I have a friend who is an ESO lore nerd and owns this, so this is promising, but the gameplay being that bad kinda turns me off tbh
is this for PvP or PvE? Requiring frame-perfect timing for PvE content sounds like a mind-bogglingly weird design decision
It's not frame perfect stuff, it's like you do a light attack, then a skill cast as close as possible to it actually firing as you can, then another light attack as soon as that actually fires, then the global cooldown (1 second) should be up and you can cancel the animation with another skill cast, and so on, and you generally want to be within less than .1 seconds off that mark on average. It's not hard especially with addons that can give you a metronome for the timing, but it's absolute murder on your hands over the length of a dummy parse.
The dumbest thing is is that if you do that perfectly you gain about 15% more DPS, but the community acts like it's where all the damage comes from. Like doing it well or doing it poorly means a difference of a few thousand DPS, while just maintaining a decent rotation and having the gear and champion point perks you need will cover almost all of your actual damage output. But literally every single resource on ESO DPS focuses on animation canceling and everyone acts like it's some esoteric art and the key to everything, when the actual key is to just use the right skills and also have like 5,000+ attack/spell damage from your gear and buffs, while also somehow having a 75+% crit rate and a +100% or higher crit damage bonus, which will more than triple your damage output versus having 3,000 attack/spell damage, a %50 crit chance, and like +40% crit damage. In that case the former can literally ignore the animation canceling completely and still do like 80K DPS and the latter can animation cancel perfectly and not break 20K.
gameplay sounds pretty sus, might stay away
does it improve with friends?
Probably, I could never get mine to play. Is it on sale for like $8 right now? If so it's fun enough for that and it'll remain enjoyably long enough to get through all the vanilla storyline (which is absurdly long and if you do all 3 faction main quests and the free Morrowind chapter story you will have literally seen maybe two thirds of the total content in the game).
The bigger problem is that the endgame content is really... mediocre. DPS is, despite what the community breathlessly insists, primarily a gear check paired with a really obnoxious thing where you're animation canceling two things per second. In dungeons healer is just a 3rd DPS that maybe tosses down a HoT AoE and some stam/magic recovery stuff, while in trials they actually need to be fully specced with gear to buff their team and also fully specced into raw healing. Tanks make the boss sit in one place by pushing the taunt button once every 15 seconds, and that's pretty much it because there's very limited AoE taunt ability (it requires a specific armor set and specific moves to do) and they just removed soft-taunts to help gather trash completely for literally no reason. The overall community approach to dungeons is toxic as hell, while trials are paradoxically a little more relaxed but also are mechanically sparse and kind of boring.
So basically, do you like The Elder Scrolls setting and want to see all the cool places that you read about in the lore but the mainline games eschew in favor of "wot if generic high fantasy land #1245?"? If so it's worth getting when it's on sale cheap. If you want a good MMO with longevity to it and don't care about Elder Scrolls stuff, skip it.
... I don't think good MMO's exist, honestly. I'm not sure if that factors in here, but I was mostly interested it as a less grindy multiplayer game. I have multiple friends who love MMO's but I could never sink my teeth into them, as they're kinda boring with the repeated grinding for levels and point-and-click combat.
I will say that for all its faults, it's not super grindy in terms of like a BDO style "ok so now you're going to run in a circle for 12 hours straight one shotting everything you see and if you do this every single day then after a hundred days you will have gained a single level" endgame grinding shit. There's a lot of timegates on certain progression things, like riding skills and learning traits for gear crafting, and getting a character to level 50 the first time can take a few hours of grinding once you're through the story, but past that you'll get a ton of free XP daily which you can collect with just a single random normal dungeon run which helps with getting to the 160 champion point gear cap and once you're there you're set because gear will never need to be reground once acquired at that level because they don't ever increase the level or gear cap.
hey man you could have just had a sign that says "stay away" like smh
