Wood Elf/ Bosmer losing stealth passive, An open letter.

wedgebert

Jordan.nick11b14_ESO wrote: »

Signed. Wood elves (which I loathe) should def. keep their stealth passive. Please don't turn this game into a version of FF14...they have a well earned reputation for nerfing jobs and homogenizing everything. Please keep the races different...

Unfortunately keeping races "different" is part of what got us into this mess. Rather than let Bosmer and Khajiit both be stealthy, in the name of "making races different" they decided that Bosmer should lose stealth and instead become super bland races with no actual flavor outside of "they think they're cats that can gracefully land after a fall" and "think they're Jackie Chan from Drunker Master except without any actual improved martial skills"

Cundu_Ertur

wedgebert wrote: »

Jordan.nick11b14_ESO wrote: »

Signed. Wood elves (which I loathe) should def. keep their stealth passive. Please don't turn this game into a version of FF14...they have a well earned reputation for nerfing jobs and homogenizing everything. Please keep the races different...

Unfortunately keeping races "different" is part of what got us into this mess. Rather than let Bosmer and Khajiit both be stealthy, in the name of "making races different" they decided that Bosmer should lose stealth and instead become super bland races with no actual flavor outside of "they think they're cats that can gracefully land after a fall" and "think they're Jackie Chan from Drunker Master except without any actual improved martial skills"

I think part of the problem, too, is that sneaking was regarded as a bit of fluffy RP garbage that is completely unimportant in the grand scheme of things, instead of being regarded (as it should be) as the single most important resource for the Thief archetype playstyle.

edit to add: I think the current batch of devs also failed to appreciate how important the Thief archetype is to the Bosmer, and I suspect they thought that only the Khajiit were ever the thieves; and that of the original Bosmer passives half of them were shared with other races because the original dev team didn't know what they were doing. I bet the devs thought they were doing Bosmer a favor. In some ways they did, but removing all vestiges of stealth gameplay from Bosmer was NOT appropriate and, in my opinion, negates most of the benefitial changes that were made.

OsManiaC

wish someone reached them at E3. 77 pages and no effect

Koronach

OsManiaC wrote: »

wish someone reached them at E3. 77 pages and no effect

Same I was hoping someone could of talked to them about these lore issues. Also your sig........;;>.=.>

OsManiaC

Koronach wrote: »

OsManiaC wrote: »

wish someone reached them at E3. 77 pages and no effect

Same I was hoping someone could of talked to them about these lore issues. Also your sig........;;>.=.>

Same as all people here, I try to keep our kin alive and stick to its origins.

Koronach

OsManiaC wrote: »

Koronach wrote: »

OsManiaC wrote: »

wish someone reached them at E3. 77 pages and no effect

Same I was hoping someone could of talked to them about these lore issues. Also your sig........;;>.=.>

Same as all people here, I try to keep our kin alive and stick to its origins.

Well I'm trying to help so you won't eat me right? (Edits in) ;^.=.^ maybe I should go stand over there.

Animal_Mother

I'm getting tired of roll dodging... every three button pushes... while a magplar...

How is this even a passive if I have to actively think about doing it?

Jaraal

Animal_Mother wrote: »

I'm getting tired of roll dodging... every three button pushes... while a magplar...

How is this even a passive if I have to actively think about doing it?

And you're not doing any damage while you're rolling down the street, either. Just burning stamina you could be using for actual DPS. Unless of course you're using a weak build and need the extra penetration, I suppose. But it's wasted overpenetration in many cases.

HowTaoBrownCow

I literally didn't realize that the Bosmer had lost their sneak bonus until I ran into this thread. Stuff is changing all the time in the game and I usually just ignore it -- it hurts the people who optimize their build for whatever the current setup is, but after the first few big changes I just gave up on optimizing and settled for role-playing. I put points into the passives, and I generally ignore the details of whatever actual benefits they give me, outside of the broad strokes of magicka for elves and bretons, stamina for redguards and khajiit and wood elves, and so forth.

