Hi! If you're here just to rant about skillgaps and call me cheese or whatever, feel free to leave a comment below. In the event we can skip that, I intend to put forward my thoughts on Procs, what they get *right*, what older stat-based models (and their adherents) get *wrong*, and why the glory days of procless pvp probably aren't as glorious as a lot of posters seem to think. This isn't going to be exhaustive by any means, simply my thoughts and opinions re: proc sets, the current direction of the game with the Q3 timer, and how we think about procs and pvp in this game in general, as a LOT of the material seems to essentially come from one source: high end pvp players, typically in a network, and largely content creators.

- Proc Sets are Good, Actually -

ESO PvP has a litany of problems - difficult to access, cliqueish by nature, rife with Feels Bad moments, performance. But much of this, performance aside, are social problems - not knowing the right people, joining the right guilds, pvping at the right times, etc. One of the most common complaints I hear about PvPers *from* PvPers, however, is -how bad everyone is-. Can't siege this, can't kill that, can't heal this. So bad. Potato potato. This is REALLY common when it comes to direct PvP contact in a lot of creator content - Streamer/Youtuber finds a guy, DIzzy Heavy Done,

"Just another potato"

Similarly, the general skill gap is often commented on in a less than favorable light by a factions own soldiers. See a 632 fighting in a field, an enemy 810 attacking. 632 blocks, misuses an ultimate, drops.

"Just another potato"

Now, *generally*, this divide exists in basically every game - that's the skill gap, after all. I'm bringing it up here because ESO itself, as a game, as a construct, is extremely guilty of perpetuating the skill gap rather than offering players ways to close it. That is, ESO is an *extremely terrible teacher* when it comes to PvP. Not only that, but it fails in several key ways that not only prevent newer or less hardcore players from learning, but in ways that make it difficulty to discern the actual game rules at all. I'll explain.

In modern video games, there's two essential parts we've come to expect and rely on - the game mechanical, and the game interactable. The game mechanical is the hardwired rules of the game: in older board games, this would be "one player takes their turn at a time" or "you can only move as many spaces as the die roll dictates" - the bones of the game, the 0s and 1s of the game Matrix. In video games, this is the functional code. Set health=0, set penetration=3000, pen vs. armor, etc. The nuts and bolts.

Then there's the game interactable - or the game aesthetic if you prefer. What we see and experience that converts the game mechanical into an intelligible, interactable space for our thinking lightning meat to make sense of. You COULD, PROBABLY find some way to play ESO without this - by manipulating code and inputs to some degree - but it would, to very nearly everyone, be an uninteresting mess nearly impossible to understand. We shorthand inputs and game moves in increasingly complex systems by using the game interactable as a liaison between our stupid electric mush lumps and the game code. I click the mouse button, character swings sword or shoots staff magic, game moves code. Easy.

Unfortunately, ESO isn't very *clear* very often on what's happening in the game interactable. This applies extremely superficially - with the fashion station completely obscuring armor, noticeable weapons like Maelstrom that would otherwise be gameplay indicators, weapon type itself, race, the list goes on. In ESO I can be in 7/7 Heavy, a "tanky chonk", with a 2h Maul, but can *appear* in PvP or PvE combat as, say, a wizaened old wizard with a battered 2h Sword. You can't change the weapon Macrotype yet (thankfully), but even then you gain the ability to disguise core gameplay features - to use the Game Interactable to *lie* - and also gain the ability to be *lied to*. Going back, this would be a lot like if in Tic Tac Toe, you had the ability to be X, draw a circle somewhere, only to later reveal it was an X all along as you complete tic tac toe.

The other player would - probably rightfully - be pissed.

Now deeper than the superficial changes, however, we have the core of why a lot of PvP players don't actually get better: stat based combat - the PvP Holy Grail, apparently - is largely *invisible* in the game interactable, at least to everyone other than yourself. There are no post-death build screens. You can't check an enemy's items like in other games, say, a moba. You can't even, largely, tell when some procs are even active and wildly change those invisible stats (though some are nice and clearly visible,. like 7th Legion). What the enemy is doing, other than the specific moves they might be using, is largely invisible. You look the same if you have 1500 Weapon Damage or 7000. 15k Resists buffed is indistuinguishable from 40k. Aside from enemy health, you have basically nothing to go on.

What armor are there wearing? I don't know.
What sets are they using? I don't know.
Well what stats did they have? I don't know.
What weapon did they have on? Vaguely? Any two handed weapon. Other than that I don't know.
Did you do damage? Normally? Yes. Here? No.
Did they do damage? Yes.
What went wrong? They did a billion and I didn't.
So what can we do better?

