• Spellcrafting
• Overland difficulty scaling

I know I'm a broken record, but what can I do. At least I'm consistent.

As said many times, so sorry for the repeat, I would like that - at least the most used - addons are integrated as part of the game content and fully under ZOS responsibility. That's my top priority wish.

Hm. Ability skins. Call THIS spellcrafting if you like, but let me make Warden look somewhat thematically cohesive.

Gardening in housing. I could write an essay about how this could work, but it'd be another cool thing for housing.

1. Vet Overland.
2. Surveys overhaul.

Things I'd mark as necessary would be different difficulty tiers for overland and/or questing, at the very least main story to not be a joke.

Second one would be more weapon lines, eso seems really restricted in this category and not fulfilling enough with different archetypes present in elder scrolls games. Spell-crafting is always a good call here.

Game's reward structure needs hard look at, but that's a complex topic also so I'd leave it as that.

I've been in the vet overland thread the past few weeks, and it can be very divisive. Some people lobby hard against it, decrying a split in player base as an unacceptable detriment to their game experience.

I can kind of see that a sudden drop in perceived player population can be disheartening, but other than keeping players penned together for trade & group finding, I don't see the benefit of keeping overland at a single baseline difficulty for everyone. There's only so much endgame content, and every chapter release feels hollow since we know before going in that victory isn't just assured, it'll be easy. And every failure point in the story is scripted and arbitrary.

Regardless, I don't think an entirely separated veteran overland is the best solution. I think having two extremes in difficulty is in a lot of ways worse than an unfailable baseline.

In the overland feedback thread, I posted a suggestion, which I'll repost here. I think it's a suitable compromise that can give everyone the level of difficulty that they're most comfortable playing at.

Forum Post: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/7821595/#Comment_7821595

Credible_Joe wrote: »

We've heard it before. Overland is too easy. Sucks the drama out of the narrative when you can't appreciate the stakes.

Here's how I would approach an opt-in Champion Overland. No separate instance, instead an immersive compromise. I present for your consideration:

The Serpent's Entropy

• A Champion Point constellation of The Serpent reverse to the Thief, Mage, and Warrior
  • No equippable star slots; all Entropy is passive and stacks
  • Stars only apply to overland content and public dungeons. Group dungeons, trials, world bosses, and group / solo arenas are unaffected.
  • The three lower stars are nested trees that represent the guardians being consumed, the head is the Serpent itself.
• Like the current Guardians, the Serpent tree has a root that unlocks more entropy stars.
  • Reverse to the current guardians, we start at the top and go down
  • Initial star: Lonely Champion
    • Fight your battles alone. While in combat, other players outside your group cannot be seen or interacted with, and they cannot see or interact with you or the monsters you're fighting. While other players are in combat, you cannot see or interact with them or the monsters they're fighting.
    • Syncs & isolates monsters to the client. A partial instance; we'd still see players adventuring, but in combat everyone else (not grouped with you) fades away.
    • Group leader's Serpent points take priority
• The rest of the stars have miscellaneous effects that buff monsters and / or debuff yourself. In no particular order:
  • Increase opponent health / armor
  • NPCs can crit
  • disable combat cues; Shorter NPC telegraphs & quicker attack patterns
  • Monster aggro chains; if an NPC starts combat with you, after a moment they alert nearby NPCs outside of your own aggro range. They, in turn, can alert others with a smaller radius, ramping down until the alert peters out or you finish win / disengage. Encourages finishing fights quickly before the action alerts the whole gang / nest / haunt and brings every mob in the dungeon onto you.
  • Player does less damage
  • Lower player's equipment quality (for instance, if you have gold equipment, reduce it to purple, etc)
  • Lower player's equipment level
  • Players can only revive at wayshrines / blue flames (dungeon entrances)
  • Increase armor degradation on death
  • Gold multiplier (like the tel var multiplier) that resets on death / guard fine, and starts lower than default gold rate
  • Quality multiplier, same as above. Increases quality of loot as you adventure, resets on death, starts lower than default.
  • E T C

With the above system, any player would be able to ramp up difficulty as much as they want without affecting anyone else. They could make overland as hard as a solo arena, or harder. It could push the envelope on theorycrafting, finding builds that can tackle content on full entropy.

Most importantly, in my opinion, it would make the narrative much more engaging. It's hard to take NPCs' awe and admiration seriously when you can stand still and light attack the Big Bad to death. In fact, it just feels patronizing at that point. A shame-- overall I enjoy the stories and lore each chapter & DLC adds to the IP.

Thanks for reading. Please be kind, and remember, this is a pipe dream. I have zero expectation for ZOS to implement this exactly as I've written. The core message is zos, pls consider making overland & solo content more difficult & engaging.

In a nutshell, a roguelike-esque meta difficulty progression system that not only makes base content more challenging, but keeps you in the same zone as everyone else while isolating combat to yourself and your group. You would still be able to interact with everyone, recruit help, trade, etcetera, but you'd be able to make the content as challenging as you want it to be without affecting anyone else.

I think this would be much simpler and easier to implement. I'm no dev, but I would imagine taking NPCs off the server and putting their burden on the client could potentially improve overall performance. There's already code in place to hide or show NPCs conditionally; just look at any quest NPC that's in one spot at one quest phase and another at the next. For separate people on the same quest at different phases, they're talking to either one, but can only see and interact with the specific quest phase version that's enabled, specifically for them.

Anyways, that's my two cents. Just wanted to throw this in here before the overland thread migrates over entirely.

jumapel29 wrote: »

[*] Roguelike or Endless dungeons (Would be cool to see but I'm not sure if this could work, it pretty much failed in WoW but it works in FFXIV so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

We are getting that this year.

Difficult solo and story mode difficulties on all what are currently group dungeons