Eigh1_Puppies wrote: »

I streamed for 28 and a half hours, with the primary goal of the stream being to test the content on the PTS and see how it compared to fight times on live. This was in response to the Health Changes that were not clearly outlined, coming in at the literal last possible second. Throughout the course of the entire stream, I posted in 3 discords with over 1000 people in an attempt to get runs going with a team performing a clear on Live and then on the PTS. Of the 29 hours, I was able to put together a grand total of 0 runs. Instead, I was only able to test classes on the parse dummy, tests which were simply futile as the dummy has been updated so much over the course of the patch, that getting a realistic comparison regarding the extent of the damage loss we’ve seen this patch is simply impossible.

I need to start this message by emphasizing how update 35 nearly single handedly destroyed interest in end game. I wish that I were overexaggerating, I wish that I was just a dramatic upset Phanatic, I wish I was wrong. But never in my entire time playing this game, since the initial introduction of the Craglorn Trials, have I ever seen this type of mass exodus from endgame. I would estimate that over 50% of all teams have completely disbanded, another 20% have stopped raiding to see how this update will affect their progression, some of the biggest carry discords that have existed for years evaporated over night, and Project Vitality, the biggest endgame initiative to date, has seen over 70% of the raid leads in charge of the teaching runs to quit the game. Why has this happened? Can we fix it? What can we do to prevent this in the future?

So with that said, what is still wrong with the current version of update 35? Quite frankly, not much! My biggest complaints are that we had no way to test and see if the health changes were sufficient enough to avoid reprog for teams, especially in the newest content, and that the changes to heavy attacks have allowed Medium Weaving to become stronger than LA weaving. It seems that the Medium Weave was not intended, so I assume that’ll be fixed at some point during U35, but the Health issue is much more pressing. It’s hard to estimate about how much lower damage is from U35 compared to U34, mainly because A) people don’t even want to raid on live much less the PTS and the dummy has gotten Major Slayer, Minor Courage, and EC which has dramatically inflated parses compared to last patch, while, granted, making the dummy a bit more accurate when comparing the buffs you get in raid: this was the original intention of the 21 mil. On top of this, the set ups for classes in U35 is much different than that of U34 due to all of the changes with the Maelstrom weapons AND the shift in damage that has made sets like Bahsei and Riptide less preferable. As a quick note, these sets most benefited players doing a lot of damage. If damage goes down “damage done” sets become less preferable than sets that do strong damage on their own, like Rele and Pillar, as the damage difference between these options are already really small on the live server. With all of this in mind, I anticipate a damage loss of about 15 to 20% on the PTS compared to live. I could be wildly wrong. One of the biggest points to make is nobody has any true way of knowing. Major Slayer gives 10% increased damage which scales to not actually be exactly 10%, Minor courage gives a ton of weapon/spell damage which is tough to factor in, and EC shouldn’t effect the dummy very much, because it really only gives a couple more % of crit damage than we already had while allowing us to run a different CP slottable. I was hitting 115K my DK and 130K on my cro on the live server, while on the PTS I hit 122.5k and 123.5k respectively. Take the 115K parse for example, and give maybe 15% increased damage for Slayer + Courage and another 3-5% increase for EC, and that parse on live with these buffs is estimated to be at about 135 to 140K, resulting in about a 15% damage loss on a “non meta” class. Take the Cro though, which took external nerfs to the class itself, and you’re looking at about a 20% loss in DPS.

Yet trials were nerfed by about 10% health with a very minimal difference boss to boss. This is probably just fine for all content up to the two most recent trials. Keep in mind that these dummy differences are considering a pure single target fight. The first two bosses in both Rockgrove and Dreadsail require a considerable amount of AOE damage. With the 122k and 123K parses being achieved in Rele, we’d have to opt for an option not as strong, like Bahsei, Riptide, or Siroria, to compensate. These options are within 5K dps of eachother, but still adds to the deficit in the most difficult content. This is an even bigger issue for console players, as we have to decide if and when it is worth stopping to take the time to change our entire set up, even further making speed runs much more difficult.

The next most oppressing issue, is seemingly the lack of adjustment in healing. We saw changes very early on that were mostly revoked, but healing output itself is still much lower on the PTS than it is on Live. I think these changes aren’t the end of the world, but it will definitely cause a bit more reprog in the vast majority of groups. Really only the endgamers will be okay. This concept contradicts the entire intentions portrayed by update 35.

