imPDA wrote: »

This also points more towards vengeance IS a permanent solution. These presets reduce amount of calculations, because they are more "hard-coded" by nature than buffs from gear, CP, etc. This system is similar to GW2 btw. If this is the way - all Cyrodiil will be dead as RW rn. Hope it is not the way they see Cyrodiil.

Also they spent too much effort drawing icons etc. They could left them with one default texture for everything actually and give a very simple name if it really just for testing. So, with this taken into account, it looks like this is DO doing to become live one day and this is VERY bad.

Well you would want passives to be on their own system so you can toggle them on and off testing wise. Once they rule out passives you could then distribute them later once mundus and sets are back in the test.

The icons and ui as far as i can recognize just reused textures so people have a visual difference. That's like a 1 sec amount of work of opening a folder and finding an unused icon.

Hugie wrote: »

I was shocked! [sarcasm] to hear the developer in charge of the Vengeance "test" mention that its U49 incarnation scheduled for early 2026 aims at balancing outgoing damage/healing caps for their simplified abilities.

If Vengeance were truly a performance test, there'd be no need to worry about its combat balance -- nor would there be a justification to invest considerable dev resources in new UIs, or new systems (perks), or new inventory tabs, or any of these enhancements being invested in this misguided game mode for lazy, casual players who are unwilling to engage with the depth of ESO's existing PvP.

Passing Vengeance off as a test has always felt pretty disingenuous to me for this reason. Do the developers really think we're that stupid? (Don't answer that. Many of us are.) What began as a "can we even do this?" exercise in validating performance assumptions/hunches has clearly morphed into a "omg, it's working -- this is how we fulfill our OG vision for massive warfare in Cyrodiil!"

Well, to that I say: if that's how you see it, you are making a big mistake and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Solving performance at the expense of character expression, build diversity, and theorycrafting to such a massive extent is absurd!

The short spurts of Vengeance on live server may still be "tests" insofar as they are testing new functionality re-introduced to Cyrodiil, but please -- respect our intelligence and stop pretending that Vengeance as a concept is a "test". It's obvious to anyone paying attention that Cyrodiil as many of us know and love today will soon be eclipsed by this ill-conceived experiment.

I understand that eradicating lag in Cyrodiil is the goal. I understand that making PvP more accessible to new players is also a priority. It's just sad that ZoS' approach here is to go completely counter to the studio's other mantras: play how you want! (Except in Vengeance.) Subclassing is the new shiny way to play out your power fantasy! (Except in Vengeance.) These "hard-coded" templates, loadouts, generic gear, morphless skills are NO REPLACEMENT for the depth of customization that ESO players have grown to expect with their characters over the past 10 years. Please stop pretending otherwise.

Sincerely,
A long-time Cyrodiil enjoyer and Vengeance hater

He also said that the same test you're talking about will happen alongside Grey Host. The vibe I got from that is that the end result would be a completed Vengeance mode alongside Grey Host if possible.

RW was decent without procs. It has lower online compare to CP campaigns, but still, it was able to gather 2-3 yellow and 2-3 red groups (alongside with randoms) to push 1 bar of blues at Ash as last emperor keep with hundreds of kills on each side during entire 40 minutes encounter. And I experienced 0 lags with at least 60 + 60 vs 20 players battle. So why proc sets was returned is a big mystery for me

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Soarora wrote: »

He also said that the same test you're talking about will happen alongside Grey Host. The vibe I got from that is that the end result would be a completed Vengeance mode alongside Grey Host if possible.

Yeah. They're testing both being live together and also said they've implemented some backend things to improve regular Cyrodiil performance and will continue to do so.

I think a version of Vengeance being released to replace the change of Ravenwatch being no proc makes sense, personally.

I would agree. With how wide the horizontal progression of eso is now most new players skip straight to cp hundreds which skips right past the u50 and nocp campaigns. Ontop of that these campaigns do not function because there simply isn't enough population to constantly maintain a balanced map.

At the same time these new players and casual players prefer vengeance and normally wouldnt be able to play in GH because it is a terrible environment unless you are a 1vXer, ball grouper, or in a zerg guild. So it satisfies what they want while fulfilling the eye candy that is massive faction warfare which brings new people into pvp.

Hugie wrote: »

I was shocked! [sarcasm] to hear the developer in charge of the Vengeance "test" mention that its U49 incarnation scheduled for early 2026 aims at balancing outgoing damage/healing caps for their simplified abilities.

If Vengeance were truly a performance test, there'd be no need to worry about its combat balance -- nor would there be a justification to invest considerable dev resources in new UIs, or new systems (perks), or new inventory tabs, or any of these enhancements being invested in this misguided game mode for lazy, casual players who are unwilling to engage with the depth of ESO's existing PvP.

