Dear ZOS - your players are frustrated with 1.6, and here's why.

C0pp3rhead · February 2015

tl;dr
- stat changes = nerf & incentive to grind CP.
- Other changes are too much at once and come without explanation.
- ZOS does not have the credibility with its customers to pull these stunts.
- Solution: hold off on rebalancing until Vet levels are compressed back to 50.

When we first heard about the huge changes that 1.6 had to offer, many players including myself were delighted that long standing complaints were finally being addressed. On top of that, ZOS planned to introduce Champion Points (CP), which would allow for more end-game progression, making us more powerful. When many of us saw the patch notes and logged on to the PTS, we found ourselves confused by big numbers. Players did not ask for many of the changes in 1.6, and we are wondering why they were implemented. Looking over many of the comments on the PTS forums, it seems that the biggest frustration stems from a lack of transparency on your part.

Before I get into the meat of my argument, I want to say that some changes were very successful. Among these are improvements to some class skills, espeically Templars and changes to trial scoring. @pppontus‌ started an excellent thread detailing many of these changes. This thread will not talk about specific class changes, as those can be found through the following links:

What I do want to discuss is stat changes.

The explanation that ZOS gave us regarding the larger numbers was this: the larger numbers provided more granularity concerning the sometimes small increases gained through CP. In other words, you could actually see these small bonuses. If all stats increased by x10, there would be few complaints - mostly concerning aesthetics. Upon closer inspection, however, there is much more going on. @angelyn‌ has posted some great information on the comparison between live and 1.6 stats. Also, check out these photos from @Jennifur_Vultee‌. From these posts, we can see that magicka and stamina increased by x9, and health by x7. Set bonuses and enchants have increased seemingly arbitrarily. Most strikingly, the relative spell power and crit chance bonuses on set items have been halved.

Here, ZOS responds that we will be able to make up these losses through CP that provide attribute, regen, power, and crit bonuses. In the meantime, however, many of us will receive at most 70 CP when 1.6 goes live - far from enough to re-achieve stats that compare with 1.5.8. Moreover, many players will have to invest their early CP in constellations that provide damage mitigation and similar bonuses to help with mere survivability. Taking all this together, many players including myself feel that the number inflation serves to hide stat decreases relative to the live version. We see that the day 1.6 goes live, we will have to engage in a months-long and excruciating CP grind just to be able to complete content that we've already done 10's or 100's of times.

How many players are just now reaching the upper veteran levels and can finally engage in City of Ash helm runs? How many of them will get a helm with the Exploration trait and no shoulders? How many of them will be unable to complete CoA when 1.6 goes live? How many players have completed Sanctum Ophidiae (SO) a handful of times and have half complete sets of SO drops? How many will be unable to get past the Mantikora again for another month? How many will actually bother to complete the content when the set bonuses are paltry compared with crafted gear?
These are the questions that ZOS has not asked itself nor the community of gamers who have pledged themselves to making the most out of this game.

Most importantly, many dedicated testers are at a loss when investigating whether these stat adjustments have truly balanced the game in a productive way. Instead, they are busy trying to figure out where precisely they have lost power and where they have gained power. They're too busy figuring out how to compare their numbers to live instead of actually doing meaningful comparisons.

What we players want to know is: WHY?. We did not did not ask for this, and we are confused as to why ZOS feels these massive changes are necessary. Looking over the patch notes, we see no justification. The changes to ultimate generation, for example, happened for many reasons. Forcing players to light attack cuts down on block-casting while making us less able to spam our ultimate abilities. However, this is information that we had to infer, and comes from the community lodging their complaints on this forum and elsewhere. Changes to the buff system however, are puzzling. Why shouldn't Critical Surge stack with 2Handed Momentum? Why shouldn't the health regen from activating Radiant Aura stack with DK Green Dragon Blood? More importantly, If I am a Sorcerer running both Inner Light and Critical Surge (which many will do because they don't like pets), their 3-effect spell-power, spell-crit, and restore mana potions will only restore magicka, making them just above 25% more effective than what can be bought through the crown store. What bothers us players is not that the mechanics are different from 1.5.8. What bothers us is that we do not see why these changes were implemented, and ZOS has offered us no explanation.

