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An In-Depth look at Update 6, Elder Scrolls Online's largest update ever.
Overlord_Neizir
Member UncommonPosts: 136
Warning: This is an EXTREMELY long post due to how massive Update 6 is!
Zenimax has dropped a ton of info on ESO's next major update in the past couple of weeks, especially with Friday 19th's ESO Live episode. On December 5th, ZOS gave us an in-depth look at the Justice System, which is an all-new type of PvE gameplay, with a Cops n' Robbers-style PvP element to come shortly afterwards. On December 19th ZOS dived in to the Champion System, telling us about the first of two phases of ESO's all-new endgame progression system. We still have a ton more coming for Update 6, and here's a list of what we know so far - an in-depth look is below:
- Justice System - Kill normal NPCs, steal from them, pickpocket from them, break into their homes etc. and become a criminal mastermind, or become a champion of the law and be a guard. In the second part of this feature, a PvP element will be added, where player guards can hunt down player criminals with high bounties, in either contingents or by themselves. More details below.
- Champion System - Accrue Champion Points and spend them on thousands of progression options! Every character higher than level 50 will get 30 Champion Points upon the launch of Update 6, and these points are account-wide and can be used on your alts as well, regardless of their level. However, you must be higher than level 50 to earn Champion Points. Enlightenment, also known as Rested XP, has been added to the game as well and makes you earn Champion Points faster. A short while after Update 6 releases, Veteran Ranks will be removed from the game entirely, placing the true level cap at 50. You can spend your Champion Points in 3 main constellations that contain 3 sub-constellations each, each tree with their own area of focus e.g The Lord in the Warrior constellation is to do with your health, and The Apprentice in the Mage constellation focuses on your magicka capabilities. All of your primary stats have been multiplied by 10 for you to better see these changes, as they will go up in incremental amounts per Champion Point spent on a passive in the tree; A 1% increase of effectiveness per Champion Point spent in that passive, up to a maximum of 100 points leading to a 100% increase. MUCH more details below.
- TONS AND TONS of Combat Changes - ZOS has completely revamped combat and has gone over every single ability in the game, and even added new ones as well as adjusting some game mechanics like the removal of Overcharge, no more soft caps, AoE cap increased to 60 with diminishing returns, and lots more. Stick n' Skirt builds have been either nerfed into Oblivion or Heavy and Medium Armor builds have been buffed into Aetherius. There are way too much changes that can't be put in this list, so look for most of them below (Most, because there's still far too much changes to count!)
- Provisioning Revamp and Fishing Improvements - Provisioning and Fishing have both been overhauled. VR10 recipes are now in the game (including Tacos!) and you can now go and hunt wild animals for ingredients. Provisioning is also more immersive, with stale/rotten ingredients being added and turning that way if ingredients are unused, WYSIWYG crate and container looting, and streamlining of the number of recipes. More info below.
- New Combat Animations - In order to make combat feel weightier and less floaty, combat animations have been improved. Bows will no longer be shot horizontally, and will shoot like proper bows. All the combat animations and their respective idle animations have been improved too.
- Better Inventory Management - All trophies, pets, costumes and even mounts will now have their own separate UI and will no longer take up valuable inventory space. Uncollected pets, costumes etc. will also be shown.
- Too much bug fixes and polishing to count!
JUSTICE SYSTEM
The Justice System will be a huge addition to Elder Scrolls Online, and it will drastically change the world and the way you and the players around you play the game. It adds a whole new level of player-driven content, and makes your actions have real impact on the world, much like stealing or killing in a single player Elder Scrolls game would. Except ESO is an MMO, and you will not only have to worry about NPCs but your fellow players also.
That’s right, players can either enforce the law or choose to break it, or even become a vigilante and do both. If you do choose to steal and murder, just be aware that there are other players out there who will make it their goal to bring justice to Tamriel and hunt you down. However, this World PvP aspect is coming another time as it requires more testing and experimentation. It shouldn't take any longer than Update 8 (I predict Update 7, releasing in March).
A list of crimes is:
- Murdering NPCs
- Stealing from shops and stalls
- Pickpocketing NPCs
- Assault
- Trespassing
- Breaking into homes
- Killing livestock
- Intimidation (As in threatening people with weapons, not the dialogue option)
You can steal NPCs’ property and also pickpocket them. It will be very clear whether an item is owned by someone or not. Picking up an owned item is considered a theft, and the NPCs will react to it. NPCs will have different personalities. Some will not hesitate to draw their sword and attack you, whilst others will cower in fear and do everything they can to avoid contact with you.
The success rate of pickpocketing will change dynamically to ensure that Outlaws are not able to successfully pickpocket their victims 100% of the time. Thieving will not be as simple as it would be in your traditional Elder Scrolls game.
