Disclaimer: I left for personal reasons not because of the game or ZOS.

TL;DR: ZOS broke it, everyone reroll and wait for next patch to re-rereoll. Farm new gear, redo your rotation, etc etc. Oh and there is the balance again, repeat.

I notice my characters are very much underperforming. I dont care about having great rotations, max dps or great sustain. I dont spend hours practicing to play on a dummy. But even i, a typical casual, notice big impacts on my characters. Squishy, runs out of res easily, lost some dps. i keep checking to see if my food buff is active and if im wearing gear. True story.

Of course this is all because ZOS cant balance anything. This is an example how ZOS balances: You have a stamDK in set X and a stamplar in set Y. The stamDK is over performing and the stamplar is under performing. ZOS balance:
1) It is determined that the 5 set bonus of set X contributes 18.67% to the damage, according to internal game data, of stamDK running this FOTM setup
2) it is determined that the 5 set bonus of set Y contributes 4.8% to the damage of the stamplar running this FOTM setup
3) it is determined that the popular ability A on stamDK contributes 23.7% of the damage to stamDK.
4)It is determined that the popular ability B on stamplar contributes 6.8% of the damage to stamplar.

ZOS Balance:
1) the 5 set bonus of set X is reduced by 50%
2) The 5 set bonus of set Y is increased by 50%
3) Ability A on stamDK is reduced by 50%
4) Ability B on stamplar is increased by 50%

Result:
1) Armor set X is mostly useless now except for normal dungeons and overland, which you can pretty much do naked anyway
2) Set Y is FOTM and now its used for everything.
3) Ability A sucks now and stamDKs use a different ability from a different skill line.
4) Ability B really rocks now and you can now get 35k dps just spamming it in purple gear.

* StamDKS are put into storage. Stamplars are the FOTM. But the real winner is a strange stamblade build that works because of the right combo of gear that now makes it the top DPS build and gives it 8% more max DPS than the old StamDK.

And then we start the process over.

How it should be balance: Small changes should be made more frequently. For example:
1) set bonus of X is reduced by 10%, ability B on stamplar is increase by 10%. Data is assessed for about a week.
2) Two weeks later set bonus of X is reduced by another 5%, Ability B is increased by 5%( half of the last increase). Data is assessed for about a week.
3) Two weeks later the 5 set bonus on set Y is increased by 5% and the stamDK ability is reduced 5%. The data is assessed
4) Stamblade comes into play now using set Y. set Y is increased by 5% and stamDK is left alone for now. The data is assessed.
5) The new stamblade, the stamDK, and the stamplar are now relatively close without any but the stamblade having to make changes. A few people switched from stamDK to other characters but most only played stamDK because it was overperforming and not because they wanted to.

A constant process of minor changes because players have an uncanny ability as a group to combine their IQ and become a supercomputer and figure out how to maximize everything in a relatively short period of time. Small tweaks is how you maintain balance without half the people that play that class needing to reroll and being annoyed. IF you tweak it to much a small readjustment in the opposite direction ( say 3% in the above scenario) can bring it exactly where you want it to be.

And then we have the other problem: DPS creep and the large divide between casual players and elite gamers. DPS has become to important in content. ZOS's answer to more challenging content is to add more incoming DPS, increase players dps max output but only under even more perfect conditions, longer dungeons and trials, and require higher DPS thresholds before we all die to enrage . This is tired formula that ensures only 10% or so of players are going to do end game trials and 25% of players or so doing vet content. Most casual players i have talked to in the past have no desire to do vet/end game content not because they dont want to experience it but because they dont want to deal with the toxic competitive atmosphere or the(both player and ZOS based) requirements. And a large majority of what creates this toxicity is DPS related. Burn through it as fast as possible so we can do more content and skip mechanics.

Another issue is that all classes/ builds have become samey samey. this class with this build is the only viable build for end game content and all other builds in this class are only good for normal dungeons and overland. So you have a very limited choice despite classes/skills/gear choices which feels like you dont really have a choice and when you do its like choosing between light red and dark red.

There is a solution to help with this, DPS creep, and overperforming builds vs underperforming builds. Its called DPS cap or throttling, depending on what version you are talking about and how its applied. The purpose is to limit DPS output in certain situations and this makes "top dps" less priority. It opens up a lot more build to end game content as well as a lot more players because end game is no longer about being able to do 50k dps when you can only get 38k. It allows some variety in character development.

One way this would work is trials for example may be both a hard cap and throttling. The hard cap might be 225k dps on this boss. Anything above this is soaked and pointless. In addition the DPS of players are throttled against this boss with DPS having diminishing returns as you increase DPS. If you have a soft cap of say 30k per player on this boss, then a player doing 50k may only contribute 36k DPS while a player doing 40k might contribute 34k DPS and a player doing 34k might contribute 32.4k, and finally a player doing 31k might contribute 30.8k. So despite a 20k dps difference their is only 6k difference in effective DPS between a 50k dps player and 30k dps player making achieving that higher DPS a lot less appealing and that player will likely choose other abilities rather than trying to max damage as is the normal now.

When combined with the damage cap throttling means that even trial groups are more likely to have lower damage requirements and be open to more builds. If you were to consider 2 tanks 4 heals and 6 dps for example and assume that between all 6 non dps they could do 45k dps. that leaves the DPS with 30k dps each hard cap( though its not figured that way). If you add one more DPS and take a heals away and figure that heals contributed about 5k dps before, you are down to 26.5k dps between all 7 to reach cap. This allows weaker dps players into the group while still maintaining the max possible progression rate on the boss. Especially when you have strong support such as DPSing heals and tanks that do decent damage.

Bosses would be tweaked with each one having a cap and hp that is different based on its skills. So one boss might have lower HP and a bit higher cap to max HP ratio but do more damage. One might have high HP and low cap so its a longer fight but does weaker damage. Higher DPS in the first fight would be more beneficial and in the second the ability to sustain res for a longer period. These two bosses might come one after the other. Throw your mechanics in there with some tweaks and now its not the same DPS down ASAP before they get to ability Y so we can avoid most of the mechanics of the fight. Because fights would be longer, trash mobs would be reduced depending on the dungeon/ trial with somewhere between 10-50% of trash mobs reduced in vet dungeons and trials.

It could also be used on world bosses. Every 5 seconds the damage reduction from you is based on total unique players that hit the boss in the last 5 seconds. For every player that contributed damage your effective DPS is reduced by 1k until you reach a 20k dps threshold in which it plateaus. Then boss rewards are better figured on contribution. 0.5% contribution is required for any reward and the reward is increased to a max of 20% of the damage in which you reach max rewards for that world boss.


This game could be so much better and so much more interesting. But ZOS keeps doing the same boring unimaginative crap over and over. New zone, new gear, nerf bat, buff something they nerfed 3 patches ago, longer dungeons that have raid mechanics on normal and take 3 hours to complete with an average group. trials that require more extreme and more ridiculous requirements and shrink the base of players willing or able to do them down to a few hundred, then down to a few, and then barely enough to have a full group.

Its sad how much potential ESO has and how little imagination ZOS has.

Edit: Severe lack of proofreading led to several corrections. Also clarity.