Best Of
Re: Official Night Market Feedback Thread
Alright, I've given it some time to sit with me.
The Night Market is messy. There's a lot I enjoy about it, but it's got a lot of problems, and it draws attention to problems already inherently in the game, too.
Here's my player context, to inform where I'm coming from: I'm someone who has HM vet trial clears and does vet dungeons for fun. I have a small group of friends I enjoy running with. Trifectas aren't my thing. I tend to do IA more than most activities because it's designed for a small group and doesn't require setting up an appointment ahead of time and clearing my schedule -- I can go as far or as little as I'm in the mood for. I parse fine as needed, and I tank when no one else wants to tank. My gear is what it should be, and I read mechanics guides ahead of running content. My friends are generally worse performers than me; they listen to me and will follow a build guide, but they're not spending hours grinding trials and dungeons for sets if they don't have to. They've done it before, and they are tired of having to do it every patch as the meta shifts.
I can't think of a way to organise this post for easier readability. I'm sorry.
The first thing I like about the Night Market is that it is challenging group content that you can drop into and out of as your heart desires. I often go pretty long stretches in between vet trials and vet dungeons because having a scheduled commitment for 4-12 players is an additional hurdle to clear on top of actually doing the content. If I have chores I need to do in a day, I can take breaks during a night market play session to do them. (And as much fun as it can be to lose time in a game, sitting down for 2-3 hours straight to play a game is very unhealthy.) It has resulted in me playing more than I otherwise might have.
The first thing I hate about the Night Market is that the trash is incredibly hostile to groups, especially drop in and drop out groups. If a player is split from their group by the map, or just getting a little lost for about a minute, the trash will annihilate them. It is a physical barrier that prevents people from getting together or staying together. I see the most common strategy players deploy to get to a group that's across the map is the suicide run, relying on the invulnerability that comes from resurrecting to protect them long enough to regroup with the group. That's really frustrating, both to be that player and to be in the group, unable to help. With the trash taking as long as it does and rewarding literally nothing, it's a terrible idea to try to swing back to the entrance of a district to pick one or two players up.
I don't think the trash has to be *** easy, but a 20% reduction to hp and outgoing damage would be an improvement. The trash is easily the worst part of the Night Market, and where the worst parts of the game come into stark focus.
A side note: the favour orbs that spawn occasionally from trash need to last longer. They're so hard to see in a fight with all the special effects flying around. As a tank, I'm always suffering from a speed debuff because of the Bracing Anchor fitness node, so I often feel like I'm being punished by having rewards taken from me as a result of filling a necessary role. Also, pulling trash groups is often the safest and smartest strategy in the Night Market, but favour orbs only drop where enemies spawn, not where they die -- that can be very, very far away.
Another side note: trash should occasionally drop rewards beyond the favour orbs. It's such a hassle and a waste of time. Blood on the Sand is not sufficient.
A third side note: Trash should respawn much slower. On the scale of once per five minutes. Not, as I've noticed, once per minute. People don't have the time to summon and use their merchant and decon assistants after a fight before all the trash respawns. It's really, really frustrating.
The second thing I like about the Night Market is that doing the Night Market theoretically unlocks relics that make it easier to move through the Night Market. The idea of learning the content actually being reflected in a literal gameplay ability that helps me accomplish my goals is really attractive. The relics are physically very attractive, and I love how they come as collectible furnishings. I like that relic splinters come from doing a variety of activities, even if they come from particular ones, so there's not really any grinding. A tour of each district got me what I needed. (The windglass as a furnishing would be better and more usable if it wasn't floating or spinning. Please change it.)
The second thing I hate about the Night Market is that the relics actually don't help me move through the Night Market, on average. The Egg of Arac relic is the best of them. Zipping around like spiderman above trash mobs is a blast. Adding another dimension to a district, especially one that is free from enemies, allows me to take a break, appreciate the ambience, and adds the feeling that there's more to the world than meets the eye. Unfortunately, it appears the ziplines have been deliberately designed so that you can't traverse the entire district that way, forcing you to spend 10 minutes fighting each trash spawn in between relic grapple points, or risk life and limb sprinting past enemies that, inexplicably, all have snares and slows and stuns. (Please stop giving every overworld enemy movement debuffs. I can tell those debuffs are there just to inconvenience me, not to add a level of complexity and interest. The enemies are inconvenient enough without them.)
The other relics are significantly worse. Enemies can run through sand walls with impunity, and sand walls don't prevent enemies from aggroing, so using the windglass to navigate the Parch can actually get you killed when going the long way would have been safer and less frustrating. (The Parch is a particular frustration on several levels; the map, because it is designed to show roads as they appear, misleads players. They try to follow the map, trusting in it like idiot fools, and end up getting stuck and dying because there's sand walls where the map tells them they should walk. Some actual paths that aren't blocked aren't on the map.)
Side note: The Night Market is the game's most egregious example of maps that just lie to you. The whole game has this problem where maps don't actually show you impassable terrain, cliffs, canyons, elevation changes in general, invisible walls, all the paths and roads that are properly passable. Some maps, if accurately representing the game world, would look a lot more like a terrible noodling cave system. Night Market has entire areas that just kill you if you try to pass through them, and the only way to tell is if you somehow have your health bar showing up on your map as you're using that map to run through them, as your health drops to zero in about eight seconds. Because the map is a full screen UI. If you're also being attacked by the plentiful trash enemies, you probably won't even know it was a zone hazard that killed you. ESO's maps have always been the worst I've seen in an MMO, but Night Market's maps are the first I've seen that are designed to kill you. That sucks. Night Market maps need to reflect the Night Market's unique challenges -- the sand walls and the baleful darkness at *least* should be on the maps, so I don't have to watch my new group mate spend 5 minutes dying to environmental hazards trying to get to my bloody group. At best, even the grapple points would be on the map -- I should be able to tell where I *could* go, even if I can't. Don't tell me that the maps have to be immersive and realistic. If they were, then the Parch would show more paths than there are on the map. The unblocked path from the entrance of the Parch, to the Ash Titan, that requires skirting around the Skirmish and going North, looks like there's an entire cliff there that should block players.
