Champion Points and Progression

Thannazzar

Eso whils being a flavorful and expansive game suffers from 2 flaws that have evolved over the years.

The first is the lack of progression scaling with activities, overland is viewed as too easy, vet dlc dungeons too hard etc by a proportion of the player base. Whilst this has partially driven us down the road of balance changes and Nerfs and insta death fight mechanics it has largely {at least from my read of the forums} left the player base dissatisfied.

The second issue regards champion points themselves, despite balancing attempts these have now been frozen and provide no incentive to play once your maxed out. They also make overland a faceroll.

I'd like to suggest an approach to this that will, I believe, change both of these for the better.

Let's assume that for the moment all gear and abilities are scaled to be effective for non DLC vet dungeons where you have to pay attention to mechanics but dont have to heavy attack twice in every rotation to maintain sustain.

For DLC Dungeons, Trials etc each one has a progression track, call it expertise or whatever, you run the content, beat a boss and you get passive abilities that aid in future runs of that dlc or trial, Extra resistance on poison for Sactum Ophidia, reduced duration of overcharge etc etc, passive that over successive runs make a next to impossible boss fight achievable and then progress able easily to advance to the next boss.

This would give groups meaningfull progression within content. If doesn't need to be retro engineered, whilst that would be good, however it could be aplied to future content patches. Gear within this activity should then be structured in the same way as normal and perfected gear for each instance aiding universal play rather than specific activity. Cosmetics could be unlocked by achieving a cirtain expertise score, ie beat the final boss on hard mode or beat the first boss 100 times, making them viable for all skill levels.

In terms of champion points, I'd propose these be scaled back to make them minor convenience buffs rather than something that makes overland a faceroll. Stuff like reducing travel costs, repair costs, discounts at vendors, increased fence resale prices, increased xp gains for below 50 alts, etc with a cosmetic unlock built in to incentivise the grind.

Xerikten

static level is at the root of many problems in this mmo. cp is a joke as it is account wide, rather generic and simplistic.

this game has many unique features which obstructs what can be done content wise. some features are a 10 others are a 1.

currently the application of all these spell nerf/changes is the only thing that make players try to obtain new gear and learn to play their class differently, personally I would like a traditional mmo level increase that would force me to do this.

wild_kmacdb16_ESO

Overland content will never be particularly challenging and you would probably struggle to find an MMO where this is not the case. As long as the combat system is within an MMO framework, it basically boils down to a numbers game. How do you make it challenging without making enemies Health sponges that do excessive damage and how is that fun for someone to have to deal with every 30ft while they are running around picking flowers?

The only way I see an enjoyable challenge being introduced to overland would be something like intelligent Enemy AI being implemented which is not feasible given the performance issues already. Things like enemies having a chance to join in the fight, instead of watching from a distance, wandering packs of mobs that might take you by surprise, etc

I’m fairly certain your dungeon progression system would only appeal to a small portion of the playerbase. It sounds like an ‘attunement’ systems of yesteryear.

As for CP, your convenience options totally replacing the existing CP system would create an enormous backlash and getting frivolous bonuses does not sound like a “Champion” system to me. I think it would be an interesting thing to implement once you reach a certain threshold in the existing CP system (let’s say CP1000).