Thoughts on "raising floors, lowering ceilings"

remosito

beadabow wrote: »

I think the dynamic approach to raising the power floor and lowering the power ceiling is an effort in futility. As long as people have differing skill levels, the "ideal" is unobtainable. There is no sweet spot. Sweet spot for who? The most mediocre player?
How do you define the most mediocre player? And what happens when a "more mediocre" player comes along? I appreciate the effort, but don't wear yourselves out trying to find middle ground in an evolving player base. The phrase "dog chasing its own tail" comes to mind.

I think the floor could safely be defined as light attack mouse button masher.

So put in a few sets and/or skills (non class skill lines) that get that up:

- full time main buff or two
- full-time empower
- full time aoe major breach

make them neuter all other skills damage and cost.

Feaky

ajkb78 wrote: »

See, I think you are missing a key point to your perspective. You are comparing top "elite" (cough) guilds and their abilities, to the pleebs you have to deal with in Normal dungeons, and how they don't measure up. And then you graciously supply a lengthy solution to bring those scrubs up to speed.

They are Normal dungeons. A large percentage of people that like to run those on a regular basis do so for a reason: to avoid the pain and bs of "end game" guilds, groups, and people that set a standard that only 5% of the playerbase will chase, and attain.

My solution to you? If you want to run Normal dungeons, then stick with your group of amazingly skilled friends who will never disappoint you with their dps. Because, it seems everyone else lacks the skill, the gear, and the knowledge to meet your expectations.

For people doing the occasional Normal dungeons that prefer to stick with that mode of gaming, they are doing just fine. It isn't Hardmode, or Vet Trials where you really need to sharpen your game. The Normal tier is designed for accessibility. And if your gear/skills/knowledge gets you through it? Then it is working as intended.

When I do random normal dungeons on my healer, I routinely am the top parser by casting 1-2 damage spells while spamming heals to keep them alive. Many times, I've seen group members ignoring quite basic mechanics like avoiding AE's and breaking cc. Honestly, sometimes its easier to solo then to do a random dungeon, but 10 transmutes are given to do a random. It seems many of the players I encounter put little effort into doing decent dps whether by lack of knowledge or practice. Its really not hard to watch a youtube video on a build and rotation before deciding to group with other players. Nothing ZOS can do will fix lazy players and we should not be catering to their play style. I understand many casual players do not want to be bothered by trying to figure all this out, but ESO has an extensive solo game available to them. But if you choose to play with others, whether it be in BGs or a random normal, there is an obligation to at last marginally be able to do the role you are signing up for.

And most of the time, its not about gear and CPs. I started a brand new account, and while still leveling my toon in blue crafted gear with white jewelry, still out parsed most group members the majority of the time.

Also worth mentioning, I give out a lot of build advice in my guilds and the one surprisingly observation is how often players ignore or do not understand their passives. The game does not do enough to teach new players how important passives actually are.

Tulshe

Stevie6 wrote: »

That wouldn't work at all. You would end up with a new player leaving or turn into a soloist. I solo because I really don't like how group play works. Group finder needs to be reworked altogether allowing for different combinations of classes to play and player skill level.

If you wanna play in group you should know how different roles work. Complete couple of quests, which would take a few minutes, isn't hard. It could be even account bound, so you won't need to do it on other characters.
I don't get your point about classes. Any class can perform any role. And if you're talking about non-standard role composition(no tank, or no healer) - you can do this too, with premade. To pull this off you need to know what you're doing, and that's not entry-level and not safe option for randoms.

The Devs can determine via in house player stats what you need to help your particular play style.

We already have build advisor with roles and skills to learn.

Armor types, weapons, and item set should play a HUGE factor into your overall damage output. Not twitch finger mouse button and keyboard smashing. It's great that a lot of players can do rotations and weave. However, you are forgetting a huge chunk of the player base that cannot or never will do to several circumstances.

I'm with you on that point.

From where I live at I have a great connection to Guild Wars 2 and hardly any lag. Can't say that with ESO. Yesterday I was hitting 120 ms while getting on the server. Going into dungeons...240 ms to 999+ ms every time. Highest was 1252 ms. Ummm can't weave with that.

My main ping drop are big cities. Dungeons are fine, but I still have 100+ ping at best.

ajkb78

Auztinito wrote: »

All of you are going in the wrong direction with on how.

Someone mentioned removing LW. That would certainly help but it wouldn’t be enough of a bump for the following reasons.

DPS Checks are the most prevalent mechanic in just about every boss fight. This combined with spreed trail BS leans into making PvE more competitive than co-operative which breeds toxicity in most online games.

Skill Traps are skills that sound good/apear good but are not. Think Chain Lightning in Dragon Age games. It’s a skill that is weak and more harmful to yourself to use. So why even use it. This is common among many games with skills or abilities. However, this game is completely different in that games regard. You’re stuck with skill and have to pay a large amount of gold to respec which is a major turn off for builds. If you try skills and 75% of them are not effective or even good. It limits what you can use to improve. Since, this game wants to be more horizontal, this is a huge kick to the gut and hinders players from improving.

Hotbar Switching is most required to do any higher level content. However, hotbar switching is extremely clunky and forced players to play specific skills or rotations. This is evident when you look at guides on the internet for this game. If Hotbar Switching was treated more like actual weapon switching mechanics in other games. It’d be based more on situation and player discretion/choice.

So, what can they do?

They’d need to remove the effectiveness of LW and Hotbar Switching. They need to make these two “mechanics” more optional and play-style based.

Remove Gold Cost of Respecing Skills or Improve skills that are not used and make them just as useful. I’d lean into both, IMO.

Lastly, re-evaluate boss mechanics. Less DPS checks. It’s fine to not have a limit of dps but you need to stop catering to 1%’s of DPS in terms of balancing where you make them the bare minimum of dps needed. Make mechanics that are more involved in killing a specific enemy, interrupting a spell, and ect.

I can think of very few absolute DPS checks, actually, and most of them are not very difficult to pass. There's the hard time limit in the portal in VSS last boss, there's Lord Falgravn hard mode execute because of the ramping damage, there's the miniboss enrage timer in VAS+x. Other than that I guess there's the gradually reducing number of pillars in Zhajhassa the Forgotten, but that is easily clearable with a group where the DPS requirement was 25k. There are certainly fights where high DPS makes things easier, but that's a different thing.

ESO is what it is. By design combat is mostly about shortish rotations of a small number of skills and achieving a reasonable level of manual dexterity and timing with weaving skills. It's specifically not like Warcraft or other games - if you fundamentally don't like ESO's approach to combat, you might be better off playing a different game. You argument is like turning up at a Go tournament and complaining that the mechanics aren't more like chess. Yes ZoS tweak mechanics but they aren't ever going to totally redefine combat so it isn't recognisably ESO combat any more.

