U50 Feedback Thread for Challenge Difficulty

ssewallb14_ESO · April 17

I think the incoming damage on Vestige is fine.

I'm able to deal with it on a proper solo build, even if I reduce my own damage tuning to the point of not being able to burst everything. The mechanics of overland mobs are largely well telegraphed and avoidable.

It's meant to be the Vet HM of overland.

If I'm tanking a hardmode trial and I'm not built to withstand the incoming damage, I will die.
If I miss a heavy attack, I'll die. Stand in an AOE? Yeah.

The hardest difficulty should be punishing. I should have to build for it. If it's too much for you you can lower the difficulty, it's not mandatory. They made 4 difficulty levels for a reason.

xxdabro90xxb16_ESO · April 17

Was the system easy to use?
Yes it is simple. But i was searching at the Map for the Settings first as there i can see Stuff in the World. When i finally found it it was easy but very big and not fitting in the existing UI.

What was the most challenging aspect of encounters?
For normal Enemys this changes not a lot. For Bosses its good and you have to keep an Eye on Boss abilities.

Did the risk feel appropriate for the reward?
Is there any Reward? Im Level 2000 and have multiple Millions of Gold?

Did you enjoy the system overall?
Yes and No. I find the Idea nice but i see no Point to activate it if i dont get anything for it. The Gold is nice, but whats about Enemys that dont drop Gold? And the Experience is nice for new Players, but the System is clearly focussed on Veteran Players that dont need any more XP, so i dont think thats a good Reward.

Any general feedback?
Other Players running lesser Diffculties ruining the Game for me. I see me getting angry when i see other Players. That encourages me to avoid them. Thats not good for the Game. I think we need to divide Players to their Difficulty, so i can play with other Players that play the same Game. Otherwise i will probably start to hate other Players, which is clearly worse then seeing less of them.

BHoth_ · April 17

I'd love middle point between Master and Vestige, for I feel the damage dealt in Master is still too high leading to short boss fights, while the damage taken in Vestige leads to getting one shot.
As another forum user posted, it feels like an FPS wherein fights are short and bursty, rather than more interesting, grinding encounters. Atleast with Delve, Public Dungeon and Story bosses. Trash mobs aren't something I care to spend much time with.

My ideal would be something akin to 200% or 300% damage taken, and 80% or 90% damage dealt decrease.

mocap · April 17

ssewallb14_ESO wrote: »

I think the incoming damage on Vestige is fine

Try to kill Titan in Badlands on Vestige. He just an elite 119k hp mob, not world boss.
It's doable, maybe Magma Shell with Elf Bane + arcanist burst. But damage + CC is too crazy otherwise.

Here he is:

Vaqual · April 18

I don't think I will go over the whole topic again here, but pretty much what I said in my thread about life taps or damage based heal returns is in fact an issue on PTS. While all other forms of healing are completely unaffected, health taps almost completely lose effectiveness on vestige difficulty. I don't think it should be this way. So either other heal sources would need to be penalized to restore proportionality, or there needs to be some kind of compensation for life taps. I suggested either an internal modifier based on difficulty or the introduction of a minimum return. Otherwise these abilities will not find a place in higher difficulties, which would be a shame for Templars, Nightblades or Dual Wield Users. Especially, since the abilities that are affected the most are not even generally overpowered (e.g. no returns when hitting shields) and basically have no real niche besides solo play.
To a lesser extent that also applies to 4 sets and Reaving Blows, but that might not be a priority for now.

Thread for reference:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/690412/current-challenge-difficulty-model-will-penalize-life-tapping-abilities

Frooke · April 18

I tried playing in Vestige mode while a friend was in normal mode, and the experience was extremely disappointing. He killed my delve boss before I could do anything.

In quests, the bosses are already instanced for each player, so that’s not an issue. But delves are shared instances—and that completely ruins the experience.

A possible solution would be to make delves instanced specifically for Vestige/Master players, applying this only to delves and not to the rest of the game. That alone would already be a huge improvement, since the most enjoyable part is the boss fights

Jeulen · April 18

Was the system easy to use?
yes

What was the most challenging aspect of encounters?
Worldbosses, but then I don’t think they need to be soloable with half build characters on vestige or master difficulty. Also stopping to smile after a mudcrab and its friends kill you on vestige.

Did the risk feel appropriate for the reward?
The challenge is reward enough for me.

Did you enjoy the system overall?
yes

Any general feedback?
I tested Master and Vestige difficulty with half build NA characters, an existing level 10 and a new character that I levelled to 13 on vestige difficulty.

The damage taken modifiers feel great as it incentivises to build a bit more defensive. But the outgoing damage is still too high. On Master mobs still die to two hits and on vestige they do not live much longer. At this point in time, vestige difficulty on a new character feels great and my level 3-11 character that puts on what they find does a good amount of damage. But any character with any type of build is still ending the fights before most of them start.

