PTS Update 43 - Feedback Thread for Infinite Archive Updates

ZOS_Kevin

This is the official feedback thread for the Infinite Archive updates coming with Update 43. Specific feedback that the team is looking for includes the following:

• Did you see the two new fire and ice arenas? Did you enjoy the new visuals?
• Did you see the new Verses and Visions?
• Do you have any general feedback?

seecodenotgames

I entered on a new character and it looked the same as it did before. Obviously there's a way to choose the new arenas, but I've not found it yet. Maybe this could be more obvious.

Varana

seecodenotgames wrote: »

I entered on a new character and it looked the same as it did before. Obviously there's a way to choose the new arenas, but I've not found it yet. Maybe this could be more obvious.

Why do you think you can choose the new arenas? I would assume they come up randomly, like the others.

ZOS_Kevin

seecodenotgames wrote: »

I entered on a new character and it looked the same as it did before. Obviously there's a way to choose the new arenas, but I've not found it yet. Maybe this could be more obvious.

The new areas are random rolled during your playthrough in IA. So you may need to try a few times before you get it.

Dagoth_Rac

Can details of the new Visions and Verses be added to Natch Potes? Or to this thread? Were any of the existing Verses and Visions adjusted?

MafiaCat115

Hello, @ZOS_Kevin

I have a few questions/observations about IA class set auras that I hope can either be answered or noted.

1. Is it intended behavior to have it be that class weapon styles do not contribute to the class aura count for outfits? (Ex, chest, head, gloves, sword 1, sword 2 does not give the aura)
2. Similar question, is it meant to be that hiding a class style helmet using Hide Helmets subtracts that helmet from the total leading to the aura?
3. Are we going to get style pages for the new sets like Pyrebrand?
4. If we do not get style pages for the new styles, will we be able to choose what aura we want active for our outfits if we use style pages from the original array of class sets?
5. In the character select screen, the aura appears when you achieve it with style pages, but not with gear. Is it supposed to be one way or another for both of them?

I have asked similar questions before but have yet to hear about whether or not these observations are intended or not. Even just a confirmation that they are intended, being worked on, or are unintended would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for all that you do.

EDIT: I just tested the gear auras for the new sets. Templar (Aetheric Lancer), Necro (Corpseburster), and Nightblade (Umbral Edge) sets do not give any aura whatsoever when you equip five gear pieces. The new auras work on DK, Sorcs, Arcanists, and Wardens.

Virenic

Pretty disappointed that the new class sets have the same style (barring vfx) as the old ones. I was looking forward to the next batch of class styles.

prof-dracko

Was that one fire marauder ever nerfed? I've killed the other two a bunch but that one shreds me every time. If not I dread to think how unbalanced the new ones are.

spoqster

Welcome additions, but you're totally missing the mark in what IA needs.

We need two things more than anything else:

• Ability to save progress
• Ability to start at any previously cleared Arc

The first one is a crucial quality of life improvement for those who want to push how far they can get. Currently a proper IA run easily takes updwards of 10 hours. You just can't expect a player to play that in one sitting, so currently going for the leaderboard is realistically prohibited by the balancing. A shame. Imagine being able to start on a Monday evening and keep going every day throughout the week, playing 2-3h every evening until you reach your highest Arc. Fun!

The second one is geared towards medium to better players who consider Arc 1 as completely braindead and a very boring waste of time. These players still want to do the dailies and go into the archive for the intended 20-45 min time slots. Allow those players to start the Archive at a higher arc (any arc they've successfully cleared). This would need a good decision on what to do with the visions in such a case. My preference is to allow players to pick the respective number of visions at the beginning of the run and disable the leaderboard for runs that don't start at Arc 1. This would let this mode double as a testing playground for players to test their builds for later Arcs. Imagine being able to go into Arc 9 directly to test the build you came up with last night without having to go through all the previous Arcs, all while being able to do your daily. Fun!

IA has enormous potential for being a super fun game mode, and currently you're holding it back by making that super fun Arc 4-5 sweet spot hard and boring to access, and by making score pushing inaccessible to anyone but the most committed hardcore players that are willing to leave their pc or console on over night.

BerylBones

I'm having trouble finding the "Eye of the Infinite" achievement to purchase the new tool. It's not pulling up when I search for it, and I can't seem to see nested achievements to search further.

EF321

BerylBones wrote: »

I'm having trouble finding the "Eye of the Infinite" achievement to purchase the new tool. It's not pulling up when I search for it, and I can't seem to see nested achievements to search further.

The Infinite Archive account upgrade “Eye of the Infinite” can currently be previewed when it should not be.

BerylBones

EF321 wrote: »

BerylBones wrote: »

I'm having trouble finding the "Eye of the Infinite" achievement to purchase the new tool. It's not pulling up when I search for it, and I can't seem to see nested achievements to search further.

The Infinite Archive account upgrade “Eye of the Infinite” can currently be previewed when it should not be.

Oh thanks, I just read through the notes too fast.
The upgrade and tool does unlock on the template character, so I was having fun playing with it lol.

tonyaccount

I agree with everyone that says we need a save option. This thing has been in the game for almost a year and it's been by far the most requested thing everywhere I've looked. The time investment for a deep run is too much for most people, and a save option needs to be added sooner than later. We prefer sooner.

Other than that what I find disappointing is that in these threads nobody is bringing up the obvious elephant in the room, which is the vision (im)balance. Most visions are underwhelming, and others are gamebreaking. This creates a situation where the correct strategy if you want to go far, is to clear 1-2 arcs of and if you don't have at least 2 Focused Efforts, you should reset the instance and start over again. It's boring and stupid, but this is what poor balance causes.

Focused Efforts is by a landslide the best vision, and every deep run has 4-5 stacks of it. The only viable endgame strategy regardless of your class is to stack FE and spam Elemental Susceptibility and status effects. This strategy is very boring to play by the way, and feels very similar on every class. Basically you spam a free ranged skill that applies lots of status effects on target(s). It gets old quickly and kills the creativity from the game.

