One of the things that the folks at Zenimax are focusing on in The Elder Scrolls Online’s upcoming update 21 is balancing the passive abilities of the game’s myriad races, as combat team dev ZOS_Gilliam announced today on the game’s official forum. He explains that there are a few reasons that the devs decided to tackle this particular issue in this update. Basically, it boils down to the fact that the devs feel like the current implementation limits players’ freedom to create and play the characters they want, whether that’s because some abilities just aren’t very useful, or because a certain race’s passives don’t provide anything unique, or simply because a certain class-race combination is mathematically superior.
The post also details the dev team’s process of reworking the racial passives as well as their goals for doing so. One of the biggest goals was to avoid situations wherein a certain playstyle has “only one option for what [is] viable” and to instead give players “more effective options when picking a race for each role in tanking, healing, or damage dealing.” In doing so, however, the devs also say that they want to make sure to “retain and enhance the unique feeling and gameplay patterns” of each race so that each one feels distinct and flavorful. The full post goes into a great deal of detail, and it also lists the specific changes that are being made to each race’s passives, so if you’re interested to know exactly what kind of changes you can expect to racial abilities in the base game when the Wrathstone DLC and its associated free patch goes live in February, be sure to check it out on the game’s official forums.Source: Official Forums
