How to fight a mega zerg

Crown

Preliminary draft is up here: https://goo.gl/dBqnAE

I'm hoping to finish it over the weekend when I have more time.

You're all welcome to comment here or in the Google Doc itself.

VaranisArano

Preliminary comment: the list of AOEs and what works well and what doesn't in high lag situations is sobering. Thank you for testing them.

I hope someone at ZOS takes a look at how the different AOEs which are smaller group's best option for dealing with large groups and stacked raids are actually performing (or not) under pressure.

And as always, its more proof that ZOS has to fix the lag if we are going to have a balanced PVP experience.

kringled_1

Nice start. I'll have to see if any of the settings changes help (although I'm on average much less likely to disconnect than my guild mates). Unfortunately at the small group size I'm usually at (3-4) we mostly have to rely on either other groups or LOS and hoping we can draw off a few of the less disciplined/surfers. Sometimes it works, sometimes no one follows, frequently we get run over.
My experience with shalks in high lag is not as consistent as yours. Sometimes it's fine, sometimes the initial animation doesn't play but the ability still goes off, sometimes both animations play but I don't see damage numbers which leaves me guessing as to whether or not it went off.

Crown

VaranisArano wrote: »

I hope someone at ZOS takes a look at how the different AOEs which are smaller group's best option for dealing with large groups and stacked raids are actually performing (or not) under pressure.

I believe that @ZOS_BrianWheeler said on one of the ESO Live casts about 2 years ago (I could be way off on timing) that a small group should not be able to beat a large group - or something along those lines. I'm sure that we would all love an update on the combat team's intent for PvP numbers, and what their goals are for likelihood of specific sized groups being able to win vs other specific sized groups.

Based on the following:

• Groups have equal skill levels
• A very high chance is seen as 90%
• A high chance is seen as 75%
• A medium chance is seen as 50%
• A low chance is seen as 25%
• A very low chance is seen as 10%

There should be reasonable GOALS as set by the combat / pvp teams:

• Two groups of 12 should have a medium chance to win against each other.
• A group of 12 should have a low chance of winning against a group of 24, largely based on how well the group executes a strategy.
• A group of 12 should have a very low chance of winning against a group of 48.
• It should not be impossible for a group of 12 to win vs any other sized group if they use the right strategy.
• Lag should not be one of the conditions for winning (as it is now, a group of 72 wins vs anything else)

Steelshiv

Crown wrote: »

Preliminary draft is up here: https://goo.gl/dBqnAE

I'm hoping to finish it over the weekend when I have more time.

You're all welcome to comment here or in the Google Doc itself.

Awesomee so far and something I've been meaning to do myself! I'll comment later when I'm not on my phone ^_^

Reverb

Nova (Templar Ult): Forget about it. It might show up 20 seconds late on the other side of the map.

Truth

Ahtu

Crown wrote: »

Preliminary draft is up here: https://goo.gl/dBqnAE

I'm hoping to finish it over the weekend when I have more time.

You're all welcome to comment here or in the Google Doc itself.

How do you defeat an army? Form your own army and have competent raid leads. An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.

Sandman929

Ahtu wrote: »

Crown wrote: »

Preliminary draft is up here: https://goo.gl/dBqnAE

I'm hoping to finish it over the weekend when I have more time.

You're all welcome to comment here or in the Google Doc itself.

How do you defeat an army? Form your own army and have competent raid leads. An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.

Is that a Jack Handy quote? Because that doesn't make sense at all. Wouldn't the army of lions beat the one leader lion then kill the sheep?

Didgerion

IDK what's the goal of this document...

To me it is a sarcastic post to bring ZOS' attention on mega zerg groups and on the thing that there is no (healthy) way to fight mega zergs.

Best way to fight zerg groups as of the current date is to go to the other side of the map and find solo players or small groups to fight against. You get less lag and a chance to actually fight.

The game needs something to counter those zergs....a simple trick to fix Zergs would be to redo Soul Shatter passive for example.

Let it produce a chain of explosions when you die with an exponential damage increase.
Firstly let it create a small explosion to the enemy soul that landed the killing blow (~50 damage)
Then if there is another soul nearby (5-8m) then make the second explosion (~75 damage)
Then if there is another soul nearby then make the third explosion (~150 damage)
Then if there is another soul nearby then make the forth explosion (~350 damage)
.....
Then if there is the 10th soul nerby then make the tenth explosion (5k damage)
....
Then if there is the 15th soul nerby then make the 15th explosion (15k damage)

The chain continues until a soul dies or there are no souls nearby.

