Joy_Division wrote: »

Since the Op put a lot of thought into this, I'll give a detailed reply why I think most of what is written sounds a lot like either inexperience or just not understanding how better players are able to accomplish the things that they do.

Frist of all, I agree that ESO is generally not good at communicating to players the mechanics of the game. If you don;t run a combat recap of some sort, there isn't an easy way to discern the mechanical information in a fight. Console players have it worse here, although those who record their fights and have damage/healing numbers turned on can still access this crucial information.

That being said, I would not be "pissed" if a player wore an outfit disguising themselves as a meek wizard when in fact that are a heavy armor brute. Mostly because I am accustomed to playing fantasy RGPS in which the vast majority of the time I have zero knowledge of what the capabilities of my opponent are in the first place. But aside from that, within two seconds of combat, I will pretty much know the resistances, damage, and rough build that my opponent has. There is no way to disguise how much I am getting hit for and how much I am hitting them. The OP seems to be really frustrated at this aspect of PVP since it is written in length, but it's not at all that hard to determine rather quickly in a fight, which is why I see this as a lack of experience. I know within 2 seconds if they have 40K resistance or 15K. If they have 5K weapon damage or 1.5K.

I am also going to disagree strongly that somehow procs better communicate to me the combat information. I took a break from this game from six months when the Thews of the Harbinger set was released. The first time I lined up a sorc combo on a player wearing this set, my health pretty much instantly vanished. After seeing the death recap full of this set, I actually had to Google this set to see how it functions. I had no clue and the only information the game provided me was a vague flash (in the midst of a lot of other combat animations) and a rapid lose of health. I never had to do that with eso abilities in the game. Reflective Scales, Crystal Fragments, Blazing Shield, etc., all of these are rather conspicuous and plus since they are so common and easily accessible with an alt, learning what they do and how is very quick. To give another example, what prompted me to take a 6 month break from the game is I fought a player who wore these 4 proc sets: Sellistrix, Blackrose Bow, Venomous Smite, and Azure Blight. All of these effects all simultaneously drain health via innocuous light attacks or double Dot Poisons. It is very rare I take a detailed look at my combat logs to try and find out what the heck happened, but this instance I did because I went form 30K health to 1K health in about 3-4 seconds after being hit by a single light attack. I also had no idea why I was glowing blue throughout the fight, except that I kept getting hit with explosions that did more than an ultimate every 10 seconds despite being a Templar who cleansed multiple times that fight. I think the contention that procs communicate the information better is only taking into account selective examples and thus not accurate.

What armor are there wearing? I don't know.
What sets are they using? I don't know.
Well what stats did they have? I don't know.
What weapon did they have on? Vaguely? Any two handed weapon. Other than that I don't know.
Did you do damage? Normally? Yes. Here? No.
Did they do damage? Yes.
What went wrong? They did a billion and I didn't.
So what can we do better?

I. Don't. Know.

ESO now has a tool that can tell you all this information in ESO logs. Moreover it was possible to figure all most of this even without them. There is a video by a popular and experienced PvP player on youtube right now that details how he is able to figure out the builds his opponents or streamers run without using ESO logs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfCUQWYj8tI&t=226s

It is possible, but again it requires knowledge and experience with the game.

In short, You. Can. Know.

When I speak of a "Golden Age" of PvP, I can assure you it's not because of "the desire to establish an older form of PvP Hierarchy." There are always going to be experienced and skilled players who do well (such as those who can tell their opponents regardless of their costume) and those "potatoes" - to use a word the OP constantly uses - who lack the experience or knowledge of the game to understand what their opponent(s) are doing and how. So such a goal would be pointless since it's going to be there regardless.

And it's not 1950seque US nostalgia. I can load up a video, present evidence of actual game changes, and do forum searches from 2015 to demonstrate that the game then is fundamentally different than it is now. So I'm not chasing an imaginary past that never existed. Rather it's the desire to revisit older game mechanics that I found more enjoyable and more interesting gameplay. Now, people can disagree as to whether or not those game mechanics are indeed better, but without question they were different and not rooted in my imagination.