Living, breathing NPCs
With the release of the new system, NPC AI has been upgraded and they will now perform activities such as sleeping, cleaning their homes and taking walks among many other activities. An NPC could be sleeping in their home one moment and the next moment they could wake up and take a walk around town, go to the tavern, or go fishing in the nearest body of water. They do these activities in real-time and don't just teleport into nowhere when you're not looking. This adds a huge layer of immersion.
This can affect criminals. Many cities, especially Daggerfall, have many hidden alleyways and lonely locations which can be a perfect spot for a murder to take place and an NPC may walk right into one, with a criminal sneaking around right behind them, preparing to strike at their target.
The time of day may also play a role in crime, and will affect when shops are open and NPCs are sleeping.
Bounties, Heat, and Witnesses
As said earlier, NPCs will react to crimes that they witness. Some may attack you in self-defense and others may not do anything, depending on their personality. NPC guards can begin to pursue you, and as they pass other guards, they will also join in on the hunt. Because of this, whatever criminal buddies that you have can do their shady activities undetected, because all the guards are chasing you and not them. But be sure that the guards don't catch you and run back to their posts before your friends are done with their crimes. Again, more immersion!
Having an NPC witness a crime will increase your bounty and “heat”, which is a term used to describe the initial negative attention following a crime, which mainly affects how guards will react to you, e.g They will kill you on sight, or arrest you and force you to pay your bounty depending on your heat level. Just like bounties, how high your Heat meter gets depends on what crime you've commited.
Bounties are region-specific, just like in Skyrim. I could go on a murderous rampage in Eastmarch and no-one will bat an eye when I flee south to The Rift. You can have bounties in multiple regions, or perhaps your villainous deeds will span several provinces! It's entirely up to you whether or not you want to commit a crime.
Outlaws and Enforcers
This is where Justice System gets very interesting. Players can not only choose to become a criminal mastermind as one of the Outlaws, but they can now also choose to become a champion of justice as an Enforcer, opening up possibilities for World PvP.
A player can represent the enforcers by wearing an Enforcer Tabard. When the tabard is worn, the player will get flagged for PvP. You will not be able to constantly toggle your tabard on and off; it will take some time to wear it or take it off, and you can't just turn off PvP if you decide to defect to the Outlaws. Committing a crime and having bounty means you’re and Outlaw and will also be flagged for PvP.
This PvP system will not be in the initial release of Update 6, but it is definitely coming in the near future, most likely in the following update in March 2015.
There are also NPC Enforcers and Outlaws that you can join. As an Enforcer in PvE, you can catch NPC criminals which will increase your reputation with the Enforcers which gives you access to more and better passives in their specific skill tree, and also will increase your fame level, which affects how NPCs positively react towards you. Fame has a counterpart called Infamy, which will affect how NPCs negatively react towards you. It is essentially the same system as Oblivion's crime system.
Enforcers
Enforcers uphold the law and it is their duty to keep Tamriel's towns and cities free of crime. Enforcers have their own skill line, which is designed to ease the job of an enforcer. You can unlock more passives in the Enforcer skill line by increasing your reputation with them, the same as with the Undaunted, the Outlaws, Fighters Guild and Mages Guild.
To begin your life as a guard, you need to grab an Enforcer tabard. These can be obtained from Enforcer Chapterhouses. They are towers located just outside cities. Whilst wearing an Enforcer tabard, the player will be able to see if players around them have a bounty on their heads.
Apart from fighting player Outlaws and confiscating stolen goods, Enforcers also have access to a fun PvE activity called Bandit Dens (Not to be confused with Outlaw Havens!). An enforcer will be able to find clues in the world which will lead to different Bandit Dens. There are hideouts scattered all over Tamriel.
Bandit Dens are naturally inhabited by Bandits. Killing a bandit boss will yield extra treasure. Bandit Dens also include chests which may or may not be trapped. Some of these chests will have contraband and other items in them, which can and should be returned to an Enforcer Chapterhouse for rewards.
Bandit Dens have an element of mystery to them; your map will not reveal the den's location and a bit of exploration is needed to find one. Many dens can be cleverly hidden. It is up to the player to explore the den and loot the rewards inside - perhaps with other fellow guards.
Outlaws
If you want to become a criminal mastermind and one of the most feared people in all of Tamriel, being an Outlaw might be the choice for you. Outlaws have the ability to sell and launder stolen property, and gain access to a skill line, which will help in their shady business. Like the Enforcers, increasing your reputation with the Outlaws will improve your skill line.
The sanctuary for Outlaws is called an Outlaw Haven. Outlaw Havens include fences and special vendors who will buy your stolen goods, but are also quite literally havens to outlaws. It is a safe zone that Enforcers cannot access. Escaping to an Outlaw Haven will dissipate your heat level, although your bounty will still remain. Alternatively you can just lay low for a while and avoid towns and cities until your heat is gone. In one of these havens, you can also group and trade your goods with fellow criminal players and organize a crime spree together.
