Long post - brace yourself!

I don’t post here much, but had some ideas I’ve been kicking around for a while and wanted to get them out there in case they hadn’t already been considered.


Destruction Staves: I think it would be great if staves did not have inherent elemental qualities, but instead reflected the character’s class (so staves would shoot out fire for DKs, frost for Wardens, shadow for NBs, etc). This would add diversity to the classes and get us away from everyone using fire staves. It also makes more sense - a wizard’s spell should reflect their specialization not what piece of wood they’re holding. I understand that previous Elder Scroll titles had elemental staves before ESO, but those titles did not have classes. In ESO they feel redundant.

Roll-Dodge/Block Animations: It would also be nice if magic users (characters with more magic than stamina) cast a warding animation while blocking and phased out of the physical realm (became sorta see-through) when preforming a roll-dodge. It just doesn’t make sense to me that a wizard should roll around on the floor or try to block a two-handed sword with a stick. The effect that these actions yield would remain the same while only the animations would change. It would make magic and stamina builds feel a little more diverse, which is a good thing, right?

Minimize/Eliminate Redundant Resource Pools: When playing a stamina-based character, you draw your resources for damage and “acrobatics” (roll-dodge, block and break-free) from stamina. When you play a magic-based character, you draw your resources for damage from magicka and “acrobatics” from stamina. I propose that instead of “acrobatics” always costing stamina, they be drawn from whatever resource pool is higher. This would work well visually with the above suggestion of changing block/roll-dodge animations, make min-max builds less cluttered and no longer dependent on a tiny resource pool for “acrobatics”, and remove a barrier for choosing magic over stamina or vice-versa. This would also make things simpler for tanks who could choose whether to play magic or stamina based on which skills they prefer, rather then which option gives them more resources.

With this change I would also recommend reworking attributes so that if you have 0 points in magicka, you have zero magicka to draw on. If you want magicka, use a set with a magicka bonus or put attribute points into it. Do the same thing for stamina. Also might want to work an explanation into the tutorial that reflects the change - “Here’s an attribute point, put into the resource you want. This is what resources do for your character, blah, blah, blah.” Pretty much the same as before, except characters wouldn’t start out with stamina or magicka: they have to earn whatever resources they want to have with attribute points.

Housing and Character Management: What if you could position all your characters in your house like assistants, and instead of logging out to character select to switch between them, you just walk over to one of them, click them and immediately, without a load screen, hop into that other character? I have fourteen characters right now. That’s 28 load-screens that last at least a minute a piece to log in and out of each of them. That’s a half hour sitting there watching the little circle in the corner eat itself. And heaven help me if I forget to do something on one of my characters or if the game disconnects {as it likes to do after loading that many environments}… and that number is only going to increase in the future. This feature would allow players to spend more time playing the game and less time waiting to play, and make player housing more relevant.

Crafting Writs in Homesteads: We have hirelings who deliver materials to us, so why not have a special craftable drop-box that elite crafters can create and use in their homes to receive and fulfill writs? This would be like a mail box that our hirelings maintain so we can focus on big-picture things like foiling deadric plots, customizing our outfits or farming motif pages. The Grand Master Crafter achievement and a sizable writ voucher price for the drop-box blueprint could be the requirements for this luxury and would assure that only the most dedicated of crafters are allowed to fulfill writs from home, and keep everyone else in the public areas. Like I said before, all that time swapping between characters really adds up - people that have been doing it this long deserve a little relief.


That’s all I’m going to share for now. I of course want spell-crafting {a gd flame atronach}, ability-crafting, to be able to change the order of my characters on load select {can’t wait} and new backgrounds for the character load screen {since I’m returning to it so often}. But after taking about a year off I gotta say I’m really happy with things that have been added to the game since then, like the outfit designer, the skill changes {silver leash!}, the awesome houses in DLC areas that I look forward to collecting when they’re available again and the pimp-tastic Grand Psijic Villa… that thing is ridiculously awesome and it’s free. All that tells me that ZOS has actually been listening to our input and appreciates us. For the first time in a while I’m actually a little excited to play the game again. Thanks ZOS!