MXVIIDREAM wrote: »

BattleAxe wrote: »

As dks are very lacking in offensive penetration could disintegrating dragon breath instead either give an unnamed armor debuff or after activation boosts dks penetration by an amount say a percentage of the initial damage dealt on first target hit this would I believe increase the effectiveness for single target pure dk builds.

Are they ? I have 14k pen unbuffed they have access to major breach aswell and with the new changes addition minor breach has been added so idk that pen is a big issue b

Pve or PvP build? Also without gear dks have no inherent pen like most other classes have in their passives. In pve dks are sorely missing pen and have to trade off a lot to get to minimum pve numbers for trials. What I’m mainly pointing out dk builds are a bit more restrictive and for both pve and PvP get restricted in build freedom. I’m simply advocating for more build diversity.

The Corrosive changes are very questionable, as someone else said, the ability met a pretty good balance once ult gen was disabled. Now, you keep walking back your initial changes from this PTS because in an effort to improve it for PVE, it became overpowered for PVP.

I think you've lost your grasp on why people supported the idea of abilities being balanced seperately between PVE and PVP. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it. The right way is to use Monster or Battlespirt modifiers to increase or decrease the potency of effects. The wrong way is to outright disable effects for 1 content type or another.

Leap knocking up in PVE, but back in PVP. Brilliant.

Corrosive ticks being buffed by 4x for PVE, awesome, but disabling it for PVP, terrible. Why not just keep the original tooltip for PVP, then add "deals 4x more damage to Monsters"? This is the type of balancing we want to see on our skills.

It's so perplexing because you acknowledge the identity crisis it originally had when it only buffed direct damage on a class that is all about dots, but now it disables the flame damage, and your ult gen. Dots, flame, and ults are core concepts of the DK class fantasy, Earthen Heart even includes an ult gen passive, so why do 2/3 of these effects not work? It just doesn't make any sense, you need to go back to the drawing board and work on how you balance abilities in a fun and interesting way.

Also, if we're saying Earthen Heart now gives Crit Damage, then wouldn't it make more sense for Corrosive to give you 100% Crit Chance instead of 100% Penetration? If you're trying to solve its power level for PVE, that would be a double whammy because Crit is way more useful than Pen. I'm not saying I actually want this.. but food for thought, one hand isn't speaking to the other. There is conflicting class design concepts from top to bottom that need to be better aligned.

The work you did on DK over months is quickly falling apart at the final hour. Losing 300 w/s damage for a PVE specific buff, instead of giving Draconic Power more oomph, or again, improving the w/s damage buff against monsters, but reducing it for PVP, is really hard to understand. We don't like this all or nothing approach.

"Flame Lash: This morph now also grants 12% damage done to monsters for 30s after activating if you are a Dragonknight. "

What. The. Oblivion. Is. THAT??? Please do not give weird hard locked incentives to not subclass. You guys specifically said you wanted to simply make all skill lines worth having, that is NOT what this change is. This change locks an entire active ability to the base class, while also forcing everyone using the class to use that one ability. Not to mention having a BULT IN NERF if you have a certain other ability slotted. What happened to "Play the way you want"? If you go through with that insanity my approval of the refresh defiantly drops form 7/10 to 3/10. You had a pretty good thing going until now, PLEASE don't throw it away with something ridiculous like that.

Make the skill lines work well together to incentivize pure classing, don't punish people for subclassing.

Tyrobag wrote: »

"Flame Lash: This morph now also grants 12% damage done to monsters for 30s after activating if you are a Dragonknight. "

What. The. Oblivion. Is. THAT??? Please do not give weird hard locked incentives to not subclass. You guys specifically said you wanted to simply make all skill lines worth having, that is NOT what this change is. This change locks an entire active ability to the base class, while also forcing everyone using the class to use that one ability. Not to mention having a BULT IN NERF if you have a certain other ability slotted. What happened to "Play the way you want"? If you go through with that insanity my approval of the refresh defiantly drops form 7/10 to 3/10. You had a pretty good thing going until now, PLEASE don't throw it away with something ridiculous like that.

Make the skill lines work well together to incentivize pure classing, don't punish people for subclassing.

This was exactly what I warned them about multiple times when moving forward with these Class Reworks.

Insinuated Class synergy. Not being told to use specific skill lines or classes by abilities and passives, but being rewarded through intelligent game design for using lines that work well together.

