Terhix

I'm afraid there is no option for me in the poll. Played Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, obviously, as well as quite a few MMOs since before WoW. I like TES and MMOs, though I'm not playing any of the latter now.

Having the spreadsheet updated, some notes regarding my Nightblade tank build: [*]Will definitely keep Strife for PvE for the healing taken bonus with the morph. [*]Agony with Prolonged Suffering seems very tempting for PvP now, need to wait and see Morphs for Entropy and Cripple. [*]Teleport Strike with aoe snare morph sounds great for initiating group fights. [*]Really happy about the new version of resolve, there seems to be quite a gap between dps and survival of medium vs heavy armor.

I don't think we have to go from barely useful to flat out overpowered, there can be middle ground, and you can use non-projectiles still. Even if Defensive Posture would end up being absolutely nerve wrecking against casters, that only fits into the rock-paper-scissors scheme, and since this isn't a 1vs1 game, said caster would just have to stop hitting the tank like an idiot and move to something else . All that said, I'm still not sure what I'd trade it for, so for the time being I probably won't feature it on my bars. Low Slash, on the other hand, seems to be amazing, from all the snares in the doc that I've browsed it had the highest % snare, and the damage debuff actually fits into the PvP tank role of protecting mates, not just oneself.

I think ESO will have a lot of negative backlash from two camps of people, what's funny is that they are very bi-polar. On one hand you have guys like you qouted, who expect nothing but a full open world with 50 skill slots to use their Razer Naga, PvP anywhere and what not - I wouldn't put too much weight to those, GW2 and to some degree DIablo 3 has paved a way. On the other hand, I've seen a guy on youtube saying it's the biggest disappointment of his life precisely because it was an MMO and he was expecting it to be Skyrim but with multiplayer, I believe terms like "more single player oriented" was used and the mere presence of an action bar was a disgrace. I kind of understand where they are coming from, but anyone who spent 15 minutes on some research before playing the game would know this is an MMO, so complaining that an MMO is an MMO is really kind of futile. Bottom line is: if someone's expectations aren't met by the game, it doesn't have to be the game's fault. And it doesn't mean they had too high expectations either, they could just have different expectations, if that makes sense? I've downloaded some 30 youtube videos over the weekend, so while I haven't got to play the game, I pretty much know the prologue by heart now, and the game looks really good, with still few months to release I'm calm. It really is impossible for me to say whether I'm going to play it for years as that depends on endgame and how they roll out content, but I'm definitely going to level to the cap and get myself suited and geared and farm enough to make my desired build complete with all the passives and what not.

Started on Friday, the beta weekend is spanning the whole.. well, weekend. Not sure if Monday is included as it was in few other games, but I guess things should be back to norm soon, and we should get more data to play with .

I guess a lot of NA people are busy playing the beta? That and I've posted my build, I don't think I'll be doing another one till release, might do adjustments if I see more info from the game, though *cough*morphs*cough*.

Watched some video leaks, few things noticed: [*]Khajiit got health regen instead of stamina regen (I assume it's the result of Aldmeri lacking a tank race). [*]At level 2 the stats visible before spending points are: 170 / 120 / 120 health / magicka / stamina, spending point in stamina increases it by 10 (120 to 130, same for magicka I assume), but spending a point in health increases it by 20 (170 to 190). [*]Just watching another video where Health behaves just like the rest of the stats -> confusion. (Must have been older build, aside from all but that one they all feature Health higher than the rest) [*]Assassin's Blade grants 300% damage bonus on low target, rather than 270%. [*]No surprise here: blocking ranged attacks, even at point blank, doesn't cause enemies to stagger. [*]You can block projectiles from staves. [*]There is a "Target Self" keybind. [*]Some passives can have more than one point spent into them (that's my assumption at least, they show up as 0 / 2 or 0 / 3 in brackets next to the name), those include armor/weapon passives. First rank of Breton's Gift of Magnus grants 4% Magicka, Spell Resistance grants 6 points at rank 1 (character level 3).

The more skill morphs we know, the better. Also empiric test if spells can be blocked would be grand. Cheers.

