tomofhyrule wrote: »

SkaiFaith wrote: »

We now know from the Reddit AUA that in 2026 we'll likely see Overland Difficulty implemented - why balance now?
Few months from now everything will need to be looked at anyway.
Let them work on what they think is the priority right now... We'll have needed balances down the road; game isn't in an unplayable state right now, we can wait a bit IMO.

Let's not pretend balance is anywhere near a good state right now.

I'm not going to go too crazy until we see the patch notes, but I'm really disappointed that it seems like they're still on the "we need to wait and see" phase for how Subclassing affected balance. Spoiler alert: it affected balance exactly as the players from the U46 PTS warned them about.

We should not have to go through 9+ months of balance being in shambles before they deign to address it. After all, look at the "how did you enjoy Subclassing and U46?" thread in General - it's not universally positive, and the longer they don't address it, the more of a chance that those players who are frustrated are going to find a new home... if they haven't already.

If I were Game Director, I would have made Post-Subclassing Balance be an all-hands-on-deck thing as soon as I saw the frustration when U46's PTS was going... and I'd also be trying to rush a really nice (paid!) feature like a new Class for U50 to get people back and spending money.

Me, I found a new home in GW2 until the devs of ESO decide to balance their stuff here.

I am not gonna invest in what resources I have to keep working on builds only for them to be destroyed whenever the devs finally decide to bring out the nerf hammer and destroy the china shop, because that's the only way they know how to balance.

I've done it for 7,000+ hours and I'm sick of it.

Yeah, balance is something that really needs to come out on a more frequent basis. It even seems like “we’ll balance every PTS cycle” isn’t even happening.

U46’s cycle was nothing short of insulting. Despite so many (experienced!) players making points about how much this would screw the game over (including data!), we got nothing besides “well this is what we want for the game so 😜”
I can clearly see the devs did not even conceive of players not wanting to Subclass, and they were thrown off guard by the power afforded by Subclassed builds. Which… really? The raid Discords called the new meta as soon as it leaked, before the PTS notes went up! The official feedback thread was full of players pointing these very obvious facts out!

I can understand that U47 was on the lighter side - we did only have Subclassing live for a month by then (let’s ignore that the U46 PTS thread had those points 6 weeks before that). But there is no excuse for U48 to still be light and in the ‘data collection’ phase. Players should not have to suffer with an unbalanced mess until March at the earliest.

I’m interested to see these patch notes, but after the ESOLive saying “light on combat changes,” I don’t have much hope. It’s really feeling like the combat team’s plan for balance is to throw up their hands and funnel everyone into Vengeance, letting PvE be whatever mess it is.

A while back, I suggested adding passive synergies between skill lines of the same class, since only the original class can use multiple skill lines unique to it. For example, after using a Storm Calling ability, Dark Magic abilities could deal 10% more damage for 10 seconds. Just a rough idea, but you get the point. It shouldn’t be too hard to implement and would give each class more distinct flavor, instead of applying the same buffs to all pure classes.

coop500 wrote: »

Me, I found a new home in GW2 until the devs of ESO decide to balance their stuff here.

I hear a lot of noise about GW2. It’s probably not for me because I’m in ESO because of the TES part, and I’ve been spending my time back in Skyrim and BG3, but I do find it interesting at the number of ESO players jumping to GW2.

Heck, a lot of the ESO StreamTeam is maining GW2 at this point. Definitely not the best look when a large faction of a game’s streamer community all jumps ship to the same competitor game.

Even if they did a pre-subclassing skill reorganization, lets be honest it probably would have been a shitshow still. They did say on the livestream the following PTS cycle we will see more balancing for live combat. TBH with vengeance going on it feels like a waste in a way. Why do a large pass on a game system that you may find out needs to be overhauled or replaced down the line? Could just be that subclassing released so messily that they need to patch it in the meantime.

Just seems like in the meantime itd make more sense to complete hybridization and iron out what stats should even be in the game to begin with. Why do we still distinguish between Weapon and spell anything? Crits? Damage? Resists? Why not get rid of the convoluted duplicates and then you could simplify tons of calculations to not compare to figure out which one is more or less.