Racials Should be Changed

Odnoc

DoobZ69 wrote: »

Yes, of course they will "balance" the racials when they are either too powerful or too weak. However, as long as there are people who will quite happily tell Shalidor to go re-roll when he tries to join a vhmTrial because he's not "meta" and back their argument behind "lore friendly" ZOS have every excuse to leave things the way they are.

Sounds like an issue with the players, not the game.

Content is 100% doable, nothing is broken.

waitwhat

dodgehopper_ESO wrote: »

waitwhat wrote: »

Question for the pro-racial passives people: Would the Ansei's shehai swings scale off max mag or max stam?

Just like with the Thu'um I believe it would draw from Stamina.

Is that so? Even YOL TOOR SHUL?

zaria

WakeYourGhost wrote: »

Cheveyo wrote: »

And then there's the fact that certain racials don't fit. Like Imperial racials, for example, don't fit with the way Imperials are supposed to be in lore. They're magicka users, ffs.

In no Game ever in the ES series (Except for the massively dumbed down down Skyrim) are the Imperials Spellcasters/Magicka Users.

They have no bonuses to anything Magicka in any game EXCEPT Action-Slasher Skyrim.
Honestly, you're going to just pull fake "Lore" out of fat air to pretend this game isn't "Lore Friendly" - This isn't going to be a productive conversation.
Also, if you're going to claim "Skyrim" as your source (Even if you didn't say Skyrim, it's obvious that it's likely the only other ES game you've played, because Imperials are NOT Magicka users anywhere else), then you might as well give up now. Not only is that game set Three Eras from now (Thousands of Years), thus radically changing cultures and possible even inherited traits - That game is also the single most simplified ES game in the entire series, and it dropped a lot of cultural "Precedent" for the sake of ease-of-use and generalizing.

Better luck next time... Also, try playing an Actual ES game - You may like it.
I'mma get back to playing ESO without all races made in to a hot mess of a homogenized flavorless paste.

In Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion racial pasives was an starting bonus, because skill leveled much faster at low levels you caught up fast if you focused on the skill and abilities. Note that if you played an weak setup like female bosmer or khajiit with an base strength of 30, this was one of your focuses even if an magic build so you could carry more loot.
Around level 30 you would have catched up with an meta build and reach level 100 in primary skills and attributes if focused.
In fact, an optimal build was counter meta as you could reach an higher level if your base stats was lower.
This in single player games who outside of Daggerfall had an difficulty slider and both Morrowind and Daggerfall was easier than overland ESO, without getting into exploit tactic like 110 magic skill in Daggerfall or int potion loop in Morrowind,
Oblivion was a bit harder and you needed an decent build, still the only lasting racial pasive was 100 more magic for altmer and perhaps 50 for breton, again an stating bonus an good magic build would be close to 1000 magic and max magic only affected sustain as in ammo capacity.

Has any who talk about the importance or racials played the earlier games, in any way off meta as in not nord in Skyrim?
And yes the male / female difference should be introduced with summerset, let males get +10 max stamina, to balance they get -10 magic, females get the opposite for balance.
Its both lore friendly as in all games before Skyrim and realistic, ladies are weaker than men so in eso we give them magic to compensate. Let make it an Summerset surprise, sure all the male altmer lore national socialist would approve

Now the older TES games was single player games with an difficulty slider outside of Daggerfall and trivial difficulty outside of Oblivion.
ESO is an competitive multiplayer game, and its no warning you get the same racial text on character creation as you get in skyrim, then you find you selected wrong, no its not an huge issue if you want to play an orc magsorc because you played it in Oblivion and Skyrim, its an bit more cruel if you wanted an magsorc and toggled between altmer and bossmer and ended on bosmer as they was cuter.

