When was ESO the most "Balanced" in your opinion?

Kuramas9tails

Although I am a skeptic of "balance" in ESO, I find that Nurfmire was a change for some good stuff but a majority of it was not needed. My favorite patch for build was probably Wrothgar tbh. Anything past One Tamriel, I only seen as a slow slope going downwards.

(Also, I am noticing a few high health/resistant pvp builds to make up for the shield nerf which is worse imo. A bunch of tanks throwing wet noodles at one another. I already came across 4 people over the weekend where we couldn't kill each other and just left it at that and turned away. How fun.)

Note: Yes, I know there's a lot of broken skills too that made it so we couldn't kill one another in PVP since Nurfmire (upper cut, jabs, flare, etc)

What are your thoughts? I am curious since I am just a sliver of one experience out of the masses of experience and opinions out there.

Starlight_Knight

My favourite was the one where they nerfed all the proc sets (viper, tremorscale, etc) and acknowledged that they were over performing. That filled me with hope that we would be moving forward to a better pvp experience.. Its almost like that idea went straight out the window!
Now we have just recovered from the sload crisis and we still have zann hitting like a train and bleeds coming out our ears.. *sigh* i just wana good pvp experience with out relying on BS.
#bringbackspeed

So yea whenever that was when they nerfed proc sets initially is my answer.

VaranisArano

Probably prior to One Tamriel, which substituted horizontal progression and meta chasing rat races for the previous grindy vertical progression.

Now, I have no desire to go back to the game prior to One Tamriel, but since then, the Devs deliberately nerf the meta so people have to grind new gear/classes just so they can stay on top.

"Balance" is an ever-moving target and often deliberately moved by the Devs to make players chase the meta and thus play the game longer than they otherwise would.

The only solution is to quit, accept that you have to regrind to be meta, or quit the rat race and be content to be slightly less good than the meta chasers.

LeagueTroll

homestead? pvp seem to be a lot more stam favored since morrowind.

VaxtinTheWolf

Probably at launch of the game. Nobody knew what they were doing, everyone was just as much of a naive fresh adventurer as others for the most part, no matter what class you were. Storm Atronach's used to flatten armies of 'heroes' at Dolmens before being brought down.

What was the question again?

Cillion3117

In the beginning. Before everyone starting whining and complaining about balance.

Trinity_Is_My_Name

The day before One Tamriel turned ESO into Disneyland.

Haashhtaag

1.5-1.7

ezio45

before morrowind

zParallaxz

Around thieves guild and definitely before one Tamriel. The only hard problems were malefic wreath from nigjtblade, proc sets, and sorc pets over performing

GreenhaloX

ESO will never be balanced as long as PvP and PvE are connected!

Alex_Lex

On paper

leeux

I cannot say when it was most balanced objectively, but I can say when it was more fun for me to play the game and enjoy it.

IMHO, the fun ended with Morrowind and the best memories I have are post Wrothgar so yeah, anything post Wrothgar up to but not including Morrowind.

Starlock

Balance is a myth. In the pejorative sense, balance is myth-as-lie in part because the nature of balance is subjectively experienced. No players have access to the needed metrics and analytics to attempt to arrive at an objective construct of balance. Even with such data, arriving at objective balance is difficult when there are so many variables and so much complexity in the system. Balanced related to what, in which situations, and what types of players? The entire concept strikes me as quite meaningless. I don't consider ESO balanced, but that is because I don't believe in balance to begin with. I ask this question instead:

At what point have the developers made changes to the game that have rendered me unable to play the game as I usually like to play it? The answer to that question is NEVER.

FearlessOne_2014

I'd say right before Morrowind released. Since I refuse the virtual rat race ESO are peppering us with. I've dropped my ESO Plus sub for the first time in years. And went to playing a more stable game with much better performance. GW2 a bit dated on the visuals. But other then that, so far a much more satisfying PvP, RvR, annd PvE experience.

zaria

VaxtinTheWolf wrote: »

Probably at launch of the game. Nobody knew what they were doing, everyone was just as much of a naive fresh adventurer as others for the most part, no matter what class you were. Storm Atronach's used to flatten armies of 'heroes' at Dolmens before being brought down.

What was the question again?

Yes nobody knew anything, Dorsia was an nightmare, people was afraid of harvesters in coldharbor.
Khajiit knew AoE solved the problem.
Still has nightmares of 5 hours in vet fungal, nobody dared to chicken and yes mecanic in that dungeon is very easy afterward
But tanked it in an group with so low dps they could not free pined players, exited group because of PTSD.

