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Elder Scrolls Online - To Trinity or Not to Trinity? - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Elder Scrolls Online - To Trinity or Not to Trinity? - MMORPG.com
We have the trinity in Elder Scrolls Online, but it’s not set in stone. We are not forced into roles. I talked about this a little in the previous column about the Dragonknight. Ever since I wrote that piece I wanted to expand on the freedom we have in this game.
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You can't do it all alone, you have the choice to build however you want though. And you can probably adjust your role somewhat to FILL another role many times. So it means you still need teamwork, but you dont have to build ONE way like boring WOW type games to fill a role.
GAME TIL YOU DIE!!!!
I had fun once, it was terrible.
Guess i just prefer traditional mmorpg's. *edit.... Also the lack of an auction house...maybe they changed that now..idk.
Aside from that .. you are right in 92% of the overland content you can be whatever you want(build) .. Heck, Helen Keller could solo most of it with some good keyboard training
The freedom in eso comes in the form of how to tank. Man if you’re good and can coneptualize builds you can do it.
Telling people a tank is not needed is misleading. If you are not superbly geared with cap champion points doing 4 year old content, a tank is needed...
I dislike the level scaling too!
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
I'm not an IT Specialist, Game Developer, or Clairvoyant in real life, but like others on here, I play one on the internet.
Sometimes it's a random target and sometimes it can be the player furthest away from the boss but they all have it even in the easiest 3 dungeons unlocked at level 10. and unlike other trinity games the game also lacks any form of AOE taunting. This is also by design.
You put all those things together and ESO group content is a special case of trinity-based game play where even if you're not tanking you need to be alert and have good situational awareness. This is a good thing and what makes group dungeons in this game more fun.
Having said that, can group content be cheesed through a combination of the right abilities and champion points making tanking and even dedicated healers optional? Of course it can. If your DPS is high enough, you have high CP and you have a build designed for the solo raid, Maelstrom Arena, you and 3 others with similar DPS build can ignore the trinity in a lot of content and just power through.
But that is a special case and common though it may be now 4 years after release, when there are a lot of players capable of cheesing the content and bored enough that they just want to power through the three Undaunted daily dungeons for the reward as fast as humanly possible, that does not negate the fact that instanced group content in the game is still very much designed for trinity game play.
Some people also seem to be confused over build flexibility and what that means. What it does mean is that you can easily change your build to adapt it for the content you're doing. There are casual solo builds, Maelstrom Arena solo builds, instanced 4-man group builds, PVP builds, Trial builds... it's up to you to adjust your build depending on what you're doing after you have your own think about what you should be doing differently and why.
What build flexibility does not mean is that you pick one single solitary build for yourself and insist on using it without adjustments in all content.
Trials are also a special case and a kind of funny one in that there are way too many players, whether they are part of the small minority that actually runs trials regularly or not, obsessed with the min/maxed trial builds that like to complain about how ESO pigeonholes you into just a handful of viable builds.
Let me ask you this: have you ever run trials as your primary activity in any MMORPG? If you have you wouldn't need anyone to tell you that trials are the domain of the min/maxers. Of course they will synthesize any game down to the best of the best classes, abilities and gear and make a mockery of any build flexibility a given game may have. There is nothing unique about how that crowd builds for trials in ESO.
If you listen to what they're saying and think that they're talking about your build when you yourself do not run trials at all, you're totally missing the point. If what they say depresses you and makes you think that build freedom doesn't really exist that's your own fault for misunderstanding what they're talking about: they're not talking about the other 95% of the game where build flexibility is very much a thing in ESO. They're talking about hard mode trial runs in record time.
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Characters in ESO have the freedom to change. That doesn't mean that group content can be completed by a group with identical builds; same as a group of characters with the same class. (If they can its not proper trinity right? Or - as @Iselin says - long term players probably can but that's not just true in ESO).
Its the content that makes the game "trinity" - specifically what is needed to complete it - not whether a character can be multi-classed.
That's exactly what I was going to say. It's just the illusion of freedom. If you want to be a casual/solo player who doesn't really dabble much in the end game group content, you can play any way you want and you'll be fine. The leveling process is certainly a prime example of this. But then once you get to the end game group content, you hit a brick wall and all that freedom you once had is now funneled into cookie cutter builds just like in any other MMORPG and if you don't conform to these builds, you won't get invited to groups that are doing the challenging content. That's ultimately why I stepped away from the game. The way I want to play my character is not supported by the way I want to play the game. I really hate the misleading sentiment going around about this game that there is a great deal of freedom. You only have freedom when your choices don't actually matter.
In overland questing and normal Dungeons you have flexibility to do content without an optimized group.
In harder content such as Veteran Dungeons, you're not doing it without a tank and heals. (You can however run with a healing tank and 3 DPS, etc) and you have a lot of versatile builds with which you can accomplish this.
When you move to Veteran Trials, you do have to have a much more optimized group and there are builds which excel beyond most make it easier to succeed.
Your ability to play different roles on any class however do make the game more inclusive and the diversity of builds isn't matched by any other MMO at the moment in my opinion. This however does allow for bad builds that just don't work well, but I prefer the freedom to find that out myself.
More correctly I suggest: as content becomes harder your freedom for solo content or the freedom of your group for group content diminishes. Relative to the "capability" of the character(s).
This doesn't mean that it misleading to suggest that players have freedom since most players for most content do.
Even in end game content there are choices: @Iselin 's comments about mechanics - you still have to be prepared to take on a different role or work differently and @Torval 's comments - if you are not bothered about doing it in record speed your choice expands.
What is also at play though is a character's capability. And as th enumber of champion points a character can have increases long term players have become more and more powerful. And with more power comes more freedom. The downside though: challenge diminishes. (Happens in lots of games not just ESO.) Which harks back to something @Iselin brought up in an earlier thread: the introduction of something higher than vet level in the dungeons.
At the end of the day its a pendulum. One way it swings towards challenge, the other direction lies freedom.
"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
The main problem I see with ESO is the limitations associated with its physical and magical damage types and stamina vs. magicka. These systems make buildcrafting highly underwhelming by limiting synergy.
There are many viable builds, so the freedom is definitively there. Of course there will always be meta builds, but they only perform marginally better. Meta build won't make you perform better than a pro player with a shi*t gear, action combat has a very high skill ceiling.
With that said, you don't need a tank or a healer if you're just running normal dungeons (with the exception of version II and DLC dungeons), everything above that you'll want at least some hybrid tank or healer.
Like any MMO too many are too concerned with stats rather than just having fun.
Was in a group the other day where a guy claimed his Warden was a tank build, he failed miserably, Warden's are stuck being healers, they can't even dps well enough for hard content.