Not sure why this would be a major reason why vengeance would be permanent. AoE is the main distribution method for calculations that can run rampant. Players hate caps because it is directly counter intuitive to the purpose of what an AoE is. They are testing to see here if higher damage AoE caps are preferred over healing. Chances are people notice their output more than their group and zerg healing. Keeping the healing caps lower also incentivizes smaller group combat or players to use both single target aimed and aoe heals instead of slotting 4-5 massive aoe hot effect skills like on live. In a way the actual build diversity is better from an active skill perspective.

If you look at the UI it is basically all copy and paste basic elements to toggle things on and off. Nothing solid enough that it makes sense to delete gear, setbonuses, or all the other game elements like class passives, etc. Again not to mention if we cant slot dlc gear in pvp why would a significant amount of players in eso ever pay for an eso+ membership or buy a chapter or season pass? This conspiracy is just full of nonsensical massive holes.

Also that loadout system is just a quick way to slot zos picked passives. Much like Call of Duty has the beginner preset loadouts that you can change and pick perks on your own.

A lot of people have been asking since Vengeance 1 for it to be a permanent Campaign. I’m sure that’s the end goal.

What I don’t see is evidence that it will replace Grey Host. I could easily see them replacing something like Blackreach or Ravenwatch, so you end up with Vengeance as the more casual Cyrodiil version, and Grey Host as the main one.

Stamicka wrote: »

Hugie wrote: »

Passing Vengeance off as a test has always felt pretty disingenuous to me for this reason. Do the developers really think we're that stupid? (Don't answer that. Many of us are.) What began as a "can we even do this?" exercise in validating performance assumptions/hunches has clearly morphed into a "omg, it's working -- this is how we fulfill our OG vision for massive warfare in Cyrodiil!"

I mean what did you expect to happen if the test showed positive results? Like I wouldn’t expect them to do these Vengeance tests and then make changes totally unrelated to their findings lol.

Hugie wrote: »

These "hard-coded" templates, loadouts, generic gear, morphless skills are NO REPLACEMENT for the depth of customization that ESO players have grown to expect with their characters over the past 10 years. Please stop pretending otherwise.

Sincerely,
A long-time Cyrodiil enjoyer and Vengeance hater

The level of build customization in ESO is not a good thing and it would actually be healthy if they reeled it back in. It’s an accessibility issue as is. Making a build now is so much more complex than it was in 2015-2016.

Even beyond ESO, overwhelming people with customization ends up creating niche audiences and hobbyists. As an example, PC gaming wouldn’t be nearly as big today if it wasn’t for pre-built systems and user friendly software and operating systems. You get more control and customization when you build your own PC of course, but there’s quite a bit of research and knowledge needed for that.

There has to be a balance between customization, accessibility, and user friendliness if you want something to reach a large audience.

Beyond that, this is PvP we are talking about. With ESO’s customization, 2 players can be fully geared out at max level and 1 of those players can literally have double the raw power of the other person. There’s so many situations where one build is simply better than another without any tradeoffs at all.

If someone is serious about fair PvP, why would
they put up with that? Truly competitive players or pvpers want to win or lose based on skill, otherwise they’ll quit for more skill based games. The lack of balance and the level at which you can outbuild someone keeps ESO unappealing to many of the people who enjoy PvP games.

Some level of build customization in ESO is fine. With sets and skill lines so wildly out of balance with each other though, it’s become a huge issue, both for accessibility and skill expression.

There’s definitely a vocal group of ESO “pvpers” that must love farming players with builds that can’t compete. If you really deserve to be getting kills, you’ll do just fine on more equal footing.

It really comes down to eso has two main systems you have the mechanical fighting game combat system and then you have the building rpg system. Vengeance as of test 1,2, and 3 is solely just the fighting game portion. Since there is no barrier to entry the new players and casuals like it. Likewise the 2014 older more technical players that like the core combat enjoyed vengeance because combat is visually clean and functional. It doesnt look like proc soup with random animations and effects killing you to the point where you need addons to tell you what is going on.

Live is probably about as opposite as you can get where they have just gone so far expanding the rpg and set system that we are now at the point where sets are now having 2-3 paragraph tooltip explanations. Look at dizzy swing and surprise attack. They were the most basic of concepts and now need paragraphs of explanations to understand.

