Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Racials are better than a personal story.
Solvryn
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
I get that most people are worried about the meta, but I wouldn’t be.
There’s only going be a small handful that extrapolate the full benefits of racials. Even then they won’t always have conditions where they can optimize them.
But they almost always seem to give better flavor than personal story.
Guild Wars 2 has personal stories, they serve no purpose or utility.
ESO has racials, people still try to follow the meta and will never be able extrapolate the full benefits, they’re just a better flavour.
Ashes spin on racials seem to be the best yet, especially if it stays in respect to racial lore.
And I think that’s the key, having racials in respect to racial lore. Flavorful and only a few can extrapolate the full benefits, but not all the time.
There’s only going be a small handful that extrapolate the full benefits of racials. Even then they won’t always have conditions where they can optimize them.
But they almost always seem to give better flavor than personal story.
Guild Wars 2 has personal stories, they serve no purpose or utility.
ESO has racials, people still try to follow the meta and will never be able extrapolate the full benefits, they’re just a better flavour.
Ashes spin on racials seem to be the best yet, especially if it stays in respect to racial lore.
And I think that’s the key, having racials in respect to racial lore. Flavorful and only a few can extrapolate the full benefits, but not all the time.
4
Comments
But I also dont understand the fascination people have about passive stats.
I could understand it if the discussion was about active racial abilities, whether in combat or otherwise, but why the F cares about passives tied to races?
There aren't even race locked classes, which mmos should have btw.
Dark Elf Paladins..... Tulnar Clerics and Knights....
Anyway...
The next time your power goes out at the perfect wrong time; when you're progressing or trying to defend a node and are abruptly interrupted know it was us.. because.. we will do anything to win.
Take solace only in the fact that our actions are a last resort to your amazing perseverance and drive for we do not enjoy taking your air conditioning away, but must do what we must to succeed against all odds.
Something like a racial augment that lets a spell ignore the effects of rain. It would never really be OP but it gives a nice flavor to your race choice. I hope they go more along these lines instead of putting it all on the backstory concept. I am with you in that it is more interesting than some personal story choice.
People should not hyper focus on finding a meta in a game that is being designed to not have 1 overarching most effective way to play. They need to give players places to shine and places to let others shine.
Yep, which is why I like racials better than a backstory, there will be only a few instances where that racial will be able to be used at a optimal level.
I loved the story aspect of personal stories in GW2, especially the intro of letting you choose X different back stories.
TULNAR MASTERRACE
Anyway...[/quote]
ACHSTUALLY TULNAR WOULD BE THE BAST CLYRYKSS
Yes that’s why I like them better than GW2s backstory thing. It offered nothing other than some quest dialogue.
I'm not really understanding how 'I resisted that effect because I am a Ren'Kai maybe since that gave me an extra 2% resistance' is better flavor because you'd need a way to notice it, wouldn't you?
Maybe some text that explicitly says that your racial bonus is the thing that cause the resistance this time?
Right but, in MMOs it's usually a little different, right?
The "Critical Focus" skill in Cardinal makes it so you full_crit on a 19 as well as a 20.
But you can also see your roll results. If you couldn't, you wouldn't 'know that you crit because of Critical Focus'.
Cardinal Trolls in my current test campaign don't have natural Critical Focus, but just streakily/randomly happen to Nat 20 crit really often. So one might 'assume that Trolls have a racial bonus to crit' when they don't, if you couldn't see the roll results.
If you stacked your passives and then your Racial was just '5% chance to resist Sleep' when you already stacked up to 35%, you probably aren't going to 'know' that your racial effect did anything. You could 'RP claim every time it happens' that it happened 'probably because you're a Vek', but you could also get into that annoying space where the Empyrean next to you always seems to resist the sleep and you don't despite your racial bonus.
So I'm trying to understand at what point it becomes information you can use for anything. I guess 'flavor' doesn't imply any real effect, but I'm then trying to see 'how is this better than a backstory?'
If I, the Empyrean, claim that I resist sleep more than the Vek because I trained it, and the RNG bears this out, the Racial Bonus of the Vek isn't contributing anything in my opinion.
Essentially, both are just bonuses that you can apply to your character. Whether players will min/max them or not is more related to the value and nature of the bonuses, not to whether they are handed out as racial or personal story based.
I also loved the personal stories in GW2, it was a nice touch! That surely enhances roleplaying and immersion.
As for the racial passives in ESO, I wouldn't say they play 0 part. They are not extremely impactful, but can definitely be handy while optimizing your build.