With so many other changes coming our way, we are not only clueless, we are suspicious. I hate to break it to you, but ZOS does not have the credibility to pull this off. ZOS is not Blizzard, ZOS is not even Bethesda. Since the game's release, ZOS has failed to fix minor issues & bugs while going back on its word regarding B2P. Many in the gaming community do no see this company as reliable nor capable of managing ESO. The changes we see heading our way seem tailored to console players, and we suspect that many will quit a few weeks after realizing that they're not playing "Skyrim: Online" or a game even remotely similar to it.

When 1.6 goes live, players will log in to find that they are significantly less powerful, that their builds and gear are worthless, and their most-used abilities are foreign to them. More importantly, they will not understand why. Many players who participate in end-game content are already frustrated and bored, having stowed away complete sets of high-end gear in their banks. All the Former Emperors running around Cyrodiil are tired of farming AP just to remain on the leaderboards and get rewards they already have. They will not see a level playing field or a challenging end-game. They will see a grind for CP. Many will quit. There is no enjoyment in grinding along in the hopes that new content will become available in June.

Plain and simple, this update is too much at once. I think many players could handle a x10 stat inflation were it not for the rebalanced stats. Conversely, they might enjoy the rebalancing if not for the inflated numbers. However, we see you increasing the difficulty of dungeons while decreasing our power relative to our current 1.5.8 stats. The 70 CP will not be enough to cover our losses. What I suggest is save most of the rebalancing for later, when you get rid of veteran levels. By then we players will have accrued enough CP that the stat rebalancing will not hurt as much - after all, there will have to be big changes when I revert from V14 to 50. We will be expecting changes then, and we will be in a place to look forward to them.

Domander · February 2015

Please don't assume you speak for me.

olsborg · February 2015

Mainly my biggest issue with 1.6 is the removal of softcaps together with the reduction in hp, making the time to kill(ttk) ridiculous. People dont react in pvp anymore, theres no time.

jamesharv2005ub17_ESO · February 2015

My biggest issue isnt the changes but how long its taking to publish them.

KhajitFurTrader · February 2015

C0pp3rhead wrote: »

Plain and simple, this update is too much at once.

Wait, what? What happened to the complains about "too little, too late"?!

Guess you can't please some people, no matter what you do...

Alphashado · February 2015

Domander wrote: »

Please don't assume you speak for me.

This. I think there are adjustments to be made for sure, but I don't think anything so drastic as postponing 1.6 is required.

DeLindsay · February 2015

Domander wrote: »

Please don't assume you speak for me.

@OP, you don't speak for me either. I'm LOVING most of the 1.6 additions/changes. Sure there are some I don't like but I'll get over it.

booksmcread · February 2015

I'm not frustrated by 1.6, just a couple items in it. Overall, I'm kind of excited by all the changes.

eventide03b14a_ESO · February 2015

Domander wrote: »

Please don't assume you speak for me.

I would be interested in your counter argument to the OP. I find most of what they said insightful.

Robbmrp · February 2015

This is from a thread on Sorcerers and 1.6. It's right in line with the OP. It's all about how much fun we are having. If it's not fun people won't play, period.

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

The group I ran Vet Wayrest and Vet Spindle with on PTS all had to respec/regear and add a lot of health to have any survivability in the dungeons.

Note that you get Health whenever you put a Champion Point in the Warrior, although it is diminishing returns. I think I got +87 health with first point, +42 health with second point, +34 health with third point, etc. Not sure of exact formula. But after a couple years of grinding out 1200 points in Warrior, we may be back to similar ratios of health.

Having to put concentration on health hurt damage and healing, but again there are Champion Points to increase damage and healing. And you do get magicka and stamina from each of their respective Champion constellations, which can help healing and DPS.

They definitely appear to have left enemy health and damage alone, but reduced player health and damage so that we could make it up from Champion Points.