That will ensure that a zerg member will die for every player they smash....that's fair imo and will make a zerg group think twice when forming.

VaranisArano

Crown wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

I hope someone at ZOS takes a look at how the different AOEs which are smaller group's best option for dealing with large groups and stacked raids are actually performing (or not) under pressure.

I believe that @ZOS_BrianWheeler said on one of the ESO Live casts about 2 years ago (I could be way off on timing) that a small group should not be able to beat a large group - or something along those lines. I'm sure that we would all love an update on the combat team's intent for PvP numbers, and what their goals are for likelihood of specific sized groups being able to win vs other specific sized groups.

Based on the following:

• Groups have equal skill levels
• A very high chance is seen as 90%
• A high chance is seen as 75%
• A medium chance is seen as 50%
• A low chance is seen as 25%
• A very low chance is seen as 10%

There should be reasonable GOALS as set by the combat / pvp teams:

• Two groups of 12 should have a medium chance to win against each other.
• A group of 12 should have a low chance of winning against a group of 24, largely based on how well the group executes a strategy.
• A group of 12 should have a very low chance of winning against a group of 48.
• It should not be impossible for a group of 12 to win vs any other sized group if they use the right strategy.
• Lag should not be one of the conditions for winning (as it is now, a group of 72 wins vs anything else)

Yeah, mine is a little less numerical, and more like "a smaller but more organized group should have a reasonable chance against a larger but disorganized group".

So I look at that list of AOEs that aren't working properly - AOEs that are supposed to be the tool smaller organized groups use to take on larger disorganized groups - and can't help but notice that something seens broken.

The outnumbered team is already disadvantaged due to numbers, so its a shame that ZOS' failure to address lag puts them at a great disadvantage because their skills don't work properly.

Ruckly

The best counter to these groups is to log off. I have a 100% success rate doing this. I think it was even one of the recommendations given by one of the people who run these groups. Or you can log onto the faction doing this and go fight the 3rd faction. They are somewhat limited by queue times the offending faction. 150 queue vs 3 bars for another faction. I have a pretty good build for taking on these groups but it is difficult to apply in practice. It uses all instant cast skills. High success rate of going off. Even so there isn't really any leveler except maybe fire treb so it comes down to statistics rather than greatness.

Ajax_22

Sandman929 wrote: »

Ahtu wrote: »

Crown wrote: »

Preliminary draft is up here: https://goo.gl/dBqnAE

I'm hoping to finish it over the weekend when I have more time.

You're all welcome to comment here or in the Google Doc itself.

How do you defeat an army? Form your own army and have competent raid leads. An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.

Is that a Jack Handy quote? Because that doesn't make sense at all. Wouldn't the army of lions beat the one leader lion then kill the sheep?

Alexander the Great actually.

Recremen

Crown wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

I hope someone at ZOS takes a look at how the different AOEs which are smaller group's best option for dealing with large groups and stacked raids are actually performing (or not) under pressure.

I believe that @ZOS_BrianWheeler said on one of the ESO Live casts about 2 years ago (I could be way off on timing) that a small group should not be able to beat a large group - or something along those lines. I'm sure that we would all love an update on the combat team's intent for PvP numbers, and what their goals are for likelihood of specific sized groups being able to win vs other specific sized groups.

Based on the following:

• Groups have equal skill levels
• A very high chance is seen as 90%
• A high chance is seen as 75%
• A medium chance is seen as 50%
• A low chance is seen as 25%
• A very low chance is seen as 10%

There should be reasonable GOALS as set by the combat / pvp teams:

• Two groups of 12 should have a medium chance to win against each other.
• A group of 12 should have a low chance of winning against a group of 24, largely based on how well the group executes a strategy.
• A group of 12 should have a very low chance of winning against a group of 48.
• It should not be impossible for a group of 12 to win vs any other sized group if they use the right strategy.
• Lag should not be one of the conditions for winning (as it is now, a group of 72 wins vs anything else)

I think that's a bit of an oversimplification of what he said, but the rest of this still looks like it's working towards a good analysis. With that said, I think we need to break down your numbers cases into more specific engagement types, because without discussing them these don't really help us understand the PvP dynamic.

