General:Thieves Guild Deep Dive: Cyrodiil Improvements

Originally published February 29, 2016. The original article can be found here.

Our second deep dive article focuses on the changes and improvements coming to Cyrodiil and its campaigns.

Before we begin, we want to reiterate that improving the performance in Cyrodiil remains one of our top priorities. While we had some small changes go into the most recent incremental patches on PC, the Thieves Guild base game patch will include some bigger items in an effort to improve the overall performance. This includes making some adjustments and optimizations to ability cost checks, armor bonuses and how abilities interact with the Champion System. These changes will not affect how the abilities work at their core, just how we treat them on the backend. After these changes are released, we will continue to roll out fixes and improvements in future incremental patches and updates.

New Item Merchant

We're excited to welcome Adhazabi Aba-daro the Golden, a new merchant selling rare items. She will appear in Cyrodiil for only 2 days each week over the weekend, and sells rare items for high amounts of AP or gold. These items are the same ones you can acquire from our 4-player dungeons, Pledges, and includes highly-desired Alliance War item sets. She will only sell a specific type of armor piece each time she appears; one week she will sell just shoulder pieces of light, medium and heavy types, but the next week she may sell helmets. Visit Adhazabi every weekend to see what she has for sale!

During her scheduled times, Adhazabi will appear in the following locations:

• Western Elsweyr Gate for members of the Aldmeri Dominion
• Northern Highrock Gate for members of the Daggerfall Covenant
• Southern Morrowind Gate for members of the Ebonheart Pact

Reintroduction of Forward Camps

In this patch, we'll be bringing back Forward Camps! These deployable respawn locations were previously available to use in ESO, and were temporarily disabled. Now that we're reintroducing them, you'll be able to purchase your own Forward Camp directly from Siege merchants and place them just like regular siege weapons. There can only be 10 Forward Camps on the entire field of battle in Cyrodiil per Alliance, and they will still have limitations on how close than can be deployed near each other. A Forward Camp will have 20 respawns available, and once those are used up, it destroys itself. Much like other siege weapons, Forward Camps can be set on fire and destroyed by enemy players!

There are some key changes coming with the reintroduction of Forward Camps that should be noted:

• You may only respawn at a Forward Camp if you are within the radius of a Forward Camp when you die.
• When you choose to respawn at a Forward Camp, there will be a two minute timer preventing you from respawning at any other Forward Camp again until that timer expires.
• Forward Camps degrade much faster than regular Siege weapons, so use them wisely.

Campaign Updates

When we publish Thieves Guild next month, the Azura's Star and all non-Veteran Campaigns will feature a non-Champion ability ruleset as an added layer to the standard scoring rules. No changes will be made regarding how Campaign scores are tallied; however, in these campaigns no Champion System passive abilities will be available for use. You will still earn Champion Points; you just cannot spend those points while in those select Campaigns.

We hope you enjoyed reading this latest deep dive, and we look forward to seeing you on the battlefield!

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