Normalize the Races - Let Us Pick Our Racials, Rename Them Adventurer Skills

Deioth

Everyone has their aesthetic choices, but PvP (and to a lesser extent PvE) requires smart builds and with the way this game's design works out you're gimping yourself playing a magicka orc, for example, or a stamina argonian. The free racial seems to be the thematic racial while the rest push you towards certain builds for certain races. I like playing Argonian, but I'm gimped with a stamina build compared to Orc or Khajiit for example. Basically, I think that the three other racials should be freely chosen from among all race's racials of that "tier", so to explain Orc's "Brawny" and Breton's "Gift of Magnus" would share the same racial pool since that's the first racial tier. They would be renamed Adventurer Skills to fit with the change and improve clarity that you're picking these bonuses as a character. Resetting your skills would allow you to pick different Adventurer Skills.

This would not only allow players to choose races entirely aesthetically, a powerful tool for such a roleplay friendly game, but would make for a compelling new layer of depth in creating builds. Since every race can play every class and learn every skill line, and given the impact of the racial pass making racials that much more useful, a normalization pass so we can pick the racials we want would be a wonderful QOL feature.

VaranisArano

Elder Scrolls races aren't just aesthetic. That's a major part of the roleplay. You can play a Nord Mage like Shalidor or Tolfdir, but there's no getting around the way you are playing against the racial stereotype.
That's more of a feature of RPGs like D&D, which heavily inspired the early TES games.

MashmalloMan

Yeah nah. This argument has been broughten up a thousand times over and while it may be nice. Every elder scrolls game has given you bonuses with certain races. This happens to be an MMO so the bonuses they've chosen are relevant to this game. It makes no sense for you to be able to choose racials from other races that you aren't playing.

Just like in other elder scrolls games, you can play as an Orc Mage, but you were always going to have a better time playing a High Elf Mage because thats what they're good at.

So you can play as an Orc Mage, you just choose not to because you believe the loss of those Magic based stats from better races are too great for you, but thats what happens when you care about min-maxing.

Deioth wrote: »

This would not only allow players to choose races entirely aesthetically, a powerful tool for such a roleplay friendly game, but would make for a compelling new layer of depth in creating builds. Since every race can play every class and learn every skill line, and given the impact of the racial pass making racials that much more useful, a normalization pass so we can pick the racials we want would be a wonderful QOL feature.

You know what is a better tool for role playing? Actually playing a race that is suppose to be inherintly good at what it's suppose to be good at and bad at what it's bad at.. Thats more role playing friendly then just picking from other races passives.

This is just another way of homogenizing the game and honestly, it doesn't help ZOS 1 bit. They are a business. Having different races be good at different things entices players to build more than 1 character to min-max the roles they want to play, making them play longer and potentialy buy more character slots. So from a business perspective, there is no reason for them to do this either.

x48rph

Your honestly not gimping yourself by that much by picking a non meta race for your build. My magplar/healer is a bosmer and I suck at weaving and yet I still manage vet content just fine for the most part. Do racials help a little? Yes, of course but unless your score pushing with a dedicated team in vet trials you can pretty much play any build with any race and be fine. And in PvP it becomes even less important in my opinion since most builds need both magicka and stamina to survive.

MashmalloMan

x48rph wrote: »

Your honestly not gimping yourself by that much by picking a non meta race for your build. My magplar/healer is a bosmer and I suck at weaving and yet I still manage vet content just fine for the most part. Do racials help a little? Yes, of course but unless your score pushing with a dedicated team in vet trials you can pretty much play any build with any race and be fine. And in PvP it becomes even less important in my opinion since most builds need both magicka and stamina to survive.

Exactly, there is a reason Wood Elf gives +1500 spell pen too. Their passives are still very usuable on magicka toons.

As a stam sorc, I always invest at least 150-300 into mag regen and 1000-4000 in max magicka. Whether it be food or enchants, I'm using those stats too. Stamina and stam regen is just as important for magicka builds if you want to sprint/block/roll dodge/break free more often.

It's really not as detramental as people make it out to be, especially in pvp. Pve will always, I mean always have best in slot combinations, because when it comes down to it, you only need to max out your dps and survive/avoid red circles. There is barely any consideration to what goes into making a pvp build where you're concern lies with tankiness, healing, damage, sustain and utility, so of course pve is going to be much simpler.

Deioth

VaranisArano wrote: »

Elder Scrolls races aren't just aesthetic. That's a major part of the roleplay. You can play a Nord Mage like Shalidor or Tolfdir, but there's no getting around the way you are playing against the racial stereotype.
That's more of a feature of RPGs like D&D, which heavily inspired the early TES games.

