@OP - you missed one major category in your list of 4 ---> Solo

Even without going into a vet dungeon as solo, just talking normal group dungeon, sustain can be an issue.

An argument could be made that group dungeons should not be solable - ok, that's a separate thread. But unless you're so anti solo and hardcore that you are willing to say the solo community is not legit and should not be reasonably included, the reduction to sustain is not just an upper end trials thing.

It affects every single player who likes to try and complete as much content as they can solo. Doesn't mean loner all the time, I do trials, solo, and quest / misc meandering. But I enjoy them as separate activities. The beta as is has a significant nerf to soloing, not just upper end trials.

Jacozilla wrote: »

@OP - you missed one major category in your list of 4 ---> Solo

Even without going into a vet dungeon as solo, just talking normal group dungeon, sustain can be an issue.

An argument could be made that group dungeons should not be solable - ok, that's a separate thread. But unless you're so anti solo and hardcore that you are willing to say the solo community is not legit and should not be reasonably included, the reduction to sustain is not just an upper end trials thing.

It affects every single player who likes to try and complete as much content as they can solo. Doesn't mean loner all the time, I do trials, solo, and quest / misc meandering. But I enjoy them as separate activities. The beta as is has a significant nerf to soloing, not just upper end trials.

Dungeons shouldn't be balanced around solo play. Solo players chose to put that handicap on themselves.

In the same way you're not supposed to Half Life with just the crowbar. Or play Dark Souls without leveling up.

You miss the point.

All other PvE content doesn't need to be balanced around because it's easy enough that players have a lot of room to run sub-optimal builds and play how they want.

Even dungeons like vet Cradle of Shadows HM can be completed without pushing the players to the limits.

Small scale PvP and Veteran trials force you into some templates and if those templates are not balanced it causes some people to be locked out of that content.

To give you an example, it's fully possible to PvP-zerg, complete hardest dungeons, solo, quest and grind Skyreach with a full group of slightly inexperienced players and no build optimisation. If you tried to run vet trials or small group PvP like that you'd get obliterated.

I'm active at both sides of what people consider 'hardcore' and 'casual'.

One of my guilds is one of the high-end pve guilds on PC/EU, and currently we're able to complete vmol hardmode on a farming base, still working towards higher scores and no-death HM runs (the latter not being achieved yet by our group). Even with maxed out builds however, this still remains difficult content which requires you a lot of concentration and MONTHS of practise to come this far. The current sustain in this group is okay, because we're all experienced and the tanks/healers are coöperating perfectly, like how it should be. When the current PTS goes live, we'll be taken a step back but the guild will find new solutions to keep completing the content. Even if this shows the content being even more difficult then before.

An other guild where I'm in is a (semi)casual dutch guild, where we're doing both normal and veteran (craglorn only) trials, depending on the group setup. Although the members we're bringing here are definitely more then averaged skilled pve players, these groups are less experienced then the example given above. We're speaking about ~25-30k dps/player here with tanks/healers who are decent as well. However they're already struggling on live with their magicka and stamina pools when they don't give attention to improve their sustain with enchants or certain item sets. When the current PTS goes live, players who are now able to complete the veteran craglorn trials will be set back to normal trials due to the lack of sustain and experience they have. Yes, for top-level players veteran trials are more or less easy now, but they still got the hardmodes, and we're speaking about a percentage of less then 1-2% of the overall player base. And even today the amount of guilds who can complete hardmode trials relatively easy are being counted on less then 2 hands serverwide. When we're starting on the real casual pve players, I wonder if they still can complete even normal mode trials if not being carried by high-level players.

With the current sustain changes you'll hit the top, which may be intended. However the current sustain changes will hit the average player even more, who aren't absolute pve experts on sustainability and damage, bringing them back into skillless heavy attacking. Then there's the case of new players, who already can sustain barely within the current live server without heavy attacking all the time. In other words, the gap between top level players and the average ones will get bigger even more. Insteat of nerfing trials, I would rather see less experienced players buffed, and perhaps make questing/dungeons/overland content more difficult when people find this too easy. This however brings back that a lot of players don't find veteran content easy to do. Perhaps a 3rd difficulty should be given for dungeons, so that top-end level players get more difficult content outside vet trials alone. There's no need to hit the average player, though.

All of this is written from a pve experience and point of view, and on how the changes do hit group-pve content. I've taken trials as an example here, but this also count for all harder pve content such as maelstrom, dsa and veteran (DLC) dungeons. I'm aware of the existence of overpowered sustainability builds in pvp, but that's a different case.