Ideally they would use vengeance to split pve and pvp. Figure out where they can setup rules or restrictions to prevent pollination of calculations to limit AoEs from doing dots to doing hots to doing effects to proccing sets to doing status effects to update each second and doing CC. People obviously like the gear system so perhaps they could repurpose AP and actually make Vengeance or pvp only sets that are performative instead of multi paragraph proc sets that cloud combat. Vengeance 4 looks like perks are just a simple way to replace 5 piece bonuses and then the loadouts are just quick simple stat setups like slotting different passives and mundus stones.

JustLovely wrote: »

Why are you promoting vengeance so hard all the time. Every thread on vengeance is the same three or four people talking amongst themselves about the virtues of vengeance and the lost cause you'd like live cyrodiil to become. It's like you're trying to push the live system we already have out of the conversation.

What's going on here?

Vengeance is a hard separation between PvE and PvP which has been much needed for years. That alone gives it a ton of potential. In the long term this will shield PvP from the negative side effects of changes that were made with PvE in mind.

I see Vengeance sort of like a fresh start. It has totally different skills, it doesn't have sets yet, and there's no subclassing. All of this makes it much easier to tweak and balance than the current mess.

There's no game that I've played that was as much fun as ESO in 2015-2018 and I don't even see anything on the horizon that's going to change that. Why wouldn't I push for something to bring back ESO PvP's early feel? Vengeance is a far better foundation than the current environment which has 100s and 100s of sets and subclassing. It's basically impossible to get the current game in a balanced state without literally removing or reworking the majority of the stuff in the game.

Stamicka wrote: »

JustLovely wrote: »

Why are you promoting vengeance so hard all the time. Every thread on vengeance is the same three or four people talking amongst themselves about the virtues of vengeance and the lost cause you'd like live cyrodiil to become. It's like you're trying to push the live system we already have out of the conversation.

What's going on here?

Vengeance is a hard separation between PvE and PvP which has been much needed for years. That alone gives it a ton of potential. In the long term this will shield PvP from the negative side effects of changes that were made with PvE in mind.

I see Vengeance sort of like a fresh start. It has totally different skills, it doesn't have sets yet, and there's no subclassing. All of this makes it much easier to tweak and balance than the current mess.

There's no game that I've played that was as much fun as ESO in 2015-2018 and I don't even see anything on the horizon that's going to change that. Why wouldn't I push for something to bring back ESO PvP's early feel? Vengeance is a far better foundation than the current environment which has 100s and 100s of sets and subclassing. It's basically impossible to get the current game in a balanced state without literally removing or reworking the majority of the stuff in the game.

yeah what he said too lol.

Just imagine pvp where the thousands of useless animations nolonger existed and you could actually see telegraphs to respond to CC.

We just have to keep pushing feedback that says do not make template pvp the end answer for vet pvp, its ideal for data, but not longterm. Its honestly probably good for new players to learn in, but vet pvp needs building with sets and gear unlocks. Even if they deleted and started remaking pvp only gear in new town vendors, end of campaign rewards, and golden vendors. The fact that they have stat changes affecting skills points towards eventually baking in the normal stat change systems like mundus, enchants, sets, etc. At least they responded to the feedback of people wanting to have any amount of stat choices, even though its this goofy thrown together system.

Hugie wrote: »

If Vengeance were truly a performance test,...

C`mon, noone believed that since first announcment cause everyone here knows about the golden lies. They burried all that TES and ONE-Tamriel was ment for, even with the ideas from Julianos, an unique gameseries.

Matt did it 100% right, leave that company!

Hugie wrote: »

We clearly have very different ideas of what makes someone good at the game, and that's OK. Fortunately for you, it seems the devs agree with yours and don't agree with mine.

The game in it's current state seems built around your idea and they keep doing things to further build customization.

Hugie wrote: »

IMO, if someone is serious about PvP, they shouldn't shy away from investing the time and resources to take full advantage of ESO's complex builds. Knowing how to theorycraft and leverage an effective setup is part of what makes someone skilled at the game. If one person is CP 3000 with all stickers learned, tens of millions of gold/AP earned, tens of thousands of raw mats hoarded, and thousands of hours of practice, I don't think it's unreasonable for that to represent a material advantage when they fight a CP 140 who just started the game a month prior. What's wrong with asking a new player to put in some time and effort and earn their power?

I just don't understand how someone with that much time invested would need a build advantage over a new player. They'll probably win through experience alone, adding a significant build advantage will probably just discourage that new player and they will never want to enter PvP again.

Anyway, most people just go to YouTube and put on what their favorite creators run. It has nothing to do with skill, it's just a matter of getting the gear and equipping it.

