Update 48 Combat/Balancing Changes

Spearblade · September 12

Ngl, my heart sunk when I heard that there were few combat/balance changes (again) in Update 48 in the Sneak Peek. Even more so when ya'll showed the list and said that was more or less it...

You don't have to redesign the wheel on every skill, every time. Some skills admittedly DO need that, but to do NOTHING when you could simply adjust numeric values (damage, healing, duration, whatever) feels really bad, especially when so many classes have dead skills, or even skill lines.

Surely you guys have the data on underperforming and unused skills? Why not move the slider on a damage skill up by 5-10% and see how it's received? You have Week 1 of 4 of PTS cycles coming up. It might be a band aid on a bullet wound in some cases, but for me, that shows effort. Or at least acknowledgement that something can be improved there. If I chop a finger off, I'd appreciate efforts to stop the bleeding before you try to reattach it.

SkaiFaith · September 12

We now know from the Reddit AUA that in 2026 we'll likely see Overland Difficulty implemented - why balance now?
Few months from now everything will need to be looked at anyway.
Let them work on what they think is the priority right now... We'll have needed balances down the road; game isn't in an unplayable state right now, we can wait a bit IMO.

tomofhyrule · September 12

SkaiFaith wrote: »

We now know from the Reddit AUA that in 2026 we'll likely see Overland Difficulty implemented - why balance now?
Few months from now everything will need to be looked at anyway.
Let them work on what they think is the priority right now... We'll have needed balances down the road; game isn't in an unplayable state right now, we can wait a bit IMO.

Let's not pretend balance is anywhere near a good state right now.

I'm not going to go too crazy until we see the patch notes, but I'm really disappointed that it seems like they're still on the "we need to wait and see" phase for how Subclassing affected balance. Spoiler alert: it affected balance exactly as the players from the U46 PTS warned them about.

We should not have to go through 9+ months of balance being in shambles before they deign to address it. After all, look at the "how did you enjoy Subclassing and U46?" thread in General - it's not universally positive, and the longer they don't address it, the more of a chance that those players who are frustrated are going to find a new home... if they haven't already.

If I were Game Director, I would have made Post-Subclassing Balance be an all-hands-on-deck thing as soon as I saw the frustration when U46's PTS was going... and I'd also be trying to rush a really nice (paid!) feature like a new Class for U50 to get people back and spending money.

StihlReign · September 12

Watched the U 48 Sneak peak twice.

Each Vengeance test is now beginning to feel more useless than the next. It's unimaginable how massive the failure of the lead dev to listen to the simplest and most common feedback from YEARS of posting and move forward.

The next Vengeance test may as well be skipped.

Then there's the pre-made loadout test coming. For 2 weeks.

10 years of free data and the devs still have less of an idea of how to fix Cyrodiil than the most experienced PVP players and guilds who have asked for literally the same thing ad-nauseum.

...but yeah, more meetings. He spoke about tuning abilities while adding a minor 33% execute buff. What tuning and how is this much damage minor?!!

#epicfail

Solariken · September 12

Agreed, but this is par for the course. There just isn't anyone that cares enough to take the time.

StihlReign · September 12

The best/worst part of the video is the tiptoeing around Stuck in Combat.

#minorpanic ensues...

If they continue to fear discussing the issue and the steps they've taken we're getting nowhere.

StihlReign · September 12

It took literally ONE HOUR of testing using Highland Sentinel in Cyrodiil on the first day the set was released to ascertain resto staffs were placing players in combat and keeping them there.

The test was simple. Equip the set, sit near a wayshrine, wait for inexperienced healers to come off the shrine from a battle and hit heal before running out of the door. I chose Alessia and BRK. Stuck in Combat. Worked every time, which sucked. HS has a visual indicator and builds stacks.

Radiating Regen ftw...or not if you need to mount, change gear, etc etc

Spearblade · September 12

SkaiFaith wrote: »

We now know from the Reddit AUA that in 2026 we'll likely see Overland Difficulty implemented - why balance now?
Few months from now everything will need to be looked at anyway.
Let them work on what they think is the priority right now... We'll have needed balances down the road; game isn't in an unplayable state right now, we can wait a bit IMO.

I'm asking for a bare minimum of looking at numeric values of abilities, moving a slider left or right basically. This is not a time consuming task, nor a huge investment of ZOS' resources.