My suggestion for the modifiers:

Seasoned: Middle of Adventurer and Master

Master: You will take 300-400% more damage from monsters and will deal 80-90% less damage.

Vestige: You will take 600% more damage from monsters and will deal 90-100% less damage.

Any instance from quest and delves should also be separated by at least (adventurer/seasoned and master/vestige). As especially with the new daily mission that sends people to kill delve bosses, there will be many instances where someone running thru the a delve on adventurer to farm the daily, will collect all the monster on their path and get any higher difficulty players killed or run in and one shot a delve boss which will strongly impact the vestige or master players fun.

Overall, I am very happy that we are getting challenge difficulty, and I am looking forward to test it on my built EU characters.

Spearblade · April 18

Question- and maybe somebody else has asked this, but would it be possible for players playing on Challenge Difficulty to apply a damage taken reduction buff (doesn't apply in addition to player challenge debuffs) to agroed mobs? Basically so Adventurers don't steamroll thru a Vestige's stuff, but are otherwise more or less god mode? I guess it could get a bit more prickly on things like world bosses and stuff, but just seems like Adventurers are likely to sneeze and kill a delve a Vestige might be fixin' to explore properly.

SilverBride · April 18

Spearblade wrote: »

Question- and maybe somebody else has asked this, but would it be possible for players playing on Challenge Difficulty to apply a damage taken reduction buff (doesn't apply in addition to player challenge debuffs) to agroed mobs? Basically so Adventurers don't steamroll thru a Vestige's stuff, but are otherwise more or less god mode? I guess it could get a bit more prickly on things like world bosses and stuff, but just seems like Adventurers are likely to sneeze and kill a delve a Vestige might be fixin' to explore properly.

This is the biggest issue I have with challenge difficulty. There seems to be an expectation that the mobs engaged by the Vestige are their mobs. If a Vestige was given a way to affect the mobs they are engaging to reduce their damage taken from everyone that is forcing difficulty on players that may not want that. This is an optional system and it needs to remain optional.

CP5 · April 18

So, I went to the dwemer public dungeon in Vvardenfel, and have more thoughts. Some fights were a lot more fun, particularly fights with many enemies, having to take out weaker targets to take them out of the fight while dodging the heavy hits of the larger constructs. Those fights felt a lot more enjoyable than before, and I even did the public even there and had a good time. But again, some bosses are designed around just pew pewing with light attacks, and yes, I know people will say "but you wanted harder fights", but you could have enemies just randomly kill the player instantly, it'd be harder, but not really enjoyable. I've said this for years that the most dangerous enemies in this game are the ones who don't faff about with special attacks and just use basic attacks, and the one giant dwemer spider boss in that public dungeon was the example I wanted to bring up here, yes my build needs to be optimized for the higher damage, but I feel to much of the threat from enemies just comes from light attacks, and not what the enemies themselves actually do/are.

Like, a necromancer is more dangerous just shooting you with his staff than conjuring melee based minions, an archer is better flicking shots at you rather than taking aim, and enemy tanks are better off just smacking you around rather than doing anything to help their allies. If there's a way to make enemy special attacks more weighted for fights, so what the enemies more uniquely do can shine more, that'd likely help, because right now the routine of stunning everything and killing most of the threats before they can respond is often the most productive, because if you don't your main hurdle is just the enemies basic attacks, everywhere, regardless of what you're fighting.

ssewallb14_ESO · April 18

mocap wrote: »

ssewallb14_ESO wrote: »

I think the incoming damage on Vestige is fine

Try to kill Titan in Badlands on Vestige. He just an elite 119k hp mob, not world boss.
It's doable, maybe Magma Shell with Elf Bane + arcanist burst. But damage + CC is too crazy otherwise.

Here he is:

First try, no magma needed. I even ate his breath AOE like a potato.

Heaviest hits were Soul Flame (Breath), 22k, Molten Rain, 10k.

Edit: Tried 4 or 5 times. He got me once because the swipe didn't render, 37k unblocked. Gotta block that like you're tanking St. Olms.

AlterBlika · April 18

Spearblade wrote: »

Question- and maybe somebody else has asked this, but would it be possible for players playing on Challenge Difficulty to apply a damage taken reduction buff (doesn't apply in addition to player challenge debuffs) to agroed mobs? Basically so Adventurers don't steamroll thru a Vestige's stuff, but are otherwise more or less god mode? I guess it could get a bit more prickly on things like world bosses and stuff, but just seems like Adventurers are likely to sneeze and kill a delve a Vestige might be fixin' to explore properly.

