Returning Player Questions

wazbaumukerb14_ESO · April 29

Hey, everyone

So like many people, I played this game a lot back in the day, but I haven't kept up with the game in many years. I am mostly a WoW player who focused on endgame content, but for casual content I enjoyed ESO.

Anyway, I thought I would compile a list of quick questions and gripes with the old game to get an idea if any of this stuff has been addressed:

1) Repeating Content - Do you still have to do the main quest and guild quests on every character? I did them all multiple times years ago and have no interest in doing that again lol. WoW lets you skip almost everything after doing it once, which is great.

2) Difficulty - I tried to play Morrowind a few years ago, but I got bored when I was killing every mob in 2 sec with gear I crafted in 2015. Has this changed at all? I don't need overland content to be like old vet stuff, but it was so utterly trivial I thought that it was a waste of time. It didn't even matter what I had on my bar. At least in single player ES games you can mod the difficulty.

3) Combat - have there been any combat improvements? In particular, I enjoy more proc-based playstyles, not buff maintenance. For example, crystal shards was always awesome because you'd get a fun proc and it changed up what you were doing. Otherwise, the entire game felt like tedious buff maintenance (though honestly it didn't matter much because even story bosses were trivial, so maybe that is a moot concern)

4) Builds - one of the things that really turned me off was how everyone basically just used the same skills, and frankly almost every class felt identical if you were using weapon skills. Is this any better or more diverse? Does a 2h DK play a lot differently than a 2h X now?

5) Instancing - Did they ever let you do missions with instances again like the original guild stuff? I recall starting the Thieves Guild, seeing players robbing the same mansion, and immediately walked away from that. Seems like a huge oversight.

moo_2021 · April 29

3) You can use oak ring and one bar builds if DPS loss is acceptable

Sarannah · April 29

wazbaumukerb14_ESO wrote: »

Hey, everyone

So like many people, I played this game a lot back in the day, but I haven't kept up with the game in many years. I am mostly a WoW player who focused on endgame content, but for casual content I enjoyed ESO.

Anyway, I thought I would compile a list of quick questions and gripes with the old game to get an idea if any of this stuff has been addressed:

1) Repeating Content - Do you still have to do the main quest and guild quests on every character? I did them all multiple times years ago and have no interest in doing that again lol. WoW lets you skip almost everything after doing it once, which is great.

2) Difficulty - I tried to play Morrowind a few years ago, but I got bored when I was killing every mob in 2 sec with gear I crafted in 2015. Has this changed at all? I don't need overland content to be like old vet stuff, but it was so utterly trivial I thought that it was a waste of time. It didn't even matter what I had on my bar. At least in single player ES games you can mod the difficulty.

3) Combat - have there been any combat improvements? In particular, I enjoy more proc-based playstyles, not buff maintenance. For example, crystal shards was always awesome because you'd get a fun proc and it changed up what you were doing. Otherwise, the entire game felt like tedious buff maintenance (though honestly it didn't matter much because even story bosses were trivial, so maybe that is a moot concern)

4) Builds - one of the things that really turned me off was how everyone basically just used the same skills, and frankly almost every class felt identical if you were using weapon skills. Is this any better or more diverse? Does a 2h DK play a lot differently than a 2h X now?

5) Instancing - Did they ever let you do missions with instances again like the original guild stuff? I recall starting the Thieves Guild, seeing players robbing the same mansion, and immediately walked away from that. Seems like a huge oversight.

1: Yes, for the main quest. The other quests only repeat if you want to do them on multiple characters, but you do not have to. You can fully level most guild skilllines and skilllines without repeating the questlines.

2: Difficulty is the same as back then. This allows most players to more easily focus on the story. There is a stickied thread on top of the general discussion forum, where you can discuss overland difficulty.

3: You can play however you want, you may want to look into mythics for buffs. Oakensoul and Velothi's-ur mage's amulet for example.

4: No, weapon skilllines are the same for everyone. With the upcoming subclass feature, ZOS is going to shake up buildvariety for classes heavily. May want to look into that.

5: The whole ESO world is a playground, so finding other players doing the same as you is possible. This is extremely noticable in new content, where dozens of players can be doing the same quests/thing at the same time as you do. For older content this does not happen often anymore though.

Welcome back, enjoy ESO!

allochthons · April 29

1) Repeating Content - Do you still have to do the main quest and guild quests on every character?
No. They offer skill points, but you can level the guilds without ever doing a guild quest, and there's no reason to do the main quest on any character if you don't want to.

2) Difficulty
This is unchanged. However, it's being discussed by the developers, even mentioned in the big April Stream. Whether it will actually happen is another question.

3) Combat
I'll leave this question to others, but if you haven't heard, there's a huge change to combat coming: sub-classing (or multi-classing, in any other game's terms.) Many think this will make all builds and combat even more similar than they are now. Some think it'll lead to more diversity. I'm waiting to see.

4) Builds
Same answer as 3.

5) Instancing
This is hit and miss. But no, most things are not instanced unless they're a dungeon or very specific parts of quests. Like heists and black sacrements are instanced, but the new zone quests are not.