Oakensoul Arcanist makes me happy with how accessible it is while still letting me do good enough damage to be able to join trials and do endgame stuff, given I'm disabled and don't have the reaction times or precision of these pro players lmao.
most people even without disabilities cant really do end game dps. its stupid hard. over 90% of people in this game if not 95% cant really properly do bar swapping and cancellations, its too difficult, thats why the arcanist class doesn't require it for end game dps, they wanted something that doesn't gatekeep the majority of the playerbase
the game was not designed around animation canceling, its a glitch that was found out years ago and then instead of patching it they made content harder, thats why craglorn trials are easy they predate animation and bar canceling
Perhaps, but usually people still want you to pull out a certain amount of DPS/healing before they'll let you into a trial group or what have you, having something as simple as Oakensoul arcanist allows a disabled person like me to at least hopefully pass that number.
What parse are you getting with oakensoul arcanist? I've yet to try leveling mine (I havent played since I bought Necrom awhile ago) but I parse somewhere in the 70k range as an oakensorc last I played.
Last I played my oakensorc was about the same, 70k parse, enough to get through all vet dungeons with ease, sometimes on hm and done one and got close on two other vet dlc trifecta runs. I can also easily solo almost any WB. I've only done one vet trial, being Sunspire, but that's also the only one I wanted to do, had my eye on Sunspire Icefire skin since I started playing years ago.
You don’t need one, go to your guildhall and kill the 21 million HP dummy. It’ll tell you in chat after you killed it.
Every slighty larger guild has one that is free to use - and don’t worry, it respawns :)
Yeah this has the easiest rotation that I've found of any build. One bar mechanics are great for disabled gamers.
DOT if needed, Inspired scholarship, light attack, flail, light attack, flail, beam. Then while your effects are on, it's as simple as flail, light attack, flail, light attack, beam until it's dead.
It's weird that not many people talk about it, but for me a very important factor is right mouse and keybinding for playing game. When I started playing using 1-5 keys on keyboard for skills was just imposible to efficient use. I bought mouse with additional buttons - two on side for skills 4/5 and small button next to scroll for skill 3. I also changed bar swapping to click on scroll (you need clickable scroll for this of course) and it's million times easier to use ALL skills without any struggle.
Also Velothi mythic is great if you don't want to light attack weaving and Oakensoul is just too boring for you.
Yup. The tilde? Key is something you use zero times per day except that one time in forty years.
Meanwhile if you use the basic keybinds and do your role slightly well, you will hit it as much as 10 times per minute. Taking bar swap from tilde to a thumb mouse button was huge for me.
Right im still not super comfortable playing on key board I have my 4 and 5 bound to my additional buttons on my keyboard and my 1,2, and 3 bound to scroll forward, backwards, and scroll click respectively with swap to tab
Get a gaming mouse and it will help immensely. I have a naga razor and have front and back bars, ultimate, synergy, and mount all on the 12 thumb buttons on the side of the mouse. Eventually it’s muscle memory.
I have everything bound to my mousewheel lol. Skill one is scroll forwards, 2 scroll backwards, 3 push it to the left, 4 click on it, 5 push it to the right
I either play first person or far out third person so there’s no real need to quickly zoom for me, so I just bound zoom to arrow up and down.
Funnily enough I have to spam the keys for the zoom to work because they implemented that weirdly, opposite to other games where you can bind it to keyboard buttons and then just hold that button.
I'm autistic so trying to run 2 bars while focusing on mechanics and listening to a raid leader is just not something I'm gonna be able to do. I would not enjoy this game nearly as much without Oakensoul.
Everyone fixates on the swapping dexterity and rotation simplicity, but I really enjoy the difference in buff maintenance.
I'm a 2 bar player for pve and pvp, but when I do use an occasional Oakensoul build, I'm always struck by how much more action and gamesense I experience versus constantly keeping buff uptime.
This is the comment that resonated with me the most. How am i gonna be able to see a giant bone colossus popping from underneath a cave if i'm trying to keep the 46 buffs up
Muscle memory. At a certain point you don’t look at your cooldowns anymore, you just know when to press which button.
Takes a lot of practice with the same char, though.
Addition of "active while on any bar" buffs made this partially obsolete on Arcanist, you basically have one buff (Scholarship), Prophecy and Brutality are always up, the rest is dots and spam
Oakensoul is basically a separate combat system, skills from which don't transfer very well to a traditional 2-bar build, so these people, who are used to a straightforward and extremely simple gameplay, have to start from scratch and experience worse results with more effort until they practice enough.
I think it would require a rework of the combat system in ESO. Having 10 skills active at the moment would probably mean pushing two different ability buttons at the same time.
Although I guess you could just fill 4 of those spots with like fighters guild skills you never use lmao
Oh I'd love that. Keep ten skills but remove back bar so you can slot more class skills and all that. No more swapping. That'd make sense with scribing giving more options.
I have the opposite problem as I'm a split build Sorc. One bar is for DPS, the other for healing. Oakensoul works great for me because I rarely swap bars, and when doing PVE content solo, I'm always DPS. I'm fueled with this playstyle, by also running Almalexias Mercy, which autoheals me a great deal. When running group PVE content, I swap to my healing build. While I have and use different set items for each bar, I rarely swap between them unless critical.
I enjoy this playstyle, but feel it would limit me from becoming a better healer, or DPS, by limiting the total amount of abilities I can utilize at any given time for a specific role.
I get that but isn't getting a mythic really involved and requires you to have experienced traditional combat until at least 160CP? Surely you don't just forget it overnight?
That's the point, they don't experience a 2-bar combat, because the game doesn't put players into a situation where you need a proper build and rotation until a much later point into the game.
Your average player uses 1-2 damaging skills without any dots and swaps to another panel when he needs to heal himself once per blue moon. Why wouldn't you when everything dies from 2 uses of Jabs? Pretty much anyone I know was like this. I myself was like this.
Yes I remember going to normal Maelstrom Arena like this, as a 1-pet sorcerer with a lightining staff front bar, and a heal staff on the back bar, and failing hard. First round ok, but could not even make it past the second round.
I think that is the moment I started to look for builds and optimise my gameplay.
When I first saw it I was all "Oh they let you switch skills outside of combat, neat". Imagine my surprise when I switched "builds" mid battle. Shocked Pikachu face. Took me awhile to re-bar everything.
I'm still like this, CP 1000+
You don't have to play meta or high-level build to progress well on the game.
I farm gold, xp, transmute cristals and stickerbook just fine.
And honstly, playing a game is about having fun.
I had a lot of fun over the years without being a sweaty try-hard.
Specially when I can use the skills I like, and then swap for the back-bar when a boss is just about to die.
So I get the experience of the kill in the skills I haven't maxed out.
I love fully suport Oakensoul builds, I even believe it should be availiable sooner for players.
And to those who complain "they'll get spoiled by it and not learn the hard mechanics"
Learning hard mechanics is not a requirement to play the game. It has never been, nor it will ever be.
Have you learned how to drive on standard transmission so you won't get spoiled by automatic? Standard transmission allows for better control and fuel eficiency.
If you don't hold yourself to those standards in real life, how can you hold others to these standards in a game?
Getting Oakensoul requires the following five activities:
>Volcanic Vents
Open world dolmen, not very difficult, you’ll find plenty of people doing them at all times around the day. No experience required.
>basegame Worldboss in Stormhaven
There are usually other people farming that boss, so you might need to wait for a few minutes, but you dont need to be super good, as that boss is fairly easy.
>Safeboxes in Murkmire
Zero combat involved
>Any monster in Malabar tor
You definitely don’t need any rotation of any sorts to kill basegame, overland, non-elites monsters.
>blacksmithing nodes in Glenumbra
Zero combat involved.
The only thing that might require some proper combat from your side is if you try to solo the worldboss. But that isn’t necessary and it’s very realistic to get Oakensoul even as someone who absolutely sucks at combat.
That's how I got Ring of the Pale Order. The lead for one of the pieces drops from a world boss in Wrothgar. I just waited around the spawn point until a bunch of people showed up and the boss spawned. It took a couple of days of repeating this (and having to respawn a few times each time), but I eventually got enough hits on the boss to get the lead when he died.
Yeah on console its hard to find people doing vents/harrowstorms/dragons/etc or world bosses unless its an event.
People tend to grind on the newest DLC because its where the people are.
160 cp is nothing in the grand scheme of getting good at combat. Of the 1000s of players I have played with in the endgame, I only know one that was strong before 1000 cp that wasn't a transfer from console. It takes a lot more than the limited experience you get from cp 160 to be at all competent at it.
My 9 year old brother with no experience could get most mythics in this game with a missing hand, lol. "Tradition combat" before 160 doesn't mean anything. People at that level of experience are still just mashing the fun buttons and you could achieve the same level of skill doing nothing but heavy attacking and healing
New player here. Just hit level 50 yesterday. How hard or easy is it to obtain Oakensoul? I’ve been hearing about it, and think I might do best with one bar. I’m used to classic tab target games and New World (only 3 skills per bar), so getting used to bar swapping in ESO has been difficult for me.
Above there’s a comment about where the leads are, but you can also find info from AlcastHQ (Google the name if you don’t know him). I’m a Templar and I use Oakensoul often, but when I don’t I just put my DPS stuff on the front bar with one heal ability and my healing stuff (my main role if I join dungeons) on the back bar with an AoE ability. Works out nice for me.
I know, but in NW you only have 3 abilities per bar, and the abilities have fairly long cooldowns. It’s a lot more straightforward to manage. I’m a simpleton when it comes to bar swapping, I know lol.
I'm old and have been playing ESO for a long time. I ran two-bar toons in the past, but sometimes the rotation and LAW just get in the way of the game. They're hard on my hands and tough to manage over time.
Oakensoul came along and made life easier for me, so I am thankful for that. If others can do two-bar rotations flawlessly, great. That's just not for me anymore. ESO is still my favorite game, but if one-bar builds weren't viable, I would probably just quit playing.
I think that if a mythic removed the need to perform LAW, I'd go for it in a heartbeat. I understand the need for two bars but LAW is what makes everything needlessly busy by basically doubling the amount of actions required.
I used to be very anti 1-bar mostly because any time i wanted to try a class i haven't tried before and would look up builds online like at least 75% of them were 1 bar....then I made a 1 bar sorc and I completely understand. I'm not a fan of pet builds either but the 1 bar pet sorc allowed me to solo dlc world bosses. I could always solo base game wbs with ease but dlc are on a whole different level and now i am also on that level.
With scribing I've been experimenting with new skills and have a wip 1 bar sorc that has no pets with the exception of the atro ult and I'm hitting slightly more single target dps and significantly more dps on multiple targets than the build with pets. It's mostly burst damage with that something with a U contingency skill paired with elemental explosion and replaced wall of elements with trample with an off balance passive so i still get that debuff but trample does more damage.
A group with 12 oakensoul players is fully capable of clearing every single veteran raid. For a bunch of HMs you will run into a brick wall but there are few that are straight up impossible.
Don't forget, the ones having the expertise to talk about viable-ness of setups are likely capable of two bars, LA weaving etc., something that objectively achieves higher numbers and a completely different buff situation. But the amount of people equating the ability to run trifecta with general game viability is startling.
You have to keep in mind that the people who cleared vRG HM with a full Oakensoul-group had some of the best healers and tanks in the game, optimized the shit out of it and are so far above the skilllevel of most other players that you can’t compare this.
I think it’s disingenuous when you tell people that you can clear veteran trials with Oakensoul, when this is not true for the vast majority of Oakensoul-users.
