xaraan wrote: »

Vaoh wrote: »

To ZOS, when there is a “Hard Mode” it should be something for groups to run progressions on for awhile, perfecting difficult mechanics in order to secure a victory. When that happens everyone competes for the first clear and its a big deal. For example, vMoL HM first clear was a massive deal. vSS HM first clear no one cared.

This is the Hard Mode of your new trial, completed on the first day of PTS, and now already beaten again when it was buffed. I’d be surprised if Kyne’s Aegis Hard Mode+Speed Run weren’t completed Day One on the PC Live servers.

From my experience of raiding since a bit before Thieves Guild on console, there was far more excitement, competition, and overall fun when all groups competed to be the first to defeat a super difficult boss. Seeing the difficulty of Kyne’s Aegis is worrying me that it will turn out like Sunspire where it is beaten after a few short raid days and no one really cares.

I disagree with some of this. The folks that are beating it now and will beat it on day one are not just the 1%, but the 1% of the 1%. It did take our group practice to get through vSShm and we were happy when we beat it. You are not wrong that other HMs like vCR and vMoL were more challenging in mechanics ways, but I do not think everything should be designed around a group of players that will beat it in the first week no matter what zos does.

There is a huge group of players right after those top guys that are still considered end game by 99% of the rest of the game and probably by zos' own standards that would still not qualify for some of these top teams. We are unchallenged by any of the content that isn't HM trials, but do see the challenge there; so it would be a shame to see a segment of players cut out of content by making it only complete-able by an even smaller group of players.

I'm not calling for massive nerfs or saying some of the calls for changes are even wrong, but I do think anyone that has not just HM trials on farm, but blasts through them within days of new content release and has the Godslayer/TTT/GH style achievements on farm should realize that making the content take months for them to complete will mean not just more players cut out from achieving those things at all, but not even having an option for challenging content (as vet mode alone does not offer that).

Maulkin wrote: »

bol wrote: »

I've been running this trial on PTS and I will tell you it is designed to promote exactly what ZoS has been trying to prevent. The skill gap. Every boss is again designed in a way that for every 10% less group DPS you have the fight takes another 50% longer. The mechanics are very punishing and hard, but for the groups with high enough DPS they don't exist. So stack and burn if you can, and if you can't you will most likely not manage to clear HM.

I am wondering who this trial was made for? For the top 1% score runners? As I am pretty sure they will get bored of it really fast as every fight is just a stack and burn trial dummy parse. As for the rest. It will be frustrating to complete and average group will take hours to clear just Veteran without HM. And for what? There is no viable reward at the end as the gear is pretty useless.

The thrill of achieving something hard? The title perhaps?

Not everything needs a material reward at the end. PvP is a gold sink with 0 rewards (especially BGs) and yet people still do it for the challenge and fun of it. Day after day and week after week.

xaraan wrote: »

Vaoh wrote: »

xaraan wrote: »

Vaoh wrote: »

To ZOS, when there is a “Hard Mode” it should be something for groups to run progressions on for awhile, perfecting difficult mechanics in order to secure a victory. When that happens everyone competes for the first clear and its a big deal. For example, vMoL HM first clear was a massive deal. vSS HM first clear no one cared.

This is the Hard Mode of your new trial, completed on the first day of PTS, and now already beaten again when it was buffed. I’d be surprised if Kyne’s Aegis Hard Mode+Speed Run weren’t completed Day One on the PC Live servers.

From my experience of raiding since a bit before Thieves Guild on console, there was far more excitement, competition, and overall fun when all groups competed to be the first to defeat a super difficult boss. Seeing the difficulty of Kyne’s Aegis is worrying me that it will turn out like Sunspire where it is beaten after a few short raid days and no one really cares.

I disagree with some of this. The folks that are beating it now and will beat it on day one are not just the 1%, but the 1% of the 1%. It did take our group practice to get through vSShm and we were happy when we beat it. You are not wrong that other HMs like vCR and vMoL were more challenging in mechanics ways, but I do not think everything should be designed around a group of players that will beat it in the first week no matter what zos does.

There is a huge group of players right after those top guys that are still considered end game by 99% of the rest of the game and probably by zos' own standards that would still not qualify for some of these top teams. We are unchallenged by any of the content that isn't HM trials, but do see the challenge there; so it would be a shame to see a segment of players cut out of content by making it only complete-able by an even smaller group of players.

