I agree a new category would be convenient; I also remember an idea floating around about a bookshelf that can be "loaded" similar to the new master crafting stations. These shelves could hold a certain amount of book so a library would need only a few to accommodate all of the readable books in game.

i myself have all but 5 i believe and it has been quite the ordeal getting them all set up.

Don't think we should assume or surrender to subclassing being the only way to play.
Pure class is still a choice and very much a thing and compromising class balance to improve subclassing is potato.
Sorc skill lines are again at state before U45 and it is getting worse with each update due to subclassing changes.
The whole push and revert situation is a complete waste, months go by and we are still net 0 on improvements for sorcs.

Desiato wrote: »

And for all the talk of human decency, I know for a fact we all play ESO on computer hardware assembled by extremely disadvantaged people who work and live in terrible conditions. Who here is willing to say no to that? [by speaking with their actions]

"Society should improve"

"Yet you live in a society. Curious 🤔"

If I tried to boycott every product that was not ethically made then I would be unable to function in society. My time is better spent being vocal when I see something wrong (and sticking to that topic when it comes up) and voting for policies and politicians that want to do something about it.

Besides, this thread is not about that. It is about our feelings about how the employees at ZOS have been treated. And I think they should have been given notice. It should be required. The same as it is in other countries with little negative side effects. I don't have to hate capitalism, be perfectly self sufficient, and try to stop every wrong in the world to want ZOS to have been treated better and say as much.

I support the employees at zos. I support workers in general.

Desiato wrote: »

It would be reckless to operate a business otherwise, and they could actually be legally liable if they did so.

Where did I say anything about capitalism? I'm talking about basic things like employers should have to give notifications to people that layoffs are coming and that they have been laid off rather than people just suddenly finding themselves locked out and completely confused.

Imperial_Archmage wrote: »

I feel for the folks impacted by these layoffs, I really do, but at the same time I can’t help but ask myself what is that they were doing before they were fired? The so called “Season of the Worm” has been nothing but rehashed old content that adds nothing new to the game.

They made the decision not to develop a conventional chapter last year. The staff who would normally work on new assets for chapters were probably either assigned to other Bethesda projects or Blackbird.

Many of the affected employees actually came from another Zenimax studio that was shut down last year, Arkane.

Varana wrote: »

I will never cease to be baffled (and, to some extent, disheartened) by people defending this horrid workplace and corporate culture.
Regardless of whether the layoffs made economic sense - while I doubt it, there is the theoretical possibility that they did - the style of firing people, how this is done, is just terrible.
And I really hope more people in that industry start unionising.

I'm not president of the world, and Microsoft doesn't make the rules they operate in either. Right or wrong, this is how our society functions. I would say it's largely good as until recently, the world had seen unprecedented global prosperity. But nothing is perfect and some would say the wheels are coming off this wagon for complex reasons that are beyond the scope of the eso forums.

If Microsoft didn't function in a fiscally responsible way, they would actually be in violation of their fiduciary duty to their shareholders. You might imagine them to all be residents of an ivory tower, but many are also individuals a who are either part of mutual funds or shareholders themselves who count on dividends to fund their retirement.

The bottom line is they are making decisions that they think are best for their stakeholders. Every responsible company operates like this. I doubt anyone making these decisions likes them.

It should be noted that ZOS employees are part of a union and though they can no longer access work systems, the last we heard the affected employees are still being paid with benefits.

Regardless, this is how our society functions and you can't blame a company for operating within its rules. If they didn't, they themselves would eventually be the target of an acquisition by another corporation that does.

Namacc wrote: »

Current pvp builds are limited by major resolve choice - the best source is from class skills which means you will always have to pick a class skill line that contains major resolve. And because restoring light and storm calling are so good you see everyone using them.

If you don't choose a class skill line with major resolve you need to use mighty chudan as there are no better alternatives but have the opportunity cost of losing better monster sets such as bloodspawn or balorgh.

Existing sources of Major resolve outside of class skill lines other than chudan

• Heavy Armor skill is used by block tank builds in pvp to be as tanky as possible by sacrificing all damage, movement etc. The snare is not worth it on other builds.
• Mages guild balance is not worth using in pvp due to huge nerf to healing done and shield strength which can stack with other similar effects like jeralls, major and minor defile.
• Psijic order mending spirit major resolve at 5 secs is too short for pvp and the caster doesn't get resolve - the ally does. Also, replaces light attack damage with a heal instead, so it's not worth it on pvp damage builds.
• Scribing has no good source of major resolve for pvp because the highest duration is 10 secs which is too short on such an important buff and the skills that can have major resolve are better off with other buffs such as major vitality on healing soul. Some scribe skills can't have major resolve but do have minor resolve such as ulfsiid's contingency.