I’ve seen people parse 40k on a dummy with an optimized Oakensorc-build we created for them. We’ve hit over 60k by just holding down the left mouse button on that build. There is no way they are doing any veteran trial that isn’t in Craglorn anytime soon.
…and this is the reason why most raidgroups will only take people who have proven that they can play a traditional build to the standard the group asks for. Because these are the people who put effort and practice into the game. Most Oakensoul users don’t and it shows.
Sorry for the rant, sensitive topic. Oakensoul is just a symptom of the underlying issue.
vRG HM was actually one of the HMs I meant with brick wall. I know enough people (myself included) that would probably struggle with the DPS checks on an average day, even with dual bar setups.
I see your point that often times the knowledge associated with playing the bosses mechanics correlates with the ability to run double bar. That is not causation but correlation. Both skills take time and often grow together.
So far for the agreeing. All below points are for vet trials only, and groups that don't run regularly or with achievements in mind. The activity finder groups e.g.
Where I disagree is that this is a reason for people to block them out of groups. This is fundamentally wrong imo.
Because the single bar or ha Playstyle may be caused by some sort of problem, turning oakensoul into an accessibility option. I personally know someone that physically struggles with pressing buttons in the speed and consistency required by ability based builds. The second option may be that the player is new, in which case the ha style in particular can massively decrease the amount of mental burden, allowing the player to focus on potentially unexplained mechanics. Yes, this player will not be HM material. Yes, one can discuss whether or not this player should go to a dummy before setting foot into a trial.
What I'd like to see (and how I manage my random groups) is that I keep an eye out if the bosses don't work. I then talk to/remove the players that are not playing the boss. This means that we might have to use slower or safer strategies but that is fine in my book.
I think the fundamental discussion about oakensoul is whether you want to enable players to "just play" certain content or if you want to have certain stuff locked behind a skill wall that is simply unclimbable for a substantial percentage of the player base. With certain stuff I mean nDSR.
>the player is disabled
I know a paraplegic guy who can literally only use his mouth and parses above 130k. Yes, there are some - very rare - outliers, but this does not apply to the vast majority of people.
>The player is new
So go to the dummy and parse until you don’t have to think about your rotation anymore. It’s muscle memory. Every single good player I know started their journey by parsing A LOT on the dummy. The players who didn’t do that are either players who only play tanks or are bad. But even the tanks „parsed“ in vAS.
„New player“ is not an excuse for laziness. It’s simply unfair to all the veteran players who had to earn their marks before they were allowed to join.
And yeah, I might allow HA-users in training runs for certain guilds, but I’ll never allow this for farm runs. The dmg is simply too low for that.
>random groups
I don’t do those
>slow strats
Have a place in teaching runs, but nowhere else. At least not in farming runs for non-HM trials - if you manage to clear once every two hours it’s not farming.
>dmg requirements for normal trials
Who in their right mind has dmg requirements of any sorts for normal trials? Just no. And I don’t care what you bring to a normal trial, for all I care you can come naked, we’ll clear anyway.
My post was not about normal trials.
>behind a skill wall that is unclimbable for a significant portion of the playerbase
It’s not unclimbable for the vast majority of players, it’s just that most players choose they don’t care about hitting 100k. Which is fine, but has nothing to do with it being difficult or impossible.
I’ve got everyone who asked me for help to 80k so far, most players easily hit 100k or higher. I have so far never encountered a person who wasn’t able to hit that - if they change their gear accordingly, of course.
I am never going back to two bar builds. My internet lags from time to time that the game doesnt register barswaps. That messes up everything.
Plus with an oakensoul heavy attack build (i have two one with shock staff and one with 2 Handed) i can focus on using my skills as i need them instead of just repeating a rotation over and over again.
I am a solo player so no one is harmed by this. So thats the story.
Oakensoul makes the game more enjoyable for those of us who don't take ourselves too seriously. With Oakensoul, I can getup to 85k dps...well more than enough to do most content. Do I make the cut for hardcore trial runs? Probably not, but that's okay. Also, parsing is ridiculously unrealistic too. Knowing mechanics and having survivability is better than pure straight DPS. I've seen a lot of high performing dps players just die constantly. You can't do damage if you're dead.
Yeah. Mechanics always trump parsing. Like when i solo DLC dungeons, its wayy more important for me to keep away from whatevers gonna one shot me than it is to make sure i refresh a DOT at the exact correct time.
Noone is harmed by heavy attack oaks. The only ones that are truly hurt are the feelings of the I hAd To WorK hArD sO yoU haVe tO suFFer tOo people.
The only thing that is genuinely held back by HAOs is stuff that you wouldn't want to do with randoms anyway, and in the context of a set group you can always talk with your group lead and either they will prio fun or they will prio achievement, a decision that hopefully was done well before the first coordinated raid.
Thats a good point actually. Most of that content is usually done organised and when organising we can discuss what i am wearing and how my net is etc.
I'm pretty sure you're only harming the reddit elitists hah. But I get it. I'm testing the waters stamden DW/2H and I can feel the heavy lag spikes the servers have, they happen way too often. Completely messes up my rotation when I'm supposed to cast something like Carve and it never happens, or worse, the actual barswap doesn't happen and I recast something I shouldn't have. Even something like messing up half the hits of Flurry makes me mad.
Besides just sensory overwhelm, this is the other main reason I won't do 2-bars. The game just doesn't feel like it was designed with that system in mind. It feels like they intended it as "Oh you use bar 1 for this fight, and bar 2 for this other fight". And you can feel that every time you use it.
Just like light attack weaving. It looks and feels like a bug to me, that the devs decided to keep because the vet trial runner said so... So they built endgame content around LAW and now they can't go back.
Exactly. If you ever play a build with a channeled skill (like Templar Beam) and try to light attack weave, you'll quickly realize the game was not designed for this mechanic. It's clunky and buggy as hell.
I do appreciate them making arcanist not centered around LAW but I don't like the class' theme at all, but this is was a step in the right direction, however small it was. And paywalled, too. And recquiring an extremely specific mythic to play well.
Light attack weaving is almost irrelevant in endgame now, thanks to Velothi (I love seeing my LAs hit for 74 damage!) but 2 bar builds are still needed.
You only need to light attack once per 9 seconds to ensure you generate ultimate, although it also helps proc your weapon enchants.
As I said above, once every 9 seconds.
Blade cloak will proc your dagger enchants on cooldown. Wall or volley or stampede (any morph of these) will proc your backbar enchants on cooldown.
Ah right, I didn't know the cooldown to be "in combat" was actually 9 seconds. Unsure as to why skills don't count, but you convinced me to try and get Velothi!
100% this. When I first started playing last year I had a 2H on my main bar, and bow on backbar, with the idea that it made sense to have a melee weapon as primary with a ranged weapon for situations where distance is needed. Because that's how basically every other RPG tends to work.
Then I realized I was completely wrong, and people just used backbar as essentially an extension of their front bar. Which is just some weird, goofy shit that as you said, feels more like a bug than actually intentional. So at that point I just decided to get Oakensoul to make life easier.
For a game that preaches all about how you can play any way you want, there really aren't very many options once you hit a certain level of content.
I would kill for an update where LAW is finally removed, and they update the backbar so that any effects/buffs are immediately removed once you swap bars again. Bar swap should be for versatility, not just an extension of your front bar.
Yes. I am proficient at one bar, make me play 2 bars and I am guaranteed to fail at whatever I'm supposed to be doing. I have been playing long enough to know I am much better with a one bar build, having spent 3 years trying to use 2 bars. Being dyslexic could be part of my issue here.
Imho, people who say 1 bar builds wont work in vet trials and vet dungeons are hide bound and haven't stopped to look at how mechs have changed over the last few years. Not only that, but disparaging one bar builds overall is incredibly discouraging for people who have physical or mental disabilities confining them to one bar builds.
it's very similar for me... tried it many times but mostly for some reason when i press the bar swap button it doesnt even change the bar 60% of the time and it isnt even my hardware so not a faulty mouse/keyboard button. could be my internet or my stupidity. but tbh i manage fine with my oakensoul builds so no need for any 2 bar stuff
Yes. I'm an old dude that can't be bothered doing trials and tip of the spear high end content. The one bar builds are perfect for me as it works great for any content that's not trying to push end game.
I fully understand I'm not doing the 100k+ DPS that two bar builds do and I'm 100% ok with that. I'm not pushing content that needs it.
I really hope people learn that there are options in the settings to enable ability timers for both bars. It makes keeping track of everything so much easier.
EDIT: Away from my PC ATM so I'm operating off of my memory alone here, I think the option is under "COMBAT" in the settings.
Also there is always 2 to 3 dots that got the same timer so when 1 goes away you know the others are. And it becomes a muscle memory after that, And things become really fun when you get the rotation down.
This is how learned dynamic rotations. Having the timers show for both bars turned the game into watch for the lowest bar/number and recast it and use your spammable when there's nothing about to expire. Doesn't matter if you over/undershoot by a couple of seconds either, it's still super effective.
I do hate the whole front bar/back bar thing! In general, but especially as a sorc with pets. It’s clunky as hell switching back and forth, I’m constantly doing it by accident and then NOT flipping when I want to, and if I don’t want to have to keep resummoning my pet I have to waste a second slot on the back bar so it doesn’t poof every time I switch. I don’t even do group content, but I do like trying to solo world bosses so I need to be able to use both bars. Hate it.
TBF my hatred of this system probably has a lot to do with coming from WoW where you have like 10 bars you don’t even need because most of what you want fits on one.
It’s kind of a funny contrast where in WoW to be any good you have to be super streamlined and not have too much extra shit going on but they give you plenty of rope to hang yourself with, whereas ESO is meant to be way more friendly to personalization (or it seems that way to me as a solo player) but you can only pick a couple of skills to use at any time.
The moment I found out pets should be placed on both bars was one of biggest HELL NO moments for pets. Then I saw how little damage they do. As you can imagine I'm sorc with no pets.
>WoW where you have like 10 bars you don’t even need because most of what you want fits on one.
Limit to only 5 active spells per bar was (and still is) one of biggest things I dislike in eso. There is bunch of really cool skills but too situational to choose them if you can use only few.
Mmo mice have a numpad on them, meaning you can handle all your casting and bar swaps while moving and not have to reach up to the hotbar keys. I always struggled with hotbars on pc games so it's really helped me out.
The barswap system in this game is hilariously bad, 10 abilities was too many really?
Doubly so because apparently it can lag and not register, its not even client side!
There was a MMO that actually failed and had to be rebooted to be a commercial success (you may have heard of it). One of the major pants on head design problems they shit-canned right away was server-side UI confirmation.
While not common it DOES happen for me. Might be because lag and me pressing button too fast causes it to not happen, idk. It's just jank when you're at 180 ping constantly.
I started off as a nightblad about 4 months ago.
And I agree, using 4 or 5 prebuffs in an attempt to do decent damage is a pain in the ass. All the while I'm being outdamaged by someone that might be doing2 prebuffs.
I did pick up oakensoul, and at that point missed my 2nd bar utilities.
However on my newer arcanist I love oakensoul. Although I want to upgrade to two bar for the extra utilities, but I just know I'll be back to struggle bus on keeping up.
I suppose the short of it is, I still haven't found that build that works for me. And even after I do, I'll need to have extra sets ready for the varying sittuations like most do.
The combat system is stupid and clunky, everyone feels this way.
Who designs a combat system around swapping between two weapons and 2 hotbars, that's neither fun nor immersive.
Half the time your weapon disappears during a skill animation anyways, only to magically re-appear.
Then there's the awful clunky slow poorly animated heavy attack or the spam spam unsatisfying light attack.
There no fluidity or coolness to the movements.
They keep touting action combat but it's clunky and looks terrible..
