Hard to get back into the game after an ARPG binge - lack of build diversity

tzaeru

Heya,

So first I do want to say that overall ESO is a great game, I've put some hundreds to it, paid for ESO+, absolutely no regrets there.

But.

After recently binging on Path of Exile, I just have hard time actually enjoying playing my characters in ESO anymore. It just feels that all characters use the same sets, the same skills, same stat distributions.

Say, if you play stamina DPS, 8 out of 10 of your skills are very likely to be exact same as any other stamDPS. Your sets are likely to be the same, depending on if you've yet farmed the BiS items, or if you're using cheap overland sets. If you play a healer, my favorite, well again, your skills are mostly the same. You have a little bit more variety than DPS, but every healer runs Illustrious Healing, Radiating Regeneration, Combat Prayer, Energy Orb...

Within the same class, the builds are of course even more similar.

People run extremely similar CP allocations.

There just isn't that much variety to pick from. Sure, if you do play purely solo, then you can do whatever you want, but the moment you start playing with other people, you get locked into having to play these exact same builds as everyone else.

There's just too many skills that are clearly better than any other skill. There's too little situational difference between skills. Outside AoE vs single target, there are very few if any cases where a particular skill is great in a particular situation, but not so good in another situation.

CP is really just fluff. It's trivial to calculate the best allocation for CPs. There's no reason at all to take anything but that one bests allocation for stamina/magicka/healing/DPS/sustain.

So yeah. I kinda wish the game had more variety. Right now I find it hard to really enjoy doing those exact same rotations as everyone else in the exact same rhythm.

Luckylancer

ESO can not pace with PoE when it comes to build diversity. God should develope ESO for that.

If you play PvE you are right. The best staff is obvious. It may vary for raid leader tho.

PvP build may vary as well but not too much.

Younare right about CP but I dont want any other CP rework after my perfectly fine end game chracters had to grind for exp!

tzaeru

Luckylancer wrote: »

ESO can not pace with PoE when it comes to build diversity. God should develope ESO for that.

True that, and of course ARPGs are not MMORPGs, and the audiences are a bit different. Which is fine.

Luckylancer wrote: »

Younare right about CP but I dont want any other CP rework after my perfectly fine end game chracters had to grind for exp!

Yeah would kinda suck to get another CP rework soon after the last one. <.<

Firstmep

As someone who also plays both games, it's true Poe has more build options, but there is a clear cut meta there too just like Eso.
If you go poe ninja you can see that the same meta builds make up the vast majority of the endgame player population.
The main difference is that GGG is comfortable nuking the most op stuff from orbit without giving a f about the consequences.

tzaeru

Firstmep wrote: »

As someone who also plays both games, it's true Poe has more build options, but there is a clear cut meta there too just like Eso.
If you go poe ninja you can see that the same meta builds make up the vast majority of the endgame player population.
The main difference is that GGG is comfortable nuking the most op stuff from orbit without giving a f about the consequences.

There's a lot more builds that are good enough to do any content comfortably with than there is in ESO. Of course people will optimize to no end, and there will be meta builds that very slightly overcome every other build, but, in ESO, the meta builds are just too strong. You're gimping yourself if you choose to not pick the same skills and same stat distributions.

Another thing with PoE is that different players will put different amounts of survivability, mobility, raw DPS and so on in. You don't really do that much in ESO.

But yeah, I don't really mean to say that ESO needs to be like PoE.

Just saying that after playing a game with so much more variety to how you can play it, playing ESO feels one-dimensional right now. I'm just spamming the exact same skill rotations in the exact same way as every other healer.

YandereGirlfriend

Ever since the CP 2.0 system came out I've had the same critique.

The CP stars simply do not provide enough unique and viable gameplay options - either the options do not exist or, if they do, they are so absurdly under-powered compared to the meta stars that you are engaging in a flagrant bout of self-nerfing if you actually select them.

Better balancing of existing stars and more creativity when introducing additional stars would begin to address this problem.

Chelo

tzaeru wrote: »

Heya,

So first I do want to say that overall ESO is a great game, I've put some hundreds to it, paid for ESO+, absolutely no regrets there.

But.

After recently binging on Path of Exile, I just have hard time actually enjoying playing my characters in ESO anymore. It just feels that all characters use the same sets, the same skills, same stat distributions.

Say, if you play stamina DPS, 8 out of 10 of your skills are very likely to be exact same as any other stamDPS. Your sets are likely to be the same, depending on if you've yet farmed the BiS items, or if you're using cheap overland sets. If you play a healer, my favorite, well again, your skills are mostly the same. You have a little bit more variety than DPS, but every healer runs Illustrious Healing, Radiating Regeneration, Combat Prayer, Energy Orb...

