PTS Update 49 - Feedback Thread for Combat Refresh: Dragonknight

JimT722 · January 13

poison didn't really fit with dragonknight. I thought it was odd they went with that when they added stamina morphs. I think having both deal fire damage is how it always should have been. of course some people will disagree with me but I think it fits better thematically.

Gabriel_H · January 13

There seems to be even more flash bang than before. You have to give us the option to turn this off or tone it down. This game is already visual overload.

Gabriel_H · January 13

olsborg wrote: »

Corrosive seems to be the go to ultimate for pvp again, its a win button in duels on pts.

You have to remember the other classes have yet to have their refreshes. They cannot feasibly look at balance until all classes are done.

Radiate77 · January 13

Standard was an AoE DoT, that reduced incoming damage… Corrosive does this now, and there are several other options that can be sourced.

Shifting is an unpurgeable AoE Defile + Movable DoT, and the king of pressure ultimates and if replaced it has nothing similar to it.

This PvE centric suggestion to destroy Shifting Standard being echoed by PvE only players, completely disregards the fact that we have no alternative to Shifting Standard in a PvP setting.

Shadesofkin · January 13

NuclearPath wrote: »

Personally after testing myself and seeing others test, it’s become very apparent that this is not the right way forward with this class, at least so long as others aren’t modified right now as well.

(Lots of things said I'm not quoting for the sake of readers)

I think for the moment this is the best way we could proceed, but that the other realistic options are to:

A. Hold these changes until you can do changes for all of the classes at once
B. Do changes for all of the classes at once right now
C. Give the passives here huge number increases to make it so that playing Pure Class DK compares to subclassed Arcanist

Apologies again for this being so long, and if you read it all the way, thank you.

Some of your changes feel just a little too 1%er focused, but I do agree that there's a need to bump the numbers on pure DK if we're really keeping to pure class viability. I do agree that passives don't all feel like they're where they *should* be in terms of flavor, but my guess is, this was done because they're trying to avoid subclassing getting all the best perks and we will see a similar shift to every class.

Vaqual · January 13

After spending a bit more time looking at the animations the biggest "miss" so far is the weapon position during Dragon Blood. The chest pound is nice and smooth, but I do not like that the weapon teleports to the back and needs to be drawn again. That is especially sad, because doing a double chest pound with the weapons in hand would like a mega cool goading motion. Can you please try to align the weapons in this animation to keep them drawn? Basically you would need to rotate the handposition so the character doesn't pount with the thumb towards the body but rather with the thumb up. This should be compatible with all weapons.

Other than that everything you did to update this ability was on point. I really think that change would make it look much more immersive.

CameraBeardThePirate · January 13

Gabriel_H wrote: »

olsborg wrote: »

Corrosive seems to be the go to ultimate for pvp again, its a win button in duels on pts.

You have to remember the other classes have yet to have their refreshes. They cannot feasibly look at balance until all classes are done.

You don't need to have other class refreshes to see that adding 100% Pen to all DoTs is overtuned. It turns Corrosive into an instant melt button if the opponent doesn't have a purge.

Gabriel_H · January 13

Shadesofkin wrote: »

I think for the moment this is the best way we could proceed, but that the other realistic options are to:

A. Hold these changes until you can do changes for all of the classes at once
B. Do changes for all of the classes at once right now
C. Give the passives here huge number increases to make it so that playing Pure Class DK compares to subclassed Arcanist

A. They've already laid out their refresh plans. Suddenly saying see you in a year or two would be financial suicide.
B. They don't have the resources for that.
C. Dummy parses are meaningless. It needs to be tested in content.

So I present:

D. Allow ZOS to complete all the class refreshes, at which point they will likely do 2/3 balance passes, and in the meantime enjoy the new shiny toys as they come along.

NuclearPath · January 13

Shadesofkin wrote: »

NuclearPath wrote: »

Personally after testing myself and seeing others test, it’s become very apparent that this is not the right way forward with this class, at least so long as others aren’t modified right now as well.

(Lots of things said I'm not quoting for the sake of readers)

I think for the moment this is the best way we could proceed, but that the other realistic options are to:

A. Hold these changes until you can do changes for all of the classes at once
B. Do changes for all of the classes at once right now
C. Give the passives here huge number increases to make it so that playing Pure Class DK compares to subclassed Arcanist

Apologies again for this being so long, and if you read it all the way, thank you.

Some of your changes feel just a little too 1%er focused, but I do agree that there's a need to bump the numbers on pure DK if we're really keeping to pure class viability. I do agree that passives don't all feel like they're where they *should* be in terms of flavor, but my guess is, this was done because they're trying to avoid subclassing getting all the best perks and we will see a similar shift to every class.

Oh they certainly were, again, that's what I do in the game and that's why I made it known at the top. Regardless I really feel like a lot of this would only be a benefit to the general playerbase and for the class in general.