Regarding all abilities/effects/sets that are "monsters only" -

It's super goofy and immersion-breaking for me, [snip]
[edited for bashing]

What is being done to DK is quite possibly the worst game design that I've ever experienced.

ArchMikem wrote: »

Below is an early look at the upcoming adjustments for DK:

Ardent Flame

• Lava Whip: This ability and the Flame Lash morph now generate 5 stacks of their empowered forms for 20 seconds, rather than enabling the ability to cast the ability as many times as you can within 7.9s (at most, 7 casts). Increased the damage by 40% to account for less casts. Overall, this should make both versions of the ability much easier to use in a rotation, rather than feeling like you must choose between uptime of other abilities and the super sick flip whip. 
  • Flame Lash: This morph now also grants 12% damage done to monsters for 30s after activating if you are a Dragonknight. 
    • In a future PTS update this will be increased to 15% for 45s but only if all stacks are consumed – to help avoid turning it into a passive buff effect and more of a reward for using the ability to its maximum effect. 

I, don't know how to interpret this? My Dragonknight build completely relies on setting enemies Off Balance so I can use the Power Lash form of Flame Lash, but this sounds like the change is taking away a lot of the ability's up time? Does targeting Off Balance enemies even still change the ability to Power Lash?

My read on this is that yes, Off Balance still procs Power Lash.

The change is that with the current setup, one attack on an Off Balance enemy will have you powered up for 8 seconds, so you need to drop everything and just spam Power Lash 7 times in a row before the proc wears off, which means if your DoTs run out, you have to choose between getting them back up or getting the maximum use of your Power Lash (and if you get stunned or something, you lose your window entirely). The new one will give you 5 Power Lashes that no longer have a time limit, so you can reup DoTs or get staggered or whatever without losing 5 guaranteed hits.

Dovahmiim wrote: »

This genuinely feels like a new ZOS, did anything change internally that could have led to actually listening to players and coming up with good ideas?

New head and essentially a smaller team if I’m not mistaken partly why only doing one class at a time.

One thing I’ve been seeing come up a lot in discussions is that Ardent Flame feels a bit too stacked and could probably be spread out more, especially with subclassing in mind. Building on that, I think swapping Talons from Draconic Power with *Core of Flame would be a good way to approach it. Moving Talons into Draconic Power would make that line more appealing for tanks in PvE by adding extra utility and sustain value. The concern isn’t Dragonknight as a pure class the skill lines themselves are fine but that subclassing into Ardent Flame gives other classes access to multiple delayed burst tools in an already burst heavy PvP meta this would help distribute power more evenly across DK skill lines and reduce potential subclassing power creep without negatively impacting pure DK gameplay

Miracle19 wrote: »

Overall moving on the right direction, listening to community feedback.

The corrosive change, while being a pretty significant nerf, does have a little justification but could be adjusted to more fair terms. 12% is absurd, 8% is even high but WORKS. Removing the dot from PvP is understandable as it was pretty ridiculous, however, ulti gen should be brought back to the skill as now you take significantly more damage to only gain full pent for physical and magical dmg. We cannot forget the ideology of DK, it should be able to brawl and sustain in fights without significant draw backs in terms of defense. Onslaught gives you that and 100% crit(acuity) with NO drawbacks, all in 1 ability for significantly less ultimate cost.

Corrosive Armor also has a built in draw back of either you dont have any pen while its not active, or you have wasted pen while it is. It also makes Balorgh much less usefull when active. It was essential a telegraphed bomber skill as you had to make your whole build around using that one ultimate.

The change to the Standard of Might ultimate is a nerf that should be cancelled if the goal is to increase the power of the DK. It takes me more time now to kill mobs with the new Standard of Might than it did using Standard of Might as it exists now on the live servers. That’s a power reduction, not a power increase.

Tyrobag wrote: »

BananaBender wrote: »

Tyrobag wrote: »

"Flame Lash: This morph now also grants 12% damage done to monsters for 30s after activating if you are a Dragonknight. "

What. The. Oblivion. Is. THAT??? Please do not give weird hard locked incentives to not subclass. You guys specifically said you wanted to simply make all skill lines worth having, that is NOT what this change is. This change locks an entire active ability to the base class, while also forcing everyone using the class to use that one ability. Not to mention having a BULT IN NERF if you have a certain other ability slotted. What happened to "Play the way you want"? If you go through with that insanity my approval of the refresh defiantly drops form 7/10 to 3/10. You had a pretty good thing going until now, PLEASE don't throw it away with something ridiculous like that.

