Yeah... it´s one of those threads...

Anyway, just thought I´d write down some feedback on the game from my perspective. And my perspective is this -

I wasn´t here for the Beta, but got the game right away on official launch. This is the first MMO I´ve played, I mostly enjoy solo RPGs, and I mostly want solo content online a well. That being said I do trade in guilds. I like, or can at least put up with, PUGs. And I´ve done voice chat veteran trials which is nice as a change, but not my first choice of activity. My guess is that I am a pretty common type of ESO player, though I have no evidence for this.

Now I´ve played the game a lot, on and off, over 5 years. I´ve finished the MQ , tons of other quests, have all DLC, finished almost all veteran dungeons, some veteran trials, been emperor...

And in many ways I think the game has gotten a lot better, but in others worse - mostly indirectly. So these are some of my rambling thoughts on perceived issues and solutions, both small and 'fixable', and large and 'not gonna happen, you understand nothing about game design, it´s hard man!'. A lot of this has been said before. Guess I´ll just say it one last time.


Overland difficulty:

Now this is the absolutely most important problem with ESO at the moment for people like me. People who enjoy playing story but also enjoy a challenge. Skip the rest of my ramblings, but this might be worth listening to.

In some ways ESO was more fun at launch. Because the world was more dangerous. You didn´t know about the game mechanics. Some quests were above your level. You didn´t get a bloody shoulder pad until level 13 because RNGesus punished you for all the savescumming you did in Civilization 2.

But this is 5 years down the line for many of us.

We know more about the game. We now know stamina-based attacks scale 10:1 on max stamina:weapon damage. We (recently ) found out that bleeds bypass armor.

We know jabs proc Selene, we know it makes no sense, but we accept it and move on over our enemies´ bear-mauled corpses.

We buy purple food instead of using that overpriced green stuff. We are no longer excited that we find blue-level equipment (no really, I was back in 2014!).

We have CP we cannot even use.

And yet, the enemies are *easier* to kill than at launch, even not accounting for character progression. Quests autolevelled. Doshia nerfed. Gutsripper is more like Gutstickler, the MQ tomb battle has turned from 'adrenaline rush' to 'yawn', and even DLC bosses go down in bloody seconds!

Just, for the love of Talos, Naryu Virian, Sheogorath, and all the Alts in the world, implement a battle-spirit type debuff for overland questing, preferably with added rewards.

And NO, turning off CP isn´t a solution. And NO, gimping yourself isn´t a sensible solution. Stop giving that 'suggestion', and go back to whining about how shieldstacking and killing potatoes is impossible because ZOS only care about crown crates. Shoosh, away.

The lack of difficulty also has some more insidious effects.

First of all it tends to lead to quest skipping and story skipping. Now, ok, admittedly this is mostly on me. But when I quest I tend to be in 'massacre mode', through the sheer force of 5 years of accumulated DPS numbers. Boss fights being so short and the general plowing through enemies means it *is* harder sometimes to keep track on exactly what is happening storywise. You have to deliberately take it slow when talking to NPCs, and then go back to mowing through mobs. Now I can do it, but in general everything would feel much more rewarding if I had to, you know, work for the reward and more frequently mind my surroundings.

Second it means too regularly running into people who don´t know basic combat mechanics. And it cannot be that people are too uninformed to know them - they are in the tutorial! I am pretty sure the fact that you pretty much never have to use them is the reason people don´t seem to learn them. After today´s pledges I am seriously thinking of preparing to copypaste the following every time I do Direfrost:

YOU MUST USE BREAK FREE WHEN SHE LEVITATES YOU! BREAK FREE! USE BREAK FREE! FFS HOLD THE RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON AND PRESS THE LEFT! NO! WHILE YOU HOLD IT!!!!!

This is a shame since I have to say ESO has one of the best combat systems I´ve ever played. Seriously. I played Skyrim again recently and was surprised at how clunky combat felt. ESO combat (lag nonewithstanding) is smooth, responsive, rewards combos and use of multiple abilities, encourages mixing of standard attacks and abilities, and so on.

It makes me sad that this only matters in vMA and when you solo the tougher world bosses.

If I could redesign this, I would put a message on the screen the first 50 times you fail to interrupt or block a heavy attack, gently describing the reason you are now lying on the ground with a sad health bar. People need to learn these basic mechanics, then turn the message off. Also the player should be forced to manually write "standing in red makes me dead" 10 times before being unlocked to be able to play in groups, similar to how you must type "DESTROY" to delete some items.

And that last part was only half joking.


Quest Log:

It is too small. Even only picking up guild quests I intend to do later, so I don´t get pestered, I don´t have room to do all writs at once. Just putting +5 or +10 to the limit would help a lot, TYVM. This would also help since you could pick up more sidequests while doing a main questline, intending to do them later. As it is I can walk past a quest giver and just go 'nah, no room for that quest whatever it is'.

