It seems like a cop-out answer, but it is hard to pick one of these.

AWA, while we were told was necessary, was done in a way that did not include obvious things like Eidetic Memory. One character needs to read all of the books, ones in dungeons, trials, Cyrodiil, and other places. There are so many of them too. Surely making that AWA would have freed up a lot of space in the database. I can create a character more suited for trials and get achievements there, but I would have to start reading lorebooks on that character all over again to get that achievement. Then they had the audacity to add more achievements at least twice after AWA was implemented! All those commemorative ones that I had to go back and do anyway, since they hadn’t been tracked, like safeboxes and mundus stones. That is a real slap in the face.

Hybridization made every character, regardless of whether they were stamina or magicka, have to equip daggers on one bar and a staff on the other. I really hate this. It is said to be incomplete and there are calls to finish this, but I fear things would get worse if that were the case.

Even before hybridization the U35 nerfing of dots was a blow to dps builds. Before that everything was centered around this. Skill rotations became a nightmare afterward, skills had different timers and it just didn’t work as well.

Subclassing as a mandatory upgrade for end game activities was the final straw. No need to have more than one character if you do this, otherwise you have to respec every character to be the same. The option to not subclass wasn’t even considered during the development process.

So how do I rate these? Subclassing has affected me the most in a negative way, but perhaps it is because all of these other things came first and it is a cumulative effect. I could rank U35 or hybridization higher because they were near the start of the downhill slide for combat and perhaps if they had not happened the rest may not have as well. Out of all of these AWA is the least bothersome because there is some stupid random book from any bookcase that I have never read on my main, the one who has the most lorebooks, and I may never find it. There are also lorebooks in trials that she has not read, but she is not well suited for trials, I had another character for that. At this point getting all of the lorebooks just isn’t going to happen.

I dislike the new BGs but I wasn’t overly fond of the old BGs, though they were much more enjoyable than the 30 wins I had to get in the new BGs for the bear mount. I try to keep fighting even when it is a lost cause, but I just quit and spawn camped during one CTR where all my teammates were spread all over the map and I plus maybe one or two others were trying to get the relic and dying repeatedly. I even had one player on the other team give me a “gg” message for trying so hard. I can gladly avoid these now and be unaffected.

I think I have to still rank subclassing as the worst because of the chilling effect it had on end game activities both PvE and PvP. I feel it every time I go to Cyrodiil on my pure class character. I would feel it in trials in PvE if I went back to running trials again on a pure class character. I’ve had to make so many unpleasant changes to my characters with respect to all of these things, it’s just the final straw for me.

I just want 24 man groups to come back so the large pvp guilds are around again.

The game isn't dying, but it is shrinking—as expected when the combat team can’t respond to even a third of our feedback.

They released subclassing, which, to be honest, could have been great for the game and still provided class diversity if they had listened to our feedback to buff underperforming lines. Honestly, some lines are so bad—and the reasons so obvious—that it wouldn’t take much effort to make them at least decent without breaking anything.

Instead, they just nerfed the outliers, which barely changed anything, since Herald is still BiS. They completely ignored our feedback and are now investing in a PvP mode while leaving subclassing in the unacceptable state it’s in.

Don’t get me wrong, Update 46 was a good patch, but they should have gone full force in fixing its issues with Update 47. Now, once again, we’re being ignored in Update 48.

Not to mention how this new DLC system feels even emptier than what we had before, and as I mentioned before, the word “pass” does not carry a positive reputation among gamers and will only make people less interested, as they'll assume it's tied to limited time content.

LikiLoki wrote: »

No matter what anyone says, the game is still good. Good for new players. The developer needs to focus on attracting fresh people. It would be more interesting for me to play if I saw new faces for whom this world is just opening up its secrets.

Overall yes, but I think they really need to address the lack of combat versatility. They have slowly narrowed the options pretty greatly. Subclassing has added some niche builds and some customization, but the lack of addressing the underused lines is frustrating.

There are many things to do but the balance is pretty sad right now. The combat team really needs a fire lit or some changes to hierarchy. The whole team cannot think this is the way to go, take feed back from the community.

Part of the decile is probably other good options in the market opening up.

dcrush wrote: »

The majority of the AUA replies are just… corporate word sauce. They don’t answer anything.

“That’s a great question - we’ve been looking at this for some time now and while we cannot give a direct answer it is something we are working on and we will have some exciting news about it in the future but we cannot talk about it yet. We will be excited to talk about this another time though, especially because we are really working on this and on improving our communication with the community.”

Copy, paste, done.

This.

I don't understand why they'd take time out of their busy schedules to give "answers" in the format that's been criticized for over 10 years. Where do they see this kind of verbiage working? I'm not seeing it on the forums, on reddit. Seems like most of the reception's pretty negative. I'd really love someone like @zos_kevin or @ZOS_JessicaFolsom to provide some insight here.