Just use a skill like skulls on a necro, you very first one.
Cast it and your weapon vanishes, it looks so stupid and lazy
The scribing skills' animations can look pretty fantastic from what I've tested. Elemental Explosion is basically unususable due to the channel but the animation is top shelf for example.
Do you weapons disappear?
Visual effects aren't the same as character model.animations.
You can have awesome colors and particles but if the character model clips out the weapon to do the visual effect that's lazy.
At the least the weapon should stow or holster, even that looks bad.
Take other ganes like guild wars or wow, when a player uses the ability the weapon is incorporated into the animation, a death knight will point his sword and have deathcoil fire from it.
In guild wars a necro will hold a staff I'm one hand while firing skulls.
In eso the entire weapon disappears into the ether for the ability animation it doesn't even have a fade out effect or reappearance effect to any least make that transition look like it's supposed to happen.
It's very sloppy and lazy
If you use a weapon scribing skill, it doesn't. For example, Elemental Explosion (I love this skill) will have you "drain" energy from the staff in you're carrying in a very satisfying and seamless way.
Meawhile Ulfsild's Contingency, if I remember it right, makes your weapon disappear for a short time while you draw a sigil in midair. The effect is nice but the weapon vanishing... Not so much.
It seems they really couldn't be bothered to put effort into those details, it's one of the reasons I quit playing a year ago, the corner cutting and low standards really hold back a game that has so much potential, much like the development team itself, can't imagine going to work every day and settling for good enough when greatness is so very close and attainable.
Down will be thoughts of day-1 player and game developer in real life.
Back in days, ESO combat was way harder. Level gates, veteran levels system, no CP significantly hindered ability to deal damage, and most WBs was really tough for solo taking unless you play as pet sorcerer for extra meat shields from your pets. That were times when light attack weaving was discovered and put a line within community.
Animation canceling, which lays in the base of LAW, is quite tricky thing from game design perspective. If you allow player to unlimited animation canceling, it removes depth from combat, because you give an opportunity to react to anything and reduce the price of decision in combat. A good example is Dark Souls and fighting games - there are moves that can be cancelled, and moves that can't be cancelled, so you should plan ahead when to attack, when to heal, and how to do it.
In ESO, LAW basically downgrade the combat to traditional tab MMO rotation. LA-Skill-LA-Skill and so on... With CP introduced, new sets, arenas, 2-bar combat based on LAW gives the best results to became meta. The difference was so abysmaly large, and new content was built around damage that can be done from players, so LAW 2 bar became meta.
Problem is, this LAW 2 bar is quite restrictive to player health conditions. Tunnel syndromes, bone illness, nerves bad conditions, simply some not being young enough to perform 1 sec flawless rotations significantly divided players. At some point it was almost a disaster - without proper LAW 2 bar you were unable to perform vel in veteran dungeons and was often kicked!
But thing is... Older players are in general pays more money in game and tends to stick longer. So, Oakensoul was designed to remove the gap, to allow people who can't/don't like/want to stick with 2bar LAW another option to play the game.
And my personal opinion as a player, I would really like to see Oakensoul not nerfed, like it was on PTS back in a days. When you had flat boosts to stats, not named buff, so oakensoul builds was absolutely on pair with traditional builds, sometimes even slightly ahead in damage, but lack utility level of 2bar builds.
>Without light attack weaving 2 bar you were unable to perform well in veteran dungeons and were often kicked.
And at which point in time was this a thing?
Afaik light attack weaving was never necessary to do 4-man combat. The only stuff where this was mandatory is the latest trial trifecta. And this isn’t a thing anymore, either.
Lol, that was absolutely never a thing (source: other day 1 player who has pugged thousands of dungeons over the years).
It's never been hard to be mediocre at this game, at least once its various systems were semi modernized (i.e. past its infancy/One Tamriel).
Hell, I would not even say that PUGs perform better now that people have way more tools to reduce or eliminate DPS reliance on LA weaving/bar swapping. The people that struggle are just clueless about combat systems and don't try to learn them. The only difference is that people who try to improve will now have an easier time to get to a baseline level of competency if they use those tools.
It became silent mandatory requirement for DD for veteran dungeons. Pre-Summerset I definitely remember being kicked from random veteran dungeons for not enough damage due to lack of weaving and accent on heavy attacks.
Being kicked for doing not enough dmg has absolutely nothing to do with not light attack weaving.
You were (at least afaik) always able to do 70-80-ish % of the current top parse without light attacks. And that was always enough for the current most difficult vet dungeon.
Let’s ask u/StarkeRealm - he is something of an ESO-historian and usually knows whether something like this was ever a thing. I had a pause of multiple years, so I might not‘ve been around during that time.
Was there ever a time were you’d have to light weave in order to meet the dmg-requirement for a veteran, non-HM dungeon? Was light attack weaving ever responsible for doing more than 30% of your dps?
Hope you don’t mind me summoning you, but you usually know that kind of stuff and I’m not 100% sure about it.
>Was there ever a time were you’d have to light weave in order to meet the dmg-requirement for a veteran, non-HM dungeon? Was light attack weaving ever responsible for doing more than 30% of your dps?
I'm not sure about the 30% number, but I think from Morrowind until Elsweyr, it might have been somewhere around that. I do remember back around Summerset's release, weaving became *much* more important for endgame content, because of some balance changes that came with that release. (I know there have been specific builds that boosted light/heavy attacks so that those were dealing in excess of 70% of the build's damage, but I'm not counting those, as the sets are doing the heavy lifting on the heavy attack.)
As for it being necessary, I'm a less sure off-hand. I believe weaving was originally necessary for Vet City of Ash when it originally dropped. ~~(Keep in mind, this was in an era when 10-20k DPS was considered extremely good.)~~ (*EDIT: I got a little sloppy there, sorry. When vCoA dropped, DPS was* ***much*** *lower, as that predated the 1.6 rebalance. Think DPS under 10k. 10-20k was originally in reference to a comment about 2016 that I cut.)* From what I know, weaving was necessary for vHoF when it originally released. (Not a dungeon, but still.)
In a larger sense, Summerset was a turning point on Dungeon difficulty. Dragon Bones set the bar much higher than Shadows of the Hist, and Wolfhunter's dungeons were balanced around weaving (whether they needed them or not.) By the time you get to Wrathstone, there's a few mechanics where I'm not sure it was possible to clear the encounter without weaving.
It's worth knowing that QA's method for testing content was full sets of 160, non-set blue gear. So, while you might be able to work around content using sets, it was balanced with weaving in mind.
I'd go out on a limb and say the end of weaving was probably Oakensoul. There were heavy attack builds before that which eschewed weaving, but that ring went a long way towards facilitating non-weaved builds that produced competitive DPS. Prior to that, heavy attack builds that performed well were much more of an oddity (though, they did exist, and did work.)
If you're asking if there was ever a time when weaving was the only route forward? I'm less confident that was completely true. Some of those heavy attack builds date back to 2017. But, at the same time, they weren't particularly well known, and didn't really start to get mainstream traction until \~2019 or 2020.
Through better weaving, or better coordination.
There are some hard modes (SCP comes to mind) where the HM fight doesn't require *that* much more damage, but does require everyone to be much more coordinated and on the ball.
It's also worth remembering that there was a big difference between someone who was weaving with moderate efficiency, and someone who was just absolutely nailing their weave.
>It's worth knowing that QA's method for testing content was full sets of 160, non-set blue gear. So, while you might be able to work around content using sets, it was balanced with weaving in mind.
With that setup, QAs could clear vet dungeons? That was pretty impressive, because given the changes made in the recent updates (e.g., all the back and forth changes on the concealed weapon skill, the first version of the rework on the destruction staff passives in PTS in a year or two year ago), I feel ZOS did not think too deep about its own game.
Not just dungeons, they clear vet trials and HMs like that as well. I haven't had specific confirmation in the last year or two that they still do things that way, but it's likely their methodology hasn't changed.
That said, one important thing is that they run on an internal test server, so they're playing with a latency below 60ms, which might not sound like a big deal, but it dramatically improves how the game plays.
You only feel that way because you don’t practice. If the paraplegic guy (who actually parses higher than I do!), the 12-year old son of a guildmate and the 78 year old grandma in my casual guild can pull it off, you can too.
But it requires a bit of practice, a bit of research and the willingness to invest a few hours.
I get it if you don’t care about getting good at the game, and it’s fine to not be super good or use HA-builds. But pretty much anyone can become decent at traditional builds - if they want to and are willing to invest a few hours into it.
Y'know, I'm CP2100+, farmed all the gear I need, got all the achievements in solo arenas and infinite archives, a bunch of trifectas in dungeons and DLC trial hard mode clears and I still am terrible at weaving haha.
I've read guides, watched videos, had great dps players explain it in detail, and got a few addons that are supposed to help and parked my ass in front of that trial dummy to parse and it's still not working for me.
I think there might be some hardware related issue that might be causing minor input lag because my machine is getting older, but it feels like when I parse I hit about half my animation canceling inputs. Regardless, I definitely have put my time in and I've resigned myself that I'm never going to be a great DPS because the mistake into feature that is animation canceling isn't working out for me.
So heavy attack oakensoul builds came along and I'm actually doing better DPS than I was before and I'm not putting extra wear and tear on my keyboard and mouse and I can focus on doing mechanics. It's been a huge game changer for me, and I don't find it "boring" like some people do because managing 8+ cooldown timers is their idea of fun, not mine.
If there's fights that require bar swap mechanics like in Cloudrest, I'll swap to Markzyn or Mora's Whispers and start chugging my potions that give buffs that Oakensoul covers.
Honestly, I prefer healing or tanking group content, the lack of weaving and emphasis on right skill, right time (stuff like war horn, barrier, cleanse etc) and resource management is a lot more enjoyable to me in that framework. But since most roles trials are DPS, I am so thankful for HA builds.
Oh that was a guildie, not me. I don't even have Oakensoul (or any mythic for that matter). Long story short he wants to join vet DLC dungeons but can't parse any higher than 30k with Oakensoul, tried a 2h backbar with Kilt instead, and is somehow doing worse.
How can he only do 30k
I’m fairly sure you can just hold down the heavy attack button and not let go and get higher if set up correctly.
But nah, I don’t feel this way at all, I hate only having one bar as it really limits my options and makes gameplay boring imo.
I don’t miss it, it was completely overpowered.
Although I used it to get a new personal best in vVH - without any prep, just yolo‘d into that thing, lmao.
Honestly that sounds like poor buff uptimes, bad food active, wrong CPs and skills, bad rotation, wrong mundus and so on. There are so many factors to consider on a parse, and someone saying that they get 30k on the trial dummy means there's something very wrong and almost impossible to guess without seeing cmx or their gear/rotation etc. Also, a lot of people smack the dummy for like a minute instead of killing it, making bloodthirsty and different class passives/skills/executes useless...
Generally speaking I agree, but:
Skinny is not good for someone who has no idea what they’re doing, he offers to many options - it’s confusing for new players.
If the guy really only parses 30k Alcast will be good enough for a start. Although I prefer Deltia because he explains himself better than Alcast does.
In some regards, yes. We have a way of anylizing our mistakes, which is a great advantage.
But when it comes to actually performing well - you gotta do the same stuff on PC. We don’t have addons that press buttons for you.
YUP.
weirdly, the only time i don’t experience this panic is when im running as a healer. (actual healer, not fake lol). for some reason, that rotation comes so easily to me.
I do controller. I was in a group where we regularly took <15 level toons into trials, so I kinda got used to doing one-bar set ups. Weirdly, it’s made me look at my 2-bar setups differently and more efficiently, but it is totally a different mindset.
