xylena wrote: »

Kelinmiriel wrote: »

Has anyone given a reason why we have to give up Blackreach to have Vengeance running all the time?

Because otherwise not enough players join the test, like what happened last time. As far as I know what they're trying to test is how the new mechanics impact performance under stress, which can only be accomplished if they push in as many players as possible.

But this isn't necessarily because players are turning away from Vengeance, as I doubt I'm the only Vengeance enjoyer uninterested in another "test" after a year, and is instead simply waiting for the real thing to go live. Seems like it could've gone live a while ago.

So your campaign of choice is playable for the first time since December, but you’re not playing it cause you’re ready for the real thing? Lmao, you’re not playing it cause it’s garbage and you know it.

SneaK wrote: »

Lmao, you’re not playing it cause it’s garbage and you know it.

Most GH players left are the ones who don't care about AvAvA or persistent environment, so obviously these players would not understand why another "test" does not appeal.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

Now it's going live with basically no balancing having been done.

I too am concerned about this. Haters aside, there are valid balance criticisms, stacked healing in large scale turning fights into a player count, solo play being dominated by the unmatched utility and sustain of NB, leaning heavily into generic damage skills.

Ratzkifal wrote: »

xylena wrote: »

Ratzkifal wrote: »

If you stop expecting a good product you will never get a good product

This isn't about features, its a technical limitation, like complaining that your car can't break the sound barrier. Devs stated that the major factor in GH lag is build system calculations. So to fix the lag they had to make a new build system. The simplified mechanics kill 2 birds with 1 stone, dealing with both the lag (performance) and the ball group problem (accessibility).

Maybe when they have reworked all 7 classes and everyone is on modern skill designs, GH will perform better, but that is still in the future, for now they keep lowering the pop caps.

Nothing of what you just said justifies Vengeance as a permanent gamemode. If the class rework could or is intended to fix performance, there would be no need for Vengeance.

The ball group problem runs deeper, because they are a major cause of lag, along with bash builds which can cause lag even in duels and BGs, so addressing this problem could result in significant performance gains when done correctly, but so far not much testing was done to even verify or disprove this hypothesis.
Instead the devs threw the possibility of the complete removal of Gray Host into the conversation while already very much intending on removing all other campaigns, leaving us only with faction-locked PvP or Vengeance - a horrible choice for those who like to play actual PvP with friends across multiple alliances.
Considering that performance in Cyrodiil used to be good shows us that it is possible. The server refresh and Whitestrake's Mayhem performance show us that good performance is possible. The test-removal of cross-healing shows us that good performance is possible. You liken something that is very possible, even if difficult, to something nonsensical like wanting a car to break the sound barrier. If that's not arguing in bad faith, I don't know what is.
To me this is more akin to having a flat tire on your bike, and instead of fixing the tire, the proposed solution is having your bike modified into a unicycle and telling anyone who dares to complain that this is a perfectly good unicycle and that there is nothing to complain about. Even if it is a good unicycle, it's not a bike. It's not the same and it never will be until it stops being a unicycle and starts being a bike again.

Well actually it does. If the request is to have more players at the same time in the campaign, then the system complexity needs to be reduced. you now have layers of skills, champion points, sets, conditions, background cyrodiil bonuses and everything else and you’re trying to resolve the current state in real time so of course it’s limited to the number of players in grey host. if you want 300 player fights at a keep then vengeance is how you get it. No amount of magic fairy dust is going to make grey host run for several hundred players.

xylena wrote: »

SneaK wrote: »

Either way, it’s glaring when someone championing for Vengeance isn’t even playing it when it’s available.

Do you get excited for preseason football games?

As a washed up old spectator, no.
As a starting TB, absolutely.

xylena wrote: »

Kelinmiriel wrote: »

Has anyone given a reason why we have to give up Blackreach to have Vengeance running all the time?

Because otherwise not enough players join the test, like what happened last time. As far as I know what they're trying to test is how the new mechanics impact performance under stress, which can only be accomplished if they push in as many players as possible.

But this isn't necessarily because players are turning away from Vengeance, as I doubt I'm the only Vengeance enjoyer uninterested in another "test" after a year, and is instead simply waiting for the real thing to go live. Seems like it could've gone live a while ago.

From Patch Notes:

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Vengeance Campaign is available full time as a campaign...Gray Host campiagn will also be available. However, Ravenwatch, Icereach, and Blackreach campaigns will be closed down.

This is not a test.

When Vengeance was first created, it was supposed to be a test. It was temporary, and all other campaigns were closed down for the reason you stated.

If they still wanted to do tests of this sort, they should do it as they first did. Close down ALL of the campaigns, including Gray Host, where most of the people play. Make it temporary, and offer incentives to play, such as the Golden Pursuit that was active during the first Vengeance campaign. And also - not have it running during a PvE event, which they've done on almost all subsequent Vengeance campaigns, which has kept me from participating.

xylena wrote: »

Kelinmiriel wrote: »

This is not a test.

