No.

What really well coordinated groups with ample experience with mechanics can achieve in a private trial instance has no bearing whatsoever on my enjoyment of the game.

I never check leaderboards that realistically I am never going to feature in for what others are doing either.

The very purpose of balancing is to bring the meta and the non-meta closer together. What you're describing is a flat nerf, which is not what proper balancing should be.

Well, the problem is, you can't put toothpaste back in the tube. Taking power away from people is always more problematic that just not implementing a system that's so easy to exploit.
In my opinion, they should just boost less used skill lines at this point.

Just a reminder that a game should never be balanced around top 0.1% players. You're using score pushers/speed runners to justify a change, while the overwhelming majority of the player base can't do what you're saying. But don't get me wrong, I do agree that the current power creep is stupidly high and they need to do something about it, but as others mentioned, a proper balance is not cutting everything damage or just increasing HP, and from now on, any change that reflects a considerable nerf will give a sour taste to players that play that play style.

Games like ESO are impossible to construct in a way that it would be perfectly balanced for everyone. Why? Because all the people are not the same. Some people like casual gaming, some like hard-core gaming, some like only PVE some only PVP.

This is why there needs to be different difficulty levels aimed for these different groups of people. Stop nerfing sets and skills and the tools we use to play the game. I would also vote for sets to have different stats for PVE and PVP. This way if some set is too powerful in PVP but works great in PVE you don't have to take a leak on both sides but you can adjust them as needed. Too many times when a set is nerfed because people cried out how powerful it was in PVP, it ended up also be ruined for PVE too, or wise versa.

When people who have used their time to learn and advance their skills in game kills bosses "just like that" the solution is not nerfing the sets and skills. The solution should be to introduce more challenging levels while also having lower levels for more casual players.

EDIT: I have waited a long time for ESO to implement a dungeon+ system to the game as it is in many other known mmo. Newer DLC dungeons offer a nice trifecta challenges but most of the dungeons can be run naked on vet difficulty eyes closed without problems. There could be +difficulty levels just like it is in Infinite Archive, a high score list and better loot for those who manage to clear them. There are many ways to enhance the difficulty of a dungeon and set up new challenges like a time schedule or more and harder trash monsters or changing environmental disadvantage etc.

No, is my answer. As much as I am in agreement to what you're saying about hard content be ridiculed by the amount of damage specific groups do, balance should not revolve around these groups. When games focus their balance on the 1% of the whole population, it ruins it to everyone who just enjoys the same builds but on a casual level.

I figured the meta out at the beginning of PTS and I'm sure that most players did to, and it was only a matter of time when most players will take advantage of it. Some players might use the same setup of Assassination, Dawn's Wrath and Herald of the Tome for their DPS set up, and I use the same setup as well but don't use the beam spammable because I live and breathe as NIghtblade main ever since I started playing the game. I only use Dawn's Wrath and HotT as supplementary for my NIghtblade skills.

I've also made some off meta builds for all my characters (DPS and healing builds), and I like to think outside the box, and not do the same thing as everyone else.

At the end of the day, it's still up to the player that plays the game, and how one understands mechanics.

Yeah, I am that ordinary player who constantly wake up to see the effect of my abilities reduced, bonuses removed, gear changed and my little joys and ideas of a build ruined for the reasons I have no idea about, and then I read in a patch notes that it was done because some uknown players somewhere somehow were able to cheese the game and "accumulate too high crit chance", or because "you already have too many buffs from other players in certain group setups" (which I don't), or "we didn't intend for this skill to combine with that set effect producing too much damage" (which I didn't) etc. It was already frustrating enough before, but now with subclassing I guess all class skills will eventually end just being cut in half, so when combined with a certain other half from other class it would give a resemblance of the old power level.

What I love the most is how many of developer explanations in the patch notes for Update 46 were reduced to a simple "now that sub-classing is here", as if that line along should explain everything. We removed your heal for having no pets, now that sub-classing is here. Eh, thanks, what am I supposed to do?..

Desiato wrote: »

Of course they will continue to balance the game.

This is nothing new. Power creep has happened in ESO from the start. Normal base game dungeons used to be tougher than vet base game dungeons of today. vMA and vDSA used to be challenging. vMOL HM was super challenging when it was introduced. Arguably the most challenging. I didn't clear it back in the day, so I don't know, but that's a view that's out there.

