The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind Upcoming Changes Detailed

A big expansion always shakes up the established status quo in any MMO. In case you were thinking of checking out the Morrowind expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online but weren’t looking forward to being blindsided by all the new stuff, Fextralife provides a comprehensive guide that explains all the upcoming changes.

Here’s a video rundown:

And an excerpt from the guide itself:

Champion System

We’ll start here with the Champion System, which has been given a significant make over in a very positive manner. For starters, players will gain a cap increase of 30 Champion Points, but on top of that they will find that Champion Stars within constellations are now heavily front-loaded. This means that players will not need to invest as many points into a star to get more out of it, in fact the benefit decreases much more significantly the more points you spend in a specific star. This will not only encourage players to spread out their points, and create some more build diversity, but will also give players who don’t have quite as many Champion Points a chance to be more competitive with players who are at the cap.

Furthermore, many of the Constellations and stars have been reworked in some form or another, either with completely different passive abilities or with reductions to their overall benefits. Notable changes are the replacement of the cost reduction stars for both Magicka and Stamina and the reduction of the recovery stars for Magicka, Stamina and Health down from 25% to 15%. What these changes do is put significantly more pressure on the player to manage their resources, encouraging more players to wear Light or Medium armor for the recovery/cost reduction passives as well as makes it harder for players to stack two really high DPS sets.

Other notable changes include reductions to the amount of healing and “damage-type” damage you can deal which are down from 25% to 15%. While this may seem like a huge nerf to DPS, Zenimax has cleverly added a new star that increases the damage of direct damage abilities by 25% called Master-at-Arms, to compliment the Thaumetuerge star that increases damage over time abilities by 25%. This again is a move that should help build diversity and encourage players to find unique combinations of abilities that take full advantage of those passives. Have you been keeping a specific set in your bank that you thought you’d never use? Now might be the right time to dust it off and give it a go.

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General Combat Changes

The main focus of many of general combat changes is resource management. Zenimax simply felt that players were too overpowered and had to spend very little effort to maintain their resource pools while being able to output huge damage numbers, so they have implemented some changes to make sustain something that must actually be managed. The first of these changes is to reduce the cooldown for being charged Stamina or Magicka to block an attack to 0.25 seconds from 0.5 seconds. This will drain these resources twice as fast when blocking, providing a huge nerf to tanks and PvP builds that could nearly perma-block.

Sneak attacks no longer grant a bonus to Critical Damage when used against other players. Sneak attacks will continue to guarantee a Critical Strike and stun the target, and will also still grant a bonus to Critical Damage when used against monsters. This is a huge nerf to PvPers that play from stealth often, primarily Nightblades. We can only assume this was done because they want players to get back into using Light and Medium Armor and Nightblades pose the biggest threat to making this possible by being able to CC and kill anyone within seconds who may have done so. It sucks for Nightblades, not so much for the rest of us.