There's no point. Even just one or two more players on vestige will "ruin" your experience because general mobs aren't strong enough still. Besides, overland is meant to be beaten by multiple players. It is by design that you may encounter random players who might help you out. Otherwise what you're looking for is a single player game I guess

decairn · April 19

After I sit here killing my 10th delve boss in a row trying to get a mythic lead I want to suggest that mythic lead drop chances are increased based on challenge difficulty. Repeated farming for a lead drop is super super boring and grindy. Make less grind.

Arunei · April 19

@xxdabro90xxb16_ESO @Frooke @Jeulen @Spearblade
This already happens on Live, just with the roles flipped, and has been this way ever since the game launched. Someone might be doing a WB or a boss in a Public Dungeon and then suddenly a stronger player can come along and nuke that enemy in two hits.

They already acknowledged this point in the Week 1 Update thread. As for making Delves and Public Dungeons instanced? There are over 150 Delves I believe and if I counted right 38 Public Dungeons, making all of those instanced for anyone above Adventurer mode would still take a LOT of resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

ZOS_Finn · April 20

So, to answer some questions on Challenge Difficulty and instancing combat. This is going to be a little bit technical to hopefully explain the limitations from that perspective.

Everything in the game has a "weight" to it. This includes monsters (very weight heavy), interactable objects (these very but can be weight heavy), etc. Weight is determined by how much information is stored in a given object. I mention this because we have formulas for how much "weight" we can attribute to a given zone or instance of a zone and that is based on the intended player cap. So, for instance, Overland zones generally have no weight restrictions because we expect a lot of players in those zones so the weight attributed to the zone is justified and won't adversely affect the server. It gets much more tricky in situations where we expect reduced players in a given zone. The most restrictive are solo instances or fight spaces. We have a lot of development tools we use to make sure we do not exceed weight capacities in these spaces so it should feel seamless to players.

Each zone is controlled on the backend by something that determines which of our servers will spin up which zones when new copies are needed. In Greymoor, we saw the effects of the zones being spun up were not correctly attributing weight. Trials would spin up on weight heavy controllers which would result in adverse conditions in any zone connected to that controller. Our engineers took great pains to reorganize the code in these controllers to make sure the zones were even and weight was correctly distributed.

I bring this up to highlight the technical aspects of how the game operates from a monster and zone perspective to further illustrate that spinning up new zones based on difficulty without weight concerns and attribution would be extremely detrimental to the entire game. Needing to essentially double all of the available zones in the game without regard to population and weight would mean the entire server would have some pretty major issues regardless of where you would be playing. Even in Delves and Public Dungeons, locations that were not created with these concerns in mind, would potentially be breaking for the server.

We want Challenge Difficulty to be a fun experience for players and, while most of the feedback is regarding the desire for us not to split players from a design standpoint, the technical concerns are most likely bigger than that. This is not said to dismiss feedback but more provide context.

Please DO keep providing feedback. We have some fixes in the works coming for CD. Mainly around the calculations we are making on the backend so that player damage is more in line with expectations but that is not exhaustive and we continue to monitor things. We are taking a look at the Master difficulty in particular as thats where I think most folks will find their groove and we want to make that as smooth as possible.

ManDraKE · April 20

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

So, to answer some questions on Challenge Difficulty and instancing combat. This is going to be a little bit technical to hopefully explain the limitations from that perspective.

Everything in the game has a "weight" to it. This includes monsters (very weight heavy), interactable objects (these very but can be weight heavy), etc. Weight is determined by how much information is stored in a given object. I mention this because we have formulas for how much "weight" we can attribute to a given zone or instance of a zone and that is based on the intended player cap. So, for instance, Overland zones generally have no weight restrictions because we expect a lot of players in those zones so the weight attributed to the zone is justified and won't adversely affect the server. It gets much more tricky in situations where we expect reduced players in a given zone. The most restrictive are solo instances or fight spaces. We have a lot of development tools we use to make sure we do not exceed weight capacities in these spaces so it should feel seamless to players.

Each zone is controlled on the backend by something that determines which of our servers will spin up which zones when new copies are needed. In Greymoor, we saw the effects of the zones being spun up were not correctly attributing weight. Trials would spin up on weight heavy controllers which would result in adverse conditions in any zone connected to that controller. Our engineers took great pains to reorganize the code in these controllers to make sure the zones were even and weight was correctly distributed.

Well, sounds like in 2026 a good autoscalable infrastructure with a better scheduler for zones would be a good idea. Having servers on a fixed-scale infrastructure spin up the zones, instead of the scheduler spin up right-sized servers needed for that zone/group of zones explains many performance issues with the game. It's been a while since Microsoft bought you folks, could be a good idea to check Azure AKS....

code65536 · April 20

ManDraKE wrote: »

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

So, to answer some questions on Challenge Difficulty and instancing combat. This is going to be a little bit technical to hopefully explain the limitations from that perspective.

