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Will the ESO Combat Changes Improve Endgame Accessibility? - The Findings of PTS Testers So Far

By Andrew | 18 Jul 2022 | Share

The primary mission of the combat changes in Update 35 Lost Depths, according to Zenimax, is to close the gap between high end players and more casual players, thus making endgame PvE content more accessible for the more causal players. This is often referred to as closing the delta, or lowering the ceiling while raising the floor.

However, as we have previously covered here, the majority of those responding to the changes on the Official ESO Forums were opposed to the changes, with many of them questioning the suggestion that they would improve accessibility, Indeed, many were actually arguing that they will have the opposite effect, making trial and dungeon progression significantly harder for the less experienced teams and players due to the reductions in DPS and healing output.

Common counter arguments to these claims were that the players were simply overreacting and that they needed to go and actually play trials on the PTS instead of just theorizing or basing their view on dummy parses only. Over the past few days, a few groups comprised mostly of very experienced players have indeed started doing test raids on the PTS, and some of them have reported their findings to the ESO community. This article will be an overview of what they have found out, and what it might mean for ESO players.

Rockgrove trial in ESO

How accessible will the hardest content be in Lost Depths?

Today we will cover two of the test runs that have been done on the PTS. The first one will focus on what is arguably the hardest content in the Elder Scrolls Online at the moment - the hardmodes of . Very few players have done this at the moment, and only two raid groups in the world have managed to complete Swashbuckler Supreme, the trifecta achievement (all hardmodes, no death, and speedrun all in the same run).

The group reported that they had lost around 30% of their DPS in boss fights, but damage output against trash fights where ground DoTs are not as important was not affected much by the changes. They also expressed some surprise that the healing changes were not as brutal on the group as had been initially expected. When the PTS notes were first announced, there was a lot of concern about almost all healing skills being nerfed to only tick every 2 seconds.

However they finished off by saying that it's likely that they were only able to adapt to the changes so easily because they had extremely experienced DPS and healers on their team, including world record holders, and that the majority of less experienced groups would have likely have difficulty adapting to the changes. They speculated that therefore the trifecta achievement would be just barely possible in PC, and flat out impossible on console.

You could argue that the accessibility of Hardmodes is not that important anyway, as it is the newest trial so you would expect it to be very hard, and the hardmode is already far beyond the reach of the majority of the groups regardless of the proposed changes in . So next up we will cover a trial that is more of a realistic goal for less experienced groups, but still a worthy challenge requiring a lot of practice, coordination and some optimization.

Dreadsail Reef trial in ESO

How accessible will Mid-Tier Trial Content be in Lost Depths?

The example that we are going with here is Hardmode. This is a good example of a "mid-tier" trial because it's not the kind of trial that a beginner trial group would be able to complete on hardmode, however players that have a few hardmodes in other trials under their belt already do have a chance of completing it with a lot of practice, as long as they meet certain standards of DPS, situational awareness and mechanical ability. In my view, Cloudrest is a "bridge" between ESO's easier trials and the hard ones, a challenge that all players wishing to reach the height's of ESO's endgame must first conquer.

was another cause for concern among some players after the patch notes dropped, due to the healing nerfs and how they might interact with things like the Baneful Mark mechanic. Baneful Mark is a curse which is cast on the entire group several times during the execute phase of the main boss fight, which drops their health and gives them a massive debuff to their healing taken. The only way to cleanse this debuff is to be healed back up to 100% health. There are other mechanics that are also doing a lot of damage at the same time, but this isn't supposed to be a Cloudrest tutorial so just suffice it to say that there is a pretty high amount of damage hitting the group in this trial, but not as much as in some of the newer ones.

In this run, the players reported a damage loss of around 20%, which is contrary to the reasoning that Zenimax laid out in the Combat Preview and Patch Notes that longer DoTs and easier rotations would lead to a damage improvement. They also reported that the healers did struggle a little with some mechanics, primarily the damage sources that tick on the group members once per second. However they were experienced players so again, they were able to adapt to it. Surprisingly, the Baneful Mark didn't cause too many problems either.

Interestingly, they did also note that the initial intense backlash against the PTS changes may have been a slight overreaction, that in most cases endgame players who have already established themselves will be able to adapt just fine to the changes, and will not have any major problems completing content or achievements.

However they still believe that newer players who want to get into endgame trial progression will struggle a lot more due to the nerfs, a problem which may be made worse if some of the endgame players who are saying they may quit the game if the changes go Live do go ahead and do this, as there will then be less raid leaders to teach the trials to newer players, causing a "brain drain" kind of effect.

Cloudrest trial in ESOThe testing and discussion will likely continue until next Monday, when we can expect the first batch of major changes to the PTS to drop. At this point we will see if Zenimax are going to rethink any of the changes.

We hope you enjoyed this article about the patch notes in ESO. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.

by Andrew

18 Jul 2022

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