I. Don't. Know.

And here's the stumbling block - this is where a large portion of otherwise would-be PvP players get stuck, get frustrated, and can't - as the community loves telling them to - "get good". "Getting good" is a process: it involves acknowledgment that we could have done better at things within our control , it involves acknowledgement that some things are out of our control, and it involves introspection regarding *WHAT WENT WRONG* and how to move forward and not let that go wrong again. But ESO is actually extremely BAD at letting players *know* what went wrong in PvP. They know they LOST. They know *that*, technically, went wrong - they missed their desired macro result. They didn't win. But other than that, they only know that -

the enemy guy did a billion and didn't take any damage at all
or
the enemy guy stayed a billion miles away spamming pulses and frags and streaks but never seems to actually run out of mana, even if I learned a little and interrupt Dark Deal
or
I died before the game even registered I was under attack
or
so on and so forth (usually the first entry, though)

The game itself doesn't give the player the TOOLS to understand what went wrong and how to improve from there, because we can't ever see what we were up against or why what happened, well...happened. Stat based combat, being largely invisible, is also therefore largely unintelligible. And if I can't even tell what's *happening* in the game, interactable or mechanical, how am I ever supposed to deduce what went wrong?

MEANWHILE, IN PROCTOPIA -

Procs are (typically) clearly telegraphed or showcased. They're flashy, they're big, they're glowy, they are OBVIOUSLY HAPPENING, but also largely interactable and predictable. Most importantly, however, they're *learnable and intelligible*, for all the same reasons PvE mechanics are. They clearly happen, a result occurs, the player links these two things, learns, and develops strategies based on what they've learned.

If I'm not behind the pillar when the bomb goes off, I die.
If we don't break people out of the stone form, I die.
If I stand in the laser, it hurts me.
If I stand in the poison cloud, it hurts me.
If i stand in the red circle when it "pops", it hurts me (and heals them???).

Be behind the pillar when the explosion happens
Break people out of stone form
Don't stand in the laser
Don't stand in the poison cloud
Don't stand in the red circle when it "pops"

Now PvP is intelligible and learnable. It's no longer, "oh well I guess that guy somehow had like 35k-40k resists? and they hit like they had thousands and thousands of weapon damage. And also kind of never ran out of resources? I'm not really sure what to do here, because I'm not really sure what happened.

Now its, "Hit him to make his armor create the circle, and retreat out of the circle. Their autos have summoned Birds. The Birds hurt me, but don't last forever. I should survive until the birds are gone, then make my move before they can summon them again.

Now its, "Their autos come with a laser? it's not the big red laser that hurts a lot, it's a purple one, but it seems to heal them a little? I should make sure to move away when the laser is up to break it, but I can also stay in it a little if i have to. It doesn't hurt nearly as badly as the red one does."

I could go on, but even when it's not nearly as cut and dried for learning patterns (say, Caluurions, Venom, etc), the procs tend to produce a play pattern to maximize them. The play pattern tends to be visible to all involved parties. The play pattern, since it is visible, is extremely learnable with effort. When people learn the patterns and react accordingly, it forces the proc user to change *their* patterns, flee, or try to ramp up aggression to break past the pattern the defender has learned.

I'm not saying all procs are inherently balanced - Vateshran Laser, looking at you here - but all nonstat procs are inherently more intelligible game design, more understandable by all involved parties, and, since we can all generally agree that all involved players at least knowing the rules to the game they're playing is a minimum threshold for competition, more competitive.




- The Golden Ages of PvP -

Now, I'm not totally oblivious to the idea that a lot of stat-based combat is part of a larger cluster of properties that people tend to remember fondly as being "better PvP', largely because it had a much wider "skill gap". And to some extent, I do empathize with this and find some small parts true - but I also find that the majority is very "American 1950s" Nuclear-Retro - that is, remembered fondly as a golden age by some, but in reality extremely awful for a much larger section of the affected population. Much of it comes from the desire to establish an older form of PvP Hierarchy that used to exist due to "skill" - that is, Master Players at the top, a few middlemen, and the majority of the playerbase at the bottom "where they belong".

Because, y'know. Potatoes belong in the dirt, right?

Something interesting about a LOT of these recollections though, when you listen to them, is that a good portion of them involve *the game breaking*, or at the bare minimum, situations that not only wouldn't be celebrated in other game systems, but probably wouldn't have even been *allowed*.

"Back when you could be good, you used to be able to kite 30 players around forever. See I had this build..."
"I had a build that would bomb whole groups with one Dawnbreaker. See I had this build..."
"I was permablock. I remember this one time I had like, 20 guys on me, and they couldn't get it. See I had this build..."

Usually around there they'll go into some amalgamation of arcane CP and gear combinations with stat allotments that allowed the fundamental rules of the game to change:

Resources were essentially unlimited, or block was basically free, or damage was far beyond typically available means, or - and this is the root of the most common stories - the build just (did everything*. Had too much damage, too much sustain, too much resist, too much mobility.

"I was unstoppable".