Also, I definitely agree that they're trying to avoid subclassing getting all the best perks, but right now with how they've balanced things subclassing will remain the same for the forseeable future power wise anyway, so why not throw DK into the mix? If DK is a competitive pick against Arcanist in terms of subclassing, it would really spice things up, because right now DDs in high end content are either:

Arc/NB/Templar

or

Arc/NB/DK

and because they moved some of the power off of Ardent Flame with these changes that probably sadly becomes only Arc/NB/Templar.

Again, yes, only a problem for that 1% like you mentioned, but I know a LOT of people who might come back if it wasn't just hard Arcanist meta, and I'd really love for the end game community to thrive like it did years ago when I was most active in it.

NuclearPath · January 13

Gabriel_H wrote: »

Shadesofkin wrote: »

I think for the moment this is the best way we could proceed, but that the other realistic options are to:

A. Hold these changes until you can do changes for all of the classes at once
B. Do changes for all of the classes at once right now
C. Give the passives here huge number increases to make it so that playing Pure Class DK compares to subclassed Arcanist

A. They've already laid out their refresh plans. Suddenly saying see you in a year or two would be financial suicide.
B. They don't have the resources for that.
C. Dummy parses are meaningless. It needs to be tested in content.

So I present:

D. Allow ZOS to complete all the class refreshes, at which point they will likely do 2/3 balance passes, and in the meantime enjoy the new shiny toys as they come along.

A. They have, and these changes feel like they have the best intentions, but they aren't going to have the correct impact right now.
B. Then they need to hold off and work on rebalancing subclassing and all subclasses as a whole with smaller changes gradually.
C. Parses might be meaningless but from what I've seen and heard it isn't performing as well as subclassing or Arcanist in content. Yes, it does perform well, but people want the most powerful and nothing else. DK with this is still not the most powerful.

Your D option is not the way forward, because it will be well over a year at their current change cadence before they get around to finally hitting the problem child which is Arcanist, unless they decide to rebalance it anyway in the meantime, at which point I ask... Why not just refresh it right then?

RedKynAbyss · January 13

I’ll start with the things I love.

I have been a DK main since Beta and used to be on the forefront of the DK meta. People on Xbox would look to me after patch notes for new sets and skills and ask me how I think the class was going to perform in both PvE and PvP. I used to have the highest MagDK parse on Xbox with one of the higher StamDK parses. I have DK main-tanked and off-tanked multiple trial trifectas including, Godslayers, Gryphon Hearts, Hurricane Heralds, and have DK healed just as much. I have a lot more experience with this class than most people you will find, and continue to play the class pure because subclassing just feels wrong. This is all to say, any criticism I have comes from a place of passion and love for my favorite class, not out of malice for the developers or designers.

The refresh to the designs is incredibly clean, though some of the sound effects border on just sounding like the Arcanist. When live Magma Armor pops, there’s this sick dragon roar sound, focusing on keeping the auditory “I’m a dragon” would help the skills pop a lot more.

Thank you so much for making molten armaments useful. On live, it’s just a skill slot taken up for two/ three buffs that everyone will already have. It’s the sickest weapon effect in the game, walking around with this flaming staff or sword on your back, and now I get to actually use it an it not be useless. While I like the way the molten weapons look in the redesign, the cool factor of it comes heavily from seeing your OWN weapons on fire. The chunkier weapons take away a lot of the cool factor for me, so it would be nice to have the ability to just set my weapons on fire and not have the chunkier ones that pop up from the skill.

While I will sorely miss Eruption, I also appreciate that after 10+ years of me begging for Cinder Storm to cover a larger area so it’s more effective at healing a group, I finally got it. I also think the new animation for it and the new sounds are good. Well done devs and art team!

The changes to Stone Fist are appreciated, though I will miss the “oomph” that Stagger gave to a team.

I love the flavor text which has been added to the passives, but I wish there were more flavor text in the actual abilities themselves. Arcanist has flavor text in the passives AND skills

I appreciate that the designers are adding more utility to chains to make up for the loss of major expedition, but Major Cowardice might be a little too oppressive in PvP and a little too strong in PvE. If it works into your balancing figures, I think Minor Cowardice or even Minor Breach would be the better debuff for chains, including making the “pull enemies to you” morph cost less so it’s easier to round up enemies without running out of all of your magicka reserves.

Adding Minor Courage to Blood of the Elder Dragon may come to haunt balance later, so I’d recommend keeping an eye on that one

Overall, I have more positive things to say about the refreshed designs than negative, with one major exception. Spiked Armor looks kind of bad. I don’t want to say it and downgrade someone’s hard work, but it went from this badass row of spines on your back and arms to… honestly Haj Mota-like assets. It’s underwhelming in comparison to the current design just because of how small and mostly unnoticeable it is. If there’s a way to make the spikes/spines larger, I’m sure I speak for many people when I say that it would be preferred.

Things I don’t love and don’t quite make sense to me.