But you will be significantly weaker as a VR14 with 70 Champion Points in Update 6 compared to an old-fashioned VR14 on Live. You will likely be unable to complete content in Update 6 you were previously able to complete without grinding out more Champion Points. Solo bosses in dungeons are not too bad. But trash groups and bosses with adds are very tough. For example, the first wave of little spiders in Praxin fight is far more difficult than Blood Spawn.

It is kind of understandable. If 70 Champion Points made us as powerful as Live, then we would be godlike once we had hundreds or thousands of Champion Points.

But with dungeons still scaling based on VR level and not how many Champion Points you have, the difficulty is bizarre. And not much fun. Are we going to have to run in circles in Spellscar for months until we gain enough Champion Points to be as powerful as we were and tackle daily quests we are used to completing?

Dominoid · February 2015

Add me to the list of people not to speak for.

Oughash · February 2015

Really excellent post, OP.

Some anecdotes:
1. I am in PvE (carebear) and PvP guilds (high end). The PvE players are utterly distressed -- it took them forever to level, forever to learn their rotations, and a long time to get gear. Most builds are now obsolete, and all characters are provably weaker. They will not last long in the new Vet dungeons. And there is no new content for four months! They will quit.
2. The high-end PvP players are looking at an incredible CP grind. In PvP you have to have (near) best stats and gear to be competitive. If we're optimistic and suppose 1 hr/CP by doing hard grinding then it will take ~290 hrs to be able to attain the 120 pt passives for any particular constellation. 290 hrs of non-stop grinding!! i.e. NOT pvp'ing. And if it doesn't take you an hour, but 2? or 3? or 4?We are looking at 1000s of hours of grind. This is stupid and lame. We want to kill people and take names. Not press Impulse 1354625873 times on a mindless mod. Players (have already) will quit over this if not changed, me included.

(CP's should be ~100k XP, at most, given current XP settings.)

pmn100b16_ESO · February 2015

olsborg wrote: »

Mainly my biggest issue with 1.6 is the removal of softcaps together with the reduction in hp, making the time to kill(ttk) ridiculous. People dont react in pvp anymore, theres no time.

lol yeah, where as you used to look at your health and see 80%, keep fighting, 60%, couple more hits, 40%, right shield and heal. Now if someone manages to take a bit out of your health pool through your shields, you have to take drastic action to avoid an almost instant death.

I won't be playing pvp in this state. Too fast and furious and not enjoyable for me.

bowmanz607 · February 2015

Ditto I like the update. It is still in testing so like I have said so many times in soany forums calm down. Saying you don't like something is not enough. Broadly suggesting that this or that sucks is not enough. Provide substantive feedback. What skills can't u use the same and why is it a problem other than you don't like it. Omg so now you need to get champ points to get your toon where u want it. So what. Look long term not short term. Yes if u have a buff u can't stack it so what. Diversify a little. Find new tactics. Use different pots. Become more versatile. Without soft caps stacking all of those skills would make the game unbalanced. I mean I was able to get my v14 on point to where it was with just 70 champ points and there was a lot of changes for me. Ofcourse you can't use the same exact setup and expect it to to work the same. The question is can you put the points and get new gear to be able to get to where u were. From the ppl I talked to and myself the answer is yes. What have you tried to do to remedy your own situation before complaining about it? We have known since the summer this was coming. If u expected to just log in and not having to adapt then that is just poor plaining and not reasonable. This is a complete overhaul if the foundation of this game.

sput4ueb17_ESO · February 2015

A lot of the changes are nice and welcomed . but .... Champion points will improve our stats a lot compared with the new veteran players making the gap (in pvp mostly ) difficult to close. Somehow we will have to invent new ways to make the trials no jumping around speed runs and pledges will become daily torments .
I am afraid afraid of the imbalanced builds that already are coming out from pts players
The biggest problem from this patch is the freedom loss that all classes will suffer in the gameplay style . So far you could change armor and play a different kind of style with the same player.player. Sry for my English but for example 1 Templar could play a decent tank and heal with just 1 armor change same with dk and other classes.
That kind of play is already history in PTs and is a pity cuz that was ESo biggest advantage imo.
Too little time in front of us and lots of things that are needed to be fixed...
Good luck Zos