Make the skill lines work well together to incentivize pure classing, don't punish people for subclassing.

I actually really like the idea of individual skills being better based on the class you are playing on. While this doesn't really address the issue of subclassing being stronger than pure DK, but it does give people reason to play on multiple different characters based on the build, assuming they are going to introduce something like this on all classes.

No, it incentivizes people to play on the one class that gets a 12% buff. They'd be deranged to impliment this on all classes, because it would completely ruin the point of subclassing. Neither pure classes or subclassed builds should be inherently stronger. Until this change, they were well on their way to that.

BananaBender wrote: »

I think the subclass vs pure class issue is going to get fixed once we are done with all classes being reworked and here I think ZOS has done a really good job with DK.

It will not be fixed if they continue making certain skills only worth using on the base class.

BananaBender wrote: »

Right now the reason why subclassing is so incredibly strong is that some classes can give up skill lines and lose effectively nothing while gaining a bunch of power, but with the reworked DK all the skill lines are good and give something valuable which means that subclassing wont be just a massive bonus without any downsides.

Yes, that is why subclassing is so strong. Which is exactly the reason why all skill lines need to be created equal, which this change flies in the face of. With crazy changes like this we end up with skill lines that are good as long as you're on the base class and using one specific ability but worthless for everyone else. This is how you destroy build diversity.

BananaBender wrote: »

Of course this is going to make DK weaker for now until other classes are going through their reworks, but once every class is designed around subclassing, I think DK and pure builds in general are going to be in much healthier spot.

But this change isn't "designed around subclassing", its designed against it. Things like this are going to put the entire game in a less healthy spot. Once again, neither pure classes or subclasses should be inherently stronger. The skill lines provided together in a class should synergize well together, not be built to force every DK to keep ardent flame and use whip because the whole class was balanced around having an exclusive 12% buff.

I would disagree with most of your points in the sense that what the whip change base class choice becomes a factor in making your build especially if more classes use this type of change in at least one of their skills. I do agree pureclassing and subclassing should be on a similar power level. As it stands currently not subclassing is limiting players who choose to pure class as several class lines are above the rest root issue is with the 3 dlc class having 3 role specific lines making it an easy choice to build a role with all the changes dk gets now this choice isn’t as cut and dry. What I mean is an Arcanist has an easy decision to subclass drop the tank and heal lines and pick up 2 class lines with the juiciest passives for a damage dealer. Further point this out factoring scribing in as well the “tank” line in dk kit was beyond sub par in sense subclassed tanks almost never chose draconic and instead opted for earthen heart. With the blending skill lines as they have now it’s not as easy a choice but not impossible choice. Sure initially dk lines are now not as ideal of a choice for subclassing because they don’t provide everything a specific role wants. Given direction class refresh is going there won’t be a clear cut 3 skill lines everyone runs to hit peak performance. Subclassing will become less about choosing the best passives and using what skills are provided but now base class also becomes a factor as well as theme of what a player wishes to build a subclassed character as. This will end with a much larger build diversity versus what we currently have and will likely have until the last class gets refreshed.

Tyrobag wrote: »

BananaBender wrote: »

Tyrobag wrote: »

"Flame Lash: This morph now also grants 12% damage done to monsters for 30s after activating if you are a Dragonknight. "

What. The. Oblivion. Is. THAT??? Please do not give weird hard locked incentives to not subclass. You guys specifically said you wanted to simply make all skill lines worth having, that is NOT what this change is. This change locks an entire active ability to the base class, while also forcing everyone using the class to use that one ability. Not to mention having a BULT IN NERF if you have a certain other ability slotted. What happened to "Play the way you want"? If you go through with that insanity my approval of the refresh defiantly drops form 7/10 to 3/10. You had a pretty good thing going until now, PLEASE don't throw it away with something ridiculous like that.

Make the skill lines work well together to incentivize pure classing, don't punish people for subclassing.

I actually really like the idea of individual skills being better based on the class you are playing on. While this doesn't really address the issue of subclassing being stronger than pure DK, but it does give people reason to play on multiple different characters based on the build, assuming they are going to introduce something like this on all classes.

