dcincali wrote: »

Rofaka wrote: »

nikolaj.lemcheb16_ESO wrote: »

Epona222 wrote: »

Good luck enjoying endgame with the other few who persisted.

The thing is, veteran levels and Cyyrodiil is THE endgame, there is nothing waiting for you at V12.

There is no gear raiding and thank god for that, this game actually make sense.

The fact that there's nothing waiting for you at VR12 is the more reason to make veteran ranks a prestige/cosmetic reward ^^

and yes, thank the eight that there's no such thing as raid or PvP gear, imagine having to get new leveling, raid and PvP gear every Veteran Rank :')

Yes cause the v12 Dominion (or what ever faction you are) sets that drop in Cyro aren't pvp gear... *giggle* Obv someone has never been to Cyrodiil...

Shhhh...don't give them something else to complain about

I could agree with this.

I made it to VR4 on my DW/med/NB. Let's just say I don't play him anymore.

ndbuddrwb17_ESO wrote: »

Help me out ESO community. I'm seriously struggling. How, oh how does one have fun in this game while VET levelling and beyond? I'm trying real hard to stay motivated, but as my another friends drops the game and un-subs every week, I'm finding it harder and harder to battle on.

I've arduously meandered through to Vet 6 now, but I can't do it anymore. It is all just so, ridiculously boring. It's the same old grindy, slow, dull questing over and over again with no reward or even attainable goal. It's watching paint dry. I want to keep playing, I do. I *want* the game to be fun, but it's just... not. Just about every enemy I encounter of any elite rank is absurdly tough, some - like trolls - feel totally unbeatable, even when I'm 80% decked out in epics.

as people can't play endgame with their friends this game will lose subscribers. I really want this to get trough the skulls of some devs...

Evergnar wrote: »

I'm all for improving vet levels but a couple carrots won't do it for me. What was good about levels 1-50 was the journey. That is where vet levels fall short.

Without a continuing main story line, or fighters guild quest line, or mages guild quest line, or some new quest line (like spy/espionage) it won't matter what small carrot you hang out there.

There is little to get immersed in. Quests start to feel like Groundhog Day. They were not designed for characters from other factions. There is little new other than the landscape. No provisioning materials. Only 4 new motifs for twice the amount of content.

Sorry but Zos painted themselves into a corner with the vet levels and I'm just not sure how they will get out. That being said I'm for trying something, anything for that matter, to improve it.

People are constantly looking to fix the veteran levels. I say remove them, make everything normalised to level 50, and keep those vet levels as a cosmetic reward.

I may be one of the few who actually enjoyed the veteran content, but that is likely due to how I've played the other elder scrolls titles. I would play once through with the difficulty slider set to medium or easy, and get my fill of being uber. Then I would download patches and mods to fix exploits and improve and balance combat and then set the difficulty to max and play through with a greater challenge. Then I would go through the story again. Veteran levels sort of remind me of this, with the added benifit of playing through a similar story but in a different setting and with new characters. I personally love it.

But I know it's not for everyone. I would honestly like to see Caldwells silver and gold kept in for players like me. The artificial difficulty, the similar story, everything. But I would like to see a different option added as well. One that lets you go to other aliences, not as a ghost reliving that story, but as a member of your characters alliance, causing mayhem and disrupting, instead of assisting.

Just my two cents I suppose, but I hope they improve the experience for those displeased with the content.

p.hurst1b16_ESO wrote: »

I like the VR system. Triples the basic quest content, all the delves and dungeons to find. World bosses and Dolmens to beat. Veteran Dungeons. Games have done elite or master or expert dungeons before.

This game needs to introduce a few daily quests (not trivial kill x and gather some quest mats). By this I mean Veteran dungeon runs. Daily random veteran for your tier with a solid reward such as 750g 10000VP per tier, a Grand soul gem and a roll on a blue item list that contains jewellery and weapons only, not armour.

Give players some sense of being something more than they were on the road to 50. VR1 is nothing really, start off as a scrub in a new campaign, craft some slightly better gear and optional Veteran toggle on dungeons you already did.

The dungeons themselves are not a draw for me. I am quite picky about my gear and do not want boss drops and such.

Well, they did promise us we will be ABLE to do other faction's content.. it seems they have changed it last minute, scaled everything up from lvl 50 to give us 10 more levels artificially.. which went bad in most cases (hell, even reward for Cadwell's Gold was a level 50 neck.. they have upped it to VR10, but it's stats remain the same as lvl 50 item). And changed "ABLE TO" to "MUST"..