None of the passives themselves were very impactful, but they can give you a base to guild your character on. The bigger things like fire resist to counter fire vulnerability (it was impactful at release with the way resists worked, and allowed me to roll with one less fire resist jewelry than other vamps). The little things like Dumner having a skin shade that hides your vampireness
My point is that racials can be rolled into a character concept. Even if you don't role play or do anything with a character story (I don't), race having an impact helps you build that concept.
I'm fine with low to medium power racial traits. But please make them hold the same power through the life of the character. IE, don't make a racial be +2 STR, when at level 15 we have 20 STR and at endgame we will have 200 STR. Instead make the racial +5% STR
It's a Passive so I should expect my Passives to have an effect. If for some reason, I thought there was some bug, I could test it.
I'm not going to compare my Sleep Resist to some other character. I'm going to assume that they stacked their Sleep Resists differently than I did. For all I know, that Empyrean has Sleep Resist Passives from the Scolar's Academy. I'm not competing with other players who have SR. I just need my Sleep Resistance to work well enough that it does for me what I want it do.
The only competition I would need to worry about is whether my SR is high enough compared to my opponents Sleep.
I might expect to see some UI text telling me a Racial Active skill failed or succeeded, but I would not need UI text telling me that Passives are helping me because - they're Passives.
Racials are fine, most people are not going to get the full value out of them, because they aren’t playing at that high skill level.
Just like they’ll never use the “meta” at maximum efficiency. Especially if they’re using the streamer meta, which is usually behind.
- Tulio & Miguel
So, to clarify my statement with an example of where I think racials can be a detraction to immersion rather than an addition. Some races, such a dwarfs, are known to be more physical with their traits but if you want a fire-throwing mage in a dwarf toon, you may be sacrificing efficiency of build and feel that your dwarf just isn't smart enough to be a great mage thus reducing your level of immersion. For this reason I hope racials don't affect the combat/spell aspects of any race, so that all races can be just as effective no matter what combo race and class are used.
Why would your immersion be effected if you still be a fire mage?
Min/Maxing means that you sacrifice one area of the character build in order to max another area of the character build. IE; place minimal points in CHA in order to place max points in INT.
If you want a Dwarf to be a Fire-throwing Mage, you max the points you can in INT, you wear Magical armor instead of Physical armor, you choose Mage as your Primary Archetype and Mage as your Secondary Archetype and you choose Scholar's Academy as your Social Org. There might even be a Religion that provides Augments which boost Fire abilities.
There will be Racial Augments that affect Active Skills.
We can expect there to be Racial variants of Tanks and Mages and Bards.
How Racial Passives might affect Active Skills - we don't know, yet.
Min/max = pay 50%, get 80% power.
Fun/grief = pay 200%, get 60% power.
That was my understanding of min/max till very today. So, basically real definition of "min/max" is "fun/grief" in my terms, I guess. And I am probably not alone with it.
I see only meta and ways to counter it. Why bother about "pay 200% to get 60% power" without a way to reach the 100% power of meta build.
Well, it is fine if you are playing solo. But if I see fun builds in my group when we are doing challenging content and losing because of it than I feel that I have to waste my time agruing with that funny guy or to kick him and waste my time finding new less funny one.
Meta is what people expect you to use. It is generally considered the best, but I have yet to play a game where the general accepted meta was actually best.
Min/maxes will usually be ahead of the meta - because we are the ones that tell you what the meta is, and the rest of you generally just blindly follow it.
For that thread I am not interested in splitting "meta build" into the "current public meta which is not really the meta but rather generally considered the best build" and "the real meta and true best build, but for now it is known only by very small smount of nerds, dataminers and datascience enjoyers".
And surely not connected with this response, but is it possible to fully hide annoying ignored users with 10k+ posts who's only reason to exists at this forum is to mess with the terms to twist the flow of the conversation? I still able see them, sadly.
its about using your time in the most optimal way.
it's about building your character in the most optimal way. for example, if you put 50 points on int, you get 50% damage, but if you put 100 points on int, then you only get 70% damage. so maybe you do more dps if you put 50 points on int and 50 in casting speed, or 70 in int and 30 in casting, etc.
Yeah, it is the minimum effort to get the maximum output.
This, in Korela's example, a person that isn't getting 100% output is by definition not min/maxing.
To be fair, the example I gave above of people telling others what the meta is really is actually just a subset of min-maxers, it isn't the group as a whole.
I mean, there is an amount of incorrect I don't care about, and then there are things that are incorrect that I don't care about at all, but if you are very incorrect on something I do care about, I'll correct you.
I know, attempting to be correct in the things you say is an outlandish notion!
emphasis added
LOL.
The sad thing is, it's true.
In every game I have ever played, 90%+ of players just blindly follow a build guide.