Core Combat Values: The Flaws of "Play as You Want"

Stamicka

Recently, we were given some insight into the core values of ESO's combat system. While some of these values can be beneficial to casual play, they are very detrimental to competitive play. I'd like to discuss the downsides of ESO's "Play the Way You Want" value and it's impact on mastery and competitive play.

The full post I am referencing: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/624269/eso-developer-deep-dive-core-combat-values/p1

Too Much Choice is Not Always a Positive Thing
The first thing I want to address is Wheeler's statement about playing as you want:

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Play The Way You Want
We strive to provide freedom and flexibility that allow you to transform your character fantasy into a gameplay reality. We value diversity of choice and playstyle with abilities, weapons, and armor. Some combinations of these tools are more effective than others, but every character should have the capacity to protect their group, mend allies, or devastate foes.

• Wear any combination of light, medium, and heavy armor
• Slot abilities from any skill line you've discovered
• "Deck building" through a selection of abilities, items, Champion Points, etc.

Years ago when I first gained an interest in PvP, I asked my friend how I should get started. The answer was pretty simple: I was told to craft light Julianos, a few pieces of Magnus, and then buy arcane Willpower jewelry. This build was easy to acquire, effective, and simple. The champion point system was also easy to understand. Since I was a magicka sorcerer, I needed to focus on increasing magic element damage and magic sustain. Lastly, wearing at least 5 pieces of light armor was the obvious choice for my needs. This build even worked well for PvE with a slight change of skills. Making builds felt intuitive and bad choices were obvious.

In modern ESO, things are far more complicated. You probably need a mythic, the amount of sets to choose from is massive, there are more traits to worry about, and you can use any combination of armor weights. Even as a long-time player, returning from a break feels overwhelming and discourages me from participating in PvP cause of how many options there are. It is also no longer clear when you are making a bad build choice. Giving players so many options also gives them many ways to shoot themselves in the foot. The massive amount of choices can make it overwhelming for new players to get their foot in the door. It is also very easy for players to make a build choice that ends up gimping them in PvP which will make the experience worse for them. While some level of build customization is good, there is also value in simplicity. Making builds should be intuitive and relatively easy for any player to do (as it was in the past). If you want to increase participation in PvP and competitive PvE, it needs to be easy to get your foot in the door with a build.

Balance Issues
Balance issues are exacerbated by the "Play as You Want" value. It is difficult to balance a game with so many build and playstyle choices. Additionally, the lack of well-defined roles creates stale metas and a high time to kill.

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

every character should have the capacity to protect their group, mend allies, or devastate foes.

Many current issues within the game stem from this statement. In PvP, healers are very tanky and difficult to kill and many damage builds have over 30k health and can slot restoration staves to stack heals (as seen in ball groups). With this system, you end up with the majority of builds having excellent healing, good mitigation, and enough damage to still get kills (essentially all 3 roles within one character). While on a basic level this can be a good thing, it has been taken too far in the current state of PvP, leading to drawn out and boring fights.

Decreased Skill Expression
Playing as you want creates an environment where player skill is secondary to build choices. This is bad for both new players and veteran players. It also goes against the "Mastery" value that Wheeler mentions. The level of build customization currently in the game blurs the lines between a skilled player and a well-built player. Well-built players can triumph over a skilled player if the difference in builds is significant enough. This makes it difficult for new players to gauge their skill level and identify areas of improvement. It also discourages competitive/veteran players from playing since their time dedicated to improving their skill feels meaningless when builds matter more. In PvP environments, players should have close to equal footing (this was the case in the earlier days of the game when builds were simpler). This ensures that skill is the main deciding factor of a fight which makes improving your skill feel meaningful.

Paradoxical Homogenization on the High End
For players who like to play the most effective or optimized build as possible (disgarding the fun value), the game has become more homogenized and stale than ever. So why is this true if there is more choice than ever? Wheeler himself states:

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Some combinations of these tools are more effective than others

This is why the game has become more homogenized for the most optimized players. While there is a freedom to play however you want, some choices are vastly better than others. With the introduction of hybridization, I find myself using many of the same skills on every build because they happen to be the best option available. Let's look at templar as an example. In the past, magplar had some strengths that stamplar did not and vice versa. For a long time, the lack of a good heal over time was a big issue for magplar. This fundamentally changed how magplar was played compared to stamplar, and it made the Templar class feel like two different classes. Now, you can just slot vigor on any build since it is probably the best heal over time available. This completely takes away the need to compromise. The drawback here is that now there is only one best way to play a class: the hybrid way. When you take away the need to compromise, players will gravitate towards the well-rounded best option. Unfortunately, this has basically cut the number of classes in half. The choice is basically an illusion at this point.

