Feedback from a Returning Player – Gold Road, Season Pass, Subclassing, and Cyrodiil (Vengence)

OccultOverload · July 1

Hi ZOS and fellow adventurers,

After stepping away from The Elder Scrolls Online for a little over four years, I recently returned—and I have to say, it’s been an exciting, sometimes overwhelming experience. I wanted to take a moment to share some feedback as someone who’s played since launch, stepped away, and now returned to a very different Tamriel.

General Feedback

Gold Road was amazing. The new zone was beautifully designed, full of great storytelling, and felt like a natural and immersive extension of the world. The presentation and quest quality were impressive, and the exploration factor hit that nostalgic ESO sweet spot.
The new Season Pass system, while offering structure and rewards, feels a bit cash grabby. I understand the desire to move toward a live service model with regular content, but I do worry about the potential loss of the more meaningful, meaty expansions we used to get. ESO’s strength has always been its depth—please don’t trade that in for quarterly engagement loops.
Subclassing is a big addition—but honestly, it throws off one of the core pillars of the game. While it’s a neat idea, having two new skill lines tied to this system feels excessive. One skill line would preserve more balance and class identity. Right now, it feels like it's inching toward "everyone can do everything," which dilutes the uniqueness of each class.

Cyrodiil Feedback

Performance is noticeably improved compared to years past—thank you for the work here. Combat feels smoother, and lag has decreased significantly in normal conditions.
However, when more than 50 players are in the same area, the game lag and skill delay become unbearably bad. It leaves the experience feeling clunky, unresponsive, and frankly, not fun. These are exactly the moments where the game should shine—large-scale battles are the heart of Cyrodiil, but right now they feel like a technical struggle rather than an epic war.
The population is noticeably lower. Cyrodiil doesn't feel as alive or active as it once did, which is a shame, because it's one of the most unique PvP experiences in any MMO.
The stuck-in-combat bug still being around in 2025 is kind of shocking. This has been a frustration for years, and it’s incredibly disruptive to gameplay. Please prioritize a fix—it continues to suck the fun out of what should be dynamic engagements.
Sejanus load screen issues are still a thing. They break immersion, ruin pacing, and make key fights and defenses feel sloppy and disconnected. This has been around for too long.
Private or exploit-heavy addons are creating unfair advantages and causing lag. Some of these addons toe the line of cheating (and some might cross it). They should be more tightly regulated to protect fairness and server stability.
Tanks vs. glass cannon balance is way off. Currently, tanks can sit on siege and laugh as 30+ players fail to kill them. There’s no risk, no counterplay. Meanwhile, glass cannon builds carry high risk with very little reward. This imbalance undermines diversity and makes certain playstyles nearly irrelevant.
Siege pacing is too fast. Walls and doors go down too quickly, leading to zerg rushes rather than strategic fights. Increasing structure HP would allow for more thoughtful, sustained engagements and counterattacks, rather than whoever brings the most siege first wins.
Where are the Daedric Artifacts? It’s been years since we got the hammer—and that’s it. What happened to the promise of more artifacts? Something like Azura’s Star, offering healing buffs or even an area resurrection, would add interesting variety and spice to the battlefield. These were such a cool concept and deserve more attention.

Vengeance Campaign Feedback

I appreciate the attempt to isolate performance issues in Cyrodiil and give players a “clean” environment, but Vengeance is not a reflection of the real game. The caps and settings make it feel detached from normal Cyrodiil and don’t test anything meaningful regarding large-scale PvP in its true form.
Personally, I find Vengeance boring, slow, and too numbers-based. Everyone is running ranged setups. Fights boil down to giant zergs where individual skill and small-scale tactics are mostly irrelevant. It lacks the dynamism that made Cyrodiil engaging.
The AOE limit is particularly frustrating. Most AoE skills become basically useless, which kills class identity and further pushes everyone into the same few meta builds.
If this design makes its way to live permanently, please keep it in its own campaign. Let those who enjoy it have a place to play it without forcing it on the wider PvP community. The diversity of Cyrodiil’s campaigns is a strength—let’s not homogenize it.

Closing Thoughts

Despite my critiques, I’m genuinely happy to be back in ESO. There’s so much love and effort clearly still going into the game. Gold Road was a triumph. But there are some big questions around the game’s future direction—especially with monetization models and PvP integrity. I hope these concerns are taken in the spirit of a long-time player who wants ESO to thrive.

