ZOS_Gilliam

Greetings, everyone. We’d like to update you all on where we are at with the PTS feedback we have seen and our plans of action. Firstly, we would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to go through the changes and hop onto the PTS to get hands-on experience before submitting their feedback. The sheer amount of data and in-game application has helped us tremendously to hone in on the problem spaces that the larger sentiments have pointed out, and has also given us a better idea of how to isolate and tackle those problems. Let’s quickly go over the main themes we would like to improve on.

There are three main issues we would like to address with some targeted adjustments in next week’s PTS patch. These mainly pertain to Damage and Healing over Time effects, as we’ve found those have been the focus of the majority of conversations between all types of players. The first is the loss of reactive gameplay with ticking Area of Effect-based abilities, where delayed tick rates ... Read more

Greetings!

It’s almost time for the next update, and that means it’s time to share some of the reasoning behind the upcoming big shake-ups. This update brings a massive slew of balance adjustments all at once to hopefully reduce the need of large sweeping changes in subsequent updates, since some seemingly minor changes affect a huge part of the game’s combat. 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. Let’s start by breaking apart some of the fundamental realities of ESO today.


Weaving

Currently, to be truly effective in ESO’s combat, you need to learn to manipulate something that is known as “weaving,” which refers to the act of squeezing multiple actions into the global cooldown window. Doing s... Read more

Greetings! It’s about that time of year where the latest Chapter is coming up soon. The Combat Team would like to talk about some of the changes coming in Update 34 and provide some insight on where we’re coming from. We’d like to say now that since this is the big Chapter of the year, we’re continuing with last year’s approach where we slow down on the large-scale combat changes since there’s already a lot of new systems and features to take in. That being said, we still have quite a few smaller adjustments coming, focusing on the usual bug fixing and hitting outliers that are problematic for the game.

First, let’s quickly talk about the impact of previous updates’ combat changes, with the hybridization of almost everything in the game regarding character combat stats and scaling of abilities and sets. Overall, we’ve seen a pretty healthy shift to ability usage in the game where there are less binary options in morph engagement, weapon choices, armor weight focus, and so on... Read more

Greetings everyone,

We’ve been closely monitoring the feedback and discussion surrounding the Update 33 combat preview and have taken note of a few reoccurring bits that we’d like to take some time to address, particularly regarding the hybridization work we’ve been working on for the past year and a half and the next big step of making most abilities scale dynamically (when applicable) with offensive stats.

To reiterate our goal, these passes have been done to help reduce the number of restrictions when engaging with an ability in your class kit or other skill line, helping you create a build that resonates with you based on what a skill offers, rather than the stats you’ve picked. However, we do still believe stats should always play an important role in determining effectiveness of skills and how your build comes to life in the game. With the sheer number of them in game, we’ve found that the previous system of Weapon versus Spell Damage, Critical Chance, and Pene... Read more

Greetings! It’s about that time again where we have another Update coming soon, even though Update 31 just released on consoles last week. With a new PTS update lurking around the corner, the combat team wanted to give you all some deep dives into the spicier stuff coming with this upcoming patch.

In the last Update, we tried to keep things simpler with the number of changes to help combat the change fatigue many have reported, but progress cannot sleep for long as we march ever forward to improving the game. Our focus in Update 32 is two-fold: improving proc set balance and continuing the hybridization improvements from previous updates. These areas are the topics we’ve seen a significant amount of discussion on in the realms of combat balance, so we’re following up to try and get better reigns on both.

In Update 30 we introduced item proc set scaling, which aimed to lower the ease of access of “free” damage and healing from them by ensuring you needed a base line ... Read more

Greetings!

Today, the combat team would like to share what we’ve been working on since Update 30! While this update won’t have too many large-scale changes, there are a number of little things. We’d like to highlight a few of the more noteworthy changes in this post as well as talk about some behind the scenes work we’ve been doing.

Let’s start with something we’ve seen a lot of discussion on: Time to Kill (TTK) in Player versus Player environments. Compared to previous updates, the amount of damage is higher across the board than it was previously, but simultaneously, defensive power is lower too. This is mainly caused by two things: the balance standards that Champion Point 2.0 was held to in Update 29 where we introduced more choices between either offensive or defensive options, as well boosting up stats on fresh characters with the introduction of base Weapon and Spell Damage, and the base Maximum Resource adjustments from Update 30. Between these two, many build... Read more