An Outlaw (And a traitorous guard) has the ability to steal and pickpocket items. Also note that the way Sneak works is going to be changed, too. An Enforcer will not be able to see an Outlaw who is sneaking.
Get the Loot
Let’s say you commit a crime as an outlaw and receive a bounty. You can either run away or get caught by a guard. If a guard catches you, you’ll need to pay the bounty in gold. Should you pay the bounty or get killed by the guard, all stolen items that were on you will be confiscated. (Remember that NPC Guards are going to be unkillable, by the way. You can’t just muscle your way through this.)
However, keep in mind that Enforcer players can also kill you and you can kill them as an Outlaw. If they manage to kill you, they’ll be able to loot your stolen items.
This is where a Capture The Flag style mindset comes in.
Following their death, the Outlaw can resurrect himself and start chasing the Enforcer, who is desperately trying to make it to an Enforcer Chapterhouse. The Outlaw can kill the Enforcer, get the loot back and try to make it to an Outlaw Haven instead.
Champion System
Overview
One of the things where players were not as satisfied as they wanted to be with the higher-end game was Veteran Ranks. While they did give progression, they didn’t provide the sort of open character development that ZOS wanted to have in ESO. Update 5 recently allowed Veteran Ranks to give skill points and attribute points as a temporary fix for this, and also converted Veteran Ranks to level using normal Experience Points, but these were both temporary fixes. What the Champion System is, is a major character progression system for your character where you spend Champion Points to advance your character by unlocking passives that increase your Critical Chance, Armor, and other attributes. Once you have unlocked enough Passives you gain access to unique passives deeper in the trees.
Before, it was really easy to hit the soft caps on your Attributes, but now with soft caps removed, you’ll need to use the Champion System as a way to increase your attributes further. Now, if you want to reach the highest possible level of an attribute for your character you need to work hard to reach that level.
The Champion System is also account wide, whenever you earn a point to spend in the Champion System, that point is earned for your entire account. You can spend those points on every character on your account. Most passives in the Champion System are percentage based, so the benefit will be relative to your base attributes. This will help low level characters a lot if you have alot of Champion Points, but it shouldn’t be overpowered.
An important note is that Update 6 does not fully remove Veteran Ranks just yet. The reason for that is that the developers want to make sure that when the Champion System comes out everything is working the way ZOS wants it to, but it would be an even bigger challenge to make both changes at the same time, so the team wants to give themselves time to make sure they do it right.
We’ve already seen pictures and videos of the Champion System constellations. The way that works is that you spend points in each star sign to work your way through the constellations and unlock further passives. Originally the devs were looking at having players invest several hundred points into each constellation, but it made it feel like each point was not that meaningful. Now that number has been reduced from around 400 down to 100 points per star sign to unlock the highest tier passive bonuses. As you continue to spend points in the constellation, you unlock all-new powerful passives at thresholds of 10, 20, 40, 60, and 100. Each constellation has a top tier passive, for example the Steed has “War Mount” at 100 points which makes it far more difficult for you to be knocked off your mount by taking damage.
Since each passive in each constellation was changed to max out at 100 stars rather than 400, that changed the significance of each point. That changed the way that the devs wanted players to be spending points, it’s currently around 1 hour of play-time to earn a Champion point. As long as you have a Veteran Rank character, you will start with 30 points in the Champion System once 1.6 goes live. Every character on your account will have those 30 points to spend, but it’s not a shared pool. There’s several reasons why that was done, one of which is that the devs didn’t want players to be vastly separated at the start of the system based on their Veteran Rank. Everything has been re-balanced, trials, dungeons, overworld, etc… and the team wanted to make sure that players can continue doing the content that they currently can do. The team wanted to avoid situations where certain pieces of game content would become significantly harder when the Champion System releases.
When the system first comes out, there is a respec system that will be pretty cheap so that players can experiment and get comfortable with the system. Later on there will be a standard gold cost for re-speccing your Champion passives.
The Nine Constellations
There are nine constellations that you can spend points in, which are variants of the three major constellations; “The Warrior” (red), “The Mage” (blue), and “The Thief” (green). The Warrior presides over Health, as you spend points in any of the three constellations under the Warrior sign, those points will increase your health, and many of the passives in those constellations relate to defenses and defensive abilities.
Similarly, The Thief is focused on stamina, sneaking, regeneration, and mounts. The Mage presides over Magicka, and passive abilities in Mage constellations assist with damage and offensive ability, but not just spell-based offense.
It is technically possible to max out every constellation, but it would take a really really long time - around 3 real-world years worth of play time. Probably what you will want to do is pick what your character is good at and choose passives that work well for your character. The capstone ability in one of the Mage constellations (tentatively named “Butcher”) increases your damage against low health targets. Each of the minor constellations within the "major" star sign have variations to affect offense, defense, and utility.
