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Is Zenimax Backtracking on the Lost Depths Nerfs? What to Expect from the Next ESO Patch

By Andrew | 30 Jul 2022 | Share

The planned changes to the Elder Scrolls Online in the Lost Depths update had caused a lot of controversy, especially in the endgame community. These changes included massive nerfs to light and heavy attacks as well as damage and healing over time skills, along with changes to the duration of these abilities that had led some players to question if they would even be worth using if the changes went ahead.

There was also a lot of criticism that Zenimax's stated goal of making the game easier and more accessible for newer players was not being met with these changes, and that if anything less experienced players would have less damage after the patch rather than finding things easier.

ZOS already showed small signs of backtracking last week, and in an announcement yesterday it seems that this trend is going to continue, which may be a relief to some players.

Earthen Root Enclave - A new dungeon in ESO's Lost Depths DLC

What are the new plans for ESO?

Yesterday Gina Bruno posted a statement on the Official ESO Forums that laid out the new plans for the update, in response to the player feedback.

She started off by acknowledging that the original plans would indeed have hurt the performance of some players that they were purportedly trying to help. She then summarized what players can expect in the next two iterations of the PTS (Public Test Server) to alleviate these concerns.

Firstly, the nerfs to light and heavy attacks are being reconsidered. They are still being nerfed, but the nerfs will be "less drastic" and they will once again scale from your weapon or spell damage, just to a lesser extent than they currently do on the Live Server. This seems to be an attempt at a compromise and will be welcomed by a lot of players who did not like the extent to which these had been nerfed, although for many players this was not the primary issue with the patch to begin with.

Next up, Gina said that we can expect some changes to class abilities in response to player feedback. These changes will mostly be focused on Magicka-based Nightblades, Wardens and Sorcerers. Some of these changes will appear on the Week 4 PTS, but we apparently will not see the bulk of them until Week 5.

Finally, a somewhat surprising change to dungeon and trial content was also announced. In response to criticism that lowering the DPS of players would make completing content more difficult, counter-productive to Zenimax's stated aims of improving accessibility and closing the skill gap, Gina also announced that the health pools of bosses and bannermen in trials and dungeons is going to be reduced to account for that change. These changes will only apply on Veteran and Hardmode difficulties, and the extent of the adjustments will vary between different encounters. The aim is that the difficulty should be about the same as it currently is on the Live server.

There will also apparently be a Q&A session intended to address some of the common questions surrounding the changes.

Dungeon and Trial bosses will have their HP nerfed

How are Players Responding to These Plans?

It has to be said that while still not amazing, the general mood of the response from players on the ESO Forums was better than at any previous point since the original Combat Preview for was posted around 3 weeks ago.

Some players were generally pleased that some reversal of the majority of the originally planned changes was now underway. There was also some praise of the increased level of communication from Zenimax in recent weeks.

However there is also some concern that Zenimax now have an awful lot of work to do to implement and test a new batch of changes of this magnitude before is due to release, and that they might be better off just scrapping the plans for now, going back to the drawing board and releasing the two new dungeons without any major balance changes for now. This seems highly unlikely to happen though, it would be an unprecedented move.

One other common criticism is that nerfing DPS to lower the ceiling, and then subsequently lowering the HP of enemies to make up for the lower DPS seems to be rather pointless, as the second action cancels out the effect of the first leaving us back where we started. There may be some merit to this argument, but we will have to see how things turn out.

We can expect more details to come out on Monday, when the fourth batch of PTS changes will be announced in full

We hope you enjoyed this article about the PTS for ESO. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developedby Zenimax Online Studios.

by Andrew

30 Jul 2022

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