I'm playing new world alpha right now, mobs hit hard, doing a 1v2 or v3 is very challenging, it's so damn cool not to one shot everything.

The sad thing is that eso devs will never go back on this part.

BohnT2 wrote: »

Mr_Walker wrote: »

Zos needs and wants to attract players of all skills to be able to play the game. They don't cater specifically for your needs. There's plenty of challenging content out there.

There's a difference of challenging and being an insult to the playerbase treating them like a squirrel with brain damage.
We're talking about things that toddlers could do.

The whole game and every player would highly benefit from having at least mildly challenging overland content.

This requires the game to properly teach people what to do but it will be worth it in the long run, to use another analogy, the current overland content is the equivalent of not teaching children how to read.
There is a huge gap that the devs want to close but it's not because content is too hard but content that is too easy and doesn't teach anything.

But it comes at no suprise that handing a test to someone who can't even read let alone write which forces him to write a novel that he will fail and has no chance of doing it unless he was taught elsewhere.

To make things even worse, the game tries to teach people the base mechanics with the tutorial but then decides to just stop making use of those taught mechanics.
A new player stepping into the game will be overwhelmed by so many things, new skill, new world, lots of options, quests etc that he'll forget everything about the first 15 min over the course of the next hundred hours he'll spend with doing overland quests because the game just never encourages you to use those things again.


No matter what the devs will try unless they teach people properly they'll never close the gap and this will be for the disadvantage of both sides.
Endgame players will stop because their content gets deleted and every minor piece of skillful gameplay gets removed like bash weaving this patch and so many other things over the past.
For new players they will keep to mindlessly walk around the world and be unhappy because they can't improve.

I know what you mean but, unless you can select your difficulty level, it needs to be separate challenging/teaching content, because otherwise (if regular content is too hard for them) a lot of new players will just give up and leave.

I don't even mean rage quit, necessarily, but just wander off thinking the game isn't for them.

People should look up Wildstar if they want to know what happens to games that are built to be challenging, across the board.

People were so excited for it and some people loved it, but it didn't last long.

Despite being specifically sold on the basis that it would be hard.

I'll choose to ignore the bash weaving example as "skillful gameplay", as I don't want to go there again, too deeply, here...

Suffice to say that ZOS teaching people to use intended mechanics (like interrupt) properly would make perfect sense, but them teaching people to use "embraced" unintended mechanics would be quite another matter.

So, I'm not overly surprised they don't teach things like weaving, beyond a hint on a loading screen, because it would be fairly embarrassing for them to have to do so.

Considering that people can and do, apparently, just program light attack weaving (auto-attack, effectively) onto a gamepad, ZOS just need to give us an auto-attack option as part of the game.

I personally feel the chapter boss should have something that sets them apart from every other standard mob in the game. It doesn't have to be raid level complexity, or even world boss level, but at the very least, interesting. More health does not equate to challenge or fun, but what if, say, there were environmental mechanics, or a sequence of interactions that have to be completed. Not asking for 1 shots or requirement to group, but a solo-able, memorable encounter. It can be casual without being face-roll. The only real challenge here is the lack of ZOS creativity.

NupidStoob wrote: »

mairwen85 wrote: »

More health does not equate to challenge

In ESOs case it would though, because even if there are interesting mechanics we wouldn't know for many bosses as they just drop dead before they have a chance to do anything. The majority of quest and delve bosses have 150k HP. In a game where someone that has a halfway decent idea of what to do can do 30-50k dps the fight is basically over instantly.

ZoS tried to address that a little with forced invulnerability phases of some bosses (like dragonhold last boss), but all this does is introducing a wait time until you burn the boss down to the next phase.

Yes but more health alone wont do much, just a few more ticks to burn off; that's where I was going with that comment--more health is not challenge, it's prolonging the face-roll. It's just bad design and lack of imagination that's the problem here. So much so that even as players we're conditioned to expect the same dull cut and paste crap.

