Update 39 for The Elder Scrolls Online is now available for testing on the PTS. This patch brought many balancing adjustments, most notably to the Dragonknight and Nightblade classes.
The developers said that a lot of Dragonknight players have been taking Coagulating Blood (CB) over Green Dragon Blood (GDB) simply because the former is better with higher offensive stats than the latter's healing potential. To make GDB more viable, they added a small heal over time that lasts for five seconds and scales off the player's max health, recovering roughly 3% HP per tick.
On top of that, raising Green Dragon Blood's rank no longer increases its duration by one second. Instead, raising GDB's rank now increases the amount of HP recovered from the healing over time effect.
The Nightblade's Grim Focus has been improved as well. This ability and its morphs no longer need to be activated to generate stacks. That's because they now generate stacks any time the player meets their original requirements with the ability slotted on their ability bar. In other words, simply putting Grim Focus on the ability bar lets it generate stacks by hitting enemies with a light or heavy attack.
Here are the other class changes in Update 39:
Arcanist
- Herald of the Tome
- Abyssal Impact: Fixed an issue where this ability and its morphs did not cause you to unsheathe your weapons on cast.
Necromancer
- Frozen Colossus
- Reduced the cost of this Ultimate and its morphs to 175, down from 225.
- Increased the damage per hit of all versions by approximately 11%.
- Pestilent Colossus (morph): This morph now also always guarantees the Diseased status effect on each hit.
- Glacial Colossus: This morph now also extends the duration of Major Vulnerability to 17 seconds per hit, up from 12.
Nightblade
- Death Stroke
- Incapacitating Strike (morph): Fixed a VERY old and very annoying bug where the special version of this Ultimate could fail to be activated in some cases where your Ultimate cost was being affected by bonuses or penalties that changed the original 120 Ultimate cost requirement for the Stun.
- Grim Focus
- Increased the cost of the special activate to 1,890, up from 1,350, to make up for the fact that you no longer need to activate the buff portion of these abilities.
- These abilities now all use consistent naming and icons, rather than having separate names for the active versus stacking portions.
- These abilities will now highlight on your ability bar when you are at full stacks, rather than becoming a different icon.
- Relentless Focus:
- This morph now increases the amount of Weapon and Spell Damage each stack grants to 80 at rank IV, rather than increasing the duration of the buff, since the buff no longer has a duration.
- This morph now costs 1,377, rather than 1,148.
So, what can you say about the newly improved Green Dragon's Blood and Grim Focus in The Elder Scrolls Online Update 39?