Side note: I get that the Night Market was supposed to have a feeling of evolving discovery, but the thing about evolving discovery is that it comes after a period of confusion and a series of trial and error decisions that take time. Players in large groups don't have the time to be confused. (Two to four people is somewhat better.) The time they need to take to figure something out for themselves is time they're stealing, essentially, from the large group that has to wait for them. It feels bad to be in that position. It's why a lot of casuals are afraid of trying trials and dungeons in general -- they don't want to punish other people with the time it takes for them to learn. Navigation should not be a puzzle for group content. Travel time is not content. It's not gameplay. It's the tax you pay to get to do the content and gameplay. Traveling in ESO is the worst part of ESO. Everything is made better when you don't have to do it. Make maps that help players get to where they need to go, whether that's the Night Market or Auridon. Don't make maps full of lies.
More on relics that don't actually help me move through the Night Market: If I use these relics, I am ditching my group. Again, a major problem in the Night Market as a fun group experience is that group separation is death. We're now a week into the Night Market, and most of the people in my groups are still working to complete their relics, effectively preventing me from enjoying the benefits of earning them, unless I want to be a *** and leave them to their deaths.
The Egg of Arac is at least fun, and it's okay if you have the real gameworld memorised with its grapple points (not a small ask when we can't stop to look at anything for fear of trash respawning on us,) the Windslicer has serious drawbacks, but the Gleaming Lamp is actually a punishment, not a reward. If you aren't sprinting like a mad man, and you don't have the Incandescent Pod sources memorised already, the Gleaming Lamp will just get you killed. There are enemies in those areas, and their leashes go a lot further than normal trash. They also have slows, snares, and stuns, which will run out the time on your lamp. At least theoretically the windslicer might save you time if you were somehow immune to trash aggro (going invisible, for example) -- the lamp doesn't. I'm also not clear what secrets there are to discover using the lamp relic. None of the treasure chests or heavy sacks I found in the baleful darkness counted towards the Golden Pursuit objective for using relics to find secrets. I hate the Gleaming Lamp. I hate Baleful Darkness. I just pretend those parts of the map aren't real.
A third thing I like about the Night Market is that the environments are all visually stunning and incredibly interesting. I wish I could take a breath to admire them. There's really nothing in the game that looks like the three districts; they're completely distinct even from Fargrave, in spite of using Fargrave assets. I really feel the concept in the design execution. This is ESO's Sigil, city of doors, and I feel as if I am on the very edge of knowable reality, risking life and limb to discover what's really out there. It's an exciting idea, well represented in the game world.
A third thing I hate about the Night Market is that space is used so very badly. The Oases are intended to be islands of safety in a hostile world, but they're very bad at serving this purpose. Because there's just the one jump pad to each, they're practically inaccessible. If you can get to that one jump pad, you could have gotten to any part of the map; clearly trash isn't an obstacle for you. There needed to be more jump pads, or other ways of getting into the Oases. Further, the Oases aren't good staging areas, partially because they're broadly inaccessible (unless you kill yourself; I am never going to recommend other players kill themselves, I hope you can understand why,) and partially because they're in bad locations. Few of them are near bosses or skirmishes without trash in the way. Most of them are surrounded by moats of trash. I need staging areas that are immediately next to the piece of content I am going to run. My groups need that. I can't tell you how many times I've walked up to a skirmish, sat down to explain the mechanics to my group while the skirmish timer ticks down, only to die because someone inadvertently dragged dozens of trash enemies to me while I was typing. And I can't blame them, because there's no way to avoid the trash, and 99% of players can't solo it. That's why they joined my groups. The Parch Skirmish ends up being one of the best designed areas, because there's actually an area empty of enemies around it, and it's large enough that enemies have a chance to de-aggro before players reach whatever group is forming. The districts overall feel claustrophobic, and not in the sense that they feel dangerous, and that it feels like I'm risking everything by traversing them. But in the sense that I have to accept my time will be wasted by things that do not and cannot benefit me, as if my time is worthless.
Side note: I wish desperately the relics did give you safe spaces to take a second to breathe. I think if the districts were crowded natively, but you unlocked safer areas to spend a downtime in, that could feel very rewarding and multidimensional. That would be something for people to look forward to earning. Since the Egg of Arac fails to actually give you full nagivation of the Skittering District, this is what I mainly use it for, and it's not nothing. Even if I would rather have the ability to get to where I need to go, when I need to get there.
A third thing I like about the Night Market is that skirmishes have mechanics that reward non-combat actions. I like that the Brood Skirmish has a GW2 style world event in it, where players need to use interactables to progress the objective; high performing players are still free to do combat, and low performing players can contribute meaningfully by throwing coals or depositing debris. The same is true of motes of magic in the Ritual Skirmish. I find players in my groups even self select into these roles, if you take a second to explain what to do. (The pop ups telling you what to do don't always show up. I don't know why.)
A third thing I hate about the Night Market is the timers on Skirmishes. The displays for Skirmish timers are often bugged, telling people they're active when they're not, or counting down to becoming active, and then not doing so. The rotation on Skirmishes is very long. If you need to do a particular Skirmish, you might be looking at several hours of waiting because it's hard to predict when one is going to be active. It seems to me that only one can be active at a time, but that's not stated anywhere in game. That sucks. I suspect the count downs serve to allow groups to form for them, because they can be pretty challenging, but it mainly just serves to make it a piece of content that is largely unavailable at times that work for you. I feel bad for people who only have a couple hours to play a night, because that's just gambling. I don't like a piece of content that requires you to gamble just to do it.
Side note: 36 players is too small for an instance. You don't find anyone organically running around at this point and do things together spontaneously, like you would in a GW2 style group event. The group finder is mandatory, and that's not explained in any Night Market materials. It needs to be. It's not a piece of the in game UI you stumble into organically.