Infinite Archive needs elementary level fixes, not more Marauders and bosses. Here is a short list of vision changes required:

1. Focused Efforts needs to be heavily nerfed. Just buffing other visions isn't a solution here because many of them also buff your status effect damage. Buffing other things would only result in power creep and status effect spam still being the only viable strategy for a deep run, with the only difference being that it's even more powerful than before with all the buffs from other visions.

Focused Efforts is by any objective metric an extremely overperforming vision. Balance cannot exist with one vision being at least 3x as good as anything else. Anyone who is opposed to nerfing it, think about it again. Do you want to have a one-strategy meta or try out a bunch of cool fringe sets that you've always wanted to play with?

3. Attuned Enchantments must not work with Weakening glyph. The vision itself is fine and doesn't need to be nerfed otherwise, you just need to "blacklist" Weakening from it so the spell/weapon damage of bosses/marauders cannot be dropped to 0 with Torug's Pact/Heartland Conqueror build. Currently if you use this set-up and have 5 Attuned Enchantments, almost all bosses become ridiculously easy as they have 0 weapon/spell damage. That means you can take an unblocked heavy attack or 1-shot attack in the face, and it will do 0 damage.

3. The Gold and Exp gain visions need to be removed completely. They are the polar opposite of Focused Efforts. All I have seen is them cause negativity in people because they are completely useless and a waste of vision slots.

4. Most other visions need to be buffed a lot. The reality is that outside of a few gross offenders, most visions are simply lackluster. Either you get lucky and find one of the really good ones or you are dealing with leftovers. A good starting point would be nerfing Focused efforts by about 60% while also doubling the effect of most of these lackluster visions. Of course, looking at each one individually would be even better, but this would be a good quick fix to make the gameplay more diverse.

Additionally, the Dragonknight ability Magma Shell needs to finally be nerfed. All these ridiculous 30+ arc duo runs were made with Magma Shell cheese builds where one or both players in the group were Dragonknights with ultimate gain builds who can maintain nearly 100% Magma Shell uptime. I don't know why this has not been addressed.

Dragonredux

I’ll start by saying this is from someone who tested Arc 1 to Arc 3 solo.

Did you see the two new fire and ice arenas? Did you enjoy the new visuals?

Yes they look nice aesthetically, I like the Apocrypha variant of them. However, some of islands in ice arenas are kind off too spaced out personally.

Did you see the new Verses and Visions?
Yes, I personally encounter every Verses and Visions except Adaptive Athlete but I saw screenshot of it.

I’ll say of the new Verses they are at worst, ok at best (Grasping Limbs) to really good (Extravagant Elixirs and Orbiting Echoes).

As for Visions, I can see the potential for stuff like Adaptive Conqueror promoting holding your ultimate and combo-ing it off of things like the Strategic Reserve CP slottable. Apocryphal Emissary is neat giving another defensive buff at another stack while also switching the pet, although personally I think the second pet is better than the third.

Quickened Tinctures needs a buff for it to be worth taking. 1/2 seconds per stack is not worth it compared to other Visions. I suggest 2/4 or even 5/10 because there’s no potion currently besides maybe Immovable that’s warrants such a low reduction currently. In addition, the cost of making/potions if a player decides to spam it, and besides what’s the harm of having a little taste of power.

Do you have any general feedback?

The new added enemies and bosses (so far) aren’t too bad, I noticed you added the heavy attack indicator around your character whenever a Clannfear attempts to jump which is a nice change.

Fabled Mystic and Fabled Stormcaller aren’t too bad to deal with, I rank them on the same tier as Pyromancers, although the Lightning Flood AoE indicator could be better especially with all the Lightning Visions/Verses now.

Fabled Lightcaster are Druids on steroids. I personally think they shouldn’t get affected by their own immunity. Fabled Brewmaster’s Damage Reduction zone I can deal with by LoS-ing them but I feel their potion drink should be interruptible, because it’s kind of annoying seeing them go from 50% to 100% with no real counterplay.

I haven’t fought the Werewolf Marauder yet (because I keep getting spammed with Gothmau and Hilthrax) but I did fight the Minotaur. His heavy attack hurts but he doesn’t feel unfair like Gothmau and his AoEs denies areas but they go away eventually which is nice.

I’ll mirror the other posts by saying having a checkpoint to forego the leaderboard or something. Also please adjust the Ruinachs’ (Gothmau and the other boss) damage, they hit much harder than anything else in there.

Araneae6537

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

I agree that an ability to save progress would be wonderful and I wouldn’t care if it disqualified me from the leaderboards. I just want to see how far I can get, but taking sufficient breaks when needed.

I hope in the future there will be additional books added (such as the new lore books from the Gold Road prologue) and furnishings or plans (such as the ramps both straight and curved found in many Apocrypha delves.

Tyrobag

The style pages need to have the ridiculous class restriction removed. There is no reason for it, and it was made very clear how unpopular of an idea it was when it was first done. If you're making a pass of IA, and you actually want to get more people to run it willingly, this should be your #1 priority. Not much more to say than that, refer back to the hundreds of previous comments that got ignored last time if you need more.

BuffNukem

I apologize that I don't have access to the PTS, but I still wanted to provide some feedback/bugs from Live that I would like to provide so they may be considered in any PTS updates as well. If any of these suggestions have been addressed already in U43, then fantastic!

1) Please make the Arc/Cycle/Stage counter visible on the Verse select screen so you can easily confirm which stage you just finished so you can better strategically pick a verse for the next stage. It is easy to forget which stage you are on after you've been in IA for a while. For example: I often favor more single-target focused verses going into a stage 3 cycle boss as opposed to favoring an AOE or get perk on kill verse going into stage 2. Being able to see the current Arc/Cycle/Stage will greatly help with the optimal verse selection.