About the only point I agree with is the annoyance of skill changes costing gold. It's not even a lot, at least for morphs, but it's annoying enough if I want to switch my main from dd to tank for the afternoon. I have all the skills I need (armour, weapons etc.) but there are about 4 skills I have to morph (scamp to clannfear, etc.) each time. And even as DD I sometimes need to change between FP and crushing shock for different content / role. I'd quite like to see the gold cost reduce or disappear, or alternatively I'd like to be able to put additional skill points to unlock the second morph alongside the first one once the first was fully ranked up (even if only one morph could be slotted at once).

Oreyn_Bearclaw

Auztinito wrote: »

All of you are going in the wrong direction with on how.

Someone mentioned removing LW. That would certainly help but it wouldn’t be enough of a bump for the following reasons.

DPS Checks are the most prevalent mechanic in just about every boss fight. This combined with spreed trail BS leans into making PvE more competitive than co-operative which breeds toxicity in most online games.

Skill Traps are skills that sound good/apear good but are not. Think Chain Lightning in Dragon Age games. It’s a skill that is weak and more harmful to yourself to use. So why even use it. This is common among many games with skills or abilities. However, this game is completely different in that games regard. You’re stuck with skill and have to pay a large amount of gold to respec which is a major turn off for builds. If you try skills and 75% of them are not effective or even good. It limits what you can use to improve. Since, this game wants to be more horizontal, this is a huge kick to the gut and hinders players from improving.

Hotbar Switching is most required to do any higher level content. However, hotbar switching is extremely clunky and forced players to play specific skills or rotations. This is evident when you look at guides on the internet for this game. If Hotbar Switching was treated more like actual weapon switching mechanics in other games. It’d be based more on situation and player discretion/choice.

So, what can they do?

They’d need to remove the effectiveness of LW and Hotbar Switching. They need to make these two “mechanics” more optional and play-style based.

Remove Gold Cost of Respecing Skills or Improve skills that are not used and make them just as useful. I’d lean into both, IMO.

Lastly, re-evaluate boss mechanics. Less DPS checks. It’s fine to not have a limit of dps but you need to stop catering to 1%’s of DPS in terms of balancing where you make them the bare minimum of dps needed. Make mechanics that are more involved in killing a specific enemy, interrupting a spell, and ect.

So many things wrong with this that I frankly don't know where to begin. Your proposal would gut combat. True DPS checks are extremely rare in this game, and respacing skills is a trivial expense. Not even worth mentioning other than that it is one of many necessary gold sinks. You should only need to respec skills if switching roles or if going between PVE and PVP, and even then, its mostly just the morphs which barely costs anything.

I refuse to promote balancing the game around the lowest common denominator.

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Goregrinder wrote: »

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

Goregrinder wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

Goregrinder wrote: »

Those who spend time developing a skill should always be rewarded by being better at that skill than someone who does not take the same time to develop it. Lowering the skill ceiling basically tells us that they don't want people to spend time getting good...that a fresh CP 160 toon will have the same level of success as someone who has played since beta.

You can 'lower the ceiling' without lowering the skill ceiling. Reducing the results you get from Absolute BIS Gear & Skill, isn't the same as removing the skill that's needed to get those numbers. If your perfect rotation & build gets you twice the DPS needed to clear the highest content, rather than 4x the DPS needed, you still needed your perfect build, rotation, and skill to get there, and a bad player still won't match it.


(When the range of DPS between bad players & top players gets too wide, it causes problems with even being able to design & balance new content. That can be seen in games like Star Trek Online, where low-end players might make 10k DPS, and the best players in the "DPS League" are pushing 500k.)

You're saying you can lower the skill ceiling without lowering the skill ceiling? Or what other ceiling is there besides the skill ceiling?

DPS =/= Skill

If your Perfect Skill (build, gear, rotation, timing, positioning, etc) gets you 100k DPS.

And they change the numbers so that your Perfect Skill gets you 50k DPS.

The ceiling has been lowered (50K is smaller than 100K), but the skill required was still the same.


Of course, figuring out how to reduce the numbers gained from all those perfect buffs/synergies/combos/etc without reducing what happens from basic skill, is the challenge.

This makes absolutely no sense (or maybe I am just not understanding what you are saying). This game is a Skill game when it comes to DPS. Of the 5 things you mentioned, the first two arent skill based (perhaps they are knowledge based), and the last three are potentially skill based (not sure if there is much difference between timing and rotation). Rotation is certainly skill based and of the things you mentioned, it is the biggest piece of the pie (bigger than the other 4 put together).

If all you do is reduce damage by 50%, sure you could lower the elite DPS from 100k to 50k, but you would also shrink the those doing 10k down to 5k. From a percent standpoint, the gap hasnt changed. In that example, the gap is still 10x.

They only way to truly lower the gap between those at the bottom and those at the top is to make ROTATION less impactful. The other things are drops in the bucket. The issue of course, how do you make Rotation less impactful without gutting combat.

@Oreyn_Bearclaw Add more situational buffs, bonus synergies, if you will.

These would still require reaction time and would allow bonus damage in the right context. Plenty of other games have figured out how to make 'skill checks' that require the player to interact without the need for memorization of a perfect rotation.

Witcher, God of War, Atlas, heck even Dead by Daylight all have skill check windows that require player presence at the time of the check - not possible to memorize the timing, key press required, etc to accomplish the check result. (Think Combat Metronome, but the red portion isn't always in the same place at the same time.) Slottable perks and now CP could be invested that would lessen this effect directly (making the window bigger, or the moving portion slower) for players that do not have the physical ability to hit that perfect rotation mark. It would still allow high end to be higher because someone would have to opt to slot one of those perks, missing out on another that a high end player would be able to maintain because of their personal ability.

Our characters are supposed to have skill levels the players cannot. I can't walk into a crowd of 10 people, pick a fight, and hold them all off indefinitely with my IRL tanking skills. This is what the in game bonuses are intended to help counter. Perks to improve or at least soften the effect of rotation timing would go a long way in that regard.

I'd also like to see the skill overwrite of LA's go away. There is zero need for the ability queue in regard to LA's. This alone would allow people to more successfully LA between skills regardless of ping rate and other factors to achieve that higher DPS. It would take nothing away from the high end, because a perfectly timed rotation (higher LA ratio, ~ .9) would still outperform a less perfectly performed rotation (.7, .8), but the ratio wouldn't suddenly drop to 40-60% because the game is designed to overwrite the LA's because of the queue.

The LA could be part of the skill check window, rewarding higher DPS with a perfectly timed response, slightly less DPS with a less than perfectly timed response, if some kind of actual feedback (other than "your LA didn't go off for some arbitrary reason") was built into the game.

There are ways to do this that still reward the young, skilled, fast reaction times without cutting out everyone else with higher ping, lesser rigs, age, medical conditions, etc, because the character skills and perks could help compensate for this while still providing that gap between beginner-mid-high-l33t.

I'm sure those systems work great in single player games where all you have to balance is one player fighting multiple NPC's. ESO, however, is not a single player game. It's a Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing game, or MMORPG, sometimes referred to as simply an MMO.