These are the current issues with the current patch. Outside of these, the game is in good shape I think. Classes and Sets are balanced well, I’m not upset about ditching the ridiculous resource based sets in terms of DPS, we have two phenomenal new dungeons, when all said and done, U35 is pretty good! So why is endgame dead? I believe the PTS in U35 presents a unique opportunity to not only work to build the game to fit the vision of the devs, but also to learn from a massive mistake that, if addressed, will ultimately result in a much healthier ESO community moving forward. At this point, I don’t think that there are any changes that can be made to bring the player base that has quit back in. At least, not yet.

I want to preface the second half of this discussion by addressing a notion that has brought us to this point. I am being brutally honest when I say, if you reading this are somebody who has intentionally attempted to degrade or disregard the devs as a team who “does not care about the game” or “does not care about the player base” or “who does not play their own game” you are simply a part of the problem. You share responsibility in this moment. Like it or not, this statement is downright insane, and players who adopt this ideology, regardless of whether or not you had good ideas, put yourself in a position to be ignored. Though I can’t say I don’t understand the reason you might say these things or feel that way, it just logically does not track. The dev team for ESO in fact is one of the most caring and engaged team in all of gaming. As a sort of testimonial, I want to say that Finn takes the time to be in so many places where he receives both constructive and abrasive feedback, while continuously taking it with an open mind and working to make the game better by directly engaging with those who play it in organized settings. Gilliam very directly interacts with trusted names in the game to get thoughts and opinions about the direction some of these updates take, as well as being a phenomenal and informed player himself. Gina Bruno saw a random tweet from a twitter account with less than 200 followers pop up on her feed, containing a google doc that said “What did Raiding on the PTS Tell Us?” clicked on it, read it, and shared it with her team. The very next day, Zos_Seiffer was lurking in the stream and literally thanked us for our feedback. THEY DO LISTEN. THEY DO CARE. These people are incredibly invested in their craft, they take it very seriously, and they put forth a phenomenal work ethic to do so. Sometimes they miss the mark. It is human nature. And if you don’t believe this, you at bare minimum have to believe that Zenimzax makes a lot of money on this game, and that it is within a company’s best interest to keep its consumer base happy. Period.

That said, a large reason the endgame community has disbanded is for one of two reasons. Either, players have a grievance against the direction the game is headed and want nothing more to do with it, or the amount of reprog that has resulted from the last year of intense changes in the game has become unbearable. I feel it’s easier to first discuss the “sweeping changes” that has played a large part in this burn out first.

As an endgame raider, the absolute most frustrating challenge presented in the game is roster prog and reprogression. It completely kills the fun of content, because, rather than progging the content itself, you are spent setting time away in your week to progress this content, only to be the most challenged by finding qualified interest in the content being progressed, or by having to relearn things that you as a team have already progressed. Especially in extremely difficult content, it’s so important to have the exact same 12 every week, otherwise you waste entire days reprogressing content for subs, regardless of their own skill and experience levels. If you are missing your OT in a PB prog, it doesn’t matter if you pull in the best OT in the world, they will cause reprogression, if not for learning the fight the way the group is used to performing it, then for the simple sake of tank synergy on Bahsei. That alone will waste an entire night of raiding. And when each patch has either presented a variety of completely new sets and skill to acquire, as well as completely new concepts in maximizing damage, whether it be something fundamental like a rotation or something more advanced like situational burst, you create a race to finish a prog before the patch so as to avoid reprog. Who in their right mind wants to be stressed about having the ability to complete content before a major change possibly prevents you from being able to do so? Or even at that, who wants to completely relearn the trial with potentially different strats due to a massive decrease in damage that was not properly adjusted? For ANY group, a newer team with an average burn will now have to go through the pains of having to learn how to handle more mechanics in a fight, potentially having to adopt a more difficult strat that’s more damage focused, rather than a safe one that’s more focused on survivability. On the high end, teams progressing the most difficult content will now have to spend weeks, if not months, relearning the most effective ways to do damage in a particular fight in order to meat a previously met burn. This is bad for everybody. Once you break the game with high damage, you can’t just go and take it back, at least not when this massive power creep has existed for years, allowing MORE PEOPLE to get into endgame, only to rip it away from everybody, destroy progression, and create reprog for every single team. Even teams pushing World Records will not be able to do so in new content anymore. It will simply be impossible, because damage used to be higher. This entire philosophy resulting around making content more difficult by decreasing damage output, is not only counterintuitive to the goal of making content more accessable, but simply bad for everyone.