From the few morphs that we did see, they seem to make some substantial differences, depends on the skill obviously. Assassin's Blade adds a healing component on killing blow, Fiery Reach adds 40% damage to next attack. Also, Mage's Fury hints at more than a single tier of morphs.

My experience from playing Prot in WoW was that spell reflect was way more useful in PvP than it ever was in PvE (and yes, I did run with a proper offensive PvP spec at the time) - a lot of the spells that bosses used which had potential to one-shot any non-tank (and nearly so a tank) would simply be non-reflectable, so it's usefulness was really limited. It might not be as easy to reflect in PvP if a lot of the casts are instant - but I wouldn't worry too much about it, there are skills that interrupt casting, and everybody can do a bash to interrupt casting (at least in melee), I'd be surprised if you couldn't predict at least some attacks in PvP. Then we got information whether you can reflect projectiles already mid-air (you could in GW2, not in WoW for technical reasons), if you can then even if it's an instant cast it doesn't really matter. And yes, spells don't have cooldowns, but neither does defensive posture, and it's cheap. I have seen some casters take half of their hp with a single spell - granted they were all mostly PvErs without resilience and stuff, but it was always hilarious. I think you quite underestimate the usefulness of reflecting a spell, Muscle. By reflecting the damage you don't just negate the damage, which is great and probably something you can do to some degree with just blocking, but also deal that damage back to the attacker. You can put it this way: the difference between taking 1000 damage and taking none is 1000 damage, the difference between taking 1000 damage and taking none while dealing 1000 back is 2000 damage. Assuming armor doesn't work against spells (it didn't in WoW), having a full set of heavy with s/s and all the passives for them will already make anyone attacking you with physical damage cry in despair, especially since you can - and cheaply (-20% from heavy, -25% from s/s and -whatever% max rank of defensive posture grants) - block them on top of all that passive mitigation. Having the ability to reflect spells is essentially closing the gap in your defenses and making you into a real juggernaut.

Keep your shit together, try to have fun and don't burn yourself on it. Keep in mind that what you're going to see will likely change a lot till release, the changes happening during beta stage are much more drastic from deploy to a deploy compared to patches after release. If you want to document stuff, be careful, NDA is no laughing matter.

Well, if the Khajiit is essential, and it's not as obvious as in it's not the Khajiit, then by deduction and elimination it ought to be the guy next to the Khajiit.

No idea who Blake is, but judging by avatar: That, or the guy on the left who is about to get a bitchslap on the neck.

Ok, let's get this sorted: what can and cannot be blocked? [*]s/s passive, Deflect Bolts: Block 15% additional damage from projectiles and ranged attacks [*]s/s active, Defensive Posture: Activate to reflect next spell projectile at attacker [*]resto staff passive, Absorb: Blocking spells restores 5 magicka [*]Mages Guild passive?, Greater Ward?: reduce incoming spell damage by 15% while blocking The last one on the list seems rather confusing, it actually doesn't exist on the mystical google doc spreadsheet, which is probably most up to date, but it does exit on the leak we got in news here, which seems to match the Quakecon build. If that passive no longer exists, that would be actually convenient for my hypothesis, since it's the only blocking related passive that doesn't apparently affect block as a mechanic itself, but rather gives you damage resistance while blocking. Wording of it all can be rather tricky, especially given they are just leaks and things can get lost in translation, but both s/s skills listed talk about "projectiles", and Defensive Posture explicitly states "spell projectile" (both on the spreadsheet and on Tamriel Foundry listing). With all that in mind my hypothesis would be that blocking any kind of a ranged projectile - be it arrow, a destro/resto staff light or heavy attack, or any sort of a fireball-ish kind of a spell - is possible. That means, ESO would need to use a mechanic separating offensive spells between projectiles and non-projectiles. Also I'm now tempted to make room for Defensive Posture in my build, goddammit.

Not sure how much magicka you'd gauge most caster builds would use, Muscle, but Cripple and Strife are mid-range magicka cost, Entropy is efficient, but then Aspect of Terror is mid-high and Mark Target, while excellent and presumably something you only need to cast once, rather high with 80 magicka at rank 1. Other than that, it loos very solid.