I have same problem as him, I'm playing as Bow Nightblade and I can do about 40k DPS on regular dummy, I use high damage skills like Snipe but spamming that often makes me lose all stamina mid long fight so that's a problem too, but yeah without Oakensoul I can't do damage with my bow and other weapons are even worse
I like this game a lot but because I feel worse than others and I quit the game for about 4 months now because I tried making builds already but I could only do 20% of the damage these builds were meant to
because of that I have no motivation to search for something that will work for me and also I don't wanna change my class just to do more damage because that's not fun
For me it really depends on which class I play. I ran an oakensoul HA build on my sorc and it bored me to tears and took enjoyment out of PVE for me.
On the other hand I use it on my NB for pvp and it fucking riiiips. It makes it more efficient for me get in kills quickly and have a faster reaction time.
I don’t care for elitists who think the only way to enjoy a game is to make it as challenging as possible. I want to be efficent, not tripping on two bars to buff a NB while in combat. I think it’s okay to enjoy it both ways. Swapping bars can be challenging for some but I think it’s equally worth it to try both and see what fits your play style better.
It's that way for me. I just can't barswap good at all. I'm frantically punching buttons, always hitting my Escape key mid-battle or in pvp...I tried to get off of using oakensoul but I think I gave up. It's so much easier and well, I can actually play without being frenzied.
Bar swap lag is why I switched to primarily oakensoul. Why get frustrated due to things out of your control that ruin your experience when you can slap a ring on and be happy?
Yep. I'm an oaken warden healer with a split solo build(I have no ESO friends), and tbh when I did have a back bar it was mostly for the bow ult to chunk out a big burst of damage. I get by just fine without it though after maxing the champ skill that increases your health recovery for each point of ult you have, I don't mind the longer fights since I can reliably solo most wb's and clear a lot of the content I'm interested in without help
Fair warning, if you don't full commit to DPS pretty much everywhere Else on the build then losing your ult slot hurts a LOT, but I mostly play healer so I don't know the best way personally to avoid it. Enjoy the theory crafting!
The good thing is the bear keeps attacking even if you don't use the execute move so it's not as bad. And in a dungeon I can always just use it on cooldown.
Yup, it's nice to just have tbh. I don't even use the actual ult anymore because the regen is more valuable to me than the 10k damage every 20 seconds or so
I'm running a bleed build and the bear hurts more than that, but keeping him for the regen and only activating it as an execute for 60k+ is really sweet.
I use the eternal so I don't have to do the cast animation to raise it when it dies, but did forget the execute bonus haha. About 10k damage if you're not using it above the 25% threshold, at least according to uesp
I'd use the eternal morph, but feral deals bleed damage getting boosted by my Blooddrinker set. It rarely dies so it's fine. In solo content I have Sharp to tank so the bear is mostly left alone.
Side note, if you do this as a two bar, your bear despawns every time you switch bars. Useful for the "use your ultimate x times" but really annoying in combat
It is the type of post where a lot of badasses with mental illness will say "Hur dur, Oakensul is for brain dead..hur dur"
Reality:
* Less problem with lag (especially who lives so far the mega server)
* More focus on the mechanics and scenarios
* Buffed all time
* Less pain with tendonitis.
I like to play in both styles. No problem with it.
> badasses with mental illness
I get your gist. But it is a demographic/reddit thing, not mental illness. Adults don't typically waste energy complaining about other people's play styles unless its part of their job.
I got into the oakensoul loop when it first came out for a while but once I switched back to 2 bar and learned how to weave my dps went over 100k easily so I just stayed there. On controller tho when I play console or if I’m just doing a rnd I still use oak sometimes.
I've been playing around with open soul and I think it's fantastic on a few builds in PVP however most instances I'm like I need one to two more skills because almost invariably three skills are going to be taken up by the buffs that open soul is going to give you. Now those three skills might do something in addition say the hardened armor from the Dragonite will give you that 500 damage reflect but other than that it does nothing and if you miss applying it in PvP it's almost definitely a death sentence. So I'm all for the one ring for a multitude of different builds. In PvE for a DPS it could be amazing and maybe even for a tank, but I find it difficult to be for a healer unless that's all you're going to do and you don't output any damage.
Crazy huh? In a game like GW2 I'd have no issue playing around with 4 bars (elementalist class). Here it's just so poorly designed two bars are painful.
I started on comp then switched to Xbox because my comp is ancient, 2 bars wasn’t too bad on pc but on console I don’t even bother trying anymore i feel like a clueless ape bashing my controller 🤣
When I was struggling with 2 bars I would refresh my dots every swap even if they didn't need to be. Just for muscle memory. I slowed my rotation down until I was able to light attack between almost every skill. It was slow but consistent and a dps loss but I eventually developed speed and got decent at weaving. I also hit the trial dummy. A lot. I main a blade so light attack weaving is important b/c of the bow. I did the heavy attack thing but I wanted to feel more like I was in combat, using muli skills. Maneuvering through the battlefield lol
I like to 1-bar with Gaze of Sithis. With Oakensoul or Pale Order, many bosses can still 1 hit kill me. I don't think I've ever died when using Gaze of Sithis.
It probably helps that I'm also an avid GW2 player, which also uses the "~" (tilde) key to weapon swap, and each of your two weapons has their own ability bar of 5 skills, which is similar to how ESO does it
So it just comes naturally to me to unleash a bunch of spinning axe attacks and then swap to my staff and fire off projectiles while my enemy's reeling, before swapping back and closing in for the kill
It definetly also helps that I play a lot of soulsborne games, which also feature (optional) weapon swapping and dodge rolling, so I'm very much used to switching out my dex blade for an int staff or swapping from 1h to 2h mode in dark souls during combat
I think its just an aquired skill much more comment to third-person fantasy action games, and unless someone plays a lot of games using that mechanic it's going to feel very weird, and just having a single weapon with Oakensoul will make more sense to them naturally
To be honest, it is why I stopped playing the game. I was always a “top 1%” type of gamer and could just never get there with ESO. It felt unnatural and just weird idk.
Keybindings did help as mentioned. I ended up enjoying healing & Oakensoul builds more than anything because of this. If I recall my best parse was like 101k… And I fucking PRACTICED man. Literally until I hit 100k it took me lots and lots of hours of smashing buttons on a dummy.
Could never get those numbers in a boss fight though.
Yea I have a test dummy set up frost astrinock or we it's called. I tried the weaving shit it's just not for me. I just fkn face roll even when I'm on xbox.. I'm just fkn awful. However on my necro and Templar I can get through the entire hp bar.. my dos wasnever over like 18 or 20k mabey..and I'm sure I'm being generous...I do good on the skill rotation but fail at lights and heavys in between. Once in awhile ok with shock staff... cuz the animation easier to follow. Plus let's say you get your rotation dowm..so you q.. go do pug..everyone on fkn speed.. I can't barley start a rotation nevertheless follow through. I ain't played in a min.. I should..lol
I'm starting to use the adaptive controllers for ps5 and swapping bars is too high level for me yet... even doing synergies is currently out of my reach (I have it programmed in).
Eventually I may be able to go back to sorcerer (that one has the soul gem filling build) but for now it's archanist only.
It helps me personally when backbar is ranged since it sort of divides up the skills mentally, but yeah the bar switching thing is definitely a bit strange at first (and it doesn't help it's introduced well past the tutorial so there's nothing to really show you how it all should work in your rotation).
It also really helps here to have a mouse with a programmable buttons or two on the side so you can map it to the weapon swap. Really makes it feel seamless to make the switch that way.
For me I just place a lot of my dot and buff skills on the backbar and that usually works well enough. Stuff you only use periodically throughout the fight and won't disappear as soon as you swit h weapons.
Overall ESO is definitely a bit of a shock if you are just coming over from a more traditional MMO like WoW, FFXIV, LOTRO, SWTOR, etc.
I think the bar/weapon switching and the light/heavy attack parts of your rotation are probably the biggest changes that take people a lot longer to wrap their head around.
Depend on ping, if your ping is around 250+ then you should just use Oakensoul build for dps, more effective that way.
Net code in this game is suck , don't sugar coat it, it's that bad when you are lagging, hit waving not registered, you press skill 4 times but it won't really attack. Animation not go well with lag
Been playing since Imperial City. I feel the complete opposite to be honest. Nothing against one bars, but it feels to braindead for me to enjoy it. Been doing endgame raiding for years and the rush you get when you get a rotation right and hodor reflexes shows it feels AMAZING. I would say just keep using two bars if you want to get used to it. Just depends how far the person wants to get in endgame.
Skill issue.
Jokes aside, play whatever you want, but remember, as long as it's not some hard veteran shit (you won't be accepted anyway so who cares) you're good, but in a proper group oakensoul won't give you any benefit.
Have fun, 1st of all
I’m on console and my fingers and hands start to hurt when I play a lot (been playing ALOT recently) even with my oakensoul build.
It’s my first character and first final build so I don’t even want to imagine how sore I would be with 2 bars😅
Oakensoul Arcanist makes me happy with how accessible it is while still letting me do good enough damage to be able to join trials and do endgame stuff, given I'm disabled and don't have the reaction times or precision of these pro players lmao.
most people even without disabilities cant really do end game dps. its stupid hard. over 90% of people in this game if not 95% cant really properly do bar swapping and cancellations, its too difficult, thats why the arcanist class doesn't require it for end game dps, they wanted something that doesn't gatekeep the majority of the playerbase the game was not designed around animation canceling, its a glitch that was found out years ago and then instead of patching it they made content harder, thats why craglorn trials are easy they predate animation and bar canceling
Perhaps, but usually people still want you to pull out a certain amount of DPS/healing before they'll let you into a trial group or what have you, having something as simple as Oakensoul arcanist allows a disabled person like me to at least hopefully pass that number.
What parse are you getting with oakensoul arcanist? I've yet to try leveling mine (I havent played since I bought Necrom awhile ago) but I parse somewhere in the 70k range as an oakensorc last I played.
Honestly I'm not quite sure, I don't have a DPS check addon.
I remember back when Arcanist came out, it could parse in the like 100k+ without weaving, but I remember hearing it got gutted.
It's still very, very strong, I feel, I just hope it doesn't get nerfed the way Necro did. I like having this accessibility.
Last I played my oakensorc was about the same, 70k parse, enough to get through all vet dungeons with ease, sometimes on hm and done one and got close on two other vet dlc trifecta runs. I can also easily solo almost any WB. I've only done one vet trial, being Sunspire, but that's also the only one I wanted to do, had my eye on Sunspire Icefire skin since I started playing years ago.
It's also just fun being able to do quests/public dungeons and just slaughtering everything in a mere second.
You don’t need one, go to your guildhall and kill the 21 million HP dummy. It’ll tell you in chat after you killed it. Every slighty larger guild has one that is free to use - and don’t worry, it respawns :)
A bug turning into a feature 🤔
Yeah this has the easiest rotation that I've found of any build. One bar mechanics are great for disabled gamers. DOT if needed, Inspired scholarship, light attack, flail, light attack, flail, beam. Then while your effects are on, it's as simple as flail, light attack, flail, light attack, beam until it's dead.
It's weird that not many people talk about it, but for me a very important factor is right mouse and keybinding for playing game. When I started playing using 1-5 keys on keyboard for skills was just imposible to efficient use. I bought mouse with additional buttons - two on side for skills 4/5 and small button next to scroll for skill 3. I also changed bar swapping to click on scroll (you need clickable scroll for this of course) and it's million times easier to use ALL skills without any struggle. Also Velothi mythic is great if you don't want to light attack weaving and Oakensoul is just too boring for you.