And that brings us to reason number two. About half of the endgame casualties occurred in week one. People didn’t care if the changes made it live or not. The mere implications of, evidently poorly tested, ideas and concepts imposed yet another case of a direction, philosophy, and lack of awareness that killed people’s interest in endgame. The entire concept of making the game “more accessable” is one that very few people oppose. That said, every single major change to combat with no exception, simultaneously and significantly strayed away from this goal, while making combat dull and boring. A lot of this was corrected later on but it was too late. A large portion of the player base is led to believe that the devs “Don’t know their own game” because of some of these blatantly obvious poor decisions. To be fair, that statement is crazy. But coming from an endgame perspective, a correct rephrasing of that, would be to say that, “The Devs don’t play their own game at this level.” That is a true statement but an unfair expectation. I don’t think the devs should have to play the game at a top 1% level to continue to do the phenomenal work that they do. But maybe what they should consider doing, is recruiting a team of the best, of the most elite, to test this content for them, and to provide feedback and suggestions before presenting these ideas, to ensure that their changes align with their goals. Update 35 had three main changes in week one; Healing DOTS ticking once every two seconds compared to damage that ticked every 1 second, Combat dulling by allowing DOTs to tick every 2 seconds, and light attack nerfing. The healing changes made strong heal checks and even strong DOTS against players much more difficult to heal through, making content much more difficult, and requiring much more expertise to compensate for. This is a change that would have been very annoying but mostly possible to reprog for endgamers, leaving average players to struggle much more with much less room for error. The dull combat mainly effected endgame players, and the changes made to this I feel are sufficient. The one that even struck me as okay initially was the changes to light attacks. This seemed to make sense. By making weaving less important, there should have been a smaller skill gap between players. The Ninja Pulls team proved this to be the complete opposite of the truth, demonstrating logs to compare on Falgraven Hard Mode from a team progging DB and one only progging SOTN. The logs from the 21 minute sotn prog proved to have a higher damage % coming from light attacks than the much higher parse from the 10 minute DB prog, with about a 5-10% difference. Newer players don’t maintain rotations as well as endgame players, making light attacks even more important, because they’re always at least constantly performing that action. Absolutely NONE of these changes helped forward the goal of accessibility. This patch even in week 5 does not forward that goal in any way, maybe outside of slightly stronger heavy attack builds. Beyond this, all of these changes in week one were not even presented in a “go test them and see if they do what we hope they will” type of format it was a “this is happening, it will work, and trust us” type of format, creating a massive divide in a community that ultimately supports this goal.

And with that, quite frankly, nobody knows what’s going on. The vison Zos seems to present is wildly contradicted by their own actions, making the true vision incredibly unclear and hard to follow. On top of this, the communication regarding these changes, regarding the direction of combat, even regarding the issues people really care about seem to be very weak. Granted, stronger than the communication has been historically, but still not enough. This is a very united and invested community. We all care about the game on a level stronger than it being “just a game” and its players want to know, not only what changes Zos plans on making, but when to finally expect an end to these earthshattering changes patch to patch to patch. Endgamers just want to progress without the constant threat of the patch looming over our heads every 3 months. We need clarity. We need something more organized. We’d like to be more informed going forward, without actions contradicting statements. Trust has, admittedly, been lost from the endgame community.

I don’t want to discredit the hard work and dedication that is put into this game. But it has to be said. A large reason the endgame community has dissipated with no hope of return in the near future, is due to the constant changes, lack of communication, and lack of clear vision regarding these changes. Nobody knows what’s going on anymore, nobody knows what to expect, and so many people are simply over it.