How to Improve
Build choices should be meaningful and well balanced with each other. let's say a player is looking for a set that allows them to sustain both their magic and stamina, they may come across Amberplasm: Adds 245 Magicka Recovery, Adds 245 Stamina Recovery, Adds 245 Health Recovery and Wretched Vitality: While in combat, applying a Major Buff or Debuff to a target grants you 260 Magicka and Stamina Recovery for 15 seconds. While in combat, applying a Minor Buff or Debuff to a target grants you 130 Magicka and Stamina Recovery for 15 seconds.

These sets are poorly balanced with each other and a veteran player would see that wretched is a far better choice. Wretched can be single barred, gives more recovery, and can easily have 100% uptime. Amberplasm grants health recovery, but this doesn't matter in PvP anymore. There is not a meaningful choice to be made here, the player should just choose wretched vitality. Instead more sets should be designed with built in drawbacks and benefits. For example, New Moon Acolyte gives more damage than Hundings Rage, but at the expense of sustain. Here there is an actual meaningful choice to be made. A player could choose the option that better fits their playstyle. Designing sets with both benefits and drawbacks (like New Moon) is better for both balance and build diversity.

Conclusion
This is not to say that all aspects of "Play the Way You Want" are a bad thing. Some level of build customization is a good thing. However, when there are 100s of sets in the game with customizable traits and weights it starts to become a detriment. Additionally, if you want players to truly be able to build how they want, build choices NEED to be better balanced with each other.

Hurbster

It should be 'Play as you want as long as you play how you want the way that we want you to play how you want'.

Kusto

"Play as you want" only applies if you're playing solo. In group content if you wanna be competitive you gotta play how everyone else is playing.

Supreme_Atromancer

Play how you want is a fantastic design principle. I disagree that its a problem in itself, or it can't coexist with mastery.

The problem is that soooo much of the design space is soooo ridiculously underpowered.

Which rewards spreadsheet design and punishes trying to build to intuition.

Space should be left for mastery, AND failure, but there DOES need to be bounding.

McMasterx

Hurbster wrote: »

It should be 'Play as you want as long as you play how you want the way that we want you to play how you want'.

"You can have any color truck you want, so long as it's black."

VaranisArano

I think "Play the way you want" flies out the window once you do competitive content, whether that's PVE or especially PVP.

Once you get competitive, you've got to pick what makes you effective. Ironically, this means that most of the sets/possible builds are junk, and you end up with relatively limited choices and strategies in both PVE and PVP.


I'll disagree a bit on the skill vs builds factor. Maybe I'm just bad, but I've never been able to slap on a meta PVP build and perform up to snuff. I need practice before I can make the build work for me. No way could I just put on a new build and take on a skilled PVPer without practice unless they were hilariously unoptimized. So I think there's still skill expression.

Baconlad

I don't know. I feel like I've been able to play as I want.

When I first started I imagined a Magic templar focused on sun magic. I went all the way to craglorn back in 2014 before I realized I couldn't solo anything anymore, and back then finding groups for craglorn content was impossible. Also everyone told me dark flare was poop in dungeons. So I slotted jabs and became a solo god over night. I wasn't happy so I played around with multitudes of builds, including a blazing shield tank, I got bored of PvE and right after wrothgar went full PvP. Swapping from ur common sweeps based magplar to blazing shield frequently.

During morrowind I didn't even finish the quests, I stayed in cyrodiil until summerset launched and I attempted to bring my dark flare build back and MAN did it work in PvP....I was dropping 25k hammers of angry angel dust down on players. But it still sucked in PvE.
I made it my only build for years until....

The nerf hammer came down on snipe spammers right before elsweyr. they couldn't fix snipe desync, so they nerfed the dogs crap out of it. And in order to hide the change...they nerfed wrecking blow and dark flare...so I quit, salty and enraged after two months into EW.

