Ironically, their base resources are probably one of the most accessible damage boosts for low and mid-tier players, since you get them by leveling up, passives, CP, gear, and easily obtainable food buffs. No need to manage your buff skills or use potions on cooldown.

By removing those buffs, you'd prioritize the other damage buffs that are available from skills, group sets, and potions...which plays to the strengths of high-damage players in their organized groups, not the low damage players struggling in basic Vet dungeons.

Malkosha wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Ironically, their base resources are probably one of the most accessible damage boosts for low and mid-tier players, since you get them by leveling up, passives, CP, gear, and easily obtainable food buffs. No need to manage your buff skills or use potions on cooldown.

By removing those buffs, you'd prioritize the other damage buffs that are available from skills, group sets, and potions...which plays to the strengths of high-damage players in their organized groups, not the low damage players struggling in basic Vet dungeons.

Hmmm. I didn't want them removed but instead become less effective as you level but didn't take into account the high level player who is just starting to get geared for high end work. It wouldn't hurt the low level player at all since they would be a full strength, but the high level player who wasn't geared enough to overcome this would be hurt. For something like this to work, you would need to find another metric other than "level".

Since CP doesn't correspond to being a high or low damage player, I don't think you are going to find another metric to tie these diminishing returns on attributes unless you want to just implement a flat damage cap.

Max Stamina and Magicka are easy to build for. They are accessible to low damage as well as high damage players. If you want to target the effects that makes high damage players do high damage, look for the stuff they use that low damage players don't.

Typically the areas where low damage players look for inprovement to do high damage is stuff like appropriate potion buffs, the right amount of penetration/weapon damage/spell damage, DPS-boosting gear like Relequen or arena weapons, and a practiced rotation that includes good weaving. At that point, it's more about gameplay differences than it is about the differences in their max stamina and magicka. (This is one reason you see ZOS changing light attacks and rotations this patch, because that's something that does impact the damage gap. Its also a reason you see a lot of requests for ZOS to teach players how to weave, do a rotation, etc., because that's how players overcome the damage gap.)

If you just give high damage players diminishing returns on their stamina/magicka, they are going to compensate for the loss by using all those gameplay techniques they've learned.

However, the low damage players who have the right attributes but don't use those techniques are still going to do low damage because they don't use effective gameplay techniques in combat. They will not become high damage players until they do, and so the gap persists.

So I'd say that, yes, this is too simplistic to really address the damage gap between low and high damage players because it doesn't touch the things that contribute most to that gap. There's also a fair bit of difficulty as to how we would even determine who gets the diminishing returns, since CP doesn't correspond to low or high damage.

Finally, we've had soft caps on attributes before. ZOS moved on from that design and has since moved to the stamina/magicka split with hybridized cost and scaling that we see now. That's not to say they couldn't backtrack if they wanted to, but it would be going back to something they already tried.

It would make sense if this was a traditional MMO.

In ESO, we have battle scaling. Which actually gives low level players MORE resources than endgame players.
But they must have gold gear at their current level to apply the greatest amount possible.
In fact, a level 48 player (48 because you can’t craft gear at odd levels and farming for something at 49 would likely push you to 50 and CP where you become much weaker) with all gold gear also level 48. Will have more resources than anything possible by a CP player.

If you get a duel invite from a level 48 toon hanging around, don’t underestimate them. They are scoring easy duels by taking advantage of the stats granted from the scaling system.

Literally, the only thing stopping low level toons from completing Vet Trials is the fact they can’t physically access them!