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Greyhost and Vengeance
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JohnRingo✭✭✭
Sounds like what they have in mind for the new PvP mode they're working on, supposedly like a three way Cyro keep siege battleground with full build options.I also do not think we need 900 people in Cyrodil I would rather have more customization and a solid 360! Currently, vengeance is too limited for me. Feels like im in a loadout FPS game, not MMORPG PVP game.
There's about the same room for theorycrafting in Vengeance and GH. In Vengeance you only have a few real options. In GH you only have a few real options (but endless worthless garbage setups that give players the illusion of choice, wasting their time and resources on solved puzzles).
Also fully disagree. 10 year Gray Host Vet here and I purposely avoid meta gear. No set armor that I wear is popular or newer than about 7 years old. And definitely no proc or pull sets. Take care to not make assumptions about the average player's armor in Grey Host.
Edited by JohnRingo on December 12, 2025 4:40PM2 -
ToddIngram✭✭✭✭All the more reason to not do GH. Nothing like being stalled into a slideshow when the ball groups show up. No thanks.
ZOS is who's decided not to listen to the years of player suggestions to limit heal stacking to create the situation you're complaining about. They could just fix that one thing in Cyrodiil and see where things stand after that.
ZOS could balance and fix most of the issues with Grey Host if they just tried.
Yep, if ZOS just gave some credit to their customers for knowing what they want and responded accordingly ESO would be in a very different place right now.6 -
ToddIngram✭✭✭✭
FTFY.Greyhost has become the perfect example of ... no meaningful balancing.
Vengeance is their attempt at meaningful balancing. Even if you don't like how they're doing it, still way more of a meaningful attempt than say, jamming in yet another 5pc proc set as a bandaid "fix" for one of the many problems caused by some other 5pc proc set.
Vengeance isn't balancing. It's a template.7 -
ToddIngram✭✭✭✭robertlabrie wrote: »Xylena, the community seems to disagree. Greyhost remains popular. Several mandatory tests haven't forced everyone to like Vengeance. Telling us we're wrong isn't convincing anyone. I opened this thread advocating for both modes as a choice and I'm hoping ZOS sees the need to do so.
Last two nights prime time PC NA have seen all three factions pop locked in Grey Host, and all three factions one bar in vengeance. This is happening when vengeance is giving double XP and a 50 crystal transmute box daily, and more people are still playing Grey Host.5 -
JohnRingo✭✭✭ToddIngram wrote: »robertlabrie wrote: »Xylena, the community seems to disagree. Greyhost remains popular. Several mandatory tests haven't forced everyone to like Vengeance. Telling us we're wrong isn't convincing anyone. I opened this thread advocating for both modes as a choice and I'm hoping ZOS sees the need to do so.
Last two nights prime time PC NA have seen all three factions pop locked in Grey Host, and all three factions one bar in vengeance. This is happening when vengeance is giving double XP and a 50 crystal transmute box daily, and more people are still playing Grey Host.
On PS5 N.A. I have seen no bars in Vengeance since GH returned2 -
ToddIngram✭✭✭✭ToddIngram wrote: »robertlabrie wrote: »Xylena, the community seems to disagree. Greyhost remains popular. Several mandatory tests haven't forced everyone to like Vengeance. Telling us we're wrong isn't convincing anyone. I opened this thread advocating for both modes as a choice and I'm hoping ZOS sees the need to do so.
Last two nights prime time PC NA have seen all three factions pop locked in Grey Host, and all three factions one bar in vengeance. This is happening when vengeance is giving double XP and a 50 crystal transmute box daily, and more people are still playing Grey Host.
On PS5 N.A. I have seen no bars in Vengeance since GH returned
I think with game boxes the lowest population is displayed differently than on PC. Game boxes will show zero population when the pop is very low, but the lowest population ever displayed on PC is one bar.
I'm not 100% on this of course, but that's the way it looks by reading other posts and seeing screenshots from game boxes.3 -
Major_Toughness✭✭✭✭✭The same thing happens every day on PC EU at prime time.
Vengeance with basically no population, and GH with 50+ queues on all alliances.
MAKE AZUREBLIGHT GREAT AGAIN
PC EU > You1 -
reazea✭✭✭✭✭
✭Major_Toughness wrote: »The same thing happens every day on PC EU at prime time.
