Questing and leveling feels too easy

Deyirn

I got the game in mid 2015 and back then I remember some challenge while questing and leveling.

After the One Tamriel patch, it felt really easy to quest and level, you had the freedom to go everywhere, like in single player TES games, but the challenge was lost. Even at levels 30-40 you can solo some of the world bosses, whose purpose would imply that you need the help of other players to take them down.

To add to that, the combat, mainly using melee weapons for light and heavy attacks feels like caressing the mob with a paper sheet, completely lacks the impact (poor sound design/visuals) of "hell yeah, get cut, mob".


I feel like ZOS should increase the difficulty of questing and leveling (like how they added disguises for sneak quests and completely defeating the purpose of sneaking, they should remove disguises), by at least increasing players' mortality chances and making them think on how to approach mob encounters, not just mow through everything like they're braindead.

Kel

Stop putting champion points into your low level alts, for one.
Secondly, questing is meant to be achieved by anyone and everyone...it's not supposed to be challenging or have a hardcore mode. Vet dungeons and trials are where you are supposed to look for challenge.

So funny how players are asking for dungeon story mode and asking for overland content to have increased difficulty. Each has its place.

You want challenge in overland content, you'll have to find ways to do it yourself. You'll have to "gimp" yourself. And I personally don't care who doesn't like that answer....if you want a piece of content designed to be completed by all players to be harder, you'll have to find ways to make it harder for youselves. Games that have gone down the road of harder difficulty in overland content have mostly failed...I don't see Zos doing that.

Even making it a toggle almost seems pointless and too much effort for little return, as most players wouldn't use it. Players naturally want to level as fast as possible in a MMO for the most part, and most likely wouldn't even use the feature.

Overall, I feel safe in saying this just isn't in the cards for ESO, right along with dungeon story mode or a PvE Cyrodiil.

It is what it is...

Druid40

I miss overleveling, but One Tamriel brought us quite a bit especially in relation to overland sets. Small sacrifice. The world bosses are also more challenging than they were.

Loves_guars

Yes it's easy for us veterans but I swear, I've seen a good share of new players, friends or randoms struggling. It would definitely drive some I met away.
I agree there are ways for us to make it more challenging : use low gear, don't asign cp, don't use food, etc.

Robo_Hobo

Yeah, I miss the quest difficulty before One Tamriel, but I love everything else about it.

I've been questing again on new characters though and have found ways to bring it close to what it was like back before One Tamriel though, here's some things I do on those characters to keep my power in check without being too restrictive (it is still an RPG after all, so I gotta feel some sort of progression)

No Champion Points
-They might not have their full effect on under-level-50 characters but it still completely breaks balance of quests by using them, before and even after level 50. If you want any sense of difficulty in quests those are the first things to remove.

No Crafting
-Crafted armor/weapons and supplies also throw balance out the door with quests. Whether that's stuff you made yourself or bought/received some other way. This includes upgrading. So you're stuck with what you pick up or buy from vendors. It still leaves some space for RPG progression, since you can find higher quality items, items with more appropriate enchants, and still find and complete sets.

No Dungeon/Trial/Arena/Monster Sets
-These items were made with dungeon difficulty in mind, rather than overland quests, and so can become too powerful to use if you want a more balanced overland experience.

No Guild Trader Purchases
-If you want to retain that little bit of rpg progression, then keeping yourself from simply outright buying your favorite overland sets is a good idea. It could take awhile for you to passively complete the sets from quest rewards/delve bosses/etc, which gives you something to look to earning.

Limit your self-healing
-This is the most important factor, honestly. Overland difficulty is designed in mind with the player seemingly not having too many sources of self healing. Overland enemies don't do much damage and attack slowly, but if you can't heal as reliably, then that damage can actually start to add up throughout the fight. Since you're doing less damage as well, the fight will be able to last long enough that you actually have to use defensive tactics to survive. Certainly, it's absolutely no VMA or even NMA, but you can't just only light-attack and stand in red perpetually.

-Some classes have more built-in self healing than others. Sorcerer surge healing will make overland irrelevant. Nightblades Siphoning strikes and (if you're Magicka), Strife will do the same. Best results for this are specs like Stamina Templar and Dragonknight, because of the lack of powerful class self heals. 2h instead of dual wield will further limit it, since you don't get blood craze, and Rally is the last 2h ability unlocked, by which time overland will probably have started to become faceroll easy again anyway. This is of course assuming you don't go into PvP to get Vigor, in which case would be just as OP as Surge/Strife/Siphoning Strikes.

