ago there was a seemingly 100% mitigation bug but what was actually happening was that your client was doing 2x the damage on cast timed skills. Or the server was only saying the damage was 1/2 of what it was supposed to be. Since the server controlled player death it never wanted to kill the player.

Usually the typical desync people refer to is when the client shows they have 20% hp, but for some reason the server dictates that they are dead already. In this case the client did not calculate the same amount and was slave to whatever the server says. Now this may have changed over the years but supposedly when desyncs happen the server sometimes will ignore all healing that was supposed to happen that tick. Meaning if you can force a desync you can ensure a player will die with enough damage.

It is also not just restricted to HP. With inconsistent code there are also regen and restore desyncs. If you try a permablock build in pvp you will notice that you can sustain a group of players forever. All of a sudden your recovery just goes fubar with no other changes by the enemies

The other major desync I know of involves light and heavy attack transitioning. Its very noticeable with all of the light attack and heavy attack proc sets. Aswell as skills like crystal weapon or imbue. Basically what I think is happening is you have to hold your light attack button for an extra 0.001s for it to start doing the heavy attack charge code. Except the server only counts you as doing a light attack. So the divergence happens there. Obviously I cant look at the code or what the server is seeing, but its my best guess.

Id think nothing should happen until the client finishes their input. However for anticheat reasons the server may be trying to pay attention to how long the button is held for and count on its own. Normally light and heavy attacks are so inconsequential so in 2014 who cared about this issue. However now adays you will see people flop over in pvp all the time because your enchants triggered off the light/heavy attack and the enemy got desync'd by enough damage the server decided they were dead. Combine enchants, multiple proc sets, triggered skills like crystal weapon and suddenly you can stack up beyond ultimate levels of damage.

That makes sense. I just wonder why they couldn't make the client do some more calculations to determine if it's desyncd, and if it is desynced, to send a packet to the server for updated player stats, to synchronize. Like when your recovery completely tanks out, have the client detect that and communicate it to the server, so that the server can work to synchronize the clients.

I wonder if some kind of architecture could exist where player clients connect to each other to help synchronize and validate information, to offload some of the work of the server...

Maybe that would be a coding/security nightmare though and open the door for hackers or introduce new problems. Whatever the case, I'm sure the code to tackle these issues is very complex, at least from my limited experience programming that kind of stuff.

I would say just fix the initial cause of the desync, but I'd imagine things like packet loss, ping, and all that are involved and not really something ZOS has the power to prevent.