Well this is actually exciting. Over and over, I see suggestions of how to fix “pain points” in ESO and Fallout 76 go unheeded for years and years, and then something gets announced that is better than any of the things people have suggested. I can’t think of an example off the top, but it’s happened several times. I think we’ve just seen another.
For years and years, people have complained that they wanted to be able to change a character’s class, like you can their race. Being a full-stack developer for decades, their reaction always felt like the class was a high-order property of the character, which was tied into too many things to ever change.
Well they’ve just announced “subclassing.” A character is defined by 3 skill class lines, but subclassing will allow you to swap out 2 of those lines for lines from any of the other 6 classes (but not both from the same one). To me, this is even better. This is much more interesting than just changing classes.
The best part is that it’s free for all players as a base-game feature. It won’t cost $15 per toon in the monetization shop, which, given prior history, is what I would have guessed if no one had told me otherwise. (That’s what the “race change token” costs.)
At this point, people are worried about 2 things with this change: that class identity will be wiped out, and that there will be significant power creep. First, yes. Class identity is basically going to be a thing of the past. No one is really going to care what class a toon is. It will only matter as far as there are a very limited number of class-specific sets which will still be class locked, but no one uses them anyway.
Second, oh, my, yes! There is going to be power creep. The subclassing feature is already live in the PTS server, and people are already posting dummy parses.
They’ve already pointed out that some of the hoped-for things won’t come true, like how the sorcerer’s Daedric Prey — which boosts all pet damage by 45% — will only apply to sorcerer pets, so it’s not going to boost the warden bear or the necro blast bones. However, that being said, it looks like we’ll be able to make builds capable of more than current god-tier level (~130K) with this system, without needing to be a sweaty try-hard at light attack weaving and animation cancelling. (Which the purists say are different things, but I can’t figure out the difference. Maybe this is why I suck at it.) This isn’t some perfect weaving build that requires 10-millisecond timing for 200 button presses in a row without missing. More than half of this guy’s damage on the parse came from the arcanist’s beam, which is an easy thing to manage.
Oh, dang. Hyperioxes is one of the current prominent ESO streamers. He’s getting 131K with a heavy attack build, which is nothing but holding down the attack button and occasionally pressing a skill button. I can get 93K with this kind of build currently, but it absolutely maxes out around 98K if you manage to land a lot of crits. So this is a big upgrade. I mean… that’s almost 50% more, for the sake of replacing one skill line, and using one of the new mythics. This is veteran trial hard mode DPS numbers in the easiest build configuration possible. (OK, to be fair, the new mythic he’s using will require light attack weaving in order to restore resources, but the exact timing won’t be an issue for the build, and that’s the hard part.)
The oakensoul ring and the arcanist class opened up the vet trial scene to a lot more people in the game, including me. I think this move is intended to give people a shot at running hard modes and trifectas who wouldn’t have stood a chance before. There was a 4-man prog group in my main guild of people who were all awesome at the game, and they got stuck in their runthrough of the dungeon trifectas. When that happened, I knew then that I was never going to get on in that scene because I’m not even as good as them. If ZOS doesn’t nerf this too much — and the studio lead has been clear that they’re happy with how these DPS numbers are testing internally — this is going to open the end-game content to another strata of people. Maybe I’ll finally be able to manage a perfect Veteshran Hollows run; who knows!
Of course, everyone who was really good at weaving is hating all of this, and I love that part too. I’m bitter that I can’t do it well, even after all these years, and those that gatekeep the game over it can suck it. I’ll take the achievements anyway, thank you very much.
I retired from ESO back in December. I’m thinking I may un-retire when all of this lands. It seems like it’s going to be a blast.
