if that really is possible then that just makes the game accessible which would be a good thing

Simple solution: if you have no armor beneath your costume, you should have low health and die quickly if not paying attention to the game. Health should recover pretty quickly too. CoD has very simple mechanics but it’s engaging because much of the challenge is not to die. Even a blind person doesn’t die in ESO overland. Kill fast, die fast.

Bastian did a whole delve boss fight for me when I was afk.

All true, and well put. However it doesn't address the concern raised by OP. That being little to no difficulty in the majority of encounters faced by the player. Your examples are all select activities, that you opt in for to experience a challenge. But even many of these are not "challenging" to a moderately active player depending on the mechanics present.

I don't think the point is making everything much harder, its about making it so you have to pay attention and put some thought into more encounters instead of swatting them away like flies haha.
You could have an enemy that doesn't pose much of a threat unless you make x mistake, or an enemy that is quite formidable but if you do x and y you are good, enemies with multiple action paths so you can't always predict what it will do with certainty. It just makes the enemies we come across a bit more engaging and therefore fun to defeat. We have the block, dodge and sneak features, these should be more in demand for overland content and not just a gimmick to make the game more Elder Scrolls-esque. They only really play a part in some of the activities you listed. These should be things you have to actively use to keep your character alive instead of just tanking the hits even if you are in light armour.

Kinda diminishes my level of attention when you chose to compare MMORPG combat, with Call of Duty.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/590162/overland-content-feedback-thread

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I took a new low-level character with crappy gear to Blackwood back during the first Blackwood event, and found it rather hard to stay alive when fighting some of the overland enemies. I also found it rather hard to stay alive in overland back when I was first playing through Vvardenfell and the base-game zones. /shrug

Sure, things are different now that my main characters are leveled up and have decent gear. But my low-level alts still have a somewhat tough time completing certain overland content.

This, also has helped out new players in Craglorn group delves and other places.
And newer dlc is harder, yes I like this, but is not suited to new players.

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I took a new low-level character with crappy gear to Blackwood back during the first Blackwood event, and found it rather hard to stay alive when fighting some of the overland enemies. I also found it rather hard to stay alive in overland back when I was first playing through Vvardenfell and the base-game zones. /shrug

Sure, things are different now that my main characters are leveled up and have decent gear. But my low-level alts still have a somewhat tough time completing certain overland content.

Same here. I think those forum members saying that brand-new characters can easily defeat all overland enemies are just assuming that *their* experience of the game is everyone's.

vsrs_au wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I took a new low-level character with crappy gear to Blackwood back during the first Blackwood event, and found it rather hard to stay alive when fighting some of the overland enemies. I also found it rather hard to stay alive in overland back when I was first playing through Vvardenfell and the base-game zones. /shrug

Sure, things are different now that my main characters are leveled up and have decent gear. But my low-level alts still have a somewhat tough time completing certain overland content.

Same here. I think those forum members saying that brand-new characters can easily defeat all overland enemies are just assuming that *their* experience of the game is everyone's.

We also have to remember that those "brand-new characters" very likely have a couple of thousand CPs and their controlling players' veteran knowledge and mastery of the game.

Tandor wrote: »

vsrs_au wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I took a new low-level character with crappy gear to Blackwood back during the first Blackwood event, and found it rather hard to stay alive when fighting some of the overland enemies. I also found it rather hard to stay alive in overland back when I was first playing through Vvardenfell and the base-game zones. /shrug

Sure, things are different now that my main characters are leveled up and have decent gear. But my low-level alts still have a somewhat tough time completing certain overland content.

Same here. I think those forum members saying that brand-new characters can easily defeat all overland enemies are just assuming that *their* experience of the game is everyone's.

We also have to remember that those "brand-new characters" very likely have a couple of thousand CPs and their controlling players' veteran knowledge and mastery of the game.

Sorry, but that's a completely wrong assumption. A lot of the new characters are controlled by new players.

erdYrrson wrote: »

OP comes up monthly from that forum account in slight variations, every time closed by mod in favor of the relevant topic.

Nice, I thought something seemed rather familiar here but didn't have the time to investigate.

vsrs_au wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I took a new low-level character with crappy gear to Blackwood back during the first Blackwood event, and found it rather hard to stay alive when fighting some of the overland enemies. I also found it rather hard to stay alive in overland back when I was first playing through Vvardenfell and the base-game zones. /shrug

Sure, things are different now that my main characters are leveled up and have decent gear. But my low-level alts still have a somewhat tough time completing certain overland content.

Same here. I think those forum members saying that brand-new characters can easily defeat all overland enemies are just assuming that *their* experience of the game is everyone's.

