agreed, so sick of the nerfs and the making the game worse for everybody. the average player needs to be able to perform too. the fact that these 3% of people can do stuff has nothing to do with the rest of your player base, think of your real customers not this top 3% who don't make up the wider player base PAYING this game

Its not nerfs per se but simply having to 180 builds constantly...

Honestly, the main reason I stopped playing ESO for over a year perhaps even two and then only returned for a few months at a time, has always been the repeated nerfs to my favourite classes, skills, and gear sets.

I still remember vividly the moment when I had finally crafted a solid DPS build for my Stamina Nightblade. I had spent months grinding for it, carefully fine-tuning every detail. Just when I was ready to fully enjoy the build, the developers suddenly hit it with nerfs left and right. I uninstalled the game immediately and didn’t look back for quite some time.

About a year later, I decided to give ESO another chance. I checked how the game had evolved, started rebuilding my setup, and once again invested months grinding gear, trial sets, and tweaking my Champion Points for the best performance. And yet again, the same cycle repeated itself, the sets I relied on were nerfed, certain features were disabled, or entire mechanics were no longer viable.

Now, with the introduction of subclassing, I’ve come back to ESO and, for the moment, I’m genuinely enjoying it again. I sincerely hope they won’t ruin or excessively nerf subclassing as well because if they do, I will not hesitate to cancel my ESO+ subscription once more.

To add to all of this, I have permanently moved on from my Stamina Nightblade. Ever since the release of the Arcanist class, I have thoroughly enjoyed playing as an Arcanist, especially making use of the Grave Lord Skill Line.

A policy of not nerfing anything is not really sustainable in the long term, or it need to be paired with regular increase of 'game' ( monsters mainly ) difficulty, otherwise you will end up absolutely trivializing everything - something that is already going on, I know.

I understand the frustration, but truly the problem is not nerfing per se, it's over-nerfing - in other words, rather than balancing overperforming things by bringing them back to the performances of, say, they middle-pack, nerfs usually swing too much and make overperforming things underperforming, thus sending them into irrelevance.

Also let's face, how many sets are in this game ? It's just wishful thinking to say 'but they should buff older / irrelevant things !' And sure, my precedent paragraph is also wishful thinking - I don't believe for one instant that they can balance all or even a significant part of the sets. Well, they could by changing them all to be very generic, but I don't think it's really a solution.

The problem of ESO, regarding sets of items especialy, is that all of them are being accumulated, and that this massive pool of sets is constantly expanded while the game is also constantly evolving. For me a rather late player, it's wild when I see people refering to Medusa as once being a worth it set to equip, but apparently at one stage of the game it was worth getting you minore force buff from a full 5-pieces set. And I guess it's only one example among many, many more.

This situation, an ever-expanding pool of sets, cause and will continue to cause many problems, such as the interest of new sets, who could fall in roughly 4 categories :
- Useless
- Overperforming
- Balanced and usable by most people
- Niche ( and even in this category, you could again apply the 3 above )

Useless is what most of new sets are : not worth getting them, not worth even thinking about them. You read the patch-notes / some guide, see the effect, and just forget about it because it's bad.

Overperforming is what a handful of new sets are : stronger than most if not all other sets, and thus a must have.

Balanced is obviously what every new sets should be : something that is maybe not overperforming, but still a decent choice, a decent option to get.

Niche is more complexe, from heavy-attack builds ( but are they truly niche ? ) to support sets to pvp sets ( arguable the major place for niche sets ); it's nice to have niche sets, some that provide great boon for a specific type of situation, for a specific playstyle, but even then - most are useless. I remember some months ago someone complaining about the lack of new heavy-attack focused sets, while like 3 of them were being released - all of them bad, as you can guess.

And here there is, maybe, possibly, some kind of twist ( I don't say it is so, I say it's possible it is so, and that there can be an incentive for doing so ) : you rather release overperforming new sets, so people have another incentive to buy the new content, and then - well either a new, overperforming set is released in the newer content, thus effectively nerfing older stuff, or the new overperforming set is overperforming a bit too much, and it is nerfed.

In the end, while I understand complains about nerfing stuff, I can't really imagine you can do without nerfing stuff - but balancing a game should involve both nerfs and buffs, and above all careful consideration not to nerf a set into complete oblivion, which is indeed not a great thing. And while I don't think you can do without nerfing stuff... somehow I think there are deeper problems, and I fully understand some criticism about nerfs.

