Elder Scrolls Online

[Mímir]

can you do the enchanting trick? raise your enchantment as much as possible, then enchant gear that raises your enchantment skill. then don that gear and enchant gear to raise your enchantment skill. rinse and repeat here. then enchant armour and weapons to do unbelievable damage.

No They are trying to have some balance - there's PVP and all that jazz so no room for "exploits". Although you can of course enchant, make potions, meals, beverages, armor and weapons and such.

My preference is to enchant bows, and sneak around. slower, but you can clear a roomful of peeps taking no damage at all, all the while acting as a sniper

Sneak mechanics in ESO are roughly the same, every class can sneak; vampires and khajiit are better at it, leather armor gives bonuses and so on; and it's a pivotal aspect of PVP. Not very realistic to have two armies of 50 heroes each side sneaking around and being invisible on the battlefield; but it's a nice niche where low level players can help the team by playing clever and high level players can get into a position to solo assassinate stuff deep behind enemy lines and get out alive. Of course, there are also skills and mechanics to counter sneaking. It adds some variety.

In general it's my impression that ESO has a lot more player-based mechanics than most MMO's. You can block and roll so timing matters (if you come up against a macro-type MMO player, you can just block his big damage macro and mitigate most of it, leaving him dry of resources and easy to kill), and there's a wide range of utilites (like sneak) that aren't directly put into stats for the player to see.

You have to carefully watch your resources and use the appropriate skills and abilities at the right time; rather than setup a large macro that take cooldown timers into account like in other MMO's. In ESO, you are actually sort of playing the game and not the user interface.

That also means even if you have a super op max level character, you can still be bad at the game and die all the time; and vice-versa. Stats and gear matters a little too much for my taste though; there are cookie-cutter builds in which everyone can have success if they can invest the time in getting the gear, levels and skills, but I reckon MMO's have to be that way due to the crowd they cater to. It has to be grindy and "rewarding".

There are some bugs and really heavy lag when you PVP in large battles, and it can be frustrating. A lot of horseback riding too when you die. And then getting killed by a lone ganker when you are on your horse on the way back to the fight you just got killed in. You have to level up your horse so it can go faster, otherwise you'll die from boredom getting from A to B if the gankers don't get you first. There's a lot of dying, so I'm sticking to an Altmer vampire Sorcerer that's excellent at sneaking and has a teleport skill so I can gtfo when I'm caught in a bad situation.

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All of the above refers to PVP mechanics and balance, in PVE it's impossible not to win. That's my major issue apart from the grind. More or less every character build you can come up with rocks in PVE, and you can waste mobs that are higher level than you with ease. Then you take your build to PVP and realize that it totally blows and all your theorycrafting was in vain. The PVE difficulty is way too easy; although towards the end-game there are more challenging dungeons you actually need 4 players to complete. Another thing is the group finder, which is terrible, plus the fact that everyone writes either French or German in group, even when they are capable of writing in English and know that there are non-german/french speaking folks in the group. Rude!

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I'd say it's definitely a game worth playing. Don't expect Skyrim or a regular TES game, it's something else than that. It is an MMO at heart, but you feel it the least when you are roaming the open Alliance War PVP-ground in Cyrodiil. When you get towards the end-game, you realize that it's going to be a long grind until you can compete with the better players, and that has sort of put me off for the moment.

Anyways, if you got the game come find me on Azura's Star, Aldmeri Dominion.

EDIT: ALSO the audio and music is absolutely top notch.

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