Thanks for the opportunity to give feedback here.

I'm sorry, but I have to start by saying I despise Subclassing. I don't hate the idea of it, but the way it was implemented felt like someone took a sledgehammer to ESO and now we're sifting through the detritus to see what is salvageable. I'll start by addressing your specific questions, and then I'll have some further thoughts afterwards:

Did your ability to play and/or complete certain types of game content improve after the launch of Update 46? If so, prior to the launch of Update 46, what was your character build?

No, not in the slightest.

I play top-end dungeons and high-end trials on my main, who is a Dragonknight tank. I'm very comfortable with how he plays and I really enjoy it. I'm also very much into the character design and backstory I have (more on that below), so I started ESO knowing that I wanted him to be a DK and I liked his identity and skills. My standard setup for most things looked like this for trash/bosses:
  
With that setup - and some changes for specific things here and there - I managed to get every 4-man trifecta in the game (I got Lep Seclusa as my last one the week before U46 dropped), as well as the first 5 trial trifectas (TTT, IR, GH, GS, DB) and some of the later HMs.

Now I do have an overland build for him as well that's specifically my "lore-friendly screw-around build" using off-meta sets and skills but it really matches the way I want my character to be.

I'll say that the Shield Toss skill alone sold Gold Road to me because I've been dying to be able to have my main go full Steve Rogers, and I threw a knockback on it so I can spend five minutes just laughing because I tossed a shield at some mob's head and threw him off a cliff with it. Meta? No. But fun? Heck yes. And I can very easily Armory between my for-fun and sweaty builds depending on what I'm doing that day.

What did you change to your character build when Update 46 launched that allowed you to play or complete content that you had trouble with before? What game content was it?

Now? Well, I can still do all of that content. It hasn't changed that.

But now it just feels so wrong to play. As I said, I'm really into my whole design for my character, and now I have to throw away everything about him because I'm "supposed" to run something. It feels dirty - like I'm just playing a random build that I have no input in because the difference between a meta build and anything else is immense. Who cares what I want to play, because now all that matters is what I have to play.
  
Like... he's themed around fire. Not ice! What? And what is this Hermaeus Mora nonsense doing here?!? He's not a Daedric Cultist! I had to throw away a lot of my fire skills so I could throw in all of this other stuff I need to run because the group needs it all. It doesn't feel like my character anymore, just some random mish-mash of "here, run this because you need to!"

I know one of the big ideas we hear a lot (even from the devs!) is "Play the way you want! You don't need to play meta if you don't want to!" Which... well, no, not really. Especially if you're talking about the later trial HMs. But even for lower level content than that like standard vets, we need to remember that we live in a society. We can't solo vDSR, so you need other people there. And if you're getting people to take the time to run things with you, it is the mark of a good citizen to show up at your best. If you're coming in and telling the group that you don't care about them and treat them like disposable NPCs, then they're also free to take someone else who does want to play with others.
I always compare it to doing a group project in school. Sure, you could tell your groupmates that you're not going to do any of the planning with them and you'll do your part of the project on the topic you want whether they want to do that topic or not and then drop it in their lap. But that's not going to get you a good grade; that's likely to make your groupmates complain to the teacher that you're not working with them and they'll try to get you replaced. That isn't toxicity, at least not on the part of the group. That is toxicity on your part for treating the other members like trash and not wanting to work with them to do a project together.

Now I do still play my standard build sometimes when I'm in a group of friends and they also don't mind me willingly eating nerfs and playing at a subpar level since I'm now not playing the best of the best setup. And that's much more fun since that's the build I made for my character. And yes, I can still do the content at a high level. But I know that I am gimping myself by doing so, and I do not want to inflict that on random people.

So yes, I can still do all the content I did. The only thing is that I am not having fun anymore. It feels like a chore, and I want to get out and put my fun build back on... which then feels like a bit of a letdown since I'm not pushing myself in high level content. In short, because of Subclassing, it feels like ESO's new mantra is "Play the way you want, or play the content you want. But not both."