It feels weird that the class that has always prioritized long DoTs is suddenly being relegated to extremely short DoTs. I believe the better option would be to put that “ramping” effect on all of the DoTs and increase their timers back to 20 seconds or even longer. There should be a reward for staying in the fight for longer. While Avalanche is certainly a reward for staying in the fight, you’re never going to get it to max stacks in PvP because your opponent will have already melted to your oppressively strong and shorter DoTs. In PvE, I can’t get it to max stacks outside of veteran dungeons and trials because things are dying too quickly to the front-loaded power of the new DoTs for that to happen. As it stands right now, DK is not attrition but burst. The DoTs are shorter but more powerful so there’s no need to out last your opponent, just delete them with ridiculously powerful DoTs which last a very short time. To me, the better option would be to change the 7% increased DoT damage to something like “every 2nd/3rd time your damage over time ticks, increase it’s damage by 2%” and set the maximum to 8 or 10%. Revert these super short DoTs back to long DoTs to synergize with that, and then DK goes back to feeling like an attrition warrior, where they’re rewarded for drawing the fight out as long as possible to get the maximum damage out of the longer DoTs.

Back before all DoTs got standardized to 15-20 seconds across all the skill lines, DK was the long-DoT heavy spammable class. Engulfing Flames and Burning Embers were 18 second DoTs in a game where the next longest DoT was Blockade of Elements at 15. Eruption was the single longest DoT at 24 seconds. Because of these long timers, these were also the most expensive DoTs, but it was okay because you needed to cast them much less often. Now, the DoTs are expensive AND don’t last long, AND their cost is split between two resources meaning you can’t just focus on sustaining one, now you MUST sustain both. I have never struggled to sustain a pure-classed MagDK with Poisonous Claws, Deadly Cloak, Stampede, Carve, and Beast Trap. In the PTS right now, because of all of the damaging-morph of skills costing stamina, I can’t sustain that same rotation even WITH an absorb stamina glyph on the back bar and on the off-hand dagger. My magicka doesn’t move an inch because the only magicka costs I have are whip, molten weapons, and the new Flames of Oblivion. By changing all the stamina morphs to be the higher damaging ones, you’ve indirectly forced a DK wanting to use those morphs into maximum stamina, or sacrificing damage heavily to compensate.

In PvP, what made DK the best dueling class was you stick a DoT on someone, and they have to deal with it for 18-24 seconds, or use resources to cleanse it. That’s where the “attrition class” identity came from. Making the DoTs shorter has led to this feeling of never actually being able to USE the spammable because a DoT always needs to be refreshed. A true “attrition” class wouldn’t be one that needs to keep spending all of their resources trying to keep DoTs up. Classic pyromancy/ fire magic in RPG games has always been “slow burn leads to uncontrollable blaze.” You place the DoTs that are weaker at the beginning, but they last a long time and they continuously damage you for more every turn. It seems contradictory that the focus is to make the class “attrition” but the DoTs got shortened and made to do more damage over a shorter period, so you’re not really “attrition,” you’re just burst damage in a different flavor.

In conclusion, first, if you read all of that, thank you for considering my feedback. Second, I don’t want to discredit any hard work that has gone into this redesign. I think you have all done a wonderful job bringing DK into the future of ESO, I just hope that some of these issues I have are things that you will all consider while tinkering with the balance during the PTS cycle.

Zeeejay · January 13

I don't come on the forums often, but I wanted to provide my feedback for the Dragonknight refresh in PTS Week 1. I am assessing this from a PvE DPS perspective primarily. Overall, I think this is a good starting point for the rework, but I feel that there are some points I think could use buffs/changes within the class.

The new visual updates and changes look very nice, apart from some minor visual bugs (like with Wing Buffet).

I was surprised that the vast majority of skills kept their old base & morph icons though, that seems like a missed opportunity to update those as well.

Regarding the overall power of the "pure class DK" for PvE DPS, I was pretty disappointed with the results. I was expecting much more of a power increase from these changes than I discovered.

I personally feel like "one-note" passives like Iron Skin (now Burnished Scales), Scaled Armor (Heart of Stone), and Burning Heart (A Soul Ablaze) should really have a double effect - especially if it's the last passive in the line, like A Soul Ablaze. I would love to see these retooled to have either two "one-note" effects like Balanced Warrior (technically three!). Dragonknight is sorely lacking any sort of penetration, critical chance, or critical damage bonuses, those would be nice to include, even in the flavor of "increase critical damage by x% per Dragonknight ability slotted".

With regards to the active skills, a few of the damage-over-time skills feel a bit weaker than before.