Hugie wrote: »

To your point: why would someone serious about PvP put up with "that" ^? Because that's literally ESO's gameplay loop. That's what makes ESO, ESO. Play the game, earn resources, invest them, grow stronger. If that's too much of a hassle for someone who claims to enjoy "skill-based" games, then perhaps that's just an excuse they're telling themselves to avoid putting in a modicum of work.

That isn't what makes ESO ESO, the original game was not this bad. Battle scaling used to be extremely generous, maybe even a little too generous. I was able to get my first kills in Cyrodiil when I was like level 20 something just because I had gear my level. Vet 16 players still had an advantage over me, but I didn't feel hopeless.

I felt like I stood a chance. I wouldn't have stayed in PvP if I entered today and got insta killed by someone I couldn't scratch. How do you expect a game to retain new players if the Veterans have both a build advantage AND an experience advantage. As you can see now, Cyrodiil gets very few new players and it seems like so many people who enter NEVER enter again.

In regards to the gameplay loop that you mentioned where people play and grow stronger, I enjoy that loop too and it can coexist with a skill based game. The advantage that the fully leveled people have over the lower leveled people shouldn't be massive.

I remember getting my sharpened Maelstrom Greatsword. It took a lot of runs and I definitely put in time to get it. That item gave me a small stat advantage and it also made my crit charge do some extra damage. It was an advantage, but it wasn't a game changer. If someone didn't have a Maelstrom weapon they still stood a chance against me. Today certain sets and mythics are game changers and you genuinely won't stand a chance unless you wear them or something equally as strong. So the degree to which these advantages exists definitely matters here. The game can still be mostly skill based and reward players for their time invested. ESO no longer reaches that balance though.

Hugie wrote: »

But part of what appeals to a lot of ESO's players is that ESO's PvP is different, has always been different, and rewards investment (intellectual and material) in the game.

The level of build customization might appeal to players now, but the PvP community used to be much different. There were a lot of great players I never saw again after One Tamriel. That's also the patch where some of the big streamers like KingRichard started to get fed up too. In fact, if you want a throwback, watch his video called "Elder Scrolls Online Dueling Exposed King Richard Edition" where he rants about exactly what I'm talking about.

Anyway, once poisons, procs, and ridiculous builds like tremorscale/viper came into the game, a lot of the veteran PvPers at the time just quit. They saw what ESO was becoming and they jumped ship, lots of them went to more skill based games. This basically worked like natural selection and a lot of the people who continued to play at least somewhat tolerated the declining role of skill in ESO. This trend has continued over the past 9 years to now. So maybe you're right that the majority of regular pvpers now appreciate the level of build customization in ESO, but they were selected for. It's a very small number of people cause everyone who didn't like it jumped ship eventually. I think that ZOS would win back way more people than they would lose by reeling the build customization back in (or at least getting the set and subclassing systems under control).

I'm looking forward to testing and I'm really happy to see the devs putting in this amount of work to improve PvP. Seeing this level of attention and effort is fantastic.

Much as I've had fun in the laggy mess of Cyrodiil, I'm fully supportive of re-doing the whole thing from the ground up, so we have good performance and balance. I'm not going to try guessing how Cyro will look at the end, but I am crossing my fingers that it's both fun and fast. Because it's been so much fun having huge battles without getting dumped out of the game.

Could we maybe either move the vengeance test or the undaunted event to another date, so they do not run at the same time. These are totally different happenings with different rewards, so it is strange to have both running at the same time as players will miss out on time doing one or both of these happenings.

Tyralbin wrote: »

It was actually stated that it wasn't a replacement.

Do you have a quote for this? Everything I've seen them do and heard them say points to Vengeance being a new game mode. The 'it's only a test' has only ever referred to a particular iteration of Vengeance.

I was saying that the effort put into these Vengeance "tests" feels like more than just testing. It seems like they’re planning to gut build diversity in PvP. If that happens, I’m done for good. I didn’t run dungeons hundreds of times because it was fun—I did it for the gear. Same with grinding skill lines, skyshards, morphs, and spending millions testing builds. If all that gets tossed out, ESO is over for me - have fun runing PBUG/Fortnite in ESO skin.

Mayrael wrote: »

I was saying that the effort put into these Vengeance "tests" feels like more than just testing. It seems like they’re planning to gut build diversity in PvP. If that happens, I’m done for good. I didn’t run dungeons hundreds of times because it was fun—I did it for the gear. Same with grinding skill lines, skyshards, morphs, and spending millions testing builds. If all that gets tossed out, ESO is over for me - have fun runing PBUG/Fortnite in ESO skin.

In December, GH will be available alongside Vengeance. Also, it was said that the current version of Cyrodiil is already being adjusted here and there. There's no reason to add fixes already if the final plan is to delete it imho.