Everything in the game has a "weight" to it. This includes monsters (very weight heavy), interactable objects (these very but can be weight heavy), etc. Weight is determined by how much information is stored in a given object. I mention this because we have formulas for how much "weight" we can attribute to a given zone or instance of a zone and that is based on the intended player cap. So, for instance, Overland zones generally have no weight restrictions because we expect a lot of players in those zones so the weight attributed to the zone is justified and won't adversely affect the server. It gets much more tricky in situations where we expect reduced players in a given zone. The most restrictive are solo instances or fight spaces. We have a lot of development tools we use to make sure we do not exceed weight capacities in these spaces so it should feel seamless to players.

Each zone is controlled on the backend by something that determines which of our servers will spin up which zones when new copies are needed. In Greymoor, we saw the effects of the zones being spun up were not correctly attributing weight. Trials would spin up on weight heavy controllers which would result in adverse conditions in any zone connected to that controller. Our engineers took great pains to reorganize the code in these controllers to make sure the zones were even and weight was correctly distributed.

Well, sounds like in 2026 a good autoscalable infrastructure with a better scheduler for zones would be a good idea. Having servers on a fixed-scale infrastructure spin up the zones, instead of the scheduler spin up right-sized servers needed for that zone/group of zones explains many performance issues with the game. It's been a while since Microsoft bought you folks, could be a good idea to check Azure AKS....

Overland difficulty is always going to be difficult to control for. Even if all the Vestige people were stuffed into their own little Vestige instance, you could be happily soloing a boss when a group of friends come barging in and ruining your little solo party. The true challenge in the game has always been and will continue to be in well-controlled instances like dungeons and trials. Challenge difficulty is a marked improvement over what we have, but people are expecting unrealistic things out of it. And bloviating about server infrastructure in the process.

And there are other problems with separate instances, if you just think about it. What if someone runs into a boss that they can't kill and want to turn it down one level? Great, now they gotta change instances. And endure a load screen. And oh no, this boss in the new instance that they were teleported to has already been killed. And heavens forbid if you want to play with a friend who's playing at one level different from you.

The backend stuff is only the tip of the iceberg, and hand-waving "Azure" not only isn't going to actually solve that, but it also won't fix all the other issues.

EthanolMuffins · April 20

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

So, to answer some questions on Challenge Difficulty and instancing combat. This is going to be a little bit technical to hopefully explain the limitations from that perspective.

Everything in the game has a "weight" to it. This includes monsters (very weight heavy), interactable objects (these very but can be weight heavy), etc. Weight is determined by how much information is stored in a given object. I mention this because we have formulas for how much "weight" we can attribute to a given zone or instance of a zone and that is based on the intended player cap. So, for instance, Overland zones generally have no weight restrictions because we expect a lot of players in those zones so the weight attributed to the zone is justified and won't adversely affect the server. It gets much more tricky in situations where we expect reduced players in a given zone. The most restrictive are solo instances or fight spaces. We have a lot of development tools we use to make sure we do not exceed weight capacities in these spaces so it should feel seamless to players.

Each zone is controlled on the backend by something that determines which of our servers will spin up which zones when new copies are needed. In Greymoor, we saw the effects of the zones being spun up were not correctly attributing weight. Trials would spin up on weight heavy controllers which would result in adverse conditions in any zone connected to that controller. Our engineers took great pains to reorganize the code in these controllers to make sure the zones were even and weight was correctly distributed.

I bring this up to highlight the technical aspects of how the game operates from a monster and zone perspective to further illustrate that spinning up new zones based on difficulty without weight concerns and attribution would be extremely detrimental to the entire game. Needing to essentially double all of the available zones in the game without regard to population and weight would mean the entire server would have some pretty major issues regardless of where you would be playing. Even in Delves and Public Dungeons, locations that were not created with these concerns in mind, would potentially be breaking for the server.

We want Challenge Difficulty to be a fun experience for players and, while most of the feedback is regarding the desire for us not to split players from a design standpoint, the technical concerns are most likely bigger than that. This is not said to dismiss feedback but more provide context.

Please DO keep providing feedback. We have some fixes in the works coming for CD. Mainly around the calculations we are making on the backend so that player damage is more in line with expectations but that is not exhaustive and we continue to monitor things. We are taking a look at the Master difficulty in particular as thats where I think most folks will find their groove and we want to make that as smooth as possible.

Really appreciate how communicative and transparent y'all have been lately, can say it was one of the key factors for me returning to the game. But with the difficulty splitting, I understand the technical issues and desire not to split the playerbase too much. In my opinion the only splitting that would need to happen is for story bosses in the zone as I think that is the source of most feelsbad moments that would occur.

ZOS_Finn · April 20

EthanolMuffins wrote: »

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

So, to answer some questions on Challenge Difficulty and instancing combat. This is going to be a little bit technical to hopefully explain the limitations from that perspective.

