Oberon

Most of the data on esohead is accurate, though there are some discrepancies with a few of the descriptions not being fully updated. For right now it's a pretty good source of data.

Imperial Racial Passives: CONDITIONING IIncreases Max Stamina by 4%. RED DIAMOND IMelee attacks have a 10% chance to restore 2 Health. SHIELD AFFINITYIncreases experience gain with the One-Handed and Shield Skill Line by 15%. TOUGH IIncreases Max Health by 4%.

Bow: Snipe I got my Bow to 38 in the last beta weekend and picked up Snipe, but unfortunately the 30 minute loading screens, 3-10 second ability lag and crash-out-of-Cyrodiil bugs prevented me from working on Snipe on the last day to get to its morphs. It was essentially unplayable or I would have gotten them easily. If we get to keep our characters for the next beta weekend I'll have them in the first few hours. On a side note, Snipe itself didn't really do much more damage from stealth than a regular heavy attack from stealth. It does have a cool animation--you lean back, aim up at a nice high angle, pull the bowstring back, hold it, and then let loose with a barrage of arrows. It's actually only one arrow, but the animation shows several streaks leaving your bow. It appears very much like you'd imagine an English longbowman firing an arrow at a distant target. I thought of it as a mortar barrage because the arrow streaks slam down on the target from above. It was fun to use. The 40 meter range is noticeable. If you fire at a target from stealth at the maximum 40 meter range, the stealth stun lasts long enough for you to draw and fire a second Snipe before the target runs to inside the 20 meter minimum range. If the target does get to within 20 meters while you are in the 3-second windup, you will not fire at him even if you began the 3-second timer while he was at 20+ meters. When auto leveled to 50 inside Cyrodiil and firing on level 50 npc's, it does about 1/3rd of the target's health when firing from stealth. My character is not yet a legitimate 50, and the autoleveling gives you stats far below what you'd actually have at 50. I'll certainly test Snipe's effectiveness once I'm actually 50 with decent gear. edit: I checked some sources and the following appear to be the Snipe morphs. I have not confirmed these personally but I believe this information to be accurate: LETHAL ARROW ICast Time3 secondsTargetEnemyRange40 metersCost60 StaminaDeals 18 Poison Damage and reduces enemy healing taken by 47% for 10 seconds. 100% chance to apply poison status effect.New Effect: Deals poison damage and applies the poison status effect. Reduces enemy's healing taken. FOCUSED AIM ICast Time3 secondsTargetEnemyRange40 metersCost60 StaminaDeals 18 Physical Damage and increases Weapon Power of ranged attacks against target by 10. Marked target can then be hit by ranged attacks from an additional 5 meters away.New Effect: Enemy takes more damage from ranged attacks and can be hit from further away.

An option to join a Cyrodiil campaign with no pvp. Yep, that's right, a no pvp campaign, so that I could explore, gather crafting mats and do pve content at my leisure. Since the Megaserver breaks up campaigns into blocks of players anyway, nobody would be harmed and like-minded players would simply join that one--no down side.

Light and heavy attacks are the standard free attacks that you get with every weapon. They aren't the same as the active abilities that cost Magicka or Stamina, like Mage's Fury or Critical Charge.

Do we have any cold, hard numbers showing how much damage light and heavy attacks deal?

Actually, I expect they will not allow multiple castings of Daedric Mines or stacking Lightning Spash, as that's the easy (read: lazy) game design solution. Hopefully they'll stick to their original resource-driven design goal and not veer off into WoW-land with such decisions.

For tougher individual targets Weakness To Elements will be a dps boost, because it lasts 15 seconds. In that time you'll hammer away many more than 4 times, so it will pay off. For easy targets that might die in a couple of hits, I agree that it's not so good. Rune Prison is your friend for leakers

Buffs and debuffs will almost certainly be toggles, so that should not be an issue. However, every artificial restriction ZOS places on active attacks represents one step closer to a cooldown/non-resource based system (World of Warcraft) and one step away from the original resource-based design concept they wanted to employ. [*]If a Sorc wants to lay a minefield, he's paying for those attacks just like that Sorc over there is paying for spamming Mage's Fury. I say let him. [*]If a Sorc wants to lay Lightning Splashes all over the battlefield, or even stack them up, he's paying for those attacks too. Let him do it if he wants. He's spending time and resources just like everybody else. It's either a resource-driven system or it isn't. Artificial restrictions dramatically reduce the availability of tactical decisions on the battlefield. For example, if a team of Sorcs stack up Lightning Splashes to make a spot impassable, then they are expending a lot of time and resources to do that. The attackers can either (1) be idiots and run into it and die or (2) come up with a counter by moving around that one spot, going after the Sorcs, or some other idea. Multiple healers can stack their aoe heals, so I would hope that multiple Sorcs can stack their aoe attacks.

The latest info has Mage's Fury with a base cost of 24 dealing 7 damage, and Lightning Splash at 53 dealing 4 damage/sec for 5 seconds. There is a substantial cost difference, so the choice comes down to determining if the target will stand in the Lightning Splash aoe for any length of time. One might imagine that he will not. We also do not know if a Lightning Splash ground effect will remain in place if the caster tosses out additional Lightning Splashes in series. I expect Daedric Mines prevents more than 3 mines out at a time despite the caster paying full price for more, but is Lightning Splash given the same harsh design treatment? We don't know. If the caster can toss out multiple Lightning Splashes, can he place them on top of one another or is the target subjected to only the damage of one? What if several casters put their own Lightning Splashes down in the same place? More questions without current answers

Where did you discover the 30% mitigation number for wearing 7 pieces of Heavy armor versus 12% for wearing 7 pieces of Light armor? I hadn't seen the mitigation figures posted as hard, confirmed values anywhere, so this would be welcome news. Are these numbers confirmed from in-game testing? Also, the new skills spreadsheet indicates that Heavy armor gets 1% per piece of Heavy equipped rather than the flat 4% from the older sheet. This would make it 7% for a full set of Heavy rather than 4%. It's only an extra 3%, but in the world of mitigation, every % matters I agree that Light armor is the way to go for a healer Templar in any event, as Magicka cost/regen is a huge factor for them.

From a code and server standpoint, it's not that big of a deal. If they want to remove buffs, pets, dots and so on when a player switches hot bars, the code only needs to do that when he actually switches hot bars--not all of the time. It's pretty straightforward either way ZOS wants to go on this. There are valid points of view on both sides, so we'll just have to wait for a tester to verify it directly.

To determine the value of regen we still need to know the global cooldown on ability use--for instance, how many Mage's Fury spells can a Sorcerer fire off in a 60 second period, assuming he has infinite Magicka? How many light attacks can he fire off in the same 60 second period? Is it one attack per second, so Magicka regen per second matches up exactly with casting cost, or is it one Mage's Fury every 0.75 seconds or some other value? This will tell us the true value of Magicka regen since it's rated in a per second quantity. Hopefully someone in the beta will just stand and fire off a spell as fast as possible with a stopwatch running and then see if it's exactly one per second or not, and test that with different spells in case they have different casting animation speeds. Same for light and heavy attacks, to determine their worth as compared to activated abilities that cost Magicka. The same calculations naturally apply to Stamina-burning abilities and their light/heavy variations.

Absolutely keep every number we can get our hands on. If the values change, they can be updated. Without cold hard numbers, discussions would be filled with conjecture, and therefore not worth a whole lot

That was my guess as well, implying that spamming Mage's Fury would be far superior to light/heavy attacks--at a cost of burning a lot of Magicka, of course. Naturally, we still need the hard numbers on those attacks, but time should fill in these details (wtb open beta sooner rather than later