The last we heard, the harder overland difficulty is probably going to be an optional toggle.

Subclassing is also going to be optional. Not going to argue this here, though.

But I don't think the increase to damage or survival from Subclassing will necessarily cancel out the increase to difficulty of overland. If it does, then just toggle the overland difficulty or start/stop Subclassing.

SilverBride wrote: »

One of the things being developed this year is an increase to general overland difficulty because some players find it too easy. Another is subclassing, that from what I am reading will increase player damage significantly.

Won't these just cancel each other out? At least as far as overland is concerned?

It’s too early to tell. Subclassing hasn’t even been balanced and we don’t even know what “veteran overland” will look like. As in how difficult it will be.

I suspect part of the reason why ZOS is taking their time with overland difficulty is to see how subclassing performs and work around that.

Erickson9610 wrote: »

What I'm curious about is how easily the harder overland can be toggled, if ZOS goes that route. I imagine it will be activated by some shrine or NPC you talk to somewhere in the world, rather than being an option in the settings menu or being an item you consume.

I assume it will be separate instances, every zone has a normal and a hardcore version and you load into the one you selected. When you switch the flag you will reload the zone, similar to how the open-world PVP instances in SWTOR work.


My thoughts to Subclassing:

Personally, I'm looking forward to the options it brings for adding utility and survivability to solo builds (as in soloing group dungeons) for classes/characters that I'd like to play but fall short in this regard. And yes, this is an mmo, but as I see it, being able to solo it, makes me far more willing and capable of carrying a clueless group finder pug.

I was done with progress raiding, and playing the one-trick-pony build the group needs, before I even started playing ESO, but I don't see where "play this NB/Necro/Arc multiclass build" is any different than "play that Arcanist build", other than now you have 3 characters that will be accepted in the raid. When chosing to participate in that game mode, one has to accept, that the meaning of "roleplaying" in MMORPG changes from "play-pretend to be someone else" to "playing your role in the team".

Will subclassing lead to increased raid difficulty? Possibly, but ESO's playerbase is already is divided by a ridiculously huge dps gap that is only based on physical skills. Better to increase difficulty using mechanics instead of numbers.

Will it lead to class nerfs? Possibly as well, but the way subclasses are being implemented as new account wide skill lines you have to level again from scratch, implies they already are prepared for nerfing only the subclassing skills if need be.

Will most build combinations be very bad and look viable on paper only? 100%. Build theory is needed much more than "look how well this build can beat a target dummy that doesn't fight back, while having 100% uptime of all buffs and debuffs".

Maybe the optional harder overland thing will be a togglable debuff that removes 1/4 of your armour/resistances/penetration/resources/etc?

SilverBride wrote: »

One of the things being developed this year is an increase to general overland difficulty because some players find it too easy. Another is subclassing, that from what I am reading will increase player damage significantly.

Won't these just cancel each other out? At least as far as overland is concerned?

As far as overland content, no one anywhere is saying that subclassing is going to make guar easier to kill lol. They're talking about optimized DPS, which doesn't really happen in overland (except for maybe soloing world bosses).

Based on PTS as of this week, subclassing will increase the high end of DPS for players who are at least somewhat optimized. People who parse and do veteran hardmode content. Whether it helps lower-performing players is up to their skill line choices.

Based on PTS, the lower-end player might lower their damage (and ability to stay alive) or raise it, depending on if they make good or bad choices with subclassing. For example, someone might swap out their class defensive skills to get access to a fun warden bear, increasing their damage but unintentionally making themselves squishy.

Personally, I think everyone having access to passive survivability skills like Surge, Living Trellis, Living Dark, etc., will be good for players who are challenged by overland bosses. For players who are challenged by guar and minotaurs, they can even add more pets and get more heavy attack buffs and heals.

Tariq9898 wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

One of the things being developed this year is an increase to general overland difficulty because some players find it too easy. Another is subclassing, that from what I am reading will increase player damage significantly.

Won't these just cancel each other out? At least as far as overland is concerned?

It’s too early to tell. Subclassing hasn’t even been balanced and we don’t even know what “veteran overland” will look like. As in how difficult it will be.

I suspect part of the reason why ZOS is taking their time with overland difficulty is to see how subclassing performs and work around that.

Therein lies the issue with ZOS because it’s always “too early to tell” because they don’t communicate to their customers like a normal dev team does. By the time we can tell the feature’s gone live with massive issues that could have been prevented via good dev team communication and listening to the PTS players.

They were still in early prototyping so this will takes still quite a long time to be released.

Best way they could do this is probably with World Tiers like Diablo and Division 2 does. The tier you are in defines the difficulty and the rewards.

I also wonder if those difficulties are separate instances. I would be very frustrating if a player if fighting 2 bats for a minute and I run by and kill the 30 bats with one button press. In most of the games that have several difficulties those are usually separate layers where you can only group if people are in the same tier. This seems to go against ESO their design principles, so it will be curious to see how they handle this.

Ragnarok0130 wrote: »

Erickson9610 wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

I realize that both are optional (I won't get into my thoughts on that here), but if a player subclasses and also opts in to increased overland difficulty, how will that work? I don't think subclassing can just be easily turned on and off.

Subclassing is supported by the Armory system, so you can equip a build that is or isn't using Subclassed skill lines. Alternatively, you can visit a skill respec shrine (or use a scroll) to change which skill lines you're using. So that will be fairly easy to toggle, especially if you have an Armory assistant.

What I'm curious about is how easily the harder overland can be toggled, if ZOS goes that route. I imagine it will be activated by some shrine or NPC you talk to somewhere in the world, rather than being an option in the settings menu or being an item you consume.