A fourth thing I like about the Night Market is that the quests interior to the district are very full of texture without demanding too much from me. I like the radiant quests in Skyrim -- they help me feel what it's like to be in the setting, in the space, and they give me a perspective on run of the mill, status quo problems. When I sabotage the weapons in Blunt Steel, I feel like a sneaky saboteur behind enemy lines, risking life and limb to hinder my foes. When I go save the animals in Free the Caged, I get the feeling that the Night Market is full of opportunists willing to hurt others for personal gain. I like that I can stop them. I think it's a virtue these quests aren't full of text and loaded with character interactions -- the fact that I get them from discovering an item, or a note, makes it feel as though my character is taking initiative and responding to the world on their own terms.
A fourth thing I hate about the Night Market is that it's group content that has a bunch of solo conventions in it. The quests interior to districts are solo quests. The trial group that makes Night Market a decent experience isn't doing those quests -- they're killing bosses or doing Skirmishes. If you step away from your trial group for a moment to do one of these objectives, or at least search for where it is, you've been separated from your group, and you will likely have to die to get back to them. As a tank, I never feel like I can do that. My group is waiting on me to aggro the next trash or boss. And other people doing the objectives doesn't count for me, even though this is supposed to be group content. Almost all other content shares progress across a group. Solo quests have no business being in the Night Market as it's currently implemented. Also -- the Night Market is a trial zone, but treasure chests and heavy sacks are still unique to the individual. That feels wretched. There should be a timer on them, at the very least. I never go for them because I feel like I'm stealing from my team and wasting their time when I do. And when I'm one person in a 12 man group, that's 11 people who are waiting for me.
Side note: What is wrong with quest sharing? I know by default you can't share the quests individual to the districts, but the logic that governs when you can share daily quests from your faction leaders is opaque and nightmarish. I never know when I can share a quest or why. The Night Market is clearly designed around the conceit that you're sharing quests -- you can't get that 10k faction favour by just doing your own dailies and nothing else -- but that's not spelled out in the Night Market, and sharing quests randomly doesn't work sometimes. I run, again, with a small group of friends, and we almost never can share our daily quests with one another. I'd like to know why.
A fifth thing I like about the Night Market is oddities. I've asked for non-combat activities before, things you can do in the game world beyond killing a bad guy, and the oddities are that. I think the Arachnid Invasion would be a great little addition to a festival or event as a little minigame, part of the celebration. A party game. Just silly for fun, like LOTRO has for its seasonal celebrations. It makes the world feel like a world, not a massacre simulator. I like that oddities give you little buffs. (I am very happy to see IA buffs make their way to other parts of the game. They're fun and interesting.)
A fifth thing I don't like about the Night Market is the races. Theoretically, they should be as silly and just plain fun as oddities, but because they're in spaces with incredibly hostile trash mobs that take ages to kill, they're pointless. God forbid someone else is in your district, trying to outrun the trash. They will drag their trash onto you. I don't do them. (An exception is the Parch races, that are completely sequestered from combat. I particularly like these because you can organically discover them as little secrets hidden in the gameworld, if you're paying attention to the signs.)
The calamities are fine. Neither love them nor hate them. I do think it's funny when the duneripper eats someone in the middle of doing something else, even though I know it is so frustrating for them.
The brazen and argent bosses are fine. You chose some pretty mechanics-heavy bosses for an open world zone, but... It's nothing that can't be explained in a sentence or two. I think that's okay.
I quite like a dungeon that's just a boss. I don't like trash normally. I think the ensnaring spider in the Gossamer Crypt is too tight a DPS check -- the ensnaring spider always killed at least one of my group members every time it spawned in my run of it. I also think there's too many mechanics to juggle around in the Timeless Wallow. I'd like to see the scarabs removed, if I could choose one mechanic to trim. If I could choose a second one, I'd remove the skeleton adds that aren't the bone wyrms. Otherwise, I kind of liked these dungeons. If they were tweaked in these ways, I might do them more regularly.
The group finder is very bad. I should be able to join other groups with a preexisting group -- trying to get myself and my friends into the same group that's forming is annoying and frustrating. We often have to quit a group because it fills up before we all can get into it. Making your own group and listing it is also annoying. The group finder should save your previous group finder information so you can repost a group with one click. Having to input the same information over and over again because one person drops out is a hassle -- Most group leaders I know only bother when the group drops from 12 people down to 8. You should also be able to toggle a listing, so that it will repost itself as people drop, not needing to open a full screen interface while we're in the middle of a big calamity fight.
I will report back after I do the trial.
A parting note... The slapdash nature of running content in the larger Night Market is that you struggle with necessary roles, either in fulfilling them, or having too many. The Night Market is hard enough you *need* a tank, but you only ever need two tanks. Anything more than two tanks is an active detriment to the play experience -- you'll be going slower because you have less DPS. You'll have people fighting over aggro, spinning around bosses that have cleave mechanics. (This happened to me last night trying to run the Descender Skirmish.) And groups that don't have tanks generally die. Just setting aside for the moment that ESO has the most miserable tanking experience I've ever endured in an MMO, the problem of tanks in the Night Market is not an easily solved one. Tanking in ESO comes at the expense of so much DPS, especially in the Night Market where tanks do need to be very optimised for survival. At least excess healers can still do respectable damage if their healing is redundant. I had a bizarrely good group that was five healers. Still did great damage, and no one died.
tl;dr there is something good and special about the Night Market, but it's mired in a lot of very frustrating nonsense. Most of that nonsense is trash mobs.
The Night Market is messy. There's a lot I enjoy about it, but it's got a lot of problems, and it draws attention to problems already inherently in the game, too.
Here's my player context, to inform where I'm coming from: I'm someone who has HM vet trial clears and does vet dungeons for fun. I have a small group of friends I enjoy running with. Trifectas aren't my thing. I tend to do IA more than most activities because it's designed for a small group and doesn't require setting up an appointment ahead of time and clearing my schedule -- I can go as far or as little as I'm in the mood for. I parse fine as needed, and I tank when no one else wants to tank. My gear is what it should be, and I read mechanics guides ahead of running content. My friends are generally worse performers than me; they listen to me and will follow a build guide, but they're not spending hours grinding trials and dungeons for sets if they don't have to. They've done it before, and they are tired of having to do it every patch as the meta shifts.
I can't think of a way to organise this post for easier readability. I'm sorry.