Everything in the game has a "weight" to it. This includes monsters (very weight heavy), interactable objects (these very but can be weight heavy), etc. Weight is determined by how much information is stored in a given object. I mention this because we have formulas for how much "weight" we can attribute to a given zone or instance of a zone and that is based on the intended player cap. So, for instance, Overland zones generally have no weight restrictions because we expect a lot of players in those zones so the weight attributed to the zone is justified and won't adversely affect the server. It gets much more tricky in situations where we expect reduced players in a given zone. The most restrictive are solo instances or fight spaces. We have a lot of development tools we use to make sure we do not exceed weight capacities in these spaces so it should feel seamless to players.

Each zone is controlled on the backend by something that determines which of our servers will spin up which zones when new copies are needed. In Greymoor, we saw the effects of the zones being spun up were not correctly attributing weight. Trials would spin up on weight heavy controllers which would result in adverse conditions in any zone connected to that controller. Our engineers took great pains to reorganize the code in these controllers to make sure the zones were even and weight was correctly distributed.

I bring this up to highlight the technical aspects of how the game operates from a monster and zone perspective to further illustrate that spinning up new zones based on difficulty without weight concerns and attribution would be extremely detrimental to the entire game. Needing to essentially double all of the available zones in the game without regard to population and weight would mean the entire server would have some pretty major issues regardless of where you would be playing. Even in Delves and Public Dungeons, locations that were not created with these concerns in mind, would potentially be breaking for the server.

We want Challenge Difficulty to be a fun experience for players and, while most of the feedback is regarding the desire for us not to split players from a design standpoint, the technical concerns are most likely bigger than that. This is not said to dismiss feedback but more provide context.

Please DO keep providing feedback. We have some fixes in the works coming for CD. Mainly around the calculations we are making on the backend so that player damage is more in line with expectations but that is not exhaustive and we continue to monitor things. We are taking a look at the Master difficulty in particular as thats where I think most folks will find their groove and we want to make that as smooth as possible.

Really appreciate how communicative and transparent y'all have been lately, can say it was one of the key factors for me returning to the game. But with the difficulty splitting, I understand the technical issues and desire not to split the playerbase too much. In my opinion the only splitting that would need to happen is for story bosses in the zone as I think that is the source of most feelsbad moments that would occur.

Most story instances (or graduation moments) are instanced to you and your group. They have been that way for a bit now though there are some that are not.

EthanolMuffins · April 20

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

EthanolMuffins wrote: »

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

So, to answer some questions on Challenge Difficulty and instancing combat. This is going to be a little bit technical to hopefully explain the limitations from that perspective.

Everything in the game has a "weight" to it. This includes monsters (very weight heavy), interactable objects (these very but can be weight heavy), etc. Weight is determined by how much information is stored in a given object. I mention this because we have formulas for how much "weight" we can attribute to a given zone or instance of a zone and that is based on the intended player cap. So, for instance, Overland zones generally have no weight restrictions because we expect a lot of players in those zones so the weight attributed to the zone is justified and won't adversely affect the server. It gets much more tricky in situations where we expect reduced players in a given zone. The most restrictive are solo instances or fight spaces. We have a lot of development tools we use to make sure we do not exceed weight capacities in these spaces so it should feel seamless to players.

Each zone is controlled on the backend by something that determines which of our servers will spin up which zones when new copies are needed. In Greymoor, we saw the effects of the zones being spun up were not correctly attributing weight. Trials would spin up on weight heavy controllers which would result in adverse conditions in any zone connected to that controller. Our engineers took great pains to reorganize the code in these controllers to make sure the zones were even and weight was correctly distributed.

I bring this up to highlight the technical aspects of how the game operates from a monster and zone perspective to further illustrate that spinning up new zones based on difficulty without weight concerns and attribution would be extremely detrimental to the entire game. Needing to essentially double all of the available zones in the game without regard to population and weight would mean the entire server would have some pretty major issues regardless of where you would be playing. Even in Delves and Public Dungeons, locations that were not created with these concerns in mind, would potentially be breaking for the server.

We want Challenge Difficulty to be a fun experience for players and, while most of the feedback is regarding the desire for us not to split players from a design standpoint, the technical concerns are most likely bigger than that. This is not said to dismiss feedback but more provide context.

Please DO keep providing feedback. We have some fixes in the works coming for CD. Mainly around the calculations we are making on the backend so that player damage is more in line with expectations but that is not exhaustive and we continue to monitor things. We are taking a look at the Master difficulty in particular as thats where I think most folks will find their groove and we want to make that as smooth as possible.