You now have multiple players involved when fighting NPCs, and you even have players fighting against other players. On top of that ESO uses an action based combat system that incorporates elements of traditional MMORPG's that came before it, such as buffs, debuffs, spells, etc.

That's already like 4 or 5 extra layers you have to balance compared to a single player game. I don't know why people still use the argument "Well Zelda Ocarina of Time was a well balanced game, I don't know why the developers of Star Citizen don't balance it the same way....it worked for Zelda!...". That argument didn't make sense to me back in 1998, and it still does not make sense to me here in 2021.

@Goregrinder two of the four I mentioned are not single player games.

It's not much different than a synergy, but with a limited window. The only additional check would be the perks mentioned, which would most certainly be required to be slotted, so the server side check is either required or it's not, and it's no more processor intensive than any other 1 of 4 perk check.

It actually adds something dynamic to the fight, vs the combat equivalent of typing in a 15-20 letter word with perfect cadence.

nqvarihs wrote: »

Merforum wrote: »

2. I actually would love to have online tutorial or at least a company statement from ZOS stating clearly that LA EXPLOIT, which is doing LA weaving (a VALID light attack ever other second in front of each skill) in the SAME SECOND AS A SKILL effectively getting TWO actions in ONE second, is something that they think is positive to the game and also want people to learn, and give us training on it AT THAT POINT, until they state this explicitly it is an exploit that I WILL NOT DO ON PURPOSE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThZtwhYkKSs


LA/HA tests

Combat in ESO is one of the things that truly separates our game from others like it. It’s action oriented, fast-paced, and gives you a lot of freedom over its various mechanics/interactions. It is balanced not with ability cooldowns, but via ability costs and resource pools - you can’t keep casting abilities or block/roll dodge without the proper resources to fuel those actions. We’ve found that players love this freedom and there is always a “button to press” or action to take at any point in combat.

High APM play is still rewarded as the absolute highest DPS and requires a mix of both Light and Heavy attacks, interacting with Off-Balance as optimally as possible.

[snip]

[Edited for Baiting]

& where's the level up tooltip that explains to a new player why their light attacks don't go off?

Sanguinor2 wrote: »

Alurria wrote: »

Hmm, reading your post a thought occured to me. If they got rid of the LA weaving they could introduce buffs specific to a dungeon only useable in that dungeon trial etc. Just throwing that out there. You would get a buff from a npc in the dungeon or trial and it would last as long as you are in there. I'm just speculating of course. But I digress I think horizontal progress is possible. You either have to lower the ceiling or raise the floor more. As far as weaving if it wasn't something they originally intended I wouldn't expect them to actually teach people how to do it. That wouldn't be logical. Leaving it in game is another matter that has created the situation as it is now a large gap. There maybe that 1%who will always be on top but there are a whole bunch in the middle who don't want to be left behind. So something has to give right? People play to have fun that is the main point fun is defined differently for different people. Truly I don't want homework to have to play a game. This is just my perspective on the issue.

Zos doesnt really teach anything in Eso. This is not limited to weaving. Zos doesnt even teach you that stam costing abilites scale with weapon damage/max stam only.

And again: Weaving hasnt created the situation with floor and ceiling as it is now. The gap is created by lack of knowledge on how to set up a character optimally. One example: 2 people parse. Player 1 runs a BiS build for PvE dps. While he misses 40% of LAs and recasts some dots late he still hits decent numbers. Player 2 runs ebon, lord warden and Salvation. He hits every light attack and executes a perfect rotation. He will still be several 1000s of dps behind Player 1.

Why does something have to give? The middle can easily achieve a level of performance to be able to clear nearly everything comfortably. They might not get the trifectas or the dps check on the last boss in Sunspire hardmode but vet trials can easily be done without being at the top. Also what do you define as the middle here? Everything between the floor and ceiling still has potential to have massive gaps between them.

And sure people play to have fun. No one forces anyone to do homework when playing the game. But when one enters certain group content it is not unreasonable for the rest of the group to expect that 1 guy to be able to perform at the required level. This mostly applies to vet content tho. But if people dont care about rising from the floor why should the ceiling be lowered to meet them? The floor doesnt care.

Those arguments are absurd and you're taking floor and ceiling a bit too literally.

Nothing in game will nor should compensate for the mix and match you speak of. No half serious DPS is trying to do so in Ebon & Warden. The gap, the real 'floor' in discussion is the mid tier. It's still the vast difference between people with the right gear, trying like hell to apply everything they know, everything they've reasonably learned in the game and still seeing a tremendous difference between the mid tier 'floor' and the high tier 'ceiling.'

If it was so blatantly obvious, if it was so easily attainable, there would not be the extremes between two people wearing otherwise identical gear.

It's like training to race a car. You put in hours every single day for years and you hit a certain limit. You're still far behind the top end drivers, only to find out the manufacturer never bothered to mention you had a whole extra gear. The tooltip stating "drive faster" simply doesn't cut it.

If there was decent in game feedback identifying where person A was falling short vs person B, it would then be strictly on the person to improve at that point.

That feedback is all but non-existent. There are no trainers. There are no advanced or role specific tutorials. There are all but useless level up tips and unintuitive gameplay. If not for a handful of add ons and some seriously dedicated people that have spent years reversing this game, we'd all still be guessing 90% of the time.

The difference this is truly about regards those low to mid-tier that are trying to improve, that are doing their homework, that are more than willing to put in the time. It takes far more than a written guide and a couple of videos or the gap there currently is simply would not be as high as it continues to be.

The actual 'floor' probably doesn't care. That is not the people that are being affected.

I would certainly not be opposed to better player tutorials, but I also believe in a little self accountability. It’s 2021. There is a thing called google. Plenty of very detailed guides on how to pull proper damage and anyone can make the choice to actually spend the time on a target dummy, which gives all the feedback you need. Admittedly, consoles could do better in that department. I also agree that the mid tier to the ceiling is the only gap you can meaningfully manage, but most of those stuck in the mid tier don’t put in the practice time to get better.

You don’t need a perfect rotation or LA weave for any content in this game, but if you practice and master it, you should be rewarded with more damage.

How much more damage is appropriate at the extreme end of things is certainly debatable from a balance perspective, but the flip side is that that there are way too many people that copy a build refuse to parse more than a handful of times and rage about the skill gap. Or maybe I should say damage gap. Most mid tier players won’t acknowledge their own skill limitations.

@Oreyn_Bearclaw while the guides will get you started, where better to get feedback on the timing required (and where one is having issues when learning) than from the very game that requires that timing?

You can eventually deduce some things from line by lining Metrics. You might even find insight from a handful of other addons that will show patterns in a personal parse. The dummy by itself will only ever give you the end result. A lot of people I know raised their DPS by trial and error. It's hard to know what's 'broken' simply by the final DPS score.

I realize you don't need top 1% for any content. It's simply about the desire to improve and having tools available to allow that pursuit without all the guesswork. I feel like that should be available from a game of this caliber for anyone from 10k to 80k+.

