ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hi All, thanks to everyone who tuned into our Dev Stream today. Let us know what you thought of the format and general impressions of what we showed of today, as we plan to have more of these in the future. Thanks in advance!

Stream VOD

While I do think the Class Mastery is a step in the right direction to fix the subclassing issues, there is no way it will fix things with *that* combat lead. It is going to take a lot more then an bandaid fix to start fixing the huge balance issues.

Abadoning zone refreshes and only updating certain locations is a huge miss if true. The zone refreshes did not do enough but that does not mean they should just drop it, rather they should be looking to improve on their first attempt and actually bring vanilla zones in line with chapters. This is especially crucial if they're going to be doing new content in these old zones. I don't want to look at low resolution, dated assets.

My random thoughts in no particular order:
I really liked the stream and all the details about development. It's really cool to hear some of it as someone who is interested in game design philosophy.

Overall I'm very excited about a lot of what's coming up. I'm most curious about favors and rumors and have been doing some silly speculation with friends on what those all will entail. I'm very excited for more exploration and puzzle related things coming to eso as someone who very much enjoys that. I'm very curious about Sage's Vault as I have several things in other games that I wish would see their way into eso in some form and I'm wondering if this is one of them but I'll just have to wait and see.

I'm a little nervous about class mastery passives but I'm going to take a wait and see approach there. The previews did not give me enough to feel right commenting on them at this time but I hope they are implemented in a fun and creative way and not swinging the pendulum the other way in terms of balance.

I am mildly curious about various QOL threads/suggestions that have been cropping up and/or if systems that do not seem to have any updates planned will at least get a reassurance we get something new down the line. I know dungeons and new zones got reassured but those who like tales of tribute, companions, scribing, etc would like to see updates too. Also giving systems like antiquities more than just new leads.

Great stream, please do more of these.

code65536 wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Radiate77 wrote: »

Kevin you guys are making a bad turn with Class Mastery Passives, I get that the values are subject to change, but this cannot exist post-Refresh.

Could you be more specific? Happy to send your thoughts and feedback on this to Alec and Brian. But we need a bit more information so they have something actionable to potentially address.

@ZOS_Kevin Based on their earlier post in this thread, they are saying that the plans to make skill lines not role-oriented will significantly decrease the effectiveness of subclassing. Right now class mastery passives make sense, to bring pure class in line with subclassing.

But if the plan is for the class refresh to move away from role-oriented skill lines, then that should suffice for bringing subclassing in line with pure classes, and in such a case, then class mastery passives will represent an overcorrection of the current problem. (Note that his post does specifically say "post-Refresh".)

So, in short, class mastery is a nice fix for subclassing balance right now, but after all the class refreshes are done, it might result in the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction.

Well said.
I also doubt that, after the refresh, people would be fine with seeing these "pure" class bonuses removed again. So they are probably here to stay.

In a post-refresh game where skill lines are no longer role-oriented (and you therefore can no longer combine e.g. 3 DPS skill lines because there no longer is such a thing as a DPS skill line), it seems there will be too many strikes against subclassing:

• you have to spend more skill points on your subclassed skills
• you can't pick 2 subclassed skill lines from the same class
• most synergies between skill lines will probably be intra-class (there's already little reason to separate Ardent Flame from Draconic Power in the refreshed DK)
• you lose the new pure class bonuses

The limitations to subclassing seem to be based on wanting to rein in (unintended) synergies between cross-class skill lines, but when these synergies are gone and subclassed characters lose out on bonuses, why would anyone subclass? That's the concern.

Ideally, the class refresh would have lead to a situation where every skill line could stand on its own, and no particular combination of skill lines would need a crutch. But if pure classes are supposed to be better under any circumstance, subclassing needs to find a new design niche and have some of its restrictions eased up.

Small suggestion:

This stream was great to see (finally got a chance to catch up on it). Always love seeing little peeks behind the curtains so to speak on the dev process and ideas that are being thought about and/or worked on and the passion of the team behind the game.

Personally, I would love to see some of these streams leading up to the PTS release of each class refresh, giving some insights into where ZOS feels the class is heading/wants it to move towards, things the team is trying/looking into to try and solve the pre-refresh feedback, and to potentially collect some very early feedback before things hit the PTS and it becomes very time sensitive to make changes.

Kyzeragon wrote: »

Loved the stream content and format, especially Alec's explanation about refreshed abilities feeling slow. That kind of in-depth technical discussion is what I'd enjoy seeing in a dev stream; announcements already have plenty of their own spotlight. Even if I don't understand all of it, it's interesting to hear about the details of what goes into the game, and it's cool to listen to someone nerd out about what they're interested in.

Yes, this was the first time I've really heard Alec talk, I was impresssed by their articulation.

anadandy wrote: »

I was excited to hear Jason talk about more puzzle type content and content that "uses your brain". When I was replaying some of the old vanilla quests, I remembered how much more of that there used to be.

Yes, likewise. My mind immediately went to those amazing 'investigation missions' (I forget their proper name) in The Secret World. If ESO's puzzle quests could even just begin to approach the quality of those then they're going to be a great addition to the game.

SkaiFaith wrote: »

I've read many times "Pure classes should be more powerful than subclassed".
I hope Devs know very well that in order to Subclass they made us REgrind every line of every class at half the speed...
NO - Subclassed should NOT be less powerful than pure classes. It makes no sense.
Everything balanced? Sure. Pure Classes stronger? Would be a joke to every player who worked their arse off to level everything AGAIN.

I am sorry what? And what about players that played their "pure" classes for 10 years and were forced to subclass to keep up? They did not worked their "arse off" over the years to perfect their build?