But also, I didn't realize it because Bosmer have *always* had the sneak bonus, and that sneak bonus was part of the broad strokes that I associated with them. So, when I saw that the Bosmer racial passives had changed, and I read that the "sneak detection radius" had changed, I just assumed that it was a weirdly worded way of saying that they were harder to detect. There are armor set bonuses that improve your sneak, and they also phrase it in terms of sneak detection radius, so I just assumed that was what was going on.

But I've just recently started playing my one Bosmer character again, and doing the Thieves Guild and DB questlines, and it was striking me that my sneak seemed worse than I was expecting. My main character is Khajiit, and I was expecting them to have similar sneak abilities, as usual, but my Bosmer kept being detected when I thought I should have been fine. It was weird, and it had been nagging at me to try to figure out what was going wrong.

And now I know. ZOS, why would you change a sneak/scout type race into just another stamina DPS? The minor speed buff was a nice touch, and would have paired well with the sneak bonus to create the idea of the woodland ranger, moving swiftly and silently through the forest. But now my tiny Bosmer is basically the same as my redguard, and exactly as sneaky as my giant high elf warrior.

I'll roll with this change as I've rolled with all the others. The change to a detection buff is absolutely useless to me, and when I get detected I'll just kill everyone around me like any stamina DPS would do. But it definitely takes some of the fun out of this character for me.

Ratzkifal

Animal_Mother wrote: »

I'm getting tired of roll dodging... every three button pushes... while a magplar...

How is this even a passive if I have to actively think about doing it?

There is generally nothing wrong with passives like that, but then they need to make a difference to your overall playstyle. You can't exactly do that on a Bosmer in PvE because it hurts your only other strength which is sustain. You have two conflicting passives there and that's bad design. Your sustain is supposed to make up for the lack of damage and your damage boost can't fill gap created by losing that sustain.
If we only look at the movement speed, then it's alright, because it boosts you at the moment you need it, the way you need it.

But otherwise if you design a conditional passive, that condition must either be rewarding something you are already doing anyway (think of direct attack or blocking procs) or give you such a large boost that it's rewarding going out of your way (think of Essence Thief). You should also make sure that the buff and condition somehow align in purpose. For example getting a lot of selfhealing is pointless if the conditional is healing someone else who is low.
The current form of Hunter's Eye rewards you the most if you are in a sticky situation and makes you choose "fight or flight". It does the "flight" part decently, but the "fight" part is lacking because 1500 just doesn't make much of a difference. It looks more like it's supposed to be a table-turner as it tries to reward good defense with a boost to offense, but it performs poorly on that front.
If you are losing already, +1500 penetration won't make you win. Unless you dodged an important skill from the enemy, but you don't need Hunter's Eye for that.
And if you dodgeroll while winning already, then you either just gave up your window of opportunity with an unnecessary dodgeroll or you have something else like Eternal Hunt working to your advantage, which most of the time means you would have won even without the 1500 penetration because the fight just wasn't even close in the first place.
And all of this doesn't even take into account that it doesn't work like that in PvE at all and there it pretty much misses the purpose it's meant to have entirely.

anadandy

HowTaoBrownCow wrote: »

And now I know. ZOS, why would you change a sneak/scout type race into just another stamina DPS? The minor speed buff was a nice touch, and would have paired well with the sneak bonus to create the idea of the woodland ranger, moving swiftly and silently through the forest. But now my tiny Bosmer is basically the same as my redguard, and exactly as sneaky as my giant high elf warrior.

(emphasis mine) This is perfectly stated, in an effort to make the racials "distinctive" they turned Bosmer into just a bland stamina race.

Vlad9425

I don't get it. They've clearly seen there's an overwhelmingly negative response to the changes to the Bosmer passive but they do nothing? Why not just revert the change and then you no longer have to deal with this discussion.

