Hybridization
SneaK
✭✭✭✭✭
Might disagree… but I think hybridization is almost on par with subclassing contributing to bad balance and removing variety.
It’s ironic.
Edited by SneaK on September 29, 2025 9:59PM It’s ironic.
"IMO"
Aldmeri Dominion
Bosmer Nightblade AR 32 - Altmer Templar AR 26 - Dunmer Dragonknight AR 18 - Altmer Sorcerer AR 20 - Khajiit Dragonknight AR 18
(+3 not worth mentioning, yet)
15
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AcadianPaladin✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭Definitely disagree. I very much like the flexibility that both features provide.
PC NA(no Steam), PvE, mostly solo4 -
Lord_Hev✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭Might disagree… but I think hybridization is almost on par with subclassing contributing to bad balance and removing variety.
It’s ironic.
Agreed. But the effects subclassing has had are far more profound and damaging. Both complement each other very well though, which makes all the negatives even more glaring and potent. Hybridization did some damage, but subclassing is inflicting actual irreparable injuries to the state of the game.7 -
licenturion✭✭✭✭✭
✭
It's the same in every online loot game these days. A lot of people run the things that gives the quickest rewards.
I am currently playing the new Diablo 4 season and I basically see most people running the 2 most OP classes of the season with the same few current OP builds that kill everything on screen by pressing 1 button. Even though that game has a lot build variety as well.Edited by licenturion on September 29, 2025 10:32PM2 -
Kendaric✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭While I like subclassing, I utterly hate hybridization.2 -
fizzybeef✭✭✭✭licenturion wrote: »
It's the same in every online loot game these days. A lot of people run the things that gives the quickest rewards.
I am currently playing the new Diablo 4 season and I basically see most people running the 2 most OP classes of the season with the same few current OP builds that kill everything on screen by pressing 1 button. Even though that game has a lot build variety as well.
Ok but eso was never a 2 set game and now it is.
If its fine to you , cool.
I prefered the game how it was before hybridisation and subclassing, the meta created is insanely boring2 -
licenturion✭✭✭✭✭
✭licenturion wrote: »
It's the same in every online loot game these days. A lot of people run the things that gives the quickest rewards.
I am currently playing the new Diablo 4 season and I basically see most people running the 2 most OP classes of the season with the same few current OP builds that kill everything on screen by pressing 1 button. Even though that game has a lot build variety as well.
Ok but eso was never a 2 set game and now it is.
If its fine to you , cool.
I prefered the game how it was before hybridisation and subclassing, the meta created is insanely boring
I understand. But do you think this will change in the future?
If ZOS rebalances sets and skill lines, people will transmute into the next 2 OP sets and skills 10 minutes after the patch drops. Gamers are gonna be gamers.Edited by licenturion on September 29, 2025 10:40PM4 -
fizzybeef✭✭✭✭licenturion wrote: »licenturion wrote: »
It's the same in every online loot game these days. A lot of people run the things that gives the quickest rewards.
I am currently playing the new Diablo 4 season and I basically see most people running the 2 most OP classes of the season with the same few current OP builds that kill everything on screen by pressing 1 button. Even though that game has a lot build variety as well.
Ok but eso was never a 2 set game and now it is.
If its fine to you , cool.
I prefered the game how it was before hybridisation and subclassing, the meta created is insanely boring
I understand. But do you think this will change in the future?
If ZOS rebalances sets and skill lines, people will transmute into the next 2 OP sets and skills 10 minutes after the patch drops. Gamers are gonna be gamers.
Thats why they should rollback to pre hybridisation and subclassing.
I know it will never happen no worries.
There was a meta for stam and for mag, there was build diversity and class identity.
Now we have neither.
Im sure roleplayers are happy they can be fire wardens or whatever now, most of the endgame players seem to be pretty upset and dislike it and it what nobody can argue off, it splitted the community and made many leave.2 -
YandereGirlfriend✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭licenturion wrote: »licenturion wrote: »
It's the same in every online loot game these days. A lot of people run the things that gives the quickest rewards.