2) The incremental update to IA in the past that greatly adjusted a lot of the damage to companions was a GREAT change and finally made running with a companion reasonably viable. There are still a few boss fight mechanics that I believe can still be adjusted that seem overly punishing to a companion (ie unpreventable massive damage). For reference, I run Isobel as a tank for most of my runs and these are the mechanics that will always kill her:
2.A) Yolnahkriin: At ~50% health he hovers over the platform and sets the center of the platform ablaze. Isobel immediately runs into the center to tank the flame atros and this mechanic will nearly instantly killing her. The only way to stop her from dying to to unsummon her, which defeats the point of having a companion.
2.B) Lady Thorn: At ~50% health she covers the platform with red mist and you must stay inside the moving green circle safe zone. Isobel doesn't know how to follow the green circle and will run into the mist to tank an add, thus dying to the red mist immediately.
2.C) Zhaj'hassa: When this boss explodes the room and does one-shot damage to anyone (including a companion) not behind a pillar, this is an extremely hard mechanic to get your companion to follow you behind a pillar so they don't die.

3) There is some sort of bug with the marauder boss Gothmau and a companion recognizing his presence. Isobel has no issue immediately recognizing the current other two marauders and will immediately taunt them, but with Gothmau she doesn't respond properly. I can be fighting Gothmau, and he could be the only enemy alive and Isobel will sheath her weapons and go into out of combat idle animations nearly every time. Occasionally when Gothmau gets below 50% health, Isobel with suddenly recognize his presence and start tanking him, but almost never before that point.

4) Please consider adding a way to re-roll or banish a select number of verses and/or visions. There is nothing more frustrating than getting a selection of 3 to chose from and none of the 3 provide any tangible perk for your current build.

Necrotech_Master

BuffNukem wrote: »

I apologize that I don't have access to the PTS, but I still wanted to provide some feedback/bugs from Live that I would like to provide so they may be considered in any PTS updates as well. If any of these suggestions have been addressed already in U43, then fantastic!

1) Please make the Arc/Cycle/Stage counter visible on the Verse select screen so you can easily confirm which stage you just finished so you can better strategically pick a verse for the next stage. It is easy to forget which stage you are on after you've been in IA for a while. For example: I often favor more single-target focused verses going into a stage 3 cycle boss as opposed to favoring an AOE or get perk on kill verse going into stage 2. Being able to see the current Arc/Cycle/Stage will greatly help with the optimal verse selection.

2) The incremental update to IA in the past that greatly adjusted a lot of the damage to companions was a GREAT change and finally made running with a companion reasonably viable. There are still a few boss fight mechanics that I believe can still be adjusted that seem overly punishing to a companion (ie unpreventable massive damage). For reference, I run Isobel as a tank for most of my runs and these are the mechanics that will always kill her:
2.A) Yolnahkriin: At ~50% health he hovers over the platform and sets the center of the platform ablaze. Isobel immediately runs into the center to tank the flame atros and this mechanic will nearly instantly killing her. The only way to stop her from dying to to unsummon her, which defeats the point of having a companion.
2.B) Lady Thorn: At ~50% health she covers the platform with red mist and you must stay inside the moving green circle safe zone. Isobel doesn't know how to follow the green circle and will run into the mist to tank an add, thus dying to the red mist immediately.
2.C) Zhaj'hassa: When this boss explodes the room and does one-shot damage to anyone (including a companion) not behind a pillar, this is an extremely hard mechanic to get your companion to follow you behind a pillar so they don't die.

3) There is some sort of bug with the marauder boss Gothmau and a companion recognizing his presence. Isobel has no issue immediately recognizing the current other two marauders and will immediately taunt them, but with Gothmau she doesn't respond properly. I can be fighting Gothmau, and he could be the only enemy alive and Isobel will sheath her weapons and go into out of combat idle animations nearly every time. Occasionally when Gothmau gets below 50% health, Isobel with suddenly recognize his presence and start tanking him, but almost never before that point.

4) Please consider adding a way to re-roll or banish a select number of verses and/or visions. There is nothing more frustrating than getting a selection of 3 to chose from and none of the 3 provide any tangible perk for your current build.

for point 2 i agree, using a companion in archive is much more feasible, the ways ive kind of gotten around yoln or lady thorn with the companion mostly staying alive is by using the "heel" command (on PC hold Y+right click), this makes them follow you and not aggro on anything unless you issue an attack command (Y+left click, or do a heavy attack)

theres a few other bosses which they also can get nuked by as well, such as the endling

for zhaj'assa, the companion will 99% of the time end up dying to the curse mechanic well before the room explodes as he will usually use the curse at least once or twice before exploding the room, and the companions dont know how to use the cleanse pads unless they accidentally walk over one

ive also noticed that issue with isobel and gothmau, when i tell her to attack him she just stands there with a blank look like she doesnt know what shes supposed to do, im not sure if this has to do with a bug on the melee taunt, or if it will work differently if she had a ranged taunt (ice staff), ive tried testing with azander using his ranged taunt but it ends up never spawning gothmau for me to test against lol

BuffNukem

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

for point 2 i agree, using a companion in archive is much more feasible, the ways ive kind of gotten around yoln or lady thorn with the companion mostly staying alive is by using the "heel" command (on PC hold Y+right click), this makes them follow you and not aggro on anything unless you issue an attack command (Y+left click, or do a heavy attack)

theres a few other bosses which they also can get nuked by as well, such as the endling

for zhaj'assa, the companion will 99% of the time end up dying to the curse mechanic well before the room explodes as he will usually use the curse at least once or twice before exploding the room, and the companions dont know how to use the cleanse pads unless they accidentally walk over one

ive also noticed that issue with isobel and gothmau, when i tell her to attack him she just stands there with a blank look like she doesnt know what shes supposed to do, im not sure if this has to do with a bug on the melee taunt, or if it will work differently if she had a ranged taunt (ice staff), ive tried testing with azander using his ranged taunt but it ends up never spawning gothmau for me to test against lol

Thanks for the reply and confirmation of the same things I've seen.