Koronach

Vlad9425 wrote: »

I don't get it. They've clearly seen there's an overwhelmingly negative response to the changes to the Bosmer passive but they do nothing? Why not just revert the change and then you no longer have to deal with this discussion.

I want to know what the point of the loremaster is. I thought one of his jobs was to make sure the lore was correct. I also love the fact he claims he really likes Argonians and their lore yet our passives don't match the lore. So what is his job exactly? This whole one passive per race just doesn't work. People want a new race how will that work without sharing passives?

Cundu_Ertur

Vlad9425 wrote: »

I don't get it. They've clearly seen there's an overwhelmingly negative response to the changes to the Bosmer passive but they do nothing? Why not just revert the change and then you no longer have to deal with this discussion.

And this feedback started the same day that the changes were announced. It was initially questioned because the wording is so confusing, because the description of the detection bonus is worded almost exactly like the hiding bonus. When the intent was clarified in a later update the *** matter struck the rotating airflow impellor.

BlueRaven

Vlad9425 wrote: »

I don't get it. They've clearly seen there's an overwhelmingly negative response to the changes to the Bosmer passive but they do nothing? Why not just revert the change and then you no longer have to deal with this discussion.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/456997/class-reps-update-meeting-notes-jan-30-2019/p1

"Bosmer: ZOS has heard concerns about the stackable powerful movement speed. Bosmers will still get a speed boost off dodge, it just wont be as high. Bosmers will get some short damage bonus as compensation. Note: Reps specifically asked about the community’s concern that bosmers are trading stealth for different buffs. We were told that ZOS saw these concerns and would work on creating more options/systems for stealth gameplay outside of race. With these additions, stealth gameplay will open up to more players, and also allow bosmers to have the nice combat buff will still having avenues to be as stealthy as before." (Emphasis mine.)

This was from a January Class Reps meeting. They knew people were already complaining about it, yet they went on with it anyway. Make of that what you will.

Jaraal

BlueRaven wrote: »

Vlad9425 wrote: »

I don't get it. They've clearly seen there's an overwhelmingly negative response to the changes to the Bosmer passive but they do nothing? Why not just revert the change and then you no longer have to deal with this discussion.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/456997/class-reps-update-meeting-notes-jan-30-2019/p1

"Bosmer: ZOS has heard concerns about the stackable powerful movement speed. Bosmers will still get a speed boost off dodge, it just wont be as high. Bosmers will get some short damage bonus as compensation. Note: Reps specifically asked about the community’s concern that bosmers are trading stealth for different buffs. We were told that ZOS saw these concerns and would work on creating more options/systems for stealth gameplay outside of race. With these additions, stealth gameplay will open up to more players, and also allow bosmers to have the nice combat buff will still having avenues to be as stealthy as before." (Emphasis mine.)

This was from a January Class Reps meeting. They knew people were already complaining about it, yet they went on with it anyway. Make of that what you will.

And opening up stealth to all races still makes Bosmer tied for last place and less stealthy than two other races.

Lore is still corrupted, in-game quest dialogues still don't make sense, and it's basically a verification that they nerfed Bosmer to make Khajiit more attractive to those who embrace the stealth playstyle.

anadandy

BlueRaven wrote: »

Vlad9425 wrote: »

I don't get it. They've clearly seen there's an overwhelmingly negative response to the changes to the Bosmer passive but they do nothing? Why not just revert the change and then you no longer have to deal with this discussion.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/456997/class-reps-update-meeting-notes-jan-30-2019/p1

"Bosmer: ZOS has heard concerns about the stackable powerful movement speed. Bosmers will still get a speed boost off dodge, it just wont be as high. Bosmers will get some short damage bonus as compensation. Note: Reps specifically asked about the community’s concern that bosmers are trading stealth for different buffs. We were told that ZOS saw these concerns and would work on creating more options/systems for stealth gameplay outside of race. With these additions, stealth gameplay will open up to more players, and also allow bosmers to have the nice combat buff will still having avenues to be as stealthy as before." (Emphasis mine.)