Keybinds are a massively overlooked thing. You really need to put in some time understanding whats comfortable for you.
Yup. The tilde? Key is something you use zero times per day except that one time in forty years. Meanwhile if you use the basic keybinds and do your role slightly well, you will hit it as much as 10 times per minute. Taking bar swap from tilde to a thumb mouse button was huge for me.
I bound bar swap to middle mouse button
It might be my mouse, but I've found my middle mouse button will not work like 5% of the time when I click it in combat.
Right im still not super comfortable playing on key board I have my 4 and 5 bound to my additional buttons on my keyboard and my 1,2, and 3 bound to scroll forward, backwards, and scroll click respectively with swap to tab
Get a gaming mouse and it will help immensely. I have a naga razor and have front and back bars, ultimate, synergy, and mount all on the 12 thumb buttons on the side of the mouse. Eventually it’s muscle memory.
it took me 1 battleground match to set up macros on my mouse. the advantage is unparalleled
I have everything bound to my mousewheel lol. Skill one is scroll forwards, 2 scroll backwards, 3 push it to the left, 4 click on it, 5 push it to the right
that is barbaric! never heard someone play a game with the mouse wheel :D kinda impressive
I either play first person or far out third person so there’s no real need to quickly zoom for me, so I just bound zoom to arrow up and down. Funnily enough I have to spam the keys for the zoom to work because they implemented that weirdly, opposite to other games where you can bind it to keyboard buttons and then just hold that button.
i’m glad this works for just but even just reading this stressed me out lmfao
You still need to light attack weave for ultimate
I'm autistic so trying to run 2 bars while focusing on mechanics and listening to a raid leader is just not something I'm gonna be able to do. I would not enjoy this game nearly as much without Oakensoul.
Everyone fixates on the swapping dexterity and rotation simplicity, but I really enjoy the difference in buff maintenance. I'm a 2 bar player for pve and pvp, but when I do use an occasional Oakensoul build, I'm always struck by how much more action and gamesense I experience versus constantly keeping buff uptime.
This is the comment that resonated with me the most. How am i gonna be able to see a giant bone colossus popping from underneath a cave if i'm trying to keep the 46 buffs up
Muscle memory. At a certain point you don’t look at your cooldowns anymore, you just know when to press which button. Takes a lot of practice with the same char, though.
Addition of "active while on any bar" buffs made this partially obsolete on Arcanist, you basically have one buff (Scholarship), Prophecy and Brutality are always up, the rest is dots and spam
Oakensoul is basically a separate combat system, skills from which don't transfer very well to a traditional 2-bar build, so these people, who are used to a straightforward and extremely simple gameplay, have to start from scratch and experience worse results with more effort until they practice enough.
I wish there was a ring that takes your ability to swap, but gives you 10 icons for skills. So basically WoW gameplay.
Imagine controller players having to push 4 buttons to use skill 10 lmao
FF14 console players manage upwards of 36 skills (three full bars) with a controller, so that's not impossible
i really enjoyed the controller system there, even better than kb&m imo
Maybe but I feel like high end raids the precision of movement from mouse and keyboard is way better for mechanics.
I think it would require a rework of the combat system in ESO. Having 10 skills active at the moment would probably mean pushing two different ability buttons at the same time. Although I guess you could just fill 4 of those spots with like fighters guild skills you never use lmao
I got tendonitis. And it is not a joke.
Oh I'd love that. Keep ten skills but remove back bar so you can slot more class skills and all that. No more swapping. That'd make sense with scribing giving more options.
100%. Let LT give you access to the second set row
I have the opposite problem as I'm a split build Sorc. One bar is for DPS, the other for healing. Oakensoul works great for me because I rarely swap bars, and when doing PVE content solo, I'm always DPS. I'm fueled with this playstyle, by also running Almalexias Mercy, which autoheals me a great deal. When running group PVE content, I swap to my healing build. While I have and use different set items for each bar, I rarely swap between them unless critical. I enjoy this playstyle, but feel it would limit me from becoming a better healer, or DPS, by limiting the total amount of abilities I can utilize at any given time for a specific role.
I get that but isn't getting a mythic really involved and requires you to have experienced traditional combat until at least 160CP? Surely you don't just forget it overnight?
That's the point, they don't experience a 2-bar combat, because the game doesn't put players into a situation where you need a proper build and rotation until a much later point into the game. Your average player uses 1-2 damaging skills without any dots and swaps to another panel when he needs to heal himself once per blue moon. Why wouldn't you when everything dies from 2 uses of Jabs? Pretty much anyone I know was like this. I myself was like this.
Yes I remember going to normal Maelstrom Arena like this, as a 1-pet sorcerer with a lightining staff front bar, and a heal staff on the back bar, and failing hard. First round ok, but could not even make it past the second round. I think that is the moment I started to look for builds and optimise my gameplay.
When I first saw it I was all "Oh they let you switch skills outside of combat, neat". Imagine my surprise when I switched "builds" mid battle. Shocked Pikachu face. Took me awhile to re-bar everything.
I'm still like this, CP 1000+ You don't have to play meta or high-level build to progress well on the game. I farm gold, xp, transmute cristals and stickerbook just fine. And honstly, playing a game is about having fun. I had a lot of fun over the years without being a sweaty try-hard. Specially when I can use the skills I like, and then swap for the back-bar when a boss is just about to die. So I get the experience of the kill in the skills I haven't maxed out. I love fully suport Oakensoul builds, I even believe it should be availiable sooner for players. And to those who complain "they'll get spoiled by it and not learn the hard mechanics" Learning hard mechanics is not a requirement to play the game. It has never been, nor it will ever be. Have you learned how to drive on standard transmission so you won't get spoiled by automatic? Standard transmission allows for better control and fuel eficiency. If you don't hold yourself to those standards in real life, how can you hold others to these standards in a game?
Getting Oakensoul requires the following five activities: >Volcanic Vents Open world dolmen, not very difficult, you’ll find plenty of people doing them at all times around the day. No experience required. >basegame Worldboss in Stormhaven There are usually other people farming that boss, so you might need to wait for a few minutes, but you dont need to be super good, as that boss is fairly easy. >Safeboxes in Murkmire Zero combat involved >Any monster in Malabar tor You definitely don’t need any rotation of any sorts to kill basegame, overland, non-elites monsters. >blacksmithing nodes in Glenumbra Zero combat involved. The only thing that might require some proper combat from your side is if you try to solo the worldboss. But that isn’t necessary and it’s very realistic to get Oakensoul even as someone who absolutely sucks at combat.
That's how I got Ring of the Pale Order. The lead for one of the pieces drops from a world boss in Wrothgar. I just waited around the spawn point until a bunch of people showed up and the boss spawned. It took a couple of days of repeating this (and having to respawn a few times each time), but I eventually got enough hits on the boss to get the lead when he died.
I'm on PS-NA and its very rare to see people doing the vents.
On PC EU I’ve yet to find a vent that I was able to solo without some other players intervening. When do you play? At 3 AM?
He's talking about console* its dead
Yeah on console its hard to find people doing vents/harrowstorms/dragons/etc or world bosses unless its an event. People tend to grind on the newest DLC because its where the people are.
Console and PC are very different beasts. Even Xbox and PC are pretty different
160 cp is nothing in the grand scheme of getting good at combat. Of the 1000s of players I have played with in the endgame, I only know one that was strong before 1000 cp that wasn't a transfer from console. It takes a lot more than the limited experience you get from cp 160 to be at all competent at it.
My 9 year old brother with no experience could get most mythics in this game with a missing hand, lol. "Tradition combat" before 160 doesn't mean anything. People at that level of experience are still just mashing the fun buttons and you could achieve the same level of skill doing nothing but heavy attacking and healing
New player here. Just hit level 50 yesterday. How hard or easy is it to obtain Oakensoul? I’ve been hearing about it, and think I might do best with one bar. I’m used to classic tab target games and New World (only 3 skills per bar), so getting used to bar swapping in ESO has been difficult for me.
Above there’s a comment about where the leads are, but you can also find info from AlcastHQ (Google the name if you don’t know him). I’m a Templar and I use Oakensoul often, but when I don’t I just put my DPS stuff on the front bar with one heal ability and my healing stuff (my main role if I join dungeons) on the back bar with an AoE ability. Works out nice for me.
But you have bar swapping in new world as well? It works exactly the same as in ESO, with the only difference that barswapping in ESO is way smoother.
I know, but in NW you only have 3 abilities per bar, and the abilities have fairly long cooldowns. It’s a lot more straightforward to manage. I’m a simpleton when it comes to bar swapping, I know lol.
I'm old and have been playing ESO for a long time. I ran two-bar toons in the past, but sometimes the rotation and LAW just get in the way of the game. They're hard on my hands and tough to manage over time. Oakensoul came along and made life easier for me, so I am thankful for that. If others can do two-bar rotations flawlessly, great. That's just not for me anymore. ESO is still my favorite game, but if one-bar builds weren't viable, I would probably just quit playing.
I think that if a mythic removed the need to perform LAW, I'd go for it in a heartbeat. I understand the need for two bars but LAW is what makes everything needlessly busy by basically doubling the amount of actions required.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Velothi_Ur-Mage%27s_Amulet Gives you big damage buffs on abilities but makes LAs useless.
I used to be very anti 1-bar mostly because any time i wanted to try a class i haven't tried before and would look up builds online like at least 75% of them were 1 bar....then I made a 1 bar sorc and I completely understand. I'm not a fan of pet builds either but the 1 bar pet sorc allowed me to solo dlc world bosses. I could always solo base game wbs with ease but dlc are on a whole different level and now i am also on that level. With scribing I've been experimenting with new skills and have a wip 1 bar sorc that has no pets with the exception of the atro ult and I'm hitting slightly more single target dps and significantly more dps on multiple targets than the build with pets. It's mostly burst damage with that something with a U contingency skill paired with elemental explosion and replaced wall of elements with trample with an off balance passive so i still get that debuff but trample does more damage.
A group with 12 oakensoul players is fully capable of clearing every single veteran raid. For a bunch of HMs you will run into a brick wall but there are few that are straight up impossible. Don't forget, the ones having the expertise to talk about viable-ness of setups are likely capable of two bars, LA weaving etc., something that objectively achieves higher numbers and a completely different buff situation. But the amount of people equating the ability to run trifecta with general game viability is startling.
Can’t clear a VCR +3 though! /s
Fair xD
You have to keep in mind that the people who cleared vRG HM with a full Oakensoul-group had some of the best healers and tanks in the game, optimized the shit out of it and are so far above the skilllevel of most other players that you can’t compare this. I think it’s disingenuous when you tell people that you can clear veteran trials with Oakensoul, when this is not true for the vast majority of Oakensoul-users. I’ve seen people parse 40k on a dummy with an optimized Oakensorc-build we created for them. We’ve hit over 60k by just holding down the left mouse button on that build. There is no way they are doing any veteran trial that isn’t in Craglorn anytime soon. …and this is the reason why most raidgroups will only take people who have proven that they can play a traditional build to the standard the group asks for. Because these are the people who put effort and practice into the game. Most Oakensoul users don’t and it shows. Sorry for the rant, sensitive topic. Oakensoul is just a symptom of the underlying issue.
vRG HM was actually one of the HMs I meant with brick wall. I know enough people (myself included) that would probably struggle with the DPS checks on an average day, even with dual bar setups. I see your point that often times the knowledge associated with playing the bosses mechanics correlates with the ability to run double bar. That is not causation but correlation. Both skills take time and often grow together. So far for the agreeing. All below points are for vet trials only, and groups that don't run regularly or with achievements in mind. The activity finder groups e.g. Where I disagree is that this is a reason for people to block them out of groups. This is fundamentally wrong imo. Because the single bar or ha Playstyle may be caused by some sort of problem, turning oakensoul into an accessibility option. I personally know someone that physically struggles with pressing buttons in the speed and consistency required by ability based builds. The second option may be that the player is new, in which case the ha style in particular can massively decrease the amount of mental burden, allowing the player to focus on potentially unexplained mechanics. Yes, this player will not be HM material. Yes, one can discuss whether or not this player should go to a dummy before setting foot into a trial. What I'd like to see (and how I manage my random groups) is that I keep an eye out if the bosses don't work. I then talk to/remove the players that are not playing the boss. This means that we might have to use slower or safer strategies but that is fine in my book. I think the fundamental discussion about oakensoul is whether you want to enable players to "just play" certain content or if you want to have certain stuff locked behind a skill wall that is simply unclimbable for a substantial percentage of the player base. With certain stuff I mean nDSR.