I put my aging PC in its box and almost two years later at the end of markarth I came back on Xbox. Made myself a promise, that I'd use dark flare and not care about the haters. But I stayed in PvE just requesting through everything again, I still have to do elsweyr and aldmeri quests...

Then oakensoul dropped...and I got back into dungeons and perfecting my dark flare I don't care setup in PvE dungeons. And while it's not taking home any awards, I'm only about 7k DPS loss from using the new and terrible sweeps. Dark flare is actually a decent spammable for ranged templar in PvE now!! And I get to use my lazy one bar build just to hit more dark flares!

In Cyrodiil, which as of late I've been in much more, I'm not doing to bad! Played like a ganker I'm able to smackdown most players before they can react.

In both PvE and PvP I'm finding myself able to play almost all the content in the game. I pull normally three times the kills as deaths in BGs, I'm killing tons in cyrodiil between deaths (I struggle in NB and tank fest IC though...) and I'm able to pull 70k dps on a trials dummy. Completed veteran hardmodes I had never completed before. All on the build and using the skills I ENJOY using...

I understand some may not have this experience, but I think the threshold for success in this game is much lower than the playerbase want you to believe it is.

We're told that if you dont kill five players while tower camping then ur build "doesn't work" or if ur not running the same build that progression trials players are running than you aren't doing it right, or if in a BG you die once you suck...all that is wrong, you don't need to be the bees knees to play even the toughest content in the game...play what you want, there will always be those who try to tell you not to. But since comming back to the game I've been rather happy with the game...other than the recent light attack and dot duration nerfs...those were bad...

Everaen

Unfortunately, when it comes to video-gaming and customizable builds, there will always be a gear/build/skills/etc. that are objectively better for the majority.

That puts a conundrum on the player. Do you dogmatically pursue the META, or do you pursue whatever you personally find entertaining. Sometimes the two align, for sure, and that is a happy place for those players.

People complain about the game being too easy or too homogenized. These people most likely are chasing a META that they don't find entertaining. There are countless builds and ways to play. Many of them would actually make the game more difficult for the player. Some of them will be close enough to the META (let's say within 5-10%) that you could still have fun and be competitive.

If you like a more difficult game, maybe scrap the META chase, and just slot abilities and gear that you enjoy using.

Maybe, as an exercise, for a time on a particular character, just slot some gear that has a flashy or visually cool 5pc bonuses and cool Monster set, and forget the META abilities that give you all the META passives and only slot abilities that are fun to press -- maybe they go boom, or make you zoom, or whatever floats your boat.

Just play that way for a bit. See if you have any fun having to sweat a little bit with fun gear/abilities, versus performing the same META rotation with the META skills/gear that every META YouTuber advises.

jaws343

Arguably, deciding to do challenging group/pvp/arena content is playing how you want. Even when playing in such content requires more refined builds. You are making the choice to do that content and take on whatever requirements that content entails for your build. Play how you want let's you also just not do that content, and run whatever flavor build you want, and likely, that flavor build is perfectly fine when you are doing all that other content.

For example, I have been running, effectively, the same build since Elswyr released, with a few monster set/mythic exceptions. Is it Meta, nope, not at all (maybe for solo play it is, but definitely not group). But I am clearing vet dungeon/trial content just fine on it. Pushing trifectas? Absolutely not, but also, I am not running with groups attempting to do those challenges. I am effectively playing how I want. If I wanted to push for trifectas, I'd put together a more optimized build.

Alchimiste1

Supreme_Atromancer wrote: »

Play how you want is a fantastic design principle. I disagree that its a problem in itself, or it can't coexist with mastery.

The problem is that soooo much of the design space is soooo ridiculously underpowered.

Which rewards spreadsheet design and punishes trying to build to intuition.

Space should be left for mastery, AND failure, but there DOES need to be bounding.

what are you even saying ?

MEBengalsFan2001

Players need to find what works for them period. If I'm running around in all light armor and killing players in PVP than yes my build is working. I should know I'm squishy from a lack of resistance but I should do well with my damage given offensive stats from wearing all light armor.