What happens if you add 5% more damage to Twisting Path/Refreshing Path in Shadow? Or increase their durations? Or to Shattering Spines? Or any number of virtually unused skills? In all likelihood, nothing that would come close to changing the meta. But it could make them slightly more competitive to where somebody might consider it an option, even if it still doesn't stack up with Assassination for pure damage, or Herald of the Tome, etc.

Some of these skills may be in skill lines more "intended" (for those classes that DO have defined skill lines) for tanks or healers, sure, but is a tank doing slightly more damage going to hurt anybody? It's much more likely a dps takes something like Shadow and now has a little bit more hp from passives and a now serviceable skill for doing some damage.

Why not implement small, easy changes on skills that we KNOW aren't commonly used?

Rkindaleft · 12:51AM

SkaiFaith wrote: »

We now know from the Reddit AUA that in 2026 we'll likely see Overland Difficulty implemented - why balance now?
Few months from now everything will need to be looked at anyway.
Let them work on what they think is the priority right now... We'll have needed balances down the road; game isn't in an unplayable state right now, we can wait a bit IMO.

Why not balance now? Not sure what Overland difficulty has to do with not making balance changes. The people who want to stay at the current difficulty (assuming it's a slider) probably won't make any changes to their builds/skills and will just keep playing the way they're playing now and the ones who do care will just make a proper build/learn how combat actually works, like people do now when they want to progress to more challenging content.

If you actually care about the content in this game above normal difficulty, the current combat balance is probably the poorest it's ever been. When this next update goes live, we will have already had 6+ months of poorer than ever. That's definitely enough time for them to no longer have to say "we need more time to see how things are affected and we need more data." People told them exactly how this was this was going to go back in April during the first week of the U46 PTS.

If nothing changes in this update we will be looking at 9+ months of poor with no changes, perhaps longer if then they decide to skip over it again during the Q1 update next year.

To be honest, at this point I've completely stopped caring which route they take. Either buff the weakest skills/skill lines to give everyone more options to be competitive or just tone down the strongest skill lines to make the skill lines more even of a playing field. I just don't think it should stay the way it is now with zero changes.

Daoin · 1:22AM

eso's combat and balance changes must have become a joke in general over the last ten years simply because they keep doing it not because the changes are good or bad, if eso could have a comedy sketch, that would be it, but even the same lines in a joke get old which must be plain to see by now

Gabriel_H · 8:42AM

This is the price paid for the way they implemented sub-classing. There will be constant changes for the next two years, followed by periodic tweaks, all on top of the typical re-balancing that happens from time to time.

Sub-classing made the power creep worse, and the min/maxing to the point that it is killing end-game for tanks and healers who now have to bring additional buffs, on top of what they already were, beacause the DDs have no survivability skills or passives - because it's been decided that an extra 5s on a 30m run is too much.

That is an absolute tiny fraction of the player base's idea of fun. ZOS continue down the road of Harder = More boss health. There are fewer and fewer mechanics in each new trial. It's all about damage soaks, rather than having to actually deal with a set of mechs.

The saving grace has been the dungeon team, who continue to put out solid content. Yet even that cannot escape the power creep - even the newest dungeons. For experienced players veteran is little different to normal, with a big jump up to hardmode, but once a group understand the patterns they can focus on burn burn burn and it loses all challenge and meaning.

tomofhyrule · 3:28PM

Gabriel_H wrote: »

This is the price paid for the way they implemented sub-classing. There will be constant changes for the next two years, followed by periodic tweaks, all on top of the typical re-balancing that happens from time to time.

And my biggest fear is actually that this will be their excuse to not add anything new. No new Skill Lines, no new Grimoires, and definitely no new Class.

I understand that U47 wouldn't be able to have many rebalances from Subclassing since it was only live for a month at that point (let's ignore the fact that the U46 PTS had players listing every problem with data evidence, all of which was completely ignored, and they were proven right the second it went live). But at this point it's been live for 3 months while they got U48 ready. That's enough time to at least see where the major issues are, and... "no major combat changes?!?!"

It really seems like the Combat team has been hard focusing Vengeance to make it a new mode, and allowing PvP/PvE balance to exist as is because... Vengeance automatically fixes balance, I guess?

God I want a new Class so bad. I want to see the world through new eyes, not just take a bunch of my existing characters and mash them together. But if the balance is this bad and they can't even bother to fix it, then what hope do we have of getting anything new?

StihlReign · 4:26PM

Add player based crit resist to every NPC in the game. Overland difficulty done.

Can we tune skills, drop battle spirit and fix the subclass mess now?