What Are Medium Attacks, and Are They About to Become Meta in ESO?

Due to the upcoming changes to the Elder Scrolls Online in the Lost Depths update, there has been talk of Medium attacks and their meta potential.

By Andrew   •  Published 2 years ago

With the final Lost Depths changes now announced, and the Empower rework looking likely to be coming to the Live Server in a couple of weeks, it's time to have a look at what this may mean for PvE combat in the Elder Scrolls Online. 

Weaving - The Story So Far

Casting our minds back a few weeks, Zenimax originally announced massive nerfs to light and heavy attacks (which included medium attacks too) to attempt to close the skill gap for players overall. The logic here was that being able to weave light attacks gave players a substantial advantage over those who weren't so good at it in terms of their total DPS output. 

It's fair to say this wasn't very popular, and we've talked about it a fair bit already. In response to player criticism, ZOS eventually went in a very different direction on Week 4 of the PTS, where the damage of light and heavy attacks was increased again, although to a lesser degree than on the Live server. They also announced a rework to the Empower buff, and this is the key part. 

They changed Empower to increase your damage from Heavy attacks by 80%, a pretty huge amount. This initially caused some excitement that easy heavy attack rotations may become more viable in ESO, and this may well be the case. But other players were wondering if it could also apply to Medium attacks. 

That's because of the way the new version of the Empower buff is worded, it doesn't say "Fully Charged Heavy Attacks", it just says "Heavy Attacks". This means it also applies to partially charged heavy attacks, also known as medium attacks. This was quickly confirmed by testing it on the PTS, and it was not changed on the final week of the PTS, either. 

ESO Warden ClassESO Warden Class

A Medium Attack Meta in Lost Depths?

So, what does this all mean?

Basically, the commonly held theory in the endgame PvE community is that Medium attack weaving is now going to be meta. You simply have to hold down the light attack button for long enough that your character starts charging a heavy attack, and then release it. This will cause the attack to be counted by the game as a heavy attack, and you will get the 80% Empower buff augmenting its damage, assuming that you have a source of the buff of course. 

It has to be said that this state of affairs is rather surprising, given that ZOS originally said that they were aiming to reduce the skill ceiling to make the game more accessible. This change undoubtedly does the opposite of that - Medium Attacks are very hard to weave, much more so than light or heavy attacks, but those who are able to consistently do it will see substantial bonuses to their damage output. One player showed an example of an impressive 121k parse, in which 25% of their DPS came from Medium attacks. That parse can be seen on this forum thread, along with some other discussion about this topic. 

To a large extent this issue seems to have slipped under the radar in the wider ESO community; endgame players are talking about it a lot, but not many other people seem to have caught onto it. Whether this is due to indifference about its effects on the skill cieling, or due to fatigue after all of the "casual vs elite" debate that's happened recently is anybody's guess.

ESO Earthen Root EnclaveESO Earthen Root EnclaveOn a final note, it's possible that ZOS will make a last minute adjustment on this front if they want to. All they would really have to do is change the Empower buff to only apply to fully charged heavy attacks, thus closing the apparent loophole which is, for better or for worse, currently undermining their own stated objectives for Lost Depths. Doing this would also upset some other players though. Not everyone thinks a high skill ceiling is a bad thing, indeed some players argue that a game should aspire to reward those who practice and master its mechanics. 

We hope you enjoyed this article about Medium Attack Weaving and Lost Depths in ESO. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.
Andrew

Andrew

Published 2 years ago

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