Mechanics Questions

[Terhix]

Does anyone know the Breton's magicka mastery value at level 50? Or want to hazzard a guess what it might be?

 

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

[Musclemagic]

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

 

Based on rank 1 abilities, average spell cost is about 48. So, 3/48 = 6.25% extra casts (comparable to 7% extra regen). It really shines though when you use cheaper spells like Fury for 24. 3/24 = 12.5% extra amount of casts. Magicka Mastery's potentially really good, it just depends on how you use it though--like everything else.

[Terhix]

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.

[ghost5689]

OMG,soo guys i got a certian beta invite i wont say from where or what game hehe. Any advice?

[Terhix]

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.

[Musclemagic]

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.

 

The real question isn't if you can block them. It's, "If you block a powered ranged attack, will the person be knocked like they would be knocked if they're using melee? Does this apply to Resto Staff which uses a magic attack, albeit at short ranged? And, if it applies to Resto, does it also apply to Destro and Bow if they're within countering-range (melee range)?"

 

PVE I'd take Defensive Posture and Puncture for sure, but I don't think a single spell is worth reflecting in PVP for the price of their spell-cast. In a game where there's no big cooldowns that you can expect and there's a lot of small spells, reflecting spells will be much better over-time, (Reflective Scale//Eclipse) than for a single spell at a time, unless you have a way of knowing when someone's going to cast an Ultimate or something. In PVE you'll probably have a better idea of when something worth reflecting is coming your way and you can be prepared for it. In PVP, will anything be worth the cost? Will everything be worth the cost? Can you make a 5 heavy 2 medium S&S Build that's able to continuously spam it and it can beat any caster in PVP? Can you do this with any MP heavy Temp or DK, forcing the opponent to just stop using spells on you entirely? Maybe these abilities don't even work in PVP, but I don't see them doing that.

[Terhix]

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.

[ghost5689]

Dont know if you guys could help me or not but while downloading it i get a webget error then it starts all over again from zero

 

by the way since i actually got more than one invite am i allowed to give them away. 

[Terhix]

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).

[Musclemagic]

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.

 

I mained a prot war in high mmr rbgs, I know it was useful in WoW pvp but because it's spammable and low cost I don't think it will be very easy to use in ESO... If it is, then it's flat out overpowered and killing a tank would be near impossible for a caster.

[Terhix]

I mained a prot war in high mmr rbgs, I know it was useful in WoW pvp but because it's spammable and low cost I don't think it will be very easy to use in ESO... If it is, then it's flat out overpowered and killing a tank would be near impossible for a caster.

 

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.

[More-Oh-Wind]

 

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 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).

 

 

NOOO MY PRECIOUS STAMINA REGEN ON A KHAJIIT!!!

 

Doesn't make sense IMO, but I'm sure it does from a AvAvA battle scenario

[Musclemagic]

Does anyone know if we can use one weapon type for both bars? (Either 2 different Destro Staff bars, or even using DW and then using one of those DW weapons in your S&S bar#2. Maybe even using the same Bow in both bars?)

 

If so, does it limit you to 1 ultimate for that 1 weapon type--if you're using the exact same weapon on both bars?

[ghost5689]

yes, you can use the same weapon dont know about ultimate though.

[ghost5689]

Does anyone know if the bow or destruction staff does more damage at lvl 1?

[Musclemagic]

yes, you can use the same weapon dont know about ultimate though.

 

You just made my day!

[DocZero00]

You just made my day!

I have not been in beta yet , but what  everyones says each Ultimate is its own spell ; so I would think you could put the same

Ultimate on each task bar even if you dont have the same weapon type.

[Musclemagic]

I have not been in beta yet , but what  everyones says each Ultimate is its own spell ; so I would think you could put the same

Ultimate on each task bar even if you dont have the same weapon type.

 

Yeah, the quake-con video shows that that's true.

 

I was mostly asking about the weapons. If you have the same weapon for both bars, if you would be able to also use different ultimates on those two bars was a side question--the answer's probably yes, but I've still never seen someone using two different ultimates at all so it's just something I think about a lot.

[Musclemagic]

Anybody got a guess on what will increase pet damage/health? Will it be flat #'s based on your cLvl or will it scale with SP and/or WP? What do you think?

[Volgard]

Few questions about blocking:

 

1) damage reduction (physical only?) is different if we consider shield block, 2h weapon block and dual wielding weapons block, but could someone give me numbers on that?;

 

2) mechanics of blocking

– “pure†block means that I have raised shield/weapon (holding right mouse button) and I’m waiting for attack or I can bash opponent anytime (clicking left mouse button while holding RMB)– this is standard block and in that process after hitting he won’t be off-balanced?

- “parrying†block means that I have raised shield/weapon and I’m waiting for attack animation (only doable with enemy power attacks?) to bash (LMB) and in that process after successful “parry†he will be off-balanced?

