Brief Commentary on the Current PvP Enviroment

Draehl

I just wanted to comment on the current PvP environment as I've been rather frustrated as of late. Everyone is doing massive amounts of burst damage making the entire concept of sustained damage/pressure type builds 100% irrelevant. It feels to me like I'm forced to be either a massive burst build, or dedicate to being a 100% pure distraction tank or some cheeseball/borderline abusive build to hope to survive more than 5 seconds in Cyrodiil. Certain NB builds are perma dodging to gain better survivability than tanks. Sorcs with Ball Lightning are probably the most trollish build I've ever had the displeasure of encountering in any MMO- and I've certainly played my fair share. You're forced to slot a limited number of teleport or charge skills to have a hope of keeping up. No single skill should have as much going for it as Ball Lightning does and it at least feels like blatant developer favoritism.

I left another title to come to your game because of this same type of balance concerns and I'm beginning to consider looking for another simply because so little is being done in such a drastically imbalanced system. I don't expect perfect balance (no one should!) but would it really be so wrong to expect incremental skill tweaks on the mini-patches you release most Mondays? "We've reduced the damage of Wrecking Blow by 5%", "Ball Lighting absorbs are limited to 4 per cast", "Successive dodges cost 50% more" or even "The Cyrodiil Battle Spirit buff has been increased from 5000 to 8000." Okay, great, maybe that's not enough but you're making a visible effort to at least TRY instead of sitting on your hands either doing nothing about these issues or looking for some magic bullet solution that you likely will never find.

In any case I can very much appreciate some of the recent patches you've made to encourage players to spread out such as the Delve and Anchors changes as well as the overall improvements of 1.6- that being said I must say (with no spite in my tone) that in the real world if other tech firms manage their products as poorly as PvP is handled in most MMOs they will lose customers in droves. Game devs, particularly MMO devs are for some reason given a free pass on some of the most obvious issues. Not even the bugs that I KNOW can be difficult to pinpoint and fix- for those I am happy to be patient with you folks on, but simple small balance oriented number tweaks (we know take far less effort to implement) you should be far more liberal with trying on a live environment. Maybe the population of caring adult gamers with standards is small enough that its drowned out by the burst addled kids who are happy enough to implode each other in these zerg battles, but it feels like the standards of this genre are far too low. I'm only 30 but feeling like old man MMO- maybe I need to think about hanging my gamer hat up if these things frustrate me as they do. I've just seen these same mistakes made over and over again in this genre and it simply baffles me that you folks can't learn from your predecessor's mistakes.

I'll keep playing and continue to stay subscribed to support the game, despite not caring for the aesthetic store items. You've got a great core game to build off of and I hope the B2P/Console business model will be successful to the point that maybe you gain more needed developer resources to work on balance and content releases in a more timely manner.

Pirhana7_ESO

Alot of us are just hanging in there with this unbalanced system and things that make you go hmmm.... Camelot Unchained is still over a year away and this still seems to be the best thing until then with 3way siege warfare.

Soris

My thoughts exactly OP.. Couldn't have said it any better.

Cody

i faced some one today who did at LEAST 10 roll dodges, then managed to do a CC break, and still perform multiple uppercuts and charges, and STILL could roll dodge away when my teammates came. Crap like this has happened MULTIPLE times throughout my last few visits to vet server PvP.

PvP(at least in the vet servers) is a disgrace right now. Its all about "spam X skill" and "insane burst damage" there is literally almost NO resource management involved, no strategic usage of abilties, no timing required, NOTHING. idk what's worse, the unkillable LA tanks of pre 1.6, or.... this.

not to mention the atrocious lag.

/sigh

I will stay, despite how horrible PvP is right now. I've invested far to much to just quit over PvP being ruined(even though its the reason i bought the game in the first place:/)

to all y'all that like PVP being nothing but insane burst insta kill and "spam roll dodge and damage shields" PvP, then good for y'all, I hope y'all are having fun:/

i certainly am not. I may as well be playing call of duty due to the state of this games PvP

lujate

There's not a whole lot of competition in the RvR PvP market, so there's no real incentive to improve.

What is this "Camelot Unchained" of which you speak?

Sylveria_Relden

Camelot Unchained appears to be a "Dark Age of Camelot" reboot- I think the essential purpose is to bring back what was so original about DAoC's RvR, etc.

Haven't really delved into it too much, but if they manage to be successful I'm sure they'll gain a following. There was a lot of good about DAoC's RvR system- however, it wasn't all great, either. Tremendous imbalances between classes and realms, lots of cheating and exploits, etc. Personally, I managed mid-RR before I quit the game and by that time it was almost always dominated by the Hibernians (shroomers and bainshees mainly) and the new stuff they were releasing was more confusing than it was value-added. (EA had taken over by then.... go figure)

lujate

I've heard of Dark Age of Camelot,but i never played. Most people who talk about that game speak like it is something sacred, as if it walked on water (a certain amount of nostalgia i imagine).