I am currently playing the new Diablo 4 season and I basically see most people running the 2 most OP classes of the season with the same few current OP builds that kill everything on screen by pressing 1 button. Even though that game has a lot build variety as well.
Ok but eso was never a 2 set game and now it is.
If its fine to you , cool.
I prefered the game how it was before hybridisation and subclassing, the meta created is insanely boring
I understand. But do you think this will change in the future?
If ZOS rebalances sets and skill lines, people will transmute into the next 2 OP sets and skills 10 minutes after the patch drops. Gamers are gonna be gamers.
Thats why they should rollback to pre hybridisation and subclassing.
I know it will never happen no worries.
There was a meta for stam and for mag, there was build diversity and class identity.
Now we have neither.
Im sure roleplayers are happy they can be fire wardens or whatever now, most of the endgame players seem to be pretty upset and dislike it and it what nobody can argue off, it splitted the community and made many leave.
Huh?
People have monocultured the best-in-slot since forever in this game. It was that way before either subclassing or hybridization.
You ever try to bring a Stamina character to a serious trial before hybridization? Laughed out of the instance.
"War, war never changes."10 -
Ratzkifal✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭You are 100% correct, but the main difference is that people are more attached to their class than their attribute. Pretty much nobody is a "magicka main", so hybridization never rubbed people the wrong way like subclassing has. But both contributed to powercreep in a very similar manner and both forced themselves onto the players in the same way. We used to not have to play hybrids, but now not playing hybrid means intentionally nerfing yourself.
It has always bothered me, especially initially when enchantments were not hybridized and your stamina templar would benefit from spell damage enchants than weapon damage, and magicka DK benefitted more from weapon damage enchants. Utter foolishness! I'm glad they found a solution for that, but I don't think they can find similar solutions for subclassing...
Subclassing is fun, but it's bad for us, because it homogenizes builds and kills build diversity and makes balancing even more tricky than before. It kills the replayability of the game, as people would rather incorporate new class abilities into their current build than start over and make an alt character.This Bosmer was tortured to death. There is nothing left to be done.3 -
SneaK✭✭✭✭✭Might disagree… but I think hybridization is almost on par with subclassing contributing to bad balance and removing variety.
It’s ironic.
Agreed. But the effects subclassing has had are far more profound and damaging. Both complement each other very well though, which makes all the negatives even more glaring and potent. Hybridization did some damage, but subclassing is inflicting actual irreparable injuries to the state of the game.
Not disagreeing that subclassing is further beyond as an issue. But didn’t hybridization completely kill light armor? I honestly could be wrong, I took a very long break from ESO during the hybrid push. From my POV, it’s all just as overwhelming as the next, the changes with mag and stam are very very hard for me to understand."IMO"Aldmeri DominionBosmer Nightblade AR 32 - Altmer Templar AR 26 - Dunmer Dragonknight AR 18 - Altmer Sorcerer AR 20 - Khajiit Dragonknight AR 18(+3 not worth mentioning, yet)1 -
SneaK✭✭✭✭✭You are 100% correct, but the main difference is that people are more attached to their class than their attribute. Pretty much nobody is a "magicka main", so hybridization never rubbed people the wrong way like subclassing has. But both contributed to powercreep in a very similar manner and both forced themselves onto the players in the same way. We used to not have to play hybrids, but now not playing hybrid means intentionally nerfing yourself.
It has always bothered me, especially initially when enchantments were not hybridized and your stamina templar would benefit from spell damage enchants than weapon damage, and magicka DK benefitted more from weapon damage enchants. Utter foolishness! I'm glad they found a solution for that, but I don't think they can find similar solutions for subclassing...
Subclassing is fun, but it's bad for us, because it homogenizes builds and kills build diversity and makes balancing even more tricky than before. It kills the replayability of the game, as people would rather incorporate new class abilities into their current build than start over and make an alt character.