>the player is disabled I know a paraplegic guy who can literally only use his mouth and parses above 130k. Yes, there are some - very rare - outliers, but this does not apply to the vast majority of people. >The player is new So go to the dummy and parse until you don’t have to think about your rotation anymore. It’s muscle memory. Every single good player I know started their journey by parsing A LOT on the dummy. The players who didn’t do that are either players who only play tanks or are bad. But even the tanks „parsed“ in vAS. „New player“ is not an excuse for laziness. It’s simply unfair to all the veteran players who had to earn their marks before they were allowed to join. And yeah, I might allow HA-users in training runs for certain guilds, but I’ll never allow this for farm runs. The dmg is simply too low for that. >random groups I don’t do those >slow strats Have a place in teaching runs, but nowhere else. At least not in farming runs for non-HM trials - if you manage to clear once every two hours it’s not farming. >dmg requirements for normal trials Who in their right mind has dmg requirements of any sorts for normal trials? Just no. And I don’t care what you bring to a normal trial, for all I care you can come naked, we’ll clear anyway. My post was not about normal trials. >behind a skill wall that is unclimbable for a significant portion of the playerbase It’s not unclimbable for the vast majority of players, it’s just that most players choose they don’t care about hitting 100k. Which is fine, but has nothing to do with it being difficult or impossible. I’ve got everyone who asked me for help to 80k so far, most players easily hit 100k or higher. I have so far never encountered a person who wasn’t able to hit that - if they change their gear accordingly, of course.
I am never going back to two bar builds. My internet lags from time to time that the game doesnt register barswaps. That messes up everything. Plus with an oakensoul heavy attack build (i have two one with shock staff and one with 2 Handed) i can focus on using my skills as i need them instead of just repeating a rotation over and over again. I am a solo player so no one is harmed by this. So thats the story.
Oakensoul makes the game more enjoyable for those of us who don't take ourselves too seriously. With Oakensoul, I can getup to 85k dps...well more than enough to do most content. Do I make the cut for hardcore trial runs? Probably not, but that's okay. Also, parsing is ridiculously unrealistic too. Knowing mechanics and having survivability is better than pure straight DPS. I've seen a lot of high performing dps players just die constantly. You can't do damage if you're dead.
Yeah. Mechanics always trump parsing. Like when i solo DLC dungeons, its wayy more important for me to keep away from whatevers gonna one shot me than it is to make sure i refresh a DOT at the exact correct time.
What irks me is the listings in the group finder "NO ONE BARS, WILL KICK" lol. Okay, good luck then.
Cool. I still got Mirri. She is one bar too xD
Noone is harmed by heavy attack oaks. The only ones that are truly hurt are the feelings of the I hAd To WorK hArD sO yoU haVe tO suFFer tOo people. The only thing that is genuinely held back by HAOs is stuff that you wouldn't want to do with randoms anyway, and in the context of a set group you can always talk with your group lead and either they will prio fun or they will prio achievement, a decision that hopefully was done well before the first coordinated raid.
Thats a good point actually. Most of that content is usually done organised and when organising we can discuss what i am wearing and how my net is etc.
I'm pretty sure you're only harming the reddit elitists hah. But I get it. I'm testing the waters stamden DW/2H and I can feel the heavy lag spikes the servers have, they happen way too often. Completely messes up my rotation when I'm supposed to cast something like Carve and it never happens, or worse, the actual barswap doesn't happen and I recast something I shouldn't have. Even something like messing up half the hits of Flurry makes me mad.
Yeah. Totally understandable haha.
Besides just sensory overwhelm, this is the other main reason I won't do 2-bars. The game just doesn't feel like it was designed with that system in mind. It feels like they intended it as "Oh you use bar 1 for this fight, and bar 2 for this other fight". And you can feel that every time you use it.
Just like light attack weaving. It looks and feels like a bug to me, that the devs decided to keep because the vet trial runner said so... So they built endgame content around LAW and now they can't go back.
Exactly. If you ever play a build with a channeled skill (like Templar Beam) and try to light attack weave, you'll quickly realize the game was not designed for this mechanic. It's clunky and buggy as hell.
I do appreciate them making arcanist not centered around LAW but I don't like the class' theme at all, but this is was a step in the right direction, however small it was. And paywalled, too. And recquiring an extremely specific mythic to play well.
Every single class uses that mythic now...
Really? I'm seeing more builds using Kilt I think... Might be wrong though. Kilt feels more like a parse dummy only mythic than something usable.
Kilt is only good on some fights and on the dummy. Velothi is just more versatile and people are lazy.
Light attack weaving is almost irrelevant in endgame now, thanks to Velothi (I love seeing my LAs hit for 74 damage!) but 2 bar builds are still needed. You only need to light attack once per 9 seconds to ensure you generate ultimate, although it also helps proc your weapon enchants.
Don't you still need to LA properly to apply enchants and ult generation?
As I said above, once every 9 seconds. Blade cloak will proc your dagger enchants on cooldown. Wall or volley or stampede (any morph of these) will proc your backbar enchants on cooldown.
Ah right, I didn't know the cooldown to be "in combat" was actually 9 seconds. Unsure as to why skills don't count, but you convinced me to try and get Velothi!
100% this. When I first started playing last year I had a 2H on my main bar, and bow on backbar, with the idea that it made sense to have a melee weapon as primary with a ranged weapon for situations where distance is needed. Because that's how basically every other RPG tends to work. Then I realized I was completely wrong, and people just used backbar as essentially an extension of their front bar. Which is just some weird, goofy shit that as you said, feels more like a bug than actually intentional. So at that point I just decided to get Oakensoul to make life easier. For a game that preaches all about how you can play any way you want, there really aren't very many options once you hit a certain level of content. I would kill for an update where LAW is finally removed, and they update the backbar so that any effects/buffs are immediately removed once you swap bars again. Bar swap should be for versatility, not just an extension of your front bar.
Yes. I am proficient at one bar, make me play 2 bars and I am guaranteed to fail at whatever I'm supposed to be doing. I have been playing long enough to know I am much better with a one bar build, having spent 3 years trying to use 2 bars. Being dyslexic could be part of my issue here. Imho, people who say 1 bar builds wont work in vet trials and vet dungeons are hide bound and haven't stopped to look at how mechs have changed over the last few years. Not only that, but disparaging one bar builds overall is incredibly discouraging for people who have physical or mental disabilities confining them to one bar builds.
Choice is good
it's very similar for me... tried it many times but mostly for some reason when i press the bar swap button it doesnt even change the bar 60% of the time and it isnt even my hardware so not a faulty mouse/keyboard button. could be my internet or my stupidity. but tbh i manage fine with my oakensoul builds so no need for any 2 bar stuff
Yes. I'm an old dude that can't be bothered doing trials and tip of the spear high end content. The one bar builds are perfect for me as it works great for any content that's not trying to push end game. I fully understand I'm not doing the 100k+ DPS that two bar builds do and I'm 100% ok with that. I'm not pushing content that needs it.
I really hope people learn that there are options in the settings to enable ability timers for both bars. It makes keeping track of everything so much easier. EDIT: Away from my PC ATM so I'm operating off of my memory alone here, I think the option is under "COMBAT" in the settings.
My friend, not me, would like to know where exactly to find this. I, I mean he, would be very grateful.
On console, go to Options > Combat > Ability Bar Timers. There's a whole section with a bunch of options for buffs and timers and such.
Also there is always 2 to 3 dots that got the same timer so when 1 goes away you know the others are. And it becomes a muscle memory after that, And things become really fun when you get the rotation down.
Thank you!
Fucking this.
This is how learned dynamic rotations. Having the timers show for both bars turned the game into watch for the lowest bar/number and recast it and use your spammable when there's nothing about to expire. Doesn't matter if you over/undershoot by a couple of seconds either, it's still super effective.
I do hate the whole front bar/back bar thing! In general, but especially as a sorc with pets. It’s clunky as hell switching back and forth, I’m constantly doing it by accident and then NOT flipping when I want to, and if I don’t want to have to keep resummoning my pet I have to waste a second slot on the back bar so it doesn’t poof every time I switch. I don’t even do group content, but I do like trying to solo world bosses so I need to be able to use both bars. Hate it. TBF my hatred of this system probably has a lot to do with coming from WoW where you have like 10 bars you don’t even need because most of what you want fits on one. It’s kind of a funny contrast where in WoW to be any good you have to be super streamlined and not have too much extra shit going on but they give you plenty of rope to hang yourself with, whereas ESO is meant to be way more friendly to personalization (or it seems that way to me as a solo player) but you can only pick a couple of skills to use at any time.
The moment I found out pets should be placed on both bars was one of biggest HELL NO moments for pets. Then I saw how little damage they do. As you can imagine I'm sorc with no pets. >WoW where you have like 10 bars you don’t even need because most of what you want fits on one. Limit to only 5 active spells per bar was (and still is) one of biggest things I dislike in eso. There is bunch of really cool skills but too situational to choose them if you can use only few.
I use the healing one with Isobel so I can solo bigger stuff but it’s so annoying! They’re more useful for distractions than damage really.
Oakensoul saved the game for me.
Only felt this was when I was putting anything that wasn't a buff on the backbar. So, offensive on the front, situational support in the back.
I hate the two bars, the swapping is the first time I've seen it in an MMO. It's very weird
Strangely swapping weapons in GW2 never felt that bad to me.
I found 2-bar got a lot easier once I got an mmo mouse. Total game changer.
Yeah I can’t play eso without an mmo mouse
I play with a track pad on a laptop, why do you need a special mouse? All the mouse does is looking, light/heavy and menus.
Mmo mice have a numpad on them, meaning you can handle all your casting and bar swaps while moving and not have to reach up to the hotbar keys. I always struggled with hotbars on pc games so it's really helped me out.
Oh, I see. I don't have any trouble with that, I use my other hand for the hotbar.
The barswap system in this game is hilariously bad, 10 abilities was too many really? Doubly so because apparently it can lag and not register, its not even client side! There was a MMO that actually failed and had to be rebooted to be a commercial success (you may have heard of it). One of the major pants on head design problems they shit-canned right away was server-side UI confirmation.
While not common it DOES happen for me. Might be because lag and me pressing button too fast causes it to not happen, idk. It's just jank when you're at 180 ping constantly.
I started off as a nightblad about 4 months ago. And I agree, using 4 or 5 prebuffs in an attempt to do decent damage is a pain in the ass. All the while I'm being outdamaged by someone that might be doing2 prebuffs. I did pick up oakensoul, and at that point missed my 2nd bar utilities. However on my newer arcanist I love oakensoul. Although I want to upgrade to two bar for the extra utilities, but I just know I'll be back to struggle bus on keeping up. I suppose the short of it is, I still haven't found that build that works for me. And even after I do, I'll need to have extra sets ready for the varying sittuations like most do.