Really appreciate how communicative and transparent y'all have been lately, can say it was one of the key factors for me returning to the game. But with the difficulty splitting, I understand the technical issues and desire not to split the playerbase too much. In my opinion the only splitting that would need to happen is for story bosses in the zone as I think that is the source of most feelsbad moments that would occur.

Most story instances (or graduation moments) are instanced to you and your group. They have been that way for a bit now though there are some that are not.

Awesome, good to hear!

Jeulen · April 20

Many thanks for the extensive explanation, it is always interesting to know the details of the technical limitations.

I think at this point it's more important that Challenge Difficulty works as expected and is balanced in a fun way.
I would love to play on Master with its 300% more damage taken, while still having the option to up the difficulty for when I want to challenge myself to the 1 hit and I am dead difficulty, but at the moment even new characters do enough damage on Master that Questing feels a lot like Adventurer. Everything dies before it gets to attack me.

ManDraKE · April 20

code65536 wrote: »

ManDraKE wrote: »

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

So, to answer some questions on Challenge Difficulty and instancing combat. This is going to be a little bit technical to hopefully explain the limitations from that perspective.

Everything in the game has a "weight" to it. This includes monsters (very weight heavy), interactable objects (these very but can be weight heavy), etc. Weight is determined by how much information is stored in a given object. I mention this because we have formulas for how much "weight" we can attribute to a given zone or instance of a zone and that is based on the intended player cap. So, for instance, Overland zones generally have no weight restrictions because we expect a lot of players in those zones so the weight attributed to the zone is justified and won't adversely affect the server. It gets much more tricky in situations where we expect reduced players in a given zone. The most restrictive are solo instances or fight spaces. We have a lot of development tools we use to make sure we do not exceed weight capacities in these spaces so it should feel seamless to players.

Each zone is controlled on the backend by something that determines which of our servers will spin up which zones when new copies are needed. In Greymoor, we saw the effects of the zones being spun up were not correctly attributing weight. Trials would spin up on weight heavy controllers which would result in adverse conditions in any zone connected to that controller. Our engineers took great pains to reorganize the code in these controllers to make sure the zones were even and weight was correctly distributed.

Well, sounds like in 2026 a good autoscalable infrastructure with a better scheduler for zones would be a good idea. Having servers on a fixed-scale infrastructure spin up the zones, instead of the scheduler spin up right-sized servers needed for that zone/group of zones explains many performance issues with the game. It's been a while since Microsoft bought you folks, could be a good idea to check Azure AKS....

The backend stuff is only the tip of the iceberg, and hand-waving "Azure" not only isn't going to actually solve that, but it also won't fix all the other issues.

I'm not "hand-waving" Azure, i specifically mentioned Azure AKS service. Why? because complex scheduling/scaling it's exactly what Kubernetes is designed to solved. And i'm not talking out of my ass, large scale cloud infrastructure it's what i do for a living and i've been doing this for over a decade, and i did work on a gaming company hosting large scale multiplayer games, and what i just said is exactly how we orchestrated thousands and thousand of multiplayer instances (zones)

I'm not saying that is easy to migrate something like this, it's probably a multi-year project, but given the maturity and resources of ZOS at some point they need to evolve the original infrastructure that they designed over a decade ago.

Credible_Joe · April 20

@ZOS_Finn

Is there no feasible way to offload instance weight to client side? Many online solo games (mostly souls likes) only apply networking to monsters when players elect to group up.

I wouldn't presume it to be straightforward, but besides addressing congestion concerns being raised, it could additionally improve performance in other aspects of the game as a significant margin of combat gets distributed to client compute.

JimT722 · April 20

Master does feel perfect for solo. even if technical limitations prevent instances based on difficulties I still appreciate the feature.

CP5 · April 20

I really appreciate that kind of information, makes things a lot easier to discuss knowing what limitations there are. I'll just have to see how the interactions pan out on the live server, I'm several years behind on zone content so I imagine the zones I'll be using this feature in first will be quiet, and I'll enjoy what I can of it. But speaking on technical limitations, I know as far back as the base game, with a good example being the final boss of tempest island, that npcs can have skills they can only use on players with specific conditions, and I was wondering if that was an angle that could be taken to make the encounters more engaging beyond adjusting the damage done/taken sliders.

xylena · April 21

I don't see a UI feedback thread but this will probably come up a lot in Challenge mode with all the stacking dot effects they put into PvE these days.

The way that death recaps display damage-over-time is extremely misleading. It will say something like x30 Pyrebrand 30000 Damage, which happened over 30sec, but this is displayed next to small damage 3-4 digit direct damage that happened within the last few seconds.

Many players don't understand how dots work and will think that 30k damage hit them all at once just like the other hits in their death recap, leading to lots of frustration and completely baseless nerf demands. There is no indicator on the recap of the time frame.