Other examples of capstone passives include is “Arcane Well” in the Apprentice tree, a debuff that causes enemies you kill to explode in a Magicka detonation. Shadow is all about eluding your enemies, so the master unlock for that is “Shadow Strike”, while you are stealthed your heavy attacks are 50% faster to execute. In the Steed, there is a buff that, when you block, gives you a dodge bonus for a short amount of time.
The first point you spend in a particular star sign is worth approximately 1% to the particular attribute. For example, the first point you spend in a start that increases your Stamina Regeneration would increase that attribute by 1%. The second point you spend is worth around 0.9%. The more points you spend in a particular star sign the lower this bonus will go. Therefore, the first 10 or so points you spend in a certain star sign are going to be the most significant. This helps to prevent there from being massive separation between players in the long-run of the system.
This diminishing return encourages players to rotate around through multiple star systems in order to invest their points, this encourages players to deviate and seek creative places to invest Champion Points and prevents there from being obvious “best ways” to implement your character progression.
Just to recap, The Warrior is Health and defense, the Mage is Magicka and offense, the Thief is Stamina and utility. The Tower is all about cost reduction, The Lover is about regeneration, The Shadow helps you evade and elude your enemies, stealth costs less stamina and CCs against you have a shorter duration.
Within the Mage constellation, the Atronach has the “Master at Arms” skill. The Ritual empowers your Physical attacks, giving penetration and Critical. The master skill in Ritual gives “Last Stand”. When you are below 20% health, you gain more Ultimate by giving you a buff every 20 seconds if you are below this amount. The Apprentice is all about Magical damage, the master skill there is “Arcane Well” (the Magicka explosion).
The Steed reduces your incoming damage with increased block damage and other defensive perks. The master skill gives you a damage shield while blocking. The Lady constellation protects you from Negative effects, you take less damage from Poison and Magic. The master passive there is “Unchained”, when you break free from crowd control all your Stamina costs are reduced for short amount of time. The Lord improves your vitality, Damage Shields you receive are stronger, Healing Potions are more effective, you increase the healing you take. “Infusion” gives players recovery and a damage shield when you resurrect someone, or are resurrected yourself. There are four unlocks in each constellations and four places to spend points in each constellation.
Enlightenment
The Champion System includes a new “Enlightenment System” which is a boost to the amount of experience you earn towards your Champion Point progression. This helps to prevent players from being penalized when they play lower level alts and helps players to catch up more quickly if they go out of town for the weekend or something. Enlightenment ticks up while you are offline so that you can more quickly catch up on game-play time that you missed. Right now, Enlightenment is tuned to give a x4 boost to Champion XP gain while you have the buff.
Attribute Rescaling
One side-effect of the Champion System is that attributes and stats are being re-scaled by quite a bit so that players feel like small percentage changes that they are gaining have a meaningful benefit from that investment. For each attribute pool, for example Armor, the value you get from items is very significant. Armor now increases your Spell Resistance, so Heavy Armor is far more beneficial for playing defensively, and players that wear Light Armor face a bit more of a trade-off when they sacrifice their defenses some.
The devs couldn’t really just put Champion on top of what we have now, because it wouldn’t have felt satisfying. We’ve also seen a lot of cool changes as a result of this in PvP, for example, a healer in heavy armor is really tough to take down, but can run out of resources in the long run. A healer in Light Armor can cast spells for days, but definitely need to have an escape plan in mind because they will take more damage.
Buffs which stack on top of attribute pools are still significant, but they are not a way to totally counteract the impact of the equipment choices you have made. For example, a Dragonknight wearing Light Armor who uses the Spiked Armor buff will be more defensive, but not to the same degree as in the game right now.
The maximum number of Champion Points will be 3600. That's thousands of progression options, and literally 3 years' worth of character progression, not even including whatever ZOS might add to the system in the future! That is huge!
How to get Champion Points
Champion Points will be gained through XP, and it will take you about an hour of playtime to get a point. A lot of changes to dungeon XP have been made, and the devs are targeting making some changes to XP in PvP aswell. They have to be careful because no-one wants death trading or keep trading. The daily PvP quests are now much more rewarding, because there are huge XP rewards there. ZOS is trying to even out all the different playstyles in terms of what they reward for XP. Now you should be gaining a similar amount of XP regardless of which activity you do.
The Tower Constellation.
Gameplay and Combat Revamp
AoE Cap Changes
The design philosophy of the AoE changes were intended to make sure that any changes made were appropriate for both PvP and PvE content. Both damage and healing abilities needed to work well in both environments.