Suggestions
Add major resolve to:

• Annulment and it's morphs at 20 secs
• Evasion and it's morphs at 20 secs
• Fighter's guild ring of preservation at 20 secs
• Scribe skills that don't currently have major resolve such as contingency, increase duration of major resolve in Scribe skills to 20 secs up from 10 secs

I think all the scribing buffs are way too short

Another thing I'm noticing here is the major difference in how people are talking about their playstyle.

A lot of people who talk about how exciting Subclassing is that it has enabled them to approach harder content use language of the form "I was able to do this." But there are a lot of people who are disappointed about pureclasses being underpowered who are using language closer to "my character was able to do this."

The "I am a player with various setups in my toolkit" and "I am the overseer of a group of individual characters with their own lives" dichotomy is an important distinction, and Subclassing is another one of those things that is bringing the "I want to build the best character because it's just a series of pixels" and "It is important to me that my characters act as their own people" into conflict. And now you have a third faction, the "I love Subclassing because I can finally make my character who they were supposed to be, but I'm choosing lines based on lore and not meta" group. A simple buff to pureclasses or nerf to subclassed builds won't help that third group now even though it would help the former two.

I will say that ESO, since U33 and Account-wide Achieves, really has felt like it's moving towards being a game for players with one character. Sure, things can be easier with more than one and we have gotten a few achieves here and there for having a bit of a roster, but the homogenization of characters is also a huge turn-off for the players who prefer to have all of their characters as individuals. After all, why should we bother spending our money on cosmetics if every character ends up being the same in the first place? Many people who favor the RP aspect like having characters that look and feel different, and Subclassing making it so there is essentially one OP setup and a bunch of meme builds really makes it difficult to care about the game as a whole when we see that the only way that the game seems to favor playing is some combination of the same handful of templates.

This is a major problem with spreadsheet balancing: having a circumstance where you have e.g. a tank who plays like a brick wall versus a dodge-roll tank versus a brawler tank are all different ways to accomplish something and make it fun to have alts. But if everything is homogenized down to "this tank does his attacks in red and this tank does the same attacks but blue and this tank does the same attacks but green," then it's not as much fun anymore. In a perfect world, there would be multiple setups - yes, some may be good general ones, some may have specific strengths and weaknesses, some may be high-risk-high-reward (essentially that's what we... almost... had before Subclassing - DK tanks were generally good, but there were cases where Sorc or Necro tanks could be much more preferable in specific fights; Arcanist was maybe a little too good, but it was good to have other classes around for support DPS roles like Z'enDKs or MKSorcs or ECCros or Templars for execute). But a lot of those playstyles should be about the same level so that all are welcome and nobody feels social pressure to bow to one single meta to rule them all like we have now

But yes, I know a lot of high- and top-end players who are also interested in their RP. I personally am one of those people who still tries to make sure that specific characters get specific achievements credited to them. I also know a lot more mid-high level players who are extremely interested in how their characters are build at present and have no intention of changing them... which is only meaning that gap between the normal and vet HM groups is ever widening.

I don't know of a single person who left the game (all my guilds are PvP) that have returned... for any reason lead alone subclassing.

Not sure on player numbers, they don't really share pop caps for some reason (and they won't say why they won't share those numbers). If I had to take a guess the numbers you're seeing is carryover from the vengence test and PvE people coming to PvP for one reason or another.

I'd be curious to see if this trend holds or not.

Thanks for bringing this up! We shared this thread with the housing folks. This is something they are thinking about, because of course we want you to have all of the books. But admittedly, this is still in the idea/see what is possible phase of things. So we will see what ideation and testing brings back, to see if something is possible and the impact on performance overall.

But it is on the team's radar and they have this thread for a reference point.

Edit: Also wanted to add that this will take awhile. Didn't want to set expectations that you will see anything around this in the immediate future.

ESO's PVP combines two things that probably shouldn't be ever mixed: a high skill level barrier to entey ans insanely powerful proc sets/ dubious mechanics that hardly require any skill.

All this on a setting that also combines two things that shouldn't coexist: big map and a small population.