At the very least, the death recap needs to give players the correct time scale with dots, should show dps too. It is extremely misleading to hide this information. It is extremely misleading to place a stack of 30 ticks over 30 seconds next to a single recent tick as if they are the same.

PvE or PvP, players shouldn't need addons to understand what actually killed them.

ZOS_Finn · April 21

CP5 wrote: »

I really appreciate that kind of information, makes things a lot easier to discuss knowing what limitations there are. I'll just have to see how the interactions pan out on the live server, I'm several years behind on zone content so I imagine the zones I'll be using this feature in first will be quiet, and I'll enjoy what I can of it. But speaking on technical limitations, I know as far back as the base game, with a good example being the final boss of tempest island, that npcs can have skills they can only use on players with specific conditions, and I was wondering if that was an angle that could be taken to make the encounters more engaging beyond adjusting the damage done/taken sliders.

A bit beyond the scope for this initial implementation but it is something we can look at in the future, especially for things like story boss fights where we know it is limited to you and your group.

AdmiralDigby · April 21

Devs I spent a lot of time thinking about this so please read, it would be greatly appreciated.

Was the system easy to use?
Yes.

What was the most challenging aspect of encounters?
Public Dungeons & World Bosses.

Did the risk feel appropriate for the reward?
No this is the biggest missing component. It wasn't anywhere near the appropriate level of rewards. I'll go into detail below.

Did you enjoy the system overall?
I'm someone who plays at a high level (Trial HM, Trifecta Groups ETC.). So it was nice having an increase in challenge. Here is the issue with the current system though. The damage taken spikes up so much its going to force pretty much everyone to become a tank. Similar to how progressing in Infinite Archive (IA) works. Two possible solutions:

1. Focus on just reducing damage done and tone down the damage taken debuff. However this forces everyone to play as a DPS when solo (which tbh...most do anyways...so?)
2. Have a system where the game will look at your Max Health & Max Armor. If it's above a certain amount. It registers you as a tank. Gives you a different set of value for the debuffs. Damage taken can go very high. Damage Done doesn't have to be hurt as much. Some talents already do this with just health. I think including armor would be important.

Any general feedback?
Adding to the reward feedback. This game's combat system has a high ceiling for skill. Which is good. However, overland being so easy has led to the vast majority of population just having very weak builds because they could get away with it. When these players try to challenge themselves with Vet or even Vet HM content. The insane spike feels overwhelming, they give up, end game doesn't grow.

This system is the perfect way to expand the % of players who will progress their ability and knowledge of the game via progressing through the difficulty tiers IF rewards are worth it. XP is good for new players looking to get 800ish CP to complete a build. Gold from monsters is so trivial, the gold increase is still pretty meaningless.

You need to give rewards people WANT. I'll give a list below of things I think would work.

- Increased recipe drop rates from Killed Mobs as difficulty increases
- Increased gear drop rates (overland gear)
- Unique recipes/motif/furnishings and style pages that will only drop from higher difficulties (maybe from world bosses?)
- Small Transmute caches
- Small Trade bar caches (implements new system)
- Include these challenges in Tamriel Tome (defeat X on X difficulty).
- Gold Tier Mats
- Similar to IA. Small chance for any set from any overland area to drop. (finishing sticker book, heck maybe even make it smart drop). Maybe include class sets for this (some hate IA).
- For private instances and quests (ie, main story line) if you complete on X difficulty you get unique reward (titles, mount, skin, house etc.) Doing this I would make a new character and replay the main story with increased difficulty. Would be fun.

Tarum · April 21

First of all, I would like to thank you for implementing this system. ESO is an immersive, story-driven game, so I want to share my personal experience to better explain my feedback.

For years, every time I return to ESO, the illusion of traveling across Tamriel immediately breaks when every enemy is so weak that quests feel trivial and any sense of danger disappears.

I am not a hardcore player. I don’t use complex builds, and yet the current state of the live servers offers no meaningful challenge outside of dungeons. This makes systems like equipment progression, passive skills, weapon quality (green, blue, etc.), and especially crafting, which I truly enjoy, feel unnecessary.

When ESO first launched, before One Tamriel, I played as a casual player coming from single-player TES games. As a roleplayer, I crafted my own weapons and armor as an Orc blacksmith, upgrading them to blue and purple quality not just because I liked it, but because the game required it during leveling. It was engaging and satisfying.

In recent years, despite not being a highly skilled player and not using optimized gear or Champion Points, every character I play, whether it is my old level 50 Orc or even lower-level characters around level 10 to 25, effortlessly destroys any threat. NPCs asking me to defeat powerful enemies that supposedly threaten entire regions feel almost comical. It becomes very hard to believe in the narrative when these “bosses” pose no real challenge at all.

I would also like to point out that in early ESO, before level scaling, the challenge at equal level felt appropriate for non-power players.