---

So when I first heard about Subclassing (and yes, it was leaked through all of the Trial Discords a few weeks before the official reveal), we all knew that it looked like a disaster waiting to happen. We all know that the Classes themselves are not completely balanced with each other, and now we're going to allow people to drop their underperforming lines and take overperforming lines from other Classes as well. The raider Discords were already calling the meta setups even before the official reveal... and they were all right. And yet, it almost seems like... the combat team didn't anticipate any combos beyond 'Zookeeper' and 'Elementalist'?

Now I'll say it again: I don't have a problem with Subclassing existing in the first place. I'm really happy for the people who are able to make their fun overland builds a little close to what they wanted them to be, I really am. But it needed some limits on it to prevent it from bringing a wrecking ball to combat. I actually would have even liked a freer form of Subclassing: get rid of the skill point and XP penalties, allow swapping all three lines, and allow accepting multiple lines from the same Parent Class. But balance it properly. Personally, I would have started by allowing Subclassing just by swapping lines willy-nilly to be possible in overland and normal content only, so PvP and vet PvE would still have some structure. Maybe as it's balanced further, then start to open it up later. I was really hoping that would be the case, and... well, the Khajiit's out of the bag now.

This does remind me a lot of the Vengeance tests in a way - a lot of players like Vengeance as it is and that's great. But a lot of the hardcore PvPers loathe Vengeance because they have fun by building and experimenting with sets and skills and the like... and that part isn't in Vengeance. Similarly, high-level PvE since Subclassing has pretty well turned into "If you are a DPS, run this setup. If you are a tank, run this setup. If you are a healer, run this setup" because nothing else comes close to that level of power. It's "template PvE," just making us farm the stuff for our own templates. The creativity and fun we used to have progging high-level content has been drowned out in a green (and sometimes cyan) laser rave with everyone holding red glowsticks.

As I said, I'm extremely into the character design and development process. I spend months preparing my characters and writing their backstories. I have one character per Class, and I designed them around their Class because I see their Class as their set of abilities. Scribing actually was a lot of fun since I could start to pull in elemental attacks that are not native to their Classes, but once Subclassing hit... well I was originally going to do it for a few of them, but I ended up hating it so much that I stubbornly kept all of my characters pure and took it as a personal challenge to build them the way I wanted using only sets and Scribed skills to spite Subclassing - like my Maormer Elemental Monk character (Sorcerer) who I built to use wind, water, and earth from his sets, fire and lightning from his staves, and then a Scribed skill to give him some ice along with the wind and lightning he has native to his class.
I actually was invited to a friend's stream as part of the ESO Tenfest to talk about my character design process (also featuring the next character design I have waiting in the wings for as soon as we get a new Class... hopefully soon please!)
That's also one of the things I actually like about Subclassing too - the fact that Subclassing would allow ZOS to add a new Class and then players who just want to toy around with the new lines could do so on existing characters, but those like me would still have the option of making a brand new Level 1 character to explore the new tutorial and updated starter zones.

Now, I'll admit that my alts are just for-fun characters, so I'm not really concerned about them being underpowered compared to the meta (especially considering my second character is a werewolf who keeps his transformation unmorphed since his fur is not supposed to be black or white. Then again, he's supposed to be a brown werebear so that's a different problem entirely - which again could be fixed with Skill styling, please...)
But as for my main... that's where it hurts. And it really hurts that in order to play at a high level, I am expected to throw away his individuality and the setup I made for him because having a pure DK is so incredibly much worse than anything I could do with a Subclassed setup (or rather, there's really only one or two Subclassed setups that would be acceptable themselves).

