Every time I read someone saying "you are overreacting, the sky isn't falling, we hear this every patch", the very first thing that pops into my head is they haven't actually read the patch notes. Maybe not even looked at them (the length alone is daunting).

This isn't your everyday nerf, this is not the hammer it's the nuclear option of nerfs. People are focused on DPS, because let's face it DPS is king, but that's really only the tip of the nerfburg. For my money, more attention should be paid to the 40% reduction in the most commonly used heals. In the long run that's going to be just as painful as the DPS loss for a lot of content. And then there's the 10% nerf to ranged damage and the nerf to resource returns for HA. And then there are all the class ability nerfs. Really it's just depressing.

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

[snip]

I have played this game since beta 2014 and since 2018 I had a love hate relationship with this game, the bugs were never fixed the long dungeon queues for example. The pvp lag running the game into the ground and now I come back seeing craglorn LFG trials dead, nobody is looking for trials. It's not 1% so many people have left this game between 2018 and now it's insane how this game is still having people like you defend it. I have seen so many combat changes the first being the champion point system change at the very start my god what a big mistake was that one. The only people at the end of the road for this game left will be people with houses and the people who like the lore.

[edited to remove quote]

I'm concerned about the health of the player base as a whole. Too many players are leaving and considering leaving before the Update releases.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Bill

Since this update was announced and broken down by various streamers, massive guilds which have been full since game launch are losing hoards of players. We just had an event. Normally the servers would be full right now, but they're not. It's turning into a ghost town.

Update 35 has too many different changes in it. It's too much for average players to take in all at once.

I'm not suggesting to cancel all changes but rather to pick a few important ones out of the bunch and save the rest of the update fun for a later update by splitting the changes into 2 updates. It would be much appreciated.

I'm also going to mention a thought or two here which seem to go lost before each Update.

If the update lowers the average dps for high end raiders, it lowers the average dps for casual players too. So everyone is impacted.

Players don't play RPG's and MMO's to not feel mighty. We have enough of not feeling powerful in real life (for example at work). We enjoy being strong heros in ESO, who can save a King.

We don't want to feel we're hitting enemies with a wet noodle.
When our lightning crackles or our sword plunges into some Daedra, we want to see dead bodies everywhere.

Have fun in game everyone.

Lucozade85 wrote: »

I really can't be bothered to keep changing gear / adjust how I play so often and it seems every character I create or something I work towards gets nerfed several times during that process. Not to mention the farming of materials needed every time there's a change.

What's also demotivating me is U35 looks like there will be no class identity with most classes having 9 dots and use a spammable 11 times, not sure what's fun about that.

It's also frustrating seeing these changes that no one has asked for but still have the same bugs / glitches for years with no acknowledgement on when a fix will ever be made.

I feel you...

Every time we take ZOS at their word we are giving them an out for what they are really doing. This Dev team arent newbies that are in elementary grade math class simultaneously. They arent trying to make things accessible. Its the complete opposite. They want things to be more difficult to sell sets and mythics.

I did end up cutting my losses in a sense.
I stopped grinding like an imbecile begging for the RNG to bless me with a piece of equipment for a build that would help me improve as a player. I stopped doing dungeons and trials, I only do the dailies from the orc to increase my rapport with Isobel.

I did it long since before the upcoming nerf, simply because of veteran overland... It's the most debated thread on the top page right now, but my reasoning is simple.

There's no veteran story content. Fungal Grotto I's final boss is scarier to solo than Molag Bal himself. When I made a witcher build for fun (10kdps lol), defeating molag bal was a breeze. But when I finally solo'd fungal grotto I with that character, I actually felt accomplished. But there's no story dungeons that tie you to the main quests at all (except maybe Eveli's dungeon to find the book... which is a prologue quest to the prologue quest to blackwood).

Yeah, making builds is fun, but if you want the story to be challenging, you're not supposed to toggle on a hard mode, you're supposed to gimp and nerf yourself to the ground. That's exactly the opposite of what makes the game engaging for everybody who wants to improve their DPS farming and grinding for gear and mythics repeating dungeons over and over and over and over again to get all transmutes to get every single digit out of their builds.

But if you want to be immersed in the story and feel like the threats they're supposed to be, which are supposed to be the end of the world, then you shouldn't farm for all that gear, nor invest in levelling up your CP, let alone transmutes. Just unequip everything, remove your CP, don't use passives, and if you use gear, make sure it's white and that it doesn't belong to a set, don't use mythics, don't use monster helms.
NOW the story might be a challenge.