And its all in their head, lots think they do 10k dps because they are bosmer mages, if they was altmer they do 40k, no they do 11K max. Other think it to, It has an damaging effect on the game, this is the real problem.

dodgehopper_ESO

josiahva wrote: »

I disagree. The passives really don't make that much difference and should only matter to you if you are a min/max type of person. So what if your stamsorc has extra magicka? Just means he can streak more often than a stam sorc without...even if it comes at the cost of less stam. There are fights where extra magicka for streak will be far more useful than extra stam(the inhibitor comes to mind). Your viewpoint is distorted...regardless of what years of PvE may have taught you, maximum DPS is not the end all and be all of this game...dead DPS do no damage...survival and adaptability are more useful 90% of the time...this is why PvP players have such bad DPS...its just not as important in a dynamic environment like PvP(or vMA for that matter). The ONLY time max DPS makes a real difference is certain PVE bosses that MUST be burned down ASAP once they reach a certain threshold and even then racial passives make a marginal difference...gear is much more of a factor...and individual skill the biggest factor of all

I would love for what you are saying to be true but the passives make a fairly large amount of difference particularly when you factor in things like multiple percentile bonuses stacking with one another. That max magicka can get insane when you start stacking other buffs that stack magicka. The added altmer elemental damage is likewise no joke. I agree with you that gear and skill are a big factor but you can't qualitatively be telling us that a Khajiit and an Altmer are on a level playing field. You're talking about 10% more magicka, magicka regen, and 4% more elemental damage. Please don't insult our intelligence.

RainfeatherUK

This nonsense got really damn OLD back in the day. Surprise, surprise here it is again.

Its laughable that people can't leave well alone. The need to drum up some self back patting rubbish, just to try and get their opinion forced on everyone else.

When I actually played this game it was people like you that ended up driving me away. So called best intentions and reasoning destroying anything that actually made this game elder scrolls.

I said it when p2p was lost. I said it prior to crown crates and I'll say it again.

LEAVE THE GAME ALONE. Nothing good has come from this forums armchair 'me me me' perspective and I personally (I dont know about others) have had enough.

Feel free to not reply. I understand this forum is for discussion but I have my reasons, gave my own opinion on it. Certainly have no interest in changing it. Do hope I avoided too much editing being required too Mods. Sorry. I'm just sick of this 'holier than thou' everything that exists should tailor to me stupidity thats rife in gaming right now. This topic has been repeated a dozen times for goodness sakes. Does the forum search function even work? /Rant

Racials ARE a STAPLE. Fritter it away and you might as well forget the lot.

starkerealm

waitwhat wrote: »

If Nords don't have a widespread magical tradition, why are there so many undead Draugr running about Skyrim?

Because, Dragons.

Okay, in Morrowind, Draugr were Nord zombies who'd starved to death, and been placed under some curse, which caused them to rise.

Jump to Skyrim, and Draugr are now remnants of the Dragon Cult. The Dragon Priests worshiped the dragons, and in turn were granted power. They then created entire necropoli dedicated to ensuring their immortality, "feeding" off of the energy of their servants (who would eventually become the Draugr once their bodies started decaying).

So, the Draugr exist because of a handful of Nords, not because of some grand tradition.

waitwhat

starkerealm wrote: »

waitwhat wrote: »

If Nords don't have a widespread magical tradition, why are there so many undead Draugr running about Skyrim?

Because, Dragons.

Okay, in Morrowind, Draugr were Nord zombies who'd starved to death, and been placed under some curse, which caused them to rise.

Jump to Skyrim, and Draugr are now remnants of the Dragon Cult. The Dragon Priests worshiped the dragons, and in turn were granted power. They then created entire necropoli dedicated to ensuring their immortality, "feeding" off of the energy of their servants (who would eventually become the Draugr once their bodies started decaying).

So, the Draugr exist because of a handful of Nords, not because of some grand tradition.

That would be the widespread magical tradition, given the breadth of the dragon cult's influence across Skyrim, the number of its adherents (judging by the number of draugr and priests alone), and the aptitude those adherents demonstrated in maintaining the cult's rituals.

We can't give the dragons all the credit for how the cult and its rituals worked. The ritual of transference, and the task of maintaining residual life force to transfer, doesn't appear to be simple for the lower-ranked adherents, and there are just too many of them to imagine that a dragon cursed each one individually. Clearly, the Nords were good enough at learning magical practice for the dragons to bother teaching. We also have examples of barrows without dragon priest remains, which suggests that draugr didn't exist just for the sake of a handful of Nords.