The other main issue I have is that Subclassing and all the balance around it seems... directionless. We're at the point where there are massive pendulum swings in the combat design and nobody knows what the Combat Team's goal even is. Even in some of the PTS discussion, there are two schools of thought on how it should be (I wrote a whole post on this over there) Basically, everyone can agree that a focused build should be more powerful than a jack-of-all-trades build, but which is the 'focused' build and which is the 'jack-of-all-trades' build? Are we focusing on a character's role, so a character with 3x DPS lines should do more damage than a pure Class which can do all roles with those lines; or are we focusing on a character's archetype, so a character who specs hard into their parent Class will be stronger than a character who trades some of their Class's innate weaknesses for another Class line to have more abilities?
Personally, I am in the latter camp. Using something like D&D as an example, a character who keeps one Class all the way to level 20 will have access to a smaller number of abilities since they can only access their Class's abilities... but they have the most powerful versions of those abilities, whereas a character who picked up a multiclass can't access those top-level abilities, but has a lot more options in combat.
(I'll also point out that I use D&D as an example since it is most similar to the Class system in ESO. Classes in previous TES games were more just telling you which skills started out at a higher level, but it's difficult to compare a solo RPG to an MMO since balance isn't really a factor in a solo game since other people aren't involved so you can be as godmode as you want, but when others are around you do need to worry about balance)

That balance swinging is also torturous, since the obvious solution is always "let's nerf skill X because it's OP if it's combined with skill Y from a different parent Class!" But... what if you're not running that combo? What if you are just running skill X because you like the three parent Class lines, and now you were just handed a major nerf on the potential that you might combine it with Y... which you're not. You just lost a lot of power with nothing to show for it.
That's what we've seen for the 'balancing' in U46, particularly with the severe nerfs to DK sustain and Sorc pet business. The balance isn't conditional to using Subclassing, it's essentially "you'd better Subclassing or else you'll lose a lot of power!" There's a part of it that feels like we're being... 'encouraged' to Subclass whether we want to or not. I know I've heard that "pure Classes feel very underpowered compared to Subclassing" was a major piece of feedback even from the Content Creators testing an early build, but that hasn't really been addressed. I don't like that it feels almost like the devs are telling me that the way I like to play is "wrong." But as it is, anyone who chooses not to Subclass is willingly taking a massive self-nerf and for what?

Another thing I'll point out related to the above is that it almost seems that even the devs don't realize how the Classes are built. Now I don't expect the developers to play the game outside of work or be pros at it, but there should be some base level of understanding of the mechanics of the game. In the Developer Preview article, the Systems Designer is quoted as saying "players can drop their tank and support skill lines for more damage-dealing abilities and passives." But... only three of the seven Classes have strictly defined skill lines by role. That's less than half of the Classes! All of the basegame Classes (DK, NB, Templar, Sorc) have some lines that may fit better into one role of the other, but most players before Subclassing would use a mix of skills from two or even all three lines. How can we drop a healing line if we don't have a healing line?

I do think that the combat team coming out and saying what their goal is for balance - whether to consider a role as the focus or a Class as the focus - would help. It does seem that most people who are not fans of Subclassing as it is are the ones who favor the parent Classes as the focused builds and Subclassed builds as being able to spread out utility and use other skills to account for innate weaknesses. Even the preview article does reference this by saying "Also, there is no desire to reduce the effectiveness of pure classes and their ability to complete content," but the massive power Subclassing allowed did de facto reduce the effectiveness of pure Classes greatly.

That also leads to a discussion of Class Identity. Players have always talked about Class Identity as a way to tell how the character feels - DKs always felt a bit on the tanky side, even as a DD or healer; Sorcs were your streaky movement Class; and so on. This was especially important in PvP since you wanted to have an idea what that enemy would do - you see them go into stealth and you know there's a NB around: everyone hold block since they will probably try to bomb on the flags or the like. Now, you see someone in PvP with a Netch following them and you have no idea what's coming.
I'll go back to that article again: "Class identity is still important for key aspects of our game: Achievement, class styles, class scripts, class item sets, and so much more," but this reads almost like an insult. When players talk about Class Identity, we mean the skills they use and how we can anticipate their actions. That is gone. There is no more Class identity. And yet, the devs are holding onto this idea of "Class identity" because... God forbid someone who wasn't born a NB wears pants with modelled-on pockets?!?! What?!?! Locking the Class set style pages was an unpopular move when it was first done in U41 (when they were unlocked in U40), and now the team is doubling down on that?!?!