Searing Claw and Disintegrating Dragonfire. These two had their duration reduced and DPS adjusted to compensate, but they still fall quite a bit short due to ticking every 2s as opposed to every 1s like most of the other 10s damage over time effects in the game.
I also think the Standard of Might should do flame damage still, even if it is reduced or if the player's bonus weapon & spell damage is reduced to compensate. This is such an iconic skill for the class, seeing a Dragonknight drop a standard in a fight means that it's about to go DOWN and it really does not feel that way in this iteration.
I would like to see Magma Fist "Heat Shock" buffed at least back to prior value. I understand this was relocated in the kit to apply exclusively to the player, but the team buff from Magma Fist was hardly worth using in solo or dungeons, and in trials it was a nice skill expression for a little boost. I would be interested in seeing it scale inversely with group size, where the previous Stagger maximum is the value for Trial-sized groups, but there is an increase when using it in a smaller group or even solo.
While not included in the rework, I would like to see Dark Talons' damage increased in some way since it no longer benefits from the extended duration passive and it's value compared to a spammable cast has decreased.
I would really like to see consideration of Eruption coming back to take Hearth & Home's place. Hearth and Home is a good bonus, but it's already readily available in an ability that you can simply slot and forget, without having to worry about uptime or remaining within a circle (even though it's large). I also think this would be more consistent with Ardent Flame's new active skill pattern of "one morph that boosts damage, one morph that adds healing."

I hope my feedback is helpful, I am eager to see the teams in action this PTS.

tomofhyrule · January 13

Regarding Hearthfire and its morphs:

U32 was when Ash Cloud and its morphs changed from an upfront cost to a cost-per-second, but that does seem incongruous with other placeable AoEs. Especially if it's considered as a ground HoT, comparable skills would be Grand Healing (resto staff) or Healing Seed (warden), neither of which have a cost-per-second. Players are also not able to cancel the effect early, save for running out of magicka.
It may me more consistent to convert those to an upfront cost.

The DK skill that should get a cost-per-second is the new Engulfing Dragonfire, as that is a channelled attack that can be cancelled at will.

Also with Hearthfire: losing the damaging version is a bit sad, and it would make more sense for Eruption to return as a damaging ability. I'd reformat them to be as such:

Base morph (Hearthfire): heals and applies Fortitude and Heriosm, healing is increased if the player is in the HoT
Healing morph (Fire Keeper): Also includes protection, reduces cost as ability ranks up
Damage morph (Eruption): Deals damage instantly, does damage over time, snares

Twohothardware · January 13

There's a few visual bugs that need to be worked on but otherwise this is an impressive overhaul of DK so far. The new animations for DK and Two-Handed are much more impressive than what we got with Scribing. I'm looking forward to leveling up a new DK character.

Wup_sa · January 13

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Regarding Hearthfire and its morphs:

U32 was when Ash Cloud and its morphs changed from an upfront cost to a cost-per-second, but that does seem incongruous with other placeable AoEs. Especially if it's considered as a ground HoT, comparable skills would be Grand Healing (resto staff) or Healing Seed (warden), neither of which have a cost-per-second. Players are also not able to cancel the effect early, save for running out of magicka.
It may me more consistent to convert those to an upfront cost.

The DK skill that should get a cost-per-second is the new Engulfing Dragonfire, as that is a channelled attack that can be cancelled at will.

Also with Hearthfire: losing the damaging version is a bit sad, and it would make more sense for Eruption to return as a damaging ability. I'd reformat them to be as such:
Base morph (Hearthfire): heals and applies Fortitude and Heriosm, healing is increased if the player is in the HoT

Healing morph (Fire Keeper): Also includes protection, reduces cost as ability ranks up

Damage morph (Eruption): Deals damage instantly, does damage over time, snares

Making the heal cost a flat value will make it once again useless. It should have stayed the way it currently works and with smaller area to not make it overpowered.

Meridiano · January 13

These changes can become fine only after all other classes are butchered rebalanced as well. Especially when it comes to the DD role, because single Herald skill line is now stronger than all 3 DK lines combined. This means, late 2027 or maybe even 2028 is when we can begin to recover from this disaster rebalance, because Arcanist is the strongest asset and the last in the queue in the same time. Until then, it will be only frustration over frustration, for every single class being placed to the chopping block for the sake of global balance. Basically, there will be no balance until everything is finished and stabilized.

As you see, it's all about "can become", "maybe", "in a few years", etc. We only have some hope ZOS are able to pull up this balance rock while it's 2x as heavy as the pre-rebalance one, and 4x as heavy as pre-subclass one; and we know they have failed on them both already; and now they have even less resources after the recent layoffs (my sincere condolences on this matter).

Do you think this illusory destination worth the painful journey? It's definitely not easy to reach heaven by violence, catastrophes in between peek out from all five corners. Or should I say 7 corners because of 7 classes? Or 21 corners because of 21 lines? Or 1330 corners because of the possible combinations, since ZOS want every skill line to provide something useful for any role?

This sounds surrealistic, and looks like a fever dream. I will read forums very carefully with every calamity rebalance iteration, oooh, the oceans of tears will be deep and sweet. And reading people who "haven't had to parse in like 6 years" telling us "the changes are good" will be the cherry on the cake.

It's only the beginning. So much fun ahead.