Unfortunately for us Console folks, we have no means to issue a "heel" command so there is no way to keep them out of the damage. I have ways I work around it and still kill those bosses fairly easily, but the devs should really look at changing the damage those mechanics do to companions, like they did to most of the other IA boss mechs. It seems like they just forgot a few bosses when they fixed many of the others.

Erickson9610

I saw both the fire and the ice areas. On a run that lasted up to Arc 5, I saw the fire stages multiple times, but I didn't see the ice stages at all. And, on another run that only lasted one or two stages in the first Arc, I got to see the ice stage immediately.

I wish there was more diversity in the visuals. Suddenly seeing ice or fire stages after nothing but green Apocrypha setpieces is a nice change of pace, but I wish IA was more akin to the Maelstrom Arena or the Dragonstar Arena in terms of the diversity of stages and how frequently the color palette swaps.


I got to fight both of the new Marauders. I liked the way the Werewolf Behemoth Marauder changed the gameplay, but I was confused as to why there weren't any "traps" to lead it into, as that was a staple of the Balorgh fight. The Minotaur Marauder was an interesting fight, with its snare AoE and its charge ability. Overall, the new Marauders are trivial to eliminate at a range, and they are extremely punishing to melee players.


A friend of mine was lucky enough to try the new Avatar Verse. While the appearance was nothing more than a polymorph, the function it provides is exactly what Necromancer players have been hoping to have — the ability to summon about a dozen skeleton minions to attack enemies.

It's a shame that this function — as well as the Werewolf Behemoth Avatar, I'll add — are relegated to being possible only in the Infinite Archive. They're a lot of fun to use, and the alternatives (the Necromancer class and the Werewolf subclass, respectively) pale in comparison.

Necrotech_Master

BuffNukem wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

for point 2 i agree, using a companion in archive is much more feasible, the ways ive kind of gotten around yoln or lady thorn with the companion mostly staying alive is by using the "heel" command (on PC hold Y+right click), this makes them follow you and not aggro on anything unless you issue an attack command (Y+left click, or do a heavy attack)

theres a few other bosses which they also can get nuked by as well, such as the endling

for zhaj'assa, the companion will 99% of the time end up dying to the curse mechanic well before the room explodes as he will usually use the curse at least once or twice before exploding the room, and the companions dont know how to use the cleanse pads unless they accidentally walk over one

ive also noticed that issue with isobel and gothmau, when i tell her to attack him she just stands there with a blank look like she doesnt know what shes supposed to do, im not sure if this has to do with a bug on the melee taunt, or if it will work differently if she had a ranged taunt (ice staff), ive tried testing with azander using his ranged taunt but it ends up never spawning gothmau for me to test against lol

Thanks for the reply and confirmation of the same things I've seen.

Unfortunately for us Console folks, we have no means to issue a "heel" command so there is no way to keep them out of the damage. I have ways I work around it and still kill those bosses fairly easily, but the devs should really look at changing the damage those mechanics do to companions, like they did to most of the other IA boss mechs. It seems like they just forgot a few bosses when they fixed many of the others.

there is a way to use pet commands on a controller, i had to look it up though because i dont use a controller myself

click and hold the left and right sticks, and use the control for block to call them back (heel command)

used this for reference: https://benevolentbowd.ca/games/esotu/eso-guide-pet-commands/

tonyaccount

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

Focused Efforts is at least 3 times as powerful the second best visions. Nothing else comes even close, and even the Attuned Enchantments builds need 4-5 stacks of FE in a deep run. AE is also only really good if you have exactly 5 stacks of it and you're running a specific build(Torugg/Heartland). If you aren't running this exact cheese build, 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 Attuned Enchantments. In fact 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 of anything else, and usually it isn't even close.

We have two options here. Either we keep Focused Efforts as it is and pretend it's fine and keep the one-dimensional status effect meta on where you are locked to one build and your success mostly depends on how lucky you got in the vision lottery(=how many FEs you got), or we nerf the obvious offender and buff all the stinker visions to a useful degree and make other builds viable.

We can either try to make it so that every run can be good even if you don't hit the jackpot, or we can have the current lootbox meta. I have mostly given up on Archive even though I love the concept, because it's a huge waste of time just to get a decent run started.

A deep run even with perfect visions takes hours and hours, and if you have to spend 2h in the beginning of the run just to see if it's worth a try, I find it pretty demoralizing. And by the way, sometimes you spend 2-3h resetting the instance without finding the right visions, and then you have to give up because you don't have the time for the actual run even if you get the right visions the next try.

In its current state the Archive doesn't respect your time. That's why all the good players largely stopped doing it after a few weeks, and by far the biggest reason for that is the poor vision balance.

For the Archive to be interesting and worth the time, every single vision needs to be at least decent and none of them can be gamebreakingly overpowered.

Necrotech_Master

tonyaccount wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

Focused Efforts is at least 3 times as powerful the second best visions. Nothing else comes even close, and even the Attuned Enchantments builds need 4-5 stacks of FE in a deep run. AE is also only really good if you have exactly 5 stacks of it and you're running a specific build(Torugg/Heartland). If you aren't running this exact cheese build, 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 Attuned Enchantments. In fact 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 of anything else, and usually it isn't even close.

We have two options here. Either we keep Focused Efforts as it is and pretend it's fine and keep the one-dimensional status effect meta on where you are locked to one build and your success mostly depends on how lucky you got in the vision lottery(=how many FEs you got), or we nerf the obvious offender and buff all the stinker visions to a useful degree and make other builds viable.

We can either try to make it so that every run can be good even if you don't hit the jackpot, or we can have the current lootbox meta. I have mostly given up on Archive even though I love the concept, because it's a huge waste of time just to get a decent run started.