Ultimately, when having this conversation of magicka vs. stamina and racial passives, we have to reject the Altmeri notion that Aetherius/Magnus is the source of all magic on Nirn. Nords practicing the Thu'um practice magic. Sword Saints wielding shehai wield magic. The Spinners who shape reality with stories shape it with magic. In each case, those races practice magic to an extent beyond just a handful of exemplary individuals, (certainly to an extent within the bounds of what the Vestige should be able to achieve), but also in each case the source of the magic is not Aetherial. The game hews too close to the Altemeri view, that magic comes from Aetherius, and thus the Altmer, being the Aedra's closest descendants on Nirn are thus the closest to magic.

Truly, in distributing magicka racial passives, the game largely seems to ask "How much Aldmer do you have in you?"

waitwhat

RainfeatherUK wrote: »

This nonsense got really damn OLD back in the day. Surprise, surprise here it is again.

Its laughable that people can't leave well alone. The need to drum up some self back patting rubbish, just to try and get their opinion forced on everyone else.

When I actually played this game it was people like you that ended up driving me away. So called best intentions and reasoning destroying anything that actually made this game elder scrolls.

I said it when p2p was lost. I said it prior to crown crates and I'll say it again.

LEAVE THE GAME ALONE. Nothing good has come from this forums armchair 'me me me' perspective and I personally (I dont know about others) have had enough.

Feel free to not reply. I understand this forum is for discussion but I have my reasons, gave my own opinion on it. Certainly have no interest in changing it. Do hope I avoided too much editing being required too Mods. Sorry. I'm just sick of this 'holier than thou' everything that exists should tailor to me stupidity thats rife in gaming right now. This topic has been repeated a dozen times for goodness sakes. Does the forum search function even work? /Rant

Racials ARE a STAPLE. Fritter it away and you might as well forget the lot.

I feel like people said this about jewelry crafting, and it was wrong then.

If it weren't for the constant threads on the forums asking for jewelry crafting, ZOS would not have invested so much effort into it. We'd have gotten something else, or just nothing.

And, frankly, if ZOS is willing to give us jewelry crafting, decoupling racial passives from the META doesn't seem so far-fetched.

Recremen

starkerealm wrote: »

waitwhat wrote: »

If Nords don't have a widespread magical tradition, why are there so many undead Draugr running about Skyrim?

Because, Dragons.

Okay, in Morrowind, Draugr were Nord zombies who'd starved to death, and been placed under some curse, which caused them to rise.

Jump to Skyrim, and Draugr are now remnants of the Dragon Cult. The Dragon Priests worshiped the dragons, and in turn were granted power. They then created entire necropoli dedicated to ensuring their immortality, "feeding" off of the energy of their servants (who would eventually become the Draugr once their bodies started decaying).

So, the Draugr exist because of a handful of Nords, not because of some grand tradition.

@starkerealm

The same could logically be said of the more "magickal" societies, too. How many Altmer or Bretons are actually part of the spellcasting elite, and how many are just the laborers and farmhands responsible for doing the work that enables others to spend their life performing more frivolous tasks? We should be resisting all this race-essentializing if we're going to be true to the lore, not encouraging the continued use of whole-race passives. Give us something more like Battlespire.

kongkim

No its one of the things that make it a TES game.

MaleAmazon

No its one of the things that make it a TES game.

Like classes?

Amadis001

> 2. This takes an aspect away from 'playing how you want.

This is the whole point of races. If you take away racial passives, races are just costumes. BORING.

starkerealm

Recremen wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

waitwhat wrote: »

If Nords don't have a widespread magical tradition, why are there so many undead Draugr running about Skyrim?

Because, Dragons.

Okay, in Morrowind, Draugr were Nord zombies who'd starved to death, and been placed under some curse, which caused them to rise.

Jump to Skyrim, and Draugr are now remnants of the Dragon Cult. The Dragon Priests worshiped the dragons, and in turn were granted power. They then created entire necropoli dedicated to ensuring their immortality, "feeding" off of the energy of their servants (who would eventually become the Draugr once their bodies started decaying).

So, the Draugr exist because of a handful of Nords, not because of some grand tradition.

@starkerealm

The same could logically be said of the more "magickal" societies, too. How many Altmer or Bretons are actually part of the spellcasting elite, and how many are just the laborers and farmhands responsible for doing the work that enables others to spend their life performing more frivolous tasks? We should be resisting all this race-essentializing if we're going to be true to the lore, not encouraging the continued use of whole-race passives. Give us something more like Battlespire.

