Feedback on Yesterday's Battleground Brawl Livestream

StarOfElyon

XSTRONG wrote: »

StarOfElyon wrote: »

I wish I had saved specific videos from content creators like Isth3reno1else, Grimsforge Gaming, Kristofer ESO, and more over the years who have taken the time to explain the problems with combat. Their feedback was not heard. If I can find those videos, I will post them.

What about PvE content creators? I started playing eso because Alcast content

I was on my phone, and I didn't want to make a super long post. But yes, Alcast, Dottz, and even Deltia expressed complaints many times before moving on. User Generated Content is massive for any product out there, so I saw a decline in that as an indication of the declining health of the game. Not only that but I really enjoyed watching so many of them and having them as part of the community; it hurt to see them go but I understand that they felt like the game was being aimed at a different audience.

StarOfElyon

I'm just going to share a non-PvPers point of view on the stream:

https://youtu.be/ybeSoIoj-EE?si=D1MLjBj0-6neYoWv


I mentioned players feeling like Zenimax was seeking the casual player at the expense of the veterans, and Eigh1 Puppies seems to be getting that impression as well.

https://youtu.be/Nb7vjDtj0cs

ZOS_JessicaFolsom

Hey all, thank you for the additional replies - there are many good insights here. Increasing the amount of Q&As/AMAs we do, and adding more regular feedback surveys does seem doable. As Kevin touched on in this post earlier tonight, many of us are going to be out for Thanksgiving holiday, and we'll follow up when we return. We are making an effort to be here on the forums a bit more, and we don't want our lighter presence over the next week to send the wrong message. The Community team will still drop by as we're able in to check on things here. For those of you who celebrate, we hope you have a restful Thanksgiving with family and/or friends.

Pelanora

https://search.app?link=https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/64817&utm_campaign=aga&utm_source=agsadl1,sh/x/gs/m2/4


" 'What’s the most important skill for somebody who wishes to commentate for ESO’s PvE or PvP activities?'

'In my opinion, it’s knowledge and experience in your field. You can’t just talk about what’s going on. You must help people understand why it’s significant: why such a thrilling moment is so exciting. This is especially true in such an intricate and seemingly chaotic environment like an ESO Trial. You need to know enough to explain a dangerous situation quickly and fluently. You need experience being in that situation to reflect the excitement or panic in your own demeanor, and then you have to be a little dramatic—enough to help the audience feel the excitement that you do in that particular situation.' "

Erickson9610

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hey all, thank you for the additional replies - there are many good insights here. Increasing the amount of Q&As/AMAs we do, and adding more regular feedback surveys does seem doable. As Kevin touched on in this post earlier tonight, many of us are going to be out for Thanksgiving holiday, and we'll follow up when we return. We are making an effort to be here on the forums a bit more, and we don't want our lighter presence over the next week to send the wrong message. The Community team will still drop by as we're able in to check on things here. For those of you who celebrate, we hope you have a restful Thanksgiving with family and/or friends.

I'm glad to hear that more Q&As and AMAs/AUAs are doable! The Gold Road AUA was genuinely really exciting to participate in and had a ton of spontaneous feedback from various developers, and the Companions Q&A on the forums here is something I frequently cite as it's all in one post. I'm looking forward to more of those!

silky_soft

Why not just do it all on the forums. You can even make anonymous polls here. When was the last time anyone saw a poll from a member of staff here?

I don't see why reddit or any other medium should be used at all.

Erickson9610

silky_soft wrote: »

I don't see why reddit or any other medium should be used at all.

I figure that more players have access to the ESO subreddit or the other ESO social media outlets (like @TESOnline on X/Twitter) than they do the ESO forums. I can't imagine many of them chose to create an account specifically for the ESO forums, but they're likely to have an existing Reddit or X/Twitter account.