bowmanz607 · February 2015

I agree it does leave some restrictions initially with how u want to play. But once you get the points then all you have to do is change armor again. Not to mention. When changing how you want to play sometimes that meant a respectable in morphs and what not. You can do the same thing with champ points. As for the play how you want element of eso. I think that can be taken out of context sometimes. Meaning, I am a bosmer nb and I envisioned playing a stealth player that deals massive damage from the shadows with a bow. Although I can make an armor change and swith to a magika build and still be useful it is crazy to think that I will be on part with a high elf or breton. So although u can play as you want it does not make you equal to others that have the better passives. (This was more of a rant on ppl who say I can't play how I want when I want and be like the other person or on their lvl. Not necessarily directed at previous post)

Beleron · February 2015

1.6 is fine.

Yes justice has issues, so does champion, but are they still improvements? YES. Will they need to be fixed? YES.

Are the removal of soft caps not working out well with damage output so high. YES. We need to increase the hp you can reach. and heavily decrease crit multipliers.

Have itemization and stat systems always sucked? YEP. Are they actually moving to IMPROVING THEM? YEP!

Are there still many issues? YES
Are we still at least moving forward instead of continuing to sit still? YEP!

so ... ZOS... keep at it. We are happy to see the improvements.
HOWEVER. We will complain when things still aren't balancing out correctly. Which is what a pts is there for. So we can point stuff out.

RDMyers65b14_ESO · February 2015

Other than the changing the drop rate on clothing, there is nothing I am frustrated about 1.6.1 other than it's not live yet.

trimsic_ESO · February 2015

I'm pleased with the 1.6 changes, although some fine tuning has to be done to balance some skills and improve the meta game.

When I returned back to the live server, I did not have the same fun I had on the PTS. There the combat animations were much more reactive, the skills were more pleasant to use and looked more balanced, and the build diversity was just not a concept. The Champion System brings more depth to the game too.

Ace_SiN · February 2015

olsborg wrote: »

Mainly my biggest issue with 1.6 is the removal of softcaps together with the reduction in hp, making the time to kill(ttk) ridiculous. People dont react in pvp anymore, theres no time.

Well I agree with this way more than the OP. I actually like 1.6 overall. My biggest issue is how low the TTK is. I go into PvP now and get wrecked in mere seconds.. Admittedly it's a bit of a l2p issue, since I just haven't adapted to the change yet. However, I've PvPed enough to know that TTK this low is never going to be "fun" for long and it only serves to lower the skill ceiling. It doesn't take much skill to kill someone before they can react. Imagine chess where the first one to move wins..

Skillful counterplay > 1 shot kills

c0rp · February 2015

The only major issue I have with 1.6 is that it takes 4 times as long to earn a champion point as what ZoS initially told us it would. This is frustrating for the PVP only folks.

Yusuf · February 2015

I'm completely unsatisfied with the changes in 1.6 and as it stands now I probably won't play "that" game.

Everything up until 1.5 was immensely fun but 1.6, now that I was able to test my 3 copied v14 characters (Sorc, NB & DK) I literally had fun with NONE.

Sure the champion system is cool and all but I didn't expect them to reduce ALL our stats with this nontransparent upscaling to make up for removed softcaps and people who will eventually have a thousand points in the future.

With the same attributes, gear and passives my character on live has 2400 HP and 18000 on the pts..is that good? Is that bad? I'm not in the mood to repeat months (almost a year, wow) of learning and getting a "feel" for the numbers in the game.

There is literally no reason left to run a single trial run anymore, if you can even manage to beat it since you don't know what HP-values you should go for.

I actually like the new animations but light attacks are a lot weaker than they used to be on live and, maybe it's my EU-ping, but weaponswap is worse than ever before!