Vengeance with basically no population, and GH with 50+ queues on all alliances.
It will be interesting to see the spin on this population discrepancy in the future. There is no way to credibly claim vengeance is popular now, but will ZOS try to make the claim anyway?2 -
Gankform✭✭✭fix the *** Cap on Grey host, we have to w8 25-30min to play pvp...and the venge stupid test is dead..are u crazy guys or what?0 -
xylena✭✭✭✭✭
Maybe you're one of those gamer gods who can dominate with an off meta build, but an average player in jank armor is just a target. The specifics of their build don't matter. Their human decisions don't matter. They have neither skill nor math on their side. They just die.Take care to not make assumptions about the average player's armor in Grey Host.
Put another way: JohnRingo on an off meta build vs JohnRingo on a top meta build, well practiced on both. JohnRingo on the top meta build will win 100% of the time.PC/NA || Cyro/BGs || solo/smallscale || retired until Dagon brings a new dawn of PvP1 -
Arrow312✭✭✭✭✭Major_Toughness wrote: »The same thing happens every day on PC EU at prime time.
Vengeance with basically no population, and GH with 50+ queues on all alliances.
It will be interesting to see the spin on this population discrepancy in the future. There is no way to credibly claim vengeance is popular now, but will ZOS try to make the claim anyway?
Trust me they will find or make a way that it seems to be that Vengence is popular. Maybe they say the vengence bars werent full but tbf 1 bar vengence = 2 bars GH....or something like that.PC EU X'ing, Small Scale PvP
Arr0w3123 -
RaidingTraiding✭✭✭
FTFY.Greyhost has become the perfect example of ... no meaningful balancing.
Vengeance is their attempt at meaningful balancing. Even if you don't like how they're doing it, still way more of a meaningful attempt than say, jamming in yet another 5pc proc set as a bandaid "fix" for one of the many problems caused by some other 5pc proc set.
Pretty sure it was all about performance testing and not balancing.1 -
MorallyBipolar✭✭✭✭Major_Toughness wrote: »The same thing happens every day on PC EU at prime time.
Vengeance with basically no population, and GH with 50+ queues on all alliances.
It will be interesting to see the spin on this population discrepancy in the future. There is no way to credibly claim vengeance is popular now, but will ZOS try to make the claim anyway?
Yes, yes, it will be interesting to see if ZOS ever mentions this iteration of vengeance or not.
We can now say with 100% certainty that vengeance is a fail. People won't play it, even when it's the only option.3 -
MorallyBipolar✭✭✭✭Major_Toughness wrote: »The same thing happens every day on PC EU at prime time.
Vengeance with basically no population, and GH with 50+ queues on all alliances.
It will be interesting to see the spin on this population discrepancy in the future. There is no way to credibly claim vengeance is popular now, but will ZOS try to make the claim anyway?
Trust me they will find or make a way that it seems to be that Vengence is popular. Maybe they say the vengence bars werent full but tbf 1 bar vengence = 2 bars GH....or something like that.
And vengeance never went above two bars for any faction after the first two days of mandated vengeance. Vengeance never got higher than one bar after the second day of mandated vengeance. Meanwhile GH pop locked every day as soon as it came back.
And the argument that vengeance bars represent more people is pure speculation on the part of anyone who's not working on this project for ZOS. The pop caps in Cyrodiil is treated like classified top secret documents....or at least how top secret documents used to be treated in the past anyway.4 -
Nebbles✭✭✭Grey Host is simply a ball group playground paired with some stupid op builds. All due to a lack of interest and ability to actually make it a somewhat balanced environment. It is the worst balanced PvP in any game I've played. GH will eventually die, no new blood will come into it.
Vengeance still has some way to go. I can't see side by side campaigns work. They will need to make a decision if they want Cyro to be alive in the future. Right now it's a complete joke.3 -
YandereGirlfriend✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭The emerging line from the die-hard Vengeance crowd can seemingly be translated into, "We see that people still prefer Grey Host so now we definitely need to cancel Grey Host to force those players into Vengeance".
To which I would say: absolutely NOT.
Let the free market of players decide where they want to play. Let them vote with their feet. It is up to Vengeance itself to make itself attractive to players. Only Vengeance can save itself. Coercing players into gameplay that they do not enjoy by deleting the content that they do enjoy is both bad business as well as extraordinarily fraught karma.