I think if they wanted Veteran Ranks as BONUS, they should have build endgame content for lvl 50.. not VR1/6/12. At lvl 50 (=VR1), you can just access 3 dungeons.. for everything else you need to continue leveling.

If they REALLY wanted veteran ranks to be bonus, they SHOULD HAVE made them the same way as Blizzard did with Paragon levels in Diablo 3 - they are not needed for anything, they are just there so you can feel slightly rewarded for continued playing(/grind).

Not like this, when you are FORCED to do the same quests over and over - doing every single quest in all of Tamriel just to level up a single character? That kills fun. Ask WoW. They at least have alternate zones for leveling, so you don't have to do the exact same quests again, if you choose to level an alt.

The problem is that the game wasn't designed originally to have Vet levels. It was created that you would level up 1-50 in your faction, that's it. At that point you would have Cyrodiil or dungeons.

During the closed beta tests, people complained so much that they changed how the game progressed, letting people experience the other zones without having to reroll, and viola, VR was born. It's an afterthought (a rushed one at that), which is why it feels so disconnected to the rest of the game. Have you ever noticed that there is no level 50. You go from 49 to VR1. This is why.

Had they left VR out of the game and not cave to the people complaining that they wanted to see the entire game on a single character, we would have had a progression at end which made more sense. Even with Craglorn coming out, they could have made it a Level 50 zone (since we all would have been), and keep it a horizontal progression instead of a vertical one. Craglorn should have been an endgame PvE zone that you went to after the intial 1-50 content and it would have made so much sense. Unfortunately, there is no going back now and the damage is done.

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO wrote: »

I played Oblivion and Skyrim on max difficulty as well, after playing one or several characters at regular difficulty to see most of the quest lines and the effects of some of the many different choices that were available. It was fun, challenging but also rewarding, and I still remember the thrill of trying to find a winning strategy for fights that had been almost face-roll easy on regular difficulty. Why am I not enjoying the same difficulty spike in ESO? Well, several reasons. See below.

I know this is not Skyrim, and I know this is not a single player game, so the comparisons below might not be 100% relevant, but my point is that the difficulty in this game is an unwelcome thing to most, even someone like me who enjoys a challenge as long as I have a choice. And that leads to the reasons:

1) Choice.
In the single player games I was doing it of my own choice, which means a world of difference. I could take that difficulty slider down a notch or two at any moment, but I chose not to. It was a deliberate "nightmare mode" with near impossible challenges for those who wanted it, not regular content that everyone was forced to do. In ESO it isn't fun, because I did not choose to play the game this way. I am forced to play the game their way. In other games, I do this when I have little else left to do, with absolutely no expectations to play the entire game to its end with that difficulty setting, and fully expecting to have my virtual backside handed to me on a platter in most situations.

2) Non-combat options.
ESO veteran ranks are not as difficult as, say, the highest setting in Oblivion (6x enemy damage, 1/6 player damage), but in Oblivion, you tried to avoid going toe to toe with those insanely boosted mobs wielding your nerfed weapons. You used poison, ranged sneak attacks, repeated hit and run attacks, led enemies into traps, relied on followers, hid in a closet and hoped for the NPC to lose track of you, turned enemies against each other by using spells, basically anything to keep you out of melee combat, and used hack and slash only as a last desperate resort if all else failed. In ESO, there are no options except in-your-face fighting in most situations.

3) Combat options.
In ESO, you have the same basic combat options at VR as in lvl 1-50: no useful followers, stealth is basically useless except for getting a first heavy hit in, and there are no big strategic advantages to be gained from the environment. Ranged attacks hit you around corners and through cover, even through walls, and NPC melee attacks hit from a large distance. You get no other tools to counter it than to "learn to play", with a sort-of real time combat system that is heavily crippled by network lag, at least for many EU players. Yes, you need to learn to move and block and dodge and use an effective rotation of skills that work on the particular enemy you are facing, but there is a limit to how much good it will do. There's no room for creative fighting styles in VR, just "this is how you should do it", with a short list of viable alternatives and very little room for error. Some of this is due to class and balance problems, but some of it is tightly connected to the game mechanics.

4) Cost.
In the other games I enjoy, dying comes at absolutely zero cost. You just reload a saved game or resurrect at a spawn point and try a different strategy, or try the same thing again hoping to get lucky. Failing and dying in ESO punishes you. A dozen failed attempts at a fight costs you rather a lot of gold in soul gems and repairs, and you need to spend extra time to earn that gold in order to stay relevant in solo play. The measly quest rewards and other sources of income I can find in VR zones while questing are nowhere near enough to pay the repair bills alone, much less spend anything on good gear or afford a respec. I need to grind for gold just to experience vanilla flavored, solo play content of the game. In other games, I often laugh when I die. In ESO, I curse when I die.

