ZOS Needs to Admit Their Intention with Update 35 and be Honest

p4l4mu7

They were claiming all these changes are aimed to reduce skill gap but even a child could figure out if you nerf everything it applies to both experienced and newbie players and player gap is bigger than ever now. People were providing datas even if you are in top 1% some content are near impossible, vss hm portal for example. How does this increase accessibility when majority of the players can't complete them anymore.
It is obvious that their intention is to slow down combat as much as they can without putting cooldowns on skills after the previous backlash. For years Zos has been trying to improve server performance by taking features away from the game in the past they changed core healing skills nerfed them to ground to reduce their impact on server then they tried to introduce cooldown and now they are trying to slow down combat increasing dot uptimes so you don't cast them as often and these dots tick every two second so there isn't as much calculation for the server.
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[Edit for Bashing.]

Urvoth

Yep, seems like they've been gunning in the direction of scrapping down their game instead of just improving performance through server upgrades or other means. Clearly the new PC NA servers have improved performance, so why didn't they do that years ago and why haven't they upgraded the other servers yet?

Dagoth_Rac

But couldn't they have reduced server load and simplified combat rotations without gutting damage across the board and making content more intimidating, and likely scaring away more players? Have DoTs tick every 2 seconds but hit hard. Reduce Jabs from 4 hits to 2 hits but have each jab hit hard? Emphasize fewer "Actions Per Minute" but each action doing more damage seems like it would improve performance without making players, especially the low and mid tier players, feel weaker.

SeaUnicorn

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

But couldn't they have reduced server load and simplified combat rotations without gutting damage across the board and making content more intimidating, and likely scaring away more players? Have DoTs tick every 2 seconds but hit hard. Reduce Jabs from 4 hits to 2 hits but have each jab hit hard? Emphasize fewer "Actions Per Minute" but each action doing more damage seems like it would improve performance without making players, especially the low and mid tier players, feel weaker.

Exactly this! Flat damage on LA HA makes sense because less server computations. LA do less damage to reduce their impact on the parse - not a problem. Why do you nerf every single DOT then? Just adjust spammable and DOT damage to make up for loss of damage on LA/HA - nobody will complain.... Then adjust the HA sets to bring heavy attack damage to where it currently is and add HA damage reduction into battle roar passive to address grievances about HA builds in PVP. Boom everyone is happy.

Heals impact server performance? Well you can make heals abit more powerful and make them not crit - boom less server computations that do not impact anyone, because healers traditionally have low crit chance anyway, so if my heals will heal for more and not crit - I won't even notice, so long as my base HPS stays the same.

Cross-healing problem in PVP? Guess what, there is a PVP passive for it.

There are so many things you can safely take away without anyone noticing, why do you nerf damage while at it? I don't understand. And if you are upfront and honest about it - nobody will complain either. Why cover it?

Cyber10

It definitely seems that there are more motives than stated. It does not make sense to gut the game like this to help new players for an eight year old game.

FluffyBird

p4l4mu7 wrote: »

Bonest

Necromancer detected!

MidniteOwl1913

Yeah, I also think this is about performance. But I can understand why they might want to keep that under their hat if the alternative is the player base blaming ZOS for the increasingly laggy game and then insisting that they spend the money to upgrade the servers. I guess having the player base blame you for awful fun-killing changes is better.

Adernath

Urvoth wrote: »

Yep, seems like they've been gunning in the direction of scrapping down their game instead of just improving performance through server upgrades or other means. Clearly the new PC NA servers have improved performance, so why didn't they do that years ago and why haven't they upgraded the other servers yet?

The funny thing is they didnt improve the performance at all. These changes didnt improve the performance at all. It is worse than I have ever experienced (and I play since beta). Sorry ZOS if you don't revert these changes asap its the last nail in the coffin for this game to me.

Csleia

when theres nothing left to take away they'll just turn off the servers, same as every other cancelled mmo of old

neferpitou73

It's honestly just delusional at this point to think the servers can be improved by reducing calculations. They've tried so many of these band-aid solutions but the only meaningful improvement increase occurred when the server hardware was updated.

FrancisCrawford

The changes from 1-second to 2-second ticks were very blatantly to aid server performance.
ZoS made no attempt to disguise this fact.
And now they aren't making many of those changes, due to feedback.

While there is much to criticize ZoS for, I'm not sure the OP takes one of the better angles of attack.

Tannus15

Never attribute malice when incompetence will suffice.

ZoS have clearly stated their intentions with this patch, on multiple occasions. The only thing we can do is take them at their word.

The outcome of the testing on PTS strongly indicates that it's not meeting the stated goal of this update, but that doesn't mean that they had some other agenda, just that it didn't work the way they thought it did.

If they continue down this path in the face of what I consider to now be overwhelming evidence then something has gone very wrong.

Not every idea they have had this update is bad, not everything needs to be thrown out. Crystal weapon obviously needed some attention, I think stampede was too dominate in the PvE meta for too long.
There are lots of good changes here.

But the goal of lowering everyone's dps by 10% to 25% makes no sense to me at all.
The light attack nerf is fine. Push up spammable damage to compensate and reward people for using skills.
Leave heavy attack damage alone, particularly lightning staffs which there is a very common playstyle.
Make dots last longer to make rotations easier, sure. But why nerf their damage? Literally, let them do the same dps with an easier rotation. isn't that the goal in the first place?