This was from a January Class Reps meeting. They knew people were already complaining about it, yet they went on with it anyway. Make of that what you will.

And so far the only option/system for stealth game play created was the new Vesture of Darloc Brae set. The 4 piece bonus is essentially the old Bosmer stealth radius.

Cundu_Ertur

Jaraal wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

Vlad9425 wrote: »

I don't get it. They've clearly seen there's an overwhelmingly negative response to the changes to the Bosmer passive but they do nothing? Why not just revert the change and then you no longer have to deal with this discussion.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/456997/class-reps-update-meeting-notes-jan-30-2019/p1

"Bosmer: ZOS has heard concerns about the stackable powerful movement speed. Bosmers will still get a speed boost off dodge, it just wont be as high. Bosmers will get some short damage bonus as compensation. Note: Reps specifically asked about the community’s concern that bosmers are trading stealth for different buffs. We were told that ZOS saw these concerns and would work on creating more options/systems for stealth gameplay outside of race. With these additions, stealth gameplay will open up to more players, and also allow bosmers to have the nice combat buff will still having avenues to be as stealthy as before." (Emphasis mine.)

This was from a January Class Reps meeting. They knew people were already complaining about it, yet they went on with it anyway. Make of that what you will.

And opening up stealth to all races still makes Bosmer tied for last place and less stealthy than two other races.

Lore is still corrupted, in-game quest dialogues still don't make sense, and it's basically a verification that they nerfed Bosmer to make Khajiit more attractive to those who embrace the stealth playstyle.

Exactly. Orcs are traditionally the least stealthy race in lore and in all iterations of TES games, and currently Bosmer are exactly as stealthy as Orcs. And that's garbage.

HowTaoBrownCow

BlueRaven wrote: »

Note: Reps specifically asked about the community’s concern that bosmers are trading stealth for different buffs. We were told that ZOS saw these concerns and would work on creating more options/systems for stealth gameplay outside of race. With these additions, stealth gameplay will open up to more players, and also allow bosmers to have the nice combat buff will still having avenues to be as stealthy as before."[/i] (Emphasis mine.)

It does suggest that they are precisely not grasping the issue. It's not that I want my Bosmer to have the same stealth level that he had before (though that would be nice). It's that I want being a Bosmer to mean the same thing that it used to mean. I want being a Bosmer to be somehow fundamentally different than being any other race. If you give me, I don't know, a new armor set buff or a new potion or food that can boost my sneakiness to its old levels, that doesn't make Bosmer more stealthy than other races. I'm exactly as stealthy as a giant High Elf with that same armor/potion/food, and less sneaky than a Khajiit who may be half-again my height and twice my weight and have bright white and gold fur.

I think part of the problem is that ZOS puts a lot of priority on combat and rather less on immersion and roleplay. (I'm not saying they ignore it entirely, but it's lower priority.) They watch PvP and trial stats, and start adjusting abilities and passives and set bonuses and all that to achieve some more "optimal" mechanic, usually with a goal of keeping extreme players happy with combat. And they also have a goal of having any race and class be able to play any of the traditional combat roles (DPS, healer, tank) at least reasonably well. And I appreciate the need for both of those things. But it seems to me that they often do that at the cost of the uniqueness of character choices, and the immersive experience of being in a character's headspace. Part of playing a Bosmer, to me, is that sense of stealth; I'm smaller, faster (achieved with gear choices and mundus stone, before there was a passive boost), and can moved unnoticed through the forest in a way that lumbering, thyroid-overcompensating, waste-of-space races cannot. I don't expect to go toe-to-toe with a roid-rage redguard or orc; I expect to vanish back into the forest, and return in the cover of darkness to cut his throat while he sleeps. (Nature is cruel, and so is my Bosmer.)