No, it incentivizes people to play on the one class that gets a 12% buff. They'd be deranged to impliment this on all classes, because it would completely ruin the point of subclassing. Neither pure classes or subclassed builds should be inherently stronger. Until this change, they were well on their way to that.

Except when other classes get a buff similar to the one on DK which gives and incentive to pick that class as your base class. Classes need to have unique strengths to give players a reason to play on multiple characters, like the game was before subclassing. Adding unique buffs to certain skills is one way of achieving this, reworking class masteries and class sets could be another one.

How would you go by making subclassing and pure classes equally strong? Subclassing allows for you to patch in the weaknesses from your builds. If you don't have AoE damage, you can simply slot in some AoE damage from another class. No execute? That's easily fixed with subclassing. How can you make sure pure class is on the same level to subclassing when the idea of subclassing is to improve your base class? The only way subclassing could be a "side-grade" is if all skill lines are a the exact same level in every single way, meaning they are identical.

In this current state, whip is a really good spammable/semi-spammable with a really strong buff and the only one which requires you to be a specific class, but as I stated, assuming in the future every class gets a buff which incentivises a player to pick that class as their base class, how is this a bad thing? If DK ends up being the only class with a unique buff requiring you to be a base DK, I agree that would be stupid, because it's exactly what was the case with arcanist and the insanely strong class mastery and it sucked.

Tyrobag wrote: »

Yes, that is why subclassing is so strong. Which is exactly the reason why all skill lines need to be created equal, which this change flies in the face of. With crazy changes like this we end up with skill lines that are good as long as you're on the base class and using one specific ability but worthless for everyone else. This is how you destroy build diversity.

On PTS there is already twice as much build variety as there is on live. Ardent Flame + Earthen Heart + Assassination seems extremely strong, so does Animal Companions + Winter's Embrace + Herald and the old meta builds are still as strong as ever. I don't really see how the DK whip has destroyed build variety when as of right now we have twice the playable builds we had before.

Tyrobag wrote: »

But this change isn't "designed around subclassing", its designed against it. Things like this are going to put the entire game in a less healthy spot. Once again, neither pure classes or subclasses should be inherently stronger. The skill lines provided together in a class should synergize well together, not be built to force every DK to keep ardent flame and use whip because the whole class was balanced around having an exclusive 12% buff.

Engulfing Dragonfire parses 170k+ on single target on PTS right now, which uniquely doesn't work with the whip buff, I don't see how you are forced to pick whip if you are a DK.

If every class ends up with a unique buff, I don't see how that is going to hurt build variety in the slightest (assuming it's implemented properly). I'm going to make a hypothetical situation which hopefully demonstrates what I would like to see from the future of subclassing and the unique buffs.
Let's say you have a build with Ardent Flame + Winter's Embrace and Herald of the Tome, now you would get a flat dmg buff from being a base DK, very nice. If you were a base Warden with the same build, they might get a buff like "While Artic Blast is active your status effects deal 200% more damage" or something along those lines. Now you are incentivised build around status effects, making the build play completely differently. Arcanist on the other hand could have a buff which increases your AoE damage etc. With the same 3 subclasses you could end up with 3 builds which play completely differently from one another. Of course one build is going to be stronger is most situations, but the specialization of builds is what got killed by subclassing and that's what I hope will be brought back.
You no longer bring a templar in the group because you want more single target and execute damage, because every build already has those. Or necro for AoE, because again, everyone has everything.

I do wish they had made the damage buff more specialized than just a unique damage done boost to monsters, but I think class specific buffs are a great tool for the devs to incentivise class diversity (if done right).

Radiate77 wrote: »

BananaBender wrote: »

I do wish they had made the damage buff more specialized than just a unique damage done boost to monsters, but I think class specific buffs are a great tool for the devs to incentivise class diversity (if done right).

Forest for the trees take, certainly.

You encourage class diversity by making all classes comparable, not by telling anyone who is playing a class other than Dragonknight to ignore Ardent Flame entirely.

When you isolate skill lines to certain classes, you eliminate diversity, not increase it.