So yeah, that was a book, I know. But I'm writing all of this because I really love this game. I just... don't really love the direction it's been going in lately.
As an anecdote, I'm known in my friends circle as the Bugtester. If there is a bug in this game, I will find it and I will be affected by it. I once lost all of my Trial gear when my storage chests were deleted and it took a month to get it all back. I spent a full patch cycle unable to do any questing whatsoever because my quest states were all borked. I got an 11-day temp ban in the PTS Planemeld since I want to test every patch and give my feedback.
And even after all of that, I have never dropped ESO. But U46's completely unbalanced mess that was Subclassing got me the closest to uninstalling that I've ever been.

It makes me sad that I spend my time going onto the PTS every cycle to test things and make reports, only for pretty well all of the PTS feedback to be discarded without a glance. I'm not a content creator; I'm doing it all because I love this game, but I've come to the feeling that this game doesn't care one bit about me. Between the utter lack of communication, and the one-two punch of bad news of the NA event getting cancelled and then reading between the lines of the Director's letter, it really left a sense of hopelessness behind.

I'll admit, I'm pretty well at the "log on, do endeavors, log off and go play something fun" stage. ESO has kinda lost that fun for me. The writing of the story content has been on a steady decline - I'll admit that there's not much that can be done in an MMO where world states need to allow for many different players, and I'm actually one who would like the world to stay static in 2E 582 so players don't feel like they need to rush through content to do it in the right order. But I have other games like Skyrim of BG3 if I want my hardcore solo RPGs I can lose myself in. And let's not forget that TES 6 might be a thing. Eventually. Maybe.
I find it interesting that that one "What is your favorite expansion year in terms of storytelling" thread from last week had so many people saying Orsinium, even though it wasn't an option. That was a fantastic story. Even some of the Q4 DLCs we've had were great. But the tentpole Chapter lines were usually dull and full of obnoxious one-dimensional caricatures and returning character were more often than not horribly Flanderized.

At this point, most of what I'm doing now is... looking at my characters, dreaming up costumes for them, dreaming up stories for them, and hoping that eventually I'll get some new ways to play (read: Classes) that I can make more.
Essentially, I'm playing The Sims: Tamriel Edition. And let's face it, The Sims is free to play now if that's all I'm doing in the first place...
I'd love if ESO would really look to the things it does well and the things you can't get from other RPGs - Finn's Dungeons/Trials team is consistently amazing, and I'm so excited we're getting two sets of dungeons this time again. ESO also allows us to see parts of Tamriel we haven't seen since Arena, and there's still so much of Tamriel itself that is left to be explored. And the group content, because the best part of playing ESO is being able to share it with friends.

Sorry if that seemed like a bit of a downer. I really do love this game, but sometimes I think it doesn't love me back. Here's a few character pictures in the spoiler below if you want to see some though.

Me and others have asked for this multiple times. It's insane that after so many years, we are still missing dyes in some basic colours, especially ones that are matte with some saturation (but not eye bleeding high saturation).
The Exiled Goldenrod dye and 10-Year Anniversary Goldleaf Dye are the best yellows we have, but they are still not a bright neutral or cold yellow.
Goldleaf dye is the better of them and do look like a warm yellow on a lot of things:


Yellow is visible on npcs and artwork of motifs, but we don't have it.
Such as the Meridia worshippers in Western Skyrim. They got a warm yellow, which the Goldleaf dye might be close to:


House Monard style's default colour on the cloth part is a bright neutral yellow.

The Hlaalu style in it's concept got a bright yellow too, which is a bit less saturated in game, but even then we still can't match the in game version.


We're also lacking in some nice matte and saturated browns, and oranges, that is less extreme than Anequina Sunrise.

My play time has definitely scaled back I might do a couple of battlegrounds and some IC dailies then log. Not touching Cyro outside of Vengeance until they address heal stacking.

With most players in battlegrounds running Storm Calling/Assassination/insert 3rd damage line mainly Animal Companions or Aedric Spear things have become too homogeneous and repetitive. At least with whatever the new shiny set they released you still had 7 distinct classes behind the proc. Funny enough it has also added another aspect of enjoyment to the last Vengeance test for me even with the restrictions I saw more diversity in builds and playstyles compared to battlegrounds.