No Dark Exchange on DK .

I typically play with a twohander, but I want to try and make something else work. There is no real reason aside from that, I just figured I can try to make an attrition wear-them-out build and see whether it works or not. It's all about the fluff, I liked playing PvP Prot in WoW at one point where they buffed the hell out of the spec (although not competitive arena wise, it was heck a lot of fun on BGs), I liked playing Templar in Aion and - most relevant to the build at hand - Reaver in Rift. A lot of it all hinges on what kind of things can be actually blocked by the shield, and how that works compared to just all out dps build, how much damage the bash (not the active skill, but the right into left click that everybody has and that gets double damage with a shield passive) does and so on. In other words, I'll try to make it work, and if it doesn't, I'll try something else.

I'll still keep siphoning strikes on my alt set for resources, and if I burn stamina faster than magicka - which is very likely, I can try to fix that either by getting cripple instead of low slash, or teleport strike instead of charge.

I was contemplating one thing for my tanking PvP load out, namely replacing Cripple with Entropy from Mages Guild, so it would look something like: 1 - Low Slash (stamina, -20% weapon damage, -60% movement speed) 2 - Shield Charge (stamina, charge+stun) 3 - Immovable (stamina, I'm teh juggernaut) 4 - Entropy (magicka, dot + small heal) 5 - Strife (magicka, damage + hot) U - Death Stroke Depending on how effective Low Slash is going to be compared to Cripple as a snare (I'll still keep Cripple on my alternative bar), I might get rid of it and put Cripple back in and roll around with 3 magicka abilities. Entropy is interesting, since it's 14 damage and 12 healing over 12 seconds, nothing crazy compared to 11 instant damage and 19-ish healing over 10 from Strife, however the base cost of Entropy is only 29 magicka, and that goes down to 25 with a Passive, and the duration (and I guess total damage as well) goes up by 20% with another (not the healing part apparently, since the healing ticks once every 6 seconds, so 20% duration boost doesn't help). All in all it makes it a very efficient spell, and then there is something I completely overlooked: a passive that increases damage done with a spell cast /after/ any mages guild spell by 15%, which means I can combo Entropy -> Strife to get that extra bit of damage and extra bit of healing out of Strife as a result. That's can be quite some healing, and it's bloody efficient.

My guess would be that it's around 5% to 7% of average spell cost, to match the regen passive of Altmer somewhat.

Nobody is perfect.

"You know, I should really make this gender-neutral." ... 5 minutes later ... "Naaaah"

Just finished setting up a website here: http://hipstersonacid.com/ Will fix the forum categories and write some crap tomorrow, I mean, why do you even need a description with a name like that, amirite?

Or gay. Or both.

You don't really need to invest in Stamina, since it appears that we get 20 health, magicka and stamina per level, plus 10 points to put in either, so even if you max out magicka every level, you'll end up with 1570 magicka and 1080 stamina base. Now on the subject of the limit of abilities - how many extra abilities that you need for PvP can you really list? A melee skirmisher needs a snare, a gap closer of some sort, maybe some burst or execute and some survival or escape tool and... well... that's about it, really. Look at Moba games, that they are able to create rich and interesting gameplay with characters having around 4 abilities each is a testimony of what really matters in PvP: it's the strategy, positioning, communication, knowing when to go in and all out and when to retreat. You really don't need 10 different 5 minute buffs, 4 ways to root people, 10 different frost attacks, 3 different damage shields and 4 escape tools on a mage, all on separate cooldowns. I did buy Razer Naga back in the day, and now I despise the whole concept of having to buy extra piece of hardware to handle all the abilities. I already have a keyboard - it's in the name: key-board, it's a board with nothing but keys on it, if you make a game with so many things to handle that a regular keyboard is not enough, you're doing something very wrong . And if you find yourself in a situation where you can't have everything you'd want and you have to pick between, say, a damage buff or a damage reducing ability - that's very good, PvP is much more interesting when people have specializations and weaknesses.