CyberOnEso wrote: »

Also, I don't think there is need for gear to be locked behind this system. It would meerly be a new challenge for people who have already cleared all the other trials.

If the players are in there only for the challenge, ZOS doesn't need to change a thing. You can just have all 12 people remove their CP before entering.

Wish granted and it didn't take any coding time whatsoever. Yay!

CyberOnEso wrote: »

redspecter23 wrote: »

CyberOnEso wrote: »

Also, I don't think there is need for gear to be locked behind this system. It would meerly be a new challenge for people who have already cleared all the other trials.

If the players are in there only for the challenge, ZOS doesn't need to change a thing. You can just have all 12 people remove their CP before entering.

Wish granted and it didn't take any coding time whatsoever. Yay!

Yes, but I am more suggesting that with new achievements it would provide an incentive for people to progress further in the trials.

I suppose a certain small subset of players might be interested in a "naked" no cp run achievement. That's a very narrow audience though. It wouldn't take a ton of work to add it, but really, you would be putting it in for 4 or 5 guilds worth of people to shoot for. These same people will shoot for it anyway, even without an achievement. The bragging rights alone would be enough reward for them.

I'm not saying it's a horrible idea. I'm just saying that practically nobody would care about it.

Mechanics became skippable because a lot of power was injected into all parts of the combat system--the vast majority of which had nothing to do with CP. (People with 531 CP can't even skip Lunar in 2016, yet people in 2019 with 300 CP--231 CP fewer--can not only skip lunar, but skip lunar on pad 5.)

So it seems kinda funny that your solution for walking back the power is to flip off the system that is arguably the least responsible for that power. But, okay, I guess flipping off CP is easier than walking back the myriad of other changes that were made.

But it's still a terribly clumsy way to go about it. People need to spec differently and build differently. If it's anything like PvP, it's a real nuisance. You also lose things that are not combat related, like Treasure Hunter. Finally, since we've already established that most of the power creep has come from things not at all related to CP, what's to say that future power creep won't make this new mode worthless?

If people really want more difficulty, it would be easier to just adjust the content than to go about it in such a hamfisted approach as disabling CP.

But I do want to specifically call out your example of vSO. The problem with vSO is how it was revamped in 2016. The original mechanic had the totems being major threats, and the lamia's death explosion near a totem would destroy it. I remember the days when I was a part of the "lamia team" that would taunt the lamia, take it to a totem, and kill the lamia at the totem to destroy it.

Then vSO was revamped in the summer of 2016. And in this process, it seems ZOS f---ed up. The lamia explosions no longer did enough damage to destroy the totems. The other problem was that the effects from the totems were just inconsequential. When we went into vSO right after the revamp, we first tried things the old-fashioned way and discovered that the lamia mechanic no longer works and that the totems posed virtually no threat. So of course burning was the way to go. It was the only way to go, since not only was there no point in killing the totems, you can't do it even if you wanted to!

If ZOS wanted the the original SO mechanic as intended to be what people do, then they need to make lamia explosions reliably kill the totems (which I think they did do in a recent patch, though I haven't been in vSO in ages) and they need to buff the mechanical effects of the totems so that they actually make a difference. I highly doubt that shutting off CP would move people back to doing the mechanics as originally designed.

Addendum: If the goal is to get people to do mechanics...

• vHRC HM: The problem is that people can just ignore the Gargoyles and have the OT kite them out to the middle of nowhere. Solution here is simple. After the boss enters the final phase, restrict the fight space (fill the hall area with a cloud of poisoned dust that will quickly kill anyone lingering inside) and increase the damage/radius of the Gargoyles. This will force groups to kill all Gargoyles before the final phase instead of ignoring them and cheesily leading them on a wild goose chase.
• vSO: As already noted, the problem is that the totems don't really matter. So make them matter.
• vMoL HM: Trigger Lunar mechanics if Rakkhat reaches 25% health during the first Lunar cycle.
• vHoF Boss 1: Increase the enraged damage of spheres based on how many are up. So two or three enraged spheres (not uncommon to see when one boss dies in a do-the-mechanics run) won't be a threat, but all eight enraged spheres (burn strats) will basically 1-shot everyone.

To be clear: I'm not actually suggesting that these changes be made--I'm personally pretty wary of buffing old content. I'm trying to make the point that there are far more elegant and effective ways of getting people to do mechanics that don't involve clumsily sledgehammering combat mechanics.