The ESO forums is a miniscule subset of the overall playerbase and it really doesn't encapsulate all that the community actually thinks of the game. That's why it's important to use multiple social media outlets — some players only use one platform, so we should get their thoughts, too.

kiwi_tea

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hey all, thank you for the additional replies - there are many good insights here. Increasing the amount of Q&As/AMAs we do, and adding more regular feedback surveys does seem doable. As Kevin touched on in this post earlier tonight, many of us are going to be out for Thanksgiving holiday, and we'll follow up when we return. We are making an effort to be here on the forums a bit more, and we don't want our lighter presence over the next week to send the wrong message. The Community team will still drop by as we're able in to check on things here. For those of you who celebrate, we hope you have a restful Thanksgiving with family and/or friends.

I should have acknowledged what a watershed the new Battlegrounds feel like, despite all the criticism. More feedback would be amazing, because I know PVPers have come to think, after years and years of hearing nothing: "No news is bad news". It is so incredibly welcome to have something new, and it is clear that effort went into crafting the new mode. Lobby issues aside, 8v8 is a success in my book. It is chaotic fun! 4v4 will be a success-ish in the long term, once it ceases to be the default queue, and ceases to place people who wanted to queue 8v8 back into 4v4.

In 4v4 the biggest barrier to their success is the poor state of the PVP gameplay at this moment. I know a huge number of people in the PVP community have come to feel the situation in PVP is beyond fixing, and that it's well past the point of "too little, too late". I struggle to imagine how we might get PVP back to a healthy place where core skills and gameplay really matter more than heal-stacking and big proc damage. Making Battle Spirit restrict the number of same-name heals over time you can stack to one stack over what you cast yourself would be a major contribution. Even with such an enormous nerf, ball groups and cross heals would still be incredibly powerful, but it would take bar space away from ball groups in particular who would have to run a wider range of HoT skills to achieve the effect they can currently get just by stacking up a dozen radiating regens and echoing vigors on each other. Ball grouping is a skillful playstyle, but it is painfully overtuned with very little counterplay beyond running an opposing ball group. It also lags the whole region around these groups. In Cyrodiil you can currently tell a ballgroup is coming to a keep just by the drastic drop in framerate as they approach. The huge lag spikes they can create add to the fact that - even if you aren't bait for them - it is very hard to form much counterplay. Right now, with the sheer amount of healing over time they can stack, even the huge DoTs applied by multiple fire ballista can struggle to make a dent. You will sometimes see ball groups just run right through very, very hot killboxes on a breach, and almost immediately recover off any of the damage. Without sets like Azureblight that can punish big cross-healing clusters, siege is some of the only counterplay to a ball group, but the healing is still just too strong, and modern ball groups are too fast and snare-immune to be caught in siege very often.

The sheer power of cross healing really is one of the biggest issues PVP faces. It is evident in BGs too, where you get lobbies that go the full 15minutes with barely a single kill because there are just so many cross heals stacking up.

Some form of "trap" siege in Cyrodiil that circumvents Snowtreaders and Banner Bearer would be nice. Spike traps, etc. You could set it down and you get a few seconds of immobilise to siege or attack ball groups or zergs. A way for smaller - but organised - groups to have counterplay to large, coordinated healing swarms would make Cyrodiil less discouraging.

There is also the fact that very, very tanky builds can output enormous damage with proc-sets. I think Sypher during his stream after the official one even did a brief little thought experiment about having Battle Spirit apply a damage debuff once you go over a certain health threshold. That honestly doesn't sound like an awful idea.

You already have Battle Spirit. Please use it more, or otherwise implement more similar PVP-instance specific effects. It could be the solution to a great number of PVP's issues. The one thing I can't even imagine a solution to is the sheer scope of power creep that proc sets have created, and how completely ineffective nearly all the "core ability" counterplay can be in the face of their power. They just don't cost enough to players for the damage they put out, but players also need that level of damage to cut through the power of all the healing over time. If cross healing is nerfed - which needs to happen - the power creep is effectively worse due to the sudden drop in effective bulk, and I just don't have the slightest idea how to solve that issue.

