PTS Update 49 - Feedback Thread for New Item Sets

ZOS_Kevin · January 12

This is the official feedback thread for the new item sets. Specific feedback that the team is looking for includes the following:

Were there any sets you felt were over or under powered compared to current offerings in the live game?
Do you have any other general feedback?

Zeeejay · January 13

Shattered Paths Signet - a wonderful new mythic, it's been really fun to theorycraft and test with. Seems like it has a nice little niche that it can fill and create a new creative space for damage dealers in PvE without adversely affecting PvP balance or being too powerful to affect PvE balance.

Thousand Eyes - I believe this is meant to be a "1vX" monster set. It's an interesting concept, but I'm not up to date enough in PvP to definitively state whether it is a good addition.

Glittering Goad - I think this monster set is trying to do too much at once. I feel like it would be great to juice up the damage portion and AOE minor brittle, then removing the restorative energy part. This would allow it to exist as a potentially good frost damage option with a nice AOE debuff.

The Ruckus - This definitely strikes me as a PvP monster set, I don't really have any valuable feedback to provide here.

Gorethief - Similar to The Ruckus, I don't believe I have any valuable feedback to provide here.

YandereGirlfriend · January 13

Overall, this is a nice crop of sets and one pleasantly devoid of the obvious, "Well, this set is completely dead-on-arrival..." candidates that sometimes/often account for the entirety of new set releases in a patch.

Shattered Paths Signet: Very cool idea but 170 feels very arbitrary and "spreadsheety" to me. I would suggest changing this to 250 to allow for, a) some additional power for dedicated status effect builds, and also b) 250 or half of your ultimate bar is much more intuitive to divide behavior around. It also allows for more types of ultimates to be used while still maintaining the bonus damage effect rather than losing it because you happen to be using a more expensive damage ultimate.

Gorethief: I love this set. My only issue to raise is that the Bleed explosion animation just looks like a Bleeding Contingency proc going off which in turn just looks like dark haze and not like Blood. I would love for the proc animation to have something like the Lady Thorn synergy animation or the Crimson Twilight animation played in reverse, which actually look and feel Bleed-themed.

olsborg · January 13

Gorethief, the healing number is a tad low, atleast on pts, I healed 3k, but in cyrodiil that will be halfed wich is a fairly weak heal imo.

therrieur · January 16

Shattered Paths Signet

Big fan of the design of this mythic item. My main concern is that in its current iteration, it may force people wanting to maximize damage to run the Ultimate from the Animal Companion skill line. I would hate for this item to have to be nerfed in a specific way to makes it only viable for Frost/Animal Wardens to get value out of it.
Would highly recommend that if there is tuning to this item, it is made in limiting "passive" ultimates like bear for it. Or giving a flat status effect Value and not gaining any benefits from having an ultimate.

epic-buttkkr · January 16

Shattered Paths Signet
I see a lot of PvE talk related to this mythic, and I am excited to mess with it in the infinite archive, just like a lot of folks. Its an interesting Idea for a mythic and its fun. However For the Balance of PvP, I am worried. I know the Damage potential is cut in half for PvP, But that does not stop it from being one of, if not the most oppressive mythic item for status effect burst combos. In particular, and specifically, force pulse gankers. Recently in BGs and Cyrodill, force pulse ganking has become very popular since the combo is very easy to do and also has the safety of range. Its also very dysnc heavy, being that force pulse is a ranged skill with no travel time, so the damage from it is done instantly. This means most of the time you are getting hit by the combo,(about 7 out of 10 times) the damage does not actually register for you until the second force pulse is cast, meaning you are getting hit by 2 separate force pulse casts at the same time. This is on top of the opening of the combo with crystal weapon, recuperative treatise into either a Bow heavy attack or Snipe cast, bar swapping and then light attacking before force pulsing, spams many small instances of damage in a small amount of time. This is then further modified by prioritizing status effect procs for each tic of damage and then adding that to draugrkin, making for really silly burst. By itself, this build is not an too big of an issue to deal with, as the players that use it tend to be quite squishy and many of them are quite clumsy in how they pull off the combo. It normally takes a minimum of 2 back to back force pulses to put down a player with 30k hp, if most items in the combo crit, and they get a successful desync off on you. A seasoned player can easily counter the damage and retaliate if it is just a single force pulse ganker. This leads people to sit on keep walls, or sit behind a zerg and just poke people to death with lethal damage, all while being just out of range. A more popular option recently as well for cyrodill is running in groups of 3 to 8, all using the same force pulse build on a single person, making the damage near in-escapable.
I had some hope with the DK changes that the wings would counter alot of the damage from this combo, but come to find out, It almost does nothing since most of the damage is status effect related. This on top of now adding molten weapons into the combo, with the new dragonknight changes plus Shattered paths signet, the new mythic item, Supercharges the combo, making it Lethal within the first force pulse. Testing it on the pts, It deals Melee ganker levels of damage from a safe distance, and the combo does not even need to crit anymore to be lethal. As fun as it would be to run around with this build on the live server, The popularity of this build and how it is used, plus how easy the combo is to do makes this build Something to be considered when looking at the balance of this mythic item.
Suggestions -
-I would suggest either Adding a travel time to Force pulse, for more counter play (remove desync)

-Further reducing the damage of the Shattered Paths signet when in pvp,( I did like my elemental susceptibility build, so hopefully not this change)

If any, make this change
-Make shattered Paths Signet also prevent you from going into stealth while equipped (preferred)

-Limiting crystal weapon and molten weapon procs in the same global light attack (limits creativity)

ESO_Nightingale · January 17

Glittering Goad is a monster set that does frost damage!

glittering goad is a monster set that does minimal frost damage and is utility based.

thanks for getting my hopes up for nothing

YandereGirlfriend · January 17

Glittering Goad: I think that this is meant to be a PvE tank set. But it feels as though it is #DoinTooMuch with the various disconnected effects. There are also plenty of PvE tank monster sets but literally zero Frost Damage monster sets worth using as a DPS. As such, I would join with the above comment and call to streamline this set into a Frost Damage DPS set.