Within the same class, the builds are of course even more similar.

People run extremely similar CP allocations.

There just isn't that much variety to pick from. Sure, if you do play purely solo, then you can do whatever you want, but the moment you start playing with other people, you get locked into having to play these exact same builds as everyone else.

There's just too many skills that are clearly better than any other skill. There's too little situational difference between skills. Outside AoE vs single target, there are very few if any cases where a particular skill is great in a particular situation, but not so good in another situation.

CP is really just fluff. It's trivial to calculate the best allocation for CPs. There's no reason at all to take anything but that one bests allocation for stamina/magicka/healing/DPS/sustain.

So yeah. I kinda wish the game had more variety. Right now I find it hard to really enjoy doing those exact same rotations as everyone else in the exact same rhythm.

ESO PvE and ESO PvP are basically 2 different games. If you play PvE there's clearly the "best in slot", but if you play PvP, you build whatever work for you. And nobody will question your PvP build because if it works, it works.

PvP is very personal, you won't find a BiS build there. Whatever work for you, not necessarily will work for other people and vice-versa.

Djennku

Builds are player-created. They do not come with the game. In ESO there are 500+ item sets, plus all the skill lines, weapon types, play styles, etc, and infinite possibilities for builds to be created. It's all up to players putting stuff together and testing it out.

Red_Feather

I just made a post about how I think having the dual profession system that guild wars had would be great. Even though guild wars is over 15 years old it had such a crazy amount of build diversity and people would come back to login just from them adding a new skill to the game. Anyone play guild wars? What a magic time it was. And the skill system was based on magic the gathering!

Chelo

Djennku wrote: »

Builds are player-created. They do not come with the game. In ESO there are 500+ item sets, plus all the skill lines, weapon types, play styles, etc, and infinite possibilities for builds to be created. It's all up to players putting stuff together and testing it out.

Not for PvE... PvE is basically a math game and when people figure it out, that's it, there's no room for discussion until the next patch.

Luke_Flamesword

ZOS really should buff a lot of crappy sets. We can have good overland sets like Briarheart or Mother Sorrow, so why not have more of them? What about dungeon sets?

Oh, right, I forgot that with many good sets it will be hard to push new meta gear with every DLC...

colossalvoids

Not even poe, even after diablo 2 it's hard going back to eso.

Mythreindeer

I always felt like I was just chasing the build around the tree in PoE. The map system got boring quickly and combat was meh. Game performance was atrocious as well. No perfect game I suppose.

tzaeru

Mythreindeer wrote: »

I always felt like I was just chasing the build around the tree in PoE. The map system got boring quickly and combat was meh. Game performance was atrocious as well. No perfect game I suppose.

Yeah, I burned out of PoE once again. It's fun in a few month long bites, and I only ever play it on HC anyhow. But the mapping gets extremely burdensome pretty fast.

ESO has an amazing world to explore and so much stuff to discover that I don't feel like I've yet touched even half of the game world. I also love many of the boss fights and dungeon mechanics.

Right now I just feel.. bored.. when actually engaging in combat. So simplistic, and so little variety.

tzaeru

Djennku wrote: »

Builds are player-created. They do not come with the game. In ESO there are 500+ item sets, plus all the skill lines, weapon types, play styles, etc, and infinite possibilities for builds to be created. It's all up to players putting stuff together and testing it out.

This isn't really true, it's rather a consensus. You absolutely must meet certain performance goals to be a successful member in veteran dungeons and trials. And to meet these goals, you more or less have to go with specific sets and skills that everyone else is also using.

There's really a major problem with how strongly ESO pushes you to maximize certain simple attributes. Take, for example, Mother's Sorrow. Almost every magicka build runs that.

The root problem is that every stat that an item like Mother's Sorrow or Julianos or so has, boils down simplistically to a single stat. The conversion of critical to DPS, magicka to DPS and spell damage to DPS is linear and it doesn't matter what enemy you're fighting, how you're fighting, what skills you use the most, etc.

Mother's Sorrow, Julianos, etc - they're all just sets that give you +% damage and that's it. They have a single stat, and you maximize that single stat. That's why there's so little variance.

Critical is a fluff stat. Most stats are just direct conversions into damage, no exponential ramp up, no matter what enemy you fight, no relation to what skills you use..