Yeah I know I could write down where the questgiver was. But I am frequently lazy. Since game designers made us that way, what with their auto-map, mini-map, auto-journal and quest compasses, they have no right to complain.


Potion hotkeys:

I´d very much like 2 hotkeys for potions, or a hotkey to switch between say 'preferred potion 1' and 'preferred potion 2', so I don´t have to use the quickslot wheel for that. (Don´t know if there is a mod that gives one, but I want an official one either way). It´s the heat of battle, every moment counts.


Merchant and inventory interface:

Just fix.

Vigor:

This just needs to be moved to be accessible earlier. It does not make sense that this skill which is central to many stamina characters takes a few hours to unlock doing something many people don´t wan´t to do at all. Who benefits from Cyrodiil having people who only play there because they are forced to in order to unlock a skill?


Champion Points:

The system is fundamentally good since it allows permanent progression on all characters, however I think it also has fundamental flaws;

-The division of points between stamina / physical and magicka along with the diminished returns forces people into stamina and magicka characters, overly encourages spreading out CP and hinders original builds and hybrids. Now ok, there are some things in the game that favour hybrid builds (DLC sets, triune trait, tristat glyphs) and some that don´t (need to choose between spell and weapon damage on jewelry glyphs etc). But the CP thing seems unnecessary. It isn´t progression so much as forced specialisation. If I want to do physical damage I need to put points in CP stars that compete directly with magic damage stars. Now there has been an improvement, IIRC bows were separate before, but still...

The Champion System would much benefit from an overhaul. I would merge the penetration stars (is there any way to have this not sound like sexual innuendo?) like how the lover mundus works. The 'X armor focus' also seems a bit... I mean what is the design thought behind that? The ONLY thing it does is force you into the '5 pieces of one armor type' character design. That´s not even a choice, it is a hint, but then you should have gotten that hint from the armour passives in the first place. Which I don´t like either - why not have all armour passives scale with number of pieces? Allow us to mix and match as we please.

I would also put in non-combat related CP. I guess you´d have to put them in separate constellations like the actual Guardian signs (Mage, Warrior, Thief). Just something to make me able to actually flesh out my characters into more of actual... well, persons, rather than DPS equations.


Racial passives:


Remove and make new passives free to choose among, similar to Diablo 3. I can see reasons why someone might force Bretons into magicka and Redguards into stamina while selling race change tokens. I just cannot think of any morally acceptable reasons.



Hybrid builds:

Hate to say it, but Pelinal in its current state has to go. The more I think about it, that set ironically is the biggest hindrance to opening up for hybrid builds. Because it can already be utilised quite well. And the moment changes are made to make hybrids more viable, that set will be mandatory. And then what will you do; make it 50% as effective? Maybe. Personally I think Pelinal ironically both boosts and hinder hybrids. Otherwise, I would like to see game design decisions that don´t punish hybrids. The game pushes the race, class, armour and weapon stereotypes quite far enough as it is.


Cyrodiil balance:

This will me mean. That is intentional.

Ok so people need to get it through their heads that you will not achieve balance in Cyrodiil. There are simply too many whiny, screaming immature people there. It is the nature of the game - how do you 'balance' a fight between 8 people on one team and 3 on the other, with voice chat and Discord on one side and "my mouse is running low on battery" on the other? Then you have people like the Sload Screamers. People who use screwy builds to gain a huge advantage, write that they "enjoy 1vX" - translation: "like to kill people in online games who never stand much of a chance because their character sheet has smaller numbers on it". These people then make freaking Youtube videos about not being able to do it as easily!? Say what you want about me, at least you don´t have to listen to my voice when I´m whining here.

Cyrodiil is what it is. A neverending Ouroboros of "lets retake Nikel for the 2039199342th time", dying to lag and OP builds. In small doses I´ve found it quite enjoyable. Being emperor and /sitchair on top of a keep, waiting to be dethroned and watching my crumbling empire as the sun set to the sound of enemy trebuchet thunder... it was a high point in ESO for me, for sure. But the flaws of Cyrodiil are inherent, and - and I say this as an actual real-life health professional - many people just need to move on if they don´t enjoy it. You will get killed. You will have been unable to respond to the attack. It will be lag -> not being able to break free -> death recap.

And since Vivec is apparently filled with people who hate the game balance, think the map sucks, that the lag makes it unplayable and that ZOS don´t care about it - why should we listen to these people when it comes to improving the game?




As per usual this turned out longer than expected (that´s what she said!).

I would like to thank ZOS for a great game though - I keep coming back to ESO and I truly think the game is great and could be even greater. And many signals have been encouraging to me - devs saying they want classes to perform all functions, the changes in order to make light and heavy attacks relevant, etc... So here´s a shout-out to the devs - you have something sweet going here and many of us enjoy your work!

If anyone got this far and actually read everything, I hope you got something out of it - have a fishy stick!

Also Matriarch Runa´s ice floe breakings in vMA are HP based.