A deep run even with perfect visions takes hours and hours, and if you have to spend 2h in the beginning of the run just to see if it's worth a try, I find it pretty demoralizing. And by the way, sometimes you spend 2-3h resetting the instance without finding the right visions, and then you have to give up because you don't have the time for the actual run even if you get the right visions the next try.

In its current state the Archive doesn't respect your time. That's why all the good players largely stopped doing it after a few weeks, and by far the biggest reason for that is the poor vision balance.

For the Archive to be interesting and worth the time, every single vision needs to be at least decent and none of them can be gamebreakingly overpowered.

or we just buff the other visions to make them more enticing to grab

3% increase to direct dmg per stack is pitiful, it should be a minimum of like 10-20% per stack

for those players who do get far enough, they do actually run out of vision choices because each one can be stacked only 5x, avatar ones can only be stacked 1x

so eventually there is a max number of vision selections, and the biggest problem with most of them is that they just dont scale well

the direct dmg one for example, 3% per stack, max 5 stacks, means if you get to 5 stacks, you basically just have major and minor slayer active, thats it, thats terrible

focused efforts makes the archive fun because it does do ridiculous dmg, but right now its the only thing even worth building for because all of the other ones just arent good

3% direct dmg, 3% aoe dmg, etc are just too low values to even bother with, sure its nice having the bonus, but its realistically not even noticeable, it takes 2 stacks to equate to the same value you get from CP passives

tonyaccount

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

Focused Efforts is at least 3 times as powerful the second best visions. Nothing else comes even close, and even the Attuned Enchantments builds need 4-5 stacks of FE in a deep run. AE is also only really good if you have exactly 5 stacks of it and you're running a specific build(Torugg/Heartland). If you aren't running this exact cheese build, 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 Attuned Enchantments. In fact 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 of anything else, and usually it isn't even close.

We have two options here. Either we keep Focused Efforts as it is and pretend it's fine and keep the one-dimensional status effect meta on where you are locked to one build and your success mostly depends on how lucky you got in the vision lottery(=how many FEs you got), or we nerf the obvious offender and buff all the stinker visions to a useful degree and make other builds viable.

We can either try to make it so that every run can be good even if you don't hit the jackpot, or we can have the current lootbox meta. I have mostly given up on Archive even though I love the concept, because it's a huge waste of time just to get a decent run started.

A deep run even with perfect visions takes hours and hours, and if you have to spend 2h in the beginning of the run just to see if it's worth a try, I find it pretty demoralizing. And by the way, sometimes you spend 2-3h resetting the instance without finding the right visions, and then you have to give up because you don't have the time for the actual run even if you get the right visions the next try.

In its current state the Archive doesn't respect your time. That's why all the good players largely stopped doing it after a few weeks, and by far the biggest reason for that is the poor vision balance.

For the Archive to be interesting and worth the time, every single vision needs to be at least decent and none of them can be gamebreakingly overpowered.

or we just buff the other visions to make them more enticing to grab

3% increase to direct dmg per stack is pitiful, it should be a minimum of like 10-20% per stack

for those players who do get far enough, they do actually run out of vision choices because each one can be stacked only 5x, avatar ones can only be stacked 1x

Buffing everything else doesn't fix anything. When you buff your "increase to direct damage per stack" by quadrupling its effect, the only correct way to utilize it is to spam Elemental Susceptibility with 4-5 stacks of Focused Efforts because 90%+ of your direct damage comes from status effects. All you have done is made the one viable build even more powerful, and caused power creep. Focused Efforts will still be the centerpoint of any good run.

This "ignore the obvious problem and randomly buff everything else and see what happens" strategy never works because it doesn't even begin to address the problem.

Regarding your other point, you have to get extremely far in the archive to run out of visions. We're talking arc 30+ here, and that is well beyond 99.99% players' grasp. It's a moot point.

Necrotech_Master

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

Focused Efforts is at least 3 times as powerful the second best visions. Nothing else comes even close, and even the Attuned Enchantments builds need 4-5 stacks of FE in a deep run. AE is also only really good if you have exactly 5 stacks of it and you're running a specific build(Torugg/Heartland). If you aren't running this exact cheese build, 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 Attuned Enchantments. In fact 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 of anything else, and usually it isn't even close.

We have two options here. Either we keep Focused Efforts as it is and pretend it's fine and keep the one-dimensional status effect meta on where you are locked to one build and your success mostly depends on how lucky you got in the vision lottery(=how many FEs you got), or we nerf the obvious offender and buff all the stinker visions to a useful degree and make other builds viable.

We can either try to make it so that every run can be good even if you don't hit the jackpot, or we can have the current lootbox meta. I have mostly given up on Archive even though I love the concept, because it's a huge waste of time just to get a decent run started.

A deep run even with perfect visions takes hours and hours, and if you have to spend 2h in the beginning of the run just to see if it's worth a try, I find it pretty demoralizing. And by the way, sometimes you spend 2-3h resetting the instance without finding the right visions, and then you have to give up because you don't have the time for the actual run even if you get the right visions the next try.

In its current state the Archive doesn't respect your time. That's why all the good players largely stopped doing it after a few weeks, and by far the biggest reason for that is the poor vision balance.

For the Archive to be interesting and worth the time, every single vision needs to be at least decent and none of them can be gamebreakingly overpowered.

or we just buff the other visions to make them more enticing to grab

3% increase to direct dmg per stack is pitiful, it should be a minimum of like 10-20% per stack

for those players who do get far enough, they do actually run out of vision choices because each one can be stacked only 5x, avatar ones can only be stacked 1x

Buffing everything else doesn't fix anything. When you buff your "increase to direct damage per stack" by quadrupling its effect, the only correct way to utilize it is to spam Elemental Susceptibility with 4-5 stacks of Focused Efforts because 90%+ of your direct damage comes from status effects. All you have done is made the one viable build even more powerful, and caused power creep. Focused Efforts will still be the centerpoint of any good run.

This "ignore the obvious problem and randomly buff everything else and see what happens" strategy never works because it doesn't even begin to address the problem.

