The change to flames of oblivion and ranged DK

Callosum · January 22

First of all, in a broad sense, I like the changes made to DK, and most of my complaints about skills or animations have already been pointed out numerous times. However, I have not seen anyone considering how the change to Flames of Oblivion will now affect the ranged Flame Staff/Bow DK setup. I know this is not meta, but Flames of Oblivion was a core skill for the ranged DK setup. I actually like the idea of using the new Magma Fist (Stone Giant) with a Flame Staff, yet the change "forces" a more melee-oriented setup. This is fine for most DK build and also suits the DoT playstyle, but it negatively impacts ranged DK setups.

Nevertheless, my suggestion is very simple: keep the old Flames of Oblivion as the base morph and let Incinerate sacrifice range for more damage.

MXVIIDREAM · January 22

I like the change for the most part however the cost of the skill compared to the damage it does just isn’t worth it in my opinion 3,500 mag would be a much better number

MashmalloMan · January 22

MXVIIDREAM wrote: »

I like the change for the most part however the cost of the skill compared to the damage it does just isn’t worth it in my opinion 3,500 mag would be a much better number

It's pretty expensive, but how do you figure the damage isn't worth that cost?

Using the base tooltip of 1799 from live, +10% damage with PTS, and the hidden 15% burning proc chance, that's 4 ticks of 1978 damage over 4s. That's at least 8k total, probably closer to 8.5~9k considering Burning is more likely than not with Charged, DK passives, and CP.

By comparison using some high damage delayed burst abilities:

Haunting Curse: 3k x 2 = 6k
Deep Fissure: 2.6k + 3.6k = 6.2k
Blighted Blastbones: 3.6k + 400ish Diseased = 4k
Power of the Light: 1.1k + 3.9k = 5k
Any 20s single target dot at minimum has a 4.6k tooltip

If we're comparing it more to damage over time self aoe abilities:

Deadly Cloak: 567 x 11 = 6.2k
Quick Cloak: 422 x 16 = 6.7k
Solar Barrage: 435 x 11 = 4.8k

There's also Hurricane and Arctic Blast, but both of which would require a lot math from me I can be bothered to figure out. They're better than the above 3, so I would guess they're closer to 8k over their 20s like Incinerate.

Hurricane is relatively cheap, but it is a dot, not a burst skill, and happens to be the armor skill. That said I wouldn't be surprised if it gets more expensive with the rework later this year.

Arctic Blast costs 3.7k Magicka like Incincerate, it's a self dot, but starts with aoe burst damage warranting that higher cost.

Claw, Breath, Soul of Flame, Talons, and Magma Fist are all super weak in comparison. If you ask me, they should knock Incinerate down a little, remove the 10% buff it got for no reason, then buff all the other abilities. At that point, a lower cost makes more sense to me.

MashmalloMan · January 22

Callosum wrote: »

First of all, in a broad sense, I like the changes made to DK, and most of my complaints about skills or animations have already been pointed out numerous times. However, I have not seen anyone considering how the change to Flames of Oblivion will now affect the ranged Flame Staff/Bow DK setup. I know this is not meta, but Flames of Oblivion was a core skill for the ranged DK setup. I actually like the idea of using the new Magma Fist (Stone Giant) with a Flame Staff, yet the change "forces" a more melee-oriented setup. This is fine for most DK build and also suits the DoT playstyle, but it negatively impacts ranged DK setups.

Nevertheless, my suggestion is very simple: keep the old Flames of Oblivion as the base morph and let Incinerate sacrifice range for more damage.

I suppose not many people have mentioned this because most understood what DK represented for the past 10+ years and will continue to represent even more, going forward. They're meant to be a melee, brawler, dot based, flame, damage dealer.

Can you run them as ranged? Sure, but I think it would be a stretch to expect any ability to accomidate that when it's not the design intention of the classes core fantasy. Frankly I don't want all classes to offer ranged abilities when they're melee, or melee skills when they're ranged, I want clear cut distinctions, pro's and con's, or else we'll continue to have the same old conversation about homoginization.

To be fair, your ask is reasonable to say "Hey I'll take the unmorphed ability to accomidate my unlikely playstyle, rather than completely change the final morph" but I don't think ZOS really wants players to do that. In the past, they made intentional decisions to make sure the base ability is a weaker version than the morphed counterpart, they're not meant to be a 3rd morph and it's why they closely match 1/2 of the morphs vs being entirely unique.

The only place I can think of this happening is Silver Shards which is rather unintentional. The morph effect makes it aoe, but people rarely select AOE Damage Done CP, so you effectively lose -6% damage done by morphing it. I wouldn't expect that to last very long once they finally address that skill line, but it is there, so there's precedent for it.