The first thing I like about the Night Market is that it is challenging group content that you can drop into and out of as your heart desires. I often go pretty long stretches in between vet trials and vet dungeons because having a scheduled commitment for 4-12 players is an additional hurdle to clear on top of actually doing the content. If I have chores I need to do in a day, I can take breaks during a night market play session to do them. (And as much fun as it can be to lose time in a game, sitting down for 2-3 hours straight to play a game is very unhealthy.) It has resulted in me playing more than I otherwise might have.
The first thing I hate about the Night Market is that the trash is incredibly hostile to groups, especially drop in and drop out groups. If a player is split from their group by the map, or just getting a little lost for about a minute, the trash will annihilate them. It is a physical barrier that prevents people from getting together or staying together. I see the most common strategy players deploy to get to a group that's across the map is the suicide run, relying on the invulnerability that comes from resurrecting to protect them long enough to regroup with the group. That's really frustrating, both to be that player and to be in the group, unable to help. With the trash taking as long as it does and rewarding literally nothing, it's a terrible idea to try to swing back to the entrance of a district to pick one or two players up.
I don't think the trash has to be *** easy, but a 20% reduction to hp and outgoing damage would be an improvement. The trash is easily the worst part of the Night Market, and where the worst parts of the game come into stark focus.
A side note: the favour orbs that spawn occasionally from trash need to last longer. They're so hard to see in a fight with all the special effects flying around. As a tank, I'm always suffering from a speed debuff because of the Bracing Anchor fitness node, so I often feel like I'm being punished by having rewards taken from me as a result of filling a necessary role. Also, pulling trash groups is often the safest and smartest strategy in the Night Market, but favour orbs only drop where enemies spawn, not where they die -- that can be very, very far away.
Another side note: trash should occasionally drop rewards beyond the favour orbs. It's such a hassle and a waste of time. Blood on the Sand is not sufficient.
A third side note: Trash should respawn much slower. On the scale of once per five minutes. Not, as I've noticed, once per minute. People don't have the time to summon and use their merchant and decon assistants after a fight before all the trash respawns. It's really, really frustrating.
The second thing I like about the Night Market is that doing the Night Market theoretically unlocks relics that make it easier to move through the Night Market. The idea of learning the content actually being reflected in a literal gameplay ability that helps me accomplish my goals is really attractive. The relics are physically very attractive, and I love how they come as collectible furnishings. I like that relic splinters come from doing a variety of activities, even if they come from particular ones, so there's not really any grinding. A tour of each district got me what I needed. (The windglass as a furnishing would be better and more usable if it wasn't floating or spinning. Please change it.)
The second thing I hate about the Night Market is that the relics actually don't help me move through the Night Market, on average. The Egg of Arac relic is the best of them. Zipping around like spiderman above trash mobs is a blast. Adding another dimension to a district, especially one that is free from enemies, allows me to take a break, appreciate the ambience, and adds the feeling that there's more to the world than meets the eye. Unfortunately, it appears the ziplines have been deliberately designed so that you can't traverse the entire district that way, forcing you to spend 10 minutes fighting each trash spawn in between relic grapple points, or risk life and limb sprinting past enemies that, inexplicably, all have snares and slows and stuns. (Please stop giving every overworld enemy movement debuffs. I can tell those debuffs are there just to inconvenience me, not to add a level of complexity and interest. The enemies are inconvenient enough without them.)
The other relics are significantly worse. Enemies can run through sand walls with impunity, and sand walls don't prevent enemies from aggroing, so using the windglass to navigate the Parch can actually get you killed when going the long way would have been safer and less frustrating. (The Parch is a particular frustration on several levels; the map, because it is designed to show roads as they appear, misleads players. They try to follow the map, trusting in it like idiot fools, and end up getting stuck and dying because there's sand walls where the map tells them they should walk. Some actual paths that aren't blocked aren't on the map.)
Side note: The Night Market is the game's most egregious example of maps that just lie to you. The whole game has this problem where maps don't actually show you impassable terrain, cliffs, canyons, elevation changes in general, invisible walls, all the paths and roads that are properly passable. Some maps, if accurately representing the game world, would look a lot more like a terrible noodling cave system. Night Market has entire areas that just kill you if you try to pass through them, and the only way to tell is if you somehow have your health bar showing up on your map as you're using that map to run through them, as your health drops to zero in about eight seconds. Because the map is a full screen UI. If you're also being attacked by the plentiful trash enemies, you probably won't even know it was a zone hazard that killed you. ESO's maps have always been the worst I've seen in an MMO, but Night Market's maps are the first I've seen that are designed to kill you. That sucks. Night Market maps need to reflect the Night Market's unique challenges -- the sand walls and the baleful darkness at *least* should be on the maps, so I don't have to watch my new group mate spend 5 minutes dying to environmental hazards trying to get to my bloody group. At best, even the grapple points would be on the map -- I should be able to tell where I *could* go, even if I can't. Don't tell me that the maps have to be immersive and realistic. If they were, then the Parch would show more paths than there are on the map. The unblocked path from the entrance of the Parch, to the Ash Titan, that requires skirting around the Skirmish and going North, looks like there's an entire cliff there that should block players.
Side note: I get that the Night Market was supposed to have a feeling of evolving discovery, but the thing about evolving discovery is that it comes after a period of confusion and a series of trial and error decisions that take time. Players in large groups don't have the time to be confused. (Two to four people is somewhat better.) The time they need to take to figure something out for themselves is time they're stealing, essentially, from the large group that has to wait for them. It feels bad to be in that position. It's why a lot of casuals are afraid of trying trials and dungeons in general -- they don't want to punish other people with the time it takes for them to learn. Navigation should not be a puzzle for group content. Travel time is not content. It's not gameplay. It's the tax you pay to get to do the content and gameplay. Traveling in ESO is the worst part of ESO. Everything is made better when you don't have to do it. Make maps that help players get to where they need to go, whether that's the Night Market or Auridon. Don't make maps full of lies.
