Tamriel Foundry

Having spent most of my ESO time over the past 4 weeks on the PTS, here are my thoughts.

The synergy change is welcoming; the activation of synergies fire off promptly and the reversion (in PTS 3.3.3) of synergy cooldown back to 20 s is great. That said, as of PTS 3.3.2, there was still a bug relating to proximity rule of the availability of synergies in groups of players, which I hope will be fixed before it goes Live.

Blocking change is unnecessary and serves nothing but to marginalise the already least-played role in endgame. They are really shooting themselves in the foot by opting for this, especially after the good work of lifting the AoE cap.

Heavy attack timing is closely related to the change to Off-balance status, where the introduced cooldown period of 15 s and Off-balance period of 5 s (as of PTS 3.3.3) placed an artificial limitation on the skill rotation of players. In prolonged combat events in the endgame, where resource management is of greater importance, the challenge for players would be to take advantage of the double resource returned in the 5 s window, while minimising disruption to their rotation and thus their overall dps. For some classes and setups where the DoT timing permits players to fully utilise this 5 s window (2 full heavy attacks), the adjustment needed may be minimal. But where the DoTs don't fit in perfectly, e.g. magicka templar, it poses another challenge. A related and inevitable consequence is that any remaining magicka setups that still utilise dual wield (mostly templars) will be eliminated due to the furthered inefficiency (on top of the lower weaving damage) with doing fully charged heavy attacks with swords on magicka-based characters. A change that seeks to increase variability and expand the the tactical options for players, also takes some of that back - it's a zero sum.

The interrupt change actually functioned well on the PTS, partly because heavy attacks and some common skills are still exception to the interrupt rule (e.g. Puncturing Strikes, Soul Strikes and Uppercut); it also isn't as helpful as it sounds to people getting interrupted, and not as detrimental to the people who interrupt, because the article was only giving a partial picture (whether intentionally or not). When one is interrupted, one cannot recast the same ability within 3 s, but one is also staggered, stunned (2.5 s) and set off-balance for 5 s (as of PTS 3.3.3), this means that under most circumstances, the 3 s penalty to recast the ability is moot. When this elapses or when the player breaks free, a 7 s cc immunity is applied, preventing against other hard cc effects. Where the article says "making future casts unstoppable", it really is just referring to the future casts of hard cc effects made in the 7 s window. The immunity itself is not unique to interrupt, can be granted through potions, skills or breaking free of other hard cc effects and is already a core part of PvP. Therefore functionally, all this change does is to have the cc immunity apply to interrupt, in order to allow counter-play and break the stalemate between people who continually interrupt others and people who are continually interrupted with zero cooldown.

The AoE change is welcoming. Having previously relaxed the target cap in 2.7 (first 6 targets by 'proximity' take 100% damage, next 18 take 75% of damage and last 36 take 50% of damage), this is indeed another step to remedy a perceived issue that wasn't a problem to begin with. It is easy to overuse "I told you so" and erode its connotation meaning but this is a case where its use is warranted, because of the profound impact it has had on the game over the past 45 months.

Given all the combat mechanics changes that are coming with update 3.3, a few of which are outlined in the article, I am still not getting an indication of whether or not ZOS has a clear direction of where they want to take the game to, the audience that they want to appeal to and ideas or intention on how to address other glaring shortcomings and unbalance of the current mechanics (e.g. magicka DK in endgame, overabundance of niche or underpowered gear and increasing power disparity (partly due to the Champion System)). It does feel that they are merely remedying their own errors in the past, while devoting much development time on cosmetic aspects of the game (e.g. player housing, outfits and crown store).

Awesome insight @Latin, your perspective makes things much more clear, particularly the clarification on the actual consequences of the stated interrupt change.

AS a tank - I'm super excited about this update. Check me out ma!