Don't yuck someone else's yum. Respect your fellow players and let them enjoy what they enjoy.Edited by YandereGirlfriend on December 15, 2025 9:08PM1 -
Iriidius✭✭✭✭✭JustLovely wrote: »
The pop levels on Vengeance feel exactly the same as on GH while both are running. During NA prime time there will be 1 big zerg fight on the front and 1 smaller fight somewhere else, that's about it. The difference is that Vengeance has room to grow because it's accessible to new players, while GH and its gatekept meta will only continue declining.Turtle_Bot wrote: »Assuming the pop caps (numbers given by both ZOS and independent player addons) are correct, then there's roughly similar numbers of players in vengeance that there is in GH (at least on PC EU).
Everyone should have to climb the same hill to PvP. Advocating for the removal of the game mode many of us log in to play because you want a friend or spouse to get into PvP without putting in the same effort the rest of us have is a bad look.
...and yes, advocating for making vengeance permanent is the same as advocating for the removal of Grey Host. ZOS will never run both modes same time.
ZOS ran both Vengeance and Grey Host at the same time the moment you were writing that comment and both of them were populated.
Vengeance was populated enaugh to find big fights even in offhours. More than 1 or 2 bars weren’t needed other than for comparison to GreyHost bars because for some reason Vengeance must have 900 players to not be called dead campaign when ZOS keeps u50 and Ravenwatch despite having 0 players.
GreyHost was full despite outside Vengeance all other campaigns being empty so it lost few players and quality to Vengeance.
Test has shown that both campaigns can run at the same time without hurting GreyHost.
You want Vengeance deleted just to prevent supporters to play there and make up that Vengeance removes GreyHost to get reason and blame the other side of taking away your GreyHost instead.3 -
MorallyBipolar✭✭✭✭JustLovely wrote: »
The pop levels on Vengeance feel exactly the same as on GH while both are running. During NA prime time there will be 1 big zerg fight on the front and 1 smaller fight somewhere else, that's about it. The difference is that Vengeance has room to grow because it's accessible to new players, while GH and its gatekept meta will only continue declining.Turtle_Bot wrote: »Assuming the pop caps (numbers given by both ZOS and independent player addons) are correct, then there's roughly similar numbers of players in vengeance that there is in GH (at least on PC EU).
Everyone should have to climb the same hill to PvP. Advocating for the removal of the game mode many of us log in to play because you want a friend or spouse to get into PvP without putting in the same effort the rest of us have is a bad look.
...and yes, advocating for making vengeance permanent is the same as advocating for the removal of Grey Host. ZOS will never run both modes same time.
ZOS ran both Vengeance and Grey Host at the same time the moment you were writing that comment and both of them were populated.
Vengeance was populated enaugh to find big fights even in offhours. More than 1 or 2 bars weren’t needed other than for comparison to GreyHost bars because for some reason Vengeance must have 900 players to not be called dead campaign when ZOS keeps u50 and Ravenwatch despite having 0 players.
GreyHost was full despite outside Vengeance all other campaigns being empty so it lost few players and quality to Vengeance.
Test has shown that both campaigns can run at the same time without hurting GreyHost.
You want Vengeance deleted just to prevent supporters to play there and make up that Vengeance removes GreyHost to get reason and blame the other side of taking away your GreyHost instead.
The side by side "test" showed that if people have an option they won't play vengeance.3 -
Turtle_Bot✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭YandereGirlfriend wrote: »
Let the free market of players decide where they want to play. Let them vote with their feet. It is up to Vengeance itself to make itself attractive to players. Only Vengeance can save itself. Coercing players into gameplay that they do not enjoy by deleting the content that they do enjoy is both bad business as well as extraordinarily fraught karma.
Don't yuck someone else's yum. Respect your fellow players and let them enjoy what they enjoy.
Agree with this point here, but it goes both ways.
The die-hard anti-vengeance crowd are using all the same disinformation comments of "We see that some people prefer Vengeance, but because the (laughably bad for data gathering) population bars confirms our anti-vengeance bias, we definitely need to cancel Vengeance to force those players into Grey Host".
Like literally 2 comments above yours and the most recent comment that was responding to a take that was similar to your own (that being, let both campaigns run and let players decide where they want to play) did this.
Both sides need to take a massive chill pill, let both campaigns be their own thing and let players decide which one they want to play.