Someone ultimately figured it out the first time, before there were guides to be read. How much farther would we be if they had not had to guess to make those discoveries in the first place.

There's an absolute wealth of information out there. It's sad that it's missing most in the one place it should be.

That is NOT true on PC. I also refuse to promote balancing the game around the lowest common platform denominator (consoles) but admittedly, that is necessary to some degree on ZOS's end. A CMX parse gives a TON of information. You can see where and when you missed LAs, you can see what skills are specifically causing you issues on your pace, etc. The CMX tab is extremely useful for helping to improve your parse if you know how to interpret the data.

Trial and Error is always the lowest form of problem solving, and I would advise against confusing it with Practice. There is no need to play this game by T+E. Do it if you want to, but there are plenty of people online who will show you exactly how to maximize damage if that is your goal.

I strongly encourage anyone new to parsing, or interpreting the data, to watch this video. It is in the context of a Magcro from last patch, but the last few sections (all tabbed) are extremely useful to anyone. Revelx is one of the best DPS in the game, and he has the most analytical and objective approach to combat of anyone I have been around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEv795kBWK4

ajkb78

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Auztinito wrote: »

All of you are going in the wrong direction with on how.

Someone mentioned removing LW. That would certainly help but it wouldn’t be enough of a bump for the following reasons.

DPS Checks are the most prevalent mechanic in just about every boss fight. This combined with spreed trail BS leans into making PvE more competitive than co-operative which breeds toxicity in most online games.

Skill Traps are skills that sound good/apear good but are not. Think Chain Lightning in Dragon Age games. It’s a skill that is weak and more harmful to yourself to use. So why even use it. This is common among many games with skills or abilities. However, this game is completely different in that games regard. You’re stuck with skill and have to pay a large amount of gold to respec which is a major turn off for builds. If you try skills and 75% of them are not effective or even good. It limits what you can use to improve. Since, this game wants to be more horizontal, this is a huge kick to the gut and hinders players from improving.

Hotbar Switching is most required to do any higher level content. However, hotbar switching is extremely clunky and forced players to play specific skills or rotations. This is evident when you look at guides on the internet for this game. If Hotbar Switching was treated more like actual weapon switching mechanics in other games. It’d be based more on situation and player discretion/choice.

So, what can they do?

They’d need to remove the effectiveness of LW and Hotbar Switching. They need to make these two “mechanics” more optional and play-style based.

Remove Gold Cost of Respecing Skills or Improve skills that are not used and make them just as useful. I’d lean into both, IMO.

Lastly, re-evaluate boss mechanics. Less DPS checks. It’s fine to not have a limit of dps but you need to stop catering to 1%’s of DPS in terms of balancing where you make them the bare minimum of dps needed. Make mechanics that are more involved in killing a specific enemy, interrupting a spell, and ect.

So many things wrong with this that I frankly don't know where to begin. Your proposal would gut combat. True DPS checks are extremely rare in this game, and respacing skills is a trivial expense. Not even worth mentioning other than that it is one of many necessary gold sinks. You should only need to respec skills if switching roles or if going between PVE and PVP, and even then, its mostly just the morphs which barely costs anything.

I refuse to promote balancing the game around the lowest common denominator.

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Goregrinder wrote: »

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

Goregrinder wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

Goregrinder wrote: »

Those who spend time developing a skill should always be rewarded by being better at that skill than someone who does not take the same time to develop it. Lowering the skill ceiling basically tells us that they don't want people to spend time getting good...that a fresh CP 160 toon will have the same level of success as someone who has played since beta.

You can 'lower the ceiling' without lowering the skill ceiling. Reducing the results you get from Absolute BIS Gear & Skill, isn't the same as removing the skill that's needed to get those numbers. If your perfect rotation & build gets you twice the DPS needed to clear the highest content, rather than 4x the DPS needed, you still needed your perfect build, rotation, and skill to get there, and a bad player still won't match it.


(When the range of DPS between bad players & top players gets too wide, it causes problems with even being able to design & balance new content. That can be seen in games like Star Trek Online, where low-end players might make 10k DPS, and the best players in the "DPS League" are pushing 500k.)

You're saying you can lower the skill ceiling without lowering the skill ceiling? Or what other ceiling is there besides the skill ceiling?

DPS =/= Skill

If your Perfect Skill (build, gear, rotation, timing, positioning, etc) gets you 100k DPS.

And they change the numbers so that your Perfect Skill gets you 50k DPS.

The ceiling has been lowered (50K is smaller than 100K), but the skill required was still the same.


Of course, figuring out how to reduce the numbers gained from all those perfect buffs/synergies/combos/etc without reducing what happens from basic skill, is the challenge.

This makes absolutely no sense (or maybe I am just not understanding what you are saying). This game is a Skill game when it comes to DPS. Of the 5 things you mentioned, the first two arent skill based (perhaps they are knowledge based), and the last three are potentially skill based (not sure if there is much difference between timing and rotation). Rotation is certainly skill based and of the things you mentioned, it is the biggest piece of the pie (bigger than the other 4 put together).

If all you do is reduce damage by 50%, sure you could lower the elite DPS from 100k to 50k, but you would also shrink the those doing 10k down to 5k. From a percent standpoint, the gap hasnt changed. In that example, the gap is still 10x.

They only way to truly lower the gap between those at the bottom and those at the top is to make ROTATION less impactful. The other things are drops in the bucket. The issue of course, how do you make Rotation less impactful without gutting combat.

@Oreyn_Bearclaw Add more situational buffs, bonus synergies, if you will.

These would still require reaction time and would allow bonus damage in the right context. Plenty of other games have figured out how to make 'skill checks' that require the player to interact without the need for memorization of a perfect rotation.

Witcher, God of War, Atlas, heck even Dead by Daylight all have skill check windows that require player presence at the time of the check - not possible to memorize the timing, key press required, etc to accomplish the check result. (Think Combat Metronome, but the red portion isn't always in the same place at the same time.) Slottable perks and now CP could be invested that would lessen this effect directly (making the window bigger, or the moving portion slower) for players that do not have the physical ability to hit that perfect rotation mark. It would still allow high end to be higher because someone would have to opt to slot one of those perks, missing out on another that a high end player would be able to maintain because of their personal ability.

Our characters are supposed to have skill levels the players cannot. I can't walk into a crowd of 10 people, pick a fight, and hold them all off indefinitely with my IRL tanking skills. This is what the in game bonuses are intended to help counter. Perks to improve or at least soften the effect of rotation timing would go a long way in that regard.

I'd also like to see the skill overwrite of LA's go away. There is zero need for the ability queue in regard to LA's. This alone would allow people to more successfully LA between skills regardless of ping rate and other factors to achieve that higher DPS. It would take nothing away from the high end, because a perfectly timed rotation (higher LA ratio, ~ .9) would still outperform a less perfectly performed rotation (.7, .8), but the ratio wouldn't suddenly drop to 40-60% because the game is designed to overwrite the LA's because of the queue.

