Softcap Removal
Holy Crap, about time eh? With the champion system, ZOS will be removing the Softcaps and in turn putting in hard caps, that aren’t easily obtained.
Armor for example, the hard cap is 50% damage reduction. In order to hit this cap, you’ll need to maximize everything from buffs you’ll be using, the type of armor you’re wearing, even the traits you’ve chosen. Everything has a place in the game now, in order to hit cap, you can’t be wearing light armor. Even with the buffs you won’t be able to cap yourself in armor. If you want to hit Cap you’ll need to be wearing Heavy Armor, using the Reinforced Trait on all gear, proper buffs, and having all points in the champion system that increase your buffs.
With this softcap removal, they are doing a complete rebalance of the game. No more will we see Light Armor builds that surpass the ability of a heavy armor build. If it is damage reduction you want, you should be wearing heavy armor, as it only makes sense.
While at the summit, Paul Sage showed us a mock-up of how the stats are changing and how they will be allocated. For example, 18% of our total armor will come from the base armor value. Obviously heavy armor has a higher base value than that of light so in order to achieve that 18% you’ll want heavy armor. 4% from Reinforced, 24% from the champion system, and so forth. No longer can we substitute one area for another, a light armor tank using buffs to hit soft cap.
This rebalancing is going to be huge for those who PvP. Those light armor characters that are near un-killable, will be far and few between.
Adding Granularity
With the Champion System and how the point system works, (giving you 1% or 0.5% added bonus) they also need to increase our stats so those bonuses will be seen. As it stands right now, if I was to earn 1% to stamina recovery, it wouldn’t be shown as the number is too small. In order for the bonuses to be visible to the player and to make those bonuses feel rewarding they need to increase our stats by 10 times.
I am not a big fan of this. This feels like the Blizzard approach to things. Every time Blizzard releases an expansion they also increased the stats by a lot to make the players feel that they are becoming stronger, more powerful with their new gear choices. But really they aren’t. It is a false sense of power. If Zenimax increases our stats by 10x they’re in turn going to boosts the monsters power by 10x. So did we really become more powerful? No. Our weapons hit harder, we have more health points, but my Ambush attack which used to do roughly 20% of an enemy’s health bar will still do 20%. It just appears as a larger number. Heck, even Blizzard is cutting back on this in Draenor.
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While I understand that players won’t feel empowered by seeing their stat go from 60 to 60.6, it’s the same as the stat going from 6000 to 6060. Personally, I’d rather Zenimax add in a decimal than boost the power of players by 10x. This system will only result in Zenimax eventually doing a Stat squish otherwise we’ll eventually be seeing numbers like Diablo 3, where two years ago, people were excited for a 20,000 damage crit. Now, if it’s not 20,000,000 it’s not worth mentioning.
As you can see, this new system is massive. It’s not just a small update, it’s a system that is going to completely change the way we play ESO. In order for this change to be implemented with as little hiccups as possible, it needs to be tested. When this update hits the PTS I highly recommend heading over and testing it out, and giving ZOS your feedback by using /feedback or /bug.
I think it would be awesome if ZOS opened the PTS up to the public (even those without accounts) so it can be tested. ZOS could use this opportunity to bring in new players as they’ll be able to try the game for free while testing out the system. They’d need to lock out the important stuff such as the main storyline etc. so players who do not have an account have a reason to purchase the game. As I said if they do open the PTS for public testing, I think they’d be doing themselves a massive favor as it would get more players engaged and testing as well it could be a massive PR stunt for them to try and obtain more players.
If you want to hear more about the Champion System and the smaller aspects of it, listen to the raw audio on YouTube here.