I’d point out there were plenty of folks who considered themselves a Stamblade or MagSorc (etc) main. The stam or mag always came first, cause it was a critical part of their characters play style. Not fanboying, but if I threw out the name Fengrush, many would think Stamsorc."IMO"Aldmeri DominionBosmer Nightblade AR 32 - Altmer Templar AR 26 - Dunmer Dragonknight AR 18 - Altmer Sorcerer AR 20 - Khajiit Dragonknight AR 18(+3 not worth mentioning, yet)4 -
Radiate77✭✭✭✭Hybridization sucked, but I’ll take it one step further… I have never been a fan of the changing of half of our morphs to Stamina with a green reskin. Did it open up a ton of builds in theory? Sure. But so did Hybridization, and Subclassing.
More options, does not always equate to more diversity, and when Stamina morphs became a thing, Magicka builds became a lot more streamlined to make way.
Here’s the thing though, despite not liking the introduction of Stamina morphs, if ALL skills were competitive, every change they’ve made in the past decade would have paved the way to a better experience for everyone, but the balance team has just fallen flat every step of the way.
If we had a major balance patch at the same time Subclassing had dropped, I guarantee there wouldn’t even be a fraction of the people on this forum complaining, but instead they added a second Spec Bow in the holster to the most performative skill line in PvP, and kept Fatecarver exactly how it was.Edited by Radiate77 on September 30, 2025 4:39AM4 -
BXR_Lonestar✭✭✭✭✭
✭Might disagree… but I think hybridization is almost on par with subclassing contributing to bad balance and removing variety.
It’s ironic.
Been saying this for a while actually. I much preferred the game when Mag builds were an entirely different meta from Stam builds. Now they're just all the same across the board.
It feels like with every change they make with this game, the amount of build variety decreases rather than increases. Sure, there will always be a meta, and it is always your choice whether to play the meta or not, but when the meta is so far ahead of everything else. At that point, the choice is whether you want to keep pace or whether you are comfortable playing a build that you KNOW is suboptimal and may be a burden to your group because of it.4 -
BXR_Lonestar✭✭✭✭✭
✭Hybridization sucked, but I’ll take it one step further… I have never been a fan of the changing of half of our morphs to Stamina with a green reskin. Did it open up a ton of builds in theory? Sure. But so did Hybridization, and Subclassing.
More options, does not always equate to more diversity, and when Stamina morphs became a thing, Magicka builds became a lot more streamlined to make way.
Here’s the thing though, despite not liking the introduction of Stamina morphs, if ALL skills were competitive, every change they’ve made in the past decade would have paved the way to a better experience for everyone, but the balance team has just fallen flat every step of the way.
If we had a major balance patch at the same time Subclassing had dropped, I guarantee there wouldn’t even be a fraction of the people on this forum complaining, but instead they added a second Spec Bow in the holster to the most performative skill line in PvP, and kept Fatecarver exactly how it was.
Morphs didn't really do much for build flexibility IMO. One morph is still clearly better than the other in 95% of combat situations, and so the choice is just obvious. In almost every situation you can imagine, people are running the same morphs of the same abilities.
Its like this game had more variety when the DPS cap was lower, but there were more ways to get there, and when mag and stam metas were separate.2 -
tomofhyrule✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭BXR_Lonestar wrote: »It feels like with every change they make with this game, the amount of build variety decreases rather than increases. Sure, there will always be a meta, and it is always your choice whether to play the meta or not, but when the meta is so far ahead of everything else. At that point, the choice is whether you want to keep pace or whether you are comfortable playing a build that you KNOW is suboptimal and may be a burden to your group because of it.
This is the issue here.
I’m over the “but but but you don’t have to play meta!” argument we see everywhere, even from the devs. It reeks of someone who doesn’t touch endgame content trying to explain endgame content to people who are very experienced in that.
The meta build is obscenely more powerful than anything else, full stop. If you are not bringing the meta, you are coming to your group admitting that you are playing in self-nerf mode and that you don’t care about them enough to contribute properly.