TL;DR: ESO difficulty is problematic because reasons.

I agree with nearly everything you said up there. And that's part of the reason I said "sort of". I definately agree that the most frustrating part is the choice aspect. I just let it slide a bit because difficulty hiked up near where I would hike it up myself. It is still frustrating though.

To elaborate on what I was saying before, I would like to have gold and silver stay the same for those who want it, but scale it back a bit for those who don't. It would then become an option to complete, and would be an achievement/ status thing where you would get a silver or gold medallion next to your name, similar to PvP rank.

Then if you had that option with the sabotage option, it would create a massive endgame content. The "normal" Vr zones should be the sabotage option (with a difficulty reduction), as to not break immersion, but cadwell should be able to send players who want to into the other alliance's in the same way as the content does now. The increased difficulty would be equivalent to a 're noobing' for that experience (as it kind does now.) There should also be better rewards for completing cadwells, for those for whom achievement is not enough.


As for being forced to use certain builds, I personally did not find this to be the case. I've barely used staves, only getting my restoration to 20 because a Guildie needed help in a dungeon (my destro is at 13 because I used it a bit for wolf farming in crows wood. That got boring faster than I could justify any profit.) I've gotten to v12 almost exclusively with my greatsword (my bow finally reached lvl 50 when I got to v9 because I used it so sparingly.) I never stopped experimenting with my bar, and found more use than I expected in abilities I had concidered worthless. (Looking at you path of darkness) Only set I've used was ashen grip, bucause I wanted to breathe fire. I kept the v5 set I crafted untill v9 because I just couldent be bothered. (You can only immagine how much that hurt my wallet.) My current gear is a missmatch of stuff, and my sword is a green from rewards of the worthy. Did the whole thing solo(appart from dungeons and dolmens ), only called in help for a V10 gargoyle who I could only get to 25%. (My guildmaster thinks I'm a bit 'special' because of my playstyle, not in the good way.)

Now that I'm done with my epeen uber rant, I miss those world traps too (especially you , smashy ayleid smash pillars :'( ) but there are still some I can use, and I can lay my own (fire rune, trap beast, aspect of terror.) And use cc. I wish there were more environmentals though.

TL;DR:
Have the current Vr area for those who want it, but have a toned down area for those who don't. Make veteran be a sabotage experience as to not break a immersion and a sense of loyalty.

Jaxom wrote: »

During the closed beta tests, people complained so much that they changed how the game progressed, letting people experience the other zones without having to reroll, and viola, VR was born. It's an afterthought (a rushed one at that), which is why it feels so disconnected to the rest of the game.

Are you sure about that? Do you have any proof? The John Cleese voiced Silver and Gold quests suggest the VR content was designed this way and was not cobbled together quickly as the result of some Beta feedback. Then you have all of the Veteran specific crafting mats, gear levels and passive skills which also suggest a deliberate plan regarding Veteran levels.

Emperor wrote: »

The game isn't the problem. It's the PLAYERS. Here me out.

.

if you make a product and it tanks because people dont want it, it is NEVER EVER the people that are the problem. it is always that your product is at fualt or at least percieved to be not good enough.

you cant change people to suit your product you have to change your product to suit people ..... or fail

" hey why dont you like this car i made?" " its dung" " no its brilliant just go away and change what you like about cars then come back and buy it "

Phantax wrote: »

Before the Mods move in this is not a quitting thread (I'm not quitting)
I am however not playing the game while it's in its current state !

Craglorn is a dead zone, literally. Yesterday (a weekend, prime time day) was rubbish there. Pretty much impossible to get a group, chat was almost non existent, anomalies are still a joke since the nerf ! (they need to be set back to how they were before)
VR zones... don't make me laugh ! I was in a VR9 zone and I can honestly say I saw about 4 people in nearly 5 hours. Tried a couple of times to engage in conversation but nothing. (not saying these peeps were bots, they weren't but they certainly weren't friendly either) Don't know if it was a stealth buff or a bug, but as a couple of threads have pointed out VR mobs are doing more damage than before the patch. Players (the few there are) are spending more time running back to repair and/or dying than they are enjoying the game !

People are still quiting the game because of veteran ranks, an MMO needs a solid endgame to stay stable, not this.

Laz wrote: »

I don't understand... People are saying VR is to hard yet my SUPER SQUISHY NIGHTBLADE can walk on enemies left and right in VR content... I'm confused, you might want to look at your build again.

Also, stop complaining. Non VR was to easy and now VR is to hard, what the hell do you want?