I also disagree with this assessment that the sort of "unstoppable" builds were overly prevalent in stat based ESO as compared to proc based If anything, these sorts of builds that did everything is exactly what we just had to play through for the past year or so. The proc sets the OP wants back into the game allow for these very sorts of unstoppable builds in the first place. With procs, I can have a combination of max resistances, strong resource regeneration, and good damage that simply can not be approached without using them. Proc sets don;t care about the nuts and bolts of a build. If anything, they make the very sorts of disguises the OP dislikes that much more possible. If I hit a player and do little damage, the game's design and intent is that this is a max resistance build that should not hit hard. Imagine my surprise when I've got multiple high damage procs hitting me.

And as far as this goes

things that actually probably should never have happened to begin with. Sure, kiting 40 players around until 30 get tired, separating 5 from that and mercing them with an Ult probably feels good to the player doing it - but it probably feels like trash for the 40 guys that can't seem to actually hit the guy, or are watching 40 players worth of incoming damage mitigated down to enough that a Vigor can keep up with it and the player infinitely sprints, rolls, class heals, and LoSs away.

We all start as one of the 40. Some of us eventually learn, evolve, experiment, etc., and cease being a "potato." If the game feels like trash for the 40, they have it in their own power and agency to stop playing in such a way that gets them put in the dirt as you say. This is another thing neither the OP nor ZOS can save poor players from. In spite of the legion of nerfs, the many attempts to "raise the floor," the introduction of so many powerful procs, poor and inexperienced players still chase after 1vXers and die in the same manner. You're not going to be able to stop this because good players beat bad players not via exploitations, but because they are simply better.

Could you imagine if a modern game had a character that could 30v1 and come out ahead? Or a character that just literally can't die? A character that could take incoming fire from 20 people for ages, KILL SOME OF THAT 20, and then just turn and leave? Players would be screaming for blood. But here, that's just "the good ole days when you were allowed to be good and all these potatoes couldn't [bunch of whatever essentially meaning Do the Things We Do]. Because, of course, it's not fun when you have to deal with it, right? It's obnoxious. You *liked* 30v1ing, you *liked* feeling powerful in a potatofield. You *liked* being the one that could break the system rather than play within it. It felt GOOD, and you remember it making you FEEL GOOD.

And comments like this I think boil down to the OP's main issue with PvP is that they don't like that is possible for one player to be able to beat multiple lesser skilled players.

Favoring a "skill gap" is not obnoxious. It's emblematic of real life and actual history. I have no idea where some people get this idea that the feats "1vXers" pull off are fantasy and would never happen in reality, but it's clear to me these people do not understand the nature of military combat or history. I'll provide one example. Private John R. McKinney of the US 33d Infantry Division was asleep (!) when roughly 100 Japanese soldiers broke through the perimeter. Upon being slashed by a glancing sword thrust to the head, he proceeded to overpower the attacker and then, single-handily, killed and fought off the entire Japanese attacking force on his own, often resorting to hand-to-hand combat. That's 1v100 without the use of any fantasy magics! So not only would I imagine a modern game to allow for "1vXing," I'd expect it because it is commensurate with reality.

This is just the reality of competition and combat and fighting. Some people are just demonstrably better than others. Do you know that over half of all planes that were shot down in WW2 were done so by only 5% of all pilots? Every day in which air combat occurred, potato pilots were getting 1vXed in droves, not because of poor game mechanics or exploiting arcane combinations, but because some people are just flat out better than others. When people call attention to the "skill gap" and proc sets, they aren;t making things up and aren;t wrong.

The OP asks if is it good for the game that the mechanics would allow for players of high skill to have a clear separation of power between those who don't. Yes. Emphatically. When I played chess against my dad, the ZOS developers did not remove my dad's queen or grant my rook a laser proc that could just simply vaporize enemy pieces. If I aspired to get better at the game, I had to learn from my mistakes and learn chess strategy. And I was far better off in the long run because learning how to play chess taught me skills that were valuable in other aspects I came across in life, to put aside the very real consideration that I got a lot of personal fulfillment when I won my first game against my dad when he was legit trying to beat me.

There isn't anything in the game preventing those 40 players mindlessly chasing an outnumbered few and dying because they erroneously assume it's simply not possible for them to lose; precisely the same mindset those 100 Japanese soldiers had. Complacency, unfounded assumptions, the lack of proper intelligence gathering, etc., are what makes those players lose. That's a willing choice they make. I do not think those negative playing traits ought to be artificially encouraged/rewarded to the detriment of those players who practice, learn, and consider their actions carefully.