And that's all I can think of

That's my compromise between faceroll easy overland and removing too much from the RPG experience. It works enough for me.

I still can try to complete overland sets and get new gear without breaking balance, and it gives use to things like that crusty bread you find lying around, or trash potions since those will be one of your main sources of healing. Even quest reward glyphs become nice because then I can use them to change the bad enchants of my stuff.

For the most part one-on-one fights are still real easy, but 3 normal enemies start to feel a little like old times, and I've actually died a couple times on quest bosses which was a great feeling. Unfortunately, it's still nowhere near to pre-One Tamriel Harvesters though, but it's enough to make questing more enjoyable.

MakeMeUhSamich

What if they simply made it so you couldn’t allocate CP until you hit 50? That would certainly make leveling alts more challenging.

Linaleah

meanwhile there is me, who was too frustrated at launch and left before my first included with a game month was over and came back BECAUSE leveling is easier now. optional "vet" zones for those who want the "challenge" fine, but do NOT touch current baseline difficulty. not everyone wants " challenge"

binho

To be honest I would love if there was an option to disable CP while questing.

I know we can always reset CP at any point but it's expensive and time consuming, especially when you do it several times per day

Juju_beans

MakeMeUhSamich wrote: »

What if they simply made it so you couldn’t allocate CP until you hit 50? That would certainly make leveling alts more challenging.

The only CP I allocate to any leveling alts is "Treasure Hunter". The rest stay unassigned until I hit level 50.
I also only use one set of crafted gear while leveling..either Hundings or Julianos (white gear). The rest of the gear is from questing/dolmens/delves..whatever I find along the way.

The game will most certainly be underwhelming to alts that have all their CP allocated and wear crafted purple gear.

Shantu

After a few characters, leveling a new one is a boring, repetitious, pain point. People rightfully want to get it done and over with. Making it hard would on exacerbate that. Like other posters have said, if you want it hard, don't allocate CP and just wear crappy gear you loot.

notimetocare

Deyirn wrote: »

I got the game in mid 2015 and back then I remember some challenge while questing and leveling.

After the One Tamriel patch, it felt really easy to quest and level, you had the freedom to go everywhere, like in single player TES games, but the challenge was lost. Even at levels 30-40 you can solo some of the world bosses, whose purpose would imply that you need the help of other players to take them down.

To add to that, the combat, mainly using melee weapons for light and heavy attacks feels like caressing the mob with a paper sheet, completely lacks the impact (poor sound design/visuals) of "hell yeah, get cut, mob".


I feel like ZOS should increase the difficulty of questing and leveling (like how they added disguises for sneak quests and completely defeating the purpose of sneaking, they should remove disguises), by at least increasing players' mortality chances and making them think on how to approach mob encounters, not just mow through everything like they're braindead.

Its intended. It is a TES game, they want to attract all those players and have a basic leveling experience as well as keeping in line with every other mmorpg. Leveling is rarely hard in mmorpgs.

Tavore1138

It's what people asked for - even some who now would agree with you.

Back at launch you could get your face chewed off by Doshia or uncle Sheo's clanfear if you didn't know what you were doing. Molag Bal was somewhat challenging. Stepping into Cadwell's Silver feeling too cocky 'cos you'd 'won' could easily lead to being kerb stomped by the first VR1 mobs you encountered.

But this made people sad

So at first ZoS spent a while tuning down some of the content and some of it probably needed a tweak or two. And many people were happy at this but others were still angry

So ZoS created One Tamriel where everything was the same level and your stats actually go down as you level up which is just cray cray but the people rejoiced.