The LA could be part of the skill check window, rewarding higher DPS with a perfectly timed response, slightly less DPS with a less than perfectly timed response, if some kind of actual feedback (other than "your LA didn't go off for some arbitrary reason") was built into the game.

There are ways to do this that still reward the young, skilled, fast reaction times without cutting out everyone else with higher ping, lesser rigs, age, medical conditions, etc, because the character skills and perks could help compensate for this while still providing that gap between beginner-mid-high-l33t.

I'm sure those systems work great in single player games where all you have to balance is one player fighting multiple NPC's. ESO, however, is not a single player game. It's a Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing game, or MMORPG, sometimes referred to as simply an MMO.

You now have multiple players involved when fighting NPCs, and you even have players fighting against other players. On top of that ESO uses an action based combat system that incorporates elements of traditional MMORPG's that came before it, such as buffs, debuffs, spells, etc.

That's already like 4 or 5 extra layers you have to balance compared to a single player game. I don't know why people still use the argument "Well Zelda Ocarina of Time was a well balanced game, I don't know why the developers of Star Citizen don't balance it the same way....it worked for Zelda!...". That argument didn't make sense to me back in 1998, and it still does not make sense to me here in 2021.

@Goregrinder two of the four I mentioned are not single player games.

It's not much different than a synergy, but with a limited window. The only additional check would be the perks mentioned, which would most certainly be required to be slotted, so the server side check is either required or it's not, and it's no more processor intensive than any other 1 of 4 perk check.

It actually adds something dynamic to the fight, vs the combat equivalent of typing in a 15-20 letter word with perfect cadence.

nqvarihs wrote: »

Merforum wrote: »

2. I actually would love to have online tutorial or at least a company statement from ZOS stating clearly that LA EXPLOIT, which is doing LA weaving (a VALID light attack ever other second in front of each skill) in the SAME SECOND AS A SKILL effectively getting TWO actions in ONE second, is something that they think is positive to the game and also want people to learn, and give us training on it AT THAT POINT, until they state this explicitly it is an exploit that I WILL NOT DO ON PURPOSE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThZtwhYkKSs


LA/HA tests

Combat in ESO is one of the things that truly separates our game from others like it. It’s action oriented, fast-paced, and gives you a lot of freedom over its various mechanics/interactions. It is balanced not with ability cooldowns, but via ability costs and resource pools - you can’t keep casting abilities or block/roll dodge without the proper resources to fuel those actions. We’ve found that players love this freedom and there is always a “button to press” or action to take at any point in combat.

High APM play is still rewarded as the absolute highest DPS and requires a mix of both Light and Heavy attacks, interacting with Off-Balance as optimally as possible.

[snip]

[Edited for Baiting]

& where's the level up tooltip that explains to a new player why their light attacks don't go off?

Sanguinor2 wrote: »

Alurria wrote: »

Hmm, reading your post a thought occured to me. If they got rid of the LA weaving they could introduce buffs specific to a dungeon only useable in that dungeon trial etc. Just throwing that out there. You would get a buff from a npc in the dungeon or trial and it would last as long as you are in there. I'm just speculating of course. But I digress I think horizontal progress is possible. You either have to lower the ceiling or raise the floor more. As far as weaving if it wasn't something they originally intended I wouldn't expect them to actually teach people how to do it. That wouldn't be logical. Leaving it in game is another matter that has created the situation as it is now a large gap. There maybe that 1%who will always be on top but there are a whole bunch in the middle who don't want to be left behind. So something has to give right? People play to have fun that is the main point fun is defined differently for different people. Truly I don't want homework to have to play a game. This is just my perspective on the issue.

Zos doesnt really teach anything in Eso. This is not limited to weaving. Zos doesnt even teach you that stam costing abilites scale with weapon damage/max stam only.

And again: Weaving hasnt created the situation with floor and ceiling as it is now. The gap is created by lack of knowledge on how to set up a character optimally. One example: 2 people parse. Player 1 runs a BiS build for PvE dps. While he misses 40% of LAs and recasts some dots late he still hits decent numbers. Player 2 runs ebon, lord warden and Salvation. He hits every light attack and executes a perfect rotation. He will still be several 1000s of dps behind Player 1.

Why does something have to give? The middle can easily achieve a level of performance to be able to clear nearly everything comfortably. They might not get the trifectas or the dps check on the last boss in Sunspire hardmode but vet trials can easily be done without being at the top. Also what do you define as the middle here? Everything between the floor and ceiling still has potential to have massive gaps between them.

And sure people play to have fun. No one forces anyone to do homework when playing the game. But when one enters certain group content it is not unreasonable for the rest of the group to expect that 1 guy to be able to perform at the required level. This mostly applies to vet content tho. But if people dont care about rising from the floor why should the ceiling be lowered to meet them? The floor doesnt care.

Those arguments are absurd and you're taking floor and ceiling a bit too literally.

Nothing in game will nor should compensate for the mix and match you speak of. No half serious DPS is trying to do so in Ebon & Warden. The gap, the real 'floor' in discussion is the mid tier. It's still the vast difference between people with the right gear, trying like hell to apply everything they know, everything they've reasonably learned in the game and still seeing a tremendous difference between the mid tier 'floor' and the high tier 'ceiling.'

If it was so blatantly obvious, if it was so easily attainable, there would not be the extremes between two people wearing otherwise identical gear.

It's like training to race a car. You put in hours every single day for years and you hit a certain limit. You're still far behind the top end drivers, only to find out the manufacturer never bothered to mention you had a whole extra gear. The tooltip stating "drive faster" simply doesn't cut it.

If there was decent in game feedback identifying where person A was falling short vs person B, it would then be strictly on the person to improve at that point.

That feedback is all but non-existent. There are no trainers. There are no advanced or role specific tutorials. There are all but useless level up tips and unintuitive gameplay. If not for a handful of add ons and some seriously dedicated people that have spent years reversing this game, we'd all still be guessing 90% of the time.

The difference this is truly about regards those low to mid-tier that are trying to improve, that are doing their homework, that are more than willing to put in the time. It takes far more than a written guide and a couple of videos or the gap there currently is simply would not be as high as it continues to be.

The actual 'floor' probably doesn't care. That is not the people that are being affected.

I would certainly not be opposed to better player tutorials, but I also believe in a little self accountability. It’s 2021. There is a thing called google. Plenty of very detailed guides on how to pull proper damage and anyone can make the choice to actually spend the time on a target dummy, which gives all the feedback you need. Admittedly, consoles could do better in that department. I also agree that the mid tier to the ceiling is the only gap you can meaningfully manage, but most of those stuck in the mid tier don’t put in the practice time to get better.

You don’t need a perfect rotation or LA weave for any content in this game, but if you practice and master it, you should be rewarded with more damage.