It's not about VR being too hard, although for some it may be. It's about the fact that it's a grind, and it's obligated. This makes it so that endgame is empty. Zenimax is making content for the few players who actually have done the VR grind, the content that the whole playerbase wants to enjoy.

AngryWolf wrote: »

Ya...I'm pretty worried the game will change into something I don't want to pay to play anymore either. Good thing I bringing up 3 toons at once, from each alliance. Get a full play through each area and if VR sucks, it won't be as big a deal to quit and move onto something else.

What's going to happen to the game when the diehard fans decide the game is over? with no endgame, this mmo has no future

Rofaka wrote: »

AngryWolf wrote: »

Ya...I'm pretty worried the game will change into something I don't want to pay to play anymore either. Good thing I bringing up 3 toons at once, from each alliance. Get a full play through each area and if VR sucks, it won't be as big a deal to quit and move onto something else.

What's going to happen to the game when the diehard fans decide the game is over? with no endgame, this mmo has no future

Some hand-waving story to re-use content and a multiplier applied to trash mobs makes good content it seems. Zen won't have to work too hard to keep them happy so no need to worry.

I agree with you OP. Sadly, many people do, and there are a variety of reasons why.

these reasons have been repeated so many times in so many threads I'm surprised that Z hasn't figured it out. Or perhaps they have...and they are just struggling to try and find a solution that will work, and wont put them into chapter 13 in an attempt to fix it.

Its a grind...
kills the desire to play alts...
goes against story progression and immersion (im AD...don't want to play a EP groupie)...
Simply too hard (or, difficult enough that the severe class balance makes it impossible for most builds unless they involved a staff and a dress)
No reward (rewards for playing a game that is 10x mroe difficult then levels 1-50 are the same rewards you get playing the same content with a lvl 1 alt)

...the list goes on, and it's huge, and players were leaving the game because of it. I think Z understands that people are unhappy (with the exception of those who are either still under lvl 50, or played a staff carrying dress wearing FotM).

UNfortunately, VR really needs a complete redesign to be optimally balanced and bring back everyone (and attract more). But I think we wont get that. I think we will continue to get measured class balance, and occasional end game dungeons, and they will try to overshadow the VR levels by getting everyone past them, and changing the game content that they add to compensate.

What VR NEEDS to be is this:

1) end game is lvl 50. VR is only tiers of gear.
2) running other fractions should be Optional content. quest rewards can be scaled a bit to compensate, or add other stat boosts (say, minor growth progression). quest rewards from Cal's series should be more impacting, but from a cosmetic point of view (more costumes, mounts, etc). heck, i'd run another fractions quests if i could get a MOUNT at the end.
3) real gear and growth progression should be found in group runs, daily quests, and challenges. challenges should NOT be limited to group only events, but have a variety of options and rewards to suit. examples:
- Crafting challenges like mini-dungeons (the mechanics for designing this stuff is already in game...make them solo or group only instances) that reward uncommon or chance at rare crafting mats.
- Solo challenges. kill X number of mobs in X time frame. Wildstar has an excellent example of this concept...tons of challenges you can do daily at any level. but I'd be happy with them at end game to start.
- Daily quests for group runs. The challenges are a good spots for this, they just need to increase the benefit of the rewards (I think they are in process of doing this now. it just needs to be far better then it is at the moment).
- Daily quests for exploration and for adventuring. this is the solo area. make them based on completing certain objectives, such as completing 2 Anchor events in Summerset isles, or visit all the boons in an area, or even as simply as kill 50 orcs in X area. give us reasons to go BACK to the areas that we've already been in. design it around the fractions that you've ALREADY COMPLETED. so if you are a purist, and only wanted to do your fractions quests in AD, then your daily adventure quests would be in random areas in AD areas ONLY.

It may be too late for #1 (serious design change), but #2 and 3 are still VERY VIABLE, and IMO necessary for this games continued evolution and survival. right now end game simply stinks, and im really trying to be nice about it. challenges are group only, end game content is group only, the rewards are not worth it (most players end up having to get gear much higher then whats given just to meet their times and be competitive), and this is after a forced grind of 2 other fractions, that are horribly balanced in a game that currently has horrible class and skill set balance.

I unsubbed, but came back after this most recent patch. I really am a "silver lining in the cloud" kind of guy, and i'm willing to support even badly implemented games if I see them going in the right direction. After this last patch I decided to re-sub, and start a new character (I wont' touch my vr level toons as that part of the game is still horribly balanced). well see if they can get VR to a playable state by the time i get there with this new re-iteration of my melee (read stamina build) templar.