Regarding your other point, you have to get extremely far in the archive to run out of visions. We're talking arc 30+ here, and that is well beyond 99.99% players' grasp. It's a moot point.

if you buff the others, it will give you more options, you wont be reliant on 1 specific vision then

if i could get 10% increase to direct dmg, that would help provide benefit instead of literally just going and resetting by arc 2 if you dont get focused efforts, thats poor gameplay right now

sure if you end up getting focused efforts and one of these others, it would still be nice, but if you bring up the other ones, then they will be more useful in those runs you dont get focused efforts

thats the point im making, right now for most people, focused efforts is a make or break to even get past arc 2, and due to how weak the other ones are i dont blame them, it does absolutely become a slog in arc 5 if you dont have focused efforts right now because all of the other ones are so bad

what if you didnt get focused efforts but your on arc 3, have 2 full set visions completed, and say +30% dmg to aoe and 20% dmg to direct, and some other bonuses from newly buffed visions that were once garbage tier

that alone would be like +50% dmg to something like wall of elements as it falls under both categories

i think all visions should be worth taking, right now only a handful are because the other ones are such garbage

like for example, another case, the vision that buffs single target dot durations, 1 stack is +12%, this at most on any dot it applies to, gives it 1 extra tick of dmg, and for some shorter dots, it takes 2+ stacks to even get 1 extra tick of dmg

for example talons on DK has 4 sec duration, its dot is single target, +12% of 4 sec is ~0.4 sec, that is not even enough to get 1 tick with 1 stack, you would need 3 stacks to even get 1 extra tick of dmg, a 20 sec dot would get ~2.1 sec increase, which is only 1 extra tick due to the 2 sec tick rate of most single target dots

the problem with the visions other than focused efforts, attuned enchantment, and set visions is they are not worth using, they do not make you feel more powerful as you get more of them and they do not scale well with the enemies

Joy_Division

Please add loot to the trash mobs.

We want ink so now losing many potential sources of it from dead mobs is annoying, especially as there is no logical reason why instanced mobs would not offer loot when killed.

If anything, it makes sense that ink should drop from enemies that are (I think) ... made of ink.

Erickson9610

Joy_Division wrote: »

Please add loot to the trash mobs.

We want ink so now losing many potential sources of it from dead mobs is annoying, especially as there is no logical reason why instanced mobs would not offer loot when killed.

If anything, it makes sense that ink should drop from enemies that are (I think) ... made of ink.

I actually managed to find Luminous Ink from the Muniment Chests in the Infinite Archive. There's still a chance to acquire Luminous Ink while running the Infinite Archive.

Joy_Division

Erickson9610 wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

Please add loot to the trash mobs.

We want ink so now losing many potential sources of it from dead mobs is annoying, especially as there is no logical reason why instanced mobs would not offer loot when killed.

If anything, it makes sense that ink should drop from enemies that are (I think) ... made of ink.

I actually managed to find Luminous Ink from the Muniment Chests in the Infinite Archive. There's still a chance to acquire Luminous Ink while running the Infinite Archive.

I know about the chests. There is consistency there. Containers outside of IA act like containers inside of IA. The same should be true of mobs. if I kill overland PvE mobs and can get ink, then I should get ink from killing the mobs in IA.

knighting68

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

Focused Efforts is at least 3 times as powerful the second best visions. Nothing else comes even close, and even the Attuned Enchantments builds need 4-5 stacks of FE in a deep run. AE is also only really good if you have exactly 5 stacks of it and you're running a specific build(Torugg/Heartland). If you aren't running this exact cheese build, 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 Attuned Enchantments. In fact 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 of anything else, and usually it isn't even close.

We have two options here. Either we keep Focused Efforts as it is and pretend it's fine and keep the one-dimensional status effect meta on where you are locked to one build and your success mostly depends on how lucky you got in the vision lottery(=how many FEs you got), or we nerf the obvious offender and buff all the stinker visions to a useful degree and make other builds viable.

We can either try to make it so that every run can be good even if you don't hit the jackpot, or we can have the current lootbox meta. I have mostly given up on Archive even though I love the concept, because it's a huge waste of time just to get a decent run started.

A deep run even with perfect visions takes hours and hours, and if you have to spend 2h in the beginning of the run just to see if it's worth a try, I find it pretty demoralizing. And by the way, sometimes you spend 2-3h resetting the instance without finding the right visions, and then you have to give up because you don't have the time for the actual run even if you get the right visions the next try.

In its current state the Archive doesn't respect your time. That's why all the good players largely stopped doing it after a few weeks, and by far the biggest reason for that is the poor vision balance.

For the Archive to be interesting and worth the time, every single vision needs to be at least decent and none of them can be gamebreakingly overpowered.

or we just buff the other visions to make them more enticing to grab

3% increase to direct dmg per stack is pitiful, it should be a minimum of like 10-20% per stack

for those players who do get far enough, they do actually run out of vision choices because each one can be stacked only 5x, avatar ones can only be stacked 1x

Buffing everything else doesn't fix anything. When you buff your "increase to direct damage per stack" by quadrupling its effect, the only correct way to utilize it is to spam Elemental Susceptibility with 4-5 stacks of Focused Efforts because 90%+ of your direct damage comes from status effects. All you have done is made the one viable build even more powerful, and caused power creep. Focused Efforts will still be the centerpoint of any good run.

This "ignore the obvious problem and randomly buff everything else and see what happens" strategy never works because it doesn't even begin to address the problem.

Regarding your other point, you have to get extremely far in the archive to run out of visions. We're talking arc 30+ here, and that is well beyond 99.99% players' grasp. It's a moot point.

