ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

[...]
As a general reminder, the goal of this program is to ensure your voice is being heard, and concerns are being relayed and discussed directly with the Dev Team. While the last couple updates have largely focused on the ongoing ability audits, we’ll be moving back to having regular calls with the Class Reps and posting public meeting notes very soon.
[...]

Since the goal of this program is to ensure voices are being heard, I have come here with quite a bit of frustration about not being heard and not even having received an official answer from anyone. So now I am coming here, to the class reps, to present my case to people that I know are at least more likely to be heard than I am and more likely to respond than ZOS is, in hopes that I can at least get an answer or better.

I don't want to beat around to bush a lot. I am here on behalf of the Bosmer stealth community. We've made multiple threads on the topic in the last two years now, most notably this one which gathered at least 152 people in support of giving Bosmer back their stealth, which isn't an unimpressive number for something that doesn't even affect balance in any way or is performance related, and more recently this PTS thread among others which goes to show that people care even to this day and didn't move on after these two years since Wrathstone. Even if some of these posts contain a lot of salt, they are largely constructive. The original thread managed to stay constructive, active and on topic for 89 pages and yet there was no official response to this.

Back in the Wrathstone update PTS we were told that you, the class reps, were raising concerns that we, the Bosmer, would be "trading in stealth for different buffs", which we appreciated to hear, but also had concerns about the reply you received from ZOS.

Source: ZOS has delivered on opening up stealth to other races and created more options with the CP system including a stealth bonus in Craft, but this has not addressed our concerns. "A system for stealth outside of race" does not address the issue that Bosmer in the lore have been the stealthy race for 25 years. Instead we got a buff to detection, which is rather useless outside of PvP and has very limited use in PvP too, which I will get into as well later.
In the Wrathstone patch notes the developer comment stated that no two races should share a passive, but this rule, arbitrary and injust as it was, has now been broken in Flames of Ambition with multiple races receiving 258 Weapon and Spell Damage.

Now there is no argument against giving Bosmer back their 3meters of stealth anymore. We never cared for the extra damage from stealth that was removed in Wrathstone, since we understand that it wasn't healthy for PvP, but ZOS left us with no stealth.
Stealth is an important part of Bosmer culture and is deeply ingrained in their lore too. The combat team might not be aware because they aren't the lore team, so they might not think of it as a big deal but to a lot of us it is.

Removing stealth from Bosmer in favor of detection is bad because:

1. It breaks the lore
   There is no precedent for Bosmer detection or good eyesight in the lore while there is plenty of very explicit mentioning of their stealth. Note that in addition to the following, there is also plenty of dialogue in games on the topic.

   • The Rite of Theft is a war custom of the tribal Woodelfs in which a tribe raids another to steal the valuable possessions or people for ransom. The larger the stolen object, the more prestige it has. While deaths do occur, these raids are generally not deadly due to the stealthy nature of this war custom. "Thanks to centuries of this practice, the tribal Bosmer have become legendary for their stealth" - Mistral Aurelian Teriscor
   • The Bosmer's most famous poem is called "The One Thousand Benefits of Hiding". Although we have never seen this poem, it has been mentioned several times, even within the books of ESO. Sources for this are the "Pocket Guide to the Empire, First Edition: Aldmeri Dominion", "War Customs of the Tribal Bosmer" (ESO) as well as "A Dance in Fire, Book 1". All these sources are quoting it to be the most famous poem and two of them also mention the forest-coupling ability.
   • Bosmer are known to possess an ability called "forest-coupling" that allows them to camouflage themselves in proximity to plantlife. This ability, in conjunction with being prone to desertion, is described as the reason why the Colovian armies stopped using the superior Bosmer archers in their legions after a failed experiment in the War of Rihad. It is said that "they would sometimes walk into the shade of a single tree and vanish. Their forest-coupling skills are remarkable." While this can be interpreted as exaggeration, their superior stealth still factored into them not being commonly recruited into archer regiments for the Empire. It should be considered that the Imperial Legion is one of the most tactically advanced and honed military forces in Tamriel, making them a very reliable source for information of military importance such as stealth capabilities of potential enemies or allies.
   • Sources:
     • "Right of Theft" - an ESO quest in Greenshade revolving around the Rite of Theft
     • A Merchant's Guide to Valenwood - book in ESO describing Bosmer as "being known for their thieving" and advising to keep watch on your goods even at night
     • Heroes of the Sanctuary - book in ESO, a story about how three Altmer used the Rite of Theft to get the Bosmer to allow them to found cities on Valenwood's coast
     • Valenwood: A Study - book in ESO, mentioning that the Bosmer came to be by learning stealth and cunning from their prey
     • War Customs of the Tribal Bosmer - book in ESO, that mentions the most famous Bosmer poem "Meh Ayleidion", meaning "One Thousand Benefits of Hiding"
     • Pocket Guide to the Empire, 1st Edition/Aldmeri Dominion - a paper booklet released with The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, it mentions the "Meh Ayleidion", but also describes the "forest-coupling" ability
2. It breaks with tradition
   Every game starting with Arena described Bosmer as great sneak thieves.