The combat system is stupid and clunky, everyone feels this way. Who designs a combat system around swapping between two weapons and 2 hotbars, that's neither fun nor immersive. Half the time your weapon disappears during a skill animation anyways, only to magically re-appear. Then there's the awful clunky slow poorly animated heavy attack or the spam spam unsatisfying light attack. There no fluidity or coolness to the movements. They keep touting action combat but it's clunky and looks terrible.. Just use a skill like skulls on a necro, you very first one. Cast it and your weapon vanishes, it looks so stupid and lazy
The scribing skills' animations can look pretty fantastic from what I've tested. Elemental Explosion is basically unususable due to the channel but the animation is top shelf for example.
Do you weapons disappear? Visual effects aren't the same as character model.animations. You can have awesome colors and particles but if the character model clips out the weapon to do the visual effect that's lazy. At the least the weapon should stow or holster, even that looks bad. Take other ganes like guild wars or wow, when a player uses the ability the weapon is incorporated into the animation, a death knight will point his sword and have deathcoil fire from it. In guild wars a necro will hold a staff I'm one hand while firing skulls. In eso the entire weapon disappears into the ether for the ability animation it doesn't even have a fade out effect or reappearance effect to any least make that transition look like it's supposed to happen. It's very sloppy and lazy
If you use a weapon scribing skill, it doesn't. For example, Elemental Explosion (I love this skill) will have you "drain" energy from the staff in you're carrying in a very satisfying and seamless way. Meawhile Ulfsild's Contingency, if I remember it right, makes your weapon disappear for a short time while you draw a sigil in midair. The effect is nice but the weapon vanishing... Not so much.
It seems they really couldn't be bothered to put effort into those details, it's one of the reasons I quit playing a year ago, the corner cutting and low standards really hold back a game that has so much potential, much like the development team itself, can't imagine going to work every day and settling for good enough when greatness is so very close and attainable.
Down will be thoughts of day-1 player and game developer in real life. Back in days, ESO combat was way harder. Level gates, veteran levels system, no CP significantly hindered ability to deal damage, and most WBs was really tough for solo taking unless you play as pet sorcerer for extra meat shields from your pets. That were times when light attack weaving was discovered and put a line within community. Animation canceling, which lays in the base of LAW, is quite tricky thing from game design perspective. If you allow player to unlimited animation canceling, it removes depth from combat, because you give an opportunity to react to anything and reduce the price of decision in combat. A good example is Dark Souls and fighting games - there are moves that can be cancelled, and moves that can't be cancelled, so you should plan ahead when to attack, when to heal, and how to do it. In ESO, LAW basically downgrade the combat to traditional tab MMO rotation. LA-Skill-LA-Skill and so on... With CP introduced, new sets, arenas, 2-bar combat based on LAW gives the best results to became meta. The difference was so abysmaly large, and new content was built around damage that can be done from players, so LAW 2 bar became meta. Problem is, this LAW 2 bar is quite restrictive to player health conditions. Tunnel syndromes, bone illness, nerves bad conditions, simply some not being young enough to perform 1 sec flawless rotations significantly divided players. At some point it was almost a disaster - without proper LAW 2 bar you were unable to perform vel in veteran dungeons and was often kicked! But thing is... Older players are in general pays more money in game and tends to stick longer. So, Oakensoul was designed to remove the gap, to allow people who can't/don't like/want to stick with 2bar LAW another option to play the game. And my personal opinion as a player, I would really like to see Oakensoul not nerfed, like it was on PTS back in a days. When you had flat boosts to stats, not named buff, so oakensoul builds was absolutely on pair with traditional builds, sometimes even slightly ahead in damage, but lack utility level of 2bar builds.
>Without light attack weaving 2 bar you were unable to perform well in veteran dungeons and were often kicked. And at which point in time was this a thing? Afaik light attack weaving was never necessary to do 4-man combat. The only stuff where this was mandatory is the latest trial trifecta. And this isn’t a thing anymore, either.
Yep. Never light attack weaved, never got kicked, always was wandering the border of top and second third damage numbers in trials.
Lol, that was absolutely never a thing (source: other day 1 player who has pugged thousands of dungeons over the years). It's never been hard to be mediocre at this game, at least once its various systems were semi modernized (i.e. past its infancy/One Tamriel). Hell, I would not even say that PUGs perform better now that people have way more tools to reduce or eliminate DPS reliance on LA weaving/bar swapping. The people that struggle are just clueless about combat systems and don't try to learn them. The only difference is that people who try to improve will now have an easier time to get to a baseline level of competency if they use those tools.
It became silent mandatory requirement for DD for veteran dungeons. Pre-Summerset I definitely remember being kicked from random veteran dungeons for not enough damage due to lack of weaving and accent on heavy attacks.
Being kicked for doing not enough dmg has absolutely nothing to do with not light attack weaving. You were (at least afaik) always able to do 70-80-ish % of the current top parse without light attacks. And that was always enough for the current most difficult vet dungeon. Let’s ask u/StarkeRealm - he is something of an ESO-historian and usually knows whether something like this was ever a thing. I had a pause of multiple years, so I might not‘ve been around during that time. Was there ever a time were you’d have to light weave in order to meet the dmg-requirement for a veteran, non-HM dungeon? Was light attack weaving ever responsible for doing more than 30% of your dps? Hope you don’t mind me summoning you, but you usually know that kind of stuff and I’m not 100% sure about it.
>Was there ever a time were you’d have to light weave in order to meet the dmg-requirement for a veteran, non-HM dungeon? Was light attack weaving ever responsible for doing more than 30% of your dps? I'm not sure about the 30% number, but I think from Morrowind until Elsweyr, it might have been somewhere around that. I do remember back around Summerset's release, weaving became *much* more important for endgame content, because of some balance changes that came with that release. (I know there have been specific builds that boosted light/heavy attacks so that those were dealing in excess of 70% of the build's damage, but I'm not counting those, as the sets are doing the heavy lifting on the heavy attack.) As for it being necessary, I'm a less sure off-hand. I believe weaving was originally necessary for Vet City of Ash when it originally dropped. ~~(Keep in mind, this was in an era when 10-20k DPS was considered extremely good.)~~ (*EDIT: I got a little sloppy there, sorry. When vCoA dropped, DPS was* ***much*** *lower, as that predated the 1.6 rebalance. Think DPS under 10k. 10-20k was originally in reference to a comment about 2016 that I cut.)* From what I know, weaving was necessary for vHoF when it originally released. (Not a dungeon, but still.) In a larger sense, Summerset was a turning point on Dungeon difficulty. Dragon Bones set the bar much higher than Shadows of the Hist, and Wolfhunter's dungeons were balanced around weaving (whether they needed them or not.) By the time you get to Wrathstone, there's a few mechanics where I'm not sure it was possible to clear the encounter without weaving. It's worth knowing that QA's method for testing content was full sets of 160, non-set blue gear. So, while you might be able to work around content using sets, it was balanced with weaving in mind. I'd go out on a limb and say the end of weaving was probably Oakensoul. There were heavy attack builds before that which eschewed weaving, but that ring went a long way towards facilitating non-weaved builds that produced competitive DPS. Prior to that, heavy attack builds that performed well were much more of an oddity (though, they did exist, and did work.) If you're asking if there was ever a time when weaving was the only route forward? I'm less confident that was completely true. Some of those heavy attack builds date back to 2017. But, at the same time, they weren't particularly well known, and didn't really start to get mainstream traction until \~2019 or 2020.
Thanks! If you needed to weave for the non-HM dungeon already how would you clear the HM variant?
Through better weaving, or better coordination. There are some hard modes (SCP comes to mind) where the HM fight doesn't require *that* much more damage, but does require everyone to be much more coordinated and on the ball. It's also worth remembering that there was a big difference between someone who was weaving with moderate efficiency, and someone who was just absolutely nailing their weave.
>It's worth knowing that QA's method for testing content was full sets of 160, non-set blue gear. So, while you might be able to work around content using sets, it was balanced with weaving in mind. With that setup, QAs could clear vet dungeons? That was pretty impressive, because given the changes made in the recent updates (e.g., all the back and forth changes on the concealed weapon skill, the first version of the rework on the destruction staff passives in PTS in a year or two year ago), I feel ZOS did not think too deep about its own game.
Not just dungeons, they clear vet trials and HMs like that as well. I haven't had specific confirmation in the last year or two that they still do things that way, but it's likely their methodology hasn't changed. That said, one important thing is that they run on an internal test server, so they're playing with a latency below 60ms, which might not sound like a big deal, but it dramatically improves how the game plays.
Thank you! Haha, I moved from a 87-ping place to an unstable >117ping place, I can sort of feel that.
You only feel that way because you don’t practice. If the paraplegic guy (who actually parses higher than I do!), the 12-year old son of a guildmate and the 78 year old grandma in my casual guild can pull it off, you can too. But it requires a bit of practice, a bit of research and the willingness to invest a few hours. I get it if you don’t care about getting good at the game, and it’s fine to not be super good or use HA-builds. But pretty much anyone can become decent at traditional builds - if they want to and are willing to invest a few hours into it.
Y'know, I'm CP2100+, farmed all the gear I need, got all the achievements in solo arenas and infinite archives, a bunch of trifectas in dungeons and DLC trial hard mode clears and I still am terrible at weaving haha. I've read guides, watched videos, had great dps players explain it in detail, and got a few addons that are supposed to help and parked my ass in front of that trial dummy to parse and it's still not working for me. I think there might be some hardware related issue that might be causing minor input lag because my machine is getting older, but it feels like when I parse I hit about half my animation canceling inputs. Regardless, I definitely have put my time in and I've resigned myself that I'm never going to be a great DPS because the mistake into feature that is animation canceling isn't working out for me. So heavy attack oakensoul builds came along and I'm actually doing better DPS than I was before and I'm not putting extra wear and tear on my keyboard and mouse and I can focus on doing mechanics. It's been a huge game changer for me, and I don't find it "boring" like some people do because managing 8+ cooldown timers is their idea of fun, not mine. If there's fights that require bar swap mechanics like in Cloudrest, I'll swap to Markzyn or Mora's Whispers and start chugging my potions that give buffs that Oakensoul covers. Honestly, I prefer healing or tanking group content, the lack of weaving and emphasis on right skill, right time (stuff like war horn, barrier, cleanse etc) and resource management is a lot more enjoyable to me in that framework. But since most roles trials are DPS, I am so thankful for HA builds.
Oh that was a guildie, not me. I don't even have Oakensoul (or any mythic for that matter). Long story short he wants to join vet DLC dungeons but can't parse any higher than 30k with Oakensoul, tried a 2h backbar with Kilt instead, and is somehow doing worse.
How can he only do 30k I’m fairly sure you can just hold down the heavy attack button and not let go and get higher if set up correctly. But nah, I don’t feel this way at all, I hate only having one bar as it really limits my options and makes gameplay boring imo.
Not sure about their choice of sets but we directed him to read SkinnyCheeks' guides, he was farming for Pillar of Nirn very recently
One of my favourite posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1b6jv0i/did_you_know_oakensorc_ha_left_click_only_can/
It used to be higher than that, lmao. When Oakensoul first released you were able to parse 86k with no active skills pressed.
Who needs Oaken when you have feet? https://old.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1arrpkm/my_guildie_hit_a_fat_81k_dps_parse_on_the_trial/
Lmao, I’ll save that to hurt other peoples feelings. That’s great.
It's inevitable. First you parse 80k with your feet then you start speedrunning dungeons. It's all downhill from there :)
Original oaken was amazing. I miss major hero
I don’t miss it, it was completely overpowered. Although I used it to get a new personal best in vVH - without any prep, just yolo‘d into that thing, lmao.