Please communicate with us more, and if devs already have a clear, concise vision for the kind of PVP they want to give us, then please outline for us what that is. Right now I don't think anyone feels there is a clear, concise vision from the devs for what PVP should look like, and often the few insights we've had seem to directly contradict what has actually happened in ESO PVP. For example, devs seem to genuinely not *want* a high power proc meta, but nevertheless a very extreme one has developed. Another example, devs seem to genuinely want to foster set diversity, but then very few sets - including even most of the ones released in the most recent patch - sit well below the baseline level devs have created for a set to have PVP viability.

HazierBlue

It blows my mind that 10 years later we are still asking/answering the question "How do we communicate better". I'm not a heavy gamer but I don't think I've seen this anywhere else.

StarOfElyon

kiwi_tea wrote: »

In 4v4 the biggest barrier to their success is the poor state of the PVP gameplay at this moment. I know a huge number of people in the PVP community have come to feel the situation in PVP is beyond fixing, and that it's well past the point of "too little, too late". I struggle to imagine how we might get PVP back to a healthy place where core skills and gameplay really matter more than heal-stacking and big proc damage. Making Battle Spirit restrict the number of same-name heals over time you can stack to one stack over what you cast yourself would be a major contribution. Even with such an enormous nerf, ball groups and cross heals would still be incredibly powerful, but it would take bar space away from ball groups in particular who would have to run a wider range of HoT skills to achieve the effect they can currently get just by stacking up a dozen radiating regens and echoing vigors on each other. Ball grouping is a skillful playstyle, but it is painfully overtuned with very little counterplay beyond running an opposing ball group. It also lags the whole region around these groups. In Cyrodiil you can currently tell a ballgroup is coming to a keep just by the drastic drop in framerate as they approach. The huge lag spikes they can create add to the fact that - even if you aren't bait for them - it is very hard to form much counterplay. Right now, with the sheer amount of healing over time they can stack, even the huge DoTs applied by multiple fire ballista can struggle to make a dent. You will sometimes see ball groups just run right through very, very hot killboxes on a breach, and almost immediately recover off any of the damage. Without sets like Azureblight that can punish big cross-healing clusters, siege is some of the only counterplay to a ball group, but the healing is still just too strong, and modern ball groups are too fast and snare-immune to be caught in siege very often.

The sheer power of cross healing really is one of the biggest issues PVP faces. It is evident in BGs too, where you get lobbies that go the full 15minutes with barely a single kill because there are just so many cross heals stacking up.

Some form of "trap" siege in Cyrodiil that circumvents Snowtreaders and Banner Bearer would be nice. Spike traps, etc. You could set it down and you get a few seconds of immobilise to siege or attack ball groups or zergs. A way for smaller - but organised - groups to have counterplay to large, coordinated healing swarms would make Cyrodiil less discouraging.

There is also the fact that very, very tanky builds can output enormous damage with proc-sets. I think Sypher during his stream after the official one even did a brief little thought experiment about having Battle Spirit apply a damage debuff once you go over a certain health threshold. That honestly doesn't sound like an awful idea.

You already have Battle Spirit. Please use it more, or otherwise implement more similar PVP-instance specific effects. It could be the solution to a great number of PVP's issues. The one thing I can't even imagine a solution to is the sheer scope of power creep that proc sets have created, and how completely ineffective nearly all the "core ability" counterplay can be in the face of their power. They just don't cost enough to players for the damage they put out, but players also need that level of damage to cut through the power of all the healing over time. If cross healing is nerfed - which needs to happen - the power creep is effectively worse due to the sudden drop in effective bulk, and I just don't have the slightest idea how to solve that issue.

Please communicate with us more, and if devs already have a clear, concise vision for the kind of PVP they want to give us, then please outline for us what that is. Right now I don't think anyone feels there is a clear, concise vision from the devs for what PVP should look like, and often the few insights we've had seem to directly contradict what has actually happened in ESO PVP. For example, devs seem to genuinely not *want* a high power proc meta, but nevertheless a very extreme one has developed. Another example, devs seem to genuinely want to foster set diversity, but then very few sets - including even most of the ones released in the most recent patch - sit well below the baseline level devs have created for a set to have PVP viability.