The big downside of it all is that the VR content used to be the place where you were forced to learn the game mechanics that in turn would help you do dungeons and trials because if you didn't then you'd just die a lot in overland PvE. Now there is really nowhere for inexperienced players to learn their class and skills before they start to want to group with people who then trash talk them and kick them for being noobs.

eso_nya

imo, the lack of difficulty has a couple of root problems:
- no mechanics beside "kill it before mechanics happen"
- heavy imbalance between hp pool, selfheal/lifeleech and incoming dps
- way to big gap in possibile dps output between newbies and veterans

in the last years they tried some bandaidfixes that did not improve the game:
- snares, roots, knockbacks and stuns on every mob there is; didnt make the game harder, but a lot more annoying
- oneshots in group content; made healers somewhat irrelevant
- upping monster hp; made fights longer but not harder

It did put "mechanics" in, it made selfsustain harder/impossible and it made skipping mechanics harder. It royally failed at creating a _fun_ challenge tho.

What should have been done would require major combat system and itemisation revamps. unlink healing and dmg stats. heavily increase players hp pools, heavily decrease possible hps. streamline incoming dmg better. streamline item sets, remove all the "noobcatchers". find a way to build a smoothly increasing difficulty/soften up break points (like the harsh transition between nma and vma). give players means to figure out if they r ready or not for certain content and point out ways to improve.

Reistr_the_Unbroken

Lmao leveling is easy? It probably is to you, but for me it isn’t.

Kel

I feel like the entire "back in the day" argument is just rose tinted glasses anyway.
There were levels back then...everything didn't scale. Chances were that you were somewhere you shouldn't technically be yet, so of course it was harder. That wasn't harder questing, that was you, yourself, choosing to go beyond what you were supposed to be capable of doing, falling under the same parameters of "gimping" yourself for more challenging content.
Questing isn't "easier" today than it was before, you just have to find new ways to "gimp" yourself...but make no mistake, that's what you were doing before by going into zones you weren't ready for. The method may have changed, but still the results are the same.

Tabbycat

Blizzard made WoW leveling harder and tedious, and as a result many players quit or stopped leveling alts.

It's a bad idea.

twofaced

MMO don't have difficulty level. Sad but true.

Wavek

Not everyone finds the solo content that easy. It really depends on the type of game they are used to and their skill level at games like ESO. As others have said, not spending CP on alts is one way to help if you want more challenge. Another is to just not equip armor (use weapons only). Another is to not spend attribute points.

Jeremy

Deyirn wrote: »

I got the game in mid 2015 and back then I remember some challenge while questing and leveling.

After the One Tamriel patch, it felt really easy to quest and level, you had the freedom to go everywhere, like in single player TES games, but the challenge was lost. Even at levels 30-40 you can solo some of the world bosses, whose purpose would imply that you need the help of other players to take them down.

To add to that, the combat, mainly using melee weapons for light and heavy attacks feels like caressing the mob with a paper sheet, completely lacks the impact (poor sound design/visuals) of "hell yeah, get cut, mob".


I feel like ZOS should increase the difficulty of questing and leveling (like how they added disguises for sneak quests and completely defeating the purpose of sneaking, they should remove disguises), by at least increasing players' mortality chances and making them think on how to approach mob encounters, not just mow through everything like they're braindead.

It's definitely gotten too easy. Ridiculously so to be honest.

They are going to have to figure out a way to make questing more of a challenge on this game for high level characters. I don't care how they do it - but it needs to be done. It's so easy it's become boring.

Deyirn

After reading all your replies, I think there should be an option when you create a new character to pick something like "leagues" in Path of Exile or Hardcore mode in Diablo 2 (well, not exactly like in D2, because there you can only die once and you lose that character).


Some "league" where you have reduced stats and everything to provide you with enough difficulty, but in turn you get better loot and more XP or something... I don't know what the benefits should be, but if there are big enough benefits, you should get completely murdered by mobs. And only those who want can check that setting for their new characters.

twofaced wrote: »

MMO don't have difficulty level. Sad but true.

They did. Vanilla WoW from 2004, Vanilla Perfect World from 2006, Vanilla Forsaken World from 2011, Vanilla ESO from 2014... All these games have had initial versions where everything was super hard compared to what it is now. I recently tried retail WoW for the first 10 levels (I usually play on Vanilla P-servers) and you simply cannot die, you get ganked by 5-6 mobs, which in the same situation in Vanilla you will die 10 times over, here you take them all out and leave combat with 50% HP.

You should go back to the archived part of the ESO forum and read some posts from 2014 and see the issues people were bringing up. Many complaints were that the game was too difficult.

kongkim

A possible way to do it is a slider that work like Battle Spirit, but the other way around and only in the world and not in dungeons etc.
The slider Debuff the player, so the base game gets harder. The player then get a small exp and gold buff so he level faster and a small buff to drop chance from mobs.