Now combine that PLUS my experience as a hardcore tank since the console game released. Every subsequent patch I see is making something that could've been fun for tanks being reworked to pander to DPS, because it's all that matters in this game, the DPS. Vateshran would've been a fun solo arena for tanks with a completely different focus unlike a DD character... strategy for final boss is as a DD, focus on all the adds, and deal splash dmg to the boss, otherwise the adds will overwhelm you and you'll die, then pass a DPS check to escape the ring of ghosts, and pass a DPS check to prevent the boss from restoring health... As a tank however, you need to focus entirely on the boss instead of the adds because you'll never fully clear the room from them, unlike a DPS, so now you have to focus on the boss while also taking punishment from all around you, the boss will restore all health by the time you beat a sub-boss, it's a lengthy challenge unlike a DD, but it actually puts your tank build to the test... until the stupid ring of ghosts with an insta-kill mechanic because your tank is a terrible DPS that they can't even deal 9k dps.
Simply put, there's no fun in support roles at all unless you're in a dlc dungeon or trial (because vanilla dungeons can be done without tanks anyway)

So when you put those two things together: Nerf yourself to make story content challenging, and no point in min/maxing a tank build since everything fun for tanks has been reworked for DPS, and one-shot mechanics make your digits completely worthless, there's simply no reason for me to do dungeons and trials, no reason to do any of the 'hard' content which is sidelined to self-contained quests that don't tie into the story.

All I'm saying is, stop the mindless unengaging grind. Stop caring for mythics and gear sets that play the game for you, until ZoS decides to make farming for those things actually engaging and not just some stupid RNG which is meant as an artificial player retention, then there's really no point to any of it.
Play the story content, skip all dialogues because you don't even get dialogue choices anyway, and only get immersed in feeling like the final boss is an actual challenge by not equipping any gear set.


-PS: I queued to a dungeon which was part of a daily quest as a DPS with my main once... 40 minutes, and still nothing. That's an insane amount of time to wait to queue into a pug for DPS... 12 minutes is long but at this point, it's a standard, but 40 minutes? In prime time, with a daily dungeon? Yeah, it's hard to deny that people are leaving, and I don't blame them.

I think player retention is always an issue. And to be fair there's always gonna be a problem keeping people playing when they have done everything they wanted.

My question is why do have to have a game that can keep your interest indefinitely? This game has SO much content, hundreds of hours of quests, nearly 50 dungeons with different difficult modes, overland content, trials, Cyrodill and plenty of stuff for achievement hunters.

For a new player I don't know another game that has so much to chew through, especially for the type of gamer who enjoys all types of content.

Apart from the dogsh*t combat animation/system. What more do you want?

prof_doom wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOJbVviAuVg&ab_channel=NefasQS

People are leaving... and it's getting harder to deny every day.

True. It's impossible to deny. The servers have been empty each day at peak times since the changes were announced. No more groups are up not even to randomly queue or do vet pledges.

The rest is my general opinion on this topic.

Player retention is always an issue in MMO's. That doesn't mean we should stay silent and look the other way as players leave in droves either. The forums are here. So we can offer our opinions and insight from our in game experiences. If we say nothing, the devs may not know why members of the community are concerned.

We understand some nerfs need to be done, but these are too many reductions at once. Some are clearly going to negatively impact certain classes more than others which leads to further imbalance.

As a suggestion, maybe the devs could consider generally reducing the amount of nerfs and the perentage of the reductions. So less extreme versions of the changes release in this update.

For example, the aoe at 1.5 times damage over 10 secs was changed to 2 times damage double duration of 20 secs. which is an approximate 33% damage loss according to their patch notes.

That could be changed to 2.4 or 2.5 times over double duration which would still be a significant damage loss but a smaller more managable one for the majority. In end effect the damage would be lowered but not so extremely all at once.

Game is up for me. Been playing since console release. Never been too bothered about updates before, kinda just rolled along. But this update is just plain dumb. And so, I’ll start looking for another mmo to have fun with.
Thx

I cancelled sub some days ago for the first time in years. Yesterday, I had 0/98 friends online. I usually have 8-15 friends online whenever I log on.

With the exception of a 2 year break from 2016-18, I've played ESO from 2015 till today. 3 years on PS, and as many on PC. I love the game because of two reasons, 1) I am an elder scrolls franchise fan, since Morrowind was first released sometime in 2002? And 2) the combat in ESO. Its fast-paced and fun.

Update 35 completely destroys that 2nd aspect. It makes the combat beyond boring. I don't want to sit around spamming one button 56 times in 60 seconds. No. Spare me.

It makes content inaccessible for a vast majority of players in the name of doing the opposite. Which shows the lack of concern from devs and the fact that they are out of touch with their own game. And the fact that more than two weeks into this, no one has had the courtesy to come clean, makes me want to question their work ethic.

So, while I am still hoping they'll swallow their egos and revert the changes, if they don't, it'll probably be a sad ending to a wonderful relationship.

