Official Discussion Thread for "ESO’s September 2025 Survival Guide"

ZOS_Kevin

This is the official discussion thread for, "ESO’s September 2025 Survival Guide"

"This September, delve into Tamriel’s darkest corners, compete for glory on the battlefield, and enjoy a sneak peek at what's coming with Update 48! Note that some of the below items may change between now and their live dates."

LunaFlora

very excited to see what is in Update 48.

XSTRONG

Undaunted celebration is the best event in eso, looking forward to it

SkaiFaith

LunaFlora wrote: »

very excited to see what is in Update 48.

Agreed, and for some reason I'm mostly excited at the idea that we could start seeing overland difficulty being tested - no official info about it, just a hope and a feeling...

Edit: also, hopefully, this article today means tomorrow we'll have the crown store showcase from Master Kevin, without having to wait after the weekend...

MISTFORMBZZZ

Vengeance means a empty ps eu pvp server for 10 days 😬🫩

OccultOverload

Please Don’t Make Vengeance PvP Tests Mandatory Again

With the recent announcement of another mandatory Vengeance PvP test, I feel compelled to speak up—not just for myself, but for many in the dedicated PvP community who’ve voiced similar concerns. While ZOS might be hoping this new event revitalizes interest in Cyrodiil, forcing all players into a homogenized test environment does more harm than good. Here's why:

1. Casual-Friendly Doesn’t Mean Better for the Game
Let’s be real: Vengeance is clearly tailored to casual players. And that’s fine in itself—new players should feel welcome. But when accessibility comes at the cost of depth and mastery, it sends the wrong message. Many casual players are enjoying Vengeance simply because it strips away the usual barriers to PvP—build knowledge, gear farming, group coordination. But that’s not accessibility—that’s flattening the experience.

There are plenty of viable, craftable builds. The issue isn’t that PvP is too hard or too gated—it’s that the current generation of players often isn’t encouraged to explore the deep systems ESO already has. Instead of empowering players to learn, Vengeance just hands them a shallow PvP experience where individual effort and ingenuity barely matter.

2. Zergs Dominate, Strategy Dies
One of ESO's greatest PvP strengths used to be the satisfaction of a skilled small group outplaying a massive zerg with positioning, communication, and smart build choices. Vengeance replaces that with pure number-stacking. The scaling and skill loadout changes mean tight-knit teams can no longer punch above their weight. Victory doesn’t go to the clever or the skilled anymore—it goes to whoever brings the most bodies and spams the most light attacks.

This undermines what made PvP in ESO compelling: it wasn't just about stats—it was about strategy.

3. Theorycrafting is Dead in Vengeance
ESO has always been about making your character your own—choosing specific gear sets, refining your build, and grinding to optimize. That effort used to matter. In Vengeance, it doesn’t. Everyone’s forced into bland, uniform setups, which eliminates one of the last truly Elder Scrolls-ish elements left in PvP.

Why bother testing, farming, and crafting when the game now tells you “don’t worry, we’ll flatten it all for you”?

4. The Skill Gap is Gone
PvP should reward mastery. Right now, it doesn’t. Vengeance's systems minimize the differences between a veteran and a newcomer, not by lifting new players up, but by dragging veterans down. There’s no reason to improve, because improvement no longer yields meaningful results.

Outplaying someone used to feel earned. Now, with simplified skills and watered-down mechanics, the thrill of besting an opponent through superior skill is all but gone.

5. Combat Feels Awkward and Clunky
The Vengeance-specific abilities are a poor fit for ESO's combat system. They don’t flow, they don’t feel responsive, and they break the rhythm veteran players have spent years mastering. PvP combat should feel fluid and impactful—not like you’re fighting with training weights on.

Instead of enhancing the experience, these abilities turn combat into a chore. It’s not fun. It’s not satisfying. It’s not what PvP in ESO was built to be.

The Bigger Problem: A Philosophical Shift
What’s most concerning is what Vengeance represents: a departure from what made ESO PvP great. This isn’t just a change in design—it’s a shift in philosophy. ZOS seems increasingly willing to prioritize short-term casual engagement over the long-term health and depth of competitive play.

Yes, you might gain some new or returning players who enjoy the simplicity. But at what cost? You risk losing the very players who’ve kept PvP alive—through bad patches, imbalances, lag, and everything in between. The players who studied, adapted, and helped build the community that exists today.

To those of us who’ve invested years into builds, rivalries, and skill-based progression, Vengeance feels like a betrayal.

Please Keep Vengeance Optional

If elements of Vengeance are going to make it to live service, then let it live as a separate ruleset campaign. Let new players ease in there. Let casuals enjoy it. But do not force all of Cyrodiil into this design mold.

We need space for competitive, strategic PvP to survive—where skill, creativity, and mastery still matter.

