u/Absalom98

The most common response I've seen to most bits of criticism of many of NM's mechanics is "it's simple, just coordinate, just kill the Calamitous boss before you do Skirmish, just communicate in the group, bro." Alright, let's dissect that a bit:

I play on PS, where typing more than 3 words out is agonizingly long, in a zone with quickly respawning enemies that shred you in seconds, meaning you can't just sit somewhere and type. You have groups of randoms, with everyone hyper focused on their goals - they're not there to kill the roaming boss, they're there to do the skirmish. Here's an example of how communication works in teams of randoms:

Last night, a group I was in was doing the werewolf boss. He got bugged out and stuck in his invulnerability phase. Several of us recognized it and told people in chat to reset boss. What do you think happened? Half the team continued the unwinnable fight, literally for 15 minutes before they died. Conveying information to a group of randoms doesn't work and there are always several people in the group that don't follow instructions or hell, may not even understand what you're saying...

Add to that that often, people in your group aren't even speaking the same language. Onto my next experience: the Raid.

The Raid requires pitch perfect coordination from all players. You need several smaller groups, each doing their orb thing, delivering it quickly or everyone wipes. So imagine how great it was last night where we tried to do the Trial for 4 hours, only managing to get past the first orb phase, in no small part because ZOS sucks ass at explaining anything in the Trial, but also because about 4 people in the group were French. So those of us who knew what had to be done couldn't even explain it to them.

ESO desperately needs better communication tools, that are universal across languages, that are quick to use for people on consoles and don't require typing. Emotes aren't bad but very limiting, and I'm not even sure if they get translated in chat. Something like pings that everyone in team gets alerted to, pins with distinct markings that can be added to maps the whole team sees, etc.

If ZOS expects hardcore zones like NM to work, where teamwork is a necessity and coordination is key, the least they could do is give players some tools to work with, and not just relying on trial and error and looking information up online...

Bosses give you like 15 points while the mindless dailies give you 40 points each? You can complete like 10 dailies in the time it takes you to group up and kill a single boss. Dailies are the most solo-friendly content in NM, so maybe ZOS wanted players to be able to get to 10k points solo?

But like, why don't Brazen bosses give you 100 points, Ardent 150, and so on? Isn't grouping up and killing bosses and such the point of NM? I'm not sure what the incentive will be to do so once I have all shards and I finish the dungeons.

Skirmishes are so bullshit difficult, you need like 20 people running around to have a chance and even then it's a meat grinder. You can spend 15 minutes doing a skirmish, only for a Calamitous boss to randomly stroll in and screw you over. How ZOS thought a Calamitous boss just wandering in the middle of a skirmish was good design is beyond me.

If group content is the focus, why are we not allowed to warp directly to players? Instead, you can only warp to the Plaza, then have to go through the exhilirating, incredible experience of running past hordes of enemies, while the group sits and waits for 10 minutes at a boss. Truly some unforgettable memories.

I like the bosses and the actual group fights, I think they're interesting. It's everything surrounding those fights that sucks ass. But as of right now, once I do each dungeon and the trial once, I'm off. If you've killed all the bosses, you'll have all the mythic leads. I'll grind the boring dailies each day to get to 10k, they just isn't any point to doing any of the content repeatedly - you'll rarely get an expensive motif page, but otherwise it's just overland gear and treasure. This was the number 1 thing ZOS needed to do right to keep players coming back throughout the event, and they didn't.

It was the same problem the Writhing Wall event had and it's still present here.

I get the bosses and dungeons are meant to be group content, sure. But the regular overland enemies are so overtuned it's abysmal. Everyone just runs past them because it takes too long to kill them and there's no purpose to doing so. If they die, they respawn and use the extended revive invulnerability period to run to wherever they need to go as quickly as possible, grab the objective, rinse and repeat.

Oh and as for the bosses. Don't bother even trying to do them unless you have like an 10+ group. Even the lowest tier are for like a 5+ group. We tried to do one of the calamitous bosses with 7 people in our group and it took like 15 minutes to beat it down.

My fear is that, unless you have a stable group to run around with, you're going to bounce off the Night Market pretty fast. 95% of players you encounter don't want to fight enemies, they're just trying to complete the mundane dailies as quickly as possible.