What's killing builds?

starkerealm · January 2018

Aisle9 wrote: »

Dapper Dinosaur wrote: »

Yes, it was because of PvP, definitely not because of endgame trial raids doing 70k dps making the content trivial. Ofc it was PvP, keep telling yourself that before you go to sleep.

I'm pretty sure when they did the mass nerfing, they justified it by talking about resources in PVP, which should lead any logical person to follow the logic that PVP is the reason they nerfed resource sustain in a way that made gameplay more boring that LITERALLY everyone was against.

Dude

"Morrowind removes cost reduction from CP" (the morrowind resource nerf).
"Morrowind introduces new PvP with Battlegrounds (NO-CP)"

Come on... put your tinfoil hat back on.

Pretty sure the battlegrounds were not, no-CP in the beta.

AbysmalGhul · January 2018

kypranb14_ESO wrote: »

I'm a healer-DPS hybrid.

*coughs Oxymoron *coughs

Ragnarock41 · January 2018

To be honest what kills this game is CP.
as the CP cap gets higher and higher, classes and builds get worse and worse.

AbysmalGhul · January 2018

Ragnarock41 wrote: »

To be honest what kills this game is CP.
as the CP cap gets higher and higher, classes and builds get worse and worse.

How is that?

Cêltic421 · January 2018

I really don't see an issue about the sustained problem people are still doing trials people are still completing them people are still PVP people are still running dungeons. for those who say this is boring or not fun why are you still here on the forms and still playing the game. some changes did need made there was just too much sustain pre Morrowind it wasn't just about PVP and the majority knows this. I can still do the same content now as I could before Morrowind so what if I have to heavy attack once or twice during an encounter it's almost been a year get over it now quit the game stop crying enjoy the game. Jeeez

Ragnarock41 · January 2018

AbysmalGhul wrote: »

Ragnarock41 wrote: »

To be honest what kills this game is CP.
as the CP cap gets higher and higher, classes and builds get worse and worse.

How is that?

add more cp, nerf classes, add more cp, nerf classes,add more cp, nerf classes....................

at some point it will be impossible for a new player to catch up.
even now the difference of 100 CP points is making or breaking builds, yet zos keeps adding more CP into the game..

Try playing no-cp some time. You will be shocked how easy it is to kill those ''unkillable'' cp tanks in there.
You will realize all of those ridicilous builds are only possible with the help of CP.

Doctordarkspawn · January 2018

ZOS has a habit of wide sweeping changes for things it views as problems or abhorrant, which usually make certain builds unworkable.

Other times they have a very specific views on what needs to happen and view any and all deviation from 'the plan' as abhorrant. And they tend to stomp out any attempted deviation with ruthless efficiency.

Half the time, ZOS kills builds through sheer incompitence. Half the time, through malice.

To say nothing of the effect the CP system has on builds.

Aisle9 · January 2018

Somber97866 wrote: »

Everyone, the first thing wrote was a question not a statement! Thought I'd clarify for the simple minded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

Artanisul wrote: »

Aisle9 wrote: »

Moloch1514 wrote: »

Aisle9 wrote: »

Moloch1514 wrote: »

There was an ESO Live last year where the combat team dev admitted that balancing PvE and PvP separately would be "too hard" and take too much time. That is who we are paying folks.

That sounds like a reasonable argument from an informed source, so... ok?

I wish I could tell my boss that the dashboard project I'm working on is too hard and will take too much time. It won't seem reasonable to her I promise!

Yeah, that would be nice, but it's also completely unrelated to your previous statement. See there's a fallacy there: ZoS' employees are not your employees, you're a customer, you're paying for the product, that generates revenue, that makes the company thrive, but doesn't get to the combat system dev team. They have wages, so you're not paying them.

Unless you're Zenimax's CEO, which I'm pretty sure you're not, but, hey, feel free to prove me wrong.

I don't know why people cant see this...
They...work....for....us...
If they make crap, we leave. It really is that simple.

Ok, so.
1) Yes, as a customer you have the power to not buy goods or services. That will give the marketing team informations about what do you like to spend money on.
2) No, they don't work for you, and you have very little influence in the decisional process that leads to the dev team getting their assignments.
3) The dev team doesn't have decisional power, there's a hierarchical structure with Project Lead, Team Leads, down to the actual devs, that have the assignment given to them when the division of the workload is decided.
4) You leaving probably makes them sad, but the dev team doesn't really care, that's the marketing team's work. I mean, I'm sure they do, I'm sure it would make them sad if you leave.
5) Adding extra periods doesn't reinforce your statement, same as adding extra exclamation marks. Thought you should know.

starkerealm wrote: »

Aisle9 wrote: »

Dapper Dinosaur wrote: »

Yes, it was because of PvP, definitely not because of endgame trial raids doing 70k dps making the content trivial. Ofc it was PvP, keep telling yourself that before you go to sleep.

I'm pretty sure when they did the mass nerfing, they justified it by talking about resources in PVP, which should lead any logical person to follow the logic that PVP is the reason they nerfed resource sustain in a way that made gameplay more boring that LITERALLY everyone was against.

Dude

"Morrowind removes cost reduction from CP" (the morrowind resource nerf).
"Morrowind introduces new PvP with Battlegrounds (NO-CP)"

Come on... put your tinfoil hat back on.

Pretty sure the battlegrounds were not, no-CP in the beta.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/335600/pts-patch-notes-v3-0-0

TL;DR;

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

[..]
All Battlegrounds currently restrict Champion Points.

[..]

