In the latest ESO PTS patch notes, we've made various small changes to the new features of Free Update 39, which players will receive as part of the base game.

The new features in the upcoming Update 39 will be free to all players, ESO ZOS team took the time to polish and clean up many large and small features in the game, and also added some small new features and quality improvements. Update 39 will be released on PC/MAC on August 21st and on consoles on September 5th.

Intro

Week 4 PTS patch notes are here, and as usual there aren't too many changes. Week three is usually where we see the last of the majority of combat and balance tweaks, but we do have a couple of things here.

Oakensoul Interaction Change

First off fixed an issue where slotted passive effects that persisted through bar swap, such as Grim Focus, could benefit targets under the influence of ESO Oakensoul or Werewolf.

This was an interesting little interaction with some of those new buffs that persist on both bars, you could actually slot stuff on your back bar, like Bound Aegis for example, and benefit from that 8% max Magicka, while you were using Oakensoul on the other bar.

So this is a bit of a Nerf, but it does make sense.

Oakensoul's design is with the intent of limiting you to one bar. So allowing a skill on your back bar to still have an effect, I can understand why they're not allowing that, but it will still work as a back bar option on two bar builds.

Flame Staff Buff

The next change is to Inferno Staves. Let's do a quick recap of Inferno and Lightning Staves over the course of PTS. For week one, Inferno Staves we're going to add 500 flat damage to the first tick of each status effect that you deal damage with, and Lightning Staves we're going to add 12% to channeled and damage over time abilities. With the increased damage, we can get some ESO Gold faster.

In week three, they changed those up a bit Lightning Staves were given channeled and direct damage abilities instead of the damage over time, and Inferno Staves were given a 12% boost to damage over time, instead of the status effect damage.

Also Read: Try to Get These Top 4 Weapon Sets In Elder Scrolls Online! - Intro & Effects

My Analysis About The Changes

One of my initial points of feedback over that was Lightning Staves were given a main damage type to improve, which is direct damage and then a more Niche damage type the channeled damage. While Inferno staves were only given a main damage type in the damage over time, so they have addressed that now with week four, they're adding 12% status effect damage as well to Inferno Staves. However there is one main problem with this and that is for most setups 90% or more of the status effect damage you are getting is coming from Burning, Poisoned and Bleeding, which was already boosted in last week's ESO version of this, since those three are dots.

You already had the 12% boost there, so really compared to last week's version you're only gaining 12% to the other five status effects over Charged, Concussed, Chilled, Diseased and Sundered and these don't really typically account for much of your total damage. So 12% to those, I don't think that's really going to make a noticeable difference over last week's version of Inferno Staves.

Now for Wardens, this could be interesting with their increased Chill damage since that procs so often 12% more to that sounds nice, but many Wardens are already running an Ice Staff not an inferno to benefit from their class passive that boosts damage when using an Ice Staff.

Then we have ESO Nightblades, who can get a fair amount of overcharge damage, but even that boosting by 12% in this example here, it's only adding about 270 DPS almost nothing, and Inferno Staves really isn't going to synergize well with Nightblade, anyways since they are mostly direct damage, and would do better with Daggers, Bow or a Lightning Staff.

What I think they should have done is add back on that flat status effect damage boost, if they're going to go this route instead of the 12% and that way the three main damaging status effects Burning, Poisoned and Bleeding would also see an additional bump from the week three to four changes.

Maybe not the 500 that was initially proposed, maybe that's a little too high with both of these bonuses here. But something that boosts the flat damage of the ticks instead of having it percent based. We are pretty late into ESO PTS at this point though, so we'll see if anything further can be adjusted with this.

Outro

That is it for the week 4 changes, you will think these are just my initial reactions, so it's always possible that I overlooked some usage.

Thanks for your reading!