   • Elder Scrolls 1 Arena
     
     
   • Elder Scrolls 2 Daggerfall
     
     
   • Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind
     
     
   • Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion
     
     
   • Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim
     
     
   • Elder Scrolls Online (before Wrathstone)
     
     
3. Detection is bugged
   After some thorough testing I've noticed that Bosmer detection goes through invisibility, which seems to be an unintended interaction as the target does not actually become targettable despite being revealed. The invisible enemy automatically dodges all targetted attacks as if they had just successfully activated Cloak, which leads me to believe that invisibility is coded by setting enemy detection to zero and the Bosmer passive bypassing that. Detection from skills or potions intended to reveal invisible enemies, which give what I like to call "truesight", always come with a special indicator above the character's head and actually state "invisible enemies" rather than "stealthed" enemies, where "stealth" is the result of sneaking and countered by detection while "invisibility" is the result of skills or potions and is countered by "truesight". With no such truesight indicator being present in Bosmer, I feel like this is a bug and not a feature.
   
   Furthermore due to the way the eye indicator works in a situation where both a Bosmer and an enemy are in stealth, the eye indicator goes from "hidden" or closed to "danger" or half-open for the enemy first! This means that an increased detection radius gives away your presence to an enemy before you, the Bosmer, are made aware of theirs. The same is true in the case of the Khajiit but a notable difference is that a Khajiiti presence is alerting an attentive enemy at the same time as with any other race while Bosmer are alerting enemies before any other. In stark contrast to other races though the stealth passive allows Khajiit to remain hidden while Bosmer are detected at the same rate as any other race, making additional detection detrimental to someone who is trying to be stealthy.
   Evidence of the hidden/danger interaction can be found here:

   Ratzkifal wrote: »

   Basically recreating/reposting my old post, because I can't quote it thanks to the thread being locked.
   
   Test1: No medium Armor on both, the one with the red orbs has 3/3 Hunter's Eye.
   
   
   Without wearing any armor, the "danger" indicator is nonexistant for the person being revealed. You go from completely hidden straight to full reveal. However there is some very wonky behavior as I am constantly going "hidden" again since no combat is happening, only to be immediately detected as soon as the indicator goes to "hidden" without any of us moving. This is when sneaking face toward face. The fennec fox pet was friendly enough to not go into stealth, so you can still tell where my sneaking Bosmer friend is. Note that he is not standing on top of the flag but slightly behind it (there is room for about another crouching Bosmer between him and the flag).
   
   Test2: One has full medium armor with passives, the other with the red orbs has 3/3 Hunter's Eye
   
   
   This time the Bosmer without the Hunter's Eye passive put on 7 pieces of medium armor, none of which interact with detection nor stealth beyond the medium armor passive. As you can clearly see, the Bosmer without Hunter's Eye is made aware of a nearby enemy through the "danger" indicator - the half opened eye. The Bosmer with Hunter's eye is still hidden and has no idea an enemy even exists in the area. This time the helpful fox behaved and went properly into hiding. The duel flag is touching the Hunter's Eye Bosmer's heel this time.

