The Scribes of Fate PTS has arrived and there are some absolutely huge Tank changes on the horizon. For the most part a lot of the changes are good and we can expect Tanking to be in a better place thanks to these adjustments to a lot of the fundamentals of Tanking.

There are changes to Tank gear, trait, abilities and the general functions of Tanking in The Elder Scrolls Online.

Official PTS Patch Notes: PTS Patch Notes v8.3.0 — Elder Scrolls Online

Discuss the Scribes of Fate in The Tank Club Discord!

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• Block/Bar Swap Change

Currently on the live server when you bar swap you drop block for a short time during the bar swap animation. This is being removed meaning that when you switch bar you’ll continue to block which prevents the possibility of being killed from a dropped block during bar swaps.

• Taunt Immunity Change

Currently on the live server if you cast taunt often you are able to build up two stacks of taunt. If a second person then taunts an enemy in this situation they gain taunt and the enemy would become taunt immune also meaning they cannot be taunted again until the immunity expires. They have made it so that you cannot build up two stacks by yourself and have increased the number of taunt stacks to 5 to create immunity. What this means is multiple people would need to cast alternative taunts 5 times within 12 seconds which is highly unlikely to happen by accident, with the current way that it works it can be done by accident and you also have no way of tracking this in the base game or on console, it requires an addon. Taunt Immunity will still exist but will be much harder to cause on an enemy.

• Soft Taunts

In the past Soft Taunt was a hidden feature that was behind skills such as Silver Leash and Unrelenting Grip, it was a short 5 second taunt which we called a “Soft Taunt” since it didn’t act the same way as a regular taunt such as Pierce Armor and it only applied on enemies that didn’t currently have an active taunt. This was removed from the game a while ago due to it causing some taunt related issues and rather than fix the problem the developers simply removed it from the game.

They have now brought back taunting with pull skills which is great news, and it will now be a traceable 15 second full taunt. Again it will not be possible to taunt a target using a pull if they already have a taunt active which means you can’t steal taunt off a Tank by using it, but it does make things much easier with regards to when a Tank is pulling in enemies, it will only be a single skill cast rather than having to pull then also taunt a target.

Pulls that will taunt targets include:

• Dragonknight’s Unrelenting Grip
• Necromancer’s Beckoning Armor
• Fighters Guild Silver Leash
• Monster Set Swarm Mother

• Changes to Ice Staff

To summarise it – they have removed the Immobilisation that can be caused by an Ice Staff and Wall of Elements when causing the Chilled effect. In return they have added a 40% snare and AoE Minor Breach but this again only applies to Chilled enemies.

This is a combination of both a buff and a nerf – we’ve taught people to use the Pulsar/Blockade method of Immobilisation and Crowd Control for the past few years due to the large amounts of buffs and debuffs applied via doing this, and it also made Immobilising enemies accessible to all Tank Classes. This is important because when you pull or chain an enemy the CAN be immobilised afterwards but if you take a Nightblade for example, they don’t have an accessible skill that causes enemy immobilisation, they have a Fear skill with Mass Hysteria and when you pull an enemy then try to fear them, it simply doesn’t work.

Obtaining a snare doesn’t to be a good substitute for the loss of the immobilisation but you are getting a nice potential AoE debuff with Minor Breach. This will work well especially in trial situations and makes the gear set Dragon’s Defilement completely redundant as you are able to put down blockade in an add pull and then Pulsar to create Minor Breach. If they then have something like Razor Caltrops or Unnerving Boneyard you’ll have Major and Minor Breach which provides a huge debuff to the enemy with very little effort. The gain of Minor Breach is also beneficial for a double Ice Staff setup as you’ll now have both Major and Minor Breach along with a Taunt all locked into the Ice Staffs base toolkit.

• Vampire – Mist Form

This ability returns to PvE in a brand new format. It now works as teleport gap closer/evasion skill. While this isn’t going to essentially be for Tanking, there are situations where it might be found somewhat useful for example boss swapping mechanics in the trials Dreadsail Reef and Halls of Fabrication. During the teleport you’ll receive no damage from three projectiles and there are different effects for the morphs. With Elusive Mist you’ll gain Major Expedition and Major Evasion which would give you a speed boost and AoE damage reduction for 4 seconds.

• Harmony Jewellery Change

There has been a drastic change to the Harmony jewellery trait making it arguably much stronger. You’ll now gain 880 of each resource when you activate a synergy per Harmony piece worn so that’s 2640 Health, Magicka and Stamina return for every synergy used if you were using 3 Harmony.

This will also stack with your Undaunted Command passive, and when using a Shard or Orb synergy you’d gain those resources in addition as well.

If you gain 1600 Health, 800 Stamina and 600 Magicka from the Undaunted Command, used 3 Harmony (2640) Magicka Recovery (10 ticks 5070) jewellery and use only a Shard/Orb synergy on cooldown once every 20 seconds, that alone would be 4240 Health, 7400 Stamina and 8310 Magicka gained every 20 seconds. If it was a Luminous Shard synergy then make that 12270 Magicka.

You could also safely use the synergy from Blood Altar without negatively effecting your group but this isn’t a consistent synergy as it requires you to be low on health.

The more synergies you use, the more resources you’ll gain, but there are two problems that might occur. For Trial situations, if you have an Alkosh user then you shouldn’t be using up all the synergies so you have to think about that. If there isn’t anyone using Alkosh then you can use them more or less as much as you want and you’ll obtain a massive amount of resource gain.

You may also run into situations where there are little to no synergies at all, then Harmony becomes completely inactive as a trait. When you look at gear traits you want to target traits that have high activity, for example Infused Magicka Recovery is active 100% of the time if you don’t have a full Magicka bar where as Harmony will only be useful the second you press a synergy so it has a high waste potential if no synergies are available.

• Gear Adjustments

Crimson Oath’s Rive has been changed to only activate when in combat to prevent it accidentally proccing and causing a fight to begin.

Archdruid Devyric has changed from a cone attack to a 7m x 5m rectangle so it will hit targets more reliably.

Pearls of Ehlnofey has been changed so you now only need to be under 50% resources to proc it rather than 30% but you’ll only gain 3 Ultimate now rather than 5. It does make the set more accessible for people but it’s a reduction in usefulness for people who were able to utilise it already.

This patch is a dungeon DLC and so we have two new dungeons, 2 new monster sets and 6 new 5 piece gear sets, 2 of which are heavy armor sets.

None of the sets really jump out at being very useful for the majority of Tanks and situations.

Abyssal Brace provides a group buff but it’s not a very strong one, it is potentially a consistent buff however so in high group AoE damage fight it would have some minor use.

Telvanni Enforcer is a 5 piece sustain set which doesn’t seem like it worth the time to farm it, especially with the changes to Harmony, so even for a beginner you likely wouldn’t need this. It’s also quite similar to the Torc of Tonal Constancy which is just a 1 piece mythic item rather than a whole 5 piece gear set.

Roksa the Warped is the only monster set that seemed somewhat like it has a use for Tanks. It’s a sustain set but not a very good one, at max stacks it would offer you 310 Health, Stamina and Magicka recovery. This could be replaced with something more consistent such as Chokethorn/Shadowrend or even Engine Guardian, the fact that you have to build up the stacks and you can lose them makes it quite unappealing.