AD_ThisIsTheWay

In regards to PVP - I think the concept of 'play as you want' is tricky given the types of pvp systems that ESO has developed so far. In massive group campaigns, or BGs... it is hard to 'play as you want' while simultaneously doing well. In campaigns, you are forced into situations where you need to survive in a 1vx situation. In Bgs... you are constantly facing people with meta builds using dark convergence + Colossus, plaguebreak, vicious death... etc. These types of games force you into some type of meta in order to have any chance to stay alive and get kills.

I feel like if we had a new intimate PVP game mode... a tournament system or something that allowed for 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 dueling modes... this would free up so much room for people to get more creative with their builds and truly 'play as you want'. I am extremely curious to hear from ZOS why exactly they haven't pursued something like that yet.

If you want to hear more of my thoughts in regards to PVP and my tournament system idea... see my recent post in general: "My thoughts on ESO and the Future of PVP - 2023 and Beyond"

belial5221_ESO

It is play any way you want,jsut your effectiveness is a different story.They never said play any way you want and be top tier player as a stamsorc/tank/dual sword/woodelf.Atleast there's more freedom in builds that are effective,and not everyone needs same race/class/gear,even if all combos aren't meta,still pretty efective builds out there for most things.

heaven13

As others have noted, hybridization has reduced the viability and diversity of builds. Sure, I can still play a mag class with staves but not nearly as effectively. Unless I am a warden and HAVE to use ice staves.

Certain setups will always be more effective but when one class so far outperforms another at a role in a certain trial or one weapon so vastly outperforms others for damage, choice is very reduced if you still want to engage in harder content. There needs to be more balance and closer performance ability between weapons and between classes. You can have that diversity and still have choices and viability but, instead, we’ve just gotten closer and closer to one viable option for endgame and then “play as you want” for questing. Do better.

Paralyse

MMO: exists
Minmaxers: also exist

The two are inseparably linked. As long as there are game systems in an MMO, players will eventually find the best possible combination of gear, skills, and CP to perform their role at the highest possible level.

This was a much different game early on. Health/mag/stam were approximately 1/10 of their current values but overland content was more difficult.

Builds were very open -- you saw Sorcs running around in full heavy armor with bows and resto staff backbar, Nightblades in light+medium armor with sword and board front bar and DW backbar, etc.

It sounds fun. It was fun. Before long the players began to figure out the concept of builds, and things took off from there, but at least the playstyle was still more open. Ranged was ranged, melee was melee. The downside is there were an overwhelming number of possible builds that were just totally useless in dungeons and trials.

Nowadays everything has gone the opposite direction. There are a very small number of "correct" ways to set up your toon in PvE for a given group encounter; the other options range from slightly less desirable to completely non-viable. Pretty much everyone plays melee DPS builds with medium armor and some combination of staff, bow, DW, or 2H. Healers are invariably resto + ice/lightning staves; Tanks sword & board with ice staff backbar.

Despite the sheer number of sets in this game, when it comes to DPS, for instance, there are only a handful worth using in content. On the other hand, the problem goes the other way for healers and tanks, who have to carry around bags full of gear on a regular basis, or leave it in the bank and swap it out, where it takes up a ton of space.

The challenge for devs and ZOS is figuring out how to design content that supports a "play your way" style of building your toon but also allows advanced players to be challenged. In other words, if ZOS were to redesign trials so that you could complete them using toons running any build/sets/skills they wanted, players who spent the time optimizing and minmaxing their toons to achieve top performance would find the content laughably easy, and be disinclined to run it. However, the current situation punishes off-meta builds so heavily that the same content is not as accessible to more casual players or those who want to "play their way" because the content is tuned by ZOS relative to the meta.

MEBengalsFan2001

AD_ThisIsTheWay wrote: »

In regards to PVP - I think the concept of 'play as you want' is tricky given the types of pvp systems that ESO has developed so far. In massive group campaigns, or BGs... it is hard to 'play as you want' while simultaneously doing well. In campaigns, you are forced into situations where you need to survive in a 1vx situation. In Bgs... you are constantly facing people with meta builds using dark convergence + Colossus, plaguebreak, vicious death... etc. These types of games force you into a meta in order to have any chance to stay alive and get kills.

I feel like if we had a new intimate PVP game mode... a tournament system or something that allowed for 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 dueling modes... this would free up so much room for people to get more creative with their builds and truly 'play as you want'. I am extremely curious to hear from ZOS why exactly they haven't pursued something like that yet.