Tcholl · January 13

I play DK since the start of my time in ESO and I love this class. My participation in this forum have been mostly trying to provide feedback about this class and how it compares with other classes. My experience comes mostly from PvP, where I have played solo and in ballgroups.

The current version of DK is already a shell from the class we knew. Nerf on corrosive, nerfs in sequence to combustion, nerf to battle roar... We used to be tanky as hell. Dead. We used to build the DK fully for damage and get the burst from corrosive. Dead. We used to build to get recovery from the battle roar passive and combustion. Dead. Until recently, we still had some nice status effects builds, which needs not only fire but poison and other procs. This will also be dead with the fire only theme, which can only proc once and it is not even a unique version of the burning. The passives are terrible, who cares for health regeneration these days? No one.

What we have left was the cool identity and the awesome skills like Flames of Oblivion and Eruption. Now, this update arrives and takes what is left away.

This is not the way to do it. You cannot come 10 years late and tell us we played the class wrong for all this time. This is disrespectful to the players and the original devs who created this iconic class that endured nerfs in sequence.

Also, the justification for doing all this changes, which is making pure class viable and compete with sub classing is a joke. What have been done that clearly put any of these new lines desireble for any builds? By the feedback, the class will probably comes out of this update with less DPS and skill lines that confuse even the more experienced players. Igneous, for example, is now responsible for major and minor brutality for the WHOLE GROUP. After the update, we will have to keep 2 skills to do the same. Moving mountain blessing out of the Earthern Hearth line does not make ANY sense for someone using igneous for a decade. I am sure the team that thought this was a good idea does not have thousands of hours of muscular memory keeping these buffs.

Waiting 2 years to have all classes reworked and somehow balancing sub classing is not realistic either and lose your favorite class in the process is not fun. I wish that the dev team would come up with much better solutions, but my experience is that this update will go live very close to what it is now and will keep the trend of this game going fully downward.

NuclearPath · January 13

Meridiano wrote: »

These changes can become fine only after all other classes are butchered rebalanced as well. Especially when it comes to the DD role, because single Herald skill line is now stronger than all 3 DK lines combined. This means, late 2027 or maybe even 2028 is when we can begin to recover from this disaster rebalance, because Arcanist is the strongest asset and the last in the queue in the same time. Until then, it will be only frustration over frustration, for every single class being placed to the chopping block for the sake of global balance. Basically, there will be no balance until everything is finished and stabilized.

As you see, it's all about "can become", "maybe", "in a few years", etc. We only have some hope ZOS are able to pull up this balance rock being 2x as heavy as the pre-rebalance one, and 4x as heavy as pre-subclass one; and we know they have failed on them both already; and now they have even less resources after the recent layoffs (my sincere condolences on this matter).

Do you think this illusory destination worth the painful journey? It's definitely not easy to reach heaven by violence, catastrophes in between peek out from all five corners. Or should I say 7 corners because of 7 classes? Or 21 corners because of 21 lines? Or 1330 corners because of the possible combinations, since ZOS want every skill line to provide something useful for any role?

This sounds surrealistic, and looks like a fever dream. I will read forums very carefully with every calamity rebalance iteration, oooh, the oceans of tears will be deep and sweet. And reading people who "haven't had to parse in like 6 years" telling us "the changes are good" will be the cherry on the cake.

So much fun ahead.

I've been saying this as well. We need either all the refreshes to happen now or for this to take a very different direction. One of the people replying keeps saying something along the lines of "ZOS cant balance everything until they're all refreshed" and as much as he's actually telling people to just sit and wait patiently seemingly, he's also not wrong. They aren't able to balance things because the refreshed classes are balanced in a completely different way than current classes, and so either ZOS has to make the refreshed classes more similar to Arcanist to make them competitive, or they have to do all of the balance changes / refreshes at once for this to be effective.

Radiate77 · January 13

The idea is that things will not need to be balanced post-Refresh.

From what I’m seeing, around 100k DPS will be the benchmark for all classes & subclass builds, although it would be nice to get an official confirmation that this is the plan.

NuclearPath · January 13

Radiate77 wrote: »

The idea is that things will not need to be balanced post-Refresh.

From what I’m seeing, around 100k DPS will be the benchmark for all classes & subclass builds, although it would be nice to get an official confirmation that this is the plan.

I mean considering I've seen more than one person hit 140K with DK on the PTS I don't think that 100K is necessarily the target. I do think the idea is that they may not need to be balanced so much but we're on track for the full refresh to take until at minimum sometime in 2027, and the final one is going to be Arcanist. Everything else either needs their refresh done sooner or everything needs a large balance pass, especially Arcanist.

MXVIIDREAM · January 13

Gabriel_H wrote: »

xylena wrote: »

Templars I now share in your pain over the Jabs animation change.

Oh please, that TMNT cosplay is far worse than my jabs.