4. Detection is only useful in PvP
   This one is a rather simple point. There is no PvE content where detection is useful. There is not a single sneaking NPC and even the NB NPCs that use cloak do not actually get revealed by the same bug that reveals invisible players. It might be a cool feature for the future to introduce, but as there are currently none this passive is very limiting and is in direct conflict with the goals of the racial rebalance which ZOS stated back in Wrathstone (goal #2 universal applicability). Stealth can be used for Heists, Sacraments but also in PvP to avoid IC sewer base campers or get a Skyshard when you don't feel like fighting. Detection only has a single purpose use while Stealth is actually flexible and can be used to be offensively by setting up an ambush or defensively by avoiding players.
5. It does not work as a counter to Khajiit
   An idea that we thought the combat team might have had was that there should be a counter stat to stealth and while that is true, Detection on the Bosmer does not serve as a counter to Khajiiti stealth because they are on the same alliance. Stealth isn't really utilized in Battlegrounds aside from Capture the Relic perhaps, so if that was their train of thought at any point, it is a little bit too niche to make Bosmer be the counter to a race that is usually on their side unless it is a very specific game mode of Battlegrounds and one player actually decided to sneak.
   We do think that Detection has its place in the game and should be available, but it is not flexible enough to be fit as a Racial passive. We like that it has made its way into CP because nobody was willing to drop a 5-piece item set bonus to wear a set that granted Detection. My personal suggestion was that Detection in CP should be made twice as powerful per point spent so that the handful of players we encountered who did like Detection can invest into it if they so chooseif they feel it's worth it instead of forcing it upon every Bosmer. This would also bring it in line with other sources of Detection as the 3m Bosmer currently have pale in comparison to the 20m that a Detection potion offers.
6. It limits choice
   One of the original goals of the Wrathstone racial passive update was to open up more viable options and allow players to make choices instead of having only one viable race for any one purpose. The Wrathstone update failed to deliver that when it comes to stealth races. Originally Khajiit and Bosmer were both the stealthy races of the game, and rightfully so, but after Wrathstone the number of choices was lowered to one - Khajiit, since they got to keep their stealth bonus. General consensus among the Bosmer stealth community is that as long as a passive explicitly mentions being stealthy, it would be considered enough. Although we all agreed on the original 3m of stealth being what we wanted at the time when no two races were allowed to share a passive we were also willing to accept bonus movement during sneak. The general movement speed bonus Bosmer have received on the Flames of Ambition PTS is not explicit to stealth and falls into the same category as the 6% sneak cost reduction Imperials get, which we called an "accidental bonus". We do not want an accidental bonus, we want acknowledgement of their innate abilities in their racial passives as described in the lore.
7. Habits
   The Argument of habitude is not a very compelling one on its own, but combined with the others listed above it does hold weight too. We all have emotional investment in our characters to some degree and the people with little emotional investment have already used their race change tokens to jump ship or simply don't care about the issue. But a lot of us remain and we have refused to spend the three skill points into Hunter's Eye out of protest. Before Wrathstone Bosmer weren't viable for anything except gankers, roleplay or being cute. People who made a Bosmer did so partially because of stealth as that was what made them unique. People who wanted to be stealthy but didn't want to be Khajiit made Bosmer, so when ZOS took away their stealth, these Bosmer were left without their identity. Normally when a balance change affects you negatively you just "adapt" and move on, but in this case, because of the reasons above, we felt like this wasn't right and we shouldn't have to move on and "adapt". The lore is on our side and set our expectations right for what a Bosmer should be like and ZOS betrayed that expectation when they removed stealth for these last two years. Since we are all invested in our characters we have to live with these changes and can't just switch our build, since that would erase the character we'd grown to love. For five years Bosmer in ESO were stealthy and we want to continue to be because we've never wanted to be Khajiit. This change has hurt feelings and curbed enthusiasm for the game as we'd get a daily reminder each time any one of us would see their Bosmer in their character select screen. Every time ZOS would talk about lore and how much they cared about it our salt levels would rise, because we know better because we've been ignored and got no answer.

We've had little resistance on the forums to our suggestion. The only people who were against it either misunderstood that we disliked the penetration, movementspeed or stamina regeneration when that is absolutely not the case and we very much loved those changes, or they liked detection in principle but didn't understand the how little 3meters of detection actually is. To these people I want to extend an olive branch that the new detection CP should be made a bit more powerful to compensate them for the detection they've lost.

Something that some players didn't understand was why we Bosmer didn't just start wearing gear with stealth bonuses and it is possible that people on the combat team don't understand why we don't just use the new stealth CP either. The issue lies with the expectation that as a Bosmer we should have an inherent advantage towards stealth, allowing us to reach the same level of effectiveness with stealth as others while leaving us open to wearing different sets or getting different CP instead. We chose Bosmer to be stealthier, because that is and has been their thing next to Archery for 25 years.
It's the same deal with Altmer expecting to be good at magic or Nords expecting to be tough. You'd be getting a similar response from them if you messed with them like that.

Please, class reps, help us let our voices be heard! You are our only hope.