The AoE cap on damaging abilities has been increased to 60, while leaving healing abilities still capped at 6 targets. In AvA there were a lot of situations where people, when faced by being attacked by AoEs, wanted to clump up into zerg since the damage was spread to only 6 of your allies. It was safer to bunch up as much as possible, and it turns out this was the root of all lag issues in Cyrodiil, so this change should cause people to spread out a bit which should improve gameplay and performance at the same time!
However, there are diminishing returns with the new cap. Your AoE only deals 100% damage on 6 targets (Picked at random out of a crowd), and on the next 24 targets it will deal 50% damage, and the next 30 targets receive 25% damage. AoE Heals are staying capped at 6 at a time which should greatly discourage zerging and encourage more tactical gameplay in PvP.
Ultimate Generation Changes
Right now on live, Ultimate generation is really confusing, because there are a lot of systems like blocking, dodging, damaging, and healing which all generate ultimate. It’s really confusing for players, it's confusing for designers, and it’s creating a huge disparity in the amount of ultimate that is generated based on player stats which, of course, differ greatly as most players have unique builds.
Someone who is playing a tanky, defensive, character is only generating a small amount of ultimate while people with fast attacking speed and high Critical Strike rating are generating a huge amount. What has done to reduce the inequality is a change the system to a flat generation rate. Now whenever you attack, you will gain a buff that gives you 3 Ultimate per second for 3 seconds. That number was settled on using an average character who was performing one ability (with light attack weaving) per second with an average critical strike rating as a normalizing benchmark which put Ultimate generation at a comfortable, manageable rate.
Now for healing. As a way to get rid of the problem where players would spam heals out of combat to build Ultimate, healers only get the Ultimate buff when they heal someone who also has the buff by healing that player with a light or heavy heal. This creates a better system where you more naturally do the things that you would normally be doing in combat and get adequately rewarded for it. With Ultimate, you no longer need to stack as much critical strike rating as possible to get ultimate. Critical Strike is still really useful for damage, but it’s not required for Ultimate generation.
Buff and Debuff Consolidation
The gameplay team didn’t want players to be stacking lots and lots of the same types of abilities. Soft caps are being removed, which will allow players to get as much of any resource as they want without having to worry about arbitrary limits, however, we now get to the point where if players want to do damage, they stack every single ability that adds to their weapon power. So, this “buff and debuff consolidation” was created for that. For every category of buff in the game, there is now a “minor” and “major” version of it. There are unique effects for major and minor versions of each buff type, and multiple abilities give players the ability to acquire a certain buff type. Each player or an enemy can only have one instance of a major and one instance of a minor buff or debuff applied at the same time.
There will still be a hard-cap on mitigation through Armor and Spell Resistance at 50% effective mitigation, but one of the things we did with the Champion System and the buff system is we re-organized all the balance. We know what that limit of Armor is, so that extends all the way up to the 50% where it will push players who want to hit that limit.
An example of the buff/debuff stuff: Spiked Armor from the Dragonknight gives you the Major Armor and Major Spell Resistance buffs, Immovable from the Heavy Armor tree gives the same effect. Previously players could use both abilities to stack armor, now if you used both abilities it would just extend the duration of the Major Armor buff, but players will still get the unique effects of each ability, like the Damage Return from Spiked Armor and the CC Immunity from Immovable. This encourages players to design their action bars intelligently to get the major buffs they need without overloading their bars with buff abilities.
Build Diversification and Ability Changes
The devs have gone through pretty much every ability in the game to make sure that it’s something that you wanted to use, to make sure that each ability has a use in a certain situation, rather than some abilities and morphs being obviously better than others. It was identified that, if you were a Stamina user, you didn’t have a lot of options in your build. There were only the weapon abilities that you could spend your Stamina on, but all the class abilities were Magicka based. To counteract this, there are now around 3 abilities per class that have morphs which allow the skill to scale off your Stamina pool, Weapon Damage, and Melee Critical.
Before, if you were using a staff, it would scale off your Weapon Damage and maximum Magicka. Now it’s a lot more clear and understandable. If you are using any ability that costs Magicka, it scales off Magicka, Spell Power, and Spell Critical. Now you can build your character in whichever way you want and they will be powerful when you use your skills.
A few specific changes that have been made to some classes include a few abilities that the team felt weren’t quite working the way they wanted them to. There were a number of abilities that never really hit the mark on balance, some examples are:
- Inferno (Dragonknight) – This was constantly costing you Magicka and you had to toggle it on and off all the time, but the damage was really low. The good reason to use this was for Ultimate generation, but now that’s standardized. There is a new version of Inferno which is similar to Mage Light in that it gives you a spell critical bonus and it shoots out fire that hits nearby enemies. You’ll only be able to get one major critical buff, so that component would not stack with Mage Light.