That's the root problem. There are too few cases where you could argue, "yes I might be doing less damage over the whole dungeon, *but* in these particular fights X, Y and Z I am doing more" or "yes this would be slightly less damage if I used the standard skill rotation, but since I swapped skill X to skill Y, I actually get more damage by using this other set".

lolo_01b16_ESO

You can try running support sets if you feel that normal setups are too boring for you. Some of those add a noticable difference to how the game feels. Additionally in my experience most raid leaders are very happy when you tell them that you prefer to use a set like martial knowledge instead of the common selfish setups with mothers sorrow, medusa, siroria and similar sets.

Everest_Lionheart

lolo_01b16_ESO wrote: »

You can try running support sets if you feel that normal setups are too boring for you. Some of those add a noticable difference to how the game feels. Additionally in my experience most raid leaders are very happy when you tell them that you prefer to use a set like martial knowledge instead of the common selfish setups with mothers sorrow, medusa, siroria and similar sets.

It’s even better when you can hit hard I. Those support sets as well. I run a CatCro that can hit 90K and a ZenDK that hits 85K. Catalyst these days in optimized groups goes on a tank now freeing up Necro to go full DPS. The only time I run catalyst now is on suboptimal groups or teaching runs to boost the group DPS. I also run catalyst when I use group finder as well.

People are also starting to run Zen on other classes as well. ZenCro and ZenDen can hit harder than ZenDK and can still keep max stacks if the player specs accordingly. My raid teams prefer that option actually. ZenDen for vCR3 and ZenCro in vRG, not a DK in sight other than a tank.

Everest_Lionheart

Chelo wrote: »

Djennku wrote: »

Builds are player-created. They do not come with the game. In ESO there are 500+ item sets, plus all the skill lines, weapon types, play styles, etc, and infinite possibilities for builds to be created. It's all up to players putting stuff together and testing it out.

Not for PvE... PvE is basically a math game and when people figure it out, that's it, there's no room for discussion until the next patch.

There is plenty of wiggle room without BiS gear. You can put together virtually any combination of the current and former meta DPS sets and still do enough damage to clear most vet content in the game outside of a handful of hard modes. What doesn’t really change though is the skill setup 80% of your skills pretty much never change in this game. It comes down to basically 2 flex spots that are situational for scenarios where you need and extra shield or heal or the occasional interrupt.

And then you have certian requisite skills on your bar like trap/channel, orb/degen (or maybe both), destro/meteor unless Necro or Warden. Sorc has less flexibility because of pets. Spamable is also situational, maybe it’s a class spamable, maybe it’s force pulse or crushing, maybe it’s ele weapon, or maybe it’s a dot build. Scalding rune also seems to make its way into every build these days because dots are king and make the world go round.

Sets don’t really matter. Build diversity suffers from a lack of choices in the skill department. For most skills half the morphs are useless. We need more options there to keep things interesting.

washbern

As per Zos, the CP 2.0 was a first step towards reworking their combat system and while the results are not tremendous, they're still there. For example, magicka now has a few very nice sets to play around with like Bahsei, diamond victory, mechanical acuity siroria, medusa and mothers sorrow. This, not to mention we can now use swords and daggers as well as staves. Look at mag state same time last year and it was much worse.

I am not defending anything or saying that the options arent limited, just saying that we can see zos making changes and there is legitimate hope for the future state of the game

Reverb

Djennku wrote: »

In ESO there are 500+ item set

And 90% of them are utter garbage, and another 5% are mostly garbage.

Everest_Lionheart

Reverb wrote: »

Djennku wrote: »

In ESO there are 500+ item set

And 90% of them are utter garbage, and another 5% are mostly garbage.

Have to water down the loot pool you know otherwise we would all have BiS gear in about 2 days 🤣

alberichtano

Sometimes ESO makes me think of old man Ford.

"You can have our car in any color, as long as it is black!"

"You can play ESO any way you want, as long as you play according to META!"

:P

SkaraMinoc

I agree. Path of Exile was my game before Rocket League and I have thousands of hours in both.

PoE is much better than ESO for build diversity and the number of viable, competitive builds is much more than ESO.

I'm also looking forward to Diablo 2 remaster

Sephyr

Reverb wrote: »

Djennku wrote: »

In ESO there are 500+ item set

And 90% of them are utter garbage, and another 5% are mostly garbage.

Or will be in future patches.

MudcrabAttack

tzaeru wrote: »

Say, if you play stamina DPS, 8 out of 10 of your skills are very likely to be exact same as any other stamDPS. Your sets are likely to be the same, depending on if you've yet farmed the BiS items, or if you're using cheap overland sets.

