ESO's combat team rewrote Update 51's balance pass after PTS feedback
The Elder Scrolls Online's combat team went back into Update 51 and changed the balance pass after players hammered the public test server, and it says so plainly in its own post on 13 August: these adjustments are a direct response to two weeks of feedback and were not originally planned. That is a rare admission and the reason this list is worth reading closely.
The numbers, by class
| Class | Change |
|---|---|
| Dragonknight | Core of Flame 12% missing resources (was 15%), Heart of Flame healing down 20%, Landslide builds faster and stacks to 12, Seething Fury halved in PvP, Power Lash damage down |
| Templar | Balanced Warrior uncapped and now rewards slotting Templar skills, Judgment's Brand 1600 bonus damage (was 1400), Aetheric Lancer's area effect spawns on a stationary caster |
| Nightblade | Strife grants 1% damage per 10% of current health while active; the cost increases stay under review |
| Necromancer | Nothing Wasted loses 2 stacks instead of 3 but ticks every 12 seconds (was 15), Pummeling Goliath's bash gains a 1-second cooldown and about 73% more damage, Frozen Colossus 12.5% more damage at 150 ultimate |
| Warden | Fetcher Infection 75% every other cast (was 60%), Arctic Blast about 20% more per tick |
| Sets and skills | Draugrkin's healing reduction halved in PvP and its bonuses moved to weapon and spell damage, Ice Comet about 21% more damage over time and now snares on every hit |
Our take: what it means for players
Credit first, because it belongs to the testers rather than to the studio.
Nothing in that table exists without the people who spent two weeks on a test server writing up what was wrong, and ZeniMax naming that feedback as the cause is the honest thing to do. The public test server is unpaid labour that makes a live patch better, and it deserves to be described as such.
The substance is a studio admitting that refreshing classes one at a time was always going to break PvP. Dragonknight and Werewolf went through Class Mastery first and have dominated ever since, which the team calls inevitable by nature of going first. It is inevitable, and that is the argument against shipping a refresh class by class in a game with rated PvP: every player on an unrefreshed class spends months paying for a schedule they did not choose.
The Warden entry is the one that should worry people. A class explicitly still mid-refresh gets two number tweaks and a note saying they do not indicate where it will end up, and the next stage of the refresh has already moved to 2027. That is a year of playing a class the developers agree is not finished, and no amount of Fetcher Infection damage closes that gap.
The Necromancer bash change is the quiet good one. Removing the need to double bash weave in favour of a single harder hit lowers the mechanical tax on an ultimate without lowering its power, which is the sort of fix that makes a class easier to play well without making it stronger.
What's next
Update 51 lands on 28 September 2026, a week later than first announced (the studio director's letter), and the next stage of the class and combat refresh is now targeted at 2027. Both sit on the calendar and the release tracker with the day we last checked each.
Common questions
What is changing for Dragonknight in ESO Update 51?
Core of Flame restores 12 percent missing resources, down from 15, and Heart of Flame's healing drops 20 percent. Landslide builds faster, stacks to 12 and decays slower. Seething Fury is halved in PvP, and Power Lash deals less outright damage in exchange for a monster damage bonus.
Is the Warden getting fixed in Update 51?
Not properly. ZeniMax says the class is still mid-refresh, which makes larger changes difficult, and calls these adjustments not indicative of where it wants the Warden to end up. Fetcher Infection deals 75 percent damage every other cast, up from 60, and Arctic Blast gains roughly 20 percent per damage tick.
Were these combat changes always planned for Update 51?
No. The combat team says they are a direct response to two weeks of public test server feedback and were not originally planned, with Dragonknight and Werewolf dominance in PvP named as the trigger.
Written by 0hp from the publisher's own announcement, linked above, and every specific in it was checked against that page by a second pass before it published. Independent, and not affiliated with the publisher. Dates are announced or labelled as estimates. How this site is written, and how to correct it.