Sylveria_Relden

It had a pretty great PvP system- and it was also semi-unique in the sense that you could really do large-scale PvP battles, massive amounts of area to do so (Frontiers/New Frontiers) and siege equipment, keep & tower ownership by guilds and alliances, etc. About 0%-75% timewise it was great- but toward the end, it was pretty predictable who would be able to win and hold what areas, etc. EA buying up Mythic sealed its fate, IMO.

I've yet to see another comparable game in terms of large-scale open PvP- but I've not yet been to Cyrodil in this game either. (didn't really come here for PvP, although it's piqued my interest) From what I've heard it's limited in scale and "match-based", but again since I don't know I can't confirm.

DAoC was definitely an experience. Nothing like having at least 150+ people in a single area, chaotically battling each other, people using siege equipment, people firing over walls, people storming through a gate to take a keep... the server would crash because of the sheer amount of activity. Very exciting stuff!

deepseamk20b14_ESO

In 1.6 people are still playing like 1.5. They go in and throw everything they have at a person and its all blocked or dodged. Then they realize they have run out of resources. In any case 1.6 to me made fights more tactical. Actually looking for openings, dodging, blocking when needed and not perma blocking (though people still do). A fight with a bad player will take a few seconds. A fight with a good player can take a few minutes. Personally I just did a complete respect and sent from magicka based to stamina. A pretty decent sized learning curve. So far though I've done good. One day I'll be as good as I was with the my magicka build I was so used to. The biggest lesson learned though is timing. One does not simply run in and attack with everything they got. Most people will lose doing this. Attack when appropriate and play defensively when needed.

I agree the game is terribly unbalanced but its possible to overcome it with practice. Slow it down, focus, and kill your enemy.

Draehl

deepseamk20b14_ESO wrote: »

I agree the game is terribly unbalanced but its possible to overcome it with practice. Slow it down, focus, and kill your enemy.

Some of it can be overcome, yes. But in regards to slowing it down that's my whole point. I've always played highly efficient sustained damage/offhealers in past MMOs (Affliction/Shadowpriest in WoW. Bloodmage in Vanguard. Necro/Monk in GW1. Necro in GW2. Shaman in Warhammer. Etc.) Suffice to say I'm very good at this particular role yet this game is excessively rewarding of doing burst to such to the point that playing sustained damage isn't viable because offense quite simply outclasses defense unless you're a pure tank doing next to no damage. Tack on a rather weak suite of DoTs (unless you're a DK - a couple of theirs are decent albeit melee range) and you're left with an environment wheres its either burst or pure tank.

RinaldoGandolphi

Offense better then defense?

BOL, Hardened Ward, Harness Magic, Dampen Magic, Dragon Blood, Scales, Cloak are the most complained about abilities in the game all defensive.

I'm harder to kill now on both my sorc and templar then I was in 1.5.

Cody

deepseamk20b14_ESO wrote: »

In 1.6 people are still playing like 1.5. They go in and throw everything they have at a person and its all blocked or dodged. Then they realize they have run out of resources. In any case 1.6 to me made fights more tactical. Actually looking for openings, dodging, blocking when needed and not perma blocking (though people still do). A fight with a bad player will take a few seconds. A fight with a good player can take a few minutes. Personally I just did a complete respect and sent from magicka based to stamina. A pretty decent sized learning curve. So far though I've done good. One day I'll be as good as I was with the my magicka build I was so used to. The biggest lesson learned though is timing. One does not simply run in and attack with everything they got. Most people will lose doing this. Attack when appropriate and play defensively when needed.

I agree the game is terribly unbalanced but its possible to overcome it with practice. Slow it down, focus, and kill your enemy.

if anything, PvP right now, imo, has the EXACT OPPOSITE meta, from what i've seen, its "highest quick burst damage and endless dodge/shield spam" that wins. I fail to see how any of that is "slowing down and killing your enemy"

1.5 was about block casting with LA tank set-up. 1.6 is about super high burst damage and seemingly infinite resource builds. I dare say the current meta could be compared to a COD game in terms of how fast people die and all these ridiculous builds that should not even be possible(15 roll dodges plus 3-5 uppercuts plus a few CC breaks and all the other abilities I have not mentioned like vigor, is an awful lot to use and not run out of stamina with:/)

in other words, I completely disagree with your statement.

Perhaps you have just had different encounters than I have(because I've had some truly ridiculous ones myself)