How much more damage is appropriate at the extreme end of things is certainly debatable from a balance perspective, but the flip side is that that there are way too many people that copy a build refuse to parse more than a handful of times and rage about the skill gap. Or maybe I should say damage gap. Most mid tier players won’t acknowledge their own skill limitations.

@Oreyn_Bearclaw while the guides will get you started, where better to get feedback on the timing required (and where one is having issues when learning) than from the very game that requires that timing?

You can eventually deduce some things from line by lining Metrics. You might even find insight from a handful of other addons that will show patterns in a personal parse. The dummy by itself will only ever give you the end result. A lot of people I know raised their DPS by trial and error. It's hard to know what's 'broken' simply by the final DPS score.

I realize you don't need top 1% for any content. It's simply about the desire to improve and having tools available to allow that pursuit without all the guesswork. I feel like that should be available from a game of this caliber for anyone from 10k to 80k+.

Someone ultimately figured it out the first time, before there were guides to be read. How much farther would we be if they had not had to guess to make those discoveries in the first place.

There's an absolute wealth of information out there. It's sad that it's missing most in the one place it should be.

That is NOT true on PC. I also refuse to promote balancing the game around the lowest common platform denominator (consoles) but admittedly, that is necessary to some degree on ZOS's end. A CMX parse gives a TON of information. You can see where and when you missed LAs, you can see what skills are specifically causing you issues on your pace, etc. The CMX tab is extremely useful for helping to improve your parse if you know how to interpret the data.

It is equally true on PC without add-ons. And where certain add-ons have become a necessary crutch on one platform and highlight a glaring functionality omission on another it merely highlights that a certain level of teaching functionality should be built into the core game. Most of the console players I know aren't really fussed about the lack of most add-ons (we kind of mock the apparent reliance on mechanic alert add-ons in particular, there's a joke that PC players can't wipe their ass without an add-on to tell them when to do it) but a few do highlight important missing functionality areas - feedback on training parses being arguably the most important given the recurring theme of complaints about how hard combat is in this game.

Even if what is added in merely replicates something similar to CMX, I don't understand why you would get uptight about its inclusion ("I also refuse to promote balancing the game around the lowest common platform denominator...") when it wouldn't have any negative impact on you.

This PTS sees the inclusion of skill timers for console users so hopefully it's the start of a bit more of an effort to include such basic missing functionality and I'll look forward to seeing some kind of more detailed dummy feedback in the Q3 or Q4 updates.

Redguards_Revenge

Raising the floor saves everyone from floods.

Lowering the ceiling saves resources. Only 1% of the population is over 6 ft. (or something like that) The taller people can crouch. Why waste the resources on 1%?

warg_derpin_gdf

I didn't read the entire post but let me give my general feelings. I'm no noob rpg player but I DO hate excessive grind (lookin at you Knights of Pen and Paper!!!) They changed the format right when I had everything where I wanted it at ~CP260 and the only real disappointment I had was the change in light/medium/heavy armor specializing. In my opinion, that was a super chunk of lowering the ceiling, or "leveling the playing field" as they say lol.

Putting it to words, though, I think they could have done a better job of dividing the more complex and time intensive stat builds from the essentials and, flat out, fun builds. I'm not saying they made a mistake in what they were trying to do, it's just more like, if the stat build tree was a bust with heavy curly hair, they just lopped off the stone curls wherever they could and left a dumb bust for every one to criticize. In a way it raised the floor, but not significantly, as it it mainly simplified without streamlining OR enabling powerful builds with a few fresh buffs (or really anywhere else at all ftm lol). Unless they were too add some excitement within the "slow-crawl ceiling", as I'm going to call it, they probably are leaving it just be a hearkening back to the heavy heavy grinding of yore. It's a good way to either toss around new stat ideas, or give players in that stratosphere something rewarding in a new plot-line : )

Goregrinder

Redguards_Revenge wrote: »

Raising the floor saves everyone from floods.

Lowering the ceiling saves resources. Only 1% of the population is over 6 ft. (or something like that) The taller people can crouch. Why waste the resources on 1%?

Considering that ESO still contains competitive aspects to it's modes of play, lowering the skill ceiling even by a little bit would essentially erase all forms of competitiveness. ESO should retain it's inclusiveness to all types of players, even hyper competitive ones. Everyone should have a home here.

Oreyn_Bearclaw

ajkb78 wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Auztinito wrote: »

All of you are going in the wrong direction with on how.

Someone mentioned removing LW. That would certainly help but it wouldn’t be enough of a bump for the following reasons.

DPS Checks are the most prevalent mechanic in just about every boss fight. This combined with spreed trail BS leans into making PvE more competitive than co-operative which breeds toxicity in most online games.

Skill Traps are skills that sound good/apear good but are not. Think Chain Lightning in Dragon Age games. It’s a skill that is weak and more harmful to yourself to use. So why even use it. This is common among many games with skills or abilities. However, this game is completely different in that games regard. You’re stuck with skill and have to pay a large amount of gold to respec which is a major turn off for builds. If you try skills and 75% of them are not effective or even good. It limits what you can use to improve. Since, this game wants to be more horizontal, this is a huge kick to the gut and hinders players from improving.

Hotbar Switching is most required to do any higher level content. However, hotbar switching is extremely clunky and forced players to play specific skills or rotations. This is evident when you look at guides on the internet for this game. If Hotbar Switching was treated more like actual weapon switching mechanics in other games. It’d be based more on situation and player discretion/choice.

So, what can they do?

They’d need to remove the effectiveness of LW and Hotbar Switching. They need to make these two “mechanics” more optional and play-style based.

Remove Gold Cost of Respecing Skills or Improve skills that are not used and make them just as useful. I’d lean into both, IMO.

Lastly, re-evaluate boss mechanics. Less DPS checks. It’s fine to not have a limit of dps but you need to stop catering to 1%’s of DPS in terms of balancing where you make them the bare minimum of dps needed. Make mechanics that are more involved in killing a specific enemy, interrupting a spell, and ect.

So many things wrong with this that I frankly don't know where to begin. Your proposal would gut combat. True DPS checks are extremely rare in this game, and respacing skills is a trivial expense. Not even worth mentioning other than that it is one of many necessary gold sinks. You should only need to respec skills if switching roles or if going between PVE and PVP, and even then, its mostly just the morphs which barely costs anything.

I refuse to promote balancing the game around the lowest common denominator.

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Goregrinder wrote: »

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

Goregrinder wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

Goregrinder wrote: »

Those who spend time developing a skill should always be rewarded by being better at that skill than someone who does not take the same time to develop it. Lowering the skill ceiling basically tells us that they don't want people to spend time getting good...that a fresh CP 160 toon will have the same level of success as someone who has played since beta.

You can 'lower the ceiling' without lowering the skill ceiling. Reducing the results you get from Absolute BIS Gear & Skill, isn't the same as removing the skill that's needed to get those numbers. If your perfect rotation & build gets you twice the DPS needed to clear the highest content, rather than 4x the DPS needed, you still needed your perfect build, rotation, and skill to get there, and a bad player still won't match it.