In short, restoring a sense of danger in ESO that aligns with its narrative, its progression systems, its crafting system, is not about making the game hardcore. It is about making it immersive and meaningful again. Thank you.

Was the system easy to use?
Yes, absolutely. Perhaps even too easy. It might feel more immersive if the difficulty could be selected in cities, or at a temple, using the same kind of altar where respecs are performed.

What was the most challenging aspect of encounters?
Everything feels well balanced overall, and the system seems well implemented.
I appreciated the idea of the Vestige taking 600% increased damage, though perhaps 500% would be a better value. However, the reduced damage output at 20% (-80%) feels too punishing.

For me, the ideal balance for the Vestige would be around 50% damage output and 500% damage taken.

Did the risk feel appropriate for the reward?
For me, the real reward is experiencing an immersive Tamriel where the dangers described by NPCs feel real.

I understand that for many players, rewards need to be balanced. From my perspective, it would be enough to keep rewards roughly proportional to time investment. For example, if one hour of grinding on Adventurer yields a certain amount of experience and gold, then one hour on higher difficulties should yield approximately the same, adjusted for the increased time required to defeat enemies.

So yes, increased rewards make sense only to compensate for the additional time investment. Personally, I would be fine even without extra rewards.

Did you enjoy the system overall?
Very much.

I tested it on the PTS with my girlfriend, who is also a casual player and not a fan of overly difficult or “soulslike” experiences. For us, it would be impossible to go back to the regular difficulty.

In fact, we stopped playing ESO years ago specifically because there was no sense of danger in the overland. For us, immersion is everything, and having difficulty only in group dungeons while the overland remains trivial is not enough.

Any general feedback?
Yes.

I understand that for various reasons you may not want to fully separate players by difficulty. However, the game already uses a layering or sharding system.

When I play with friends, I often have to use “travel to player” to join their instance, even if we are in the exact same location. This happens frequently. We are in the same place, but we cannot see each other.

This means the game is already distributing players across different layers while keeping quests and events synchronized. If such a system already exists, then it could also be used to group players by difficulty.

At the very least, isolate players using higher difficulty settings. There is nothing worse than struggling to survive in a delve against a group of enemies, only to have another player run through and instantly erase them with no effort.

You already have a system to distribute players. Prioritize using it to separate them by difficulty, at least for those who choose the Vestige difficulty.

Edits: typo

ExoY · April 21

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

So, to answer some questions on Challenge Difficulty and instancing combat. This is going to be a little bit technical to hopefully explain the limitations from that perspective.
[...]
Please DO keep providing feedback. We have some fixes in the works coming for CD. Mainly around the calculations we are making on the backend so that player damage is more in line with expectations but that is not exhaustive and we continue to monitor things. We are taking a look at the Master difficulty in particular as thats where I think most folks will find their groove and we want to make that as smooth as possible.

Thank you very much for this insight and clarifying the technical limitation @ZOS_Finn

I understand that having different instances for each difficulty is to heavy. Also the points that code made, highlighting additional problems with multiple instances make a lot of sense.

Since ESO overland is vast, i think in general the amount of times where this causes unsatisfying player experiences is limited. But with two exceptions that came to mind:

newly introduced zones
zones during a zone-specific event

Maybe it would be interesting to consider for the future to have the option to have separate instances for the difficulties for specific zones for a limited time (same idea as having additional campaigns during PvP event)
Since this would only affect one (or at least very few zones) at once it might be acceptable from a server load stand point.

It follows my not flushed-out idea how it could be structured and lore-wise implemented. Maybe there is something you find interesting. It would give the player the control about which experience they would like to have.

Lore-Aspect
Take a deadric prince that suits the concept of "alternative realities", maybe Ithelia. Have a small (tutorial) questline and at the end you obtain a item/tool that can put the char in and out a state of "reality flux. (This state is not saved and it is always inactive when logging in)
New Zones are experiencing "alternative realities" because they have not yet "settled". Zones for a event, well Ithelia also wants to take part and as a result there are also alternative realities there.

Player-Interaction
If a zone is experiences "alternative realities" there are 5 instances.
One (lets call it instance zero) is for everybody who is not in the state of reality flux. This zone will behave exactly as the system is implemented now. People of different difficulty can play togehter. you can change your difficulty within seconds and so on.

The other 4 instances are one for each difficulty. If you are in a zone with alternative realities and put your character in the state of reality flux, you will be ported to the instance corresponding to your difficulty. (or you activate it before you port to the zone and then you will be put directly in the correct instance)

If you change your difficulty while in the state of reality flux, you will be ported to the other instance.
The resulting problems that e.g. code describe with bosses not being there, is simple an result of this being a different reality (to not break the immersion aspect) and can be shortly explained during the (tutorial) quest, so people are aware of it.

If people deactive their "reality flux" they will be ported back to instance zero.