I spent about a year not playing ESO. I have run many cores, ranging from casual achievement groups to serious competitive groups targeting top scores. I’ve recently started getting back into raids, and done a few runs of Sanity’s Edge recently.

I am appalled by what I played. When we ran this content awhile back, there were so many opportunities for skill expression and little things you could do to hit damage checks that would let you save a lot of time. In my groups I tried to grow everybody’s skillset both for the trial and all around, and the results reflected our efforts and improvements. We looked deep into what to cast and even how to dodge roll properly; anything we could control we did.

https://youtu.be/DLALY8sXt7k?is=1DFmFGl9BJ73rbca

Today, you don’t have to worry about 90% of this stuff. In a group I play in with tons of newer players that have a lot of room to deal more damage, the Chimera lasts barely 60 seconds, Ansuul never has a wrack overlap other mechanics, and you can just let things hit you and still clear twice as fast as you could trying your ass off in the past.

As a raid lead it’s frustrating - there’s less room for skill expression because the fights are devoid of mechanical difficulty at current damage levels, even for average endgame players.

I have a suggestion. recognizing that I’m asking for something that would require dev time and resources, I thought of a solution that could leverage existing systems. The new overland difficulty system could be adapted to trials to increase the damage dealt and damage taken. Each tier could provide a small score benefit to encourage higher difficulties. For years, ESO has been building around a play how you want philosophy. That should apply to people who want to push difficult content and maximize damage without compromising the mechanical difficulty of the fights.