Is Oakensoul The Best or Worst Thing to Happen in ESO?
Elder scrolls players, I got a serious question for you? Is the new Oakensoul mythic the best or worst thing to happen to ESO?
I feel the new mythic has split the community right down the center.
You either love or hate it. The Oakensoul ring become the focal point of the entire game and I want to give some perspective on this and What I see and what I think needs to be done.
Most players have this item set or are working towards collecting the five leads in order to assemble the Mythic.
Table of contents
Oakensoul Ring Buffs
Oakensoul on the PTS
Who was Oakensoul intended for?
Why it’s so powerful
Raising the floor
Summary and opinion
Oakensoul Ring Buffs
For those that don’t know, The Oakensoul ring is a one-piece gear set that came with the High Isle Chapter launching on PC on June 6th and the consoles on June 21st.
It effectively carries your damage, sustain and survivability and eliminates the need for many buffs making your bar, rotation and gameplay much simpler. However, with Oakensoul equipped you can’t bar swap, it locks you in one bar, one set of skills and one weapon but gives you GOD tier major and minor buffs.
The Oakensoul Ring description. Update 34 for The High Isle chapter
The ring gives you your armor buff, your spell and weapon damage buff, and spell or weapon critical buff. It gives you Major Heroism which is an insane ultimate generation. There’s a lot more… The ring provides Major Courage and Major Force increasing your critical damage, mainly provided by support roles. Let’s not forget about 10% raw damage via major berserk buff, normally coming in a 5pc set like Kinras’s Wrath. You even get the minor recovery buffs Intellect, Endurance, and Fortitude, so if you drink a Tri-potion, you get the major buffs on top of this.
You gain super over-the-top buffs that usually someone else provides you and five-piece gear sets give you. And it’s all in one set item.
Now, why did the developers decide to go the major buff route? I’m glad you asked!
Oakensoul on the PTS
Oakensoul, believe it or not, was even more powerful when it first launched on the Public Test Server(PTS) giving raw stats, rather than named buffs.
Oakesoul ring description before changes, Patch Notes v8.0.1 for High Isle & Update 34 in 2022
This means, that in its original form, you could stack all those named buffs I previously mentioned, on top of massive raw stats for incredible damage, sustain and healing provides. The Oakensoul ring would be so strong it would eliminate the standard ESO two-bar setup. There were some top-tier PvE players, who on 21 million health parse dummies were hitting over 130,000 damage with one bar and Oakensoul Ring.
PTS server. Charles’s parsing results showed in the Combat Metrics Addon. Oakensoul Ring before changes
For context that’s some of the top damage in the entire world and is competing with two-bar builds or even beating them.
With this much stats, Oakensoul ring was too strong on PTS Specifically for PvE. It would ruin the two-bar, DPS, complex rotation and strategy so many people know and love from ESO…
In fact, that’s what makes both PvE and PvP fun in my opinion, that you cannot master the game. You’re always working towards better timing, weaving, buff management, and so on. ESO Combat with two bars isn’t over-the-top complex, but managing your resources with zero cooldowns beyond your ultimate is what separates the game from other MMOs. It’s a balancing act of weaving, dropping ultimates timely, rotating buffs and spamming your attacks then switching over to execute skills and timing your burst in PvP.
But going back to the Public Test Server, this original “Oakensoul setup” was even worse in PvP. Especially with Werewolves which are already locked in one bar, having many named buffs already. They were so strong, that you just couldn’t compete 1v1 with a werewolf. No matter how good you were, one heavy attack from a werewolf, one or two werewolf skills and it was over.
And this is how the Oakensoul ring become what it is today, giving major and minor buffs rather than raw stats. So now you can’t stack buffs or max stats on top of it. In a PvE context, you can’t out parse a standard, ESO, two-bar build.
Who was Oakensoul intended for?
I imagine it was created for the individual who struggles at combat in the game. They may have difficulty with reflexes, bar swapping or maybe they simply aren’t interested in a perfect parse weave. Maybe they have a physical disability. There are a lot of different factors that influence our capabilities in MMO or video games.
From my experience, ESO is a lot harder to master and manage than classic MMO.
Many MMO players come from the games where they have tab target, long cooldowns, slower pace and 1.5-second global cooldown vs. ESO 1.0 second GCd. In a traditional tap target system, you don’t have to manage blocking, dodging, sprinting, and so forth meanwhile managing your rotations your buffs your heal over time your damage over time your burst and so on. In the traditional World of Warcraft. Starwars old Republic it’s mainly about timers, priorities and buff management.
ESO combat is about all of that and more, which again is what makes it so special.
Veteran Vateshran Hollows solo Arena. One-bar build, update 34 in 2022.
And this is who I imagine the Oakensoul ring was created for. The folks that want to experience the game, want to go to the trials, even veteran and solo arenas to collect the gear without the degree of difficulty they’d experience in other games.