MXVIIDREAM · 12:04AM

MashmalloMan wrote: »

MXVIIDREAM wrote: »

I like the change for the most part however the cost of the skill compared to the damage it does just isn’t worth it in my opinion 3,500 mag would be a much better number

It's pretty expensive, but how do you figure the damage isn't worth that cost?

Using the base tooltip of 1799 from live, +10% damage with PTS, and the hidden 15% burning proc chance, that's 4 ticks of 1978 damage over 4s. That's at least 8k total, probably closer to 8.5~9k considering Burning is more likely than not with Charged, DK passives, and CP.

By comparison using some high damage delayed burst abilities:
Haunting Curse: 3k x 2 = 6k

Deep Fissure: 2.6k + 3.6k = 6.2k

Blighted Blastbones: 3.6k + 400ish Diseased = 4k

Power of the Light: 1.1k + 3.9k = 5k

Any 20s single target dot at minimum has a 4.6k tooltip

If we're comparing it more to damage over time self aoe abilities:
Deadly Cloak: 567 x 11 = 6.2k

Quick Cloak: 422 x 16 = 6.7k

Solar Barrage: 435 x 11 = 4.8k

There's also Hurricane and Arctic Blast, but both of which would require a lot math from me I can be bothered to figure out. They're better than the above 3, so I would guess they're closer to 8k over their 20s like Incinerate.

Hurricane is relatively cheap, but it is a dot, not a burst skill, and happens to be the armor skill. That said I wouldn't be surprised if it gets more expensive with the rework later this year.

Arctic Blast costs 3.7k Magicka like Incincerate, it's a self dot, but starts with aoe burst damage warranting that higher cost.

Claw, Breath, Soul of Flame, Talons, and Magma Fist are all super weak in comparison. If you ask me, they should knock Incinerate down a little, remove the 10% buff it got for no reason, then buff all the other abilities. At that point, a lower cost makes more sense to me.

So call it narrow minded or whatever the right words are and that’s okay it is leaning one way but

In PvP on a half decent player this actually hits a lot less than it would appear and unless by chance you hit a few people in a 1v1 situation this skill hits for like 3k a go now I know that adds up over time but the meta is all about burst and lining that up at good opportunity’s often means recasting
and to keep with what you said we know in practice
Deep fissue hits super hard like this skills total on the second hit in one go accompanied by both breaches
Blastbones hits hard disease but more importantly major defile off it is rough
Power of the light though I appreciate the base is low has a lot of modifiers and we’ve all seen it delete people
Haunting curse unfortunately just needs a buff tbh

So while I’m not asking to increase the damage of it I do think the cost should be cheaper as I said maybe 3.5k would keep it more in line with the cost of others

MXVIIDREAM · 12:06AM

MashmalloMan wrote: »

Callosum wrote: »

First of all, in a broad sense, I like the changes made to DK, and most of my complaints about skills or animations have already been pointed out numerous times. However, I have not seen anyone considering how the change to Flames of Oblivion will now affect the ranged Flame Staff/Bow DK setup. I know this is not meta, but Flames of Oblivion was a core skill for the ranged DK setup. I actually like the idea of using the new Magma Fist (Stone Giant) with a Flame Staff, yet the change "forces" a more melee-oriented setup. This is fine for most DK build and also suits the DoT playstyle, but it negatively impacts ranged DK setups.

Nevertheless, my suggestion is very simple: keep the old Flames of Oblivion as the base morph and let Incinerate sacrifice range for more damage.

I suppose not many people have mentioned this because most understood what DK represented for the past 10+ years and will continue to represent even more, going forward. They're meant to be a melee, brawler, dot based, flame, damage dealer.

Can you run them as ranged? Sure, but I think it would be a stretch to expect any ability to accomidate that when it's not the design intention of the classes core fantasy. Frankly I don't want all classes to offer ranged abilities when they're melee, or melee skills when they're ranged, I want clear cut distinctions, pro's and con's, or else we'll continue to have the same old conversation about homoginization.

To be fair, your ask is reasonable to say "Hey I'll take the unmorphed ability to accomidate my unlikely playstyle, rather than completely change the final morph" but I don't think ZOS really wants players to do that. In the past, they made intentional decisions to make sure the base ability is a weaker version than the morphed counterpart, they're not meant to be a 3rd morph and it's why they closely match 1/2 of the morphs vs being entirely unique.

The only place I can think of this happening is Silver Shards which is rather unintentional. The morph effect makes it aoe, but people rarely select AOE Damage Done CP, so you effectively lose -6% damage done by morphing it. I wouldn't expect that to last very long once they finally address that skill line, but it is there, so there's precedent for it.

Utterly agree with all of this though