They're testing 20th-27th. It's not going live until U50 in however many weeks, at which point they condense the queue to GH and Vengeance. This is much better for the health of GH. Vengeance is not competing for the same players.

Sorry but the 8 guys who cared about the dead campaigns are gonna have to adapt.

it would be fine if they make GH non faction locked.

Vengeance really needs to start bringing in the normal build elements that everyone is familiar with. Not to mention this is necessary for newer learning players to ever segway into normal familiar combat. IMO you should drop the perk and loadout bonus systems. Make a UI based Vengeance stickerbook for vengeance item sets like we have for normal item sets. Start out with basic nonproc performative gear designs that we can drag from the stickerbook UI directly on our vengeance character build sheet. It is very evident that casual players vastly prefer having the pve pvp split, where they dont have to waste an hour a day swapping gear just to play one content or the other.

In the vengeance build menu you would give drop down options to toggle on mundus, armor+jewelry traits, food, etc. For the most part I would expect zos should focus on introducing build elements that do not proc or have effects which can cause runaway calculations that lag the server. They need to hard limit what procs trigger off what events.

In time procs might be ok to add at a very controlled rate. Something like clever alchemist which has a simple proc effect has very minor impact. Whereas something like rallying cry or even bloodspawn may be 10x more strain on the server with checks and effects involved. Something as silly as status effects proccing could account for thousands of checks per player in a short fight. Not to mention visually how cloudy combat is on live with vfx going on.

Its a slippery slope though what you decide to introduce needs to maintain the streamlined design intent first and foremost.

I played Vengeance for about 2 hours or something, since I had to get in there for my tomes anyway.

No it did not lag. Only positive thing I have to say. I spent years in this game levelling stuff and farming gear. To have ESO's PvP minimized to a game of 'make the biggest zerg to win' is depressing.

ceruulean wrote: »

Currently, bombers, gankers and bash builds are missing from Vengeance

Nah this is fine. If you wanna get one shotted so badly, play GH.

ceruulean wrote: »

Right now it takes about 4 seconds to kill an unblocking target that stands there and lets you hit them. I think having more damage options so it's more like 2-3 seconds would be fine

With crit luck you can kill in 3 on a full glass Scout NB with buffs. The midrange dot NBs can do it 4 (dot dot ult bow). To me it is fine for the threshhold to be 3 in Vengeance and 2 in build PvP.

I sit here looking at a entirely unbalanced score of EP 3600, AD 200 and DC 150. It's been similar every day because the EP races are prevalent from PVE-side of things and that's the player types being dragged in for this week.

All this Vengeance "testing" and not a single comment from dev team regarding the game scoring mechanisms and balance. It's broken, it has been for years. Rewarding the faction winner is meaningless when many of the points are due to population in-balance and night caps that other factions can't resolve.

On Grey Host its mostly miss, sometimes hit with balance on actual score; it often depends on who and where people switched factions to on any given month. Having it balanced during any month I see high focus from guild-play on points strategies, meaning dedicating some time to resolve scoring basis balance of Cyrodiil should yield good results if ZOS puts their mind to it.

This is such a boring form of PVP. Slow, tedious and low skill required.

I think it’s a great PVP for beginners, to replace U50 and No-CP PVP. But leave Grey Host and Blackreach in tact, please. There’s an active PVP community that wants real ESO PVP, not this watered down Vengeance.

@ZOS_Kevin

I think a lot of people, like myself, may have missed the fact that a bunch of skill lines and perks are being added with the update 50 rollout of vengeance.

While I'm not a huge supporter of vengeance, I did go out of my way to give a long and detailed feedback post recently in the other vengeance thread regarding my thoughts on how the environment can improve. I'm writing this post with the same intentions.

I want to preface this by saying I am mainly a solo player when it comes to PVP, so obviously I am a bit bias there. But I think solo PVP is a very important aspect to the game - it is how most people get started with PVP on ESO, and that seems like a very important factor to consider in regards to vengeance.

Solo PVP in vengeance is already absolutely horrendous. The tools simply do not exist to outplay people. You have no mobility so you cannot break distance from people to single them out. You don't really have the self healing to outheal incoming damage, which is a problem because of the lack of mobility tools to otherwise counterplay that damage. The options to increase your own damage are very limited, and you end up not being able to really create a setup that can secure quick kills since you can't really build to increase your damage in a meaningful enough way. The most effective way to build for damage in vengeance is to stack multiple DOT effects, which is very difficult and generally not effective to do Solo, but extremely effective as a tool in an "Xv1" scenario, I.E when used against a solo individual who is at a numbers disadvantage. Ideally to compensate against this, direct damage skills (particularly melee ones) would be buffed to make them more valuable to land, but they're simply inferior compared to DOT stacking in every test we've seen so far.

