With Update 35 for The Elder Scrolls Online coming in August, along with the new DLC, The Lost Depths. While these updates are now on the PTS, community feedback for some of the major combat changes has been pretty negative on some points, and now ZeniMax has announced there will be some changes to the PTS build next week.
They’ve laid out three points of feedback, mostly pertaining to damage and healing over time, that they’d like to address and how they’ll go about making changes.
"The first is the loss of reactive gameplay with ticking Area of Effect-based abilities, where delayed tick rates make them feel far less reactive to their surroundings and further punish their lack of mobility as such. The second is how the extension of durations on Area of Effect-based abilities actively harms their effectiveness since their power has been stretched out over a longer period, further increasing their risk of targets not staying in the area. The final is how ESO has always been a game about choice, and how global standards can over-define the reality of ability portrayal and can actively harm that idea."
To address the first point, abilities that have effects that stick (“sticky”) will keep their longer duration, But they will take longer to deal damage with an increased rate per cast but less than what’s currently on Live. Ability effects that are bound to an area (“static) will last for a similar time as they do on Live, but will do less damage per cast, but more DPS than sticky effects.
Some abilities will get baseline timers that will follow through with others to give some breathing room to be competitive without lagging cooldowns.
Effectively, the one-size-fits-all approach they were looking at to streamline things didn't work for much of the community, and it muddled feelings of choice. Changes are coming that should help these abilities still feel different and let players have builds that involve needing to make decisions on risk and difficulty.
You can read the announcement of PTS changes over at The Elder Scrolls Online.