So now that we’ve identified the issues, I feel that it’s important to address the solutions. Unfortunately, I feel the most optimal solution to update 35 would simply be to undo the current combat changes and revisit them at a later date. Though I do feel that this is not possible, nor would it bring enough people back to really “save” endgame either. So more realistically, Medium Weaving needs to be fixed, mainly by changing empower to be worded as Fully Charged Heavy Attacks as well as maybe reduce the damage of Medium Attacks themselves, and boss/add health percentage for Rockgrove and Dreadsail need at least another 5% nerf. These changes alone, I believe, will save update 35, but not endgame. Rebuilding endgame requires a much more long term solution.

The next solution involves defining a better idea of where the issues in accessibility lie, and I believe Zos has wildly misinterpreted the gap in power that exists. It’s been identified as a “Skill Gap.” By their own definition, they consider mid tier players to hit, at most, 60K on a dummy, as well as complete and progress some vet and vet hard mode content, but definitely not the most recent trials. So, if it is believed that “skill” is the primary factor when comparing players that hit 60K and players that hit 140K, there in lies the issue. This gap is not properly identified. It is a gap in knowledge, and there is no better proof in this than the console player. I don’t mean this next statement as a way to boast about my own knowledge but simply to make a point, I could quite literally take any player hitting 60K on live and get them to 100K if they gave me one hour a day for a week. Easily. A more accurate representation of a skill gap would be my 127K parse compared to Charles’ 131K parse on a cro. This difference in skill really only comes down to weaving and likely crit as well. The main issue is not a person’s ability to hit certain skills in a certain order, it is knowing and understanding the fundamentals and nuisances of doing damage as a whole. Somebody hitting 60K needs to understand that light attacking between skills is the most important thing, followed by a consistent static rotation, and then understanding how to recover from mistakes in a static rotation, how to Prebuff a parse, very likely an alteration to their set up in some kind of way, what to do in execute, if the class has burst phases and how to use them, which skills are the most important, and the list only gets greater the higher the parse. A player hitting 120K could increase their parse by 5K with maybe a slightly better Prebuff and stam dump as well as a better burst in execute. These are all things players need to know and be taught. And the game has no way of doing that. No change to combat in any way shape or form will ever fix this. What players need, is an in game supported source of knowledge that teaches them most of these things, at least the basics of a rotation and weaving. There is no better example of this gap than when you compare Console and PC clear rates. The difference is clear! Add ons make a big difference, but not the ones you might think! Console doesn’t need an add on telling them when to roll dodge or when a certain mech is happening, we’ve figured that out. What we DO need are add ons that give us information about damage and uptimes. An in game implementation of CMX and maybe an integration with ESO Logs would be a game changer for the platform!!! On top of this, include a short and simple tutorial of how CMX works, what’s important, why it’s important, and what certain stats mean about your damage. Add an option to toggle on a “parse helper” which might identify weak points in your CMX and provide suggestions on how to improve them, this would change everything. All of a sudden, players hitting 60K will jump to 80k or 90k on their own with these tips.

Next, it needs to be recognized exactly what players find interesting about endgame. For most, it is not the simple challenge of the content itself. In fact, some of the most challenging fights in the game are my absolute least favorite. Take for example Bahsei Hard Mode, arguably the most difficult progression in the game. This is a fight that I would consider to be challenging, but not for any other reason than its poor design. The number one cause of death is the one shot curse mechanic. The fact that these AOEs are as small, fast, and incredibly difficult to see as they stand now, while maintaing such strong significance is insane to me. Another fight that I would consider to be challenging, but 100 times more fun is the first boss in vDSR Hard Mode. This fight is SO WELL DESIGNED. What players enjoy about content, is the tiers in strategies that exist to be able to handle them. This fight punishes bad damage, punishes damage that’s too high, and still leaves room for the top 1% to damage their way through most mechanics, while still maintaining a respectable 5 minute fight time outside of records. There isn’t an absurdly long invuln phase, and the phase that does exist requires coordination with massive penalties for failing in. There is a clear safe strat that involves burning atros and weapons as a priority. There is a burn strat that involves making the fight a bit more risky and challenging if you do not achieve the burn. And then there is also a step above that where you simply attempt to just nuke everything. There are multiple ways to handle the fight: you can split the group to handle the execute phase of the fight and try to kill the bosses at near the same time, or you can opt to mostly kill one boss, then kill the other, like old school vhof first boss style strats. This fight presents so much room for creativity in every single way that you look at it, laced with mechanics that aren’t inherently difficult, but definitely require progression. Fights like THIS are the type of fights endgame players find challenging and fun, because it allows us to make the fight harder on ourselves with the benefit of a better fight time, with a reasonable cap on just how fast the fight can be. Bahsei could be this way, if it weren’t simply for the curse mechanic.

