Inconsistent game philosophy.

Vhozek

There is no way this game is supposedly friendly towards casual players. It has been nearly a DECADE since it was released and there are yet tooltips in the game explaining what something like Healing Taken and Healing Received even mean, why Flurry is a DoT and not a Direct Damage attack when it is very clearly dealing damage directly to its target and not as aftermath or splash damage.
But the stupidest thing of all is Crit Chance.
Why on Earth does an item give you 657 Critical Chance instead of 3% Critical Chance? The flat values are NOT friendly to casual players and I doubt veteran or hardcore players even like dealing with the unnecessary inconvenience.
ZOS really can't make the argument that it's a way for hardcore players to feel welcome as they have to carefully calculate the flat value instead when they do things like mess with light attack weaving to supposedly decrease the ceiling for casual players.

I can't think of other things off the top of my head that operate similarly as bad and further add to the inconsistency of this idea that ESO is trying to be "inclusive" to new or casual players. Can we please get some consistency here and better wording for things like "Direct Damage"? You could easily rename that to Instant Damage and it would make much more sense.
Editing text does not take dev time off of future content.
You don't even need to code a tooltip, you could probably just add text to skills saying "Scales with Healing Taken" and it's done. Over with.
What is the director doing?

kumenit_taeynav

id really like to have a dictionary somewhere easy to find in the help menu to define mechanic terms. i think itd also be really helpful to include the max value and the players current value along with which passives/buffs/sets make up the current value. if its something about an ability such as direct damage then it should also include a list of abilities from the players class and their weapon/guild skill lines. the dictionary should cover more than just combat mech terms but all mech terms such as for crafting or tales of tribute or whatever else.

id love to be able to read up on definitions of stuff like that and see a list of what uses the mechanic in question and then make changes to my build and how i play the game

Snamyap

Stats on pets and companions would also be greatly appreciated. And which buffs affect them and which don't.

Pepegrillos

Some of the inconsistencies tied to the design of the game run deep. [snip]

[edited for baiting]

BlueRaven

Pepegrillos wrote: »

Some of the inconsistencies tied to the design of the game run deep. [snip]

Well to be fair, the initial design for the combat system was not designed for that. But zos decided to just go with it.

It’s a shame, the combat system does so much harm to this game, but I guess there is no changing it now.

[edited to remove quote]

Braffin

You're completely right OP, it's a pity that one of the best combat systems ever created for a video game is rather inaccessible to a lot of players due to lack of in-game explanations.

Braffin

kumenit_taeynav wrote: »

id really like to have a dictionary somewhere easy to find in the help menu to define mechanic terms. i think itd also be really helpful to include the max value and the players current value along with which passives/buffs/sets make up the current value. if its something about an ability such as direct damage then it should also include a list of abilities from the players class and their weapon/guild skill lines. the dictionary should cover more than just combat mech terms but all mech terms such as for crafting or tales of tribute or whatever else.

id love to be able to read up on definitions of stuff like that and see a list of what uses the mechanic in question and then make changes to my build and how i play the game

Yeah, it would definitely be an improvement to have that information in-game.

I don't know if that will ever happen. In the meantime you could use sites like eso-hub to gather the information you're interested in.

UESP also has a fine build editor if you're interested.

phaneub17_ESO

Vhozek wrote: »

Why on Earth does an item give you 657 Critical Chance instead of 3% Critical Chance? The flat values are NOT friendly to casual players and I doubt veteran or hardcore players even like dealing with the unnecessary inconvenience.

So this system was adopted from other games like World of Warcraft back when they were originally going to make the game have power creep with vertical progression, adding Veteran Ranks periodically to slowly increase the draw of stronger stats with ever increasing values. A rating system works better than having an extra 1% per rank and could be easier managed in the long run. We started with VR10 the equivalent of 10CP, VR12 then VR14, and it stopped at VR16 when I guess they realized the playerbase really hated this system having to recraft or farm new gear and upgrading them.

Soarora

I still don’t know how to read critical chance or penetration. I do know resistance cap is like 33.5k or something… %s would be better with something showing what the PvE caps are.

CameraBeardThePirate

Soarora wrote: »

I still don’t know how to read critical chance or penetration. I do know resistance cap is like 33.5k or something… %s would be better with something showing what the PvE caps are.

The rule of thumb for crit chance is 2100 ~ 10% crit chance. It's still annoying to have to convert mentally all the time and should definitely be changed to % in all situations.

Braffin

Soarora wrote: »

I still don’t know how to read critical chance or penetration. I do know resistance cap is like 33.5k or something… %s would be better with something showing what the PvE caps are.

Maybe this guide can help you a bit.

There are also a few pen calculators around, for example this one.

A more in-depth explanation for crit chance calculations is available on uesp.

Yeah, a proper ingame source would definitely be helpful, but I doubt zos will ever implement it. Maybe we should collect all the available data here on forums as community project.

Necrotech_Master

yeah the crit chance is probably by far the most annoying

i think i use some addon which adds the actual % value on the tooltip, though it definitely doesnt work in all situations

penetration is a lot more simple to me, as its basically just ignoring that much of enemy armor (in terms of exactly how much % dmg increase, that i dont know, but if you ignore all of the enemy armor, it doesnt really matter does it now lol)

Agenericname

Soarora wrote: »

I still don’t know how to read critical chance or penetration. I do know resistance cap is like 33.5k or something… %s would be better with something showing what the PvE caps are.

They did add the advanced view in the character screen which does the damage resist conversion for you.

The character screen also converts crit chance. Neither do anything toward telling you what % a piece of gear is adding. You would need to either do the math yourself or slot it and see what it added. I agree, they could make that easier for folks.

In my opinion pen is even more complicated. The max value is pretty easy, but not everything is 18.2k. VMA, for example, is all over the place. Most things in vMA arent 18.2k. From memory, there are more in 12.Xk and below range than the 18.2k range.

I disagree about it being inconsistent though. It is consistantly convoluted.

Dojohoda

Imagine if the weather man said, "Daggerfall has a 657 chance of rain" instead of saying a 3% chance of rain.

Braffin

Dojohoda wrote: »

Imagine if the weather man said, "Daggerfall has a 657 chance of rain" instead of saying a 3% chance of rain.

It depends on the level of the rain then.