If you want to hear more of my thoughts in regards to PVP and my tournament system idea... see my recent post in general: "My thoughts on ESO and the Future of PVP - 2023 and Beyond"

One of my guild mates is running around in BG and in the campaign using his own build, not a meta and he is doing quite well. He would probably be in the top 10 if he only played the campaign but instead he does other things in the game as well.

AD_ThisIsTheWay

@MEBengalsFan2001

Oh I am not saying it isn't possible. This is what I do on the regular. I always try and make unique custom builds and see how they fare in pvp. That is how I have fun these days!

The only point I'm making is that there are a plethora of sets that don't have much use in these large scale battles. Especially proc sets that only affect a single target at a time (im thinking scavenging demise, plague slinger, unfathomable darkness, etc). But I think in a smaller, more intimate battle like a 2v2 or 3v3... that would open up a lot more room for success with unique custom builds, and it would broaden the range for sets that are viable.

Necrotech_Master

Baconlad wrote: »

I don't know. I feel like I've been able to play as I want.

When I first started I imagined a Magic templar focused on sun magic. I went all the way to craglorn back in 2014 before I realized I couldn't solo anything anymore, and back then finding groups for craglorn content was impossible. Also everyone told me dark flare was poop in dungeons. So I slotted jabs and became a solo god over night. I wasn't happy so I played around with multitudes of builds, including a blazing shield tank, I got bored of PvE and right after wrothgar went full PvP. Swapping from ur common sweeps based magplar to blazing shield frequently.

During morrowind I didn't even finish the quests, I stayed in cyrodiil until summerset launched and I attempted to bring my dark flare build back and MAN did it work in PvP....I was dropping 25k hammers of angry angel dust down on players. But it still sucked in PvE.
I made it my only build for years until....

The nerf hammer came down on snipe spammers right before elsweyr. they couldn't fix snipe desync, so they nerfed the dogs crap out of it. And in order to hide the change...they nerfed wrecking blow and dark flare...so I quit, salty and enraged after two months into EW.

I put my aging PC in its box and almost two years later at the end of markarth I came back on Xbox. Made myself a promise, that I'd use dark flare and not care about the haters. But I stayed in PvE just requesting through everything again, I still have to do elsweyr and aldmeri quests...

Then oakensoul dropped...and I got back into dungeons and perfecting my dark flare I don't care setup in PvE dungeons. And while it's not taking home any awards, I'm only about 7k DPS loss from using the new and terrible sweeps. Dark flare is actually a decent spammable for ranged templar in PvE now!! And I get to use my lazy one bar build just to hit more dark flares!

In Cyrodiil, which as of late I've been in much more, I'm not doing to bad! Played like a ganker I'm able to smackdown most players before they can react.

In both PvE and PvP I'm finding myself able to play almost all the content in the game. I pull normally three times the kills as deaths in BGs, I'm killing tons in cyrodiil between deaths (I struggle in NB and tank fest IC though...) and I'm able to pull 70k dps on a trials dummy. Completed veteran hardmodes I had never completed before. All on the build and using the skills I ENJOY using...

I understand some may not have this experience, but I think the threshold for success in this game is much lower than the playerbase want you to believe it is.

We're told that if you dont kill five players while tower camping then ur build "doesn't work" or if ur not running the same build that progression trials players are running than you aren't doing it right, or if in a BG you die once you suck...all that is wrong, you don't need to be the bees knees to play even the toughest content in the game...play what you want, there will always be those who try to tell you not to. But since comming back to the game I've been rather happy with the game...other than the recent light attack and dot duration nerfs...those were bad...

this is a great explanation of how things seemed (i had a similar experience myself)

my experience mainly differed in that i never had any breaks since launch in 2014, never looked up any build guides or anything and play my toons the way i want, many of my toons go several years (or more) without build changes

my main has been using brands of imperium and leeching plate, almost since the IC DLC was released and has basically had no build changes for close to 6 years, sometimes he does well and sometimes the balance changes hurt a bit

the change to proc dmg scaling hurt a bit, U35 dot changes hurt more, and valkyn skoria monster set still being broken wasnt helping either (i switched off valkyn skoria since that being bugged was worse than the other 2 things lol)

Paralyse

For all the hate non-proc Cyro earned, one thing it did accomplish was allowing players to focus more on builds and skills and less on being required to run the "meta" PvP sets to have any chance of success.