If ZOS really wants to give us ultimate freedom, then it needs to come with perfect balance. There’s a reason that every game ever which is at all competitive doesn’t allow all characters to do everything at once.
Even the Class survey implied it: “can you find a way to enhance your strengths and minimize your weaknesses?” The idea is that each Class should have strengths and weaknesses and that Subclassing is intended to be the way to cover for said weaknesses means that it should be a tradeoff.
It amazes me how many “I love RPGs!” players are so anti needing to make choices and instead want it all at once.4 -
SneaK✭✭✭✭✭BXR_Lonestar wrote: »Hybridization sucked, but I’ll take it one step further… I have never been a fan of the changing of half of our morphs to Stamina with a green reskin. Did it open up a ton of builds in theory? Sure. But so did Hybridization, and Subclassing.
More options, does not always equate to more diversity, and when Stamina morphs became a thing, Magicka builds became a lot more streamlined to make way.
Here’s the thing though, despite not liking the introduction of Stamina morphs, if ALL skills were competitive, every change they’ve made in the past decade would have paved the way to a better experience for everyone, but the balance team has just fallen flat every step of the way.
If we had a major balance patch at the same time Subclassing had dropped, I guarantee there wouldn’t even be a fraction of the people on this forum complaining, but instead they added a second Spec Bow in the holster to the most performative skill line in PvP, and kept Fatecarver exactly how it was.
Morphs didn't really do much for build flexibility IMO. One morph is still clearly better than the other in 95% of combat situations, and so the choice is just obvious. In almost every situation you can imagine, people are running the same morphs of the same abilities.
Its like this game had more variety when the DPS cap was lower, but there were more ways to get there, and when mag and stam metas were separate.
It’s ironic..
It’s also confusing. They opened the flood gates thinking it would be a more streamlined approach and easier for people to achieve better results, but what it did was blur the focus from specific stats and homogenize skillsets and armor to a point that made many things in ESO useless.
I’ll go a little farther, Scribing wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it did give access to a lot of different things that in some cases are leagues better than class skills. Sometimes better than the best skill in an entire class skill line. So you open up hybrids and subclassing, there’s zero reason to run a specific class line if you can just substitute and scribed skill and get access to a whole better skill line."IMO"Aldmeri DominionBosmer Nightblade AR 32 - Altmer Templar AR 26 - Dunmer Dragonknight AR 18 - Altmer Sorcerer AR 20 - Khajiit Dragonknight AR 18(+3 not worth mentioning, yet)1 -
BXR_Lonestar✭✭✭✭✭
✭BXR_Lonestar wrote: »Hybridization sucked, but I’ll take it one step further… I have never been a fan of the changing of half of our morphs to Stamina with a green reskin. Did it open up a ton of builds in theory? Sure. But so did Hybridization, and Subclassing.
More options, does not always equate to more diversity, and when Stamina morphs became a thing, Magicka builds became a lot more streamlined to make way.
Here’s the thing though, despite not liking the introduction of Stamina morphs, if ALL skills were competitive, every change they’ve made in the past decade would have paved the way to a better experience for everyone, but the balance team has just fallen flat every step of the way.
If we had a major balance patch at the same time Subclassing had dropped, I guarantee there wouldn’t even be a fraction of the people on this forum complaining, but instead they added a second Spec Bow in the holster to the most performative skill line in PvP, and kept Fatecarver exactly how it was.
Morphs didn't really do much for build flexibility IMO. One morph is still clearly better than the other in 95% of combat situations, and so the choice is just obvious. In almost every situation you can imagine, people are running the same morphs of the same abilities.
Its like this game had more variety when the DPS cap was lower, but there were more ways to get there, and when mag and stam metas were separate.
It’s ironic..
It’s also confusing. They opened the flood gates thinking it would be a more streamlined approach and easier for people to achieve better results, but what it did was blur the focus from specific stats and homogenize skillsets and armor to a point that made many things in ESO useless.