(When the range of DPS between bad players & top players gets too wide, it causes problems with even being able to design & balance new content. That can be seen in games like Star Trek Online, where low-end players might make 10k DPS, and the best players in the "DPS League" are pushing 500k.)

You're saying you can lower the skill ceiling without lowering the skill ceiling? Or what other ceiling is there besides the skill ceiling?

DPS =/= Skill

If your Perfect Skill (build, gear, rotation, timing, positioning, etc) gets you 100k DPS.

And they change the numbers so that your Perfect Skill gets you 50k DPS.

The ceiling has been lowered (50K is smaller than 100K), but the skill required was still the same.


Of course, figuring out how to reduce the numbers gained from all those perfect buffs/synergies/combos/etc without reducing what happens from basic skill, is the challenge.

This makes absolutely no sense (or maybe I am just not understanding what you are saying). This game is a Skill game when it comes to DPS. Of the 5 things you mentioned, the first two arent skill based (perhaps they are knowledge based), and the last three are potentially skill based (not sure if there is much difference between timing and rotation). Rotation is certainly skill based and of the things you mentioned, it is the biggest piece of the pie (bigger than the other 4 put together).

If all you do is reduce damage by 50%, sure you could lower the elite DPS from 100k to 50k, but you would also shrink the those doing 10k down to 5k. From a percent standpoint, the gap hasnt changed. In that example, the gap is still 10x.

They only way to truly lower the gap between those at the bottom and those at the top is to make ROTATION less impactful. The other things are drops in the bucket. The issue of course, how do you make Rotation less impactful without gutting combat.

@Oreyn_Bearclaw Add more situational buffs, bonus synergies, if you will.

These would still require reaction time and would allow bonus damage in the right context. Plenty of other games have figured out how to make 'skill checks' that require the player to interact without the need for memorization of a perfect rotation.

Witcher, God of War, Atlas, heck even Dead by Daylight all have skill check windows that require player presence at the time of the check - not possible to memorize the timing, key press required, etc to accomplish the check result. (Think Combat Metronome, but the red portion isn't always in the same place at the same time.) Slottable perks and now CP could be invested that would lessen this effect directly (making the window bigger, or the moving portion slower) for players that do not have the physical ability to hit that perfect rotation mark. It would still allow high end to be higher because someone would have to opt to slot one of those perks, missing out on another that a high end player would be able to maintain because of their personal ability.

Our characters are supposed to have skill levels the players cannot. I can't walk into a crowd of 10 people, pick a fight, and hold them all off indefinitely with my IRL tanking skills. This is what the in game bonuses are intended to help counter. Perks to improve or at least soften the effect of rotation timing would go a long way in that regard.

I'd also like to see the skill overwrite of LA's go away. There is zero need for the ability queue in regard to LA's. This alone would allow people to more successfully LA between skills regardless of ping rate and other factors to achieve that higher DPS. It would take nothing away from the high end, because a perfectly timed rotation (higher LA ratio, ~ .9) would still outperform a less perfectly performed rotation (.7, .8), but the ratio wouldn't suddenly drop to 40-60% because the game is designed to overwrite the LA's because of the queue.

The LA could be part of the skill check window, rewarding higher DPS with a perfectly timed response, slightly less DPS with a less than perfectly timed response, if some kind of actual feedback (other than "your LA didn't go off for some arbitrary reason") was built into the game.

There are ways to do this that still reward the young, skilled, fast reaction times without cutting out everyone else with higher ping, lesser rigs, age, medical conditions, etc, because the character skills and perks could help compensate for this while still providing that gap between beginner-mid-high-l33t.

I'm sure those systems work great in single player games where all you have to balance is one player fighting multiple NPC's. ESO, however, is not a single player game. It's a Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing game, or MMORPG, sometimes referred to as simply an MMO.

You now have multiple players involved when fighting NPCs, and you even have players fighting against other players. On top of that ESO uses an action based combat system that incorporates elements of traditional MMORPG's that came before it, such as buffs, debuffs, spells, etc.

That's already like 4 or 5 extra layers you have to balance compared to a single player game. I don't know why people still use the argument "Well Zelda Ocarina of Time was a well balanced game, I don't know why the developers of Star Citizen don't balance it the same way....it worked for Zelda!...". That argument didn't make sense to me back in 1998, and it still does not make sense to me here in 2021.

@Goregrinder two of the four I mentioned are not single player games.

It's not much different than a synergy, but with a limited window. The only additional check would be the perks mentioned, which would most certainly be required to be slotted, so the server side check is either required or it's not, and it's no more processor intensive than any other 1 of 4 perk check.

It actually adds something dynamic to the fight, vs the combat equivalent of typing in a 15-20 letter word with perfect cadence.

nqvarihs wrote: »

Merforum wrote: »

2. I actually would love to have online tutorial or at least a company statement from ZOS stating clearly that LA EXPLOIT, which is doing LA weaving (a VALID light attack ever other second in front of each skill) in the SAME SECOND AS A SKILL effectively getting TWO actions in ONE second, is something that they think is positive to the game and also want people to learn, and give us training on it AT THAT POINT, until they state this explicitly it is an exploit that I WILL NOT DO ON PURPOSE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThZtwhYkKSs


LA/HA tests

Combat in ESO is one of the things that truly separates our game from others like it. It’s action oriented, fast-paced, and gives you a lot of freedom over its various mechanics/interactions. It is balanced not with ability cooldowns, but via ability costs and resource pools - you can’t keep casting abilities or block/roll dodge without the proper resources to fuel those actions. We’ve found that players love this freedom and there is always a “button to press” or action to take at any point in combat.

High APM play is still rewarded as the absolute highest DPS and requires a mix of both Light and Heavy attacks, interacting with Off-Balance as optimally as possible.

[snip]

[Edited for Baiting]

& where's the level up tooltip that explains to a new player why their light attacks don't go off?

Sanguinor2 wrote: »

Alurria wrote: »

Hmm, reading your post a thought occured to me. If they got rid of the LA weaving they could introduce buffs specific to a dungeon only useable in that dungeon trial etc. Just throwing that out there. You would get a buff from a npc in the dungeon or trial and it would last as long as you are in there. I'm just speculating of course. But I digress I think horizontal progress is possible. You either have to lower the ceiling or raise the floor more. As far as weaving if it wasn't something they originally intended I wouldn't expect them to actually teach people how to do it. That wouldn't be logical. Leaving it in game is another matter that has created the situation as it is now a large gap. There maybe that 1%who will always be on top but there are a whole bunch in the middle who don't want to be left behind. So something has to give right? People play to have fun that is the main point fun is defined differently for different people. Truly I don't want homework to have to play a game. This is just my perspective on the issue.

Zos doesnt really teach anything in Eso. This is not limited to weaving. Zos doesnt even teach you that stam costing abilites scale with weapon damage/max stam only.

