Good fixes. I hate that the downtime suddenly changed from Tuesday to Monday without much warning or notice. Most likely we will not have downtime tomorrow... but Tuesday is the day I am usually unavailable :(

Finally it is more worth to sell items in Guild Store. COD is also not as painful now.

The only thing that bothers me about this patch is that it nerfs Vampires in the aspects that no one really cared about or complained about while ignoring the larger issue with Bat swarm spamming and there was no AOE fix.

Part of the bat spamming was that it was stacking rather than refreshing. Which means instead of 1 occurance of the bat swarm they were able to get 9 -12 which was causing massive spammable aoe damage. Now it will only allow 1 occurance at a time and will recast that single occurrence reducing the damage output significantly.

I'll be taking video tomorrow for zenimax to see if the effect is now at it's desired effect.

1. Bat Swarm- Summons a swarm of bats dealing damage to all enemies around you.
   1. Clouding Swarm – Also grants you additional invisibility.
   2. Devouring Swarm – Gain life for every enemy hit.

Most of these guys use Devouring Swarm.

(If maxed out on everything Skill Rank, Max Magicka, Spell Damage)

With the ability not working as intended they were able to spam cast it and stack the healing from it. Now they will only gain the effect once per the duration of the ability. Instead of doing 801 Magic Damage every second they were able to clone that ability 5 or so times at the same second doing vastly more damage than intended.

I love it they fixed the quest I couldn't finish last night! Great service people!

• Fulfilling One's Fate: Guardian Celonron's spirit will now appear when you are directed to kill him.

Don't want to burst anyone's bubbles about the customer service, but that quest was not resolved due to you being stuck yesterday.  It was probably reported 3 weeks ago .. At least.

I just got an answer back on an issue I have 28 days ago and was surprised to see the email.

And while I see many great fixes, WW ultimate is not one of them :/

Ouch burned by fellow guildie! Well to be honest I absolutely know they didn't fix it because of my request. I was simply stating that I was happy that they fixed it since I'm not on that quest.

But bubble offically busted.. thanks.. /tears

/hug .. I'm happy that your quest is fixed :) .. May your path be forever so smooth

also no more sorc teleport scroll runs  :(

but yea, fixing the stacking is better that an overall nerf to AoE.  Yea for testing!

But that's only part of the problem, all this fix does is stop it from being able to stack on top of it self. It does nothing to prevent it from still being spammed and keeping it up indefinitely which is truly the real problem.

Stage 4 was a 60% reduction to all Vampire abilities, which not only affects Bat Swarm but also Drain Essence and Mist Form. What they did is reduced the amount of Stage 4 Ability reduction to 28%. Now Drain Essence and Mist form cost way to much Magicka to really even think about using in a fight and Bat Swarm is still spammable. With the way Ult builds between Emperor (Current and former) and Arkavi (sp) set not working right and the way DK's build Ult they are still able to reduce Bat Swarm down to being able to keep it up.

I have a Vampire, and I've used Bat Swarm. With out having the ability to spam it, it's still really strong and was able to keep me at full health even with one thing beating on me. So all this fix does is lessen the damage, and nerf two other abilities that are irrelevant to the problem.

Maybe I'm not understanding how this works. I thought the problem with Bat swarm was the amount on instances it was stacking and not the fact that it's an op skill. 

From what your saying it's an op skill and that it needs to be nerfed and the other skills that got nerfed really didn't need to be touched.

So is it the spammability that you have an issue with or the heal/dam percentage with the skill?

From my understanding - and as Fog pointed out - it wasn't the fact they could spam it - and it could stack on top of itself - so think of it as they can now gain x health and do x damage each time they hit it.  Before they could stack it and gain 10 x health and do 10 x damage since they could end up with 10 bat swarms circling them - now no mater how many times they hit their ultimate - they get 1 swarm.   That is a huge difference.  Now it will only be once we get in and fight these demon spawn of the netherworld that we will be able to test it out.  

They need to take these baby steps when making adjustments it is better for the game and the community to make several minor tweaks than a massive one that ticks off a lot of people and then they have to go back the other way.   Sometimes things are "almost" working as designed - sometimes the design is flawed (Just ask Janet Jackson about flawed designs), and other times it is a bug or an exploit.   Give them time.

I'm also glad they fixed the Sorc teleporting with the scroll - there is actually suppose to be a chance to stop the scroll carrier - the sorc was near impossible to stop - not much of a chance was given when one of them was the carrier.

The way the original ability worked was it was stackable by design, but they never intended you to be able to get a 4 or 8 Ultimate cost on Ultimates. So what they did was remove the stackable ability which solves the fact that it can do a ton of damage and take a really poor attempt at trying to stop from being able to cast it back to back. Bat Swarm with out stacking does a ton of damage and heals for a ton. On a boss fight, on my nightblade, I can cast bat swarm at the beginning of the fight and not need heals even though I have aggro on the boss for the duration then I can cast it again later on (because I don't have all the ultimate reduction abilities or abilities that build absurd amounts of Ultimate).

So with this as you can see the ability with out stacking is really really strong. Stacking just made it even worse and more OP. So now instead of fixing what really was the issue, they chop of the left hand when the splinter is in the right.

Mistform wasn't really OP, most people didn't know how to deal with it, and drain essence was a really strong heal, but had a huge counter to it. Now you have 2 of the most costly abilities in the game out side of stage 4 cost more than any other ability in game at stage 4. So it's really hard to even find a good use for either if you are starved for resources in a fight and need either a heal or a dam mit CD.

in my opinion they need to cap the amount of Ultimate reduction items/abilities/passives over just nerfing an ability that was being exploited through the use of said reductions.

Developers have to be careful with adjustments, regardless of negative or positive.  It takes time and monitoring "real player usage".  

Its early launch and most of you should be experienced enough with MMO launches, to be well aware of how this balancing deal works.

The Vamp passive still broken.

Drain essence now cost a huge chunk of mana to use.

Fog where did you get that 801 damage per second number from?  That is waaaay too high, it probably caps out at ~250 damage (barring emperors who will do a little more) with 200-225 much more realistic.

The effect stacking was clearly an unintended byproduct of them not anticipating people lowering the Ult cost to 4 and removing the stacking was definitely the right move.  Now the lowest you can get the cost is 81 (I believe) by being a sorc, using the alik'r dragonguard set and seducer set.

Elusive Mist was also problematic with the 60% reduction, sure it has a base cost of 588 but I had 91% cost reduction without even really trying (Breton 3%, Templar 4%, Seducer 3%, 7piece light 21% = 31% Magicka cost reduction on all spells, add on 60% more for Stage 4 = 91%).  That made it cost 53 Magicka, or a little more than I regen in 1 second.

Bat swarm is already capped at 6 targets so no further capping needed there.  I think these changes are a good start to stop Vampire being abusable without nerfing it out of being viable.  If they end up not being enough then I hope ZoS continues to tweak to make Vampire an option and not a requirement for AvA.

My only concern is the new Arena crafted set being added in the Craglorn Patch.  The 5 piece set bonus is a 15% reduction to Ultimate costs, which would be another tool for people to stack to drive that Devouring Swarm cost down to a 74% reduction or 52 Ultimate cost.

Well I will say that after this patch the vamps are little more balanced in PvP. I was not insta dying when I stood next to a vampire for more than one second.