*Tone of this post disclaimer: confusion / sadness, not to be mistaken for anger / ranting*

What I don't understand at all is why nerfing for PvE is even necessary. If power creep at the top is a thing then just make newer content harder so there's some skill progression that feels rewarding. That's exactly what this game does already. When I was Lv50 for the first time did I expect to clear DLC vet HM dungeons? No, I started with nFG and worked my way up.

The thing I love about this game is that there is a really clear* skill progression through the endgame content that encourages you to improve. That's how all good games work and what makes them rewarding to play. The newer content doesn't just add ridiculous amounts of health to the bosses, it adds really fun and interesting mechanics that at the higher end are very difficult to master. That's exactly how this should work. That's what makes this game so much fun.

(* Actually not that clear, because the dungeons are not listed in order of difficulty. I had to use Reddit to find out which ones to do first.)

There will always be a small number of players who master content to such an extent that it's easy for them. Always, without exception. This is true for every game ever made. They will overcome every nerf and exploit-fix and still outperform the rest of the player base by miles, because they've mastered the game. What we should say is "Good for them"!

Why, then, is it necessary to make life harder for the overwhelming majority of players with nerfs and / or massive balance changes? I keep saying "overwhelming majority" because it literally is - I think we have one Godslayer in our guild, who joined only recently, and they are chill af. The rest of the "elite" players (as we like to call them apparently) in our guild are really really good, but even so it takes us weeks of struggling to get clears as we work through the hardest content - that's with DPS at it's highest.

High DPS is not the issue with harder content.

People get so mad about nerfs for a very good reason - 99.9% of us already find the end-end-endgame content difficult enough! But also, it just feels terrible to put so much work into your build, rotation, and practising content, to have your damage output reduced. We take a step forward and two steps back, and that is never satisfying.

To summarise:
Endgame PvE content is hard enough for the majority of players. It doesn't need to be made harder, or easier, we just need to learn to get through it.

=============

What would make things more fun for newer players? Make it easier for lower level players to do more damage. How do you do that? By giving them a damage modifier.

That's it. That's the fix. We already do it, it just needs tweaking. Don't even touch the top end. If you want to reduce the skill gap, start at the bottom, not the top.

If people want to clear vet HM trials by spamming one skill and not weaving, well.. that's not how this game works. That's not how any game works.

You have to improve to progress through content. Lower-skill players need to become higher-skill players. That might sound toxic and elitist but it's just how any game that rewards improvement (i.e. is satisfying to play and not boring) works. How do people get more good more quickly? With [practise and] help from other players with more experience. What do you have to do to ensure that's a possibility for them? Encourage more experienced players to stick around.

That last point is exactly why these massive balance changes and nerfs are such a problem. I'm not saying everyone is going to stop playing the game, but people are going to be A - pissed off, and B - confused. I actually forget which patch it was last year, but I remember there was a period of months after one of the big combat change patches where no new builds were being posted online - probably because the people who do that sort of thing had to do so much experimenting to figure out what works. That's months where lower-skilled players were trying to figure out how to improve but getting very little advice. We had people in our guild asking what they should do with their builds and we had very limited ways of helping them, because we barely knew ourselves.

It took the entire patch cycle to get to grips with the changes, and then we had another major balance upheaval. Thankfully not as drastic, but still.. it makes it really difficult to have experts on hand to help other players improve when the goalposts are constantly shifting like this.

If you discourage and confuse the more experienced members of your player base to the point where they can't or won't help members that need it, then your skill gap issues are only going to get worse.

To summarise:
We need time and stability so that people can master combat, and help others master it too.
The right way to close a skill gap is by improving the skill of players.
The right way to close a power gap is to boost the bottom, not restrict the top.

=============

So let's say hypothetically that the devs stop messing around with balance changes.. what would they do with their time?

I dunno.. maybe fix some of the bugs? The game-breaking bugs that reset bosses mid-fight, crash you to desktop, put mechanics visualisations on the ceiling instead of the floor, insta-kill you for jumping / dodge-rolling. The clunky animations that people have hated for years. The bar-swap / blocking bug that stops you being able to use skills. The things we have been complaining about for so long but never seem to be addressed. The stuff we actually ask for.

Make it more obvious to newer players which endgame content they should be starting with, and what order to progress through it.

Or, if you really have to mess with balance, how about.. work out a method of isolating PvE and PvP balancing and how to implement it effectively. Fix the stuff that becomes ridiculously OP in PvP without ruining it for PvE and vice-versa. This is the thing that has been forcing us to use the same meta sets and skills for years, and restricting people's ability to use creative builds. I understand this is complicated and will be fraught with difficulty, but.. cough.

There are tonnes of really cool sounding sets, skills, weapons etc in this game that would make for really interesting and diverse builds, but unfortunately aren't viable for PvE content because they've had their wings clipped in the name of PvP balance. Instead we have, what, less than five viable PvE endgame sets for DDs? This shouldn't be the way.

To summarise:
Developer time is better spent fixing issues that affect everyone, not a minuscule number of players.
PvE and PvP are two very different games within a game, so should be treated as such.

=============

So ZoS, if you read this, I want to emphasise that I mean this in the most constructive way: if you take anything from the outrage over this patch, it's that you need a major attitude adjustment.

You are "fixing" things that the vast majority of players don't think are broken. Your attitude towards the more experienced players comes across as hostile and punitive when patch after patch you try to restrict our ability to succeed.

The consensus amongst your players is that these changes are uncalled for and unnecessary.

You are hampering your own efforts to close the skill gap by making it impossible for us to help each other.