More on relics that don't actually help me move through the Night Market: If I use these relics, I am ditching my group. Again, a major problem in the Night Market as a fun group experience is that group separation is death. We're now a week into the Night Market, and most of the people in my groups are still working to complete their relics, effectively preventing me from enjoying the benefits of earning them, unless I want to be a *** and leave them to their deaths.
The Egg of Arac is at least fun, and it's okay if you have the real gameworld memorised with its grapple points (not a small ask when we can't stop to look at anything for fear of trash respawning on us,) the Windslicer has serious drawbacks, but the Gleaming Lamp is actually a punishment, not a reward. If you aren't sprinting like a mad man, and you don't have the Incandescent Pod sources memorised already, the Gleaming Lamp will just get you killed. There are enemies in those areas, and their leashes go a lot further than normal trash. They also have slows, snares, and stuns, which will run out the time on your lamp. At least theoretically the windslicer might save you time if you were somehow immune to trash aggro (going invisible, for example) -- the lamp doesn't. I'm also not clear what secrets there are to discover using the lamp relic. None of the treasure chests or heavy sacks I found in the baleful darkness counted towards the Golden Pursuit objective for using relics to find secrets. I hate the Gleaming Lamp. I hate Baleful Darkness. I just pretend those parts of the map aren't real.
A third thing I like about the Night Market is that the environments are all visually stunning and incredibly interesting. I wish I could take a breath to admire them. There's really nothing in the game that looks like the three districts; they're completely distinct even from Fargrave, in spite of using Fargrave assets. I really feel the concept in the design execution. This is ESO's Sigil, city of doors, and I feel as if I am on the very edge of knowable reality, risking life and limb to discover what's really out there. It's an exciting idea, well represented in the game world.
A third thing I hate about the Night Market is that space is used so very badly. The Oases are intended to be islands of safety in a hostile world, but they're very bad at serving this purpose. Because there's just the one jump pad to each, they're practically inaccessible. If you can get to that one jump pad, you could have gotten to any part of the map; clearly trash isn't an obstacle for you. There needed to be more jump pads, or other ways of getting into the Oases. Further, the Oases aren't good staging areas, partially because they're broadly inaccessible (unless you kill yourself; I am never going to recommend other players kill themselves, I hope you can understand why,) and partially because they're in bad locations. Few of them are near bosses or skirmishes without trash in the way. Most of them are surrounded by moats of trash. I need staging areas that are immediately next to the piece of content I am going to run. My groups need that. I can't tell you how many times I've walked up to a skirmish, sat down to explain the mechanics to my group while the skirmish timer ticks down, only to die because someone inadvertently dragged dozens of trash enemies to me while I was typing. And I can't blame them, because there's no way to avoid the trash, and 99% of players can't solo it. That's why they joined my groups. The Parch Skirmish ends up being one of the best designed areas, because there's actually an area empty of enemies around it, and it's large enough that enemies have a chance to de-aggro before players reach whatever group is forming. The districts overall feel claustrophobic, and not in the sense that they feel dangerous, and that it feels like I'm risking everything by traversing them. But in the sense that I have to accept my time will be wasted by things that do not and cannot benefit me, as if my time is worthless.
Side note: I wish desperately the relics did give you safe spaces to take a second to breathe. I think if the districts were crowded natively, but you unlocked safer areas to spend a downtime in, that could feel very rewarding and multidimensional. That would be something for people to look forward to earning. Since the Egg of Arac fails to actually give you full nagivation of the Skittering District, this is what I mainly use it for, and it's not nothing. Even if I would rather have the ability to get to where I need to go, when I need to get there.
A third thing I like about the Night Market is that skirmishes have mechanics that reward non-combat actions. I like that the Brood Skirmish has a GW2 style world event in it, where players need to use interactables to progress the objective; high performing players are still free to do combat, and low performing players can contribute meaningfully by throwing coals or depositing debris. The same is true of motes of magic in the Ritual Skirmish. I find players in my groups even self select into these roles, if you take a second to explain what to do. (The pop ups telling you what to do don't always show up. I don't know why.)
A third thing I hate about the Night Market is the timers on Skirmishes. The displays for Skirmish timers are often bugged, telling people they're active when they're not, or counting down to becoming active, and then not doing so. The rotation on Skirmishes is very long. If you need to do a particular Skirmish, you might be looking at several hours of waiting because it's hard to predict when one is going to be active. It seems to me that only one can be active at a time, but that's not stated anywhere in game. That sucks. I suspect the count downs serve to allow groups to form for them, because they can be pretty challenging, but it mainly just serves to make it a piece of content that is largely unavailable at times that work for you. I feel bad for people who only have a couple hours to play a night, because that's just gambling. I don't like a piece of content that requires you to gamble just to do it.
Side note: 36 players is too small for an instance. You don't find anyone organically running around at this point and do things together spontaneously, like you would in a GW2 style group event. The group finder is mandatory, and that's not explained in any Night Market materials. It needs to be. It's not a piece of the in game UI you stumble into organically.
A fourth thing I like about the Night Market is that the quests interior to the district are very full of texture without demanding too much from me. I like the radiant quests in Skyrim -- they help me feel what it's like to be in the setting, in the space, and they give me a perspective on run of the mill, status quo problems. When I sabotage the weapons in Blunt Steel, I feel like a sneaky saboteur behind enemy lines, risking life and limb to hinder my foes. When I go save the animals in Free the Caged, I get the feeling that the Night Market is full of opportunists willing to hurt others for personal gain. I like that I can stop them. I think it's a virtue these quests aren't full of text and loaded with character interactions -- the fact that I get them from discovering an item, or a note, makes it feel as though my character is taking initiative and responding to the world on their own terms.
A fourth thing I hate about the Night Market is that it's group content that has a bunch of solo conventions in it. The quests interior to districts are solo quests. The trial group that makes Night Market a decent experience isn't doing those quests -- they're killing bosses or doing Skirmishes. If you step away from your trial group for a moment to do one of these objectives, or at least search for where it is, you've been separated from your group, and you will likely have to die to get back to them. As a tank, I never feel like I can do that. My group is waiting on me to aggro the next trash or boss. And other people doing the objectives doesn't count for me, even though this is supposed to be group content. Almost all other content shares progress across a group. Solo quests have no business being in the Night Market as it's currently implemented. Also -- the Night Market is a trial zone, but treasure chests and heavy sacks are still unique to the individual. That feels wretched. There should be a timer on them, at the very least. I never go for them because I feel like I'm stealing from my team and wasting their time when I do. And when I'm one person in a 12 man group, that's 11 people who are waiting for me.