Please, ZOS: support the diversity of your community, not just its lowest common denominator.

Sincerely,
A Veteran PvPer Who Still Believes ESO Can Do Better

xylena_lazarow

How close is Vengeance to being added as a permanent campaign?

Savagejack

I loved vengeance because it didn't have procs, pull sets, ball groups, and excessive cross healing. Please make it permanent, thank you!

diamondo

I hope update 48 brings up some big changes and nerfs to subclassing system in PvP it’s ridiculous the amount of damage and healing players get and how left behind pure class builds are.
There is no skill required really all players have to do is go into turtle mode dropping their Templar healing skills. I saw one player take tremendous amounts of damage and out heal then turn around dishing out lots of damage, this is becoming more of a common sight and players are more and more looking like they are being minted out of the same factory

PvP for me has become a boring experience. Because you can’t compete if you don’t want to subclass and I think while I have persisted the maps are looking emptier and I am not surprised like I said it’s a map full of players running one of two maybe 3 set ups.

Come on game developers make some changes make it harder for players to sit on these over powered builds there was so much more variety before subclassing the game was fun you could try out different things and most importantly it was balanced.

If you awaiting for the data and player feedback for to long your going to end losing them for good players have made their views clear

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

Can't wait for Vengeance especially during another event happening.

SkaiFaith

I want to express gratitude for announcing PTS dates in advance - it didn't use to be like this and the change is much appreciated!

starlizard70ub17_ESO

XSTRONG wrote: »

Undaunted celebration is the best event in eso, looking forward to it

It's a great event for leveling up the undaunted skill for your secondary characters while collecting some useful amour/weapons sets.

XSTRONG

starlizard70ub17_ESO wrote: »

XSTRONG wrote: »

Undaunted celebration is the best event in eso, looking forward to it

It's a great event for leveling up the undaunted skill for your secondary characters while collecting some useful amour/weapons sets.

It also dont include silly quest like throw a mudball, it actually have some fun gameplay to it

Hunterka71

I'm happy to take part in the Undaunted celebration. But it bothers me to no end that we still didn't have a chance to earn the Frostbane pets that were in Undaunted celebration in 2018

@ZOS_Kevin It's been two years of anniversary, we had a chance to get some past rewards, Impresario assistant has some, but this one bunch of pets is forever missing.
Please, if it's possible, could they be added for tickets during Undaunted event? If it's too late to do it, can we get them somehow? It's been years !
Personally I'm after the senche, but others were cute too. Pretty please, bring them somehow back, preferably not RNG bound.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Frostbane_Sabre_Cat_(pet)

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

@ZOS_Kevin

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/community page doesn't show Vengeance on the calendar.

Also any word on Q&A part 3?

nightstrike

OccultOverload wrote: »

Please Don’t Make Vengeance PvP Tests Mandatory Again

While I agree with you that Vengeance is an awful mode, my understanding is that it was simplified to zero in on the worst server side problems. They can set a controlled environment and then see what part of the system is breaking. For example, just to make something stupid up, let's say for the sake of argument that looting containers was making cyro fall apart. They could use Vengeance to create a baseline with that off, then turn on just that one feature, run it again, and see how things change. It's nice.......................

...............in theory.

Where this theory breaks down is two fold. First, the parameters of the campaign are controlled, but the inputs to the model are not. The same players are not performing the same actions from the same geographical / network location. Instead, they are relying entirely on entropy to overcome the massive error margin. This is somewhat ok given enough entropy, and it is admittedly difficult to inject enough scripted events and synthesized traffic to mimic what real humans do, but it's a limiting way to conduct data analysis. By that, I mean that the conclusions you can draw are limited. For example, if you create a controlled environment where one particular background process is pegged at 100%, and then compare that to another process and see if it's affected, you could identify that *correlation*. What you can't do is identify *causation*, at least again without sizable error bars on that plot.

This all leads into the second problem, which is that we have yet to see practical changes to non-vengeance cyro. We only see them hinting more and more that Vengeance itself is the real answer, and they'll keep adding features to it until it becomes a permanent campaign. That makes the whole idea of testing kind of pointless, because it doesn't appear to be testing geared towards improving existing campaigns.

nightstrike

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

This is the official discussion thread for, "ESO’s September 2025 Survival Guide"

"This September, delve into Tamriel’s darkest corners, compete for glory on the battlefield, and enjoy a sneak peek at what's coming with Update 48! Note that some of the below items may change between now and their live dates."

@Kevinmon Can you please make sure that the maintenance team talks to the event team this time around? Scheduling maintenance on the last day of an event is terrible, and as you and everyone else knows, it's made significantly worse because that last day only has 4 hours to it.

On that note, can you flat out beg the event team to burn that whole 4 hour day lunacy in a giant fire? There is no possible way that makes any sense.