So in conclusion, I couldn't possibly have been playing all 3 characters in an overpowered kind of way so that I'm now at loss in trying to perform just as well as before against the same mobs, core-elements of some of my characters have been "reimagined" (negate is basically just a black bubble that provides tiny buffs now) and in order to keep up with the nerfs I will be forced to play in ways I don't enjoy (sorcerer=petbuild, nightblade=stamina, DK=hybrid?).

Not that it matters though since there is no reason to have high DPS anyways because there is no reason to torture myself through a trial for that kind of reward, I also highly doubt the combat will be in any way faster than a game of chess since weapon swap is taking literally 5 to 8 seconds if you want to swap, use skill, swap back.

It all comes down to the suspicious upscaling though, that grinds my gears the most.

Xexpo · February 2015

I think the OP makes many valid points, I hear the same echos in many a teamspeak.
Mainly being : no one wants to grind to get back what we already have.

TheBucket · February 2015

I like 1.6

Charadras · February 2015

I think that all here must understand that we play a beta until 1.6. We have to forgot all the playstyle and restart out brain and start to think "1.6" to appreciate the game now. If we can't do this the only thing to do is say goodbye ESO and find another game to play. Always IMO

Muizer · February 2015

kaer426 wrote: »

I think the OP makes many valid points, I hear the same echos in many a teamspeak.
Mainly being : no one wants to grind to get back what we already have.

I don't get the "now we have to grind to get back to the same level" argument tbh. Why would that remain your frame of reference once 1.6 hits?

Ishammael wrote: »

2. The high-end PvP players are looking at an incredible CP grind. In PvP you have to have (near) best stats and gear to be competitive.

............in the current system. Again. Why keep 1.5 as a frame of reference? Especially in PvP, shouldn't all that matters be how you fare compared to other players in 1.6 rather than yourself in a past version of the game?

Don't get me wrong, there are legit doubts about 1.6 concerning the new class and skill balance, but people really need to let go of measuring everything against 1.5.

Kragorn · February 2015

Muizer wrote: »

Don't get me wrong, there are legit doubts about 1.6 concerning the new class and skill balance, but people really need to let go of measuring everything against 1.5.

Totally agree, far too much focus and complaining about stat nerfs and too little analysis of the effect the changes have had on characters' ability to progress through content in 1.6 in comparison to the ability to progress in 1.5

There appear to be serious problems being caused by the changes (for example the thread posted by a guild here about their initial foray into SO) but that is being drowned out by endless bickering about stat values in isolation of actual game-play.

Derra · February 2015

I like 1.6
I can also understand why people have problems with it *shrug*

Vordae · February 2015

Muizer wrote: »

kaer426 wrote: »

I think the OP makes many valid points, I hear the same echos in many a teamspeak.
Mainly being : no one wants to grind to get back what we already have.

I don't get the "now we have to grind to get back to the same level" argument tbh. Why would that remain your frame of reference once 1.6 hits?

Ishammael wrote: »

2. The high-end PvP players are looking at an incredible CP grind. In PvP you have to have (near) best stats and gear to be competitive.

............in the current system. Again. Why keep 1.5 as a frame of reference? Especially in PvP, shouldn't all that matters be how you fare compared to other players in 1.6 rather than yourself in a past version of the game?

Don't get me wrong, there are legit doubts about 1.6 concerning the new class and skill balance, but people really need to let go of measuring everything against 1.5.

They are not talking about little tweaks in power. There are talking about not being able to do whole section of content that they previously had on farm status. It's like saying "Hey everyone! We are not going to put out new content for a while so we are just going to nerf everyone in the whole game so nobody can do the current content anymore. Then you guys can spend a few months working your way back up to the content you have already beaten a 1000 times and start doing that again. After all that time we might have new content. Have fun."

jamesharv2005ub17_ESO · February 2015

You guys just dont get it. ZOS doesnt care about any of us who are already here. They only care about new people. Get the new people to come in buy a box spend a few crowns and then leave before they hit end game. Thats how pay to win b2p games work.

Fatalyis · February 2015

I like 1.6 for the most part....it just feels better....but I definitely agree that there is a LOT of work in store before this thing can go live. I'm okay with that...