@Erickson9610 that’s good to know. If you replace a skill line do we get the skill points back from the skill line to spend on the new one?

Yes, swapping out a skill line immediately refunds you your skill points when you confirm the swap. It's like when you remove the Werewolf or Vampire skill line from yourself after having spent skill points on those abilities.

Swapping skill lines works exactly the same as changing ability morphs at the respec shrine. You can preview your changes, but nothing actually happens until you pay the fee in Gold. When you confirm those changes, you're refunded any skill points you spent on that skill line you've swapped out (if it's a subclass skill line, you get double the skill points per skill refunded) and you can use those skill points to apply into the skill line that you've swapped in.

Ragnarok0130 wrote: »

Erickson9610 wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

I realize that both are optional (I won't get into my thoughts on that here), but if a player subclasses and also opts in to increased overland difficulty, how will that work? I don't think subclassing can just be easily turned on and off.

Subclassing is supported by the Armory system, so you can equip a build that is or isn't using Subclassed skill lines. Alternatively, you can visit a skill respec shrine (or use a scroll) to change which skill lines you're using. So that will be fairly easy to toggle, especially if you have an Armory assistant.

What I'm curious about is how easily the harder overland can be toggled, if ZOS goes that route. I imagine it will be activated by some shrine or NPC you talk to somewhere in the world, rather than being an option in the settings menu or being an item you consume.

@Erickson9610 that’s good to know. If you replace a skill line do we get the skill points back from the skill line to spend on the new one?

As of the current PTS on a template character the skill points from a removed line are returned when you shift to a new line.

SilverBride wrote: »

One of the things being developed this year is an increase to general overland difficulty because some players find it too easy. Another is subclassing, that from what I am reading will increase player damage significantly.

Won't these just cancel each other out? At least as far as overland is concerned?

Part of the reason that subclassing can increase player damage is because players can slot multiple damage slanted class skill lines at the cost of reduced tanking/healing capabilities.

For example, one of my test builds for the new heavy attack mythic on the PTS can one shot overland npcs without criting. I took it into the new Public Dungeon for a bit and I actually died to trash because the build is quite lacking in defenses and I got a little sloppy with using Reaper's Mark to heal. My year+ old Oakensoul build had no issues at all with the trash in the Public Dungeon. Scribing a heal/shield could probably cover much of the weakness

I don't think we have a very clear idea of how exactly ZOS is going to be increasing the difficulty in Overland so it's hard to say how much damage creep is going to influence difficulty.

SilverBride wrote: »

And I hope that the increased damage from subclassing doesn't nullify the effects of the optional overland difficulty increase, so that this issue can finally be resolved.

It can increase damage by lowering healing and tanking capabilities. Or, it could increase tanking by lowering damage and healing capabilities. It could also increase healing by lowering damage and tanking capabilities.

Subclassing isn't just about stacking damage skill lines; the tradeoff is always that you lose other valuable skills you'd want to keep yourself alive. Not many people wander into a solo arena like veteran Vateshran Hollows in a full glass cannon setup and last long — the aim of harder overland should be to make players need to use their healing and tanking skills alongside their damage skills, or group with people who use those skills.

My concern is about how these two new systems will affect each other.

The subclassing will cause massive nerfs which result in harder overland whether you like it or not and especially if you don’t use subclassing. My prediction.

Harder overland being worked on currently is a separate thing entirely.

Daoin wrote: »

as clueless as soloing a group dungeons when there are solo arenas at hand ?

There are two solo arenas. Three if you count IA. That's kinda boring. Meanwhile there are 2-4 new dungeons per year, and for me it's fun to try and solo them even when it's faster with better rewards in a group.

The carry comment was aimed at the constant fake <role> topics here.

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I feel like the whole overland difficulty issue is a player-created issue.

A lot of players— I’m tempted to say “the average player,” but I’m not sure if that would be accurate— look for the most powerful weapons and strongest armor, not to mention the most useful spells, to make it as easy as possible to withstand attacks and kill enemies as quickly as possible.

Not everyone plays that way. When I watch streamers play a single-player CRPG, a lot of them will deliberately create a specific type of character and limit themselves to specific types of armor and weapons and spells, even if those aren’t the ones which will make the game much easier to complete.

But a lot of players do play that way.

Overland content is going to be trivial if the players do everything in their power to make it trivial. And it is their right to do so, if that’s what they want to do.

I don’t know how the increase to overland difficulty is going to work, but I think I can safely predict that players who opt into it are going to do everything in their power to make it trivial to burn through. Subclassing will inevitably be part of that, but they would still approach the game the same way even if subclassing were cancelled, because finding every possible way to make content as trivial as possible— be it in overland, in vet trials, or in PvP— is how they like to play the game.

I think you overthink it. My wife and i stopped playing because the game get so boring from level 1, naked, *** weapons and armor, you just 2 shot everything.

There are alot of quests chains that have really awesome story buildup, then you get get to fight the bad guy that killed all the guards, burned every building down and fear only the devil himself. You manage to kill him with 2 lightning bolts.

Blood_again wrote: »

Subclassing is described in PTS patch notes and available for testing on PTS. It is a real feature with known details and known release dates.
The overland difficulty tweak is a "we are working on it" thing from the devs. AFAIK there are no real details or terms from the developers, while there is an overwhelming amount of wishes and speculations from players about it.

Two known things may be matched and compared. Known vs slightly imaginable one... it is nonsense.

What are you trying to compare? Patch notes vs dreams? Would the Canterville Ghost beat David Benavidez for the lightweight champion title?

I wasn't comparing anything. I was asking how 2 different features that appear that they may conflict with each other would work together.