There's Roleplay and then there's RPG Mechanics. This also being an MMO that launched with class homeginization and with less useful percentage based racials, what you picked was less important. Getting maybe 300 or 400 more stamina is significantly less useful than 2000. That could mean the difference between another two attacks that could make the difference in a fight, PvE and PvP both. Allowing players to pick and choose the racial bonuses and simply relabeling them something more appropriate like Adventurer Skills would greatly expand player choices in this game.

MashmalloMan wrote: »

So you can play as an Orc Mage, you just choose not to because you believe the loss of those Magic based stats from better races are too great for you, but thats what happens when you care about min-maxing.

This isn't a SP game where those differences are less meaningful and impactful or can be readily overcome (or just straight up modded). This is a MMORPG with competitive play and where builds matter significantly more. If this were an MMO that featured class locks, that would be one thing, but there also are veeeerryyyy few MMOs that exist where racials become a rather significant part of builds. A warrior is a warrior in WoW no matter the race, but in ESO a stamDK Orc is just plain better than a stamDK Breton or Altmer.

This is just another way of homogenizing the game and honestly, it doesn't help ZOS 1 bit. They are a business. Having different races be good at different things entices players to build more than 1 character to min-max the roles they want to play, making them play longer and potentialy buy more character slots. So from a business perspective, there is no reason for them to do this either.

There are six classes each with Tank, Magicka DPS, Stamina DPS, and Healer core variants. Altitis will not magically die just because Racial Skills became Adventurer Skills and you picked what you want from each tier to accommodate your particular playstyle and build choice.

x48rph wrote: »

Your honestly not gimping yourself by that much by picking a non meta race for your build. My magplar/healer is a bosmer and I suck at weaving and yet I still manage vet content just fine for the most part. Do racials help a little? Yes, of course but unless your score pushing with a dedicated team in vet trials you can pretty much play any build with any race and be fine. And in PvP it becomes even less important in my opinion since most builds need both magicka and stamina to survive.

In PvP, you're far more likely to notice that extra stat bump or damage bump or healing bump win you a fight than in PvE. If you're playing a race that just up and gets 2k extra stamina, you're going to notice it when you're exhausting your resources. Getting that last ability off and landing the skill or running out and dying instead is huge. Normalizing racials into Adventurer Skills would be huge for build potential and theorycrafting and allow players to play races purely aesthetically which would only make the game more approachable with deeper build mechanics.

ecru

I'm 100% for this, but I doubt this will ever happen. Not wanting to disconnect racial passives from appearance is usually an ideological decision rather than a practical one (since it makes no difference from a gameplay standpoint), and people (devs in this case) are usually pretty stuck in their ideology.

wild_kmacdb16_ESO

+1 The thought I had would be that similar to the 'Any race, any alliance' unlock, there would be one for 'Adopted by X' race. You would take on the skills of that 'X' race instead of your inherit racials.

Raisin

They already did this. They changed the racials to have far less of an impact and be only the slightest amount of flavor. Unless you are absolutely min-maxing, race does not matter. Doesn't surprise me that even when ZOS does something about it, people still aren't happy because they want more.

drakthir

I do agree the racial system is sooo bad in this game
They should not enforce racial stereotypes because it's waht those damn altmers believe
A breton who picks up a sword should be equal to everyone else who picks up a sword and my breton/reachman should lorewise probably be the best at werewolf yet it's the worse at it.
An argonian should if anything be the best or 2nd at bows/poison damage, thematically it fits better than most others but they're made into magicka healers for some reason.

The problem is the race restrictions are incredibly narrow, thats why i reckon its altmer enforced rhettoric turned into real
It would not hurt anyone to do away with racials entirely it would only be better for everyone
Like in daggerfall they enforced conditons that males and females would have different stats because of their sex choice which is messed up, glad they got rid of that. The game can improve and it should

idk

VaranisArano wrote: »

Elder Scrolls races aren't just aesthetic. That's a major part of the roleplay. You can play a Nord Mage like Shalidor or Tolfdir, but there's no getting around the way you are playing against the racial stereotype.
That's more of a feature of RPGs like D&D, which heavily inspired the early TES games.

There is this.

And Zos seemed to have considered detaching passives with the racial appearances with their original idea for race change. That idea was we could change race but our passives would not change. In the end they chose to keep race and passives tied together which makes sense because the original idea did not allow us to change passives.

Zos had another chance to consider detaching passives from appearance when they updated race passives about a year ago. That update gave us more choices for pretty much any build type and brought the benefit of passives closer together. Zos plans another pass at this for minor tweaks when the finish up balancing the new combat system.

In other words, it appears Zos has no interest in separating passives from the choice of race. Considering the long history of our choice of race being tied to passives in TES games it is unlikely this will change.

