Rich Lambert's Comments About The Current State of Balance

wolfie1.0. · 1:03AM

I just want my combat to feel rewarding and be able to show progress. Here is how I feel like ZOS treats combat.

I feel like I am climbing a hill to reach an objective and anytime I progress up the hill the path I take gets blocked by some arbitrary change that ZOS does, and every so often they lure me back up the hill with some enticing change, only to block the path again. It feels like im trying to invade a castle where the engineers I hired to open paths for me are instead impeding my progress while offering occasional good results.

Like yall should be helping us reach the top and excel, but dont want to put through the effort to do so.

Case in point. The suggested skill choice guides are out of date for new players and don't offer any real build value. Yall dont even update those to help players out. There are stats that still dont make sense and are not explained in game (crit rating vs % as one).

I can only get kicked down the dps progress hill so many times before I just wont climb it anymore, and many have either done that or just left.

SneaK · 2:51AM

Sure sounds like the vast majority of people who are invested in the game are against subclassing, maybe not as a whole but at least in its current state.

How does ZOS not understand this???

Not a rhetorical question. Seriously, how is it possible to continue to slobber their way through interviews acting like they haven’t been told about the elephant in the room sitting right beside them.

moderatelyfatman · 4:55AM

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

I just want my combat to feel rewarding and be able to show progress. Here is how I feel like ZOS treats combat.

I feel like I am climbing a hill to reach an objective and anytime I progress up the hill the path I take gets blocked by some arbitrary change that ZOS does, and every so often they lure me back up the hill with some enticing change, only to block the path again. It feels like im trying to invade a castle where the engineers I hired to open paths for me are instead impeding my progress while offering occasional good results.

Like yall should be helping us reach the top and excel, but dont want to put through the effort to do so.

Case in point. The suggested skill choice guides are out of date for new players and don't offer any real build value. Yall dont even update those to help players out. There are stats that still dont make sense and are not explained in game (crit rating vs % as one).

I can only get kicked down the dps progress hill so many times before I just won't climb it anymore, and many have either done that or just left.

Yep, preaching to the choir here.

I remember when the meta changed every three months and people were spending a ridiculous amount of time and gold in keeping up with it.

It worked well during the lockdown but as players became more casual, people started giving up. The unexpected effect was the brain drain through the loss of senior players: in my guilds they would log in once per week to help with prog groups on raids.

Some of these players had moved on from ESO as their regular game but were nice enough to come back and help out their guildies. One was a Nightblade dps main who would help the group with portal mechanics in Cloudrest; he left shortly after patch 35 when his favourite class got nerfed out of existence. I lost my stamwarden main to patch 35 and my Brittleden to the Arcanist. We have a nightblade pillagers healer who became redundant in patch 46.

Some would argue that these players should just stop whining, suck it up and accept that change is an inevitable part of the game. But we're talking about players who only log in once per week and for whom the additional time and cost required to keep playing once per week is not worth the effort.

This is going to be an even bigger problem given that the ESO player base is becoming increasing more casual but rely on experienced seniors to train them for harder content. Where will the next generation of tanks and healers come from or will ZOS respond by dumbing down the game even further?

DenverRalphy · 5:29AM

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

I just want my combat to feel rewarding and be able to show progress. Here is how I feel like ZOS treats combat.

I feel like I am climbing a hill to reach an objective and anytime I progress up the hill the path I take gets blocked by some arbitrary change that ZOS does, and every so often they lure me back up the hill with some enticing change, only to block the path again. It feels like im trying to invade a castle where the engineers I hired to open paths for me are instead impeding my progress while offering occasional good results.

Like yall should be helping us reach the top and excel, but dont want to put through the effort to do so.

Case in point. The suggested skill choice guides are out of date for new players and don't offer any real build value. Yall dont even update those to help players out. There are stats that still dont make sense and are not explained in game (crit rating vs % as one).

I can only get kicked down the dps progress hill so many times before I just won't climb it anymore, and many have either done that or just left.

Yep, preaching to the choir here.

I remember when the meta changed every three months and people were spending a ridiculous amount of time and gold in keeping up with it.
<snip>

It was a bit more palatable back then because despite the frustration, there was still some semblance of uniqueness between classes. Many are now choosing to not bother beyond one or two of their characters because they'd essentially just be copies of the same character.

moderatelyfatman · 7:38AM

Aliniel wrote: »

[snip]

Honestly, I don't think Rich Lambert is delusional: while his social media posts have not always gone down well in the past (cough-PvP-cough), he's trying to talk up the game here in his own way; and he's speaking to a general audience.

If you really want to tell if someone is delusional, don't judge them by their words but also by their actions. I'll leave it at that for you to decide whom I'm referring to.

@DenverRalphy I agree, the game was in a much better state back then and more worthy of our time and energy in grinding.
I remember people were complaining prior to subclassing that everyone in PvP was either a Nightblade, DK, Tank Warden or Shield Sorc; and that there was room for nothing else.
What would we give now to have different four metas and playstyles in PvP?

[edited to remove quote]

alpha_synuclein · 7:56AM

SneaK wrote: »

Sure sounds like the vast majority of people who are invested in the game are against subclassing, maybe not as a whole but at least in its current state.

How does ZOS not understand this???

Not a rhetorical question. Seriously, how is it possible to continue to slobber their way through interviews acting like they haven’t been told about the elephant in the room sitting right beside them.

Because their target audience are not the players that care about combat balance. As it has been at least since Oakensoul.

Meridiano · 9:33AM

You are free to not to follow meta, this is true. But in the same time other players are also free to remove you from their group if you underperform too much and they find it critical. Both choices - how to play and with whom to play - are equal in their rights.

If you underperform THAT MUCH, this means others in your group do your job for you, and you definitely should not be entitled for that. If they don't point that to you, it's only because they are nice people, but keep in mind that's still unjust to them.

And if you don't progress in your role because you like your low-efficient playstyle, this only means you are disrespectful to others in your group. In this case, they have every right to be angry with you.

Of course I don't say anything about easy group content like normals, who even cares about normals? And I don't say being weak is bad if you just can't do better. We all have our ceiling.