Thanks for reading—and thanks to the developers for continuing to bring Tamriel to life.

valenwood_vegan · July 1

Welcome back to ESO!

It's so refreshing to see useful and constructive feedback.

Agree with a lot of your points. As someone who has pvp'd but not extensively, I personally enjoy Vengeance and would engage with pvp more overall if it was available regularly. Sometimes I just want to jump in and play so cyro for an hour without having to catch up on the FOTM builds and all the combat changes and deal with the ball groups and bombers and pulls and procs. So I'm probably enjoying it more than you lol, but I totally get the point that it's probably a bit too stripped down it its current form, and wouldn't be engaging for long-term regular pvp'ers.

I hope they don't force it on everyone too, but I think having it as an option could help start to build-back-up the population that has some interest in pvp, and provide an on-ramp for players to try pvp out and see if they want to put in more effort and move up to more competitive pvp. As it stands right now, a *lot* of us try it once, maybe during mayhem, and have such a miserable experience that we never engage with it again and have no stake in trying to get ZoS to put more effort into that part of the game.

Desiato · July 1

This was me sometime in 2023 or something.

A lot of former 'pvp mains' seem have found the trial scene to be fun in recent years.

The issues that plague pvp go so much deeper than performance and ae caps. PVP balance has been an afterthought for many years.

After some time in the trial community, I realized how widespread the practice of pve players using cyrodiil to farm transmutes on their alts is. This is why so many players just melt. They get their ap mostly from capturing undefended objectives and following the herd. They don't have pvp builds and they're not really trying. IMO, most players in Cyrodiil at any given time fall into this category. I've even witnessed multiple open conversations about coordinated boosting for this purpose.

So this really dumb culture exists where many decent cyrodilic regulars essentially avoid fighting each other -- because so often that results in stalemates and because they're friends with the same goal -- and instead fall for the power fantasy of "1vxing" pve players who don't really care. It's SO broken.

Vengeance is a process. I'm not sure if it will be successful, but at least they're finally trying. However, they have a classic chicken/egg problem. ESO is mainly an ultra-casual PVE game which shapes its audience. It doesn't have many players who are true pvp enthusiasts. Even many players who call themselves pvp mains are just pve players with meta pvp builds who take pleasure in pug stomping and wouldn't play if there was actually good competition.

So how can they possibly iterate a good pvp experience without a functional audience of pvp players? They need to open up this testing to non-ESO pvp players at some point. True fans of pvp games who want good competition and find pug stomping to be below them. The nature of Vengeance makes this possible.

I play a much more popular open world pvp game with a healthy pvp audience quite a lot when I don't play eso and the good pvp players want to go at each other constantly. The ridiculous collusion we see in eso doesn't exist.

ESO *had* this in 2014 because so many DAOC fans played only for open world pvp, but this group mostly abandoned the game by the late 2010s and are kinda long in the tooth now.

valenwood_vegan · July 1

Desiato wrote: »

So how can they possibly iterate a good pvp experience without a functional audience of pvp players? They need to open up this testing to non-ESO pvp players at some point. True fans of pvp games who want good competition and find pug stomping to be below them. The nature of Vengeance makes this possible.

That's an interesting point yeah, and made me think of... was it two years ago when ESO was available for free on Epic? That brought an influx of players, and at least from what I saw in my social guild, many of them were more pvp-oriented than the average new ESO player.

We got tons of requests to duel, and were absolutely inundated with questions about where to go and what to do to PVP... and then they started finding out that they need to level up, and look up builds, farm gear and mythics and monster sets, stock up on transmutes, unlock skills, you know, all the things. The excitement quickly turned to frustration. Not everyone is willing to put that level of effort into something *before* they know if they might even enjoy it.

Within two weeks, dozens of these players disappeared from our guild. Definitely felt like a missed opportunity to draw new folks from outside ESO into pvp, and I wonder if it may have had a different outcome if the epic promotion had been combined with something like vengeance, such that these players could jump right into Cyro and see what pvp is like in ESO (and provide feedback).

OccultOverload · July 2

valenwood_vegan wrote: »

Welcome back to ESO!

It's so refreshing to see useful and constructive feedback....

Thank you! I was hoping to compose something that the developers would consider.