Beyond that, I am glad race choice has an impact. In to many MMORPGs I have played the choice of race was meaningless, boring and bland.

drakthir

Having such a restrictive race system makes the choices boring and bland because ou can only do 1 thing with them or be weak in comparison to others, if they stopped with the passives there would be a lot more variety and build choices available while actually being able to play the race and class combo you want

idk

drakthir wrote: »

Having such a restrictive race system makes the choices boring and bland because ou can only do 1 thing with them or be weak in comparison to others, if they stopped with the passives there would be a lot more variety and build choices available while actually being able to play the race and class combo you want

So race choice actually having some meaning is bland? Nah.

Also, they are not restricted to one thing. I can tank, heal, and dps on all my characters without issue. Most race passives are good for more than one thing, easily.

Raisin

drakthir wrote: »

Having such a restrictive race system makes the choices boring and bland because ou can only do 1 thing with them or be weak in comparison to others, if they stopped with the passives there would be a lot more variety and build choices available while actually being able to play the race and class combo you want

Honestly you're just limiting yourself by thinking that way. You can absolutely play any race with anything. Unless you want to be at the top of the list of players, race doesn't matter to you. The build variety is there.

As I mentioned above, ZOS DID already make changes to racials to compromise between the different perspectives. They changed it so that people could choose an ideal combo for a bit of an extra bonus to minmax, but would also not be held back by choosing not to. This was a decision made to give benefit to both sides of the coin. If you're not happy with a compromise to please different types of players because you want more, that's honestly on you.

Deathlord92

Deioth wrote: »

Everyone has their aesthetic choices, but PvP (and to a lesser extent PvE) requires smart builds and with the way this game's design works out you're gimping yourself playing a magicka orc, for example, or a stamina argonian. The free racial seems to be the thematic racial while the rest push you towards certain builds for certain races. I like playing Argonian, but I'm gimped with a stamina build compared to Orc or Khajiit for example. Basically, I think that the three other racials should be freely chosen from among all race's racials of that "tier", so to explain Orc's "Brawny" and Breton's "Gift of Magnus" would share the same racial pool since that's the first racial tier. They would be renamed Adventurer Skills to fit with the change and improve clarity that you're picking these bonuses as a character. Resetting your skills would allow you to pick different Adventurer Skills.

This would not only allow players to choose races entirely aesthetically, a powerful tool for such a roleplay friendly game, but would make for a compelling new layer of depth in creating builds. Since every race can play every class and learn every skill line, and given the impact of the racial pass making racials that much more useful, a normalization pass so we can pick the racials we want would be a wonderful QOL feature.

Completely agree all I play is my Breton stamblade though I do fine in vet pve and pvp I could do better and there’s nothing wrong with wanting improvements after all Bretons history savage warriors reachman assassins it was a Breton who murder one of the emperors. I want birthstones 🙂

stevenyaub16_ESO

For most people the bonuses actually add flavor to the races, and unless you are doing high end vet trials or making PvP montages (which many are not) then it's not going to make a significant difference in how the game plays out.

idk

stevenyaub16_ESO wrote: »

For most people the bonuses actually add flavor to the races, and unless you are doing high end vet trials or making PvP montages (which many are not) then it's not going to make a significant difference in how the game plays out.

This is very accurate. A players skill plays the biggest factor for how well a character does vs gear, set bonus, set bonus and race passives.

gepe87

On pvp, racials have more impact in nocp than cp. With 2019 changes, idont think they will revamp them.

AcadianPaladin

I don't see how enacting the OPs idea would stop people who want to play a stereotype to do exactly that. And I don't see how allowing players who want to not play the stereotype would hurt someone else's game. Choice is a good thing and those who want to play Altmer mages would not really see any change.

My wood elf has played both archers and mages since 2007 (Oblivion, Skyrim and ESO). ESO is more unfriendly to her as a mage than either of its predecessors.

I'd be fine if I could play a tiny Altmer, make her look like a Bosmer and pretend she's a Bosmer. But the game won't allow me to do that either (no tiny Altmer).

Deathlord92

I will always be a Breton assassin was in both oblivion and skyrim and have been since 2015 when eso came to console.

Coppes

In other ES titles, race only effected you when you were leveling up. Once you reach max level you could basically do whatever you want. Stamina Breton, Warrior High Elf, Magic Redguard, etc

Uniqueness came from the looks of each race and their backgrounds.

ealdwin

Deathlord92 wrote: »

it was a Breton who murder one of the emperors.

Ah, you mean Emperor Cuhlecain. Yes, a Breton will indeed murder him, though not the nightblade that the tales will remember. No, it will be the Breto-Nord from Alcaire who will murder him, Hjalti Early-Beard. Though we will know him as Talos Stormcrown or as Tiber Septim.