They need to stop making content so challenging to simply clear. That is not what endgamers find to be fun, and, beyond that, it makes content so inaccessible to newer players. If accessibility is the goal, there needs to be a shift in incentive in endgame. Right now, everybody is simply title happy. This leaves room for people to leave endgame once that incentive has expired. 90% of players who get all of their titles quit, and the other 10% go on to scorepush when “world record” patches allow them to. If Zos were to start implementing radical incentives that pushed players to naturally progress from trifectas to scorepushing, endgame would be so much healthier. Even if it’s not for the number one spot on the board, even if it’s not for a record, incentivize the leaderboards in general for players to make this natural jump, and watch this area of endgame explode as time goes on. ESPECIALLY if they keep making well layered fights like in vDSR. And if you give, say 500 geodes to every team on the leaderboard in addition to a ton of upgrade mats, you can include new meta options every patch, and nerf old sets a little, to try to keep the game interesting because the players concerned with getting those sets asap will be prepared from their previous push. Don’t make the damage difference huge, but make it worth it for leaderboard pushers, while keeping the other sets strong enough to clear content without reprogression for what would become the new “mid tier” player.

Beyond that, what players really need to see is some more communication. Players will continue to claim that the “Devs don’t play the game” until they see them clear the content the top 1% pushes for. This doesn’t seem realistic to me, nor should it be, so it may be in the best interest of them to recruit teams or players like they did during the Class Rep Era. That program was one of the best things to happen to the game in general. Class diversity expanded dramatically, and class balance rose to the point it’s at now. In Update 35, it’s pretty much a coin toss when discussing which class will be “meta” when the patch goes live. We need more communication, we need a clear vision, we need input, and we need to stop with these crazy changes. Perhaps testing these ideas much like they have in the past with certain PvP scenarios or even the way they manage event testing on the PTS would be the most beneficial. Implementing a well refined combat update in one massive overhaul, rather than spreading out big changes over the course of a year, including a change great enough to alter an entire progression once every three months, is simply not working. If these changes were allowed to brew for an entire year and released with the major chapter when players are looking to get back into the game anyway, there would be much less recourse, as long as these ideas were well tested, fully developed, and only occurred once a year. Rely on phenomenal content to expand interest in the game rather than attempting to keep it fresh every three months. This idea of constantly changing the fundamentals of a game and providing an ever shifting meta are the same principles that have killed some of the most popular games in time. Fortnite, Call of Duty, Halo, and so many more games all died trying to implement these ideas in this type of fashion. Minecraft however, has stood the test of time, because it’s a game that has only ever gotten a little better with a major update in terms of content, and hasn’t fundamentally changed much. It’s the same ol game that it was when I played it as a kid.

Keep putting out fresh and phenomenal content, give us a clear vision and let those who are invested in the game assist in bringing that vision to fruition.

francesinhalover wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

francesinhalover wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

lpfan678 wrote: »

Will the folks at ZOS consider either increasing the number of transmute crystals in geodes or lower the cost of reconstructing gear via transmutation for the week after big patches like this? I have 13 characters, and I'm feeling pretty discouraged by the fact that I'm going to have to revisit every one of them post-U35.

Maybe put some crystals in the login rewards for September? Anything would be great.

i dont think much of the gear is really changing too much, there wasnt that many gear nerfs in there

now having a week of free respecs to sort out the mess with the skills would be more useful

Kinra's isn't even meta anymore, sorc uses pet gear, and im not even sure how mag meta changed.

i dont chase meta, and im talking about individual cases

pillar of nirn for example is not changing, it and other sets with dots will greatly overshadow every skill base sticky dot by like 3-4x dmg

Yeah and in 3 months they will destroy it with nerfs. Dont worry sets will also be nerfed. Maybe group buffs also.

My question is, for a guy like me that dislikes special effects on sets, what am i meant to use that isn't garbage?

Onky set that i do like that comes to my mind is a high isle trial set so hard to get (imagine perfected) that i can safely say ill never have it.