Cutthroats focus - Activating a Nightblade ability while bracing causes you to dodge attacks for 0.3 seconds. Whenever you dodge an attack, your attacker's psyche suffers, increasing their damage taken by 5% for 5 seconds, increasing to 20 seconds against monsters.

Rourken Steamguards - While actively Bracing, you gain Steam Guardian for 0.5 seconds, reducing your damage taken by 90%. This effect activates only upon the start of Bracing



Nightblade is a class more focused on evasion and being slippery rather than blocking. In its current form NB must block cast NB abilities in place in order to "dodge" attacks in a 0.3 second window. This feels counterintuitive to the way the class plays and feels bad as you have to essentially stand in place and cast abilities - often more than once to get lucky with the 0.3 second window rather than intentionally parrying someone's attack. The average adult's reaction time is 250ms for simple visual tasks and not taking into account the complexity of ESO combat and decision making. So we are leaving people with 0.05ms of time to both hit block, and a NB ability. On top of this, a 0.3 second window and only a 5 second duration on the 5% unique damage debuff is just too short to be worth anything even if human reaction time wasn't a factor.

I propose we change cutthroat's focus to function more like Rourken Steamguards where you gain 0.5 seconds of cuttrhoats focus when you first start to block where you dodge all attacks for 0.5 seconds that are not undodgeable, and it places that 5% dmg debuff on the attacker for 20 seconds regardless if its a monster or player in pvp. I think this would be a lot more fun for Nightblades and not too strong in any way by itself. We may need to look into how it interacts with the Umbral set from IA but I think this would be overall more usable and more deserving of a class mastery and would fit the NB theme more. How cool would it be to have a parry mechanic on Nightblade, a class that is supposed to be all about being a rogue, evading, being wily and not blocking, armor, shields etc?

As it stands right now, this class mastery is not usable in any sort of intentional way, and fails to hit the mark by a wide margin unless you are a nb tank block casting everything. It is a great idea Zos, I just think it needs an adjustment to really be usable.

What do you guys and gals think?