Faulgor

Spaceroamer wrote: »

In other ES titles, race only effected you when you were leveling up. Once you reach max level you could basically do whatever you want. Stamina Breton, Warrior High Elf, Magic Redguard, etc

Uniqueness came from the looks of each race and their backgrounds.

True, for the most part (there are some exceptions like running speed, Altmer's magicka bonus in Skyrim, etc.). But that's true for classes as well. ESO is just different.

Currently, the races are in the best spot they have been, balance wise.
Only Argonians and Bosmer are really trailing behind.

hakan

if you think it matters that much you dont know sht about the game.

racials always had huge impact on ES single games. Even after maxing out.

PvE wise, they posted dummy results here and they didnt even have like 10k damage difference. it was around 2-3k at most and considering damage parses were around 60-70k and difference is scalable, you wont feel anything with your pesky 30-40k parse.

For pvp, you always need to bank on different stats not just your max mag/stam. Most people wear shackle like hybrid sets or make enchants to benefit all three stats.

you can use your bretons innate magicka abilities and never have to invest on magicka if you wanna play stam.

Source: Day1 dunmer stambladehere.

Deathlord92

hakan wrote: »

if you think it matters that much you dont know sht about the game.

racials always had huge impact on ES single games. Even after maxing out.

PvE wise, they posted dummy results here and they didnt even have like 10k damage difference. it was around 2-3k at most and considering damage parses were around 60-70k and difference is scalable, you wont feel anything with your pesky 30-40k parse.

For pvp, you always need to bank on different stats not just your max mag/stam. Most people wear shackle like hybrid sets or make enchants to benefit all three stats.

you can use your bretons innate magicka abilities and never have to invest on magicka if you wanna play stam.

Source: Day1 dunmer stambladehere.

Day 1 Breton stamblade my yt channel has lots of 1vxs 1v1s I literally have no problems but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to improve my stats my Breton is a cutthroat not a mage

vestahls

If you care about the meta so much, then don't let aesthetics get in the way. And don't take away from one of the basic aspects of this game series, which is different racial pros and cons, because of your perceived "competitive" shortcomings.

If anything, I think the racials should be even more different and drastic. Ideally, Argonians should not be able to wear boots and closed helmets, because their bodies are too different to fit into normal armor. Same for Khajiit. ZOS is already being excessively generous imo.

Lughlongarm

No thank you.

Deathlord92

vestahls wrote: »

If you care about the meta so much, then don't let aesthetics get in the way. And don't take away from one of the basic aspects of this game series, which is different racial pros and cons, because of your perceived "competitive" shortcomings.

If anything, I think the racials should be even more different and drastic. Ideally, Argonians should not be able to wear boots and closed helmets, because their bodies are too different to fit into normal armor. Same for Khajiit. ZOS is already being excessively generous imo.

Cool yeah your right take away argonians boots easier to slice of there foot no helmets to awesome clear opportunity to lop of there head so less resistances for the lizard then I bet all the argonian fans are glad ur not in charge loool 😂

vestahls

Deathlord92 wrote: »

Cool yeah your right take away argonians boots easier to slice of there foot no helmets to awesome clear opportunity to lop of there head so less resistances for the lizard then I bet all the argonian fans are glad ur not in charge loool 😂

Bet they are, lol.

I mean, the people saying race only mattered for leveling or whatnot in past TES games... What I said above is what racials were like in Morrowind. In TESIII, if you played an Argonian or a Khajiit, you couldn't wear closed helmets (you could wear open ones though, and hats), and you couldn't wear boots or shoes at all. And players mostly went with it because... it makes sense.

Deathlord92

vestahls wrote: »

Deathlord92 wrote: »

Cool yeah your right take away argonians boots easier to slice of there foot no helmets to awesome clear opportunity to lop of there head so less resistances for the lizard then I bet all the argonian fans are glad ur not in charge loool 😂

Bet they are, lol.

I mean, the people saying race only mattered for leveling or whatnot in past TES games... What I said above is what racials were like in Morrowind. In TESIII, if you played an Argonian or a Khajiit, you couldn't wear closed helmets (you could wear open ones though, and hats), and you couldn't wear boots or shoes at all. And players mostly went with it because... it makes sense.

Oh sht my bad then for taking the *** I didn’t play morrowind my love for elder scrolls started with oblivion which I played a lot skyrim then eso and I only played Breton 🙂

vestahls

To be fair, Morrowind was kind of crazy. And to have two armor slots unavailable would be a bit harsh, so I don't blame the following games or ESO for getting rid of that But yeah, could be a lot worse than a few percentage points of stamina. It really isn't that bad here, and to dilute the racials even more isn't necessary.