Please ZOS do not listen to this guy! It's not personal, but understand that not every player has days to spare dedicated to optimizing every build for all content types every patch. I'm sorry if Focused Efforts feels too over-powered to some, but don't be a buzzkill and try to ruin other players experience. If you don't like it, don't use it. Even if you are lucky 1 in 50 of your IA runs to actually get 3 to 5 focused efforts (I've only ever gotten 5 one time), it doesn't mean much once you are in arc 6+ (solo) and having to deal with seeking spheres, that flame channel from casters, dots, and more. Very few players ever get to arc 6-7 anyways, and it's not like these abilities are affecting any type of content outside of IA. Basically, it's not hurting anyone else other than possibly some players ego for not being #1 on the leader-boards. Some of us just want the game to be fun, and IA gets really hard the farther you go no matter the visions you accumulate.

Lastly, +1 for nerfing seeking spheres slightly next patch or a new verse to help some classes with an area interrupt. Also adding more visions and increasing some of the potency of existing ones is a great idea IMO. In my limited time to play, I really enjoy IA runs.

tonyaccount

knighting68 wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

Focused Efforts is at least 3 times as powerful the second best visions. Nothing else comes even close, and even the Attuned Enchantments builds need 4-5 stacks of FE in a deep run. AE is also only really good if you have exactly 5 stacks of it and you're running a specific build(Torugg/Heartland). If you aren't running this exact cheese build, 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 Attuned Enchantments. In fact 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 of anything else, and usually it isn't even close.

We have two options here. Either we keep Focused Efforts as it is and pretend it's fine and keep the one-dimensional status effect meta on where you are locked to one build and your success mostly depends on how lucky you got in the vision lottery(=how many FEs you got), or we nerf the obvious offender and buff all the stinker visions to a useful degree and make other builds viable.

We can either try to make it so that every run can be good even if you don't hit the jackpot, or we can have the current lootbox meta. I have mostly given up on Archive even though I love the concept, because it's a huge waste of time just to get a decent run started.

A deep run even with perfect visions takes hours and hours, and if you have to spend 2h in the beginning of the run just to see if it's worth a try, I find it pretty demoralizing. And by the way, sometimes you spend 2-3h resetting the instance without finding the right visions, and then you have to give up because you don't have the time for the actual run even if you get the right visions the next try.

In its current state the Archive doesn't respect your time. That's why all the good players largely stopped doing it after a few weeks, and by far the biggest reason for that is the poor vision balance.

For the Archive to be interesting and worth the time, every single vision needs to be at least decent and none of them can be gamebreakingly overpowered.

or we just buff the other visions to make them more enticing to grab

3% increase to direct dmg per stack is pitiful, it should be a minimum of like 10-20% per stack

for those players who do get far enough, they do actually run out of vision choices because each one can be stacked only 5x, avatar ones can only be stacked 1x

Buffing everything else doesn't fix anything. When you buff your "increase to direct damage per stack" by quadrupling its effect, the only correct way to utilize it is to spam Elemental Susceptibility with 4-5 stacks of Focused Efforts because 90%+ of your direct damage comes from status effects. All you have done is made the one viable build even more powerful, and caused power creep. Focused Efforts will still be the centerpoint of any good run.

This "ignore the obvious problem and randomly buff everything else and see what happens" strategy never works because it doesn't even begin to address the problem.

Regarding your other point, you have to get extremely far in the archive to run out of visions. We're talking arc 30+ here, and that is well beyond 99.99% players' grasp. It's a moot point.

Please ZOS do not listen to this guy! It's not personal, but understand that not every player has days to spare dedicated to optimizing every build for all content types every patch. I'm sorry if Focused Efforts feels too over-powered to some, but don't be a buzzkill and try to ruin other players experience. If you don't like it, don't use it. Even if you are lucky 1 in 50 of your IA runs to actually get 3 to 5 focused efforts (I've only ever gotten 5 one time), it doesn't mean much once you are in arc 6+ (solo) and having to deal with seeking spheres, that flame channel from casters, dots, and more. Very few players ever get to arc 6-7 anyways, and it's not like these abilities are affecting any type of content outside of IA. Basically, it's not hurting anyone else other than possibly some players ego for not being #1 on the leader-boards. Some of us just want the game to be fun, and IA gets really hard the farther you go no matter the visions you accumulate.

Lastly, +1 for nerfing seeking spheres slightly next patch or a new verse to help some classes with an area interrupt. Also adding more visions and increasing some of the potency of existing ones is a great idea IMO. In my limited time to play, I really enjoy IA runs.

The reason why I ask Focused Efforts to be nerfed is because it's single-handedly killing all the build diversity and turning the meta into a lottery machine where your run depends on how many FEs you get and if you don't get them, you should reset an otherwise perfectly fine run even if you have zero deaths. I don't understand how can anyone defend this design.

I get that some people don't want to work on their game and update their builds who prefer a luck based format where with enough grind and time investment they can get rewarded, but we have already seen that this design always fails.

People aren't doing Archive a lot anymore after its hot start. They got tired of it. There's no save system and the visions make it a game of luck and FE farming is a huge waste of time. The advanced players understand a run isn't worth continuing if they don't get the right visions(=enough FE). The casual players feel constantly unlucky and don't have the ability to even kill arc 2-3 Gothmau unless they get the right visions and get demoralized. It's a lose-lose system that wastes the players' time with absolutely unnecessary RNG.

It isn't just the "optimizers" who suffer from the broken visions. They just have their time wasted on the constant resetting, but they could still make it to arc 6-9 without FE. They just understand it's not worth it so they reset. A bad player getting bad visions is going to have a miserable game experience where they can't do enough damage to even get to arc 3, and after getting lucky visions once or twice they feel demoralized to play again because they know the only way they can get a decent score is by opening lucky visions. And by the way, after one or two lucky runs they often feel entitled to getting good visions and when it rarely happens and they realize that, they stop doing the content.

The concept of Archive is great, but there's enough randomness in it without the visions. Adding game-breaking levels of pure luck mechanics is going to drain the well empty in no time for nearly everyone, which is largely what has happened. This could easily be fixed and the Archive could become hugely popular with just fixing the visions and adding a save system.