LordSemaj · January 2018

Since early MMOs, damage buffs are what kill builds. If two builds exist and one has more damage than the other, the lesser build is dead regardless of how awesome it is in other areas. It's somewhat of a community issue and somewhat of a developer making 10-minute fights issue. But for as long as I can remember, MMOs have frequently thrown damage optimized gear, traits, talents, AA, magic 1 hour buffs, etc and these things are the quickest way to kill build diversity. You're not changing how you play. You're just becoming stronger.

Play any old school RPG and you'll find that the boring ones are the battle systems that encourage spamming the 9999 dmg smashfests that drop the enemies and bosses in a few rounds. Yet there are in fact great RPGs that demand using specific Protection buffs, Guard commands, interrupts, actual debuffs (not reducing their armor for even more damage), maybe even HEALING the boss or attacking something that ISN'T the boss.

Developers focus too much on things like CP damage buffs, gear 5-piece damage buffs, resources buffing damage, attributes and passives buffing damage, and players will always min-max the crap out of every possible damage buff you offer them. Instead, damage should be normalized with high damage only coming from skillful combo play or exploiting enemy weak states like the current Off-balance approach tries (even though it's a silly buff that just adds "Moar Dmg").

Ingenuity is hard, as the devs who claimed balancing PVE and PVP separately can attest. Using your brain is more challenging than doing things the braindead easy way by stacking immunities, max sustain, and max damage output. Where once a wizard might cast a mirror image that has a random chance of negating the next few attacks by how many clones he conjures now they just summon a big shield of F-U that prevents all damage entirely. Where once poison might weaken an enemy and compromise their fighting abilities it now just murders them faster. Heck, in some games the focus even used to be on not taking damage at all as opposed to heal spamming back to full.

If they really wanted to preserve build diversity, all they would have to do is trash all these damage enhancing systems and focus on gear and builds that improve other areas of the character. Lengthening debuffs, enhancing shields in various ways, boosting sprint or dodge roll, things that already exist should be the focus of build diversity as opposed to getting more damage out of a set. All the sets should do "Moar Dmg" by default. We should be picking passives, gear, and weapons by their extra effects and not by their damage potential.

TL:DR - Devs should take a page from DOTA 2 or other mobas and give players activated gear, gear with pure utility benefits, or gear that specializes in a particular style of combat rather than gear that increases your damage. Attribute buffs should be for more resources not for bigger crits.

Somber97866 · January 2018

Yes is phetorical! Let's see if in discussion my mind can be changed.

Somber97866 · January 2018

I think LordSimaj Is into something

NewBlacksmurf · January 2018

LioraValkyrie wrote: »

What kills builds? (Coming from a PvE perspective)

1) Thinking that Hodor and Mechanical-Something-Or-Other's way of doing things is the way that your own group should be doing things. Even if my group decides that the way these guilds do things is the best way, it will be infinitely more satisfying to come to that conclusion for ourselves through trial and error, as opposed to mindlessly copying.

2) Thinking that max dps is BiS for every situation. When your group wipes when the boss is at 2% health during enrage, maybe so. When your group wipes when the boss is at 76% health because you are all out of stamina and can't dodge out of a big red circle, more dps probably wouldn't have helped.

3) Nobody thinking that it might actually be fun to play defensively for a change. Yesterday, I did the last boss of vDSA with the tank taking Hiath the whole time and the healer and dds focussing the ads. After maybe 30-40 runs of vDSA, the ads died for the first time ever. It was awesome and felt more truly 'complete' than ever before!

4) Thinking that the class you play should have as much or more dps than all the other classes. My MagSorc has way less dps than StamBlade. I'm fine with that. Why? Because I have a big ****ing 10 second, 22k damage shield, mwahaha. Every class offers something unique in every role, and in some situation or other you'll no doubt find yourself thinking something along the lines of "Man, we would be so dead right now if that DK healer hadn't cast their Magma Shell!"

5) Thinking that mechanics exist to be bypassed or exploited. ZoS put them in the game because they thought that people might actually enjoy doing them! You know... for fun?

6) Thinking that you need 25k+ dps to complete Vet DLC dungeons and vMA. It's just not true! And I'm not saying this because I have less than 25k dps. I have literally resto staff heavy attacked Velidreth to death in a 2-man run while my partner focussed on rounding up the ads.

In summary, the community kills builds. There's always going to be a mathematically optimal group synergy that allows the completion of a particular trial faster than any other set of builds. But unless your sole focus is on heading up the leaderboards, just find a playstayle you like, get good at it and learn the game's mechanics as well as you can and any reasonable-minded player will be honoured to have you in their group.

Good perspective but can we still add in the devs....i mean without the devs changing stuff all the time the community builds wouldn’t be a thing.

Once upon a time there was overpowered so you actually had to be balanced

Sneaky-Snurr · January 2018

Forum whiners.

HorizonPK · January 2018

everyone out here complaining about how they nerfed sustain because of PvP, I seem to recall they made those changes because top tier PvE was just blowing through new content too easily.

wut...

Even now PvE is too easy, I was able to solo the new dungeons up to the point where I couldnt because of mechanics that needed more than 1 player to do.

I would like to remind you all that ZoS cares far more about PvE than PvP.

EDIT: I really dont like the fact that I cant solo the new dungeons btw, I know its made for 4 man groups but almost all the time I cant even play these high tier dungeons because most players cant do it, where on the other side of the spectrum most experienced players ( players that can pull more than 30k DPS single target self buffed ) dont do them because of the same reason as me, call me elitist but I would really rather not spend 2+ hours in a dungeon explaining simple mechanics to players that cant do enough DPS/Tanking/Healing in the first place or just simply dont understand.

Im a PvP main btw, I find PvE to be very boring.

Zinaroth · January 2018

ZOS' lack of needed buffs to Stamplars is what's killing my Stamplar build.

Anhedonie · January 2018

Heavy attacking.