I’ll go a little farther, Scribing wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it did give access to a lot of different things that in some cases are leagues better than class skills. Sometimes better than the best skill in an entire class skill line. So you open up hybrids and subclassing, there’s zero reason to run a specific class line if you can just substitute and scribed skill and get access to a whole better skill line.
This is true. And there is no reason to use some base subclasses because other base class masteries are superior to the rest, so why choose anything else?
Beyond that, while subclassing and hybridization and scribing theoretically create more possibilities in terms of builds, the reality is that, just with META armor sets, there is only a handful of META subclass skill lines that are really worth chosing from, so the number of VIABLE builds is very small.
I get that there will never be such a thing as PERFECT balance, but to release this kind of content without having a serious rebalancing pass feels like they're just pushing out half-baked content that was created without much thought or consideration as to how it will impact their game. Basically, it looks like they're trying something new for the sake of doing something new, and IMO, that is not a great way to manage a game.2 -
SneaK✭✭✭✭✭BXR_Lonestar wrote: »BXR_Lonestar wrote: »Hybridization sucked, but I’ll take it one step further… I have never been a fan of the changing of half of our morphs to Stamina with a green reskin. Did it open up a ton of builds in theory? Sure. But so did Hybridization, and Subclassing.
More options, does not always equate to more diversity, and when Stamina morphs became a thing, Magicka builds became a lot more streamlined to make way.
Here’s the thing though, despite not liking the introduction of Stamina morphs, if ALL skills were competitive, every change they’ve made in the past decade would have paved the way to a better experience for everyone, but the balance team has just fallen flat every step of the way.
If we had a major balance patch at the same time Subclassing had dropped, I guarantee there wouldn’t even be a fraction of the people on this forum complaining, but instead they added a second Spec Bow in the holster to the most performative skill line in PvP, and kept Fatecarver exactly how it was.
Morphs didn't really do much for build flexibility IMO. One morph is still clearly better than the other in 95% of combat situations, and so the choice is just obvious. In almost every situation you can imagine, people are running the same morphs of the same abilities.
Its like this game had more variety when the DPS cap was lower, but there were more ways to get there, and when mag and stam metas were separate.
It’s ironic..
It’s also confusing. They opened the flood gates thinking it would be a more streamlined approach and easier for people to achieve better results, but what it did was blur the focus from specific stats and homogenize skillsets and armor to a point that made many things in ESO useless.
I’ll go a little farther, Scribing wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it did give access to a lot of different things that in some cases are leagues better than class skills. Sometimes better than the best skill in an entire class skill line. So you open up hybrids and subclassing, there’s zero reason to run a specific class line if you can just substitute and scribed skill and get access to a whole better skill line.
This is true. And there is no reason to use some base subclasses because other base class masteries are superior to the rest, so why choose anything else?
Beyond that, while subclassing and hybridization and scribing theoretically create more possibilities in terms of builds, the reality is that, just with META armor sets, there is only a handful of META subclass skill lines that are really worth chosing from, so the number of VIABLE builds is very small.
I get that there will never be such a thing as PERFECT balance, but to release this kind of content without having a serious rebalancing pass feels like they're just pushing out half-baked content that was created without much thought or consideration as to how it will impact their game. Basically, it looks like they're trying something new for the sake of doing something new, and IMO, that is not a great way to manage a game.
Yea I would never ask for perfect balance, but it’s reasonable to ask for some balance.
There will always be certain players that achieve better results because there is a skill gap. This is the part I don’t think they understand. The skill gap is not the boogeyman, it needs to exist and always will in a game that requires you to press specific buttons at specific times.. Diluting the game decreases variety and kills longevity. Why? Cause the below average player is running and doing the exact same thing as the above average player but getting worse results. So why keep doing it? If there was still variety, that below average player could focus into a strength they actually have, or find a build that better suits there style and lean into it. Right now it’s all the same and the bad players look even worse cause they are running the same thing as the good players."IMO"Aldmeri DominionBosmer Nightblade AR 32 - Altmer Templar AR 26 - Dunmer Dragonknight AR 18 - Altmer Sorcerer AR 20 - Khajiit Dragonknight AR 18(+3 not worth mentioning, yet)1 -
Iriidius✭✭✭✭✭Might disagree… but I think hybridization is almost on par with subclassing contributing to bad balance and removing variety.