@Recremen, in the single player games, the racial passives were, pretty clearly, a mix of a character's education and their actual race. So a Breton or Altmer would know more about magic (at character creation), because their cultures were (on average) more knowledgeable. A Nord mage would need to study to catch up to what a Breton (even just an urchin on the streets of Wayrest) would learn in their childhood. (Conceptually anyway.) At the same time, a Breton would have a greater reserve of magicka than a Nord because of their elven heritage. That was "genetic," more than cultural.

The hard part is that ESO (mostly) jettisons the cultural element. So, in, say, Skyrim, having a unique Reachman starting background for your Breton would make sense, but far less so in ESO.

To be fair, I'm not sure we should read too much into the cultural elements getting trimmed out. That's more a function of how ESO's skill lines work.

OrdoHermetica

Possible solution: a stamina and magicka version of each Racial passive tree that you choose between at character creation tied to existing lore.

So, for example, while Redguard mages are rare, the famous Redguard mages that have existed have been exceptional at Destruction magic. So, you either take the existing default Stamina racial passives, or you take the Destro Magic passives that focus on Destro Staff abilities/leveling or something, plus a few Magicka boosts (and some overlap with the other tree, like food duration buffs, to show that it's still the race).

Similarly, Bosmer could have a Spinner passive tree, Imperials could have an "Arcane University" generalist magicka tree, etc. Same could go for magicka-based races. That would give more flexibility to what roles races can optimally play while still allowing races and racial passives to remain distinct.

Amirit

Completely disagree with OP!

OK, not completely, actually. But I do not like the idea of downplaying racials. So few games dares to include meaningful racials these days I can not even recall one other than ESO.

I would leave it as it is now, HOWEVER(!), the idea of some exceptional individuals to it's race does sound true and good. So, why not add some other racials to the mix for everyone BUT (!) for a different price. Like, if you are an Altmer, you can get your 10% magicka for 1 skill point. However, if you as an Altmer want to get 10% stamina - you would have to pay 3-6-10 points for it.

Several of the same racials for everyone but for a different price, indicating affinity of the race towards specific occupations. It would take re-balancing an recalculations so one would have to truly sacrifice something to get what he wants.

On the other hand, racials as they are now do prevent that kind of DnD minmaxing. So, may be it's still better to leave everything as it is.

Kodrac

emilyhyoyeon wrote: »

At the very least I think that current attribute-based racials should be toned down. 10% max magicka/stam is pretty huge for damage

It wouldn't be if we still had soft caps, or if they were to return. *hint* *hint* ZoS.

PlagueSD

Kashya_Vulano wrote: »

1. Racials are not 'Lore Friendly.'

No. Racials are not BiS friendly. They fit PERFECTLY into the lore. You want a BiS character, guess what? You'll need to pick a certain race/class combo.

You want to "Play how you want"? Pick ANY race/class combo. You can't do both.

KanedaSyndrome

dodgehopper_ESO wrote: »

I would love for what you are saying to be true but the passives make a fairly large amount of difference particularly when you factor in things like multiple percentile bonuses stacking with one another. That max magicka can get insane when you start stacking other buffs that stack magicka. The added altmer elemental damage is likewise no joke. I agree with you that gear and skill are a big factor but you can't qualitatively be telling us that a Khajiit and an Altmer are on a level playing field. You're talking about 10% more magicka, magicka regen, and 4% more elemental damage. Please don't insult our intelligence.

You're right. It's actually probably on the order of an entire array of set bonuses from a 5 piece set, in difference.

Ladislao

waitwhat wrote: »

And, frankly, if ZOS is willing to give us jewelry crafting, decoupling racial passives from the META doesn't seem so far-fetched.

That will not happen. One meta will replace the other. Even if one race will differ from another by 1% (now this difference is not more than 5% between the best and the worst options), min-maxers will still be "forced" to choose the best and pay money for race changing, of course. Believe me, there will be more complaints about this issue than now

Recremen

starkerealm wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

waitwhat wrote: »

If Nords don't have a widespread magical tradition, why are there so many undead Draugr running about Skyrim?

Because, Dragons.

Okay, in Morrowind, Draugr were Nord zombies who'd starved to death, and been placed under some curse, which caused them to rise.

