Hey everyone, just wanted to give you a heads up we are planning to increase the number of monsters that can drop Vitrified Souls via an upcoming hotfix. We'll post a thread with more details once the hotfix is complete. Hope this helps!

It just another "icing on the cake"... cant even use the grind to level (Dolmen enemies also give xp)

just....

I’m not putting a number on things because I can’t predict anything. But I will say this year does feel different than all of those other “omg ESO is dying” complaints we have every year. I know every player claims the game is dead every time they hit a minor inconvenience, but there is something about the number of people claiming it this time that makes it feel less like a knee-jerk cry for attention and more like writing on the wall.

• ESO’s focus has shifted hard to solo-RPG players, as evidenced by Subclassing and the number of players we now have proudly announcing that they play only solo. These players are mostly biding time until TES6 releases, and will drop ESO like a hot potato when it does. TES6 will offer them everything they want - better graphics, customizable difficulty, mods, no other players around spamming sparkleponies - so it’ll be tough for them to come back after they get that… and many would probably rather download a mod to add the zone they’re missing instead of coming back to ESO.
• ESO has been bleeding endgamers since U35, and that turned into a full-on hemmorhage with Subclassing. No vet players (or at least vets who do training things) means no new people getting into endgame, which will lead to less reason to keep Finn’s team churning out content (which is the only thing keeping the sweaty PvErs around).
• PvP. Do I need to say more? Vengeance isn’t a “new PvP” thing as much as it is a “PvP for non-PvPers!” thing. That playerbase has gotten nothing but scraps for ages, and the last we saw was that its success is all under the care of someone who doesn’t even know heavy attacks restore resources and can’t identify the one set that people have been complaining about for 2+ years.
• One of ESO’s main strengths compared to other MMOs was that it had fewer Classes, but every Class was versatile. You could totally heal on a DK or the like, and in many cases it was a lot of fun to ‘break the mold,’ as it were. And now, all of that is gone. Now other MMOs have way more to offer since ESO is just 7 sets of skill lines while others have so many more playstyles to offer
• We actually got some communication recently, but a lot of that showed us how differently the devs see things than the players. And again, a lot of comments (specifically from the Combat team) show they have no concept of what the problems are and how they are felt by actual players.
• Microsoft’s shakeup was not a vote of confidence.
• One entire supported language has just not been done this year, leaving a whole set of the players without voiced dialogue (which is one of the main things that sets ESO apart from other MMOs). I think the text was also machine-translated, so even that has times when it’s not right.
• Solstice, whatever you think of it, had less content than previous years. The playerbase even has consistently voted that the writing peaked in the Orsinium-Summerset era, and has been on a steady decline since.
• A lot of people like to bury their head in the sand and ignore SteamChart trends because “not all players use Steam!” but a trend is a trend for a reason, and unless you think that only Steam players are leaving and everyone else is staying, we can infer trends from relative populations. The numbers are going down.
• Even ESO’s content creator team is mostly maining other games (like GW2) by now. It’s not a vote of confidence if many of your creator team has stopped making content for your game, and the ones that still are have a more “what on earth are they doing?” vibe to their videos.

Altogether, I won’t say ESO is dead, but this definitely has a different feel from the last 56 times “ESO is dead!” This time, it really does feel like the vultures are circling. There’s still time to turn it around, but they have to stop promising cool stuff and actually deliver cool stuff.

I have a feeling that ZOS is on a bit of a back foot right now since they were obviously expecting Subclassing to be some massive thing and bring so many lapsed players back, and instead they got a handful of returning people at the expense of a lot of others. They absolutely did not expect the number of people who preferred not to Subclass. The team is obviously scrambling, and so many of the things they’ve done since (like the wall event) have just fallen flat despite trying to hype them so hard. All of that will just make the next pass sell even worse.

But the big thing for me is that, as much as the new Director wants this to be a “30-year game!” it’s not like he’s going to be the one to decide that. ESO won’t be one of those games that dies because the population leaves - there will always be people who will defend it to their dying day. There’s a much more immediate danger that a lot of people are conveniently ignoring: once Microsoft (which is moving away from gaming) decides that ESO is no longer profitable and doesn’t want to pay for the servers anymore, they’ll pull the plug no matter how many people are there. And then, like Legends, it’ll only exist in documentation on the wiki.

So… can ESO prove to Microsoft that it is profitable, especially after this year is making a lot of people say “I’m not buying the next pass!”? Or are they going to keep “ignoring the haters” and listening only to the white knights here and keep going down this path, and then be surprised when the executives call them into the office for that meeting?

What Ruined Combat In ESO?