Like it or not (and this is more of a general statement, not directed at anyone in particular), PvP in ESO NEEDS some form of simplified PvP, alongside the end-game of PvP in ESO, to help new players get into this part of the game. Personally I would like to see some more work done on Vengeance to enable it to be a solid on-boarding campaign for Grey Host (something that the U50 and no-proc campaigns failed at doing).Teaching new players about important stat thresholds, mechanics, flow of combat, etc. in a simplified way that's easy to learn, so that players feel like they have some base knowledge/skills to join Grey Host and don't just feel gatekept out of Grey Host by the sheer learning cliff that it has.
ZOS has implemented sets in the past that could have helped with this learning curve (intentionally or not) with mythics such as Oakensoul and Torc of Ayleid king (oakensoul with the buffs, torc with baseline stats), but on release they either overperformed (oakensoul) and required massive nerfs or underperformed (Torc) and were completely forgotten about, so much so that they really didn't work well (oaken just became the defacto everyone runs this, so nothing changed, torc just didn't do enough to compete with how oppressively overpowered all the procs have become and how stat dense all the builds have gotten).
To me, ESO's PvP has the same issues as Yu-Gi-Oh and the fighting game genre. Amazing to play/has unmatched potential once you've invested the time to get good at it, but it simply takes too long to see even the most basic of results that keep that drive going, especially in the very time-poor reality that we currently live in.
Easy to learn, hard to master is the core essence of a good game/mode, but ESO PvP (like the others I mentioned above) suffers more from easy to learn, impossible to master and that just drives the majority of new players away (or just flat out prevents them from even trying in the first place).
PvE simply cannot function in this role because of a few factors:
- PvE is a repetitive task, once the mechanic is learned, there's no variation to practice it under differing scenarios.
- PvE uses completely different stats/utility to PvP.
- PvE has set roles that it's been split into, while PvP is a mix of every role all at once with minimal definition (so the build knowledge required for PvE does not fit for PvP making it a very different skill-set even at this level).
I'm sure there's more, but it's easy to see how PvE will always fail to help players prepare for PvP. They are just 2 completely different modes and the skill-sets required for 1 does not directly/easily translate to the other, especially at an end-game level.2 -
Iriidius✭✭✭✭✭MorallyBipolar wrote: »JustLovely wrote: »
The pop levels on Vengeance feel exactly the same as on GH while both are running. During NA prime time there will be 1 big zerg fight on the front and 1 smaller fight somewhere else, that's about it. The difference is that Vengeance has room to grow because it's accessible to new players, while GH and its gatekept meta will only continue declining.Turtle_Bot wrote: »Assuming the pop caps (numbers given by both ZOS and independent player addons) are correct, then there's roughly similar numbers of players in vengeance that there is in GH (at least on PC EU).
Everyone should have to climb the same hill to PvP. Advocating for the removal of the game mode many of us log in to play because you want a friend or spouse to get into PvP without putting in the same effort the rest of us have is a bad look.
...and yes, advocating for making vengeance permanent is the same as advocating for the removal of Grey Host. ZOS will never run both modes same time.
ZOS ran both Vengeance and Grey Host at the same time the moment you were writing that comment and both of them were populated.
Vengeance was populated enaugh to find big fights even in offhours. More than 1 or 2 bars weren’t needed other than for comparison to GreyHost bars because for some reason Vengeance must have 900 players to not be called dead campaign when ZOS keeps u50 and Ravenwatch despite having 0 players.
GreyHost was full despite outside Vengeance all other campaigns being empty so it lost few players and quality to Vengeance.
Test has shown that both campaigns can run at the same time without hurting GreyHost.
You want Vengeance deleted just to prevent supporters to play there and make up that Vengeance removes GreyHost to get reason and blame the other side of taking away your GreyHost instead.
The side by side "test" showed that if people have an option they won't play vengeance.
Maybe a few more people chose GreyHost than Vengeance but in Vengeance there were fights with 60 players on a faction that still didn’t reach 1 bar.
There was a fight for Sejanus last Saturday where Siege reached cap of 20 with half the players upstairs being unable to setup theirs and 10 players on each side of frontflag preventing anyone from entering threw the open maingate. After 20 minutes AD managed to enter threw sidewall and take keep but EP was able to hold Roof for another 10 minutes and almost took back outpost before they got overrun because they couldn’t replace dead players.