The problem here, of course, being that these are also incredible examples of

1 - not necessarily player mechanical skill, but deep-seeded building arcana exploiting weaknesses in the game mechanical, or
2 - things that actually probably should never have happened to begin with. Sure, kiting 40 players around until 30 get tired, separating 5 from that and mercing them with an Ult probably feels good to the player doing it - but it probably feels like trash for the 40 guys that can't seem to actually hit the guy, or are watching 40 players worth of incoming damage mitigated down to enough that a Vigor can keep up with it and the player infinitely sprints, rolls, class heals, and LoSs away.*

*Adding a bynote here, but stuff like this - "Youtubing" or endlessly LoSing/Rolling/Block Healing/exploiting the games ability to mitigate and escape - is often cited as a skil mechanical in nature, instead of the rather simple series of steps supported by the build and usually CP. That doesn't make the people doing it bad players by any stretch of the imagination, I'm just making a personal note that "in the tower / up the stairs / circle / circle / dawnbreaker / back in / up the stairs / heal / heal / block / drop down a level / circle / circle / dawnbreaker" probably doesn't require the Galaxy Brain people make it out to require. Once you've done it or seen it a few times it goes from "riveting excitement packed with raw talent" to "completely obnoxious use of mechanics and LoS meant to make people get bored of chasing you and picking off the stragglers". Back to our story, though.

In other words, the "Glory Days" were pretty glorious for a handful of people thanks to their skill in exploiting flaws in the game - and the fact that almost every other game in existence would regard these as mistakes to be fixed rather than choices to be celebrated firmly suggests they are flaws - and pretty obnoxious for the people that didn't have the build knowledge to deal with it or just didn't have the patience to wait until the YTers got tired of dodge rolling around in a circle.

Could you imagine if a modern game had a character that could 30v1 and come out ahead? Or a character that just literally can't die? A character that could take incoming fire from 20 people for ages, KILL SOME OF THAT 20, and then just turn and leave? Players would be screaming for blood. But here, that's just "the good ole days when you were allowed to be good and all these potatoes couldn't [bunch of whatever essentially meaning Do the Things We Do]. Because, of course, it's not fun when you have to deal with it, right? It's obnoxious. You *liked* 30v1ing, you *liked* feeling powerful in a potatofield. You *liked* being the one that could break the system rather than play within it. It felt GOOD, and you remember it making you FEEL GOOD.

Meanwhile, plenty of us just remember how obnoxious it was watching you infinitely roll or mist or whatever away despite 30 people running you down. In another game we could all have sticks and you would be dead, because THERE ARE THIRTY OF US AND ONE OF YOU.
"You're all so bad" At what? Am I not clicking the Uppercut button hard enough? Should I Fossilize you THROUGH cc immunity? What's the play here?

TL;DR the glory days definitely, unquestioningly involved skill - it's just the skill of making the game break rather than the skill of mechanical execution.

What, exactly, were you doing better than everyone? Did you hit the Uppercut button harder? Lean into your keyboard when LoSing for the 17th time because latency won't register hits in time to catch you? Craftily timing your Vigor in phase with the moon so it healed for more?

The reality is you weren't. Now sure, a lot of you have time in duels and probably ARE mechanically superior to most players. In combat you know when to block, when to roll, when to turtle, when to push. And I have no intention of taking that away from you. Plenty of people pining for this time WERE or ARE exceptional players of the game - but that's not enabling this nearly as much as it seems.


- The Mismatch -

Ultimately though, the majority of the proc arguments come down to that "skill gap" - or rather, it comes down to the fact that the things that you *want back for yourself* are widely available to anyone with an internet connection - and why that's bad. Surface we all want to feel like we're good at the things we do - and many of us are - so much of the pushback against the equalization of playfield attempts to assuage our egos: the procs are too good, and that's why I can't do the things I used to do. Any idiot can deal a billion damage now.

Except, of course, if you are so much more mechanically skilled or gifted - shouldn't you still be doing better? Or was more of that skill in building the car than racing it? Is the thing you want - to go back to that clear power separation between you and hordes of others - good for the game? Or just good for you? When you tell me procs are "ruining the game", do you actually mean "the game", or "my power fantasy being fulfilled within the game"?

Is this even about procs? Or is it that if everyone has even a fraction of the statistical capabilities you have had for years - that if that statistical gap shrinks and demands more of your mechanical gap - you won't be able to flex as much? That if everyone is a little more special, you'll be a little less special? Is that what you're afraid of becoming?



Just another potato?

---

In any event, thank you all for reading. These are some of my thoughts and views on the Proc/less discourse currently going around the ESO-o-sphere, and while I certainly haven't touched on everything I would have liked to (hidden information vs. known information mostly), I think this is more than enough to make at least most of my thoughts abundantly clear.

ZOS, not all of us hate procs. Some of us do like finally being able to see what's going on in the game, instead of just endlessly having to guess if the wizard with a broadsword in front of me is going to chew through my 35k resists and blocking in 2 seconds flat before teabagging me and riding away on a guar. Personally some procs need to be tuned way, way down, but ultimately proc based gameplay is a lot more intuitive, learnable, and good for the community at large than bashing our heads into the invisible wall of stat combat. It still has a place and should be viable and good, but the Procs Are Bad mentality is NOT universal among the playerbase. In fact,

Procs are Good, Actually.


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...CP PvP isn't, though.