Arrodisia wrote: »

There are a lot of casual players who do much less damage than 35k now on live servers. Some can't even reach 25k on the dummies or in dungeons with golded gear. These nerfs aren't good for the majority of players. The nerfs should be adjusted and reduced.

The content that I am sure a lot of players do, namely overland (zones, delves, public dungeons), can be done with less than 25k DPS. Base game dungeons, zone bosses, and zone events can be done with others, and that less-than-25k player fits in very nicely. Heck, some base game dungeons can be solo'ed by players with less than 25k DPS. Players can spend hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours in this game and never do more than 25k DPS.

I am sure that this patch won't render these players totally inert and leave them sidelined, but it is adding hardship where hardship does not need to be added.

I am not sure that "adjustments" are going to be able to address that for existing players. For new player starting this fall, they should have no problems. They can replace all of us and then ZOS will have players who match the players they are developing for.

BuildMan wrote: »

My rough math guessing work

Low end dps 50k
High end dps 105k
Difference 55k

After 30% nerf

Low end dps 35k
High end dps 73.5k
Difference 38.5k

38.5k < 55k

Unfortunately that's not how it's playing out on the servers

Low end was about 25k-50k
It is now as low as 10k-30k because newer players tend to rely on spamming light attacks or heavy attack builds, particularly with lightning staff, all of which were nerfed and spammables are hard for them to keep up bc they don't have the experience with resource management. They are seeing some of the biggest hits.

Mid is about 65k-90k which is now going down to about 40k-65k

High end went from 140k-110k down to about 90k-120k

This is based on what is happening via test server streams. High end players are already finding ways around it while less experienced players are left in the dust.

Additionally this is there is a 10% change from the dummies in live so it actually appears higher then it would be on like so true comparisons are even harder to make

If the devs want close the gap between high end raiders and the new players/casuals, they should impliment a fun and completely optional dps simulation to teach players how to dps.

Basically it would tell you about your abilities, heavy and light attacks, weaving, foods, mundus, potions, buffs, etc. and it would also lead you through a basic rotation tutorial.

This doesn't mean players can't play differently. It's just optionally available to give players an idea of how to prepare for harder content if they choose to do so.

Elsonso wrote: »

Arrodisia wrote: »

There are a lot of casual players who do much less damage than 35k now on live servers. Some can't even reach 25k on the dummies or in dungeons with golded gear. These nerfs aren't good for the majority of players. The nerfs should be adjusted and reduced.

The content that I am sure a lot of players do, namely overland (zones, delves, public dungeons), can be done with less than 25k DPS. Base game dungeons, zone bosses, and zone events can be done with others, and that less-than-25k player fits in very nicely. Heck, some base game dungeons can be solo'ed by players with less than 25k DPS. Players can spend hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours in this game and never do more than 25k DPS.

I am sure that this patch won't render these players totally inert and leave them sidelined, but it is adding hardship where hardship does not need to be added.

I am not sure that "adjustments" are going to be able to address that for existing players. For new player starting this fall, they should have no problems. They can replace all of us and then ZOS will have players who match the players they are developing for.

New players rarely flock to games with empty servers after massive nerfs were done and they rarely stay.

Casuals try hard to do some of the easier normal vet content in PvE and mixed guilds usually with players who are a bit more skilled then they are. Many of those skilled players have recently left and the casuals left behind have much less players to do content with.

How won't the players be sidelined in the next patch? There are already tons of sidelined players on the servers who even after practicing can't reach the group requirements to participate in many groups. The content needs to become more accessible not less.

General nerfs isn't the way to close the skill gap.

An in game dps tutorial would be a more effective at closing the gap before reducing player damage across the board so drastically.

starkerealm wrote: »

prof_doom wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOJbVviAuVg&amp;ab_channel=NefasQS

People are leaving... and it's getting harder to deny every day.

I saw some life in Craglorn last night. For a few minutes chat was picking up again. It was almost reassuring... but, then it dropped off.

If this goes live, the consequences are going to be catastrophic for the community.

As someone else said, it is Summer, people are finally able to get out and enjoy the weather, not to mention it is hot out everywhere, I doubt people are running their PCs in these temps, not everyone has AC, not everyone wants to run their AC in record inflation economy.

alternatelder wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

prof_doom wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOJbVviAuVg&amp;ab_channel=NefasQS

People are leaving... and it's getting harder to deny every day.

I saw some life in Craglorn last night. For a few minutes chat was picking up again. It was almost reassuring... but, then it dropped off.

If this goes live, the consequences are going to be catastrophic for the community.

As someone else said, it is Summer, people are finally able to get out and enjoy the weather, not to mention it is hot out everywhere, I doubt people are running their PCs in these temps, not everyone has AC, not everyone wants to run their AC in record inflation economy.

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