In this thread, we would like to give you some insights for some of the major combat changes in the Dark Brotherhood update. We are excited to get these changes into your hands, and hope you’ll hop on PTS to see them in action for yourself! When giving your feedback, it’s most helpful to us when you support your ideas with specific details, math, and logic.



Heavy Armor

A pillar of the ESO experience is freedom of exploration and being able to play how you want. We want you to create characters that are fun, while still being successful in combat. To support this goal, all three armor types need to be effective in multiple situations. Our changes to Heavy Armor focused on giving more resources and more damage, while retaining the feel of a character in heavy armor. We also needed to be careful of not invalidating light or medium armor usage; All 3 armor types must be desirable. This means Heavy Armor needs to be useful for tanking, but also effective at dealing damage. It’s a fine line to walk. To achieve this, we added a new passive that gives increased Weapon and Spell damage, but only when you are hit. This, in addition to the resource gains from Constitution, help distinguish the heavy armor playstyle from light and medium. The longer the battle goes and the more hits you take, the more of an advantage you accumulate. This makes using elemental spells, heals, or melee attacks in full heavy armor powerful. Heavy Armor has more resources and damage than before, but it’s still less than that of light or medium armor. Light and medium armor give you a little more damage and resources, while Heavy Armor gives you a little more survivability. Simply equipping Heavy Armor doesn’t make you an unkillable fortress, and wearing all light armor doesn’t make you a piñata. However, other customization options such as Enchantments, Traits, the Champion System, and attribute point spends will move you in the direction of your choosing.



Charges

For player abilities, reliability is our top priority. We have continued to improve the reliability and responsiveness of charge abilities (specifically Focused Charge, Critical Charge, Shield Charge) over the past few updates. Issues where you couldn’t activate an ability or weapon swap immediately after charging were fixed. With this update, we’ve worked to make charges fire more reliably when on uneven terrain. This issue was caused by having to wait for the server to calculate a path between the caster and target before starting the movement, and often times this calculation was failing. We’ve changed how charges work under the hood so you can now charge up hills and down stairs. In order to increase the reliability of these abilities, we’re also allowing you to charge across gaps in terrain. There is still a height restriction, so you won’t be able to charge up a keep wall. Our goal is to have abilities firing consistently while also maintaining as much realism as possible. We'll have additional fixes for this going into the next PTS update. Please provide us with as much detail as possible if you are still having issues with these abilities.



Damage Shields

Damage shields are extremely powerful because they allow you to build your character fully towards offense while still retaining a strong defense. When adjusting damage shields, it was important to us that they remained powerful abilities that players love to use. We also wanted to maintain the diverse range of shield strengths in the game to avoid homogenization. Some damage shields like the Tri Focus Frost Staff passive give small damage shields, the Magma Shell ultimate gives an entire health bar, and Steadfast Ward gives a dynamic value based on the target’s health



Ultimately, we want to see you commit to being either offensive or defensive when using damage shields, instead of both simultaneously. Decreasing the duration of all damage shields to 6 seconds means that they are just as powerful for stopping high amounts of burst damage. However, there is now less safety with the decreased duration and more skill is required to activate damage shields at the correct time. If you spend 6 seconds trying to finish off someone and get a kill, your shields will drop and you’ll be vulnerable to a counter attack. This change allows damage shields to be strong, lets you continue stacking shields if you wish, but is much more challenging to play offensively at the same time.



Vampire

We wanted the cool thing about Vampirism to be managing the disease. That means adding a reason to be in each stage, and making it easier to manage stages. Now, each stage makes you more vulnerable to Fire damage, but gives you cheaper abilities and activates more passives. This means there’s a reason to be stage 1, but there’s also a reason to be stage 2, 3, or 4 depending on your risk tolerance to Fire damage. Since stage 1 means you take no bonus damage from fire, it’s a great option when running a scorching dungeon like City of Ash. Stage 4 gives maximum cost reduction on abilities and full power from all passives, so it’s great when the fires are out. Stages are now 6 hours long, so you have plenty of time to complete a dungeon in your desired stage.



To give more control over vampirism stages, you can now activate a vampire ability to remove 30 minutes from the timer. Each ability activation plunges you deeper into vampirism, so use them carefully.



To go hand in hand with the updates to how vampire works, we’ve also updated the abilities and made them more powerful. Mist Form removes roots currently on your character, making it much easier for vampires to escape sticky situations and helps combat players who use multiple snares. Drain Essence now heals for much more, but it continues to “snapshot” your health value on activation. This mean if you cast the ability at high health, it will heal you for a small amount, even if your health dips low. If you activate it when you are very low health, it will provide a strong heal every tick, even if you receive healing from another source. This helps provide the feeling we are looking for with vampire: High risk, high reward.



Fighters Guild

The Fighters Guild abilities were previously pretty niche and only useful in specific situations. We wanted to make them more broadly applicable, in the same way the Mages Guild is useful for all Magicka-based players who have always had more options in choosing skills. We wanted to broaden the toolkit for stamina, and now Fighters Guild abilities are useful for all stamina characters. At the same time, we also wanted to keep the flavor and personality that Fighters Guild offers. The first step we took was to remove the Undead or Daedra requirement from all abilities and make them deal their bonus effects to all types of enemies. To keep the monster hunter theme, we put a 20% damage bonus to Undead and Daedra on the Skilled Tracker passive. To make these all useful for stamina builds, we changed their damage type to physical so they scale with armor penetration, weapon critical, and the Champion star Mighty. We’re expecting to see a lot more players using Fighters Guild abilities specifically in overland, dungeon, and PvP areas.



Improved Item Traits

Every part of a boss fight should feel awesome in ESO. Combat is fluid and the bosses have a lot of cool abilities, but sometimes the loot can be disappointing. We want all item traits to be useful, and bosses to have more loot. Farming a boss for item drops is great for players who want to collect every set, or players looking to get a specific set with a specific trait. For example, the Exploration trait was a clear choice for redesign since the world is a finite size, and eventually it’s all revealed. We also wanted all traits to exclusively have combat bonuses. Exploration isn’t something you used while fighting monsters, just when running around. All of the newly updated traits are effective while in combat. Training is another example of a trait that, previously, could become less desirable as you progress through the game. Now, it increases XP from kills, so it will continue to help you progress after level 50 and your skill lines are maxed. Some traits like Divines and Infused Armor are already popular so we left them as-is. With this update, high-level content will be dropping items more frequently and with a wider variety of items. Maelstrom Arena now gives a guaranteed set drop after every level, and Sanctum Ophidia will give a set drop for every boss kill. Overall, expect to see set items dropping more frequently and in a greater variety of traits.



The combat team will continue throughout PTS working on bug fixes, balance, and polish of these new features. We'd love it if you hopped on PTS and let us know what you think.

Lead Combat Designer

Eric Wrobel