ESO Lost Depths PTS Update: The Most Notable Changes
By Andrew | 2 Aug 2022 |
The latest iteration of ESO's somewhat chaotic Lost Depths PTS was published yesterday, giving players the chance to view and test the newest changes to the upcoming DLC and update.
As is the norm for the fourth week of the PTS, the list of changes was rather on the short side compared to what can be expected on weeks one, three and five, however there were some interesting changes for players to get their teeth into. There are three things in particular that caught our eye. 
Nocturnal's Ploy Nerf
Nocturnal's Ploy is a PvP sourced set that will be added in the Lost Depths update. It's been met with quite a lot of controversy among PvP players, due to its ability to strip players of all major and minor buffs, including those sourced from things like potions. This ability to easily mitigate an opponent's build proved to be quite an unpopular idea, and as such Zenimax have decided to hit the set with the nerf hammer. The effect remains the same, however the cooldown has seen a substantial increase from 2 seconds to 15 seconds.Light and Heavy attack changes, and Empower
As we expected from the update posted by Gina Bruno last week, a rethink to the originally planned light and heavy attack nerfs was published. Their damage is still less than what is seen on the Live server, however they once again scale from your offensive stats, and the nerf is therefore less severe than originally intended. These attacks now simply scale to a lesser degree than before.Another change on this front was a change to the Empower buff. This will no longer affect light attacks at all, but will instead buff your heavy attack damage by a pretty huge 80%. To avoid one-shot builds in PvP, Zenimax took the unusual step of differentiating between PvE and PvP with this. The Empower buff will be completely disabled in PvP. It also seems that the Empower buff applies to partially charged heavy attacks, more commonly referred to in the community as medium attacks. It remains to be seen how this change will interact with the DPS meta, if indeed it survives the remainder of the PTS cycle and makes it onto the Live server.
More Oakensoul Ring Changes
The changes to Oakensoul Ring are pretty minor compared to the previous changes that it has undergone. I don't think any other item has had a more chaotic story than the Oakensoul Ring has in its very short history.The Empower buff is now being added to the Oakensoul Ring, along with Minor Slayer and Minor Aegis, two buffs that are commonly sourced from trial sets. It would appear that the intention here is to make heavy attack rotations - by far the easiest type of rotation - more viable. This rotation type was briefly meta way back in the Morrowind patch due to huge sustain nerfs, but was eventually overtaken and far surpassed by light attack rotations when sustain recovered somewhat.
We hope you enjoyed this article about the Lost Depths PTS in ESO. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.
by
Andrew
2 Aug 2022
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