IzakiBrotherSs wrote: »

So your solution is to make the only hard content in the game easy?

I never, ever said that.

I said health of trial mobs should be reduced in accordance to the nerfs to sustain and damage.

AKA: If damage output is 10% lower than in ESO:M compared to Homestead, then reduce trial mod health by 10%. Simple, easy, straight to the point.

lolo_01b16_ESO wrote: »

Marto wrote: »

IzakiBrotherSs wrote: »

So your solution is to make the only hard content in the game easy?

I never, ever said that.

I said health of trial mobs should be reduced in accordance to the nerfs to sustain and damage.

AKA: If damage output is 10% lower than in ESO:M compared to Homestead, then reduce trial mod health by 10%. Simple, easy, straight to the point.

There is no need for that because hp of trial mobs haven't been increased for the homestead patch. vMoL is balanced around the thieves guild patch and in morrowind you will still be able to do noticably more damage than in tg.

If vmol was balance around thief guild patch, why did my stam dk lose 4k dps after homestead then?

Draqone wrote: »

You miss the point.

All other PvE content doesn't need to be balanced around because it's easy enough that players have a lot of room to run sub-optimal builds and play how they want.

Even dungeons like vet Cradle of Shadows HM can be completed without pushing the players to the limits.

Small scale PvP and Veteran trials force you into some templates and if those templates are not balanced it causes some people to be locked out of that content.

To give you an example, it's fully possible to PvP-zerg, complete hardest dungeons, solo, quest and grind Skyreach with a full group of slightly inexperienced players and no build optimisation. If you tried to run vet trials or small group PvP like that you'd get obliterated.

This. Trials = PVE. Solo content isn't an issue because you can tackle it with an unlimited amount of people and quite frankly as long as you don't screw up your build and pu 64 into health you'll be fine. Dungeons are a joke and even the hardest DLC ones are a walk through the park with OK builds. They could nerf the game into the ground, half the damage and people would still sleepwalk through it. For vMA some builds always were easier than others - that's pure training and preference.

Trials on the other hand don't screw around. You can wear BiS and you'll probably never complete vMoL with your group if they're decent enough to follow mechanics while having a high DPS output. There are some easy ones like vAA, Hel Ra but HM is pretty tough if your group never completed it before - so of course trial players are the ones who will feel the changes and it does make a huge difference.

Don't know about other platforms but PS4 EU has a huge trials community. Normal or Vet, guilds or pugs, it's basically THE content to do in PVE due to gear and achievements. Hardly niche and guilds resolve around trials or PVP which really is the content where balance changes matter the most.

the new trial has major slayer sets that also have minor slayer.

so that's 5% dmg bonus plus 15% for you and two friends every 10 seconds.


so that's a major buff for those who do trials, which also applies to dungeons.

whatever was lost was gained back a fair bit right there.

Assuming you do trials of course.

MotokoKusanagi34 wrote: »

Arenguros wrote: »

I have to agree.
Trials have too big of an impact on both balancing and the players mentality.

But that doesn't mean trials should become easier, instead the focus should be shifted away from them.

Remove the leaderboards.
Don't give out the best sets in trials.
Make sure other content is not easy to cheese through with BiS gear as this means the game is broken.

It's ok to have trials give out exclusive titles, skins and be generally a superior way to generate gold when you can complete them in a average time.
It's not ok for trials to be "the only content that matters".

If you shift the focus away from trials you might as well quit the game if you're not into PVP, because other small scale group activities don't offer the same level of challenge.

The main reason nothing else is challenging is the large increase in dps over the last patches.
Most of the content was designed around 15-30k dps, not the current numbers.

Also I never said trials should be removed from the game. If you like doing challenging content, you can still complete them when they don't offer the best equip and a leaderboard.

Dixa wrote: »

Marto wrote: »

Whenever I see a discussion that revolves around the sustain numbers, there's always one thing that pops up.

Trials.

Trials. Trials, Trials.

I get it, the community does like to push themselves towards the hardest content in the game. However, this closed mentality regarding balance can end up making the game worse, not better.
I do not think that Zenimax should revert the changes currently in the PTS. They're not perfect, sure. They require a tweak here and there, I do feel that stamina got hit a bit too hard compared to magicka, but overall, the changes ZoS are positive.

Here's my reasoning for it.