I agree with a lot of this. And the best way I can analogize the state of PvP is by calling it a nuclear arms race. Everyone knows the nukes are bad and going to end the world... but no one wants to get rid of them.

xylena_lazarow

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

But my impression is that Brian doesn't represent the sweaty PvPers very well

Casuals hate the pull sets even more than the sweats do.

kiwi_tea

StarOfElyon wrote: »

I agree with a lot of this. And the best way I can analogize the state of PvP is by calling it a nuclear arms race. Everyone knows the nukes are bad and going to end the world... but no one wants to get rid of them.

The part that is distressing, and the reason so many PVP enthusiasts are acting out, is that I'm not really saying anything new. I'm pretty confident the developers have heard everything I'm saying before across five or six years now, which probably means things are staying the way they are. We're had these problems developing for just years and years and years. An enormous number of talented players have left already.

That's why I really think it's important we understand the developers' vision for PVP in ESO. Right now everything about PVP is played close to the chest and completely mystified. We have no idea what the devs want PVP to be except by inferring things from very old interviews and the general state of the game itself. It's okay if their vision isn't what certain super-sweaty players want (I'm confident it is not), we just need to know what it is so we can begin to accept and adapt. We hear so little about PVP in ESO, and consequently there has been years of constant doommongering filling the silence. It's not fun, and it is probably only happening because the devs have no good news to give us, but please, give us bad news, give us any news. Give us your vision. We all want to understand what the goal is with this system that was, at one point, a strong selling point of the game.

LarsS

There are some issues with Cyro that can be changed fast and that have been asked for a very long time. These things would be a good indication that ZOS listens.

1. Weight the campaign points with the number of players online, so we see an end to campaigns beeing decides while only a few are online.
2. Buff alliances who have fewer keeps to make the map more fluid, give extra ap to the alliance that owns enenmy keeps instead.
3. Better rewards, considering that we are fighting for a month one should expect much better rewards.

None of this should be hard to implement!

Soarora

Erickson9610 wrote: »

silky_soft wrote: »

I don't see why reddit or any other medium should be used at all.

I figure that more players have access to the ESO subreddit or the other ESO social media outlets (like @TESOnline on X/Twitter) than they do the ESO forums. I can't imagine many of them chose to create an account specifically for the ESO forums, but they're likely to have an existing Reddit or X/Twitter account.

The ESO forums is a miniscule subset of the overall playerbase and it really doesn't encapsulate all that the community actually thinks of the game. That's why it's important to use multiple social media outlets — some players only use one platform, so we should get their thoughts, too.

Having polls here would incentivize forum membership and ultimately would probably lead to more diverse conversations, since people currently tend to avoid the forums due to its bad reputation.

The_Meathead

I think my bottom line after watching is this: I have no ill will at all towards Brian or anyone else involved and appreciate the heck out of their participation in something involving PvP.

-BUT-

It's disheartening to see how unfamiliar he seemed with what was happening in front of him.

While I absolutely don't think his personal ability as a PvPer is integral or even important to his job, he certainly should have recognized and known everything that was present in those BG from seeing demonstrations, videos, or taking part in testing. It felt like more than just difficulty articulating things in the moment (which would probably happen to most of us in a similar situation) and more like he was seeing various Sets or Abilities in action for the very first time.

If he's not going to be hyper-involved and aware, that's fine... but someone with some authority and say in decisions needs to be, please.

We need a/some "PvP Sweat Rep(s)," for things to be their best. It's kinda unforgivable that might not already be the case, but it certainly would explain a lot of poor decisions since about U35.

Aldoss

Soarora wrote: »

Erickson9610 wrote: »

silky_soft wrote: »

I don't see why reddit or any other medium should be used at all.