Jump to Skyrim, and Draugr are now remnants of the Dragon Cult. The Dragon Priests worshiped the dragons, and in turn were granted power. They then created entire necropoli dedicated to ensuring their immortality, "feeding" off of the energy of their servants (who would eventually become the Draugr once their bodies started decaying).

So, the Draugr exist because of a handful of Nords, not because of some grand tradition.

@starkerealm

The same could logically be said of the more "magickal" societies, too. How many Altmer or Bretons are actually part of the spellcasting elite, and how many are just the laborers and farmhands responsible for doing the work that enables others to spend their life performing more frivolous tasks? We should be resisting all this race-essentializing if we're going to be true to the lore, not encouraging the continued use of whole-race passives. Give us something more like Battlespire.

@Recremen, in the single player games, the racial passives were, pretty clearly, a mix of a character's education and their actual race. So a Breton or Altmer would know more about magic (at character creation), because their cultures were (on average) more knowledgeable. A Nord mage would need to study to catch up to what a Breton (even just an urchin on the streets of Wayrest) would learn in their childhood. (Conceptually anyway.) At the same time, a Breton would have a greater reserve of magicka than a Nord because of their elven heritage. That was "genetic," more than cultural.

The hard part is that ESO (mostly) jettisons the cultural element. So, in, say, Skyrim, having a unique Reachman starting background for your Breton would make sense, but far less so in ESO.

To be fair, I'm not sure we should read too much into the cultural elements getting trimmed out. That's more a function of how ESO's skill lines work.

@starkerealm

You would have to pick and choose which games we're talking about to come to that conclusion. I'm still working on the write-up, but all this talk about racials has gotten me curious so I looked up what each race gets in each game. There are wild inconsistencies across the board, and indeed in some games races didn't even get passives, nor even active abilities. For instance, Khajiit in Arena and Daggerfall appear to get nothing. In Shadowkey they get some kind of dodge bonus. They aren't in Battlespire. Then in Morrowind they get Eye of Night and Eye of Fear, which they keep through Oblivion. But by Skyrim they lose Eye of Fear, and instead it's Nords who get to fear their opponents, for some reason. But now in ESO we get health recovery, stam recovery, and weapon crit?? Let's be real here, none of this has any precedent.

Oh, wait, no, one race DID have health and stam recovery as a canon ability. BRETONS. IN SHADOWKEY.

Naturally, this isn't even getting into the stat bonus inconsistencies. Those are a hoot to look through. No dev in the modern age would sign up for the coded messages in those stats, I'll tell you right now.

starkerealm

@Recremen, it's a little more bonkers than that, because none of the races in Daggerfall get anything. It's a known bug. Khajiit were supposed to get +10 END, -10 WILL, -10 AGL. With female Khajiit getting an additioanl +10 LUCK, for whatever reason. No, those numbers don't make sense to me either.

Inarre

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Give me oblivion-esque traits. I want the ability to randomly charm things to do my bidding once a day and other random fun. And watch the forum mine salt over how "unfair" it is.

Recremen

starkerealm wrote: »

@Recremen, it's a little more bonkers than that, because none of the races in Daggerfall get anything. It's a known bug. Khajiit were supposed to get +10 END, -10 WILL, -10 AGL. With female Khajiit getting an additioanl +10 LUCK, for whatever reason. No, those numbers don't make sense to me either.

@starkerealm Bug, or feature? The fact that the stats are overrode by class choice is, in my book, far and away the best thing about it. I used to like the idea of essentializing the races into neat categories, but recently I've come to realize that's actually pretty terrible. It robs individuals of their agency based entirely on alleged racial averages, and says way more about the prejudices of the people who signed off on it than about the lore itself. Or we can pretend that Redguards consistently getting negatives to their mental stats is Lore As Intended, and not actually gross out-of-game beliefs manifesting as a game mechanic.

starkerealm

Recremen wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

@Recremen, it's a little more bonkers than that, because none of the races in Daggerfall get anything. It's a known bug. Khajiit were supposed to get +10 END, -10 WILL, -10 AGL. With female Khajiit getting an additioanl +10 LUCK, for whatever reason. No, those numbers don't make sense to me either.