Valrien

Anywhere from 1.0-1.5

Tamriel Unlimited ruined ESO, and One Tamriel outright killed it

shadowwraith666

the only way ESO will ever be balanced is by completely segregating PvE and PvP including having separate servers for pvp

Vuron

Valrien wrote: »

Anywhere from 1.0-1.5

Tamriel Unlimited ruined ESO, and One Tamriel outright killed it

I think the game was better in the early days, but in no way was it more balanced which is what drove many of the changes.

Stamina builds simply didn't exist in end game content. You could run a stamina build in PvP but were laughed at if you showed up to a trial with a stamina build.

The stick and dress meta was the tank running sword and board, the other 11 wearing light armor and using 2 resto staves.

Valrien

Vuron wrote: »

Valrien wrote: »

Anywhere from 1.0-1.5

Tamriel Unlimited ruined ESO, and One Tamriel outright killed it

I think the game was better in the early days, but in no way was it more balanced which is what drove many of the changes.

Stamina builds simply didn't exist in end game content. You could run a stamina build in PvP but were laughed at if you showed up to a trial with a stamina build.

The stick and dress meta was the tank running sword and board, the other 11 wearing light armor and using 2 resto staves.

Conceptually though, it made perfect sense.

Class skills are innately magical, they should cost magicka. Weapon skills require lots of effort, so they cost Stamina

Why does breathing fire cost magicka but breathing green noxious fire cost stamina, for example?

I think the lack of stam builds came more from ZOS not having a proper dedicated stamina class and/or not making hybrid builds good enough. They already had the soft caps and lack of CP in place so hybrids were already in a theoretically good state. They just needed to make them viable

The current classes we have basically have no place being stamina builds. There should have been other "stamina" classes thrown into the mix.

In terms of balance, which is what this thread was about, I still think the game was very well balanced. The classes as they were intended to be played were pretty well balanced, and stamina builds while bad in PvE didn't do terribly poor in PvP.

At the very least, it's much better than the half-homogenized mess we have now

CatchMeTrolling

For pvp some time after 1.6 and before proc sets became overly toxic.

Vuron

Valrien wrote: »

Vuron wrote: »

Valrien wrote: »

Anywhere from 1.0-1.5

Tamriel Unlimited ruined ESO, and One Tamriel outright killed it

I think the game was better in the early days, but in no way was it more balanced which is what drove many of the changes.

Stamina builds simply didn't exist in end game content. You could run a stamina build in PvP but were laughed at if you showed up to a trial with a stamina build.

The stick and dress meta was the tank running sword and board, the other 11 wearing light armor and using 2 resto staves.

Conceptually though, it made perfect sense.

Class skills are innately magical, they should cost magicka. Weapon skills require lots of effort, so they cost Stamina

Why does breathing fire cost magicka but breathing green noxious fire cost stamina, for example?

I think the lack of stam builds came more from ZOS not having a proper dedicated stamina class and/or not making hybrid builds good enough. They already had the soft caps and lack of CP in place so hybrids were already in a theoretically good state. They just needed to make them viable

The current classes we have basically have no place being stamina builds. There should have been other "stamina" classes thrown into the mix.

In terms of balance, which is what this thread was about, I still think the game was very well balanced. The classes as they were intended to be played were pretty well balanced, and stamina builds while bad in PvE didn't do terribly poor in PvP.

At the very least, it's much better than the half-homogenized mess we have now

I mostly agree. My argument years ago which has seemed to prove my point was that they can't keep adding sets, skill lines, and different classes on top of an already unbalanced system and expect it to balance itself. Things can only get worse until the base is balanced, which I don't see ever happening.

ZarkingFrued

Hayden_Knight wrote: »

My favourite was the one where they nerfed all the proc sets (viper, tremorscale, etc) and acknowledged that they were over performing. That filled me with hope that we would be moving forward to a better pvp experience.. Its almost like that idea went straight out the window!
Now we have just recovered from the sload crisis and we still have zann hitting like a train and bleeds coming out our ears.. *sigh* i just wana good pvp experience with out relying on BS.
#bringbackspeed

So yea whenever that was when they nerfed proc sets initially is my answer.

I'm confused, you dont like cheese, but you want them to bring back the ultimate cheese. Moving faster than anyone can keep up with other than another cheese speed stamina character.. ok, sure. Makes total sense.