I think age (generation) and prior experience with FPS games can help. At Thanksgiving I let my young grandnephew take over on my main character in the Infinite Archive while I went to grab another glass of iced tea. When I came back he was fighting a cycle boss and beating it to a pulp. I said, "Wow, you're better against that boss than I am!" (Which wasn't entirely true, but I wanted to be encouraging after the ribbing I'd given him the day before when he took over during a fight with the Songbird WB and kept dying while the other player who was already there kept looking real hard at my character as though trying to figure out how someone at my CP level could be so lousy at staying alive.) To which he replied, with a little hint of dismissiveness in his voice, "You just have to block and dodge at the right times." I laughed at that, and said "So you're telling me I have a 'learn to play' issue?" I might add, this was on my MacBook Air, and he was controlling the game primarily with the keyboard and the touchpad, barely even touching the mouse.

Braffin wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I took a new low-level character with crappy gear to Blackwood back during the first Blackwood event, and found it rather hard to stay alive when fighting some of the overland enemies. I also found it rather hard to stay alive in overland back when I was first playing through Vvardenfell and the base-game zones. /shrug

Sure, things are different now that my main characters are leveled up and have decent gear. But my low-level alts still have a somewhat tough time completing certain overland content.

May I ask which enemies did you find difficult specifically and what were your issues with them?

In Blackwood, the enemies down in the southern swamps were beating up my lowbie pretty severely. I could tackle them one at a time if I could manage to avoid being surrounded, but it was hard to aggro one without alerting the others and getting overrun.

Way back in Vvardenfell, I especially found trolls and dreughs to be challenging. I could usually stay alive while fighting trolls, but hadn't picked up on the fact that they can be interrupted when they start to regenerate their health, so I had a really hard time killing them. And dreughs were fun to kill-- for a while I was farming them to help level up my character-- but they were far from being pushovers for me.

I might add that I prefer up-close melee fighting with swords and axes rather than ranged fighting with bows or staves, and I also prefer being able to stand my ground while I fight rather than constantly rolling around and dodging, so I tend to go for a more tanky build and worry less about DPS. I don't mind longer fights as long as I can stay alive long enough to kill the enemy, and I really enjoy fights such as the Songbird WB and Dubdil Alar WB in Vvardenfell, or the Terror Bird WB in Northern Elsweyr, where the adds swarm around me and I can just whale away at everything while standing still without dying.

But that fighting style obviously doesn't work against everything. Up until recently I couldn't solo the Spider WB in Stormhaven because I would always die rather quickly once she starts spraying acid, or poison, or whatever it is. But playing on my newest alt-- an Arcanist Healer wearing Light Armor and fighting with a Restoration Staff-- actually helped me solo that WB, because I had to learn to avoid the cone of poison spray that the spider boss in Crow's Wood PD uses. During the New Life Festival I decided to try soloing the Spider WB again with my tanky mains, but this time I was careful to step aside when that red cone appears, which allowed me to stay alive and keep whittling down the boss until she eventually died. Like I said, L2P issues.

The Queen's Consort WB starts using a similar sort of attack once he gets down to a certain health level, but I learned to avoid that long ago. I don't know why it took me so long to work that out with the spider WB, other than the fact that I never could stay alive more than 15 seconds so I just stopped trying to solo her. With the Queen's Consort, the cone of death attack doesn't come into play until much later in the fight, so my ability to stay alive for so long before that was giving me incentive to keep trying until I could work out what to do. If I keep dying mere seconds into a fight, it kind of takes away my enthusiasm to keep trying. /shrug

To add to what I said about the Spider WB in Stormhaven, the boss and adds lay down a lot of circular DOT AOEs during the fight, which I can usually just stand in and ignore, healing myself as needed. When the red cone appears and the boss rears up to start spraying, it can be easy to miss seeing that red cone when it appears due to all of the overlapping red circles. That was probably part of why it took me so long (literally years) to notice the red cone and learn to step out of it before the boss starts to spray. I'm sure I would have noticed a lot sooner if I hadn't just hung up the towel so early on and avoided her for the longest time, but my strong stubborn streak definitely didn't help, either.

I find it interesting that the "telegraphing" signals that the mobs and bosses in the Infinite Archive display before they launch an attack seem to have much longer durations before the attack begins, and the radiating lines for an impending attack that should be blocked seem to be much more pronounced (longer and brighter). Has anyone else noticed that? I'm thinking the devs went out of their way to try to help players recognize when there are incoming mechanics so they can prepare for them.

One other thing I had meant to say is that a lot of players are fixated on acquiring the most powerful skills and BIS-META gear as quickly as possible. I realize that "fixated" could have negative implications, but I don't intend it to be an insult or criticism, merely an observation and I'm not sure of a better way to say it-- "dead set on"? "greatly concerned with"?

Anyway, in my experience it's pretty common to see new players in zone chat asking about which sets they should get, which skill morphs they should pick, etc., as well as commiserating about how painful it is to grind for some particular lead to some particular fragment for some particular mythic. I also see players who've just switched servers or platforms talking about the grind for some specific leads or gear which they're trying to get ASAP. A lot of new players come into the game already full of knowledge and wisdom that they got from someone else's web site and build advice, or someone's "how to" walkthrough for where and how to get the "best" items.