Side note: What is wrong with quest sharing? I know by default you can't share the quests individual to the districts, but the logic that governs when you can share daily quests from your faction leaders is opaque and nightmarish. I never know when I can share a quest or why. The Night Market is clearly designed around the conceit that you're sharing quests -- you can't get that 10k faction favour by just doing your own dailies and nothing else -- but that's not spelled out in the Night Market, and sharing quests randomly doesn't work sometimes. I run, again, with a small group of friends, and we almost never can share our daily quests with one another. I'd like to know why.
A fifth thing I like about the Night Market is oddities. I've asked for non-combat activities before, things you can do in the game world beyond killing a bad guy, and the oddities are that. I think the Arachnid Invasion would be a great little addition to a festival or event as a little minigame, part of the celebration. A party game. Just silly for fun, like LOTRO has for its seasonal celebrations. It makes the world feel like a world, not a massacre simulator. I like that oddities give you little buffs. (I am very happy to see IA buffs make their way to other parts of the game. They're fun and interesting.)
A fifth thing I don't like about the Night Market is the races. Theoretically, they should be as silly and just plain fun as oddities, but because they're in spaces with incredibly hostile trash mobs that take ages to kill, they're pointless. God forbid someone else is in your district, trying to outrun the trash. They will drag their trash onto you. I don't do them. (An exception is the Parch races, that are completely sequestered from combat. I particularly like these because you can organically discover them as little secrets hidden in the gameworld, if you're paying attention to the signs.)
The calamities are fine. Neither love them nor hate them. I do think it's funny when the duneripper eats someone in the middle of doing something else, even though I know it is so frustrating for them.
The brazen and argent bosses are fine. You chose some pretty mechanics-heavy bosses for an open world zone, but... It's nothing that can't be explained in a sentence or two. I think that's okay.
I quite like a dungeon that's just a boss. I don't like trash normally. I think the ensnaring spider in the Gossamer Crypt is too tight a DPS check -- the ensnaring spider always killed at least one of my group members every time it spawned in my run of it. I also think there's too many mechanics to juggle around in the Timeless Wallow. I'd like to see the scarabs removed, if I could choose one mechanic to trim. If I could choose a second one, I'd remove the skeleton adds that aren't the bone wyrms. Otherwise, I kind of liked these dungeons. If they were tweaked in these ways, I might do them more regularly.
The group finder is very bad. I should be able to join other groups with a preexisting group -- trying to get myself and my friends into the same group that's forming is annoying and frustrating. We often have to quit a group because it fills up before we all can get into it. Making your own group and listing it is also annoying. The group finder should save your previous group finder information so you can repost a group with one click. Having to input the same information over and over again because one person drops out is a hassle -- Most group leaders I know only bother when the group drops from 12 people down to 8. You should also be able to toggle a listing, so that it will repost itself as people drop, not needing to open a full screen interface while we're in the middle of a big calamity fight.
I will report back after I do the trial.
A parting note... The slapdash nature of running content in the larger Night Market is that you struggle with necessary roles, either in fulfilling them, or having too many. The Night Market is hard enough you *need* a tank, but you only ever need two tanks. Anything more than two tanks is an active detriment to the play experience -- you'll be going slower because you have less DPS. You'll have people fighting over aggro, spinning around bosses that have cleave mechanics. (This happened to me last night trying to run the Descender Skirmish.) And groups that don't have tanks generally die. Just setting aside for the moment that ESO has the most miserable tanking experience I've ever endured in an MMO, the problem of tanks in the Night Market is not an easily solved one. Tanking in ESO comes at the expense of so much DPS, especially in the Night Market where tanks do need to be very optimised for survival. At least excess healers can still do respectable damage if their healing is redundant. I had a bizarrely good group that was five healers. Still did great damage, and no one died.
tl;dr there is something good and special about the Night Market, but it's mired in a lot of very frustrating nonsense. Most of that nonsense is trash mobs.
xencthlu
4
Re: The Current State of Ranged Magblade.
..
Swallow soul might be the second slowest projectile in the game, right after the warden cliff racer…
Dark Flare would like to say hi.
Some tests I did a few months back, ranging from 1m - 28m.. take these results with a grain of salt, it's all based on Combat Metrix's combat log feature with the "used skill" and "damage event" toggles, times varied around 30~50ms, I did about 10 tests and picked an average/mean that seemed to make the most sense.
- Ranged Light Attacks = 0.3~0.8
- Force Shock = 0.3~0.6
- Flame Skull = 0.35~1.45
- Cliff Racer = 1.2~1.2
- Crystal Frag = 0.32~1.08
- Insta Frag = 0.53~1.08
- Dark Flare = 0.53~1.08
- Runeblades = 0.32~1.0 (0~22m)
- Poop Fist = 0.3~1.0
- Strife = 0.55~0.85
Worst to best, results are surprising. I didn't expect Strife to be the fastest, although it does have the random +200ms penalty beyond the base 300ms travel time that Dark Flare and Insta Frag have, a relic from 2014~2017 dev balance decisions. It's relatively fast, but because it's slow in melee, people probably find it really clunky vs other attacks that will end up faster in that range. It's also nearly invisible, so hard to tell what it's even doing, it doesn't give that real feedback you find on Force Shock.
Also interesting that Runeblades has 3 hits with an animation that implies they land at different intervals, but they actually land at the exact same time similar to Force Shock. Since the 3 hits are the same element, they're probably landing too close to allow for multiple Overcharged procs which is why it can only ever happen once per cast, but still has 3x the chance to happen.
I thought Flare would be the worst, at least worse than Frags, but they're nearly identical, I can only assume they share the same code with a fake animation that doesn't represent what's actually happening similar to Runeblades. Flare shoots into the sky very quick, Frag floats very slowly forward.