 

3) blocking damage reduction is applied to physical attacks (for sure - swords, axes, hammers, daggers and shield’s bash) only?. But what about arrows? Same/less amount? Is hitting box for DW or 2h smaller than shield’s (I’m facing archer ofc)?

 

4) damage from spells is reduced (only?) by overall magic/element resistance or I can block some damage from f.e. fireball (projectile type of attack not sfrom staves) ?

 

5) can I parry special attacks from weapon skills (Low Slash, Uppercut etc.) or it’s “technically†impossible due to overall game mechanic or very fast animations?

[Musclemagic]

All we really know about blocking right now is that 1) you move slower 2) it costs stamina to hold down the block button, like sneaking 3) you can block projectiles/ranged attacks as well as melee attacks. I'm not sure if you can block spells/abilities, but I don't think we'll be able to.. 4) you can block with weapons other than shields, but maybe not dual-weild..although I reckon we'll be able to. 5) you can bash, it costs stamina, and you can also power bash with the ability in the shield tree 6) I don't believe there is parrying 7) when you block someone's power attack it puts them off-balance, and then when they get hit by a power attack they get knocked down.

 

I don't know how accurate this information is. "Projectiles and ranged attacks" might not include magic abilities, but rather abilities like Scatter Shot, Silver Bolts, or Hidden Blade as well as arrows.

 

I'm not sure the base % that block reduces on damage, it's probably something like 50% for both projectiles and melee--because there are a lot of abilities that increase block % either as a whole or for specifically melee or ranged by quite a lot.

 

I don't think anyone has this information without violating the NDA. So I'd recommend asking for a PM.

[Terhix]

1) There are two passives in the S/B line, one increases blocked damage by 20%, another that increases blocked damage of projectiles by extra 16% and yet another reduces cost of block by 30%. You also can bash for double the damage at half the stamina cost. On top of that, there is a passive that makes you run faster while blocking with a shield by 50% (I hope it means you can run at your regular speed, like it did in Skyrim, and not a 50% of 50% -> 75% base speed).

 

2) The mere fact of blocking a melee heavy attack (power attack) will cause the enemy to stagger. Otherwise, you can use bash to interrupt a cast (not sure whether that makes opponent stagger at this point).

 

3) You can definitely block arrows. I doubt there is any difference in hitting box since this is an MMO and calculating hit zones would be quite an overkill for 100vs100 battles.

 

4) Spells can be blocked, yes. There may be a difference between projectile spells (those can be blocked certainly) and instant afflictions whatever those are, but that's that.

 

5) You can definitely block them, if they have a cast applied (Uppercut) you can bash them.

[Thal]

Not sure if this has been covered already but...1. With the enchantments on armour, how many enchantments currently can be placed on any individual piece? I think last time I checked it was two only tops but wanted to see if anyone knew it had changed.2. Also, I'm hoping that Heavy Armour is not limited to the health enchantments and it is possible to put any combination of enchantments on armour of any type, e.g. A heavy armour helmet with both +50 Magicka and +10 Magicka regen.3. And, finally, is it known whether, like in Skyrim, certain enchantments can only be placed on some items. As a theoretical example, if +X magicka regen could only be placed on boots, helmet and chestpiece but not on other armour piece types? Or can you have all 7 pieces of armour be enchanted with the same enchantment. Say if you were terribly keen on maximising stamina regen and were attempting to put +X stamina and +X stamina regen on every piece of armour you wore. (Note: not actually wanting to do that lol )Cheers!!!P.S. If you feel by answering you may break NDA - PM me please, thanks!

[Volgard]

Musclemagic & Terhix - TYVM!

[irons]

Not sure if this has been covered already but...1. With the enchantments on armour, how many enchantments currently can be placed on any individual piece? I think last time I checked it was two only tops but wanted to see if anyone knew it had changed.2. Also, I'm hoping that Heavy Armour is not limited to the health enchantments and it is possible to put any combination of enchantments on armour of any type, e.g. A heavy armour helmet with both +50 Magicka and +10 Magicka regen.3. And, finally, is it known whether, like in Skyrim, certain enchantments can only be placed on some items. As a theoretical example, if +X magicka regen could only be placed on boots, helmet and chestpiece but not on other armour piece types? Or can you have all 7 pieces of armour be enchanted with the same enchantment. Say if you were terribly keen on maximising stamina regen and were attempting to put +X stamina and +X stamina regen on every piece of armour you wore. (Note: not actually wanting to do that lol )Cheers!!!P.S. If you feel by answering you may break NDA - PM me please, thanks!

 

2. Enchantments aren't limited to the typ of armor so you can but the same enchantments on a heavy armor helm as on a light helm.

 

3. It's the same system like in Skyrim.