- Blinding Flash (Templar) – This was so powerful with the miss chance that ZOS had to make a lot of bosses immune to it, so it wasn’t very useful in many situations. The ability has been scrapped and replaced with “Radiant Destruction”. Its a channeled attack that you can use at range, and the lower health the enemy has the more damage it does.
- Haste (Nightblade) – This ability had a cool concept, but because of light attack weaving this ability was never really useful or powerful. It has been replaced with “Grim Focus” which is a duration buff which grants the “Minor Damage Done” buff for around 20 seconds. It tracks how many times you have attacked your target. Once you have done 8 attacks, it swaps to a new attack that allows you to summon a spectral bow which shoots the enemy for a high amount of damage. This is really cool because it’s a highly interactive ability.
- Summon Clannfear and Summon Familiar (Sorcerer) – to improve upon the Sorcerer pets, they now take less damage from AoE attacks making them much more survivable. Pets can now critically hit, and their Critical Chance is based on your own, so by improving your character’s Crit Chance, you improve your pet’s damage as well. The devs have created a new morph of Daedric Curse called “Daedric Prey”, when you cast it on an enemy your pets deal more damage to that target. This combines really well with Conjured Ward, in DPS testing for trials the Sorcerer pet build has actually been the top build based on internal metrics. It'll probably be nerfed a little bit, but pets should be much more viable now.
There are also new AvA abilities that have been added, two in each line.
- Magicka Detonation (Assault) – This goes hand in hand with the AoE changes that have been made to try to bust zergs. It’s a ranged ability with a cast time that delays for 6 seconds after being applied that does really high AoE damage when it explodes. It’s a nice risk-vs-reward ability. Enemies can interrupt you while you are casting it, and enemies have time to run out of the main group before it explodes. Healers can dispel the curse too, BUT there is a morph of the ability that if the curse is dispelled it explodes immediately.
- Vigor (Assault) – This ability adds a lot of unique things to the game we didn’t have before. This is a Stamina-based ability that will heal all your nearby allies. So if you have all your points in Stamina you can use this a lot and it will crit using your Melee Critical chance.
- Revealing Flare (Support) – This is super useful in PvP, you throw it out into an area and it reveals all stealthed enemies in the area. You can throw as many flares as you want, but it’s pretty expensive so you are giving up a lot of Magicka to cast it. Also, as a stealther you have some time while the projectile is in the air to dodge out of the area and not get uncovered when it lands.
- Guard (Support) – This is a toggle ability, any projectile that would hit a nearby ally will hit you instead. This ability can get you in a lot of trouble, but it also is a great way to help turn the tide of battle by protecting your allies. You can combine it, for example, with the Dragonknight's Reflective Scale to send those projectiles back towards enemies. As a side note, Reflective Scale now is limited in the number of projectiles that it can reflect, and will only reflect 4 projectiles at a time. However, there's no limit as to how many times you can refresh it (It does cost quite a bit of Magicka)
Another big effort ZOS took on when re-balancing abilities was tooltip clarity, there are a lot of abilities that have had tooltips completely reworked to have more flavor and more information about the way the ability works.
Synergies
One problem we have in the game is that there are currently a lot of Synergies available, but a lot of them aren’t really desirable, so you had to try really hard to time it to get the Synergy you wanted. The cooldown for using Synergies has been reduced as well as the radius to use them, so you now really have to try to use Synergies. In Update 6 Synergies have also been made way better; we no longer have channeled synergies, and they've all been made more significant and powerful.
For example, the Storm Atronach synergy now gives both the player and the Atronach an instant buff to outgoing damage. The synergies are now more rare, more powerful, and they now scale off whatever your highest stat is. So if you are a Stamina user, synergy effectiveness will scale off Stamina, Weapon Power, and Weapon Critical rating.
Better Weapon Animations
Weapon animations and idle stances have been greatly improved in order to make combat feel a little weightier and less "floaty". For example, dual wield attacks will look and feel more natural, and bows will now shoot pointing vertically and the attack speed on bow heavy attacks will be slowed down slightly in order to give bows a weightier feel. Every type of weapon's combat animations and idle stances will be getting a touch-up, not just bows and dual-wielding.
In case you're wondering, we WILL be getting a free respec when Update 6 comes out.
You're probably thinking now, "surely there can't be anything else? That's alot of stuff!". Well, you're wrong! There's even MORE stuff to come!
PROVISIONING REVAMP AND FISHING IMPROVEMENTS
The roots of the Provisioning changes date all the way back to the summer, when a post was made outlining some of the proposed changes and asking for player feedback and suggestions. Things like making the contents of the container match it visually were mixed with suggestions about an upgraded system of combination meals that provided multiple benefits. Both of these will make it into the final result, with the Guild Summit in October having revealed that the number of provision loot containers in the game will be around 80. This means that if you see a basket of apples, you’ll be able to get some apples. See some meat hanging around while visiting your local neighborhood Bosmer friends? Go loot it for your recipes.