As if whip and the buff is the only thing the entire skill line brings. For pure DPS output, yes it's weaker when you don't get the whip buff, but it's by far the strongest skill line for soloing stuff on PTS. If they fix the targetting on the heals it will be a good healer subclass and a tank one as well. I agree that they should look into making standard a more of a dps ult than a support one to make the skill line more attractive to subclass into, but I think the class unique buffs are not a bad thing at all, in fact I would love to see more of them.

Radiate77 wrote: »

Tyrobag wrote: »

BananaBender wrote: »

Tyrobag wrote: »

"Flame Lash: This morph now also grants 12% damage done to monsters for 30s after activating if you are a Dragonknight. "

What. The. Oblivion. Is. THAT??? Please do not give weird hard locked incentives to not subclass. You guys specifically said you wanted to simply make all skill lines worth having, that is NOT what this change is. This change locks an entire active ability to the base class, while also forcing everyone using the class to use that one ability. Not to mention having a BULT IN NERF if you have a certain other ability slotted. What happened to "Play the way you want"? If you go through with that insanity my approval of the refresh defiantly drops form 7/10 to 3/10. You had a pretty good thing going until now, PLEASE don't throw it away with something ridiculous like that.

Make the skill lines work well together to incentivize pure classing, don't punish people for subclassing.

I actually really like the idea of individual skills being better based on the class you are playing on. While this doesn't really address the issue of subclassing being stronger than pure DK, but it does give people reason to play on multiple different characters based on the build, assuming they are going to introduce something like this on all classes.

No, it incentivizes people to play on the one class that gets a 12% buff. They'd be deranged to impliment this on all classes, because it would completely ruin the point of subclassing. Neither pure classes or subclassed builds should be inherently stronger. Until this change, they were well on their way to that.

BananaBender wrote: »

I think the subclass vs pure class issue is going to get fixed once we are done with all classes being reworked and here I think ZOS has done a really good job with DK.

It will not be fixed if they continue making certain skills only worth using on the base class.

BananaBender wrote: »

Right now the reason why subclassing is so incredibly strong is that some classes can give up skill lines and lose effectively nothing while gaining a bunch of power, but with the reworked DK all the skill lines are good and give something valuable which means that subclassing wont be just a massive bonus without any downsides.

Yes, that is why subclassing is so strong. Which is exactly the reason why all skill lines need to be created equal, which this change flies in the face of. With crazy changes like this we end up with skill lines that are good as long as you're on the base class and using one specific ability but worthless for everyone else. This is how you destroy build diversity.

BananaBender wrote: »

Of course this is going to make DK weaker for now until other classes are going through their reworks, but once every class is designed around subclassing, I think DK and pure builds in general are going to be in much healthier spot.

But this change isn't "designed around subclassing", its designed against it. Things like this are going to put the entire game in a less healthy spot. Once again, neither pure classes or subclasses should be inherently stronger. The skill lines provided together in a class should synergize well together, not be built to force every DK to keep ardent flame and use whip because the whole class was balanced around having an exclusive 12% buff.

Yeah I can’t tell if they just don’t get it, or are refusing to see how this will impact their game.

-They are soft rolling back Subclassing.
-Quick swap Skill selection is coming.

Both of those points should be getting much more pushback, but people are blinded by all of the flashiness of the new animation reworks.

I seriously have to question… are people really okay with the skill gap widening and our creativity being taken away?

That said, I can guarantee at least this much: this will be the last time I advocate for the little guys if they won’t do so for themselves. At the end of the day, the rich are getting richer, and I’ll just kill the poor faster when I can swap between skills on the fly, and start gatekeeping players based on their origin class.

What else are we supposed to do?

They are implying that this is the culture that they want with changes that encourage it.

The issue is subclassing showed not every class skill line is on the same level when we come down to it. Animal assassin herald 3 skill lines clearly above the rest draconic dark magic and shadow clearly behind the rest.

Creativity being taken away. I would say they in a sense expanded it where now your base class choice matters in terms of creating a build. Not just choosing what passives boost your damage most. The idea it looks like going forward will be what theme is your build going for more so then what skill lines will be mathematically the best. That is not creativity that is setting parameters and cherry picking which of the skill lines will fill those parameters versus I want this theme for my build now how do I boost the theme of my build.

The direction class reworks seem to be heading we won’t see cookie cutter choose class skill lines a, b,c and sets 1 and 2; instead we will see a mixing pot of various skill lines mashed together and perhaps a mix of sets