noamineo wrote on Mar 5
th, 2018 at 9:37pm:
Hows the end-game in ESO?
I've been playing relatively active for the past year or so (started to slow down around Morrowind from boredom). Practically the game is another hamster wheel like DDO.
You grind 1-50, then proceed into champion points/levels. These go up to 600 some odd and increase by 30 every quarterly update/DLC/etc. They effectively end up being like epic destinies as they provide additional points and min-maxing via an enhancement system using an UI similar to the feats in Skyrim. Playing without champion points spent can be challenging, by the time you hit around 300 champion points most of the open world areas are a cakewalk.
From there you end up working more on hard mode dungeons, which are 'reaper'/epic. AKA: Bloat the HP with no real difficulty beyond mobs hit harder and take longer to kill. Some hard mode dungeons add a few mechanics but overall they play a lot like WoW. Don't stand in the fire, get the boss' rotational mechanics down, and kill it. EZ PZ, game is boring.
The only decent thing to look forward to is the supposedly datamined Spellcrafting system in the game. Which might bring back some Morrowind/Oblivion nostalgia for crafting your own shit. But let's be honest these guys are about as bad as turdbine in the IQ department. They turned Frost destruction staves into quasi-tank weapons that grab aggro on heavy attacks. The attack you use to regenerate resources.... So yeah. Rockstars.
Oh yeah, and dungeons are 4 man grouped instances. Trials are 'raids' and are 12? Man or some shit. I don't even remember, I ran one whole Trial in my entire ESO carrier and it was so mind numbingly boring and tedious I said fuck it. Crafting is also useless. You'd have to devote an entire year towards maxing crafting unless you want to pay, which is a new option, and even then most crafted gear is subpar to looted shit.
In general I'd give it points for being distracting at best. Only reason I stuck around was a few friends, getting into social guilds, and reliving my Elder Scrolls nostalgia from some RP guilds. But overall the experience aint DDO. It's like playing WoW and then trying SWTOR. You can see similarities, even downright lifted mechanics, but in the end it feels like another shitty cash grab MMO-lite.
I guess you can give them credit for story though. The quests are entertaining, immersive, and generally intriguing. The DLCs add some really neat stuff in that regard. If you're an Elder Scrolls fan, and or lore/story nerd then it's worth the ride as a single player adventure, but overall grouping up isn't necessary unless you again want to run Dungeons which don't add much story or plot. They exist as a game mechanic tacked on to sale copies.