Here's some other skills people complain about:
- Soul Trap = 0.34~1.43
- Fetcher Infection = 0.35~1.7
- Cripple = 0.35~1.43
- Impale = 0.3~0.61
- Grim Focus = 0.35~1.1
- Spear Shard = 1.05~1.05
- Lightning Splash = 0.8~0.85
- Mages Fury = 0.8~0.85
- Bound Armaments (1st-4th) = 0.6-1.35 ~ 1.1-1.85
BA is technically the longest, but it is a semi spammable with a caked in delay so I'll give it a pass even if I find it annoying, so the worst is definitely Fetcher Infection with Cripple and Soul Trap as a close second.
Soul Trap and Fetcher Infection have a very transparent animation, so it was never super obvious, but if you flip on the skill style for the purple crows, you'll notice very quickly how bad Fetcher really is. It's astonishingly bad.
Impale is actually much quicker than I thought matching Force Shock speed as the fastest.
Spear Shard and Lightning Splash have a hidden, locked in delay from any distance, but don't write it on the tooltip like Volley, probably why they all bug out if you cast abilities too quick
Mages Fury like Cliff Racer have that locked in travel time too, but I noticed Fury has a very small 50ms delay which tells me like Runeblade, the animation is hiding the fact that it's not actually spawning the attack above the enemy, and is instead an invisible, but fast, projectile coming from the user.
Anyway, hope they clean up these skills. Make them faster, nothing should take 1.7s and that 300ms minimum travel time needs to be dropped to like 100ms with the removal of the added 200ms on Strife, Frag, and Flare. Hybridization has made all skills viable, even if you play melee, you will have some type of ranged skill, so it really sucks to have this clunkiness baked into them with no choice around it.
Re: Night Market Keys.
At the very least you should've allowed players to hold multiple copies of a key.
Yes, yes, yes. We should be able to at minimum hold 10 copies of the keys. This would make it easier on people who run in multiple groups, and for smaller guilds since willing fills would be more abundant while not making the overland useless to farm once you have the keys, which I believe was the point of the system in the first place.
The relic system is also somewhat frustrating but at least once someone has it they have it. The keys need to be almost constantly farmed in their current state and it punishes people who lead groups who are doing all of the bosses over and over again while getting almost nothing from them.
Earlier to day I was filling for a OO run since I had all the keys (all argent and dungeons) and someone who was on the roster had to drop. We had 3 people in that group that needed the dungeons. I ended up helping out on my tank. After that we did the trial. I went into this having all of the keys including the back filled argent ones and because I was being helpful I left with no keys at all. This was not a group I normally run with and I will have to re-farm all of the stuff before I run with my other group later this week. The current system actively discourages helping in this way since for some it might mean they no longer can run with the group they signed up for/want to because someone asked them to help and they said yes.
That run earlier ran from about 6:30 ET until 9:00 E. 2.5 hours to do all of that and clear the trial is crazy. Most groups cap their run times at 2 hours max for good reasons. In a less organized group that all would have taken much longer.
eashi
4
Re: I’m so angry....
There’s literally arrows that appear on your map and in game on the compass and above the npcs heads that point you to daily quests for the night market as well as every other area in the game.
If you don’t see that you probably already picked it up
If you don’t see that you probably already picked it up
Re: I’m so angry....
The Night Market is the best thing to happen in the last 10 years!! Please stop complaining.
Can you actually help me? Then why aren’t you? What the hell are you talking about?!
How can you say this is good when I don’t even have any idea what I need to do just to pick up one damn quest, so I can go into a damn dungeon, and then finally a damn Trial?! THIS ISN'T FUN!!!
Allow me to make a prediction.. when you enter the dungeon, you(or not you) will be posting on the forum: "I'm so angry... Why are these dungeons/trials so difficult? This isn't fun".
Honestly, I’m tired of reading these messages about how "it’s all so difficult and not fun".
I hope i'm wrong
MyGTX
11
Re: I’m so angry....
The Night Market is the best thing to happen in the last 10 years!! Please stop complaining.
Can you actually help me? Then why aren’t you? What the hell are you talking about?!
How can you say this is good when I don’t even have any idea what I need to do just to pick up one damn quest, so I can go into a damn dungeon, and then finally a damn Trial?! THIS ISN'T FUN!!!
Then don't play it if it isn't fun?
Re: U50 Feedback Thread for Class Mastery
Static Reverberation
This passive was a huge problem for pvp week 1. It was in a fine state after getting adjusted to 0.5 seconds. Its now back to being too powerful with 0.3 seconds cool down and being buffed to base 5% proc rate.
Part of the problem comes from sorc being too good at being able to proc it. 5% proc base doesnt sound like much but consider that a regular status effect build can deal up to 10 instances of seperate damage per second. For example
1-Vateshran destro proc
2-Burning status effect from vateshran
3-Light attack
4-Concussion from thread of war
5-Crushing shock (frost)
6-Crushing shock (fire)
7-Crushing shock (shock)
8-Chill from crushing shock
9-Burning from crushing shock
10- Concussion from crushing shock
11-Hurricane
10+ instances of seperate damage in a single second with a 5% base proc chance at full hp, skyrocketing to a certainty at lower health thresholds. This isnt just limited to this specific scenario either, bound armamant is 4 instance of seperate damage by itself and is by itself a burst damage and the burst damage having near certainty to proc additional damage turns it from a burst to an easy execute. In fact it turns basically everything in sorcs arsenal to an execute extremely easily.
Malevolent Promise was excluded from pvp for being too war crimey, well, this passive is the actual war crime. Please consider adding a once per second clause to it with battle spirit active. Proccing an extra instance of damage every second easily makes it one of the best pure class passives in the game, simply makes it less toxic by preventing it from being oppressive in pvp.
I have to disagree here.
You’re right about being able to stack stand effects but re-read your own post. Out of the 10 sources of status application only one comes from Sorc … just one.
Nothing else on that list is Sorc Specific which means that being a Sorc doesn’t make those skills any more effective. It’s not as though Sorcs can synergize those status effects better than any other class because any and every other class can slot 9 out of those 10 abilities, it’s just that Sorcs have the passive.