Personally, I found non-proc Cyro to be a lot more fun and creative, especially as someone who didn't have most of the PvP meta sets already set up and ready to roll.

But PvP is not immune from math. Just as in PvE, there will always be a most optimal way to kill an enemy, defend an objective or heal yourself and others.

WoW has had 2-player and 3-player arenas for years. An arena is a small enclosed area with some terrain features (bridges, rocks, pillars) -- the game ends when one side's team is dead, or after a time limit is reached. However, it's not immune from math either. Some classes and specs/builds simply have much better "toolkits" for PvP encounters (stuns, slows, interrupts, damage boosters/reducers, cleanses/purges, etc. And there are also combinations or "Comps" that have the best synergies and most optimal skills. So what happens is that invariably certain comps of 2 or 3 players will be much more powerful than others, and those comps will dominate gameplay at higher rankings (MMR.)

The same thing would happen in ESO in my opinion. 2 man or 3 man ESO Arenas would eventually be researched, analyzed, and optimal combinations of class/race/build/skill/gear would be determined that would synergize well and be overpowered. Before long, those players and builds would dominate the higher rankings, just like WoW, and so to climb in rank other players would begin copying them, resulting in .. cookie cutter builds. No matter how you get there, the end result is always the same.

AD_ThisIsTheWay

@Paralyse

I whole heartedly agree with you. I played WoW for years, and I had SO much fun playing in the end game arenas.

Your analysis seems correct. I am sure that eventually, people in these 3v3 or 2v2 game modes would start to find their 'cookie cutter' builds. But man... I am really curious to see WHAT kind of cookie cutters would be created. I still believe that in a more intimate game mode like that, there would be a lot more potential for different kinds of cookie cutters/team builds. If anything... it would just be a game mode with a completely different dynamic than what we've seen in BGs and Cyrodill so far.

At the end of the day, my main hope is to just see some fresh PVP content in the future. And I personally LOVED my end game experience on Wow in the Arenas. If WoW can do it... I don't see why ESO can't!

Paralyse

Don't get me wrong, I'd love Arenas in ESO. I'd probably do a lot more PvP if they existed. Despite the fact I never broke 1600 in 3's in WoW!

I also think it would be neat to see what develops, player-wise, as far as comps/builds.

Another cool thing WoW had in PvP that might work in ESO is PvP Island Expeditions, basically 3 vs 3 arenas but in large open PvE environments, with the presence of monsters that could be killed for "resources." Killing other players also provided resources. The team that was first to a certain number of resources "won" the match. Winning (or losing, too) gave you a number of coins to spend at special vendors in each instance that sold things that could increase your damage, healing, reduce damage taken, give you speed boosts, or provide special "proc" type effects like shooting flames, charging to and stunning enemies, providing a full group heal, etc. But each player could only carry 1, 2, or 3 of each item and they were gone on use, you had to go back to the start point to buy more, but you risk the other team gathering resources faster while you're off doing that.

In other words, imagine taking a zone, e.g. Vvardenfell, and carving out a "block" of it, fencing it off and turning it into a giant PvP arena for 3 vs 3 players, but with the same monsters already there and a lot of new "elite"-type monsters added that range in difficulty all the way up to world boss level. Then do this for 6 or 8 different zones, with unique monsters and such.

MasterSpatula

"In the spirit of Play-How-You-Want, we've made the game the most homogenous it's ever been."

Then again, this shouldn't be a surprise from a company whose every single attempt to "raise the floor and lower the ceiling" has widened the DPS gap--since they refuse to do the one thing that would actually accomplish this goal, hard or soft caps.

Blanket nerfs applied across the board will always affect the weaker more than they do the stronger. And tearing down the distinctions between classes and playstyles will alway result in less variety as everyone embraces exactly the same, the most powerful, builds and sets. It shouldn't be hard to understand either of these.

