This article will go over the sum of the 5 weeks of changes being applied to all of the six Elder Scrolls Online classes in terms of combat skills from the Public Test Server cycle for Update 36 otherwise known as the Firesong DLC. Due to popular demand, we will also be adding other combat changes to this page.
For the latest and accurate tooltips, refer to our Skills and Item Sets database.
Dragonknight
Ardent Flame
Shifting Standard: Fixed an issue that would cause the Ability Bar Timer to reset after recasting the ability to move it.
Templar
Dawn's Wrath
Backlash: This ability and its morphs have been slightly reworked.
- The final damage now deals a guaranteed amount of damage based on your highest offensive stats, rather than dealing damage based on the damage it took from you over the duration and with a cap based on your Weapon or Spell Damage.
- The final damage deals approximately 10% more damage than the initial hit at base and increases up to an additional 200% to reach similar values of power seen before.
- The final damage now takes more overall damage to reach, to make the payout less reliably reached in PvP scenarios.
- These abilities are now once again limited to having one active at a time, to fix numerous exploits and bugs with the ability. This means if you cast the ability on another target while it is active, it will remove the previous cast.
Power of the Light (morph): Increased the duration of Minor Breach from this morph to 7-10 seconds, up from 6-9. This effect is also no longer tracked over the base ability with the Ability Timers option enabled, to help you keep track of the core ability instead.
Warden
Animal Companions
Advanced Species: This passive now increases your Critical Damage done by 2/4%, rather than your Armor Penetration by 495/990.
We’re shifting this passive’s focus away from raw damage and more into Critical damage, to help focus the class’s natural tendency to burst foes down. This change should also help bring up Light Armor focused Wardens, while toning down some of the power that their currently much stronger Medium Armor cousins have.
Feral Guardian: Fixed an issue where the bear from this Ultimate and its morphs could get stuck in a loop of trying to cast Crushing Swipe repeatedly until it perished or was crowd controlled. It was just trying to make you proud.
Green Balance
Budding Seeds (morph): Fixed an issue where the final heal from this ability was centered on the caster, rather than the Area of Effect.
Winter's Embrace
Arctic Blast (morph): Removed the target cap from the damage of this morph, as the damage is no longer tied to stunning enemies.
Piercing Cold: Increased the damage done bonus of this passive to 6 and 12% with an Ice Staff equipped, instead of increasing your damage done by 1/2%.
This passive is currently creating issues with morph choices in the class, as Wardens have a healthy mix of damage types outside of Magic and Frost. Many morphs that are meant to focus on damage are either close to or even eclipsed by the more utility driven morphs that retain Magic Damage, and the lack of more DPS focused Ice Damage abilities (since they are predominantly made for tanks or utility) create a situation where this passive isn’t helping the unique identity of Ice Mages keep up with other play styles. By shifting the focus of the passive over to generic damage that contextually gets stronger for the audience the passive is made for, we hope to help bring that playstyle up a bit more.
Rather than increasing the generic damage bonus of this passive, we're relying on Glacial Presence's new effect to help the base line Warden experience, then sweetening the deal slightly for those extra frosty builds out there.
Glacial Presence: This passive now increases the damage done by your Chilled status effect based on a value determined by your highest offensive stats, rather than adding 10% Critical Damage and Healing to recently Chilled targets.
It didn’t feel right having two passives that essentially did the same thing (between this and Advanced Species). As such, we're making Glacial Presence grant a bonus damage modifier that scales with your Offensive stats. This way, we don't need to worry too much about tankier builds getting a lot of power out of this passive, while helping the generic damage of the class go up when utilizing their kit and rewarding them even more if they are focused on Frost Damage as a whole. We're not too concerned about the potential Critical Healing loss here either since the requirement of an ally recently being Chilled was only applicable in PvP, where Warden healers specifically will be losing this small bit of power.
Nightblade
Shadow
Path of Darkness: Fixed an issue with this ability and morphs’ Major Expedition where the visual effects could flicker and cause client performance issues.
Weapons
Bow
Volley: Fixed an issue where this ability and its morphs only used your Weapon Critical, rather than dynamically scaling with whatever was higher.
Destruction Staff
Weakness to Elements: Increased the duration of this skill to 30 seconds at its final rank, up from 20.
Elemental Drain (morph): This morph now increases the duration to 60 seconds at its final rank, up from 23.
Elemental Susceptibility (morph):
- This morph now applies each elemental status effect (Burning, Chilled, AND Concussed) every 6 seconds, rather than applying a random of the three every 6 seconds.
- This morph no longer gains extended duration and now lasts 30 seconds, down from 60.
- Fixed an issue where the status effects from this ability could fail to apply.
- Increased the range to 35 meters at rank IV, up from 33 meters.
We’re moving around some of the morph diversity here to reinforce use case and define the power of each. Since Elemental Drain focuses on being more of a pure debuff, the duration extension feels more appropriate there, while Elemental Susceptibility reinforces the offensive bonuses we added a few patches back.
Alliance War
Assault
Resolving Vigor (morph): Reduced the healing from this morph by approximately 10%.
Racial Passives
Khajiit
Robustness: This passive now increases your Health, Magicka, and Stamina Recovery by 90 at their final rank, rather than your Health Recovery by up to 100 and your Magicka and Stamina Recovery by up to 85.
Champion Points
Warfare
Occult Overload:
- Reduced the damage per stage of this star to 1037, down from 2560.
- This node now also applies a random status effect to enemies hit.
- Added a cooldown of 1 second, to prevent cascading effects.
- The damage no longer has a maximum target cap of 6.
We’re toning down some of the burst damage of this effect, as well as its prevalence to operate like Vicious Death where it can cause cascading booms when you kill a large number of targets at the same time. The star doesn’t have enough drawbacks to justify the ease of access to instantly kill large groups of enemies, as well as being a bit overboard when used in tandem with other effects. To make up for this, though, we’re adding some more self-synergy to the effect where it will reward more booms back-to-back if you can manage to kill the affected targets within the time frame of the status applied, so it feels more controlled in risk reward situations rather than random.
Combat Fixes
- Fixed an issue where some ticking Area of Effect abilities could delay or miss their first tick, or could apply their effects out of sync with their tick rates.
- Fixed an issue where re-zoning could cause your character to load a different ability bar in some rare cases.
- Fixed an issue where Break Free’s animation could fail to play in situations when your character would be stunned mid-animation with effects such as Time Stop.
- Death recaps will no longer taunt you with the concept of bringing a friend or using the grouping tool for solo arenas such as Maelstrom Arena.
- Tri-Focus: Fixed an issue where this passive was not properly causing your block to cost Magicka.
- Fixed an issue where bashing could clear your Heavy Attack inputs.
- Fixed an issue where some immobilizes did not properly disable sprint.
- Fixed an issue where you could become stuck Heavy Attacking indefinitely after roll dodging while inputting a Light Attack.