@starkerealm Bug, or feature? The fact that the stats are overrode by class choice is, in my book, far and away the best thing about it. I used to like the idea of essentializing the races into neat categories, but recently I've come to realize that's actually pretty terrible. It robs individuals of their agency based entirely on alleged racial averages, and says way more about the prejudices of the people who signed off on it than about the lore itself. Or we can pretend that Redguards consistently getting negatives to their mental stats is Lore As Intended, and not actually gross out-of-game beliefs manifesting as a game mechanic.

@Recremen, it was pretty good in Morrowind, and Skyrim, where your racial pick affected your starting position, but didn't significantly alter your long term options. Oblivion falls slightly short of this, because the full on magical apotheosis of Morrowind isn't an option there, and it lacks Skyrim's omnivorous approach to character building.

Daggerfall's class generation system was freakin' amazing, though.

IcyDeadPeople

Kashya_Vulano wrote: »

That was a lot to explain. What do you guys think? Are racials something that need to be addressed? Leave some feedback!

After a few years of changes and balance tweaks I'd say the races are in a pretty good spot these days. Yes Altmer and Redguard are still most popular for magicka and stam builds, but even Argonian, Orc and Nord are quite strong these days depending on the goal of your build.

The only additional changes I'd like to see are slight buff to Imperial Red Diamond passive and have Khajiit Carnage provide spell crit as well as weapon crit.

If you want to play somewhat less than ideal race choice for your build in PVE, say Almter stam DK or Orc magicka NB etc, you can do well and even complete the most difficult PVE content in the game. It may be a bit more challenging for you to reach X dps and you might not reach top spots on leaderboards, but you can do well enough to complete.

For PVP there is more flexibility to come up with your own build ideas based on your class and race choice, and even some hybrid builds are quite viable. Considering all the various interesting racial passives and making decision about which race to play is a fun part of the process for theorycrafting new build, so I would not like to see "generic magicka passive" / stam replace the racial passives.

starkerealm

Recremen wrote: »

Or we can pretend that Redguards consistently getting negatives to their mental stats is Lore As Intended, and not actually gross out-of-game beliefs manifesting as a game mechanic.

@Recremen, ugh. I legitimately, did not see this when I was responding earlier. Sorry about that.

Yeah.

The hard part is, most of the time, The Elder Scrolls manages to do a pretty good job discussing racism in a (mostly) mature way. ESO is particularly good in that regard. But, yep... then there's stuff like this. When the setting misses the mark, oh god does it miss the mark.

Recremen

starkerealm wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

Or we can pretend that Redguards consistently getting negatives to their mental stats is Lore As Intended, and not actually gross out-of-game beliefs manifesting as a game mechanic.

@Recremen, ugh. I legitimately, did not see this when I was responding earlier. Sorry about that.

Yeah.

The hard part is, most of the time, The Elder Scrolls manages to do a pretty good job discussing racism in a (mostly) mature way. ESO is particularly good in that regard. But, yep... then there's stuff like this. When the setting misses the mark, oh god does it miss the mark.

@starkerealm That's a bit of the point with why I don't like the racials as they are. Bretons get bonus magicka, magicka being the stat which in previous game was derived from, you guessed it, intelligence. It's just adding an extra layer of abstraction to what is fundamentally the same issue. We can throw our hands up in the air and say "but it's lore", but when the lore is inconsistent and we've even had canonical instances of choose-your-own "racials" (as in Battlespire) it just seems so easy to go the route of "you know, maybe we should just... not keep participating in this particular development practice". And I know a lot of people are going to act all indignant like "but then races are just different skins for your character!!" to which my response is "... yeah, good."

sneakymitchell

The graybeards are mostly nords. Shalidor was in the mages guild. He was a fooled by daedric prince of madness. And he needs help from other members in getting a better deal with the mad daedric prince.

thomas1970b16_ESO

waitwhat wrote: »

I feel like people said this about jewelry crafting, and it was wrong then.

If it weren't for the constant threads on the forums asking for jewelry crafting, ZOS would not have invested so much effort into it. We'd have gotten something else, or just nothing.

And, frankly, if ZOS is willing to give us jewelry crafting, decoupling racial passives from the META doesn't seem so far-fetched.

I think it is only a matter of time before this happens. I don't mind either way.

Tannus15

We just need passive morphs.