I figure that more players have access to the ESO subreddit or the other ESO social media outlets (like @TESOnline on X/Twitter) than they do the ESO forums. I can't imagine many of them chose to create an account specifically for the ESO forums, but they're likely to have an existing Reddit or X/Twitter account.

The ESO forums is a miniscule subset of the overall playerbase and it really doesn't encapsulate all that the community actually thinks of the game. That's why it's important to use multiple social media outlets — some players only use one platform, so we should get their thoughts, too.

Having polls here would incentivize forum membership and ultimately would probably lead to more diverse conversations, since people currently tend to avoid the forums due to its bad reputation.

I understand what you're saying, but from a data gathering standpoint, creating a barrier to entry to data is a great way to induce sampling bias and ruin the value of the data.

Everyone here had the motivation to seek out the forums and get their account activated. There are people who have been banned from the forums, likely for good reason, but their input would be nonetheless just as valuable as us who are here.

The best survey to gather feedback from your players is the survey that is so simple to fill out, nearly every player does it. Each new barrier to entry will skew the data and give you an incomplete view into the real sentiments of your playerbase.

The_Meathead

Aldoss wrote: »

Soarora wrote: »

Erickson9610 wrote: »

silky_soft wrote: »

I don't see why reddit or any other medium should be used at all.

I figure that more players have access to the ESO subreddit or the other ESO social media outlets (like @TESOnline on X/Twitter) than they do the ESO forums. I can't imagine many of them chose to create an account specifically for the ESO forums, but they're likely to have an existing Reddit or X/Twitter account.

The ESO forums is a miniscule subset of the overall playerbase and it really doesn't encapsulate all that the community actually thinks of the game. That's why it's important to use multiple social media outlets — some players only use one platform, so we should get their thoughts, too.

Having polls here would incentivize forum membership and ultimately would probably lead to more diverse conversations, since people currently tend to avoid the forums due to its bad reputation.

I understand what you're saying, but from a data gathering standpoint, creating a barrier to entry to data is a great way to induce sampling bias and ruin the value of the data.

Everyone here had the motivation to seek out the forums and get their account activated. There are people who have been banned from the forums, likely for good reason, but their input would be nonetheless just as valuable as us who are here.

The best survey to gather feedback from your players is the survey that is so simple to fill out, nearly every player does it. Each new barrier to entry will skew the data and give you an incomplete view into the real sentiments of your playerbase.

This is a good point.

I used to get irked that WoW would go to such lengths to post information on Twitter rather than use its own Forums, but WoW Forums to ESO's are apples to oranges. It was a cakewalk to join them, players were barely moderated and allowed to voice displeasure freely, and the raw number of participants was enormous and I'd assume the % of the player base was far, far larger there than here.

For whatever reason, ESO Forums have always required extra hoops to join, are tremendously moderated for negativity or complaints let alone tone or bad behavior, and the number of participants here must be a truly miniscule % of such an enormous game's players.

I love ESO and prefer it by large measure to WoW for most things, but I do miss their Forums at times and wish ours were more similar here. It does indeed make using outside locations probably a better reaching alternative, unfortunately.

LadyGP

This stream answered the question I've been asking myself for years - "why is PvP always ignored and why is it the way it is?"

XSTRONG

I watched the stream today and I think Zos could have done it better but it wasnt as bad as I thought after reading forum and watching YT vids.

They needed another Eso content creator like PainintheAxe in there to liven up the audience abit.

Gameplay in the stream were played like how Battlegrounds are meant to be played with or without top tier skill.

Muizer

HazierBlue wrote: »

It blows my mind that 10 years later we are still asking/answering the question "How do we communicate better". I'm not a heavy gamer but I don't think I've seen this anywhere else.

Communication isn't the main problem. It's the fact that there is generally speaking nothing to communicate. I mean, there's a complete absence of any kind of consistent drive towards structural, incremental improvements. This just would not be the case if a dedicated PvP dev team actually existed. We have to assume Brian's actually on his own and has to work with whatever dev time he can borrow from people who spend most of their time working on other things and those other things being the priority almost all of the time. So no, we shouldn't be asking for better communication. We should be asking ZOS to form a dedicated PvP dev team, even if it's just 2 people instead of 1 that would make a big difference.

