Is it technically impossible for ZOS to make the mobs disengage earlier? Their aggro behaviour is truly silly. I ride past a group of bandits/wolves, and have to wait patiently at the wayshrine as every.single.one.of.them runs up to me to smack me and then run away.

Make their aggro stop completely after a certain distance. Alternatively, give us a green tree perk that makes creatures no longer hostile to us. Of course, cultists and daedra realistically should still be, but there's really no reason for skeevers and wolves to keep hounding you if you're just riding by.

Gabriel_H wrote: »

ESO's problem is that an add kited passed its patrol zone boundary keeps running after you and keeps you in-combat. A fix to that could be to enforce boundary rules more tightly, though this could be open to some abuse, such as a player pulling away from a multi-player fight in order to drop combat and switch gear or skills.

Like other issues like combat balance, they should implement different rules for PVE and PVP.

Very casual player standpoint, it's easy to say "meta doesn't matter" if you're doing content where it's negiligible, it's like comparing a match and a flamethrower underwater.

Of course you can go off meta, get creative, and still pull off massive DPS, but the average group struggles in high end content EVEN if they're running whatever meta is, so there's no room to get comfortable there for most.

And it's not just about you, it's about your team, if you're not bringing the best you can to your group, you're making the decision to make whatever content you're doing worse for everyone, if ONLY the combat team would care more about balance to allow different subclassing combos to be on the same level, it wouldn't be much of a problem.

I'll restrain myself quite a bit and only do a small remark on it.

Having such a balance state, where most item sets are essentially a "noob trap" and not a viable option is making community even more separated. As simple as one person is seeing they're doing 80% of damage in a dungeon as a tank, it's already a material for a potential conflict. Or group of friends raiding together, surely someone could be hard carried there and it's not a big deal but some dissatisfaction might easily arise for both carriers and the carried, it all can start from the state of balance rather than people's sentiment alone. It circles back to Brian's "all sets have it's place".

Frankly I agree with most of that perspective.

For the content that the overwhelming players engage with, balance really doesn't matter, and subclassing opens up many new ways of roleplaying your character or engaging with the game. Why hold back on more build freedom if it's going to be a net positive for 99% of players?

Like for myself, the hardest thing I do these says is vet DLC dungeons (not the newer HMs), and thematic-but-still-effective builds 0% hold me back from completing them - and that's content significantly more difficult than what the average player does.

I think in practice, the problem is twofold:

There are many mid-skilled players who know enough to look up builds but not enough to think for themselves. Since most posted builds are going to be meta/minmaxed, I think that gives the impression to many players that certain builds/classes/skill lines/sets are meaningfully stronger than others in the context in which they play - i.e. they have to follow the player-made meta.

In reality, if you're only ever going to do content that "requires" a maximum of 80k DPS or whatever, you can get there in thousands of different off-meta ways and still have a character that feels both good to play and very strong in the content you engage with. If you choose to follow copypasted builds while not doing content that remotely requires it, that is 100% your choice and a box you are putting yourself into.

However, at high-end levels of the game, "play how you want" just doesn't work well in practice. There's a level of gameplay where the perspective has to shift from your own enjoyment to the needs of the group. Following the meta is also a way of establishing shared group norms - like if the content is really challenging, knowing that everyone is on the same footing and trying their best from the get-go helps with group cohesion.

Anecdotally, the prog groups I've been in with a relaxed approach to who brings what have sometimes ended up very toxic - if you start to struggle to clear something, it's hard to approach someone and ask that they change their build to help everyone clear it. because the established norm was caring more about your own build/enjoyment than the group... which isn't productive if you start to hit a wall. And nobody is going to have fun dying to the same encounter over and over again.

shadoza wrote: »

There you go, let us be fair with out quotes. Now, what is your difficulty with my statements?

Doubt there's any difficulty they're having, it's just pointing out a potential confusion and clouded judgement. Look, you're heavily biased against some of the player groups here and it's oozing though the text, if you're not even trying to put yourself in other's shoes your position will likely fall flat for other's who are actively trying to met both ends somewhere on a common ground, work out potential ways for the feature to truly work and not just be another dead on arrival addition.

It looks like you want to make other's experience miserable because your experience was ruined by your standards, it's fine, but you can not expect to not be disagreed with. It's been 315 pages, we already been through "let them suffer" rhetoric a lot.

Does he actually play the game? Don't mean to be snarky, but if you're spending any amount of time in content other than overland, then you'd know how agonising it is to stand there plinking limply at an enemy when you know you can melt them on another build.

I will never understand why people blame Subclassing for poorly balanced skill lines.

Even without Subclassing, everyone played an Arcanist in PvE, and either a Sorcerer, Warden, or Nightblade in PvP.

The same people that don’t want to play with you if you’re not using certain skill lines, are the same ones that expected you to fully level a new character and farm out skill points to play a specific class in the first place, and if it’s exhausting to fight the same three classes on repeat I agree. This has been a problem, not one that came with Subclassing.