Kuramas9tails

ZarkingFrued wrote: »

Hayden_Knight wrote: »

My favourite was the one where they nerfed all the proc sets (viper, tremorscale, etc) and acknowledged that they were over performing. That filled me with hope that we would be moving forward to a better pvp experience.. Its almost like that idea went straight out the window!
Now we have just recovered from the sload crisis and we still have zann hitting like a train and bleeds coming out our ears.. *sigh* i just wana good pvp experience with out relying on BS.
#bringbackspeed

So yea whenever that was when they nerfed proc sets initially is my answer.

I'm confused, you dont like cheese, but you want them to bring back the ultimate cheese. Moving faster than anyone can keep up with other than another cheese speed stamina character.. ok, sure. Makes total sense.

Running doesn't cause damage....or am I missing thing?

There once was a good EP fellow by the name of CheeseburgerEddy on PS4 who was an ugly, half naked, Orc stamsorc who would only run into a keep that AD or DC recently took and run around the outside wall and I was stand in amazement the amount of zerglings who followed him and never catch up to him.

I miss that guy.

Bashev

1.5 was ok class balanced magicka wised. Each class had really good magicka spec.
DK - bats, talons, whip
Sorc - perma invisible bats, streak kite, crystal frag proc
Temp - blazing shield and blinding flashes
NB - sap + perma veil of blades

Stam builds were non existent.

Kuramas9tails

Hayden_Knight wrote: »

My favourite was the one where they nerfed all the proc sets (viper, tremorscale, etc) and acknowledged that they were over performing. That filled me with hope that we would be moving forward to a better pvp experience.. Its almost like that idea went straight out the window!
Now we have just recovered from the sload crisis and we still have zann hitting like a train and bleeds coming out our ears.. *sigh* i just wana good pvp experience with out relying on BS.
#bringbackspeed

So yea whenever that was when they nerfed proc sets initially is my answer.

For some reason, there were two mageblades in PVP this weekend who would use Caluurion’s on the same person at the same time ( Cloak, Surprise Attack, Caluurion proc). It was actually really pathetic to watch.

Tandor

It depends on your playstyle. As a solo/cooperative non-competitive PvE player I've never noticed any adverse effects from changes with the various updates, where necessary I've found adapting to something like heavy attacks pretty intuitive, and with many characters of assorted classes and builds I've always found them all pretty balanced in what they can and can't do. I can appreciate that for those heavily into PvP or trials etc it will be very different.

Starlight_Knight

ZarkingFrued wrote: »

Hayden_Knight wrote: »

My favourite was the one where they nerfed all the proc sets (viper, tremorscale, etc) and acknowledged that they were over performing. That filled me with hope that we would be moving forward to a better pvp experience.. Its almost like that idea went straight out the window!
Now we have just recovered from the sload crisis and we still have zann hitting like a train and bleeds coming out our ears.. *sigh* i just wana good pvp experience with out relying on BS.
#bringbackspeed

So yea whenever that was when they nerfed proc sets initially is my answer.

I'm confused, you dont like cheese, but you want them to bring back the ultimate cheese. Moving faster than anyone can keep up with other than another cheese speed stamina character.. ok, sure. Makes total sense.

It made for more competitive and rewarding game play and gave more of a counter to bs.

Xvorg

Before Morrowind. It was not perfect but it was going in the right direction. After the introduction of Warden everything had to change to allow ZoS to sell the new chapter.

Starlight_Knight

Kuramas9tails wrote: »

Hayden_Knight wrote: »

My favourite was the one where they nerfed all the proc sets (viper, tremorscale, etc) and acknowledged that they were over performing. That filled me with hope that we would be moving forward to a better pvp experience.. Its almost like that idea went straight out the window!
Now we have just recovered from the sload crisis and we still have zann hitting like a train and bleeds coming out our ears.. *sigh* i just wana good pvp experience with out relying on BS.
#bringbackspeed

So yea whenever that was when they nerfed proc sets initially is my answer.

For some reason, there were two mageblades in PVP this weekend who would use Caluurion’s on the same person at the same time ( Cloak, Surprise Attack, Caluurion proc). It was actually really pathetic to watch.

ikr i actually used that and zaan once just because i was fed up. evey fight was such a hollow victory and the second zaan went off it was a game ender. yea ok you can say to those people l2p and in many ways that rings true but is nonsense when you are 1vx and everyone proc is going off because all they're doing is light attacking. or getting CC's at the same time as Zaan, so you have to break cc and do 2 or 3 dodge rolls. bye bye stamina, goodbye cruel world. at leased with speed that was another counter for such scenarios.

lazerlaz

I was happy around imperial city days.