Because let’s be honest here. The vast majority of ESO PvE is very easy. Outside of Veteran and Hardmode trials and some dungeons, it’s pretty easy to get gear and complete almost anything, especially at normal difficulty.
And now these folks can have one bar, and blow through overland or vMA(vMA Guide click) finally!
Well sounds great so what’s the issue then?
Why it’s so powerful?
It’s absolutely overtuned insane in PvP, especially on any class that has a critical damage buff like the templar and nightblade. Pair the Oakensoul ring, which provides Major Force on at all times, and use a skill like Race Against Time for the Minor force and the new craftable set Order’s Wrath from the High Isles chapter, which gives a unique buff stacking even more critical damage. And you can go even further: the Shadow Mundus stone, fighting fitness champion point, Khajiit race… Now you have so many critical damage modifiers and you’re starting to see burst damage the likes of slowed and Viper–Velidreth days.
It’s so powerful in PvP and so easy to play on a stamina nightblade, ganker or hybrid templar, that it’s hard to go back to a two-bar build.
With Oakensoul ring you aren’t incentivised to go back to a two-bar build. And why would you? You hit hard, you are tanky, you are survivable and you are very fast.
Especially me, while streaming. I don’t want to have to pay attention every single second, but with the Oakensoul ring I can easily play PvP and stream at the same time and there’s almost no downside to using it.
I’m incentive to make my builds simpler and while that’s attractive to some, is this why I play ESO? Isn’t it for self-mastery of the combat and understanding of the game?
An example of this is this, I went from playing my necro bomber from the previous patch to my hybrid templar as my main overnight. Why? Because with the damage being so high, my necro just gets destroyed from a gankers within 1 second. While playing solo in an open field I’ll die and zero counterplay beyond dodging over 4 seconds or playing in a zerg group. It’s no fun.
I’d rather go play Call of Duty, turn the corner get shot every three seconds. That’s what it feels like in Cyrodiil.
So I relog back to “Oakensoul Templar” and immediately the tides would turn. Simpler, harder-hitting, and more survivable. The Oakensoul ring is just so powerful right now, it’s really hard to get excited about anything else when damage is so high, it just works so well. I equip a one-piece and feel like a walking god.
Raising the floor
I think a point of contention with PvP’ers is, it raised the floor, not the ceiling but the floor for the average player.
Major protection, armor buff just by default, thus you’re much more survivable without having to manage a million buffs and debuffs while taking pressure. Great for an average player, but eliminating some skill from the top end, allowing more casual folks to feel active and engaged in the fights without having the muscle memory. I can relate to this when I went back to Xbox I felt this way. I know Elder Scrolls Online very deeply, but I’m not used to the controller and I don’t have muscle memory on it so I felt frustrated. So I thought “man if I just had an Oakensoul right now I would start to crash!” But I didn’t. I was left with a controller I had no idea how to manage and I was destroyed over and over…
But let’s go back to PvE for a second.
The major upside in PvE is the ability for the average player to complete content they never dreamed of. I have someone in my stream that has been trying to beat the trifecta in vMA since it’s launched. Even with pale order, all gold gear and they could never get it done.
Message received from an amazing viewer who shared their experience about new mythic and ESO with me.
They equipped the Oakensoul ring and within one week they win the flawless conqueror. Other folks, never felt confident enough to do veteran trials because their DPS was so low. Slap on Oakensoul, Tzogvin’s and another trial set and you can parse 70k and higher, very easily.
However, an Oakensoul build isn’t going to out parse a two-bar build with the same level skilled player. It doesn’t change the ceiling in PvE. PvP that’s different, but the holy grail of high DPS Godslayers are still intact.
It just raises the floor for a huge group of players and it feels just right in ESO.
I still love and prefer my two-bar Magica Templar(build click) because, objectively, I do more damage, It’s more fun and there’s no incentive for me at my skill level to use one-bar build other than to create builds for others to enjoy.
Opinion
And that brings us to the question? Is the new Oakensoul ring mythic the best or worst thing to happen to ESO?
Depending on who you are, it could either be a dream or a nightmare. We have high damage meta, along with a raised floor in PvP and one of the most interesting patches maybe in the history of the Elder Scrolls Online.
My hope is this, it gets balanced so that you’re not forced to use it on any class in PvP. That the average player can pick this up, equip it on and feel impactful in any element of the game. I think the mythic needs some tuning to hit the sweet spot. Right now, on the one hand, it’s too powerful in PvP on the other it’s very helpful in PvE.
But what do you think? Where am I right or wrong? Until next time, thanks for reading!
Deltia
Wrap up:
If you’re looking for a one-bar PvE builds click HERE, one-bar PvP builds HERE or one-bar Werewolves builds HERE. Also, consider watching me on Twitch where you can ask me questions about my current builds.
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