I thought ESO's combat was bad, until...

silver1surfer69

When the lag will be in control someday (EU) esos combat mechanics are great/1 of if not the best combat system in mmos. I havent tried new world i have to say. It looks less complex means with less action options, it looks not as sophisticated from videos. Comments comparing new world and eso combat mechanics are welcome. All that said from someone who plays eso for 7 y now and is extremely dissapointed from eso and the devs responsible concerning reducing the lag especially in pvp.

MashmalloMan

Only MMO combat I've found to be more fun than ESO is BDO and BDO has it's own gigantic list of problems. They rely on combo's, cooldowns and a heavy Eastern MMO design philosophy that has endless grinding and pay to win tactics.

I've played about 20 years of MMO's at this point starting with Runescape, Dragon Quest, Fly for Fun, WOW, City of Heroes, Maple Story, Dragon Nest, BDO, DC Universe Online, Final Fantasy, Tera and countless random asian MMO's I can't remember the name for.

ESO is by far the best design with horizontal progression systems that keep me coming back purely for fun, rather than a need to grind that next level to get new gear to keep up with content and continuously do the loop all over again about once or twice a year.

Reducing your skill choice to 12 from the 20-40 options some games have using cooldown timers makes ESO's combat 10x more enjoyable because your choices matter. Skill choice and activation matters. Rotations matter.

It truely makes me laugh when I hear people claim ESO is pay to win, they've clearly not played games that gave you direct advantages that you could not obtain from any other means. From the list above, there were costumes in some of those games that gave you +30% health, +20% armor, +10% regenation, +20% crit chance. You literally had to pay 50 bucks to get a costume that would give you those bonuses.

Other games from that list had you endlessly grinding mobs for experience. In the case of FLYFF, I remember spending time after elementary school, grinding with the max exp bonuses, a dedicated healer and collecting packs of 6-10 mobs at a time for only 0.1% experience for the whole thing which probably took around 30 seconds to complete. They just kept raising the cap, the entire game was grinding levels. No raids, no dungeons, just kill mobs. You couldn't really fight each other because everyones level was anywhere from 1-120. Literal hours wasted to get half a level and then I'd do it again the next day. Looking back, I have no idea what I was grinding for, there was no goal at all.

Don't even get me started on the MMO trope of forcing you to upgrade your weapon to +10, but only with a small chance to succeed. Failing would break your weapon, forcing you to have to collect the weapon again and upgrade from scratch. Thus people would feel obligated to spend 30 bucks on packs that would protect your weapons from breaking on a fail.

Here comes ESO with guaranteed chance to improve items to gold, transmutes, the Sticker book, 1 level cap for 6 or 7 years, endless set and skill choices. What game do you know allows you to use release sets like Hundings Rage years later? Is it the best? No, obviously, but it's really not that far behind considering we're comparing damage values of 6k vs like 5.7k on a character sheet.

ESO is by far the best MMO I've played because I know at any point, I can come back to it after a break and pick up from where I left off. Yeah, there are some balance changes. Some sets lose power like New Moon from 480 to 400.. but the changes don't make it completely obsolete like other MMO's.

For all that, I applaud ZOS. They've got great combat and good system surrounding it, I just wish they would expand combat instead of spending chapter after chapter on minigames. More classes, weapons and skill lines are needed.

Hell, the voice acting for every NPC in this game alone is night/day vs other MMO's. I may not like doing quests because overland is a cakewalk, but you can't deny the attention to detail and premium feel ESO brings to the table.

SpiritofESO

Gorrdained

ESO is good until you hit pvp. Thats where all the issues start.

Mr_Stach

ESO is good till you get whiplash from all the Balance Changes

Marginis

Mr_Stach wrote: »

ESO is good till you get whiplash from all the Balance Changes

True, it can be spicy sometimes. But it helps build a hardy stomach, and it tastes really good once you can handle the heat.

Ermiq

It sounds like: I thought Call of Duty combat is bad until I played Command & Conquer. Really, it's just different. Neither of them is better or worse.

Browiseth

i actually love eso's combat. it's the kind of system that gets more and more enjoyable the more skilled and more you understand it i think.

the ability to animation cancel almost any action is huge for me and makes the combat flow so smoothly, and it presents the opportunity for me to always push myself to get better.

it's not the flashiest combat nor is it as visually engaging as souls/bloodborne/elden ring/any other modern action game, but i think on a pure mechanical level, and once you understand that mechanical level, it really starts to shine.

this is of course without mentioning that ESO is a very different game to a single player action game, and at this point a pretty old game (2014 release date) but i didn't want to mention those first because i didn't feel the need to make excuses like that for the game

chris25602

so im going to out myself here probably but I have been playing on and off since launch really heavily in 2017-18...never once have I used the the tab targeting system and I am not even mad. I know it exists and I hate it.

edit: I use line of sight the way you should be doing it. /s

edit 2: I rebind the tab button to my mount. really it makes things easier.

Casul

I came from dark souls to ESO. I loved the resource management and active combat. Still do, despite its issues.