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The Elder Scrolls Online is celebrating its 10th anniversary soon—and there are some big changes coming up in the pipeline. The biggest shake-up to this MMO, which has pretty admirably stood the test of time alongside its competition, is the introduction of subclassing—as announced in the latest ESO direct.
This grenade—filled with cool stuff, mind, but explosive all the same—thrown into the game’s balance ecosystem works as follows: In ESO, a character typically gets to choose a set of abilities from up to three skill lines in their class: The Templar, for instance, has the Aedric Spear, Dawn’s Wrath, and Restoring Light skill lines. With subclassing, though, players will get to choose skill lines from all classes—with a few limitations.
You need to be level 50 to access the system, and at least one of your skill lines will have to be from your base class. For example, if you’re a Templar, you could pick abilities from the Templar’s Aedric Spear line, the Dragon Knight’s Draconic Power skill line, and the Necromancer’s Bone Tyrant skill line. You could swap out Aedric Spear for the other templar skill lines, but nothing else.
There is one penalty: Skills from other classes cost twice as many skill points to use. This makes subclassing slightly more expensive, though given you get hundreds of skill points, it shouldn’t really be too much of a clamp on your character’s power, just how long it takes to put those skills together.
This, the direct boasts, expands the game’s seven base classes into “over 3,000” combinations—which is, uh, a little intense. Game director Rich Lambert seemed pretty relaxed about the whole thing in a post-preview Q&A—expressing that the team had done some extensive testing, and while “Power level will go up,” developers are “fine with where it is.”
It’s a very ambitious move for a 10-year old MMO to be making, turning ESO from a mono-class game into something with an ARPG-level amount of build options. But from a relative outsider’s perspective, it does somehow feel… well, right. The Elder Scrolls series has always been about cobbling together your own hero from a bunch of different options; and the subclassing system will allow you to do exactly that.
The new subclass system, along with the start of its Seasons of the Worm Cult structure, will kick off in June—so get your build calculators ready, this one’s going to be a doozy.
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Kurt Indovina
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