I have quite a big thread on this alone I don’t think I can play dk without my spikes or something that resembles them I don’t get why it’s a plate or why they’re so small they’re not an attachment really poor choice on what was such an iconic skill

MXVIIDREAM · January 13

RedKynAbyss wrote: »

I’ll start with the things I love.

I have been a DK main since Beta and used to be on the forefront of the DK meta. People on Xbox would look to me after patch notes for new sets and skills and ask me how I think the class was going to perform in both PvE and PvP. I used to have the highest MagDK parse on Xbox with one of the higher StamDK parses. I have DK main-tanked and off-tanked multiple trial trifectas including, Godslayers, Gryphon Hearts, Hurricane Heralds, and have DK healed just as much. I have a lot more experience with this class than most people you will find, and continue to play the class pure because subclassing just feels wrong. This is all to say, any criticism I have comes from a place of passion and love for my favorite class, not out of malice for the developers or designers.

The refresh to the designs is incredibly clean, though some of the sound effects border on just sounding like the Arcanist. When live Magma Armor pops, there’s this sick dragon roar sound, focusing on keeping the auditory “I’m a dragon” would help the skills pop a lot more.

Thank you so much for making molten armaments useful. On live, it’s just a skill slot taken up for two/ three buffs that everyone will already have. It’s the sickest weapon effect in the game, walking around with this flaming staff or sword on your back, and now I get to actually use it an it not be useless. While I like the way the molten weapons look in the redesign, the cool factor of it comes heavily from seeing your OWN weapons on fire. The chunkier weapons take away a lot of the cool factor for me, so it would be nice to have the ability to just set my weapons on fire and not have the chunkier ones that pop up from the skill.

While I will sorely miss Eruption, I also appreciate that after 10+ years of me begging for Cinder Storm to cover a larger area so it’s more effective at healing a group, I finally got it. I also think the new animation for it and the new sounds are good. Well done devs and art team!

The changes to Stone Fist are appreciated, though I will miss the “oomph” that Stagger gave to a team.

I love the flavor text which has been added to the passives, but I wish there were more flavor text in the actual abilities themselves. Arcanist has flavor text in the passives AND skills

I appreciate that the designers are adding more utility to chains to make up for the loss of major expedition, but Major Cowardice might be a little too oppressive in PvP and a little too strong in PvE. If it works into your balancing figures, I think Minor Cowardice or even Minor Breach would be the better debuff for chains, including making the “pull enemies to you” morph cost less so it’s easier to round up enemies without running out of all of your magicka reserves.

Adding Minor Courage to Blood of the Elder Dragon may come to haunt balance later, so I’d recommend keeping an eye on that one

Overall, I have more positive things to say about the refreshed designs than negative, with one major exception. Spiked Armor looks kind of bad. I don’t want to say it and downgrade someone’s hard work, but it went from this badass row of spines on your back and arms to… honestly Haj Mota-like assets. It’s underwhelming in comparison to the current design just because of how small and mostly unnoticeable it is. If there’s a way to make the spikes/spines larger, I’m sure I speak for many people when I say that it would be preferred.

Things I don’t love and don’t quite make sense to me.

It feels weird that the class that has always prioritized long DoTs is suddenly being relegated to extremely short DoTs. I believe the better option would be to put that “ramping” effect on all of the DoTs and increase their timers back to 20 seconds or even longer. There should be a reward for staying in the fight for longer. While Avalanche is certainly a reward for staying in the fight, you’re never going to get it to max stacks in PvP because your opponent will have already melted to your oppressively strong and shorter DoTs. In PvE, I can’t get it to max stacks outside of veteran dungeons and trials because things are dying too quickly to the front-loaded power of the new DoTs for that to happen. As it stands right now, DK is not attrition but burst. The DoTs are shorter but more powerful so there’s no need to out last your opponent, just delete them with ridiculously powerful DoTs which last a very short time. To me, the better option would be to change the 7% increased DoT damage to something like “every 2nd/3rd time your damage over time ticks, increase it’s damage by 2%” and set the maximum to 8 or 10%. Revert these super short DoTs back to long DoTs to synergize with that, and then DK goes back to feeling like an attrition warrior, where they’re rewarded for drawing the fight out as long as possible to get the maximum damage out of the longer DoTs.

Back before all DoTs got standardized to 15-20 seconds across all the skill lines, DK was the long-DoT heavy spammable class. Engulfing Flames and Burning Embers were 18 second DoTs in a game where the next longest DoT was Blockade of Elements at 15. Eruption was the single longest DoT at 24 seconds. Because of these long timers, these were also the most expensive DoTs, but it was okay because you needed to cast them much less often. Now, the DoTs are expensive AND don’t last long, AND their cost is split between two resources meaning you can’t just focus on sustaining one, now you MUST sustain both. I have never struggled to sustain a pure-classed MagDK with Poisonous Claws, Deadly Cloak, Stampede, Carve, and Beast Trap. In the PTS right now, because of all of the damaging-morph of skills costing stamina, I can’t sustain that same rotation even WITH an absorb stamina glyph on the back bar and on the off-hand dagger. My magicka doesn’t move an inch because the only magicka costs I have are whip, molten weapons, and the new Flames of Oblivion. By changing all the stamina morphs to be the higher damaging ones, you’ve indirectly forced a DK wanting to use those morphs into maximum stamina, or sacrificing damage heavily to compensate.

