Do you actually believe you can adjust all Veteran content in 2 weeks?

frozzzen101 · July 2022

Honestly I’m rather baffled with this. To the extent that it’s possible to adjust the encounters “of all bosses on Veteran difficulty and above”, you would need to do it with extremely broad strokes, and not the stated goal of reducing boss HP from encounter to encounter keep the challenge sameish. Do you actually believe this is doable? It took you 200 days of feedback to balance a singular Bahsei HM fight, and suddenly you think you can over the span of two weeks you can adjust all Veteran content in this game?

It’s just not doable and everyone knows it. As if adjusting boss hp will change anything. I can’t even follow all of the healing changes, and boss hp doesn’t have anything to do with regards to outgoing damage of encounters and healing required for those encounters. Adjusting only health value doesn’t magically solve anything, it would require fine tuning of encounters on case by case basis to achieve that. You no longer have groups on PTS testing your changes because you have cut every single thread connecting you to endgame community, community at large and you don't have time to do it yourself.

Also remember how you increased vBRP last boss hp to 18.5 million because he shared identical health with some other boss/add in the game? There is reused code for so many things, and there’s no way it wouldn’t have unforeseen consequences to do changes this large. With timeline as it is right now, there will be no way to test everything.

After absolute travesty of a PTS cycle Combat team will offload all responsibility of balance/unbalance to Encounters team? I’m sure they are thrilled about this prospect. Finn has on the record stated that they don’t want to touch older content much because those resources can go to new Dungeons, new Trials, new content in general, and by having to evaluate entire Veteran content down the line, I’m sure it will reduce quality of upcoming content, whatever that will be. I do trust Encounters team far, FAAAAR more than than Combat team, however if they get burdened with cleaning mess that Combat team created, it is very likely they will lose that vaunted trust of yours, much like Combat team has already lost it.

It’s been repeated multiple times, this entire update must be scraped. Swallow your pride and let it go. If there is any semblance of professionalism and humility left in you, you know this is right thing to do. If you truly believe in this vision of yours for ESO, scrap it as it is right now, use lessons learned and try it again some time in the future. There’s no sense rushing this out as it is right now and it will cause more damage if it goes live. There are people who left the game and they won’t be coming back, but there are people like me, who are still on the fence, waiting for the results.

Honestly ESO doesn’t have that much going for it. You don’t have legacy of WoW, you don’t have epic stories and personality cult like devs of FFXIV. Even in Elder Scrolls series you don’t have lore depth and focused world building of Morrowind or sandbox experiences of Skyrim. You have two things – fantastic combat system and friends we made along the way. If those friends leave because you destroy combat system you will have nothing. Absolutely nothing.

LeonAkando · July 2022

This is an exceedingly dramatic post. I, too, have been critical of this update. Can this patch be saved in 2 weeks? Unlikely. It is clear, to me at least, that the final patch of High Isle will be mostly addressing and cleaning up the mess of this patch.

That being said, we have gained some good things from this patch, in my opinion:

Combat:
1. Long duration buffs. Short buffs are not fun or interesting and are mostly maintenance. This new long duration buffs feel better as they drain less resources, require less management, and still often provide that support element to allies (such as DKs or Templars) or defensive qualities (such as Hurricane or Bone Armor).
2. Stronger and less punishing heavy attacks. I can't recall the last time I've heavy attacked as a DD. I've been so bombarded with the meta of light weaving (which is inherently twitchy and uncomfortable) and tuning team regen to require as little heavy attacks as possible. I am glad to see ZOS take an effort to allow more varied attacks, at least that's their intention with the Week 4 and Week 5 updates.
3. Mix duration DoTs. Controversial, but after spending a few hours doing the new content on the PTS, I have come to appreciate having a mix of shorter and longer dots. This plays exceptionally better than having to refresh all your dots at once, and plays exceptionally better than the week 1 nonsense.

