ESO Dev News May 2015

The month of May had a few news worthy items such as the upcoming removal of the Veteran Rank XP band and an update on some of the most troublesome Templar bugs. Console is only a couple of weeks away and can now be pre-ordered, so there is bound to be a bunch of news in the coming month!

Safe travels in Tamriel!

Fraudulent Game Key Deactivation

One of the biggest notices sent out to many players this month concerns the deactivation of fraudulently obtained ESO game keys. Posted to the Forums, the ESO SubReddit and sent directly to players email accounts this notice was hard to miss. ZOS is going to deactivate all of the accounts using game keys that were obtained with stolen credit cards (or other fraudulent methods). A lot of players have posted that they had purchased an ESO account cheaply on places like G2A, however it seems that at least some of these have been illegally purchased, and so are not valid.

Fortunately for those players who are affected ZOS is not going to be going around and deleting and data – so all of your character progression, items and gold is safe. If you are affected then you should follow the instructions in your email which will instruct you to purchase a new game key or purchase ESO directly from the ESO Store.

ZOS have also provided a list of official retails of Elder Scrolls Online which can be viewed here.

If you have a deactivated game key it is probably wise to contact the seller of your key (so for example G2A) and explain the situation. Another way would be to contact your credit card provider as they may also have policies dealing with fraudulently obtained goods.

Removal of Veteran Rank XP Gain Band

So in the Forums a lot of players have been complaining about the lack of XP gain when completing dungeons with higher level friends. It seemingly made no sense to help complete a Veteran Rank 14 dungeon as a VR5 and receive no XP at all if you didn’t do enough damage. This will be changed, and means that any group of Veteran Ranked players will always get XP and loot from Group Dungeons, regardless of level differences. So a VR6 can join some VR14 players and complete a Veteran Group Dungeon and still get items and XP. For more information check out the original forum post below or just head directly to the forums over here.

ZOS_Gideon:

After some discussion and evaluation, we’ve decided to remove the veteran rank band. That means that if you’re VR and doing a dungeon with your VR buddies, you will get loot at the level of the instance. The level band that affects grouped players from 1-50 will remain unchanged.

Note: This change will come in a future patch, most likely the next incremental patch.

Update On Templar Bugs / Changes

For quite some time there has been a bit of anger in the Templar community over long standing bugs, cooldowns and issue with a number of skills. This month an update was given on a large forums thread dealing with these issues and concerns.

ZOS_GinaBruno:

As promised, below is an update for some of the issues called out in this thread. Note that we tried to focus on what sounded like potential bugs, and not necessarily all of the ability feedback.

• Eclipse does not work properly when using other abilities, such as Burning Talons.
  • We’re aware of this issue, and are working on a fix.
• Focused Charge animation still occasionally gets stuck, and has a global cooldown.
  • We’ll take another look and see why some of you are still getting stuck. As for the GCD, it’s an extremely small number and is intended for this ability. There was previously an issue where using this ability would lock you out of using other spells for a few seconds (which was not intended), and has since been fixed.
• You cannot get benefit from the Focused Healing passive if you rapidly cast Purifying Ritual and Breath of Life. You have to wait until the first HOT tick to get that passive work which is 2 seconds.
  • We’re aware, and working on a fix for this.
• Puncturing Strikes grants a CC immunity to every target it hits, regardless if they are hit by the knockback.
  • We looked into this, and found that the only player who gains CC immunity is the closest person who gets hit by the knockback. If you’re seeing otherwise, please pass along some additional information.
• The healing pool from Purifying Light disappears as soon as the mob has died.
  • This is currently working the way we intended, though we are making some tweaks to this ability in the next major update.
• Projectiles from Reflective Light are missing the target when line of sight is lost.
  • We’d like to request some additional information for this issue so we can investigate further.
• Standing in Extended Ritual or Channeled Focus does not give you any healing bonus to Repentance (Focused Healing Passive).
  • We’re aware of this issue, and are still investigating a potential fix for it.
• Repentance doesn’t scale with Mending passive, and also only scales with Magicka.
  • We’ll be fixing the issue where Mending isn’t increasing the healing on this ability in our next major update. It was originally by design that Repentance scales off your Max Magicka, but with the changes introduced in Update 6, it makes more sense to make this scale off your highest stats as the ability has no cost. This will be addressed in a future update.
• Rushed Ceremony has a noticeable animation delay.
  • The launch frame of this ability is just slower than some of the other abilities by design. Since Rushed Ceremony is already very powerful, we’re ok with the fact that part of the skill of using this ability effectively is being able to anticipate damage.
• Sun Fire has a slow projectile speed.
  • This will be addressed in the next major update.
• Templar instant casts with long animations can be interrupted.
  • If you’re seeing this particular issue, we’d like some additional information so we can investigate.
• Unable to mount after healing someone that’s still in combat.
  • This is actually linked to guards and their behavior in combat; we’re going to re-evaluate and see what we can do to improve this issue.

As you can see there are quite a few issues there. A lot of players are unhappy with the cooldown remaining on Focused Charge and the slight delay with Rushed Ceremony. There is good news though, with the multiple bug fixes and the potential improvement to Sun Fire’s travelling speed!

No Delay To Console Release

Some players were worried about the approval status of ESO as it became apparent that ESO was no longer in the xBox “coming soon” section. This was just a small transition as it has now arrived in the pre-order section. Elder Scrolls Online can now be pre-ordered for both xBox One and PS4!

You can pre-purchase ESO on xBox and then download it, ready to play on the first day of release. You can also pre-order the physical copy, however this may not let you download the full game until after the release date. You can also pre-order ESO on PS4 however at the moment you can only order the physical copy.