With these things in mind, I got on the PTS to check out the new vengeance perks hoping they'd remedy some of these issues, and what I am seeing is a bit concerning to me. There seems to be many things added by way of cross healing, mitigation buffs, roots/stuns/snare, etc. But very little added in terms of damage buffs, and from what I can tell, not a single skill-based source of snare immunity. There is a blue perk that gives snare immunity, but it requires you to be stunned first which means you don't actually have any control over your snare immunity this way. There are some sources of expedition being added which is good, but without a snare immunity skill expedition loses most of it's value.

Then there are some things that are just plain problematic with just a glance.

Vanguard Ultimate - Demoralizing Disruption - A four second stun and negate on a single target. You can break free of the stun, but the negate remains (unlike the old silence incap, for those that remember that piece of history). This is going to be effectively a "you die now" button when used on someone who is at any numbers disadvantage, effectively just making you completely defenseless for four seconds. Terrible design with no real counterplay option.

Soldier Skill - Battle Trauma This skill applies 11.5k healing absorption and increases your targets roll dodge cost by 33% for 6 seconds. For those that don't know, healing absorption is a debuff that negates the next X amount of healing you do from any source. THIS SKILL HAS NO COOLDOWN, CAST TIME, OR DRAWBACK TO USE. Effectively this can be used over and over on a solo player to completely deny them the ability to heal themselves, full stop. There is no counterplay to this, if someone is spamming this on you while you're under pressure, you will die.

Disorients are BACK. Most people reading this post probably do not even know what a disorient is, because I believe player sourced disorients were removed from the game in 2017 (maybe 2018). A disorient is like a stun where it "stuns" you and can be broken free of for the normal break free stamina cost. But a disorient will also be "broken" by the next instance of direct damage that hits you, and will not grant you any CC immunity. Further, you can stun a disoriented target, resulting in chains of stuns becoming possible.

These were removed for good reason. They create extremely abuse-able situations where you can be chain stunned with very little control over your character. I'm not sure why they're being brought back here in an environment that is primarily meant as a learning ground for the rest of the game, when they aren't present in the rest of the game to begin with.

Scout - The damage choice with no damage. Scout gives you a moderate boost to your damage and sustain at the cost of an enormous amount of mitigation when compared to vanguard, which was the other meta pick in recent tests. It's not a bad option in that regard. But the damage is not really enough to make a meaningful difference, and that is likely going to be even more noticeable now with all of the mitigation buffs and healing being added in. Even worse though are the abilities. There is not one single damage buff in any of the scout active skills. There is a DOT skill that seems inferior to all the other DOTS on offer in vengeance, but I have yet to test that myself so I'll withhold judgement there. The ultimate is a 6 second debuff which provides major brittle and some small amount of armor pen - but the skill doesn't deal any damage itself, and thus is likely not going to be worth using.

This is partly what I meant earlier when I said you can't increase your damage enough to secure fast kills, which is crucial to solo PVP and just PVP in general. Even soldier, which is the other "Damage" loadout, really has no good damage built into it's skill line. It has minor berserk (5% damage) on one skill, and that is basically it.

Incendiary Retaliation - Red Perk. This perk makes you explode one second after dying for about the same damage as a spectral bow hits for in vengeance. I just don't understand what this is going to be used for other than to grief people. Once you're dead, you should not contribute anything to a fight.

Personal Gripe - Roleplay text within tooltips. I get that some people like this. I find it very jarring to read 1-3 sentences of roleplay text within an ability tooltip before getting to the actual description of what the ability or passive does. Arcanist has this included in it's skills, as does the reworked DK. In vengeance it is there on all the new passives added with U50, but not the old ones. It obfuscates the actual information you need to know and just seems unnecessary to me. If it was possible, I'd like to be able to disable these account wide.

In conclusion, I was cautiously optimistic when writing my feedback last week after taking part in the most recent vengeance test. What I am currently seeing on the PTS has only deterred me from wanting to take part in vengeance once it goes live, as it seems to me that the environment is going in the wrong direction.

I hope Vengeance has healthy population when it becomes permanent. Pvp on live is ball groups, pull sets, cheesy procs, infinite sustain, infinite speed, constant line of sight, latency, 3x lower population, longer ques, higher capacity to disconnect and start que again, and unbalanced classes so everyone just plays DK.
But I understand how Vengeance doesn't appeal to all. The keep fights are too long, and a lot of it is a zerg fest because people need to rely on each other due to diminished power and soloing capability. So there only ever seems to exist 1 fight on the map, and it's stack or die. You also can't realistically heal through oil, and have to play dance dance revolution on siege circles.