Questing Challenge: Hard Mode

VilkasKriegshammer

ESO Questing Challenge

I just wanted to share this with the community that is looking to make the overland content a challenge whether solo or with friends. I agree it's sad to have to go to these lengths to make the content difficult but this is where we are. Imposing these rules on myself has breathed fresh air into the overland content for me. Feel free to adjust to suit your own needs. If you don't want to handicap your main to this extent, try it on an alt!

Objective: Create a more difficult questing experience by minimizing health and reducing damage while maintaining Magicka/Stamina pools.

Rules:

Champion Points: None allowed.

Companions: None allowed.

Armor: None allowed.

Jewelry: Can be any quality but can only have Magicka/Stamina perks.

Weapons: White-quality weapons only and with no healing enchantments. Damage enchantments are allowed.

Skills: Use only damage and crowd control skills. No skills that grant buffs, heal, or provide shields. Debuffs allowed. Only crafting passives allowed; no other passive skills.

Attributes: No points in health; only Stamina and Magicka allowed.

Potions: Use only crafted, foraged, or vendor-bought potions. Potions are the ONLY healing source allowed.

Food/Drink: No health food/drink allowed; use only Magicka/Stamina food/drink.

Guild Traders: Buying is prohibited; selling is allowed.

Enjoy!

angst

you know that dungeons and trials exist and they have hard modes right?

OsUfi

I've done this sort of thing before. Restricting myself to a sneaky suit with no combat buffs to do all content. No weapons, blade of woe or vampire bites only except story bosses, which can be killed unarmed with a spammable.

Honestly, just felt like I was taking longer than I needed to do basic content. Would be happy to see a hard mode added with slightly better rewards. Like minimum purple drops from everything. Also deffo feel overland tips onto being too easy. End of story bosses that die in to puff of wind can be deflating.

Also feel like there might be a really long thread on overland difficulty causing this new thread to be locked or merged?

angst wrote: »

you know that dungeons and trials exist and they have hard modes right?

Not the same. Playing though a story, having a big baddie built up as a major threat to die in 3 seconds takes away all meaning from stories for some of us.

angst

OsUfi wrote: »

I've done this sort of thing before. Restricting myself to a sneaky suit with no combat buffs to do all content. No weapons, blade of woe or vampire bites only except story bosses, which can be killed unarmed with a spammable.

Honestly, just felt like I was taking longer than I needed to do basic content. Would be happy to see a hard mode added with slightly better rewards. Like minimum purple drops from everything. Also deffo feel overland tips onto being too easy. End of story bosses that die in to puff of wind can be deflating.

Also feel like there might be a really long thread on overland difficulty causing this new thread to be locked or merged?

angst wrote: »

you know that dungeons and trials exist and they have hard modes right?

Not the same. Playing though a story, having a big baddie built up as a major threat to die in 3 seconds takes away all meaning from stories for some of us.

the game is an mmo, it should not be surprising that the story is just there to tick a box

RexyCat

angst wrote: »

OsUfi wrote: »

I've done this sort of thing before. Restricting myself to a sneaky suit with no combat buffs to do all content. No weapons, blade of woe or vampire bites only except story bosses, which can be killed unarmed with a spammable.

Honestly, just felt like I was taking longer than I needed to do basic content. Would be happy to see a hard mode added with slightly better rewards. Like minimum purple drops from everything. Also deffo feel overland tips onto being too easy. End of story bosses that die in to puff of wind can be deflating.

Also feel like there might be a really long thread on overland difficulty causing this new thread to be locked or merged?

angst wrote: »

you know that dungeons and trials exist and they have hard modes right?

Not the same. Playing though a story, having a big baddie built up as a major threat to die in 3 seconds takes away all meaning from stories for some of us.

the game is an mmo, it should not be surprising that the story is just there to tick a box

It is more then just to tick a box for any MMOs as if look to how both GW2 and ESO have changed since both are approximately the same age as MMOs and where more or less started with zones that had restriction for when you could enter next zone that had higher level mobs and bosses. Both games make use of scaling to up or down scale to avoid zone/level restriction that will prevent player to enter new area and content.

There is also a problem when we start to talk about what tools each game provide. In ESO you have Champion Points that didn't exist during veteran zone time and is shared among your accounts charachters. In GW2 if you have unlocked mounts that also will change a lot of how you get around and in some cases also adds some features like doings damage or CC when you dismount etc.

Player in both games ask for Hard Mode in open world content will leave both games if that would happen as that would also add a demand for "reward" for doing Hard Mode and would in turn also increase power creep and differentiate (or alienate) even more player with getting content done as we already can see in discussion about fake (tank,DD and healer) for dungeon or trails.

Hard Mode is better suited for games where player is in control of content as in single player game or when game have from start been designed for it and for those game Hard Mode meant you would actually loose progression if your character where killed or died.

It is unclear what exactly Hard Mode would bring to the table for player that exist in the same game world, but have just start to play (a new account with no CP, no skill point or any Set armour or weapon that provide extra features from bonus of 2, 3 or 5 combination of the same gear type).

For instanced content we already have three level of difficulty and each with different reward system. Normal Dungeon work as intro for dungeon and basic access to key for chest and minor transumte stone for Transmuting (now for crafting collected sets or change Traits), Veteran provide access to some more reward including monster sets and Hard Mode add some more reward for keys and Transmute Stones.

This system adds up as most player now wants reward from Veteran Hard Mode, but can not find other player to do that content and those that have done vet HM often already have doing even "harder" content like Trails which in turn make their gear over tuned for Vet HM etc.

Imagine now to have this mess in open world and you can see what it would lead to, player would feel left out of content as you can not have every player with their own toggle for HM vs normal in a shared game world as that would mean different set of calculation and add even more strain to performance. How would devs even know where to set a bar for calling something a HM experience vs normal for open world?

ZOS_Icy

Greetings,

With there already being a thread opened on this subject here, we're going to go ahead and close this one down.

Thank you for understanding.