If what you're after is "viable", like assuming 5%-10% less DPS than max is ok, that's not really the case anymore

You can usually find a few class skills to slot, and a magic skill or two, magic ultimates work well now, elemental glyphs like fire, then try on bow/bow, 2h/2h, 2h/DW, 2H/bow, Whatever/ Maelstrom Staff, it all can crank out around 90kdps. Wear zaan, wear thrassian stranglers if you can get a bunch of kills, the new kilt + a single slimecraw piece, yesterday's meta, whatever you want, brp stuff, Vateshran hollows stuff, maelstrom stuff, dsa, (Asylum stuff still seems iffy for single target), you can usually find a way to hit 90k with any of it

Syrpynt

Chelo wrote: »

... PvE is basically a math game and when people figure it out, that's it...

Everyone! Welcome to Elder Test-Dummies Online.

Where people will kick you from a group in a normal dungeon unless you are pulling 30k on your tank character "because my buddy in my guild does it all the time for us."

StarOfElyon

Luke_Flamesword wrote: »

ZOS really should buff a lot of crappy sets. We can have good overland sets like Briarheart or Mother Sorrow, so why not have more of them? What about dungeon sets?

Oh, right, I forgot that with many good sets it will be hard to push new meta gear with every DLC...

I said that too. There's no reason to have weak sets in the game. ZOS should look at what's strong and bring everything up to that level.

tzaeru

Everest_Lionheart wrote: »

Sets don’t really matter. Build diversity suffers from a lack of choices in the skill department. For most skills half the morphs are useless. We need more options there to keep things interesting.

Yeah, it'd also be cool if your sets, skill choices and so on had some synergy, where wanting to use a specific set works better with specific skills. But that's not really the case. The sets mostly don't modify your skill choices or playstyle (aside of a few exceptions), rather they're just there to maximize either solo or group DPS. It becomes a simple flat damage calculation.

Chelo

Syrpynt wrote: »

Chelo wrote: »

... PvE is basically a math game and when people figure it out, that's it...

Everyone! Welcome to Elder Test-Dummies Online.

Where people will kick you from a group in a normal dungeon unless you are pulling 30k on your tank character "because my buddy in my guild does it all the time for us."

Well like it or not, that's PvE... Just figure the math and execute it. That's how high level end game PvE works.

Metrics revolve around the pros, not around the casuals. ZO$ nerf/buff stuff based on High Skill Players performance. That's how most games works, because high skill players set an example of what can be done with the optimal circumstances.

And I'm assuming high skill players know PvE mechanics even better than their real life jobs, so they will be pulling the highest possible damage without dying, every single time.

ResidentContrarian

Make a hyrbid, you will enjoy the game more if you're bored.

And before anyone says "but hybrids are bad" there is no content in the game my templar and DK ones haven't completed.

Granted, using hybrids has accumulated over 150 gold staves and an unknown amount of gear that gets sidelined every patch because of overall balance shifts...

Stevie6

The Devs need to put a disclaimer on ESO. It's really only for those individuals that have the finger dexterity and weaving down to a science in order to do greats amount of damage per second. I'm a disabled, low scrub solo player without any hope of doing sustainable dps. The old magsorc pet build pre Morrowind worked for individuals such as myself in the past along with the OLD Iceheart set.

I do find other games like GW2 more entertaining..better QOL ie, flying, underwater activities, etc. I have a problem with my hands not working and at best trying to get my fingers to function at a faster pace. The other problem I'm running into are the skills not going off as well as heavy attacks with the lightning staff. The server is just so laggy. GW2, I don't have a server lag issue. The skills fire off and no problems. So, it makes me think there is a hardware or software issue that exists within the ESO server. The devs response is always the same...IT"S YOU. lol.

I've been in ESO since 2017 and I do looked a value, entertainment, and overall game balance of a product and ESO has hit a wall with me. They aren't raising the floor for the casual, low scrub disabled player at all. This last patch has done nothing to raise the floor except lower it to the basement level for me. If ZOS wants money from the casual player base and keep casual players, they should consider three different server modes: Easy, Normal, and Hard (including hard mode). That way everyone can enjoy what they want to do and still go into higher level content..just to get thru it. I would love to do "higher level content" but that would mean a continual carry and that wouldn't be fair to anyone.

Maybe ESO isn't for me. I might take another long break from the game to see any reasonable changes...like more damage from skills and item sets...that's a QOL issue. It's not learn to play, get good, or practice weaving. I've been around long enough (retiree) to know what I can do. Sorry for the wall of text..just get frustrated sometimes.