Quelindor

As a casual player just trying to play this game time to time since launch, i can say I never understand how this games work. Never could figured it out how to create builds. It is so hard to understand mechanics of this game with all those different stats and powers.
So as a result I couldn't get into this game never.
I feel like playing ESO a few times a year, and every time I start, I research a lot of things, look at sets, builds, discover builds that are close to the style I want to play. I do some builds. The reason why I want to play this game so much is because of this mentality to play it your way, but I don't think this game really achieves that. I can't live more than 3 seconds in any pvp area every time I play as I want to play myself. When I do a meta build, it only increases a little, but this game is so hard to play that I can never get into it completely, and after a while, my motivation completely disappears and I get into other games. I can say that I have played almost every mmorpg on the market. This was the game that challenged me the most after BDO. Whenever I come back to WoW it takes me a maximum of 1 hour to understand what's going on in the game. It is enough to read a 5-minute guide to understand what to do in New World. If I start Lost Ark right now, I can adapt without even having to read anything. The thing is, I'm not super in any of these games, and I'm not competitive in either pvp or pve. But at least I can play these two game styles enough to have fun on my own. When I play PvP, I feel like I can really give someone a hard time. When I play PVE I can show progression up to a point. But I've never been able to finish any DLC dungeon Veteran at ESO at any time in my life. In PvP, I could hardly do anything unless I played a meta build. Even when I played meta build I couldn't do enough to at least have some fun.
The mechanics of the game are really difficult, it is impossible to understand anything. All these different sets, different builds, I think it's a very good idea, and that's what got me most excited about this game. But it's so hard to figure out what to do that in the time I'm going to spend on it, I can work hard enough to really have a real-life skill.
For me, that's the gist of it. All these resistances, crits, damage, crit chances, penetrations, etc. make the whole game a huge mathematical problem and make it impossible to do anything on your own.

Supreme_Atromancer

Alchimiste1 wrote: »

Supreme_Atromancer wrote: »

Play how you want is a fantastic design principle. I disagree that its a problem in itself, or it can't coexist with mastery.

The problem is that soooo much of the design space is soooo ridiculously underpowered.

Which rewards spreadsheet design and punishes trying to build to intuition.

Space should be left for mastery, AND failure, but there DOES need to be bounding.

what are you even saying ?

I'm saying that if 90% of the sets out there are just noob traps, it makes it so that most of "play how you want" is going to result in woefully underpowered players. Meanwhile, sticking your nose to the spreadsheet will result in vastly more power and capability. That's poor design because it takes you out of the world, and rewards a very niche way of doing things.

I'm also saying (in terms of build) that intuition, or "playing to a power fantasy" should get you a good deal of power. Certainly not relegate you to dolmens and overland rp.

I think there *should* be room for mastery, and *some* room for failure of builds, too. But there's far too much as it stands.

If this isn't clearer, point out specifically what you're having trouble understanding.

Sarannah

ZOS themselves have opened a topic for this:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/624269/eso-developer-deep-dive-core-combat-values/p1

Everaen

What common "noob trap" sets do you feel noobs are drawn to? I'm trying to think of flashy but ultimately useless or detrimental sets that someone would spend time grinding and running around with?

Somehow I don't see how Amber Plasm vs Wretched Vitality is such a huge difference that an unknowing noob would be lost in la-la land using one versus the other. If they go into PVP and get wrecked with Amber, likely they'll watch some YouTubers, read some guides, and start making changes. If they go into PVP and have fun with Amber, doesn't matter really. Fun is fun, META or not.

I'd argue for gameplay, the gear doesn't matter as much as game knowledge. Walking into PVP or Vet PVE content unprepared and with really crappy gear can be a meat-grinder and very disheartening for players who aren't willing to adapt and learn.

Especially in PVP, there's a LOT more than gear that will discourage a "noob". Tanks, gankers, 1vX livelords... If they don't have a thick skin and some determination, they're probably not going to stick around anyway.

Amottica

Hurbster wrote: »

It should be 'Play as you want as long as you play how you want the way that we want you to play how you want'.

That is how play-as-you-want is intended to work. It has never meant that every playstyle and build would be good for every activity. One of the problems ESO build diversity faces is the exact same problem every MMORPG I have played faces.

Even in games with much fewer choices, I have seen players use the wrong gear for their build (tank gear on a healer) and skills out of order or just plain the wrong skills. Both of which lead to lower performance of the character. This is just magnified in ESO due to the sheer number of choices available to use.

jaws343

Amottica wrote: »

Hurbster wrote: »

It should be 'Play as you want as long as you play how you want the way that we want you to play how you want'.