And very little of that is actual game mechanics, because games like this have their limits. But it's part of the headspace of playing my Bosmer character, that's completely different than the headspace of playing my High Elf or Redguard warriors, or Breton mage, or my Khajiit Nightblade. Those different headspaces are what let me keep playing the game, because the same quests with the same dialog can feel very different when your headspace changes. My High Elf feels at home in Summerset, my Bosmer loathes every breath he draws there and hates every pretentious Altmer he has to talk to, and it's like I've played 2 Summersets for the price of one.

But I digress. The long and short of it is that they've removed a basic part of the Bosmer's distinctiveness that's been that's been there for 5 years of ESO and several prior Elder Scrolls games, and I'm not sure that they even understand why that matters. Sigh.

Ashryn

Indeed...I'm STILL livid with the stealth changes to Bosmer and the poison resistance changes for the Argonians! I roll with most changes and adapt, but this is so egregious, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth!

Marginis

I may be in the minority but I think the stealth passive was just redundant. Perhaps Bosmer need something better than what ZOS gave them with the last racial passive changes, but I still like the idea that it's something unique to them.

Jaraal

I agree that combat is their priority, but I challenge anyone to prove that "stealth detection" actually works, and is useful in PvP. (We know it's worthless in PvE, as they specifically stated that NPCs "can't be bothered to hide").....

My personal experience with it in Cyrodiil is that it doesn't work at all. And it's a fact that the set it is taken from (Way of Air) is decon trash that doesn't even sell for a couple hundred gold on traders. So, not only did they strip us of our core value, but they replaced it with garbage.

And it would be silly to think they aren't aware of the uproar. The silence just proves that they are satisfied with things as is, and they just don't care what we think, because it doesn't fit their vision. They promised to make diverse racials, instead they cut the number of stealthy races in half, and gave most races a stamina buff. So it's hard to believe anything they would have to say at this point.

Cundu_Ertur

Marginis wrote: »

I may be in the minority but I think the stealth passive was just redundant. Perhaps Bosmer need something better than what ZOS gave them with the last racial passive changes, but I still like the idea that it's something unique to them.

Then take all magicka bonus from Altmer and Dunmer, it's redundant with Bretons. Take all weapon bonuses from every race but Orcs, it's redundant. Take all stamina bonuses from every race but Redguards, it's redundant.

Having one, and only one, race with bonuses to magic is obviously silly; having one, and only one, race with bonuses to combat is equally silly. How is it not just as silly to have one, and only one, race with any bonus to thieving?

Jaraal

Cundu_Ertur wrote: »

Marginis wrote: »

I may be in the minority but I think the stealth passive was just redundant. Perhaps Bosmer need something better than what ZOS gave them with the last racial passive changes, but I still like the idea that it's something unique to them.

Then take all magicka bonus from Altmer and Dunmer, it's redundant with Bretons. Take all weapon bonuses from every race but Orcs, it's redundant. Take all stamina bonuses from every race but Redguards, it's redundant.

Having one, and only one, race with bonuses to magic is obviously silly; having one, and only one, race with bonuses to combat is equally silly. How is it not just as silly to have one, and only one, race with any bonus to thieving?

Especially when almost all the lore and quest dialogues about thieving belong to one race.... which happens to NOT be the race that has a current bonus to thievery.

Cundu_Ertur

Jaraal wrote: »

Cundu_Ertur wrote: »

Marginis wrote: »

I may be in the minority but I think the stealth passive was just redundant. Perhaps Bosmer need something better than what ZOS gave them with the last racial passive changes, but I still like the idea that it's something unique to them.

Then take all magicka bonus from Altmer and Dunmer, it's redundant with Bretons. Take all weapon bonuses from every race but Orcs, it's redundant. Take all stamina bonuses from every race but Redguards, it's redundant.

Having one, and only one, race with bonuses to magic is obviously silly; having one, and only one, race with bonuses to combat is equally silly. How is it not just as silly to have one, and only one, race with any bonus to thieving?

Especially when almost all the lore and quest dialogues about thieving belong to one race.... which happens to NOT be the race that has a current bonus to thievery.

