Welcome, today we are going to take a look at the combat changes that will come with the new DLC Lost Depths that will launch for ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) in late August. The developers recently published a post explaining the biggest changes, or like they call it, “shake-ups”. Some of these changes are huge and can impact the ESO gameplay a lot, lets dive in!
One more thing before we start, like always the builds on alcasthq will be updated once we can test all the changes on the test server.
“The main focuses in Update 35 are twofold: improving accessibility to the game’s combat by increasing the duration of outgoing ability effects (such as damage over time, buffs, and debuffs) and a continuation of the attempt to quell some of the obscene damage production at the high end.” – ZOS
Weaving (Light/Heavy) is getting nerfed
There has always been a love and hate relationship with weaving in ESO. Some players love it because it increases the skill cap and some hate it because its just constantly smashing the same button over and over. In the article the developers said that weaving leads to a huge performance gap for players that can’t use it properly. Light attacks in endgame builds can make up to 10-20% of your overall damage.
“While this is partially unavoidable and an important part of what makes the mastery of ESO or any activity utilizing a similar system particularly satisfying, we want to do what we can to shorten that delta” – ZOS
They basically want to close the gap between high skill and new players by reducing the overall impact of light and heavy attacks. Weaving will still be there and important, but have less of an impact.
What gets nerfed? According to the devs they are reducing the overall damage of light and heavy attacks, which results in a 6-11% dps nerf to the overall build. We don’t know much more but that sounds like a huge nerf to light and heavy attack damage is coming in the Lost Depths Update 35 for ESO (Elder Scrolls Online). We fail to see how this will solve the issue, you still need to weave to optimize damage.
Lets also not forget that Light and Heavy attacks used to deal a lot less damage before they changed how they scaled about 3 years ago. Basically this is them reverting the changes, nothing more.
The developers also mentioned that they are going to adjust item sets, skills, passives and buffs to ensure that ESO classes remain balanced in dps. From our experience, this usually never works out and it will take a few patches to get things sorted after such huge changes are implemented.
Buffs are getting a longer duration
In general uptime of buffs and debuffs in ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) are a lot shorter than in other MMOs where they can last several minutes. In ESO buffs or debuffs often only last 10-20 seconds and then you have to reapply them. Good ESO players are always keeping their buffs, debuffs and damage over time effects up, increasing the effectiveness of their ESO build. New players often forget about these and only spam one or two skills, resulting in a lot less dps and survivability.
According to ZOS having to reapply buffs, debuffs or DoTs and spamming light and heavy attacks inbetween creates an unusual high APM (actions per minute). With the Lost Depths DLC U35 they want to tackle that problem by increasing the duration of effects in the game.
“As such, coming in Update 35, we are increasing the duration of many of these effects in game, primarily damage over time, buffs, and debuffs. By extending the duration, we hope to reduce the stress of many combat rotations, allowing for you to focus more on the action in front of you rather than the action of juggling buffs and debuffs on your ability bar and making the game far more accessible” – ZOS
This might definitely help certain effects that only have a small duration, but we fail to see how this will decrease the APM (actions per minute). Yes, the combat effects will generally last longer but you will still be able to activate the same amount of effects per minute. ZOS most likely wants to have less of a focus on DoT setups and more of a focus on spammables. Increasing the rather short 10 second rotations that most builds run at the moment.
And that’s not it!
“Since many of these effects currently add a tremendous amount of power per cast over their duration, simply increasing their duration would merely inject a significant amount of power into the game, where this is already in excess. To combat this, we’re adjusting many of these values to account for their increased duration; there will be overall increase of effectiveness per cast, while reducing their effectiveness per second while active” – ZOS
This will reduce the damage per second, but increase the overall damage output per cast. This is great for new players that have trouble keeping tight rotations up, but might also result in nerfs to DPS in endgame.
These adjustments will take several Patches/DLCs
And now this is where the main issue is. Not all adjustments will happen within one patch. The previous “balancing” and “class identity” changes took over 2 years to finalize and the result isn’t great. Now we are supposed to “endure” these changes to builds over several patches/DLCs again and hope that they turn out well.
“After these adjustments are live, we are going to focus on any resulting balance issues for the next few updates, hopefully reducing the chaotic nature of change for a brief period after the initial turbulence” – ZOS
The ESO endgame community hasn’t reacted kindly to the combat changes for next update, looking at a reddit post most players doubt that the developers will manage to properly balance these changes. However, it’s also not all bad, some players like the longer effect durations.
We do think that these changes won’t really help make the gap smaller. APM (actions per minute) stay the same you just spam different abilities and you still have to weave to maximize damage. However, one thing is for sure, it will bring down overall DPS for all builds, maybe that is the whole intention of the changes. Since several updates ESO DPS has gone up like crazy and it looks like their main goal is to just bring down the high DPS. If they want to reduce high dps, they should just nerf some of the overpowered sets and buffs they introduced a while ago that led to the high DPS in the first place.
Nonetheless, lets wait and see how these changes hold up on the public test server that will launch soon! It would definitely be interesting to see how longer rotation builds would feel in ESO.