Aldoss

Muizer wrote: »

HazierBlue wrote: »

It blows my mind that 10 years later we are still asking/answering the question "How do we communicate better". I'm not a heavy gamer but I don't think I've seen this anywhere else.

We should be asking ZOS to form a dedicated PvP dev team, even if it's just 2 people instead of 1 that would make a big difference.

The moment they make an announcement like this my wife and I will turn our subs back on and start buying chapters and crowns again.

Alaztor91

Aldoss wrote: »

Muizer wrote: »

We should be asking ZOS to form a dedicated PvP dev team, even if it's just 2 people instead of 1 that would make a big difference.

The moment they make an announcement like this my wife and I will turn our subs back on and start buying chapters and crowns again.

Afaik there used to be a dedicated PvE and a dedicated PvP Dev teams, but they got fused into one when Wrobel left and Wheeler took over as Lead Combat Designer (Wheeler was the PvP Lead before that).

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/453748/combat-team-news-and-updates/p1

LadyGP

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hey all, thank you for the additional replies - there are many good insights here. Increasing the amount of Q&As/AMAs we do, and adding more regular feedback surveys does seem doable. As Kevin touched on in this post earlier tonight, many of us are going to be out for Thanksgiving holiday, and we'll follow up when we return. We are making an effort to be here on the forums a bit more, and we don't want our lighter presence over the next week to send the wrong message. The Community team will still drop by as we're able in to check on things here. For those of you who celebrate, we hope you have a restful Thanksgiving with family and/or friends.

Can I make a request that doing things like removing/putting people in chat time out for saying things like "when can we expect new pvp content?" come to an end?

It's been a long standing zos tradition to delete respectable and honest questions people ask - especially if they have anything to do with PvP. This is why the PvP community is so frustrated and vocal - it leaves the impression that ZoS just cant stand the PvP community and make fun of them behind closed doors *not going to bring up the old twitch stream... not going to do it....*

LadyGP

Aldoss wrote: »

Muizer wrote: »

HazierBlue wrote: »

It blows my mind that 10 years later we are still asking/answering the question "How do we communicate better". I'm not a heavy gamer but I don't think I've seen this anywhere else.

We should be asking ZOS to form a dedicated PvP dev team, even if it's just 2 people instead of 1 that would make a big difference.

The moment they make an announcement like this my wife and I will turn our subs back on and start buying chapters and crowns again.

Second this.

Mall0ry

LarsS wrote: »

There are some issues with Cyro that can be changed fast and that have been asked for a very long time. These things would be a good indication that ZOS listens.

1. Weight the campaign points with the number of players online, so we see an end to campaigns beeing decides while only a few are online.
2. Buff alliances who have fewer keeps to make the map more fluid, give extra ap to the alliance that owns enenmy keeps instead.
3. Better rewards, considering that we are fighting for a month one should expect much better rewards.

None of this should be hard to implement!

I agree on those suggestions (yes, including the first one...and especially the last one, the rewards are useless) and there are even things which should be easier to change but would help a lot. For example the good old combat bug. It seems to be impossible to fix that. So maybe just let people mount in general? Even in combat?

This does obviously not touch the core problems or whatever you want to call it, but it would show us we are not being ignored. Just a little bit attention would make many pvpers feeling better.

JonnytheKing

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hey all, it's late but I wanted to hop in and say thank you for the many constructive and thoughtful responses since I last posted, especially those from @Destai @ESO_Nightingale @ForumSavant and @Turtle_Bot. There are fair concerns, criticisms, and suggestions here. While I can't respond to all of them, please know I've read every post and we are discussing best steps forward. I know we've said this before, but we can always do better with our communication. In that line of thought, beyond forum posts what method do you all most prefer for answers to questions? What is the most visible? A Q&A post/article? A Reddit AMA? Something else?

thank you for keeping a eye on this, something needs to change

Aldoss

Alaztor91 wrote: »

Aldoss wrote: »

Muizer wrote: »

We should be asking ZOS to form a dedicated PvP dev team, even if it's just 2 people instead of 1 that would make a big difference.