That way they dont have to change the game and players can control the diffeculty, and not affect other players.

klowdy1

Tabbycat wrote: »

Blizzard made WoW leveling harder and tedious, and as a result many players quit or stopped leveling alts.

It's a bad idea.

I wouldn't say it was made harder. More tedious for sure. After the stat squish, enemies had more health, and characters weren't hitting as hard. It's still super easy, just slower, though, they've started trying to fix that.

Mr_Walker

Yes, I have often thought that every trash mob should be the same difficulty as soloing a dolmen. It would make simple tasks such as doing a treasure chest map so exciting. Often times I have thought to myself "yay, another trash mob!". Imagine my excitement if they were even more of a PITA. I'd probably be arrested for being too excited!

max_only

Nah.

Vahrokh

It is so easy that when I want a "true challenge" , I login into WoW. Yeah, BFA expansion, where the game plays for you. It's still harder than ESO.

AcadianPaladin

I like things the way they are in this regard. There is plenty of content range for differing skill levels and differing levels of challenge to suit everyone.

SynodicOracle

Terrible idea, it's tedious enough levelling alts, dragging out that process would drive people away from that.

Quests and stories are not meant to be difficult, they're meant to be engaging stories and adventures.

For a challenge, go to trials, vet trials, vet DLC dungeons, vMA etc.

There is a place for all types of players in ESO, and you're looking in the wrong place for difficulty.

Enjoy the story and relax. I find overworld questing to be super relaxing to do while waiting for things, or late at night wandering around doing quests.

Deyirn

SynodicOracle wrote: »

Terrible idea, it's tedious enough levelling alts, dragging out that process would drive people away from that.

Quests and stories are not meant to be difficult, they're meant to be engaging stories and adventures.

For a challenge, go to trials, vet trials, vet DLC dungeons, vMA etc.

There is a place for all types of players in ESO, and you're looking in the wrong place for difficulty.

Enjoy the story and relax. I find overworld questing to be super relaxing to do while waiting for things, or late at night wandering around doing quests.

Did you read my second post? Scroll back up and read it.

The so-called "difficulty" of the game is artificial. It requires you to grind months on end to gear yourself up for trials where the only "difficulty" is measured by stats and nothing else. ESO suffers from the same thing Retail WoW is suffering right now. Artificial difficulty created by forcing people to grind.

You can only enjoy the story once, after that it becomes boring, combined with the bad combat in the game, it's really not good in general. I find "overworld" questing to be boring, tedious and too easy, because you can plough through everything without batting an eye.

Have you played Vanilla WoW? That's what I call a challenging and awesome leveling process. Too bad it's gone now and I've played WoW so much that I hate it now. Otherwise I'd be playing that and not messing with ESO, because it's too easy and casual-friendly.

Leveling alts is tedious to you, because the combat in ESO is really bad and boring and it's too easy, but you don't want to admit it and refer to it as "relaxing". From your opinion I gathered that you are OK with punishing yourself with the rules ESO has imposed on everyone, yet the idea of giving it an optional challenge that will bring a breath of fresh air is something you're opposed to. Your thinking process is puzzling me.

FierceSam

I remember when I started everything seemed really tough. A delve boss was a real challenge, I couldn’t do dolmens without a pile of other people and world bosses were absolutely impossible. Anything harder would have been a real roadblock and an invitation to rage quit. I can’t see any point in making them any more difficult - it’s entry level content. If you are going to put effort in, make the quests more interesting.

Amazingly as I got more experienced at playing the game, everything became easier. Even for new toons with no CP.

Now my challenges are the DLC world bosses, harder bosses in vet dungeons, trials and group content. Moaning that entry level questing is too easy for your veteran characters when there is still so much to do is just silly.

Now I don’t do the quest lines for their difficulty as much as for the story and I’m happiest when the storylines are complex and involving rather than super tough fights - I can get super tough fights elsewhere if that’s my thing. I found Murkmire had a good balance, with a nice main storyline, two good delves and two well balanced world bosses (easy to melt if there are 20 of you, challenging with good mechanics if there are just 1 or 2 of you) and a full on arena. Quite a nice balance whatever your level and experience.

bluebird

Deyirn wrote: »

SynodicOracle wrote: »

Terrible idea, it's tedious enough levelling alts, dragging out that process would drive people away from that.