Visual:
1. Animation updates. Let's be clear, these animation updates haven't quite hit the mark. But for the longest time ZOS has told us that they can't introduce or update animations due to a lot of technical restraints of antiquated systems. Everytime I bring someone into ESO one of the first things they mention is how dated the game looks visually. So any step, at all, to modernize and bring new spell effects, and god willing new textures and model updates, that is welcome.

Riptide · July 2022

Oh, its pretty clear they are in a cascading situation here where they had to hail mary to encounters team. Hybridization left unfinished, a whole host of tangential combat updates, and now compensating with sweeping boss health. What could possibly go wrong

Outside of some kind of unforeseen sweetener I’ll lapse just after this goes live and stay lapsed until U36 or whenever some kind of ship-righting cohesion evidenced itself. I already spent my time in the preclosed beta, closed beta, beta and first year testing for free. Paying to test for months is beyond the scope, and that is absolutely what this soup sandwich necessitates.

xylena_lazarow · July 2022

frozzzen101 wrote: »

If those friends leave because you destroy combat system you will have nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Yea this seems insane. I'm expecting lots of "standardization" that ignores context causing unfortunate results. PvP damage is still massively nerfed with little compensation, and broken new sets will exacerbate the tank meta problem.

CleymenZero · July 2022

frozzzen101 wrote: »

Honestly I’m rather baffled with this. To the extent that it’s possible to adjust the encounters “of all bosses on Veteran difficulty and above”, you would need to do it with extremely broad strokes, and not the stated goal of reducing boss HP from encounter to encounter keep the challenge sameish. Do you actually believe this is doable? It took you 200 days of feedback to balance a singular Bahsei HM fight, and suddenly you think you can over the span of two weeks you can adjust all Veteran content in this game?

It’s just not doable and everyone knows it. As if adjusting boss hp will change anything. I can’t even follow all of the healing changes, and boss hp doesn’t have anything to do with regards to outgoing damage of encounters and healing required for those encounters. Adjusting only health value doesn’t magically solve anything, it would require fine tuning of encounters on case by case basis to achieve that. You no longer have groups on PTS testing your changes because you have cut every single thread connecting you to endgame community, community at large and you don't have time to do it yourself.

Also remember how you increased vBRP last boss hp to 18.5 million because he shared identical health with some other boss/add in the game? There is reused code for so many things, and there’s no way it wouldn’t have unforeseen consequences to do changes this large. With timeline as it is right now, there will be no way to test everything.

After absolute travesty of a PTS cycle Combat team will offload all responsibility of balance/unbalance to Encounters team? I’m sure they are thrilled about this prospect. Finn has on the record stated that they don’t want to touch older content much because those resources can go to new Dungeons, new Trials, new content in general, and by having to evaluate entire Veteran content down the line, I’m sure it will reduce quality of upcoming content, whatever that will be. I do trust Encounters team far, FAAAAR more than than Combat team, however if they get burdened with cleaning mess that Combat team created, it is very likely they will lose that vaunted trust of yours, much like Combat team has already lost it.

It’s been repeated multiple times, this entire update must be scraped. Swallow your pride and let it go. If there is any semblance of professionalism and humility left in you, you know this is right thing to do. If you truly believe in this vision of yours for ESO, scrap it as it is right now, use lessons learned and try it again some time in the future. There’s no sense rushing this out as it is right now and it will cause more damage if it goes live. There are people who left the game and they won’t be coming back, but there are people like me, who are still on the fence, waiting for the results.

Honestly ESO doesn’t have that much going for it. You don’t have legacy of WoW, you don’t have epic stories and personality cult like devs of FFXIV. Even in Elder Scrolls series you don’t have lore depth and focused world building of Morrowind or sandbox experiences of Skyrim. You have two things – fantastic combat system and friends we made along the way. If those friends leave because you destroy combat system you will have nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Didn't read your post but it's ezpz. We lost 20-30% damage, they're gonna reduce boss health by 5%. Job well done!