It’s ironic.
Agreed. But the effects subclassing has had are far more profound and damaging. Both complement each other very well though, which makes all the negatives even more glaring and potent. Hybridization did some damage, but subclassing is inflicting actual irreparable injuries to the state of the game.
Not disagreeing that subclassing is further beyond as an issue. But didn’t hybridization completely kill light armor? I honestly could be wrong, I took a very long break from ESO during the hybrid push. From my POV, it’s all just as overwhelming as the next, the changes with mag and stam are very very hard for me to understand.
Light armor is bad since armor got reworked to have boni and penalty’s and light armor got the worst ones while medium armor got no penaltys making medium armor the best and everyone wearing it.
That was at the same time as cp 2.0 system a full year before hybridization of skills.
If light armor didn’t have the worst penalty’s, boni and passives in addition to giving lowest armor than players would still choose light armor on mag chars even with hybridization.1 -
MasterSpatula✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭When the gameplay team realized they'd essentially killed Magica builds, and those still running Mag were using Medium Armor and DW, that should have been a "Five-Alarm-Fire, no-one-sleeps-until-we-fix-this" panic for the entire team.
Instead, everything since then has just been doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on the same fundamental mistake. Paradoxically, limitations are freeing. You learn that pretty early in any writing or art or filmmaking program. Letting everyone do everything was always going to result in everyone doing the same few things. ZOS are so determined not to learn this lesson, it's almost like they're trying to force reality into a different shape rather than adapt themselves."A probable impossibility is preferable to an improbable possibility." - Aristotle4 -
YandereGirlfriend✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭Just like with most of the game's classes that were conjured out of thin air and have no basis in any pre-ESO lore, I always viewed the Mag/Stam divide as very contrived and gamey for the sake of being gamey. They weren't good or valuable in or of themselves, they were simply familiar and comfortable for folk who were used to them. That has value but it isn't necessarily rooted in actual game design.
Like, when I first came to the game I literally rolled on the floor laughing at the cognitive dissonance of "StamSorc" - and, thus, had to choose it as my main class immediately. But the whole idea of a Stamina "Sorcerer" felt SO dumb and artificial. Even more so because you couldn't even use 95% of your "class" kit and so StamSorc got the unironic reputation of the "class without a class" or "weapon ability class" whose fortunes rose not with buffs to the actual class but rather to generic weapon ability lines. Which was, again, completely dumb.
In other words, not much of actual value was lost in hybridization - or at least nothing that simply having better game balance couldn't solve.
Seriously, whether it's PvP or PvE or overland questing or whatever - we, as players, deserve better and more responsive balance than what we have received for the last MANY years. If you look at patch notes for similar games compared to ours the difference is VAST. We get solutions to problems over the course of years where other games receive them over weeks. Like, there is no law of nature that demands that Light Armor be bad. It is only bad because it was balanced improperly and then hasn't been changed for literally years. That isn't hybridization being flawed it is simply neglect.
The systems themselves are not to blame but rather the positively glacial (and skimpy!) cadence of patches and balance updates gives us the worst of all possible worlds for insanely long stretches of time.2 -
moderatelyfatman✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭Might disagree… but I think hybridization is almost on par with subclassing contributing to bad balance and removing variety.
It’s ironic.
Someone else has already commented to this effect so I'll explain it in terms of my own experience. I have two dark elf sorcs that I made before hybridization as dps characters. Both were a lot of fun to play and had completely different playstyles due to using different morphs of the same skill. My magsorc was the queen of ranged, single target damage while my stam sorc (thanks to hurricane) was a speedy whirlwind of melee carnage.
Hybridization merged this into a single Crystal Frag spamming meta.