COMBAT changed every year since 2014

there is no consistency.

The game is fine if you want to play for six months, but then everything changes and you have to readjust. When it happens to you once or twice, it's okay.
But now it's changed several times every year for 11 years. Maybe it's time to leave the players alone and focus on quality of life, etc.

Yeah I have to agree. My guild came back for the Vengeance campaign and we stayed bc of the subclassing. It was a lot of fun. We were even testing stuff on the PTS. Went live and we enjoyed it. I agree with the class crux change for banner. But all these other nerfs?

I don’t think the guild will be staying in game much longer unfortunately. This game feels again like players get punished for optimizing.

Desiato wrote: »

ZOS needs to choose a path and stick with it instead of trying to please everyone. It's not possible.

Don't make the end game even more convoluted by somehow pivoting back to pure classes with passive bonuses or something silly. You chose to steer the game in this direction despite the obvious problems it would cause, so stick with it. Most clinging to pure classes don't play end game content anyway.

Again, all of the problems subclassing would cause were OBVIOUS, yet you proceeded anyway. Own the consequences.

With that said, I honestly don't understand how players who profess to be into trials can be okay with trial mechs being completely trivialized. I got into trials for the mechs and challenge. I don't want those things eliminated. I am happy they will become more relevant again.

The set buffs actually mean damage is probably going up again, according to the spreadsheet people I know.

Beam arc was already irrelevant in the sweaty groups outside Ossein Cage. Everyone was using the dread build and pushing other fights so hard they're basically single target.

wreck more until you get it right!

The nerf-buff rollercoaster won't end bc ZOS said it's their design philosophy. It's up to you to decide whether you want to continue to pay for the ride. I chose to get off. It feels bad to have my builds constantly gutted especially when I just spent a lot of time and effort on them.

I don't know, as someone who sticks to theme builds (and does well enough in them that I'd tackle any content in the game if folks helped me learn mechanics - imho that's the hard part, and I don't really seek people out or I bet I could already do it) methinks that to some extent this is a case of the players optimizing the fun out of the game.

Yes, you can have 200k or whatever dps. But content was cleared back when one-tenth of that was common. Build the op terror build for when you want your Trifectas, but figure out what you want to play and play it - nerfs or buffs or whatever.

I promise that if they nerf your DPS so every boss fight takes 1 minute longer, you'll survive (though you might need an extra ten minutes per dungeon run).

Even after 20+ posts I have no clue what the OP is mad about.

Anyway, buffing and nerfing stuff is the base of balancing. When something overperforms - it gets nerfed. When something underperforms - it gets buffed. Play any online game out there and buffs and nerfs will be present. Nothing wrong with it. Quite the opposite - it's very much needed to achieve some sense of balance.

The problem with ESO is they want to keep EVERY. SINGLE. SET. THAT. EVER. CAME. OUT. RELEVANT. That's madness. There are so many sets out there it's impossible to balance them all out. Of course, this means there are going to be major overperformers and some that are just considered useless.

Then we have skills and passives. Subclassing unlocked a nightmarish number of combinations and interactions. There's no way ZOS could anticipate all the problems that would cause. They knew a *** was coming - they just couldn't know exact sources. So, "balancing" stuff now is to be expected and completely normal. (I do think ZOS has no idea of what balance is and how to achieve it. In my opinion, they don't give half a **** about it.)

To wrap things up - ESO is in a state of difficulty I can only describe as "easy" and "casual". You can run almost any of these hundreds of sets and still perform sufficiently enough to complete, let's say a Vet. DLC Dungeon. The minimal requirements are quite low and easy to achieve. Also, there's so many options that even if something gets changed, you can find something similar quite easily. Doing more DPS just means you clear things faster. However, the clear speed is sometimes so fast you completely skip mechanics of boss fights. This is very unhealthy for a game. One Tamriel wanted to make everything always relevant, but the insane power creep we have is destroying the relevance of some content. To address the power creep we need way more nerfs than ZOS is willing to make. And in this sense nerfing is actually balancing.

Cellithor wrote: »

The real question is: How do they properly balance subclasses without destroying pure classes?

Since pure classes have already been destroyed, it looks like we have received our answer: They don't.