The moment they make an announcement like this my wife and I will turn our subs back on and start buying chapters and crowns again.

Afaik there used to be a dedicated PvE and a dedicated PvP Dev teams, but they got fused into one when Wrobel left and Wheeler took over as Lead Combat Designer (Wheeler was the PvP Lead before that).

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/453748/combat-team-news-and-updates/p1

My wife and I started playing in 2019, the year Wrobel left and @ZOS_BrianWheeler took over the new combined role of Lead Combat Designer.

Everyone said Wrobel was divisive. I'm not sure it's possible to have this job without being divisive. Every action you take is going to *** off someone or some sub-community. Look at Hybridization, something that occurred well within Brian's tenure. Some players are still pissed about that. Some love it. Some are pissed that it's been years since the process began and it still isn't complete. You could easily call Brian divisive, but really it's just impossible to do the job without that.

I don't know what combat was like before the merging of the designs for both PvE and PvP, but I can say that I'm firmly in the "this ain't doin' it for me" category right now.

It seems plainly obvious to me that the task is way too complex for one person to manage. Every year since my wife and I started playing, combat has been getting more and more frustrating. Patches keep getting debuted with massive game breaking issues. The winners and losers of class balance seem more pronounced to me. Ball groups have become more and more impossible to kill with every patch.

I watched a little bit of Sypher's clips from 2017. It's wild how little healing was in the game. His resolving vigor ticks were critting for 1.7k. The biggest heal he ever received as a stamblade was 8.9k Rally crits. He'd spend dozens of seconds at 50% or less stamina. None of this happens anymore. NBs can spam offering and it will bring them back from the brink of death to full hp and that's already accounting for the fact that NBs are running around with 33k hp now compared to Sypher's 21k back in 2017. Resources are so easy to get now. It's wild to me that NBs can routinely get 15k bow procs now and it's still not a guaranteed kill after that because so many burst heals are able to crit for that same amount.

Anyway, there's plenty of issues that have been discussed here over the last couple years and it just honestly feels pointless to keep sharing them because ZOS is too slow to acknowledge them. I really hope that @ZOS_JessicaFolsom's comment regarding the Q&A's is not just lip service like the last time they threw that out there. I hope they (finally) make some investments in their ability to aggregate and reply to player feedback. Combat needs so much more help than it has. Brian's been here since the beginning hasn't he? He needs some more funding and more bodies on this. Fixing combat 4 times a year is not working at all.

i11ionward

I recently posted this comment in the PTS thread during update 44 cycle

i11ionward wrote: »

September 2024 was the lowest month for ESO 24-hour peak online in the last 6 years according to steamdb statistics. But Combat Abilities and Item Sets teams keep making unpopular changes instead of making fun and what people are asking for. If ever (I hope it doesn't happen) ESO shuts down, I can predict that it will be the fault of item set and skill balancing teams.

and the current topic only confirms that the gameplay team does not understand what is happening in the game and what the players want.

Sometimes I feel like it would be better if there were no gameplay updates at all, because new updates bring more pain and suffering to players than fun.

dcrush

After some Q&A disasters of the past years (ZOS making up their own questions and U35 Q&A just being shelved), bugs and balance issues consistently going live after they have been called out on the pts, changes such as the grim focus permaglow where feedback is asked [snip] I have zero faith that ZOS will ever improve their communication. You cannot get to ten years of running a game and still be this bad at communicating.

[snip]

I will happily be proven wrong, but I am not my holding my breath.

[edited for bashing]

moderatelyfatman

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

But my impression is that Brian doesn't represent the sweaty PvPers very well

Casuals hate the pull sets even more than the sweats do.

Casuals don't have Immobility pots.