Fishing also becomes more useful when the fish you catch now become ingredients to utilize, and you can now fillet the fish you catch and make them into ingredients. Other types of ingredient loot types include alcohol, tea, tonics, and vegetables. The continued effort to make things more intuitive as well as more interactive is what the team wants to do with this revamp. As a result, some of the weirder ingredients in recipes (beetles, anyone?) may be on the way out.
Speaking of recipes, things will be both streamlined and added. Green recipes will still be your very simple tier. Blue recipes will be rarer and require more ingredients. These will be where the combinations begin to take hold and provide extended benefits. One thing the community requested was the ability to stack food and drink buffs, and this should be the closest thing to that. Purple recipes will stay the rarest, the goal of completionists, and those looking for the best of the best. While the color coding will stay, the alliance specific recipes will be no more.
Anyone who has made alts would’ve quickly noticed how very similar recipes that provide the same benefits exist in each faction. While it’s good to provide a bit of grounding in culture and lore, the team is wise to ditch this in favor of a new collection of recipes that will reduce redundancy and whittle down the necessary ingredients. In fact, the team aims to reduce inventory demand for Provisioning. That may sound like a lot of streamlining, which it is, but what it doesn’t sound like is a reduction in overall quality. Instead of redundancy, there seems to be an effort to make this crafting discipline match the immersive direction the game has been moving toward, as well as make it more practical. By putting grain in grain sacks and cheese on plates and such, it should also cut down the time it takes to find the ingredients you need. If only Enchanting were this straightforward when it comes to finding runes.
It should be noted that anything players currently have will still be useful after the changes. The team has stated on a few occasions that recipes will continue to work at the same quality, though some might be under new names, and some details and ingredients will likely change. Anything you’ve made will also remain. Since the game is adding multiple new recipes (including VR10 recipes, which will presumably shift and grow in number once the Champion System is in place), loot containers, and recipe ingredients, it will take some getting used to once the update is in place.
If you have alts in different factions, you know that the storage reduction alone will be worth it. Crafters are always running out of inventory space, so the streamlining of the system looks promising. Adding new layers of immersion added onto what many people already consider an immersive game is also something to look forward to.
Those are the five main things going into the gigantic Update 6. This post would probably extend off your screen if we included the massive amount of bug fixes and polishing ZOS is going to do.
While there may be some issues with the game’s updates at times, there’s no doubt that ESO has improved, and looks to continue doing so as we head into a major revamp of the entire game in 2015's first major update.
Comments
when will we see this patch?
@Iathaan
We should see it at either the end of January or the beginning of February.
Wow, thank you. Nice read. Book marking. I had no clue about the buff/debuff changes, and didn't know the AoE cap change was coming in 1.6.
I understand the reason for the delay now.
pff.. ive seen Longer
all joking aside that looks amazing, I may actualy get the game now, been looking for a mmo fix for a bit now.
The way I'm reading it sounds like I should hit 50 and shelve him until the new system.
Darkfall - Sick
Earthrise - Sick
Thank you for this, I am in the market for a new MMO since WoD felt empty at 100. I bought this at launch played till about 35 and I just got frustrated with some zone progressing bugs - along with the bots. This game seems very good now, I may even come back sooner but for sure in January.
Really happy to see this, I remember Massively picking ESO as the MMO most likely to fail, completely glancing over Wildstar's potential problems, such as 40 mans, optimization, and new IP. Happy to see the reverse happened as I am not a fan of that site or Wildstar - as fans of that game at launch really annoyed me almost as much as Guild Wars 2 (sorry for the respectul fans, in regards to population issues).
At GW2's launch it was, "TOR SUCKS!!!!!!!" non-stop for awhile. Then at Wildstar's it was, "ESO SUCKS!!!!!!!"
Now both TOR and ESO seem to be doing decent.
I'd highly recommend returning tbh. Literally every single bot has been eradicated, and pretty much every progression-blocking bug has been fixed.
Not happy with the changes to Templar ability Blinding Flash into a channeled ability.
A channeled ability for pvp? Not so awesome; in fact pretty useless - unless I want to sit on a wall somewhere and play like a bot.
Just to be clear I do not play ESO for pve - there are plenty of other mmo's on the market if I want a pve game.
I would say that stuff looks pretty good however what i always look for in combat is depth of the systems.I don't care about adding points because i have played that type of system,it is still shallow ,what i want to see is various types of weapon damage and is there any mitigation types or properties ?Is there a chance to miss and avoid or interrupt?How does food play a role,is it shallow like in EQ where it really is only an out of combat buff?
There is mention of soft caps,so is there a line to be crossed for accuracy and avoidance or even weather spells hit or miss or only half hit?If there is no depth in systems to me it is just a bunch of numbers with different animations,example 50 dmg with a sword or 50 dmg with a bow all adds up to identical combat just a different animation.