At the very least, the resource-return can be safely jettisoned to increase the power of the damage.

ESO_Nightingale · January 17

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Glittering Goad: I think that this is meant to be a PvE tank set. But it feels as though it is #DoinTooMuch with the various disconnected effects. There are also plenty of PvE tank monster sets but literally zero Frost Damage monster sets worth using as a DPS. As such, I would join with the above comment and call to streamline this set into a Frost Damage DPS set.

At the very least, the resource-return can be safely jettisoned to increase the power of the damage.

Iceheart is all we have in this role and its power budget is related to it's shield uptime. I am very disappointed that the 3rd frost damage monster helmet in existance is unneccessary garbage.

ESO_Nightingale · January 17

Hey @ZOS_Kevin is it possible if we could have some confirmation as to if (specifically) the itemisation team responsible for item sets looks at the forums?

I ask because It just feels hopeless when asking for new item sets to be created for specific niches.

The last time i remember an item set being created in this way was 5 years ago in 2021 and it was for frostbite when we were protesting the insane amount of flame damage sets.

Why cant we do things like item set design competitions to get fan made item sets added to the game?

Freelancer_ESO · January 18

I assume it's a known issue that the visuals on the items aren't functioning

Thousand Eyes:

I really liked visual on the proc and it's great fun to use against trash mobs.

Glittering Goad:

This item feels like it's technically balanced relative to other items but, not really something I'd pick unless I was just after the ally it summoned.

If you bash or do a heavy attack you get a weak amount of damage spread across eight seconds.

If the target dies within 8 seconds you get a good amount of resources if you are in range of the enemy as do people in group with you. The thing is, I'm not sure at this juncture that many groups are short on resources when things are dying.

If the target is still alive after eight seconds, Minor Brittle applies to the area for 10 seconds. That's not bad but, if you want to get Minor Brittle up you do have other ways to do it and without the eight second delay.

Shattered Paths Signet

It might be beneficial to have an indicator on advanced stats for how much damage each status effect actually does for your build so it's easier to have a more clear idea of what the item is actually going to do.

The Ruckus

It appears that the item starts to make new stacks while the stacks are maxed but, the description seems to suggest that this might not be intended behavior. I think we'd need a clarification regarding how the item is intended to behave before we'd be able to give a clear answer on the balance. In the PvE I did I found that I wasn't necessarily getting the most effective usage out of it due to gaps in fights and situations where you'd kill most of the enemies before it would actually proc. I think PvP would probably be where the item would shine the most as optimized players seem to focus more on burst windows and it's downtime would be less of an issue when you aren't always trying to kill someone.

Gorethief

The regular set bonuses are kinda meh. It might be beneficial to state that the health restored when you roll dodge scales on your max health. The five piece damage proc seemed to be kinda meh in PvE my limited testing but it's a bit easier to get off regularly with beams. It might be more valuable in PvP contexts where being able to hold damage for a specific moment has more value.

MashmalloMan · January 23

Shattered Paths Signet

Really love this mythic, I hope to see more DPS mythics like it in the future. That said, I do feel you may come to the conclusion that the 170% bonus is too strong, and smack it with a nerf hammer. While I agree to some extent, I'd hope you use a chisel here, while attacking some of the root cause of its performance, in addition to making it even more fun to engage with.

The intent of the mythic seems to try and reward elemental based high cost ultimates like Shifting Banner (225 ult), Northern Storm (200 ult), Storm Atro (200 ult), and Elemental Rage (250 ult). However, the best use case right now is for users to sit on ultimate indefinitely because:

The 170% bonus is very strong and is completely removed upon spending ultimate.
You only get the random status effects at cap.
Enables a problematic scenario where 1/21 class ultimates actually deals passive damage without casting; Animal Companion's Bear. In addition, it has increased Hemorhaging chance, it's dispraportionally stronger with that ultimate than anything else available.

This can't be the intent of the design right? These are some changes I'd like to see that I think would make it a bit more balanced and fun to interact with:

At minimum, wearing the ring now gives 2 bonuses regardless of ultimate:
- Light/Heavy attacks apply a random status effect, 4s cooldown.
- +20% status effect damage.
Continues to give +1% status effect damage per ultimate and Minor Timity.
Cap reduced from +170% to +120%. (Total = 140% with initial bonus).
No longer affected by battlespirit.

The required ultimate lowers from 170 to 120, in addition to always getting a +20% bonus and random status effects, the coolest part imo. This should make using your ultimate optional instead of not optimal, providing endless options instead of the current one with bear. High cost ultimates will still perform a bit better because they remain at full bonus for longer, but all builds now get a bonus at minimum to make it less punishing to engage with.

The general idea is the important part here, the numbers can be tinkered. Maybe the cap goes lower, maybe the initial bonus goes higher, I can't pretend to know what a safe spot is, but I felt 140% with all the buffs I added for the initial part was a safe place. It also lowers how strong it can be for PVP, so I feel like the Battlespirt nerf isn't entirely necessary, especially since a PVP build is giving up a defensive mythic like Mono to use this; opportunity cost.

All the Other Sets

Bad. They're all bad. Take them back to the drawing board.