1. No elevation mechanics --> Ruin level design.
2. Automatic projectile --> Ruin balance and level design.
3. Too much wide collision judgement for melee weapon. --> Ruin balance and reality.
4. NPC enemy doesn't escape from AoE. --> Ruin reality
5. Too many buff style makes people confused. --> should be united more simply.
6. Too many meta dividing player building mech everywhere. --> should be united more simply between PVE and PVP.
(Ex. Merge Impenetration and reinforce into just "armor".)
7. Too many flat ground mech everywhere. --> Ruin creative level design and reality.
8. Too many nonsense sudden death mech everywhere in 4 player dungeon and 12 player Trial.
(--> Just make it cleaver visual design, or remove it.)
9. Too many abstract UI design makes people confused. Especially newbies.
10. There're too much queue time for DPS of rand. (Need to increase tank population)

And 11... Most of those problem never solved from 2014. Or getting worse at some of them.

Aight why not, i'll bite, i will include a TL;DR at the end.

Eso combat was "ruined" due to the ridiculous dumbing down of it to please the players that actually don't really care all that much about said combat. Basically the "loud minority" effect.

By said dumbing down i'm referring to:
Nerfing LA damage directly (and indirectly through the vma staff nerfs)
Completely killing build diversity through hybridisation (they must have noticed a teeny tiny drop in revenue since you had to have 2 characters for every class no? magdk and stamdk, magnb and stamnb, etc, those char slots cost money)
Introducing even more dumbed down mechanics such as fatecarver & velothi
Adding scribing and subclassing, further reducing build diversity

Don't get me wrong, damage is now higher than ever and seeing big pretty numbers on my dps chart is fun. But it gets really stale, way back then i could just be in 3 raid groups on 3 different classes and game would always feel fresh. Today? I have one dd and two tanks, that's it, rest of my characters have just become daily writ slaves.

Classwise all raidgroups look the same now, whereas in the past you needed some of everything, builds also look the same now between all the dds, except if you have a runeblades(high apm build) enjoyer but those are a rare breed since a lot of them quit. I've been around mmos my entire life since i'm a nerd and i've seen this happen with different titles, even though the non-tryhard share of the players is much more massive, they actually don't care all that much about said combat changes, especially in a game like ESO which has many many hours of content barely dependent on being efficient in combat. Like, take some of the few non-casual players that stuck through to today and ask them what happened, they can point out the changes. Take a 3.6k cp questingboi that's been here since 2015 and hasn't done a trial in his life and ask him the same question, chances are bro has no idea what you're talking about and is probably running winter's respite on what he thinks is a dd with earthen heart+daedric summoning+bone tyrant, while most importantly, having fun anyway.
I'm not saying catering to the largest part of the community is a bad thing, no no no, i'm trying to say that shafting the people that enjoyed the combat in order to make said crowd happy is a bad thing, especially since they actually don't care.
Games should have a skill curve, ESO especially since the game is massive you can be efficient and have fun WHEREVER you are on this curve, just adding oakensoul to 2020 eso would have been plenty good.


TL;DR: excessively dumbing down the combat to lower the skill ceiling to please the casual crowd which doesn't actually care about said combat leads to a slow drain of the actual dedicated players

Stamicka wrote: »

2. Attempts to make the combat more physically accessible with lower Actions Per Minute
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This is a weird one, I see this -sentiment- brought up in different paradoxical ways over the years. But if we actually look at gameplay from before 2020, it's almost night and day difference. A constancy: the gameplay over the last 6 years has only gotten faster and -faster-. Arcanist was designed as "low cpm" but actual gameplay pvp & pve group content is all FAST FAST FAST and very twitchy-reflex like apm. If zos is trying to lower the apm, they are doing something severely wrong for the past 6 years... lol.

I have no problem with weaving, even in 2014 where light attack > skill > repeat in perfect sequence was an enigma for the vast majority of players, I had caught onto that kind of flow from the very beginning of the game just organically figuring it out. But I am seeing a pattern with the downfall of this game's combat feel, catering to this higher apm. Or maybe it's all the proc-sets making it feel like that, either way the actual flow of combat has gotten significantly faster and bloated compared to pre 2019. Little elephant in the room I rarely see brought up in discussions around here. People complained about animation cancelling, but I had no issue watching my opponents and understanding what they were doing in their offense and defense against me. Now-adays it's just "noisy" and blurred with multitude of visual effects and proc-sets firing off in tandem from just a single player, let alone multiple. And this noise extends to PvE, in raids via all the players, and even the npc mechanics and abilities. Very noisy and overly flashy to the point that counter-play is so obfuscated. Just in time for consoles to get all the relevant pve notification addons!

100% agree. The combat balance changes weren't great in the 2017 - 2019 era either, but it was LEAGUES better then 2022 - 2025.

Marto wrote: »

Or when Sorcs in PVP could get 20s shields in the 100k health range?

Quite the Hyperbolic statement. Sorc shields under no circumstance even as emperor could ever achieve 100k. The penultimate as a 80k max magicka sorc emperor I could achieve was a combined shield stack of 30k. As -Emperor-. The average shield stack has always hovered around 10 - 12k hardened ward and 8 - 9k harness/annulment aka you would need 55k+ magicka(for it's relative time period) to barely push 20k combined shields in total.