To be honest the main status I see Sorcs using here is Overcharge rather than any of the elementals and that’s really leaning a bit on LA & scribing, also outside of the class skill set.
Running a status effect build can hit hard in PvP but it leaves the build open to quite a lot because in order to maximize it requires specific supporting gear and attention to their mitigation. A status-effect Sorc vs a subclassed crit meta build, for example, is going to have a run for their money because they’re going to have to keep up shields & heal in a rotation versus just spamming LA + skill weaves.
Sorcs are not in a good place. I don’t know who thinks that but this observation really is evidence of that if Sorcs are leaning on status effect output rather than their own class skills.
These passives need to hit hard and the buff makes sense, it provides for a viable means to be competitive in the scope of subclasses builds until the Sorc refresh, which is the whole point. Static at 0.3 & 5% is where it needs to be.
What does the source of the skill have to do with anything? Are you guys just trying to be funny?
Because your argument is that Sorcs are somehow better able to make use of applying status effects.
That, factually, isn’t true because 90% of the sources of applying those status effects are available to every player, they’re not Sorc specific.
This means that, no, Sorcs do not have some extra benefit when it comes to applying status effects, anyone can use Crushing Shock, anyone can run Vateshran, anyone can light attack with a Destro staff, etc.
If Sorcs had clad specific skills that were better able to apply status effects then, yes, you’d be right; Sorcs would have an easier time than other classes but that isn’t the case.
I don’t think it’s right to ask for a passive to be nerfed simply because it synergizes with world skills; especially when the class skills for the class in question are so poor.
Using status effects as a main source of damage in PvP is both interesting and risky; and really only works if the player is running the Signet mythic, which, anyone else can slot too. This leaves a build like that open to quite a lot in PvP despite having some descent damage potential but is far from OP.
My argument is that sorc has an easy time proccing Static Reverbation passive. I'm sorry to say that literally everything you are talking about is irrelevant to the topic...
I'll put it in simple terms to be better understood. We dont consider Wild Adaptation weak because warden can maintain at most chilled and maybe hemorrhaging with its base class skills. We consider it strong because with elemental susceptibility, blood for blood and various other sets and skills warden is able to reach and maintain a respectable number of status effects.
Obviously we dont treat class masteries in a vacuum with only the class skills. That would be, absurd, ill put a stop to this nonsense that non class skills has to be disregarded while considering class masteries. I will also ask you to reconsider your bias on sorc, it seems to be clouding your judgment.
And what myself and others are telling you is that Sorcs don’t have as easy of a time proccing the passive as you seem to think.
Remember, Static doesn’t just proc per instance of damage, it procs per instance of damage within the 0.3s timeframe. So if a Sorc tosses Crushing Shock and deals 3 instances of damage all at once, then that counts as “one” for the purposes of Static because all 3 occurred at the same time and the passive has the 0.3s cooldown, so effectively, 2 out of the 3 instances don’t contribute to the passive.
Nobody is saying that you consider Mastery passives in a vacuum, what I’m saying is that you have to consider the current state of Sorc skills as they are now in the context of how much strength these passives should or should not have. Plus, Sorcs pay a penalty for having to slot world skills over their class skills in that they take a hit to their output in doing so which goes toward being able to proc Static in the first place.
When I talk about Sorcs using skills outside of their class it is relevant because Sorcs have no reliable spammable burst. Just about every class has at least one skill that’s a reliable heavy burst spam.
When you consider that Static only reliably procs after the targets health gets below a certain point you can see where this raises a problem for Sorcs in PvP, they need burst and they don’t have it and world skills only partially deliver on this.
In PvP, with Sorc having no heavy bursts and target players having strong self healing available, getting a target down to a low enough health for Static to do any consistent numbers isn’t as easy as you’re saying. Out of, let’s say, 5 or 6 instances of damage per GCD Static might proc once, and that’s only once their health hit gets lowered.
If Sorcs had a class skill like Merciless that scaled really high and could thereby chunk a players health in one burst and then allow Static to kick in and help the Sorc keep the targets health lower and keep applying the passive, then maybe you’d have a point but that’s not the case and no world skill is that strong either.
For comparison, Burning Light, for example, will proc FAR more consistently over the course of combat and do more damage than Static will since it can apply persistently, not just when targets are lower health.
Sorcs cannot realistically proc Static more than once per second, even though the passive cooldown is only 0.3s because Sorcs don’t have access to any skills that apply damage in fractional increments. Dealing multiple instances of damage all at the same time does not count each instance toward the passive.
Further, you have the health barrier to consider so the realistic amount of proc that can happen is far less than you’re thinking and testing shows that.
NxJoeyD
2
Re: Shattered Paths Signet Is Problematic
Shattered Path Signet does NOT break the game on Vengeance! I'm perfectly content to skip out on meaningless preseason testing, which will be instantly forgotten in June.BardokRedSnow wrote: »Now please, enough derailment.
Shattered Path Signet will make the GH meta even more miserable. Adding to the ball groups and one shots, now you have players being melted by Xv1 ranged LA spam. No your DK wings will not save you because it's all dots not "projectiles" doing the damage.
You don’t even play the game anymore
I do, fought people using it, it’s really no worse than other patches where players like evo444 ran around ganking people. Really previous patches have had it worse.
Re: ESO on Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere
WhoThenNow7 wrote: »ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »Thanks, @Leebmc! We now have a bug in for this, but our team confirmed that you can type the script text below into the in-game chat and it will also fix this in the short term and remove the 30FPS cap that some of you are running into with this version of ESO.
/script SetCVar("MinFrameTime.2", "0.01")
Can you also use a script for changing resolution? My main monitor is 2560x1440, and secondary is 1920x1080. The game starts on my secondary, and when I switch to my main, I cannot get the resolution to 1440p.
My workaround for this for now was to disable my secondary monitor. Then I booted up the game and it forced it to go to my primary and it accepted the proper resolution. I then reenabled the secondary monitor and it keeps booting up on the correct one now. Not ideal, but it works now!