Aside from the combat i like most of what i read,i just don't know enough about the combat to like it or not.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
ESO's combat system is my favorite of all time. No two battles feel the same. After hundreds of hours I'm still learning new tricks.
Lots of what you mention is in the game.
1) There are various types of damage. There's physical damage, bleeding damage, spell damage, fire damage, frost damage, shock damage, disease damage and poison damage. You can enchant your gear with the various types of damage, and each type has its own property e.g Fire damage is a DoT debuff, frost slows you down, poison does damage and can't be mitigated. Every weapon except for staves do physical damage with a light and heavy attack.
2) There are 2 main types of mitigation - Armor, which increases your resistance to physical damage, and spell resistance which increases your resistance to magical damage. In Update 6 they will have a hard cap of 50% mitigation each. Some abilities can temporarily reduce your armor through a type of debuff called Armor Penetration. Same goes for spell resistance.
3) ESO has tactical-based combat like TERA rather than your usual tab-target MMO. There is definitely a chance to miss if you're rubbish at aiming and you can dodge-roll manually by double-tapping your movement keys, like in GW2. You can indeed interrupt and silence enemies.
4) Food can play a big role in combat. There are also drinks. Food increases your total stats, and drink increases how much of a stat you regenerate every 2 seconds. You can't have both buffs. There's potions too which you can use from your quickslots, and they will regenerate your 3 main stats (Health, Magicka, Stamina) on the fly. You can use all consumables from your quickslots.
5) As far as I know spells will only miss if an enemy dodges out of the way, blocks or interrupts you. RNG is completely absent from combat in ESO, everything is done manually.
6) On another note, there is also stealth combat. You can use stealth regardless of your class and weapons and you can perform a sneak attack on an enemy if they don't spot you, which does a huge amount of damage.
There are skills that give enemies chance to miss and skills and armor sets that give you % to dodge. Outside of that yep you nailed it. There is no stat that passively controls dodge and miss.
Aw nothing about Vampires and WWs in the justice system?
I thought they said stage 4 vamps and turned WWs would get attacked by guards! Damn...
Oh wow,
These updates are exactly what subscription games should be about. Keep up the good work Zenimax o.O
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
ZOS said that they definitely have something planned for vampires and werewolves, but we don't know what it is yet.
If this is really coming out in January then best time to get into it would be around may or june. Given Zeni's previous record i can only imagine how much stuff they gonna break with this huge update.
So waiting for 3 to 4 months would be ideal thing to do.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Our experience differ a lot then especially when every small or big updates they break more things than they fix.
I will save myself head ache this time and wait for few months.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
I quit couple of weeks back when LFG still wasn't working and veteran XP was all over the place. Players and devs had very different versions of it. That was well 30 days after the last patch.
Although i am happy for you if you have no issue what so ever.
Getting rid of Veteran Levels. Music to my ears.
I remember writing posts on the ESO forums three weeks after release, about how Veteran Levels were the worst thing I have ever done in a MMO. Man I got blasted back then, but really, they are horrible. How many people quit just because of them. Has to be a lot.
Menacer
Returned back to eso, great improvements.
Sounds really good. I think I'll wait until I read about how well all these changes are actually working out before I give ESO another try. They're really good at hyping their updates. Implementation has been a problem in the pass, so I'll wait and see thanks. A free weekend for returning players to try out all the new stuff would be great as I also have a character sitting at V1 because I didn't like the vet system.
Actually it looks like it's a good thing I have a character setting at V1 cause everyone will get the same amount of Champion points no matter how much vet grinding you've done.
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/143784/champion-system-clarification
ZOS_GinaBruno admin<span mitem="" rank-admin"="" title="Administrator">
- The system shouldn’t separate players more.
Also, when phase 3 of the Champion System goes live with Update 6, all accounts that have at least one Veteran Rank character on them will automatically receive 30 Champion Points. These 30 Champion Points, though applied to your account, are distributed in full to each individual character on your account, just as Champion Points you earn are. So, if you have 5 characters, at least one of which is Veteran Rank 1 or higher, all five of those characters will have 30 CP to spend. You will not be awarded more Champion Points for having five Veteran Characters versus just one. You will also be able to begin earning Champion Points on any Veteran Rank character from that point forward.This is pretty self-explanatory, and is related to the first point. While the system is meant to have built in safeguards against players pulling away from each other too dramatically – those systems aren’t in currently. A 1-to-1 XP conversion to Champion XP was too dramatic.
We feel confident that our current solution is better for the enjoyment of the game overall than our originally announced design. This comes from weeks of testing the system. While iterating on solutions and changing the design is a normal and necessary part of the game making process, we definitely understand how changes to a system like this can be frustrating and seem to come from nowhere.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey