[SUGGESTION] LA-weaving training solo instance

Olupajmibanan

Hello fellow ESO lovers,

Greymoor PTS pre-patch, known as “LA and HA changes”, tried to shrink the damage gap between damage dealers that weaves light attacks and damage dealers that does not. After month of player testing and continuous feedback, developers decided to scrap the ideas (LA 78% nerf, HA 30% buff, etc.) for now. I would like to touch the subject of LA weaving. Pre-patch parses had shown that LA-weaving would be essential to maximize the dps of the DD even if LA dmg is heavily nerfed. The core problem for the dps gap is not the damage of respective basic attacks, but the fact that the game itself does not show/teach how to perform the feature of the Elder Scrolls Online gameplay.

We propose a solo instance for learning of LA-weaving, that could be built upon the same principles as Maelstrom Arena is - multiple stages and a repeatable quest that would guide the player through them. Let’s call it Pag Lliks Arena. Upon entering the arena:

• player would be transformed into a skeleton with one action bar that would contain only one direct damage ability,
• this ability would be free of cost dealing 500 oblivion damage,
• player light and heavy attacks would also deal 500 oblivion damage,
• stage would contain only one stationary enemy, boss of target dummy type with 31500 HP, called Light Art’ack,
• upon entering the combat, Light art'ack would start countdown of 36 seconds.

If the player fails to kill the dummy in the given time, Light Art'ack casts an explosion that kills the player. At this point, player could try again under the same conditions. If the player manages to kill the Light Art’ack, player proceeds to Stage 2.

Stage 2 concept is the same as Stage 1, only changes are:

• the player would gain additional ability - a ability dealing 500 direct oblivion damage upon cast and 1000 oblivion damage every two seconds for 10 seconds,
• Light Art’ack is now renamed to Light Art’ack, Robust and his health would raise to 63250 hp
• time limit of 46 seconds

If the player manages to kill this ‘Light Art’ack, Robust’ in the time limit, player could gain access to the treasure room. Treasure room should contain some common rewards and once a day special reward that could consist of Undaunted key, Transmute crystals, or whatever you decide to be good daily reward.

Time-frames are all orientative and set up for 75% light attack coefficient as pass requirement. However, you may change these time-frames as well as dummy health to your liking.

I’ve mentioned Maelstrom Arena in the introduction and to suggest some lore into these LA-weaving training grounds.

I would like to see Fa-Nuit-Hen, his baron and notable member of Undaunted guide the player through this arena. Saying that light attacking is an art and explaining/showing how to weave it with players special abilities. First, player could encounter Undaunted NPC at the Undaunted Enclave in one of the capital cities with the pre-quest. This NPC would send the player to explore some strange activity in (insert zone here). Once player arrives to the objective, player will discover the portal to zone in Fa-Nuit-Hen’s Maelstrom Arena daedric plane called Pag Lliks. Upon entering the portal, player will be teleported to a small room where a Daedric baron will be and will continue the quest chain. The Baron will explain that his master Fa-Nuit-Hen is looking for new champions at art of light attacks and created a daedric portal in Nirn. However, before showing you to Fa-Nuit-Hen, the Baron would require you to be prepared, therefore mastering the art of light attacks. Daedric baron would require the player to repeat after him, naming what he does. In the room, there will be two dummies, one will be killed by Daedric Baron and second destined to be killed by the player. Player would have an access only to one ability and light/heavy attacks - same as Stage 1. Baron must emphasize that it is needed to do Light attack + Ability in one second to truly master the art of light attacking. Time limit would be much smaller ~10 sec, with dummy health of only 5000 health. After passing this quick tutorial, player will be able to proceed to Fa-Nuit-Hen in order to finish the pre-quest and gaining the ability to teleport from wayshrines to Pag Lliks Arena at any time.

Discussion:
Additional stages could be implemented. From the top of our heads:

• stage 3 could change the base spammable ability to have a resource cost and also add third ability that would be a 20 sec buff restoring X resource per second.
• stage 4, player would gain new AoE dot ability dealing oblivion damage and the Light Art’ack would be moving and its health would be increased again

However, I would suggest to make the stages after stage 2 optional, and it would only improve the final treasure. Daily and repeatable quests should be short & fun, to not end up being hated like Maelstrom Arena.
This new arena could be also tied to Achievement System, offering titles, colors and target dummy for completion under specific circumstances (Speed run, no death and so on).

Conclusion:
New players do not know how to LA weave, the game does not teach this mechanic and older players often send the new ones to “watch some video” or “parse on your dummy”. This disturbs the game flow as a whole - player might not want to TAB out every now and then to watch something online or may not have an access to target dummy. We believe that the proposal of solo instance that would serve as a training area for LA would be great addition to the game and could help shrink the skill gap faster without disrupting gameplay at high levels.

This concept was created by me and @satanio
We relinquish our rights for this idea and are open to further discussion. Our goal is to improve the game we all love!

We are specificaly interested in opinion of class representatives @CAB_Life @cicisch @Glory @Nefas @RebornZombie @Alcast @FeaR Turbo @GandTheImpaler and well known experienced players such as @T3hasiangod @code65536 their willingness to forward this specific idea or concept of teaching people LA-weaving in general( rather than making nerfs to light attacks and screw whole end-game community) to Zenimax Online Studios. Maybe even ZoS directly would be interested @ZOS_BrianWheeler

Glory

Hello,

Training arenas/better tutorials is something that the reps have been suggesting.

After the brief tutorial, you're kind of thrown into the wilderness without any additional options to practice/learn. It would be great if players who are hoping to do X/Y/Z better have some options in game (not just dummy parsing + the internet) to improve.

Looking at a different game, I'm a huge fan of the way that Age of Empires II is handling this, through a campaign/more advanced tutorial for those interested.

https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/The_Art_of_War

satanio

Glory wrote: »

Hello,
Training arenas/better tutorials is something that the reps have been suggesting.

And were the devs like "nay" or like "ya"?

LadyNalcarya

I agree, the lack of tutorials greatly contributes to the power gap between players. It's especially noticeable because of the recent influx of new players, you can see people just doing random stuff and hoping that grinding cp would solve their damage issues. After all, a lot of people started playing ESO because it's a TES game and they are not familiar with mmo concepts such as rotations.

Kurat

I agree that some sort of tutorial would be nice but not really necessary. People who actually want to improve have already researched it. With all the guides and videos available, there's really no excuse to only pull 10k dps unless you dont care. And alot of players simply dont care. They do their RP, questing, housing etc.
And light attack weaving alone wouldn't make much difference because their entire build is wrong. People use random set pieces, wrong food or no food, wrong cp, wrong mundus, some messed up rotation if any at all. You cant force something on people if they dont care, and others have most likely heard of Google and YouTube.

Olupajmibanan

Kurat wrote: »

I agree that some sort of tutorial would be nice but not really necessary. People who actually want to improve have already researched it. With all the guides and videos available, there's really no excuse to only pull 10k dps unless you dont care. And alot of players simply dont care. They do their RP, questing, housing etc.
And light attack weaving alone wouldn't make much difference because their entire build is wrong. People use random set pieces, wrong food or no food, wrong cp, wrong mundus, some messed up rotation if any at all. You cant force something on people if they dont care, and others have most likely heard of Google and YouTube.

Exactly my thoughts. People don't care and that's why it shouldn't be a one-time tutorial but a repeatable activity with daily reward involved. People would simply do it for the reward (e.g. 1 undaunted key for 2 minutes of work is enough of incentive) and a side effect would be their improvement in LA weaving.

cicisch

Just to tag in with what Glory said, there has been discussion around how there should be more tutorials in the game. I've even had people come to me with community based ideas of getting more people to participate in teaching.

Your concept isn't bad - a solo instance tutorial area would be helpful for the game, and I'd be curious to see if it could expand to include adjustable resistances for pvp, etc.

Glory

satanio wrote: »

Glory wrote: »

Hello,
Training arenas/better tutorials is something that the reps have been suggesting.

And were the devs like "nay" or like "ya"?

To the yea or nay, I sadly cannot say (due to NDA)

Atherakhia

I can't disagree more with this post.

There is much more wrong with light attack weaving than the general lack of exposure and reinforcement of the mechanic to players throughout the game. The larger problem is it's buggy, inconsistent, and unintuitive. To then add insult to injury by devoting resources to develop a new dungeon to artificially expose new players to this mechanic is, quite frankly, absurd. Especially when doing so would be no more productive than the current artificial method of using a training dummy. I'm sorry, but light attack weaving needs to go, and btw... so does bash weaving for the exact same reason.

A better solution is to reduce the damage of light attacks and increase the damage of spammables across the board to compensate. If Light Attack weaving accounted for a much smaller portion of a player's overall DPS this really wouldn't be a problem. But as it stands, this buggy, inconsistent, and unintuitive mechanic plays too large an impact on a player's overall DPS.

satanio

Atherakhia wrote: »

I can't disagree more with this post.

There is much more wrong with light attack weaving than the general lack of exposure and reinforcement of the mechanic to players throughout the game. The larger problem is it's buggy, inconsistent, and unintuitive. To then add insult to injury by devoting resources to develop a new dungeon to artificially expose new players to this mechanic is, quite frankly, absurd. Especially when doing so would be no more productive than the current artificial method of using a training dummy. I'm sorry, but light attack weaving needs to go, and btw... so does bash weaving for the exact same reason.

A better solution is to reduce the damage of light attacks and increase the damage of spammables across the board to compensate. If Light Attack weaving accounted for a much smaller portion of a player's overall DPS this really wouldn't be a problem. But as it stands, this buggy, inconsistent, and unintuitive mechanic plays too large an impact on a player's overall DPS.

Yes, you hit the nail on the head. It is unintuitive and that is why it needs proper tutorial and training ground. It is not buggy, and could be inconsistent if player isn't trained enough (that's where this solo instance comes handy).

In terms of resources... I would say this would be on a level of a decent prequest to a DLC.

You may be right, training dummy does the same job, but not everyone has access to training dummies, maybe there are players that does not even know what the training dummy is and how to obtain one. And I suspect that new player lvl 45 cannot obtain one (maaaaybe the Precursor one), even if he knows how. And having dummy is one thing, but learning how to LA weave on the dummy another. A player certainly needs some kind of LA guide or a teacher - yes, you could accidentally discover ESOs optimal way to deal damage again, but what are the odds.

What you propose would make the players spam only their spammables, without need to apply dots or even light attack. It would not make PvE or PvP more engaging or fun. And it would not lead to an end of attack weaving, HA-weaving could raise up and you got the same problem all over again - unintuitive combat feature, that needs to be properly introduced and well trained.

P.S.: To cheer you up, bash weaving is gone as of Greymoor, since they've reduced bash damage.

Atherakhia

I know Bash Weaving is going away. It's going away for the same reasons I feel Light Attack weaving should.

As for it being unintuitive, training someone to do something and them performing a task satisfactorily does not suddenly change the fact that something is unintuitive. Glitching out the game to purposely cancel a spell animation will forever be unintuitive. In fact, it's such poor design I'm convinced it was never intended and the developers simply can't fix it without an enormous overhaul of the combat system and the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Thus why they are attempting to kludge a fix in.

It's fine if we disagree on this matter. The more debate on this topic the better as I fall in the first camp that I mentioned above: there is simply so much more wrong with this game needing attention that changing general combat mechanics like light attack weaving simply isn't worth the effort. Thus why I feel the best course of action is to just drop LA damage significantly and increase spammable damage across the board.

OneForSorrow

I have a weird relationship with LA weaving. I've played a lot of character action games in my time so the concept of animation cancelling is familiar to me and I handle it pretty well in, say, your Devil May Crys.

But ESO is a MMORPG. Adding ping rates and latency to cancelling can be a disaster. It's very frustrating when I see my dps tank because the game doesn't register a light attack as having landed at all for reasons outside my control.

I guess what I'm saying is... I get the appeal of cancelling and support it in theory but if it went away or got redesigned I'd probably be fine with it.

Sarannah

Atherakhia wrote: »

I can't disagree more with this post.

There is much more wrong with light attack weaving than the general lack of exposure and reinforcement of the mechanic to players throughout the game. The larger problem is it's buggy, inconsistent, and unintuitive. To then add insult to injury by devoting resources to develop a new dungeon to artificially expose new players to this mechanic is, quite frankly, absurd. Especially when doing so would be no more productive than the current artificial method of using a training dummy. I'm sorry, but light attack weaving needs to go, and btw... so does bash weaving for the exact same reason.

A better solution is to reduce the damage of light attacks and increase the damage of spammables across the board to compensate. If Light Attack weaving accounted for a much smaller portion of a player's overall DPS this really wouldn't be a problem. But as it stands, this buggy, inconsistent, and unintuitive mechanic plays too large an impact on a player's overall DPS.

Totally agreeing with this post! LA weaving is just stupid. We have powerful skills, but lets spam buttons in between them. For me it seems wrong in another way also... fatigue. You should not light attack and then immediately be able to use a skill as it is now, we should be able to use a skill and then light attack while recovering from it. But when I do this, the game tells me I'm wrong and blocks me. It is just stupid, clunky, feels off, and when you have even the slightest lag it is impossible as well.

Same issues with bar swapping basically.