Quests and stories are not meant to be difficult, they're meant to be engaging stories and adventures.

For a challenge, go to trials, vet trials, vet DLC dungeons, vMA etc.

There is a place for all types of players in ESO, and you're looking in the wrong place for difficulty.

Enjoy the story and relax. I find overworld questing to be super relaxing to do while waiting for things, or late at night wandering around doing quests.

Did you read my second post? Scroll back up and read it.

The so-called "difficulty" of the game is artificial. It requires you to grind months on end to gear yourself up for trials where the only "difficulty" is measured by stats and nothing else. ESO suffers from the same thing Retail WoW is suffering right now. Artificial difficulty created by forcing people to grind.

You can only enjoy the story once, after that it becomes boring, combined with the bad combat in the game, it's really not good in general. I find "overworld" questing to be boring, tedious and too easy, because you can plough through everything without batting an eye.

Have you played Vanilla WoW? That's what I call a challenging and awesome leveling process. Too bad it's gone now and I've played WoW so much that I hate it now. Otherwise I'd be playing that and not messing with ESO, because it's too easy and casual-friendly.

Leveling alts is tedious to you, because the combat in ESO is really bad and boring and it's too easy, but you don't want to admit it and refer to it as "relaxing". From your opinion I gathered that you are OK with punishing yourself with the rules ESO has imposed on everyone, yet the idea of giving it an optional challenge that will bring a breath of fresh air is something you're opposed to. Your thinking process is puzzling me.

How can you in the same post claim that ESO's only difficulty is measured in stats and yet claim that the Vanilla WoW leveling experience was awesome? It was tedious and bloated because mobs had a lot of health and your abilities did abysmal damage, compared to the 'bad' system now where it's the opposite. A level 10 defias thief would run up to you, start to melee you for 20 seconds and kill you... hardly exciting. If you wanted to live, you had to pull just one, frostbolt frostbolt frostbolt, frost nova, run away, frostbolt frostbolt frostbolt, kite, frostbolt until its dead. Vanilla WoW was the definition of only being challenging because of stats.

ESO on the other hand has a dynamic and hugely responsive system with dodgerolling, interrupting, blocking, breaking free, sneaking, light attack weaving and skill use. I remember leveling for the first time without cp and good gear and the game did a good job to teach you to use the same mechanics that you'd need for content later. As a leveling player you'd pull a group of mobs and they'd start channeling a spell with a huge burst unless you interrupted, cast conal AoEs or linear spells you'd have to sidestep, lay traps that would snare you unless you dodgerolled, ambush stun you unless you broke free, knock you back unless you timed your block right... It's a lot more engaging than WoW used to be, and actually challenges you to be active and use your skillset.

Now if your argument is that you can avoid paying attention to mechanics due to being relatively overpowered, that's a problem with power creep, not the game itself (although insta-kill DLC dungeons mechanics would beg to differ about your claim of the only challenge in ESO being stats). If you feel you're too powerful and smash through enemies even if you ignore their mechanics, you're probably overgeared. Don't allocate cp on your alts, don't use crafted sets for leveling, use sub-level gear, and don't slot Vigor for easytimes. Plenty of people do leveling challenges in other games, like the no-heirloom challenge in WoW, or the naked challenge, or the you-can-only-equip-vendor-gear challenge, adapt those to ESO in some form if you're bored.

That said, if you tried to give up your old player privileges like cp and awesome gear and still find it easy, bear in mind that the game's outdoor content isn't meant to challenge old players, but be doable to new players. Since outdoor content is not instanced they cant really tweak the difficulty, and while they could introduce harder zones with better rewards, they'd bar a large portion of the playerbase from that and it would be highly unpopular. I'm not sure if applying a personal stat debuff would be even possible with ESO, but highly suspect that it wouldn't be worth their time. Especially since they keep churning out challenging mechanics-heavy creative instanced vet content. It's not ZOS's fault that you want one of their systems to be something it isn't intented to be, while at the same time avoid the content they design specifically for that purpose.

Ri_Khan

The only thing I'll put CP into before level 50 is 30 points into the Tower for the inspiration boost.