There's four basic types of content you can do in ESO: Questing, PVP, Dungeons, and Trials.

Ideally, you want all four to be balanced. You want all four to be fun, challenging and rewarding. They cater to different audiences, so while questing is easier for the new players, and dungeons are good for intermediate level players, Trials cater towards the very top %, in terms of power.

The problem I'm seeing with the suggestions coming from the community, is that all of them are centered around Trials, completely disregarding the balance of the other 3 types of content. If the current PTS version improves the experience of Questing, PVP, and Dungeons, while making Trials impossible... then perhaps Zenimax should simply make trials easier.

A friend was telling me how, in his calculation, The Mage in vAA would be impossible to beat with the current changes, specifically because of the last stage of the fight, in which you are forced into a DPS race. My proposed solution was: Reduce the health of the boss.

Some users have tested the PTS changes, and determined that, in order to preserve most of your resource management, you'll have to sacrifice 500-600 spell/weapon damage. This will hit your DPS, and increase the time it takes to kill anything. Then, all Zenimax has to do, is reduce the health of trial mobs, until they take roughly the same amount of time to beat. Recovery will be more difficult, yes. In addition to this, ZoS also has to rethink their changes to Spear Shards, Syphoning Strikes, etc. But overall, I think a change this simple can work to alleviate the worries of the Trials community.

TL;DR: Rather than ruin the experience of 90% of the playerbase by making recovery too easy, a simple tweak to Trials mob health would be more beneficial to the game. A change like this has less collateral damage on the balance of all other aspects of the game (Questing, Dungeons, PVP)

you know what's truly sad is that these changes really only affect trials, only a small percentage of the player base does trials and according to so many forum posts here and on the subreddit so few are even ALLOWED to try vet trials having fallen into the WoW trap of "if you want to do the raid you have to have already done that raid on the hardest difficulty - link your achievement".

these resource changes don't really affect what is likely the overwhelming majority of the active playerbase and any new players are going to be leveling up in a situation of not knowing what easy unlimited resources was really like.

i personally would prefer we go back to launch of hard and soft caps though.

The part about not letting people join raids only happens if the guild is SPECIFICALLY for speed/no death run HM raids, or simply if the people are scumbags. There are PLENTY of progression guilds that are made to run new people through normal trials, train them to get to vet, and send them on their merry way to either do endgame raids with the same guild or just to help the community in general. Hell, I'm in a trading guild that does *** weekly normal and vet trials! If you don't already have the experience or are too lazy to find a way to get experience, then you don't deserve to do the hardest trials in the first place

Arenguros wrote: »

MotokoKusanagi34 wrote: »

Arenguros wrote: »

I have to agree.
Trials have too big of an impact on both balancing and the players mentality.

But that doesn't mean trials should become easier, instead the focus should be shifted away from them.

Remove the leaderboards.
Don't give out the best sets in trials.
Make sure other content is not easy to cheese through with BiS gear as this means the game is broken.

It's ok to have trials give out exclusive titles, skins and be generally a superior way to generate gold when you can complete them in a average time.
It's not ok for trials to be "the only content that matters".

If you shift the focus away from trials you might as well quit the game if you're not into PVP, because other small scale group activities don't offer the same level of challenge.

The main reason nothing else is challenging is the large increase in dps over the last patches.
Most of the content was designed around 15-30k dps, not the current numbers.

Also I never said trials should be removed from the game. If you like doing challenging content, you can still complete them when they don't offer the best equip and a leaderboard.

why are you so worried about a leader board?

you not liking something dosnt mean its bad....im not into pvp or leader boards, i know people who are...its part of the enjoyment for them....i find it boring....

i think there should simply be other ways to earn the same rewards... same with pvp...im not into pvp...being forced to pvp to farm for example prismatic mats...sucks.... but its one of their ways to try and force everybody to enjoy their pvp...never been a big pvp fan....mostly because changes made thanks to bitching by pvp communities tend to screw the pve player base over...

cant wait for all the content to be cranked up to the level it was at when we had VR ranks....that should be alot of fun...20min to kill a giant turtle!!! and thats not even a boss just a VR giant turtle...cannot wait, it should be so much more fun after every class but warden is eventually nerfed into a fine yellow powder... then, after sales fall off, warden will get its nerfs....and...they will bring out another "expansion" that adds a new class, and nerf everybody again so that the new class will sell...because....if the only way to really have fun, is to play the new class....then thats what addicts will do.