Champion Points in Elder Scrolls Online were designed as a way to progress your character past Level 50.
Although it is possible to receive up to 3600 Champion Points from play, the Champion Point system (“CP 1.0”) pre-Update 29 has had to be capped at CP 810 for some time.
This is because of power creep. Players with a lot of CP have been noticeably stronger than players without CP.
The Old System – CP 1.0
The old system had 9 Constellations. Each Constellation had 4 or 5 passives which could be invested in. Once you reached a certain number of CP invested, you gained additional passives – at 10, 30, 75, and 120 CP for each constellation.
Some Constellations were completely useless for certain builds, e.g. only Magicka characters would invest into The Apprentice.
There was also a problem known as Jump Points, which only theorycrafters and players very active in the official Forums understood. Basically, the CP 1.0 system rounded down to the nearest whole percentage. If you invested enough CP into a passive that the User Interface told you that you’d get a 14.98% boost, you would actually only get 14%. A lot of players never realised this, so wasted some CP.
The New System – CP 2.0
Brian Wheeler explained on ESO Live that there are two types of progression: horizontal, which allows your characters to learn more skills, and vertical, which gives your character more power.
- The old CP system (CP 1.0) was very much power-based, which is how players with higher CP ended up much more powerful than players with lower CP.
- The new system (CP 2.0) has been designed more around horizontal progression. Therefore the Champion Point cap has now been lifted and you will be able to spend all of your CP up to 3600.
Constellations
The new system has only 3 Constellations instead of 9. The Constellations are now named:
- Red – Fitness
- Blue – Warfare
- Green – Craft
And instead of being able to invest in any of the CP passives that you like, you can only start with some of them. More become unlocked as you invest CP into the tree.
Sometimes you need to invest CP into a perk point that you might feel you don’t need, in order to unlock a perk that you require for your build.
Let’s take the Craft tree as an example:
You will see that six passives are available at the start. Three of these, off on the right-hand side, are independent. A further three, coloured yellow, begin perk trees.
Let’s say I wanted to unlock the very exciting Homemaker perk – You have a 10% chance to find a second furnishing plan whenever you find a furnishing plan. How would I do that?
I have several options, depending on which passives I consider important, and how many CP I have available to invest.
Route 1
If I’m short of CP or very focused on crafting, I could use the following route:
- 10 points into Gilded Fingers (increasing my gold gained)
- then 10 points into Fortune’s Favor (increasing the gold I find in treasure chests and safeboxes)
- 15 points into Inspiration Boost (increasing my crafting inspiration)
- 50 points into Meticulous Disassembly (improving the chance of extracting tempers when deconstructing or refining)
- 15 points into Master Gatherer (reducing the time it takes to harvest nodes)
- 10 points into Plentiful Harvest (giving me a chance at receiving double drops from a material node)
- and finally 25 points into Homemaker.
- TOTAL: 135 CP.
Route 2
Or if I’m more interested in Fishing than Crafting, and have more CP to spare, I could put:
- 10 points into Breakfall (reducing my fall damage)
- 15 points into Wanderer (reducing the cost of wayshrine usage)
- 10 points into Steadfast Enchantment (increasing the time it takes for Weapon enchantments to wear out)
- 10 points into Rationer (adds 10 minutes to the duration of food and drink per stage)
- 75 points into Liquid Efficiency (giving a 10% chance of not using up a potion or poison whenever I consume it)
- 25 points into Angler’s Instincts (increasing my chance of catching higher-quality fish by 10%)
- 50 points into Reel Technique (decreasing the time it takes for a fish to bite by 25%)
- then finally 25 points into Homemaker.
- TOTAL: 220 CP.
Obviously these are just two examples of possible routes.
Stages
Jump points no longer exist. Now there are Stages and the UI shows clearly what percentage bonus you are receiving, and how many CP must be invested to increase the bonus.
Champion Point Stars
You will notice from the diagrams above that there are different colours of Champion Point star.
- Yellow are normal passives which begin perk trees, and are functional at all times.
- Perk points which are the same colour as the constellation are slottable on the new Champion Bar (see below).
- Purple perk points lead to sub-constellations.
Another advantage of the new CP 2.0 system is that sub-constellations can be added for future expansion. Every constellation can have three sub-constellations, but currently only Warfare has any.
For example, the first sub-constellation, Staving Death, allows you to rapidly adjust your CP for different types of play.
- Hardy reduces the damage you take from Martial attacks.
- Elemental Aegis reduces the damage you take from Magical attacks.
- Resilience reduces the damage you take from Critical strikes in PvP.
The Champion Bar
A further complication in CP 2.0 is that not all passives are functional at all times. As already mentioned, perks whose colour match their tree must be slotted onto the new Champion Bar.
Only 12 buffs can be slotted onto the Champion Bar at a time (4 from each constellation).
If we look again at Route 1 above, my attempt to reach the Homemaker perk point, you’ll notice that several of the perks along the way are green. These include Meticulous Disassembly, Master Gatherer, Plentiful Harvest and Homemaker. Each of these must be slotted onto the new Champion Bar before they become active.
If however, I decided to go with Route 2, the green perks include Rationer, Liquid Efficiency, Angler’s Instincts, Reel Technique and Homemaker. These five perks cannot all be slotted at the same time!
In practice, I am unlikely to care about increasing the time that my food is active for when I am not in combat. Similarly, I only need to worry about slotting Angler’s Instincts and Reel Technique while engaged in PvF (Player vs Fish) activities. But this example shows how a player will need to think carefully about their Champion Bar and adjust which perks are slotted, based on the content they are doing.
Horizontal Progression
The key idea behind CP 2.0 is that High CP characters won’t be STRONGER but will be MORE FLEXIBLE.
Your chosen buffs from the red and blue trees will depend on your role in the content you’re playing (Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer) and primary resource (Health, Magicka, Stamina).
It will be easier for a high CP character to change role by switching out which buffs are slotted on their Champion Bar.
Rich Lambert, ESO Game Director, suggested that you will start progressing horizontally somewhere around the 1200-1400 CP mark.
Other Important Points
There are no plans to increase the Gear Cap from CP 160. (Something which a few players were expecting once the Sticker Book was introduced.)
ZOS are still planning to have both CP and No-CP PvP available. (Rich and a lot of the team prefer no-CP PvP).
Holy Divines, this is Too Complicated!
It’s going to be complicated. That’s why ZOS are allowing us two weeks to play with different builds and adjust for free.
Our friends Alcast & Woeler have some initial CP builds at ESO-Hub. These will be refined over time.