And again: Weaving hasnt created the situation with floor and ceiling as it is now. The gap is created by lack of knowledge on how to set up a character optimally. One example: 2 people parse. Player 1 runs a BiS build for PvE dps. While he misses 40% of LAs and recasts some dots late he still hits decent numbers. Player 2 runs ebon, lord warden and Salvation. He hits every light attack and executes a perfect rotation. He will still be several 1000s of dps behind Player 1.

Why does something have to give? The middle can easily achieve a level of performance to be able to clear nearly everything comfortably. They might not get the trifectas or the dps check on the last boss in Sunspire hardmode but vet trials can easily be done without being at the top. Also what do you define as the middle here? Everything between the floor and ceiling still has potential to have massive gaps between them.

And sure people play to have fun. No one forces anyone to do homework when playing the game. But when one enters certain group content it is not unreasonable for the rest of the group to expect that 1 guy to be able to perform at the required level. This mostly applies to vet content tho. But if people dont care about rising from the floor why should the ceiling be lowered to meet them? The floor doesnt care.

Those arguments are absurd and you're taking floor and ceiling a bit too literally.

Nothing in game will nor should compensate for the mix and match you speak of. No half serious DPS is trying to do so in Ebon & Warden. The gap, the real 'floor' in discussion is the mid tier. It's still the vast difference between people with the right gear, trying like hell to apply everything they know, everything they've reasonably learned in the game and still seeing a tremendous difference between the mid tier 'floor' and the high tier 'ceiling.'

If it was so blatantly obvious, if it was so easily attainable, there would not be the extremes between two people wearing otherwise identical gear.

It's like training to race a car. You put in hours every single day for years and you hit a certain limit. You're still far behind the top end drivers, only to find out the manufacturer never bothered to mention you had a whole extra gear. The tooltip stating "drive faster" simply doesn't cut it.

If there was decent in game feedback identifying where person A was falling short vs person B, it would then be strictly on the person to improve at that point.

That feedback is all but non-existent. There are no trainers. There are no advanced or role specific tutorials. There are all but useless level up tips and unintuitive gameplay. If not for a handful of add ons and some seriously dedicated people that have spent years reversing this game, we'd all still be guessing 90% of the time.

The difference this is truly about regards those low to mid-tier that are trying to improve, that are doing their homework, that are more than willing to put in the time. It takes far more than a written guide and a couple of videos or the gap there currently is simply would not be as high as it continues to be.

The actual 'floor' probably doesn't care. That is not the people that are being affected.

I would certainly not be opposed to better player tutorials, but I also believe in a little self accountability. It’s 2021. There is a thing called google. Plenty of very detailed guides on how to pull proper damage and anyone can make the choice to actually spend the time on a target dummy, which gives all the feedback you need. Admittedly, consoles could do better in that department. I also agree that the mid tier to the ceiling is the only gap you can meaningfully manage, but most of those stuck in the mid tier don’t put in the practice time to get better.

You don’t need a perfect rotation or LA weave for any content in this game, but if you practice and master it, you should be rewarded with more damage.

How much more damage is appropriate at the extreme end of things is certainly debatable from a balance perspective, but the flip side is that that there are way too many people that copy a build refuse to parse more than a handful of times and rage about the skill gap. Or maybe I should say damage gap. Most mid tier players won’t acknowledge their own skill limitations.

@Oreyn_Bearclaw while the guides will get you started, where better to get feedback on the timing required (and where one is having issues when learning) than from the very game that requires that timing?

You can eventually deduce some things from line by lining Metrics. You might even find insight from a handful of other addons that will show patterns in a personal parse. The dummy by itself will only ever give you the end result. A lot of people I know raised their DPS by trial and error. It's hard to know what's 'broken' simply by the final DPS score.

I realize you don't need top 1% for any content. It's simply about the desire to improve and having tools available to allow that pursuit without all the guesswork. I feel like that should be available from a game of this caliber for anyone from 10k to 80k+.

Someone ultimately figured it out the first time, before there were guides to be read. How much farther would we be if they had not had to guess to make those discoveries in the first place.

There's an absolute wealth of information out there. It's sad that it's missing most in the one place it should be.

That is NOT true on PC. I also refuse to promote balancing the game around the lowest common platform denominator (consoles) but admittedly, that is necessary to some degree on ZOS's end. A CMX parse gives a TON of information. You can see where and when you missed LAs, you can see what skills are specifically causing you issues on your pace, etc. The CMX tab is extremely useful for helping to improve your parse if you know how to interpret the data.

It is equally true on PC without add-ons. And where certain add-ons have become a necessary crutch on one platform and highlight a glaring functionality omission on another it merely highlights that a certain level of teaching functionality should be built into the core game. Most of the console players I know aren't really fussed about the lack of most add-ons (we kind of mock the apparent reliance on mechanic alert add-ons in particular, there's a joke that PC players can't wipe their ass without an add-on to tell them when to do it) but a few do highlight important missing functionality areas - feedback on training parses being arguably the most important given the recurring theme of complaints about how hard combat is in this game.

Even if what is added in merely replicates something similar to CMX, I don't understand why you would get uptight about its inclusion ("I also refuse to promote balancing the game around the lowest common platform denominator...") when it wouldn't have any negative impact on you.

This PTS sees the inclusion of skill timers for console users so hopefully it's the start of a bit more of an effort to include such basic missing functionality and I'll look forward to seeing some kind of more detailed dummy feedback in the Q3 or Q4 updates.

You will never here me suggest that ZOS shouldn't make more addons available in game. CMX would be very high on that list. It should absolutely be made available on console. But until that happens, I don't think the PC experience should be curbed due to limitations on console, that is all I meant.

Combat Metrics doesn't play the game for you, and other than perhaps the writ crafter addon, none of them do. It is merely information that you can use to better your performance. Certainly, we have way more info available to us on PC, and certainly, it is helpful.

Honestly, I think the biggest difference between PC and Console has nothing to do with addons. It has to do with platform performance and player input (controller vs mouse and keyboard). PC is objectively better in both departments. Certainly addons are useful, some more than others, but I don't think they are frankly the biggest barrier between the two. I would score higher in VMA with a Mouse + Keyboard, 100FPS, and no addons than I would with 30FPS, an xbox controller, and all the addons on the world. Same would be true in head to head PVP.

Anonx31st

It's a great idea. Why should the power disparity of a player that has had 7 years to farm cp be higher than a newer player who has better skill at the game. Great change ZOS!

LashanW

Combat monitoring addons like Srrendarr, Action Duration Reminder and GCD Bar helped improve my dps so much.


Awesome work ZoS. Things like this will help reduce the power gap between players way more than non-sensical back and forth balance changes.

zaria

LashanW wrote: »

Combat monitoring addons like Srrendarr, Action Duration Reminder and GCD Bar helped improve my dps so much.


Awesome work ZoS. Things like this will help reduce the power gap between players way more than non-sensical back and forth balance changes.

This, could not imagine how to play without it.