The truth is that subclassing is unbalanced and the form it came out wasn't planned correctly. It provided massive power creep without any reason. Treat last year like a "season" of subclassing

Subclassing instead of providing niche possibilities of filling out builds for classes turned into something mandatory.

Game is a grind, life is unfair.

i think the stream was great, as is the improved communication. The additional class skill lines sound like a practical way to improve base game classes. Upcoming content sounds good. The only thing i wanted to mention is, I hope you guys are still working on improving rewards in certain parts of the game. Things have been moving in a great direction, like with mounts finally being added to stables. But a lot of parts of the game are extremely lacking in rewards.

Most of my time spent in eso these days is either pvping or helping new players. Its a strange combination but after 10 years and tens of thousands of hours theres not a lot to do, and cyrodiil only works during certain hours sadly. But the biggest issues i see from newer players are issues with bg/dungeon ques, bg mmr, cyrodiil performance, and rewards. The other issues i hope will be improved soon, but i rarely hear anything about base game rewards. People want to go through the older zones but there are so few rewards. Even the reward of XP from the quests is terrible.

And the same goes for certain achievements in the game that are harder/more time consuming. The fact that you dont get a mount for things like master angler or emperor is just crazy. It would also be nice to see more rare items, like the clockwork reliquary polymorph, put in certain places of the game for people to chase and use/sell. Rewards overall have improved, especially in DLCs, i just hope improving them further, in certain areas of the game, is still a possibility.
@ZOS_Kevin

Hi @ZOS_Kevin
I wanted to give my feedback on the new class mastery system that was teased in the Dev Updates stream, I’d really appreciate it if you can pass this perspective on to the combat design team. It’s awesome how the team has been so open to feedback recently.

Overall, I think this is an exciting new feature coming to the game, and I like the looks of it a lot. But I think it needs a few tweaks to not feel unfair to players who want to make use of the subclassing system as well.

Firstly, I understand that for some players, class identity is very important. But to me, I love the subclassing system because ESO only has 7 classes, and there’s no single class that I resonate with perfectly. As such, ESO’s subclassing system gives me more of an opportunity to make combinations that allow me to enjoy the play style I want. For example, my main is a Templar, as she’s a devout follower of the Tribunal. However, when I was trying out the U49 PTS I swapped Dawn’s Wrath for DK’s Draconic Power to represent her natural connection to the element of fire as a Dunmer, and I really enjoyed that combination. Another poster in this forum said they have a Nord Arcanist, but they take Warden’s Winter’s Embrace because they want their Nord to have frost powers too. I would love to play around with the Class Mastery passives when they come out, but it seems that players like us are going to be punished by the new system for taking a single skill line to complement our character. In my case, both Draconic Power and Dawn’s Wrath give the passive 10% weapon/spell damage, so game mechanics wise I’m basically just sacrificing my 2 Class Mastery passives to get a bit of fun and flavour from fiery spell effects. It feels a little unfair.

How I would like the new Class Mastery system to be adapted to fix this issue is to make this system available to all players regardless of subclassing, but make it more effective the more skill lines you keep from your base class. Rather than making it so you can choose 2 passives if you are pureclassed and none if you subclass, I would prefer if perhaps there was a tiered approach where you could choose 3 passives if you have 3 skill lines from your base class, 2 if you have 2, and 1 if you have 1. I feel that something like that would ensure pure classes get the most benefit from this system, but would still allow players dipping into subclassing to get something out of it too, without becoming overpowered.

It seems like a lot of these passives are going to be tailored to specific skill lines, such as how Templar’s Hold The Line mastery passive is linked to the Restoring Light skill line. As a result, players using subclassing would already have their class mastery options limited. For example, someone like me with 2 out of 3 Templar skill lines would still get access to select from some of the Templar Class Mastery Passives, but would miss out on any skills linked to Dawn’s Wrath, since I’ve swapped that skill line out with subclassing.

Additionally, some of the skills shown in the preview like Implosion and Recursive Flame were not tied to a certain subclass. Depending on how the balancing of this system is determined to work out, they could be choices that anyone of that base class could select regardless of which skill lines they retain, or skills that are considered “capstone” skills that you can only select if you are pureclassed.

Those are my thoughts, I hope that you’ll consider this so that it doesn’t feel like people are being punished for not playing as a pure class and can enjoy the versatility and flavour of subclassing while still being able to get some use out of this new system.

Hi, I watched the stream recording over the weekend and I'm really curious about the passive skills for classes. I'm currently playing a mix of sorceress and warden (pets, I like the minions playstyle, y'know...) and I'd say my DPS is decent (around 50k chill setup and 80-90k trials setup). I don't play hard mode or anything like that, just classic overland and normal dungeons and occasionally trials. In ESO, I'm looking for a break from real life, not difficult challenges...
However, I started playing Sroc (I have a total of 20 characters, 19 of which are sorcerers...) and therefore, if my DPS is at a solid level thanks to the planned class passives, I will definitely stick with "pure sorcerer," so I'm quite looking forward to seeing if this will have an impact on staying without subclassing.

As for the difficulty, I'm not interested in it at all based on the current planned bonuses (XP and gold). These bonuses don't motivate me enough to try a harder difficulty (as I wrote above, I'm looking for a chill in ESO...). Maybe in the future, if the bonuses are different, I'll try it, but for now, no thanks.

Class mastery is BIG. Looking forward to see the rest of the passives and test.

Won't solve everything at once but good to have in parallel with class reworks, giving the rest of us something while waiting on our turns.