There were times when factions reached 2 bars in Vengeance while GreyHost was up.
In pop locket GreyHost you don’t see more than 60 players at a keep despite cap being said to be 120 but players estimated it to be 60 or 80. And the other 3 campaigns we got back instead of Vengeance are completely dead with Vengeance having multiple times their combined population.
We can have Vengeance active without hurting GreyHost.3 -
aetherix8✭✭✭✭Major_Toughness wrote: »The same thing happens every day on PC EU at prime time.
Vengeance with basically no population, and GH with 50+ queues on all alliances.
It will be interesting to see the spin on this population discrepancy in the future. There is no way to credibly claim vengeance is popular now, but will ZOS try to make the claim anyway?
Trust me they will find or make a way that it seems to be that Vengence is popular. Maybe they say the vengence bars werent full but tbf 1 bar vengence = 2 bars GH....or something like that.
What makes you think that ZOS needs to justify the popularity of Vengeance to us players?
The only people who actually need such a proof are the shareholders.PC EU - V4hn10 -
Lucasl402✭✭✭MorallyBipolar wrote: »JustLovely wrote: »
The pop levels on Vengeance feel exactly the same as on GH while both are running. During NA prime time there will be 1 big zerg fight on the front and 1 smaller fight somewhere else, that's about it. The difference is that Vengeance has room to grow because it's accessible to new players, while GH and its gatekept meta will only continue declining.Turtle_Bot wrote: »Assuming the pop caps (numbers given by both ZOS and independent player addons) are correct, then there's roughly similar numbers of players in vengeance that there is in GH (at least on PC EU).
Everyone should have to climb the same hill to PvP. Advocating for the removal of the game mode many of us log in to play because you want a friend or spouse to get into PvP without putting in the same effort the rest of us have is a bad look.
...and yes, advocating for making vengeance permanent is the same as advocating for the removal of Grey Host. ZOS will never run both modes same time.
ZOS ran both Vengeance and Grey Host at the same time the moment you were writing that comment and both of them were populated.
Vengeance was populated enaugh to find big fights even in offhours. More than 1 or 2 bars weren’t needed other than for comparison to GreyHost bars because for some reason Vengeance must have 900 players to not be called dead campaign when ZOS keeps u50 and Ravenwatch despite having 0 players.
GreyHost was full despite outside Vengeance all other campaigns being empty so it lost few players and quality to Vengeance.
Test has shown that both campaigns can run at the same time without hurting GreyHost.
You want Vengeance deleted just to prevent supporters to play there and make up that Vengeance removes GreyHost to get reason and blame the other side of taking away your GreyHost instead.
The side by side "test" showed that if people have an option they won't play vengeance.
Maybe a few more people chose GreyHost than Vengeance but in Vengeance there were fights with 60 players on a faction that still didn’t reach 1 bar.
There was a fight for Sejanus last Saturday where Siege reached cap of 20 with half the players upstairs being unable to setup theirs and 10 players on each side of frontflag preventing anyone from entering threw the open maingate. After 20 minutes AD managed to enter threw sidewall and take keep but EP was able to hold Roof for another 10 minutes and almost took back outpost before they got overrun because they couldn’t replace dead players.
There were times when factions reached 2 bars in Vengeance while GreyHost was up.
In pop locket GreyHost you don’t see more than 60 players at a keep despite cap being said to be 120 but players estimated it to be 60 or 80. And the other 3 campaigns we got back instead of Vengeance are completely dead with Vengeance having multiple times their combined population.
We can have Vengeance active without hurting GreyHost.
The side by side "test" showed that if people have an option they won't play vengeance.1 -
Lucasl402✭✭✭Major_Toughness wrote: »The same thing happens every day on PC EU at prime time.
Vengeance with basically no population, and GH with 50+ queues on all alliances.
It will be interesting to see the spin on this population discrepancy in the future. There is no way to credibly claim vengeance is popular now, but will ZOS try to make the claim anyway?
Trust me they will find or make a way that it seems to be that Vengence is popular. Maybe they say the vengence bars werent full but tbf 1 bar vengence = 2 bars GH....or something like that.
What makes you think that ZOS needs to justify the popularity of Vengeance to us players?
The only people who actually need such a proof are the shareholders.
What shareholders? ZOS is owned by Microsoft now.1