In PvP, what made DK the best dueling class was you stick a DoT on someone, and they have to deal with it for 18-24 seconds, or use resources to cleanse it. That’s where the “attrition class” identity came from. Making the DoTs shorter has led to this feeling of never actually being able to USE the spammable because a DoT always needs to be refreshed. A true “attrition” class wouldn’t be one that needs to keep spending all of their resources trying to keep DoTs up. Classic pyromancy/ fire magic in RPG games has always been “slow burn leads to uncontrollable blaze.” You place the DoTs that are weaker at the beginning, but they last a long time and they continuously damage you for more every turn. It seems contradictory that the focus is to make the class “attrition” but the DoTs got shortened and made to do more damage over a shorter period, so you’re not really “attrition,” you’re just burst damage in a different flavor.

In conclusion, first, if you read all of that, thank you for considering my feedback. Second, I don’t want to discredit any hard work that has gone into this redesign. I think you have all done a wonderful job bringing DK into the future of ESO, I just hope that some of these issues I have are things that you will all consider while tinkering with the balance during the PTS cycle.

You must also be sad we have our spikes taken away and replaced with a parasite looking tortoise shell

the heart above your head on the heal is really off putting aswell

NuclearPath · January 13

MXVIIDREAM wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

xylena wrote: »

Templars I now share in your pain over the Jabs animation change.

Oh please, that TMNT cosplay is far worse than my jabs.

I have quite a big thread on this alone I don’t think I can play dk without my spikes or something that resembles them I don’t get why it’s a plate or why they’re so small they’re not an attachment really poor choice on what was such an iconic skill

Maybe a little more spiky as opposed to looking slicked back would be best, but arguably I'd say it looks more like what I'd expect from dragon spikes. Despite this, I will say I can't for the life of me understand why something that looks like that is called Earthspike Mantle and is within Earthen Heart as opposed to Draconic Power. If you want them to look like "Earth Spikes" they need to be sharp spikes of stone protruding from the back.

YandereGirlfriend · January 13

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Regarding Hearthfire and its morphs:

U32 was when Ash Cloud and its morphs changed from an upfront cost to a cost-per-second, but that does seem incongruous with other placeable AoEs. Especially if it's considered as a ground HoT, comparable skills would be Grand Healing (resto staff) or Healing Seed (warden), neither of which have a cost-per-second. Players are also not able to cancel the effect early, save for running out of magicka.
It may me more consistent to convert those to an upfront cost.

The DK skill that should get a cost-per-second is the new Engulfing Dragonfire, as that is a channelled attack that can be cancelled at will.

Also with Hearthfire: losing the damaging version is a bit sad, and it would make more sense for Eruption to return as a damaging ability. I'd reformat them to be as such:
Base morph (Hearthfire): heals and applies Fortitude and Heriosm, healing is increased if the player is in the HoT

Healing morph (Fire Keeper): Also includes protection, reduces cost as ability ranks up

Damage morph (Eruption): Deals damage instantly, does damage over time, snares

This is a fantastic idea and one that ZOS should definitely pay attention to.

Actually leveraging the base morph as a viable skill option (and de facto "3rd morph" that fans have wanted for ages now) and not simply a waypoint en route to better options is a HUGE design win that comes at basically zero additional development cost.

All that it requires is that the base morph do something unique and situationally worth using vs. the other morph options.

Radiate77 · January 13

NuclearPath wrote: »

Radiate77 wrote: »

The idea is that things will not need to be balanced post-Refresh.

From what I’m seeing, around 100k DPS will be the benchmark for all classes & subclass builds, although it would be nice to get an official confirmation that this is the plan.

I mean considering I've seen more than one person hit 140K with DK on the PTS I don't think that 100K is necessarily the target. I do think the idea is that they may not need to be balanced so much but we're on track for the full refresh to take until at minimum sometime in 2027, and the final one is going to be Arcanist. Everything else either needs their refresh done sooner or everything needs a large balance pass, especially Arcanist.

Can you post those pure Dragonknight parses?
I’m basing the 100k on what has been seen.

I’ve heard of 140k parses that were cheesed, along with another 170k that was also cheated.

Would be great to have a video of someone start to finish breaking 110k.

NuclearPath · January 13

Radiate77 wrote: »

NuclearPath wrote: »

Radiate77 wrote: »

The idea is that things will not need to be balanced post-Refresh.

From what I’m seeing, around 100k DPS will be the benchmark for all classes & subclass builds, although it would be nice to get an official confirmation that this is the plan.