Give players infinite choice, but if the best options by far involve using the same few skills then you really just made most of those infinite choices irrelevant. So they need to do something to encourage the build diversity, it could be giving bonuses for pure-class and running 2/3 of your base class lines or creating synergy between specific classes to stop the railroading into Streak and Spec Bow. Balance has never been their strong point and combat changes are too slow in this game for the chaos they've unleashed with subclassing. I hope next year they can get balance changes out every 5-6 weeks instead of once every 3 months show us the real difference between the Season and Chapter formats.

The new battlegrounds have been successful at getting more players into PvP from what they reported. They were highly enjoyable preU46 and even during the first few weeks of subclassing when players were actually trying different things. With Cyro Vengeance is the first thing they've tried in I think 4 or 5 years? So it's probably safe to say there isn't anything else lined up aside from that. Even if it doesn't result in a lot of changes to get players back into PvP at least it was successful in scratching that itch current Cyro just can't reach.

Cyro and Imperial are basically PvPvE zones.

And just like in ESO this only attracts a very small but hardcore fanbase.

I played a lot of games that have a part of PvPvE stuff and usually those parts of the game become very niche and after a while very inaccessible and unappealing for new of casual players who ignore that part of the game.

Examples:
- Division 2 dark zone: usually groups of max level gankers
- Diablo 4 PvP zones: empty every time I pass through them
- Sea Of Thieves: they added a ‘safer seas’ option where players can play without PvP
- New World: nobody flags for PvP and the added PvP entrance zones are patrolled by max level BIS gear stacks
- Fallout 76: PvP zones died off
- Read Dead Online: mode lost support because forced PvP drove people off within weeks.

This this type of gameplay only gets a likeminded dedicated community if the PvPvE part is the only thing that defines the whole game. DayZ, Hunt Showdown, Rust, Tarkov etc. are super popular. There is also no friction between the playerbase because everyone wants and plays exactly the same thing. This also makes it way easier for the developers to focus on updates.

The_Meathead wrote: »

Erickson9610 wrote: »

The_Meathead wrote: »

Oh, sweet summer child...

They're never answering those questions. They picked the ones they wanted the first go round and ignored all the ones about Heal/Shield Stacking, Ball Groups, RoA (they don't know what that looks like on screen, anyway) and so forth that might have been stressful to answer. Don't even THINK they're gonna touch Subclassing in PvP any time soon.

Vengeance 2.0 is the A of the Q&A. It might not be exactly what you want (it's not exactly what I want), but it's what they're doing and it's all we're gonna get.

I wholly disagree with this mindset.

I genuinely applaud your continued optimism, then. Not being snarky, I really do.

They so completely avoided the heavily-requested questions I mentioned in the first go round that it felt absolutely intentional and I really don't see them suddenly popping up and saying, "Ok, guys! We're ready NOW to talk about Ball Groups, Pull Sets, Cross-Healing, and all the other things we've never been willing to truly address."

Anyone who plays Cyrodiil regularly knows how impactful/detrimental all those things are and even how much Ball Groups effect performance, but after seeing how disconnected the Devs seem from their own game during the Battlegrounds streaming, it doesn't seem like they really do. It seems even less like they're willing to address those issues or give definitive answers.

Vengeance shows they're willing to put in work, however. Lots and lots of it, though all I really wanted was some clean up on current Cyrodiil with scaling back the absurdity of grouping benefits (cross-healing/shielding amounts, Emperor-level buffs, etc) and the trimming of problematic sets (RoA.) Now we have Subclassing just making things even zanier, so... yeah, I truly feel like Vengeance is gonna be their only avenue/effort at balance and that they prefer reinventing the wheel over fixing a flat.

Anyway, I hope you get your Q&A. I really, really hope they finally address all that stuff. Sorry if I seemed like a jerk in my first reply, it just feels like since U35 the decision making has been bad, and the communication has been worse.

I think it's more likely that the answers to the third part of the Q&A are very influenced by Subclassing, Vengeance, and possibly U47/U48 and keep evolving.

Basically they jumped the gun in saying they could answer them in the timeframe they initially committed to.