And the design of all previous games, by the way. Bosmer were always #1 for thieving, Khajiit #2.

HowTaoBrownCow

Jaraal wrote: »

Especially when almost all the lore and quest dialogues about thieving belong to one race.... which happens to NOT be the race that has a current bonus to thievery.

That's a great point. There are Khajiit legends about Rajhin that talk about *his* thieving exploits. But the Bosmer have it as an acceptable part of their current culture. You can steal an important item, and then the owner has to ransom it back, and that's considered a normal thing. With that tradition, you'd certainly expect them to be better at it than your average Orc.

Sylvermynx

Wasn't Rajhin only a mediocre thief without the Ring of Khajiit? Or am I confused - and I certainly could be!

max_only

HowTaoBrownCow wrote: »

I literally didn't realize that the Bosmer had lost their sneak bonus until I ran into this thread. Stuff is changing all the time in the game and I usually just ignore it -- it hurts the people who optimize their build for whatever the current setup is, but after the first few big changes I just gave up on optimizing and settled for role-playing. I put points into the passives, and I generally ignore the details of whatever actual benefits they give me, outside of the broad strokes of magicka for elves and bretons, stamina for redguards and khajiit and wood elves, and so forth.

But also, I didn't realize it because Bosmer have *always* had the sneak bonus, and that sneak bonus was part of the broad strokes that I associated with them. So, when I saw that the Bosmer racial passives had changed, and I read that the "sneak detection radius" had changed, I just assumed that it was a weirdly worded way of saying that they were harder to detect. There are armor set bonuses that improve your sneak, and they also phrase it in terms of sneak detection radius, so I just assumed that was what was going on.

But I've just recently started playing my one Bosmer character again, and doing the Thieves Guild and DB questlines, and it was striking me that my sneak seemed worse than I was expecting. My main character is Khajiit, and I was expecting them to have similar sneak abilities, as usual, but my Bosmer kept being detected when I thought I should have been fine. It was weird, and it had been nagging at me to try to figure out what was going wrong.

And now I know. ZOS, why would you change a sneak/scout type race into just another stamina DPS? The minor speed buff was a nice touch, and would have paired well with the sneak bonus to create the idea of the woodland ranger, moving swiftly and silently through the forest. But now my tiny Bosmer is basically the same as my redguard, and exactly as sneaky as my giant high elf warrior.

I'll roll with this change as I've rolled with all the others. The change to a detection buff is absolutely useless to me, and when I get detected I'll just kill everyone around me like any stamina DPS would do. But it definitely takes some of the fun out of this character for me.

Thank you for posting. Every once in a while we’ll get someone who claims it’s just affecting 5-6 of us and no one else cares. You are proof that it affects more people than we can know. There are plenty of players chagrined with this change who just frown, don’t read the forums and decide to continue or quit that we will never know about.

HowTaoBrownCow

max_only wrote: »

Thank you for posting. Every once in a while we’ll get someone who claims it’s just affecting 5-6 of us and no one else cares. You are proof that it affects more people than we can know. There are plenty of players chagrined with this change who just frown, don’t read the forums and decide to continue or quit that we will never know about.

And thank you all for building this thread for so long. I would have kept assuming that my stealth fails were just me being a bad player, if I hadn't accidentally run into this thread and realized that it was the game, not me. That's reassuring. :-)

Sylvermynx

I ran into someone outside of game a day or so ago; we "know" each other on other forums. She had quit playing ESO some months back, and asked me how things were going.

Told her about this whole balls-up, and she said "Well.... that sucks. I got tired of all the crap that didn't work and didn't get fixed, but this.... it just bought the farm. I was thinking about starting up my sub again.... but no. That they could break lore in such a drastic manner.... and then try to justify it so badly.

"No. No more money from me. And sure - I can play without paying. But I won't. I refuse. I'm done."

I have her permission to post this, without any identifying info.

Sad.