That is how play-as-you-want is intended to work. It has never meant that every playstyle and build would be good for every activity. One of the problems ESO build diversity faces is the exact same problem every MMORPG I have played faces.

Even in games with much fewer choices, I have seen players use the wrong gear for their build (tank gear on a healer) and skills out of order or just plain the wrong skills. Both of which lead to lower performance of the character. This is just magnified in ESO due to the sheer number of choices available to use.

This is one thing I don't get about the play as you want "gotcha" stuff. Like, yes, of course some things are going to be far more successful as others at things. It always seems that the people complaining about that seem to think that a build with zero heals should be able to successfully heal a group.

Muizer

Right I think the OP is onto something. Or perhaps he's the umpteenth to be on to something but I only get it now

The slogan has been "play as you want", but what players actually want is "to play how they want in the best way they can" IMHO that means going back to and expanding on a finite selection of explicitly defined archetypical gameplay styles and then designing/balancing and advertising choices as clear steps towards or indeed away from the archetypes.
If people then want to make different choices, they should of course be allowed to diverge from beaten paths, but at least it will be diverging from a viable path, not seeking for the ever shifting 'needle in haystack' that only the most obsessed players have time and energy to figure out and declare the seasonal meta. It seems though that that might have been possible once, but if anything ZoS have moved away from it. And so now we have ended up with a community whose attitude toward endgame is either 'deterred casual' or 'burnt out meta chaser' lol.

Paralyse

Sometimes MMO devs can't win when it comes to "play it your way."

The classic WoW talent system worked sort of like CP in ESO. You had three "Trees" for each spec (e.g. a paladin had protection/tank, holy/healing, retribution/dps) and players got a point every time they gained a level, and could pick and choose any talents they wanted, unlocking more options by spending more points. It was in place until the end of Wrath.

This created some unique playstyles such as Shockadin (a Holy Paladin specced into mostly DPS / tank skills that could do decent DPS in PvP), ProtHoly (a tank with a large number of healer talents slotted, for big survivability), etc. Being able to draw from all 3 trees gave you the ability to have a DPS that could off-heal or off-tank, a healer that could throw down some DPS, a tank set up for AOE DPS to help burn down trash, etc. It was complicated a bit more for new players who had lots of options, some of them totally useless or highly situational, or that just didn't work at all or worked completely different from the tooltip.

Throughout Wrath the devs realized that most players in raids were running the exact same copycat builds (3/6/31 retribution, etc.) and decided in future expansions to scrap the planned talent system and only give players a choice of "here's 3 choices, pick 1" talent every 15 levels. They then aligned those talents to your spec, so that healers only had mostly healer talent choices, dps only had mostly DPS talent choices, and all players had at least one row with a crowd-control talent (stun, snare, silence, etc) since those abilities were no longer class-specific. Worse, the talents were all basically "variations on a theme" and didn't allow for anything really unique or creative or different.

For the next several years, the forums saw a lot of complaints about people who missed the old talent system and wanted it back, despite the fact 90-95% of those posters ran the exact same copycat builds as every other player. They talked a lot about how they felt like they had more choices. Blizzard's ill-thought-out answer was that they wanted to have "fewer choices" but make them "more meaningful." In other words, less talents, but more powerful in their effect. That didn't work either. Subsequent attempts at making "trees" (in Legion, and Battle for Azeroth) were secondary late-expansion addons that were very narrow in focus.

The latest patch before the current expansion just launched re-introduced something resembling the old talent system of Wrath and earlier, where players could once again spend points to unlock skills and branches, opening up further paths, although without quite as many options as the old system.

Most players proceeded to go to the guides and immediately look up precisely which combinations of talents were optimal for their given class and build, naturally, thereby vindicating the old adage "customers don't really know what they want, they just think they do."

In other words, even if ESO really opened up things again like they were at launch, and gave players a lot more freedom in playstyles and builds, many of the players would immediately run to look up which builds/gear/skills gave them the highest dps/healing/best tank toolkit, just like they do now; but modern ESO content isn't designed around that old system, and it could ironically make the game even more difficult for players who can't or don't want to study up on effective builds.

Jaraal

It’s actually a misnomer. Of course you can play as you want. It doesn’t mean that you’ll be any good, or effective at anything.