If you want to make it fun for casuals(and everyone in general), every run needs to be worth continuing at least until the first death and every run should have a decent chance to go deep. Currently this is simply not true. Most runs are a waste of time and worth resetting.

Necrotech_Master

tonyaccount wrote: »

knighting68 wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

Focused Efforts is at least 3 times as powerful the second best visions. Nothing else comes even close, and even the Attuned Enchantments builds need 4-5 stacks of FE in a deep run. AE is also only really good if you have exactly 5 stacks of it and you're running a specific build(Torugg/Heartland). If you aren't running this exact cheese build, 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 Attuned Enchantments. In fact 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 of anything else, and usually it isn't even close.

We have two options here. Either we keep Focused Efforts as it is and pretend it's fine and keep the one-dimensional status effect meta on where you are locked to one build and your success mostly depends on how lucky you got in the vision lottery(=how many FEs you got), or we nerf the obvious offender and buff all the stinker visions to a useful degree and make other builds viable.

We can either try to make it so that every run can be good even if you don't hit the jackpot, or we can have the current lootbox meta. I have mostly given up on Archive even though I love the concept, because it's a huge waste of time just to get a decent run started.

A deep run even with perfect visions takes hours and hours, and if you have to spend 2h in the beginning of the run just to see if it's worth a try, I find it pretty demoralizing. And by the way, sometimes you spend 2-3h resetting the instance without finding the right visions, and then you have to give up because you don't have the time for the actual run even if you get the right visions the next try.

In its current state the Archive doesn't respect your time. That's why all the good players largely stopped doing it after a few weeks, and by far the biggest reason for that is the poor vision balance.

For the Archive to be interesting and worth the time, every single vision needs to be at least decent and none of them can be gamebreakingly overpowered.

or we just buff the other visions to make them more enticing to grab

3% increase to direct dmg per stack is pitiful, it should be a minimum of like 10-20% per stack

for those players who do get far enough, they do actually run out of vision choices because each one can be stacked only 5x, avatar ones can only be stacked 1x

Buffing everything else doesn't fix anything. When you buff your "increase to direct damage per stack" by quadrupling its effect, the only correct way to utilize it is to spam Elemental Susceptibility with 4-5 stacks of Focused Efforts because 90%+ of your direct damage comes from status effects. All you have done is made the one viable build even more powerful, and caused power creep. Focused Efforts will still be the centerpoint of any good run.

This "ignore the obvious problem and randomly buff everything else and see what happens" strategy never works because it doesn't even begin to address the problem.

Regarding your other point, you have to get extremely far in the archive to run out of visions. We're talking arc 30+ here, and that is well beyond 99.99% players' grasp. It's a moot point.

Please ZOS do not listen to this guy! It's not personal, but understand that not every player has days to spare dedicated to optimizing every build for all content types every patch. I'm sorry if Focused Efforts feels too over-powered to some, but don't be a buzzkill and try to ruin other players experience. If you don't like it, don't use it. Even if you are lucky 1 in 50 of your IA runs to actually get 3 to 5 focused efforts (I've only ever gotten 5 one time), it doesn't mean much once you are in arc 6+ (solo) and having to deal with seeking spheres, that flame channel from casters, dots, and more. Very few players ever get to arc 6-7 anyways, and it's not like these abilities are affecting any type of content outside of IA. Basically, it's not hurting anyone else other than possibly some players ego for not being #1 on the leader-boards. Some of us just want the game to be fun, and IA gets really hard the farther you go no matter the visions you accumulate.

Lastly, +1 for nerfing seeking spheres slightly next patch or a new verse to help some classes with an area interrupt. Also adding more visions and increasing some of the potency of existing ones is a great idea IMO. In my limited time to play, I really enjoy IA runs.

The reason why I ask Focused Efforts to be nerfed is because it's single-handedly killing all the build diversity and turning the meta into a lottery machine where your run depends on how many FEs you get and if you don't get them, you should reset an otherwise perfectly fine run even if you have zero deaths. I don't understand how can anyone defend this design.

I get that some people don't want to work on their game and update their builds who prefer a luck based format where with enough grind and time investment they can get rewarded, but we have already seen that this design always fails.

People aren't doing Archive a lot anymore after its hot start. They got tired of it. There's no save system and the visions make it a game of luck and FE farming is a huge waste of time. The advanced players understand a run isn't worth continuing if they don't get the right visions(=enough FE). The casual players feel constantly unlucky and don't have the ability to even kill arc 2-3 Gothmau unless they get the right visions and get demoralized. It's a lose-lose system that wastes the players' time with absolutely unnecessary RNG.

It isn't just the "optimizers" who suffer from the broken visions. They just have their time wasted on the constant resetting, but they could still make it to arc 6-9 without FE. They just understand it's not worth it so they reset. A bad player getting bad visions is going to have a miserable game experience where they can't do enough damage to even get to arc 3, and after getting lucky visions once or twice they feel demoralized to play again because they know the only way they can get a decent score is by opening lucky visions. And by the way, after one or two lucky runs they often feel entitled to getting good visions and when it rarely happens and they realize that, they stop doing the content.

The concept of Archive is great, but there's enough randomness in it without the visions. Adding game-breaking levels of pure luck mechanics is going to drain the well empty in no time for nearly everyone, which is largely what has happened. This could easily be fixed and the Archive could become hugely popular with just fixing the visions and adding a save system.

If you want to make it fun for casuals(and everyone in general), every run needs to be worth continuing at least until the first death and every run should have a decent chance to go deep. Currently this is simply not true. Most runs are a waste of time and worth resetting.

again this is why we should have the other visions buffed, then its not about a sheer luck lottery on rolling 1 vision, all (or at least most all) of the visions will have a useful amount of buff

if you nerf FE, you nerf what makes the archive fun, which is being slightly OP

not to mention if you nerfed FE, nobody would bother going past arc 6 as it would just become an enormous slog because of how weak all of the other visions are already