ajkb78 wrote: »

So for almost as long as I've been playing the game ZoS has stated their desire to "raise the floor and lower the ceiling". That is, to make it easier for basic players to perform adequately at their roles and to make elite players engage with mechanics.

I don't really see a problem at the top end. I'm in several endgame guilds playing with very strong players: the amount of groups that are able to completely skip mechanics, at least in trials, is vanishingly small. There's a group I'm aware of that's getting close to a 0 portal nuke in VCR HM, but it's vanishingly rare and it doesn't matter. These players work insanely hard for such achievements, let them have their fun, it doesn't affect anyone else. Not to mention there are achievements in the game that require current levels of damage - the groups getting Godslayer don't have minutes in hand that could soak up a further 10% damage nerf. But there definitely is a problem at the bottom end: there are still vast numbers of players who consider themselves damage dealers (or at least aren't tagging themselves as healers or tanks) but completely fail to deliver the role and deal meaningful damage. If you spend any time tanking random normal dungeons through group finder you'll see them all the time. Partly it's bad gear, partly it's innate lack of skill, partly it's lack of knowledge about how to do damage.

So far ZoS's attempts to address this have mostly failed. The usual approach is through nerfs to reduce top-end damage, though the recent FOA changes are a bit more interesting: most of the base stats go up, but the power of CP is somewhat reduced. This hasn't worked either. ZoS are now hinting at further nerfs to the CP system in future updates. That won't work either.

It won't work because the nerfs focus too much on the individual, not the group. This nerfs bad players pretty much as hard as good players, it lowers both the floor and the ceiling. That's what has happened with the CP nerfs, and although increasing the base stats was a good idea it was counteracted by the nerfs to crit - I don't think anyone is getting higher dps on the skeleton dummies this patch than last patch, which is what you would expect to see given these represent individual rather than group performance. The right solution as far as altering power goes is to further increase the individual's ability to do damage, but to reduce the impact of group buffs and debuffs.

However more is needed. There is almost zero in-game tuition on how to be effective at dealing damage beyond the tutorial that simply teaches you how to use light and heavy attacks, block and bash. There's nothing about weaving light attacks with a skill, nothing about buffing or layering damage over time skills to create a rotation, because at the time you do the tutorial you don't have any skills, or maybe just 1. It's a terribly ineffectual system for a game with reasonably complex combat.

There are fighters guilds and mages guilds scattered all over Tamriel. Most of these (fighers guilds anyway) are full of practice dummies and archery targets, but you can't use them, and none of the guild personnel offer any advice on fighting. All the infrastructure is there to make a decent set of follow-up repeatable tutorial quests to provide much more in-depth tuition about effective dpsing, i.e. layering skills and weaving light attacks. The rhythm and pace of combat is something a lot of players seem to struggle with. And if some of those target dummies were made into actual dummies, even if with slightly different stats from skeletons or atronachs, then there would be at least some option for players who don't have their own or choose not to join a guild to be able to use one in a guildhall.

There are armourers and weaponsmiths all over the place, too. It would be really good if there was an option to get advice from them on set items you carry. So you might ask one for advice on say a purple Julianos inferno staff and he might tell you it looks a pretty good item for a mage, but that it would do better if it could be improved with resins. Given a cuirass of leeching plate he might suggest that the set looks to offer a lot of protection for a tanky sort, but doesn't help your comrades at all. He might suggest certain sets being good to use against other players and so on.

And finally it would really help if console players could get more useful feedback from the dummies. I play on PS4 EU but I recently bought the basic PC version just for a look at the FOA changes on PTS ahead of launch, and parsing on the dummy on PTS with access to CMX and light attack helper was a revelation. That, despite all the lag and glitchiness of PTS, did more for understanding where I was causing myself problems in my dpsing than years of well meaning advice from fellow players on PS4, because of the detail available. I know there's a Sony issue with introducing add-ons on console and I wouldn't really want add-ons in the way PC has, but it would be very good indeed if the core game could be improved so that we get similar information to that available from CMX in a summary report from the dummies. It's really disappointing that in order to have access to basic self-improvement tools that ought to be a core feature of the game I have to buy a second copy on a different platform than the one I chose to play on, install the PTS so I can recreate my characters from PS4, and add on some third party plugins. The other aspect of practicing is expense. Buying stacks of spell draught isn't a problem for most endgame players because they already have ways of making gold, but it is a big deterrent to practising properly for new players with little gold. I've suggested it before but I think there should be a way of making training versions of potions and poisons that never get consumed but only work inside player housing (or areas around overland target dummies if these were ever to be introduced) and when not in combat with another player. That way you could do all the parsing you wanted without burning through gold, but you would still have to use consumable potions in actual combat with enemies. Perhaps you could add an animus stone to any potion / poison recipe at the alchemy station to make the training variant - that would chime with use of animus stones in target dummies and would improve the market for them to the benefit of master crafters doing their master writs, who would have another source of income making and selling training potions (or just animus stones).

I suspect the above would have a much bigger real impact on raising the floor than constant tweaking of gear stats, but of course it would take a bit more work on ZoS's part.