However, there was still class identity based on the class skills: my warden still played differently to my DK and my DK to my sorc and my sorc to my templar etc. So I still enjoyed playing all four of these different classes on trials and endgame content. This happened too in PvP where a sorc could be far more mobile than a templar and DK but also not as effective at close range, resulting in a different playstyle and gameplay experience based around strengths and weaknesses of each class.
What subclassing has done is merge them all into one. And what I find particularly disgusting is they then nerfed the pure classes so that we are now forced to subclass in order to keep our old dps.
What's made it worse is that the devs have made zero attempt to strengthen the underperforming skill lines. An example of this is for the sorcerer's Dark Magic skill line: it contains one of the hardest hitting damage skills in the form of Crystal Frags. Crystal Frags was the go to skill in PvE and an absolute blast when it procced in PvP.
However, as Dark Magic is designated as a tanking skill line, it has no damage boosting passives and thus is far inferior overall to Herald of the Tome, Assassination, Aedric Spear or Animal Companion. There is no good reason for a dps sorc to run Dark Magic unless it's for role-playing.
Subclassing has killed any need for alts and basically zeroed the replayability of this game.
Edited by moderatelyfatman on October 3, 2025 3:24AM2 -
BretonMage✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭
3 years after hybridisation, I'm still appalled that they'd look at all the sorcerers dual-wielding and think, "this is fine".MasterSpatula wrote: »When the gameplay team realized they'd essentially killed Magica builds, and those still running Mag were using Medium Armor and DW, that should have been a "Five-Alarm-Fire, no-one-sleeps-until-we-fix-this" panic for the entire team.
So many people have been calling out for a rehaul of the Dark Magic line, I hope ZOS listens. At least that is the one thing in subclassing that everyone seems to be in agreement on: buffing weak lines.moderatelyfatman wrote: »What's made it worse is that the devs have made zero attempt to strengthen the underperforming skill lines. An example of this is for the sorcerer's Dark Magic skill line: it contains one of the hardest hitting damage skills in the form of Crystal Frags. Crystal Frags was the go to skill in PvE and an absolute blast when it procced in PvP.
However, as Dark Magic is designated as a tanking skill line, it has no damage boosting passives and thus is far inferior overall to Herald of the Tome, Assassination, Aedric Spear or Animal Companion. There is no good reason for a dps sorc to run Dark Magic unless it's for role-playing.
And yes, I loved Crystal Frags. I subclassed and now miss it keenly.0 -
Stamicka✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭Yea this was super predictable and before subclassing even released I and many others knew what would happen. I made a post about it, but unfortunately all of the feedback was ignored. It’s funny to go back to look and see how people thought that subclassing would be any different than hybridization.Edited by Stamicka on October 3, 2025 5:13AMPC NA and Xbox NA0 -
colossalvoids✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭You are 100% correct, but the main difference is that people are more attached to their class than their attribute. Pretty much nobody is a "magicka main", so hybridization never rubbed people the wrong way like subclassing has. But both contributed to powercreep in a very similar manner and both forced themselves onto the players in the same way. We used to not have to play hybrids, but now not playing hybrid means intentionally nerfing yourself.
It has always bothered me, especially initially when enchantments were not hybridized and your stamina templar would benefit from spell damage enchants than weapon damage, and magicka DK benefitted more from weapon damage enchants. Utter foolishness! I'm glad they found a solution for that, but I don't think they can find similar solutions for subclassing...
Subclassing is fun, but it's bad for us, because it homogenizes builds and kills build diversity and makes balancing even more tricky than before. It kills the replayability of the game, as people would rather incorporate new class abilities into their current build than start over and make an alt character.
Agree but one small part about stam/mag kind of rubs me the wrong way. Vividly remember the resource dedication being previously mostly a stamina main, it even took a certain kind of pride in a sense to beat vma on a stamblade compared to magsorc or plar as common example from "the times". One of the main blows to my overall play time and enjoyment was in elsweyr patch, where stamina times in PvE were more or less over already and most just swapped over magicka and never really looked back apart from PvP until hybridisation kicked in to claim the remaining.0