I'm not calling for massive nerfs or saying some of the calls for changes are even wrong, but I do think anyone that has not just HM trials on farm, but blasts through them within days of new content release and has the Godslayer/TTT/GH style achievements on farm should realize that making the content take months for them to complete will mean not just more players cut out from achieving those things at all, but not even having an option for challenging content (as vet mode alone does not offer that).

It depends what you think is better. Is it better for the coolest challenge to be defeating a super difficult boss? Or to no death+speed run+hard mode the trial? Those are the choices ESO has provided so far.

From what I’ve experienced, the progression for a super difficult boss was way more fun and resulted in a huge feeling of accomplishment when you finally succeeded. Groups were encouraged to improve to reach that level and in-turn it became “cool” to run the trial, bringing in way more groups, creating competition, etc. In terms of the achievement, failure only occurred when you made too many mistakes. On death, your group would respawn and get back to the fight. Furthermore, power creep would overtime drastically bring down the difficulty of accomplishing the fight. Imo that’s perfect and is why vMoL HM was considered the best experience by most players who played back then.

When no death+speed run+hard mode is the challenge..... well there’s tons of issues. There is a hidden factor called *game performance* mainly for console. ESO crashes, bluescreens, lags, invisible adds issues can happen, and a whole host of other bugs specific to each trial. These can easily result in the entire run failing at no fault of the players. It’s not fun and it leads to boredom because you are running something hundreds of extra times just to have a run where ESO functions decently enough on top of you accomplishing those three difficult achievements at once. A death means everyone has to slowly port out....wait for the one guy who’s on pause.... change difficulty to normal then back to vet to reset the trial... everyone port back in. On console it really does go slowly for most groups I’ve been in. This is why only one group has Godslayer on console (which is awesome btw) - no one wants to go through that progression because it’s more akin to torture. Even getting IR or TTT can be frustrating due to game performance. In all of my own TTT runs we’ve had one person disconnect mid-trial. However, Hard Mode is now easier for more players to accomplish right from launch.

There’s two solutions that are better than what we currently have imo. Add a third tier of difficulty, idk call it Master difficulty, to activate on the final boss and which is not required for the no death+speed run+hard mode. Or add an optional boss of ridiculous difficulty who spawns in a remote area of the map when the trial is set to Veteran or after the last boss has died on Hard mode.

Just my thoughts

Weird debate in the sense that I don't fully disagree with much of what you've said, so even though I'm offering counter thoughts to some things, it's not to say I don't understand or even partially agree with you.

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First off, I do want to shoot down the 'master difficulty' concept. As soon as new tiers are added, new rewards are desired. There are already unique titles and sometimes more behind some of those no death/HM/Speed runs, then to lock even more behind another tier and as that becomes common, more and more people will request rewards for them of varying types. End of the world? No, but I think the more you divide up the top 1% of the players and then show all the rest of the players in the game falling into one to three different categories of what they earn it shows a definitely leaning too much into that one small group of players IMO.

I also want to add that zos does not have a team of devs there able to do vetHM trials the way that the top handful of groups do it, I think it's why we often see the design of content start to crumble in HMs for trials and dungeons, where it feels like they just crank up damage/one-shots/health, etc. and depend a lot on feedback of those top guilds to tweak that. So not sure how confident I am that they should design a whole separate boss only for those top guilds to fight and spend dev time on that content as well.

In the end, if it's just about the challenge, and doing HM alone isn't enough and then doing the no-death/HM/Speed combos are still not enough (do you know how small a group of players we are talking about at this point) there are a variety of ways to increase the challenge to your group by handicapping yourselves in fun ways. (And considering many of these groups have people that record their runs and enjoy sharing crazy accomplishments on forums/reddit, bragging rights would still apply). Even our group, who is not in that league of players has had fun doing naked runs and such.

In the end, every group of players runs out of the 'new' feeling of content that comes out with expansions after a month or two. Whether it's questers, dungeoneers, trials group, housing decorators, etc. I play every part of this game and even with questing on all 18 of my guys and doing different activities with them will already say trials provides the most ongoing 'progress' 99.9% of the players that are interested in them. So I guess to me when I see the .1% of players that have these HMs on hardcore farm within a couple weeks of launch asking for the trials to be harder I see a group of players that probably are barely in the hundreds among tens of thousands of players asking for special content WITHIN other special content just for them so they aren't in the same position as every other player bored with the same old zone, dungeons, bg's, etc. it sounds a bit like overkill.