I mean considering I've seen more than one person hit 140K with DK on the PTS I don't think that 100K is necessarily the target. I do think the idea is that they may not need to be balanced so much but we're on track for the full refresh to take until at minimum sometime in 2027, and the final one is going to be Arcanist. Everything else either needs their refresh done sooner or everything needs a large balance pass, especially Arcanist.

Can you post those pure Dragonknight parses?
I’m basing the 100k on what has been seen.

I’ve heard of 140k parses that were cheesed, along with another 170k that was also cheated.

Would be great to have a video of someone start to finish breaking 110k.

Apologies don't actually have like a solid solid CMX for it. Was watching Eight Puppies last night during his stream when he was parsing, and supposedly Skinny Cheeks had the same results. Hadn't heard of any bug due to stacking yet but interesting if so. I will say though that Eight was absolutely hitting about 120k using a whip rotation as opposed to the breath rotation though, and I definitely haven't heard of any bugs for that.

Tonturri · January 13

Overall I think DK is heading in a decent direction, albeit slowly, and this effort is diminished by other factors. As another poster mentioned, the design may be good or going in the right direction but it's hampered when people can stack 3 DPS lines with no issues in certain kinds of content.

Going forward, as ZOS iterates through this whole re-design of each class, I hope they consider the impact or lack thereof of each passive skill. I hope that passives are adjusted so that they require, and scale with, how many and how often someone is using skills from that line. There are only 10 slots and folks will likely have two 'main' DPS skill lines + some weapon skills to augment. This is fine, but they shouldn't be able to slot 1-2 skills from a 3rd line of whichever one provides the most passive buffs and get the same benefit as someone who is fully invested in using that skill line.

Master Assassin and Hemorrhage are good examples of this. One is basically free and you get the full effect of the other just by slotting one skill.

Radiate77 · January 13

NuclearPath wrote: »

Radiate77 wrote: »

NuclearPath wrote: »

Radiate77 wrote: »

The idea is that things will not need to be balanced post-Refresh.

From what I’m seeing, around 100k DPS will be the benchmark for all classes & subclass builds, although it would be nice to get an official confirmation that this is the plan.

I mean considering I've seen more than one person hit 140K with DK on the PTS I don't think that 100K is necessarily the target. I do think the idea is that they may not need to be balanced so much but we're on track for the full refresh to take until at minimum sometime in 2027, and the final one is going to be Arcanist. Everything else either needs their refresh done sooner or everything needs a large balance pass, especially Arcanist.

Can you post those pure Dragonknight parses?
I’m basing the 100k on what has been seen.

I’ve heard of 140k parses that were cheesed, along with another 170k that was also cheated.

Would be great to have a video of someone start to finish breaking 110k.

Apologies don't actually have like a solid solid CMX for it. Was watching Eight Puppies last night during his stream when he was parsing, and supposedly Skinny Cheeks had the same results. Hadn't heard of any bug due to stacking yet but interesting if so. I will say though that Eight was absolutely hitting about 120k using a whip rotation as opposed to the breath rotation though, and I definitely haven't heard of any bugs for that.

Okay, can you try to hunt down that CMX so we can raise the standard from 100k for our class reworks?

MXVIIDREAM · January 13

NuclearPath wrote: »

MXVIIDREAM wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

xylena wrote: »

Templars I now share in your pain over the Jabs animation change.

Oh please, that TMNT cosplay is far worse than my jabs.

I have quite a big thread on this alone I don’t think I can play dk without my spikes or something that resembles them I don’t get why it’s a plate or why they’re so small they’re not an attachment really poor choice on what was such an iconic skill

Maybe a little more spiky as opposed to looking slicked back would be best, but arguably I'd say it looks more like what I'd expect from dragon spikes. Despite this, I will say I can't for the life of me understand why something that looks like that is called Earthspike Mantle and is within Earthen Heart as opposed to Draconic Power. If you want them to look like "Earth Spikes" they need to be sharp spikes of stone protruding from the back.

My thoughts lie with this being down to subclassing chucking too much in too many trees skills and passive etc it’s not designed around the lines but to make each one good for a pure build but not necessarily overpowered on a subclass build with other lines, not sure I’ve communicated that too well hope you get what I mean

GloatingSwine · January 13

Tonturri wrote: »

Going forward, as ZOS iterates through this whole re-design of each class, I hope they consider the impact or lack thereof of each passive skill. I hope that passives are adjusted so that they require, and scale with, how many and how often someone is using skills from that line. There are only 10 slots and folks will likely have two 'main' DPS skill lines + some weapon skills to augment. This is fine, but they shouldn't be able to slot 1-2 skills from a 3rd line of whichever one provides the most passive buffs and get the same benefit as someone who is fully invested in using that skill line.

As has been noted though, the pace of updates for classes means that doing this one at a time will just lead to a death game of classes where each one is eliminated from usability one at a time because it can't support the top meta class that gets everything and a bag of chips from one line.