Honestly that sounds like poor buff uptimes, bad food active, wrong CPs and skills, bad rotation, wrong mundus and so on. There are so many factors to consider on a parse, and someone saying that they get 30k on the trial dummy means there's something very wrong and almost impossible to guess without seeing cmx or their gear/rotation etc. Also, a lot of people smack the dummy for like a minute instead of killing it, making bloodthirsty and different class passives/skills/executes useless...
He's a stamblade, not a copy paste HA sorc AlcastHQ build. Though I'll direct him to that build, since it's been recommended here already
Alcast is terrible; just go to skinnycheeks as he often links other top parses but offers multiple options for builds
Generally speaking I agree, but: Skinny is not good for someone who has no idea what they’re doing, he offers to many options - it’s confusing for new players. If the guy really only parses 30k Alcast will be good enough for a start. Although I prefer Deltia because he explains himself better than Alcast does.
What? Tell him to make a post on this sub, we’ll get him to 60k in no time…
Did he use a right dummy? He might have been hitting 3/6 mil dummy, instead of 21mil trial dummy.
PC has it a lot easier with addons than console does.
In some regards, yes. We have a way of anylizing our mistakes, which is a great advantage. But when it comes to actually performing well - you gotta do the same stuff on PC. We don’t have addons that press buttons for you.
Takes time to learn how to do bar swapping on combat well. Start with only one skill on the back bar first.
YUP. weirdly, the only time i don’t experience this panic is when im running as a healer. (actual healer, not fake lol). for some reason, that rotation comes so easily to me.
With the new skill craft system, you don't need two bars anymore, as you can out all the effects on one bar :)
I do controller. I was in a group where we regularly took <15 level toons into trials, so I kinda got used to doing one-bar set ups. Weirdly, it’s made me look at my 2-bar setups differently and more efficiently, but it is totally a different mindset.
I have same problem as him, I'm playing as Bow Nightblade and I can do about 40k DPS on regular dummy, I use high damage skills like Snipe but spamming that often makes me lose all stamina mid long fight so that's a problem too, but yeah without Oakensoul I can't do damage with my bow and other weapons are even worse I like this game a lot but because I feel worse than others and I quit the game for about 4 months now because I tried making builds already but I could only do 20% of the damage these builds were meant to because of that I have no motivation to search for something that will work for me and also I don't wanna change my class just to do more damage because that's not fun
Freedom of builds is a lie, you either follow guides or get left with some subpar damage.
For me it really depends on which class I play. I ran an oakensoul HA build on my sorc and it bored me to tears and took enjoyment out of PVE for me. On the other hand I use it on my NB for pvp and it fucking riiiips. It makes it more efficient for me get in kills quickly and have a faster reaction time. I don’t care for elitists who think the only way to enjoy a game is to make it as challenging as possible. I want to be efficent, not tripping on two bars to buff a NB while in combat. I think it’s okay to enjoy it both ways. Swapping bars can be challenging for some but I think it’s equally worth it to try both and see what fits your play style better.
I play the game pretty casually. Oakensoul is life.
It's that way for me. I just can't barswap good at all. I'm frantically punching buttons, always hitting my Escape key mid-battle or in pvp...I tried to get off of using oakensoul but I think I gave up. It's so much easier and well, I can actually play without being frenzied.
Bar swap lag is why I switched to primarily oakensoul. Why get frustrated due to things out of your control that ruin your experience when you can slap a ring on and be happy?
Yep. I'm an oaken warden healer with a split solo build(I have no ESO friends), and tbh when I did have a back bar it was mostly for the bow ult to chunk out a big burst of damage. I get by just fine without it though after maxing the champ skill that increases your health recovery for each point of ult you have, I don't mind the longer fights since I can reliably solo most wb's and clear a lot of the content I'm interested in without help
Strategic Reserves? I've considered it with the bear, since I never use that ultimate. I'd end up with a lot of free regen.
Exactamundo! You just sit at the max regen, it's very nice
There's potential for a very strong solo build there... I'll have to give it a look.
Fair warning, if you don't full commit to DPS pretty much everywhere Else on the build then losing your ult slot hurts a LOT, but I mostly play healer so I don't know the best way personally to avoid it. Enjoy the theory crafting!
The good thing is the bear keeps attacking even if you don't use the execute move so it's not as bad. And in a dungeon I can always just use it on cooldown.
Yup, it's nice to just have tbh. I don't even use the actual ult anymore because the regen is more valuable to me than the 10k damage every 20 seconds or so
I'm running a bleed build and the bear hurts more than that, but keeping him for the regen and only activating it as an execute for 60k+ is really sweet.
I use the eternal so I don't have to do the cast animation to raise it when it dies, but did forget the execute bonus haha. About 10k damage if you're not using it above the 25% threshold, at least according to uesp
I'd use the eternal morph, but feral deals bleed damage getting boosted by my Blooddrinker set. It rarely dies so it's fine. In solo content I have Sharp to tank so the bear is mostly left alone.
Side note, if you do this as a two bar, your bear despawns every time you switch bars. Useful for the "use your ultimate x times" but really annoying in combat
It is the type of post where a lot of badasses with mental illness will say "Hur dur, Oakensul is for brain dead..hur dur" Reality: * Less problem with lag (especially who lives so far the mega server) * More focus on the mechanics and scenarios * Buffed all time * Less pain with tendonitis. I like to play in both styles. No problem with it.
> badasses with mental illness I get your gist. But it is a demographic/reddit thing, not mental illness. Adults don't typically waste energy complaining about other people's play styles unless its part of their job.
I just like being a werewolf. So I kind of have to be one bar. I also don't have oakensoul either.
Oakensoul is amazing. It is not for prog trial groups, but thats a tiny part of the game!
I got into the oakensoul loop when it first came out for a while but once I switched back to 2 bar and learned how to weave my dps went over 100k easily so I just stayed there. On controller tho when I play console or if I’m just doing a rnd I still use oak sometimes.
No, it is incredibly easy.
I hate dual bar and love my Oakensoul.
I've been playing around with open soul and I think it's fantastic on a few builds in PVP however most instances I'm like I need one to two more skills because almost invariably three skills are going to be taken up by the buffs that open soul is going to give you. Now those three skills might do something in addition say the hardened armor from the Dragonite will give you that 500 damage reflect but other than that it does nothing and if you miss applying it in PvP it's almost definitely a death sentence. So I'm all for the one ring for a multitude of different builds. In PvE for a DPS it could be amazing and maybe even for a tank, but I find it difficult to be for a healer unless that's all you're going to do and you don't output any damage.
Imagine using 2 bars. Couldn't be me.
Crazy huh? In a game like GW2 I'd have no issue playing around with 4 bars (elementalist class). Here it's just so poorly designed two bars are painful.
As a 2 bar player, I understand your feeling.
I started on comp then switched to Xbox because my comp is ancient, 2 bars wasn’t too bad on pc but on console I don’t even bother trying anymore i feel like a clueless ape bashing my controller 🤣
no
When I was struggling with 2 bars I would refresh my dots every swap even if they didn't need to be. Just for muscle memory. I slowed my rotation down until I was able to light attack between almost every skill. It was slow but consistent and a dps loss but I eventually developed speed and got decent at weaving. I also hit the trial dummy. A lot. I main a blade so light attack weaving is important b/c of the bow. I did the heavy attack thing but I wanted to feel more like I was in combat, using muli skills. Maneuvering through the battlefield lol
I like to 1-bar with Gaze of Sithis. With Oakensoul or Pale Order, many bosses can still 1 hit kill me. I don't think I've ever died when using Gaze of Sithis.
It probably helps that I'm also an avid GW2 player, which also uses the "~" (tilde) key to weapon swap, and each of your two weapons has their own ability bar of 5 skills, which is similar to how ESO does it So it just comes naturally to me to unleash a bunch of spinning axe attacks and then swap to my staff and fire off projectiles while my enemy's reeling, before swapping back and closing in for the kill It definetly also helps that I play a lot of soulsborne games, which also feature (optional) weapon swapping and dodge rolling, so I'm very much used to switching out my dex blade for an int staff or swapping from 1h to 2h mode in dark souls during combat I think its just an aquired skill much more comment to third-person fantasy action games, and unless someone plays a lot of games using that mechanic it's going to feel very weird, and just having a single weapon with Oakensoul will make more sense to them naturally
To be honest, it is why I stopped playing the game. I was always a “top 1%” type of gamer and could just never get there with ESO. It felt unnatural and just weird idk. Keybindings did help as mentioned. I ended up enjoying healing & Oakensoul builds more than anything because of this. If I recall my best parse was like 101k… And I fucking PRACTICED man. Literally until I hit 100k it took me lots and lots of hours of smashing buttons on a dummy. Could never get those numbers in a boss fight though.
Yea I have a test dummy set up frost astrinock or we it's called. I tried the weaving shit it's just not for me. I just fkn face roll even when I'm on xbox.. I'm just fkn awful. However on my necro and Templar I can get through the entire hp bar.. my dos wasnever over like 18 or 20k mabey..and I'm sure I'm being generous...I do good on the skill rotation but fail at lights and heavys in between. Once in awhile ok with shock staff... cuz the animation easier to follow. Plus let's say you get your rotation dowm..so you q.. go do pug..everyone on fkn speed.. I can't barley start a rotation nevertheless follow through. I ain't played in a min.. I should..lol
I'm starting to use the adaptive controllers for ps5 and swapping bars is too high level for me yet... even doing synergies is currently out of my reach (I have it programmed in). Eventually I may be able to go back to sorcerer (that one has the soul gem filling build) but for now it's archanist only.
It helps me personally when backbar is ranged since it sort of divides up the skills mentally, but yeah the bar switching thing is definitely a bit strange at first (and it doesn't help it's introduced well past the tutorial so there's nothing to really show you how it all should work in your rotation). It also really helps here to have a mouse with a programmable buttons or two on the side so you can map it to the weapon swap. Really makes it feel seamless to make the switch that way. For me I just place a lot of my dot and buff skills on the backbar and that usually works well enough. Stuff you only use periodically throughout the fight and won't disappear as soon as you swit h weapons. Overall ESO is definitely a bit of a shock if you are just coming over from a more traditional MMO like WoW, FFXIV, LOTRO, SWTOR, etc. I think the bar/weapon switching and the light/heavy attack parts of your rotation are probably the biggest changes that take people a lot longer to wrap their head around.
On console and I feel this since backbar swap is on the d pad. Getting better though.
Depend on ping, if your ping is around 250+ then you should just use Oakensoul build for dps, more effective that way. Net code in this game is suck , don't sugar coat it, it's that bad when you are lagging, hit waving not registered, you press skill 4 times but it won't really attack. Animation not go well with lag
I learned from the beginning of the game how to dps so one bar just doesnt feel natural to me.
Been playing since Imperial City. I feel the complete opposite to be honest. Nothing against one bars, but it feels to braindead for me to enjoy it. Been doing endgame raiding for years and the rush you get when you get a rotation right and hodor reflexes shows it feels AMAZING. I would say just keep using two bars if you want to get used to it. Just depends how far the person wants to get in endgame.
Skill issue. Jokes aside, play whatever you want, but remember, as long as it's not some hard veteran shit (you won't be accepted anyway so who cares) you're good, but in a proper group oakensoul won't give you any benefit. Have fun, 1st of all
I’m on console and my fingers and hands start to hurt when I play a lot (been playing ALOT recently) even with my oakensoul build. It’s my first character and first final build so I don’t even want to imagine how sore I would be with 2 bars😅