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Now, I don't disagree that server issues create problems for earning those other achievements. It only takes one player having a lag spike to ruin a no-death with no fault of their own. But tbf various bugs or desyncs ruin a variety of runs as it is, whether you are going for no-death or not.

Personally I've had more problem with some of the design elements of the game than just the HMs being harder/easier. Even though vMoL was more challenging, we found it easier to practice and learn vs. something like Sunspire. The HM of vSS on the last boss is essentially send your top three guys down to burn the mini boss down there and if they don't or if they make one mistake, then it's a wipe. You can't call for a backup like someone dying in the back area of vMol and try to recover, all progress is just halted with that one mechanic. And having run it now with a few different groupings of players from our guild and others, you are right, if you have those 3 awesome players the HM is easy, but if you don't, even if you have one or two of them close, it's essentially impossible and you don't even get to practice the rest of the fight, try to recover, etc. You just wipe on that first attempt every single time. And it's not a primarily mechanic-based activity like the back room of vMoL, but just a hardcore DPS check while dealing with several mechanics that can drop you. I'd be all for making that fight harder for example if they were going to change the portal mechanic to allow more than 3 go down. Then top groups could maximize how many they send down, which would help on things like speed and score runs, and other groups could send 4 or 5 down if needed, or even leave the portal open and allow a new person to port down if one died. That wouldn't guarantee a recovery b/c of time lost, but IMO recovering from fights that go south can be a lot more fun than the fight itself many times and we love trying and it offers a chance.

So I guess I agree that a hard boss can feel like a great accomplishment. But it's going to come down to the design of the whole fight IMO over just making a boss have more health, hit harder or having more one-shot/wipe mechanics in a fight. As it stand, that's their go-to for making content challenging and IMO it's made it worse. We had more fun in vMoL because we had a chance to learn and progress vs. Sunspire. We had some great recoveries where we pushed passed people dying in the backroom and were able to keep practicing the different pad mechanics as it moved on, we had lunar phase on lockdown when most top teams were skipping lunar, etc. Sunspire it was just about those three people downstairs which created a huge road block for anyone to even attempt HM, you don't see hardly any of the other mechanics in the fight until that is done and once that is done the other mechanics were not that hard. But it is frustrating having everything hinge on that and never even getting to practice the rest of the fight if it doesn't go perfectly. If that's a sign of their design direction, then that's why it's a no thank you from me on them making something 'harder' in that manner.


And frankly, I've seen a lot of players that want those easy clears. They jump at the chance to get bored farming on those teams and clearing the trials over and over again. I've stuck with my group b/c they are made up of friends that I want to have fun running stuff with, some are great, some are just decent, some have some of those technical issues mentioned below. And I've subbed in for amazing teams before and have seen how much easier a run can be when everyone is superman.

If you want a challenge, once you are bored with that top guild, then run with more teams that 'can' clear that content with work but just aren't made up of all supermen, they may appreciate the help. I know when we have a player that has run with us for stints that already have mechanics polished and can offer advice and be a solid example for others in the group it's been a positive experience. (Unless you are the type to just get frustrated things aren't as perfect as your top team, then you'd probably just end up getting salty and everyone would get cranky about any comments or jabs). But often, those players, even the patient ones get frustrated. They've seen how smooth it is with their top team and can't handle it when it's not smooth. So you have to mean it when you say you are in the run for the challenge and not just the bragging rights of a new title or whatever reward because that's all you really get for doing that, some extra challenge. And we've been told before from some players that have run with us from other guilds that a hardmode run with us is like true hardmode, so if you are patient, just working with more non-top tier teams could be just what you are looking for challenge wise lol.

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Also, you and LioraValkayrie makes good points about trials not even being about skill half the time once you get to that level of play. We have players that are great, but with potato computers or connections that cause as much a problem for them as zos' potato servers do for anyone. We have players that run with several guilds and get bored of a trial b/c guess what - everyone is running the new trial and then drop out. We have scheduling issues constantly where, and to my point about the vSS HM mechanic, if you have one of those three downstairs DDs that are great at the job callout, everyone loses morale b/c they know that the night will be a fail (though some of that is a self fulfilling prophecy when it comes to morale). Or have a key support call out and it means the runs will be a mess, no real practice that week, etc.