SnarkyHighElf wrote: »

So what now you want to turn everything elitist mode so only the 1% qqers can play? go ... urself elitist pos

I think it's more that the big bad evil should be memorable. This isn't a binary thing. It's not 0 (face-roll) vs 1 (one shots and 60 million health) -- there is a huge scale of choice that could be implemented. All people want really is a casual friendly, but ultimately enjoyable boss battle that makes use of combat elements like block, interrupt etc. It doesn't have to be punishing or gruelling or require more than 1 person to tackle it. It just requires the designers to employ a bit of imagination so that all their hard work in creating the overarching world threatening evil isn't a wet fart. Why is that so hard to understand?

edit to add:
I agree with the poster above me. That retains the casual friendly element.

From their responses I get the feeling that some people fear that they game would become inaccessible for them and the biggest portion of the playerbase but this isn't what any reasonable person in here wants.

A rework of the current overland content keep ZOS's principles:
1. Accessibility for every player
2. Accessibility for every build
3. Freedom of choice in which order you want to do
stuff
(Number doesn't represent their importance)
This however doesn't have to mean that players shouldn't improve over the course of the game.

My proposal for a rework tries to keep all those points in mind while making the game more interesting for everyone and better at teaching players the base mechanics of the game and how to figure out new mechanics better that they encounter in other parts of the game.

In order to stay in line with principle 3 the increasing difficulty and complexity is limited to every zone, meaning every zone starts with the same very low difficulty and then slowly begins to get harder throughout the main quest of every zone.
Side quests are excluded from this and inherit a very basic difficulty.


For the individual quests there has to be some restrictions which involve:
No dps races as this excludes tanks and healers while also puts an unnecessary strain on damage dealers.
No requirement for weaving but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be encouraged and taught.
No requirement to be a certain class to do a quest.


Now let's come to the most important part of this whole discussion, how to design those quests and how to implement their increasing difficulty without becoming too hard?

Right after the Tutorial a new player knows about the basic mechanics like light attack, heavy attack, bashing to interrupt, block, dodge and using skills.


The first quest won't be one to teach stuff but can contain things like blocking a move or using dodge in order to defeat an enemy or avoid something, it's important to attach this mechanic to something that shows the player that what he has done with block/dodge etc made the game easier for him without killing him if he doesn't do it.

As the quests in the zone progress more of those mechanics are brought up and can be combined to help players improve further.
By repeating those mechanics players get to know them and learn when to use them without feeling they're forced taught something.
With quests in the second-half of a zone more mechanics can be woven into a fight like using synergies and avoiding AoEs.
A good way of implementing AoEs that you want to step out are ones that drain your resources as this gives you a feedback that those red circles aren't good without flat out killing you.

The last boss of each zone should combine multiple mechanics that have been involved in the whole zone but still without being hard, we're still talking about easy fights but using the mechanics will heavily help you to complete them faster and with less stress.

To give everyone an idea of what i mean in terms of mechanics here's some ideas how to implement different mechanics:

Dodging: the boss is attacking you with heavy attacks that you'll see coming, if you don't dodge you'll get stunned and take damage not enough to one-shot but about 50% of your health, however if you dodge it the boss hurts itself or stuns itself, this gives the player the feedback that dodging an attack reduces their damage taken and makes fights easier.


Gaining resources: an unavoidable mechanic steals all your resources and you have to gain them back via heavy attacks or using potions, if you do this fast enough i.e. by using fully charged heavy attacks the boss takes a lot of damage if you just gain resources back with recovery you won't get this help, you can still kill the boss but it'll take you longer.

To better implement those things into the world you'd have quest givers telling you what like in newer trials to do by giving you advices or via combat advices or simply in the quest log with hints.

There is a plethora of ways to implement those basic mechanics that makes the game fun without making players feel forced to become "top tier" or without feeling overwhelmed as they slowly learn everything and with every new zone they explore, they learn new stuff and repeat things they've done before while exploring new content and having memories of fights, now the 7th boss in greenshade wasn't someone you can't remember but the one where you used the synergy to kill him right after you dodged his heavy attack.

Ofc my ideas are not perfect, they can become somewhat repetitive when the first few quests retain to be very easy in each new zone players explore.

It can easily become too hard or too easy at first when the mechanics are implemented for the first time but this can be avoided by putting things on the pts to test extensively before bringing them to the live servers.

The whole rework will be very time consuming for the devs and it's questionable if they'd do such a big rework at this point of the game even if it would help the game and the players

wait... that was a boss?