I miss the original difficulty vet overland content before the first difficulty nerf shortly after launch. I miss the original Craglorn which was completely gutted. And the original NPC difficulty in Imperial City.

I could go on and on and on.

I don't think balance is in a bad place. Everyone knew subclassing was going to result in a major increase in power across the board. It happened and this is the new reality. It's not going to be reined in.

ZOS probably sees this as a feature because it opens older trials up to a more casual audience. vDSR in 2025 is now vMOL in the 2020s.

They say they're planning more difficult overland content, so I'm guessing this is when we'll see the next major combat adjustment.

I used to let it stress me out, but not since returning after quitting the first time. This is just ESO.

I understand where you're coming from. I was on the fence about quitting until the day before u46. I knew what was about to happen and was extremely apprehensive. If I chose to stay, I knew I just had to swallow it and put that behind me or I'd be miserable. Life goes on.

At least they took the opportunity to nerf banner and azureblight or else it would be truly ridiculous.

I'll be honest I think if they buffed azureblight it would put a bandaid on the current issues of beam outperforming every other build in content. As long as beam itself doesn't proc the set.

I think ZOS should always try to balance the game, which includes subclassing. I also reckon that targeted nerfs aimed at overperforming skill lines wouldn't have to ruin off-meta builds, since those builds most likely don't use them anyways. If anything, better balancing could make more things equal and reduce the significant gap between meta, off-meta and maybe even pure builds.

Buff, don’t nerf.

This is the most fun I have had in years. I think Blackwood with OP Frostbite + Unstable Wall was the last I just enjoyed farming mobs. I wanna sign on every night just to experiment. Diminishing that joy will make me leave.

I think the main issue with their balancing often is that they insist on violating their balancing framework by introducing exceptions. If a build is easy to pull off, can maintain good uptimes on buffs and dps with ease, has easy resource management and good defenses/support, it should do lower damage than a build that has deficits on one or multiple of those aspects. Allowing low complexity fatecarver builds in the same league as e.g. a DoT heavy build with slow ramp up, for single target DPS, for the sake of "accessibility", is always going to sabotage balancing on a wider scale.
The same goes for all the CC rules and RoA simply violating those or supercharged mythics getting wilder with every release.

I'd reckon that most balancing flaws are painfully obvious.
Stacking 3 DPS lines would be much less of a problem, if there was a substantial benefit for bringing extra sustain or defensive capabilities into different types of content, but that is really a design issue and not per se a problem of subclassing. They have to set a baseline and decide where they want the content to be in terms of difficulty, without loopholes or shortcuts, because then they can really apply encounter mechanics that interact with player builds in a predictable and universal manner.

I think IA is great example for balancing done well and poorly at the same time. As you progress you can feel that some fights favour DPS, while in some it gets much easier if you are a little beefier. The thing that will help performance the most is to learn the encounters and prioritize the right targets, which is a rather rewarding design (time-based issues aside). On the flipside, they completely invalidated the balancing on higher arcs by basically only allowing only absolutely cheesy builds like perma magma to even compete, without providing tools for others playstyles to progress. It is good that they took action against that, even if it took long, because fundamentally nothings helps to diversify gameplay and the meta more than diverse encounter checks. Having the option to cancel out entire mechanics through DPS or to ignore them by means of things like magma armor on the other side, is always the first step down a path of unrewarding gameplay with tangible consequences for player groups.

In the end it is always easier to adjust outliers, rather then tweaking hundreds of sets and abilities up or down. Subclassing just highlights how lopsided the balance was even within pure classes to begin with, and how much of the power budget was loaded into singular abilities and passives. I have found that to be an issue for the longest time and it has always conflicted with real build diversity on the meta level.

It won't be possible to balance it due to the number of combinations possible. They shouldn't even try.

ZoS absolutely should try to balance the game to an acceptable standard but to do it with a chance of success would require high investment and visiom.
A lot of well put together non-meta builds should perform well *enough* in a balanced game. What this is is an extreme lack of balance.
In my opinion the cat's out the bag for balance since subclassing. Given the track record and the now enormous scale of balancing required, expecting ESO to be a balanced game is a pipe dream.
The task is simply goliath and they've chosen to undertake it at a time that I would argue the player base has been more fragile than ever before. I do not envy the devs.

For once, they should buff other class skills to match the meta, instead of just nerfing the meta like normal. Sometimes, power creep is acceptable and even preferable over nerfs.