What precisely, for instance, is it meant to take on 48 players? Let's take a few extreme examples and then work in towards the middle ground where the situations intersect. In one dimension, we have a situation where the 12 players and 48 players are all stacked on the same spot. They all attack exactly at the same time with their best AoE damage. Unrealistic for now, obviously, but let's take another. In another dimension of the problem space, the 12 players are in some inaccessible/safe location, and they lure or pull each of the 48 players into them one at a time, never truly fighting the whole 48 even though they're all in a potential engagement space. We will consider the opposite problem of 48v1 to be in that same vector. Let us return to the situation where two groups are stack on each other, but consider the separate cases where only one uses their attacks all at the same time while the other does nothing, and where both groups are spamming their attacks, but with the timing spread out so that nobody is getting an attack off at the same time as someone else in their group.

These different situations all represent distinct elements of any encounter. In the first, we have coordinated damage versus coordinated damage. In the second, we have a "dotting the i" situation, where most of a group is kept from participating in a key moment of a battle. Then we have a "surprise attack" situation, where only one group gets to do damage to the other, and finally we have uncoordinated damage versus uncoordinated damage. All of these scenarios (and doubtless some more that I forgot) play out during any combat engagement. For example, two groups may go at each other doing a combination of steady uncoordinated damage while trying to line up the timing/location of their coordinated strike, only for one to suddenly surprise the other and get their push in first, possibly after luring the other group around a corner. In such a situation we actually have all elements here on display.

Now that we've teased out the types of engagements, we can start examining what we actually find to be acceptable odds. For example, let us take the coordinated damage versus coordinated damage scenario. Here, the tipping point is how much damage you think someone should be able to take before dying. This is a combination of how much health/resistance/damage reduction you think should be possible, how high someone's damage numbers should conceivably go, and what the corner cases are for how those line up with high and low numbers of players. For example, how many players spamming Impulse in the exact same microsecond should it take to guarantee a kill, no matter how high your health or resistance is stacked and how low their spell power is? How does this change if they all set off a Destruction Staff ult at the same time? What about a healthy dose of Dawnbreakers? Answering these questions helps us define the line between overperforming builds and peak player performance. I don't care who you are and how high your resistances are, for example, if you want to sit in the middle of literally 48 steel tornadoes. That should not be possible even in the tankiest builds against people in non-set white gear. Good builds should get you far, but not THAT far on their own.

What about our "dotting the i" situation, though? Well, that is the realm of player skill, using the terrain and environment to their advantage in order to remain safe from most of the aforementioned 48 steel tornadoes. Here, there is no inflection point. If 48 players want to trickle in one by one around a corner and into 12 waiting burst attacks, then that is their prerogative. They shouldn't be able to magically go through walls just because they keep falling for the same trick. Literally the only thing ZOS can do to make this situation harder is to buff snares and nerf movement so that the large group can just overwhelm the smaller group with slows before they're even able to get around the corner. OH WAIT

Next we have the "surprise attack" situation. Again, this is player skill. Stop getting juked. Get a better raid lead. Naturally, I'm not talking about stacking 48 people in stealth (this is generally considered a "*** move"), but it is not only common for one group to get their timed damage off faster and in a better position than the opposing raid, it is the most defining element of large group play. You can't fix it and it isn't broken.

Finally, let's consider the uncoordinated damage versus uncoordinated damage situation. The tipping point now is very similar to our first scenario, only instead of worrying about how many damage sources someone should be able to survive in the same instant, we're concerned with how much of a continuous stream of nonfatal attacks someone should be able to sustain with healing. This is actually a little bit easier after the first problem is solved, because you can now take your old numbers for individual damage, tabulate some reasonable estimate of DPS that an uncoordinated group could get off, and compare this to heals per second for your best healer builds.

So yeah, 12 people should be able to take on "any number" of players, but they should have to utilize, and their opponents should have to fail to utilize, the skill-based aspects of combat mentioned above. And groups with large numbers are almost always going to have an advantage to mitigate the skill-based bonuses. Oh, you want to drag the zerg around that corner while rolling around the third floor of a keep? Sure, you got some of them, but oops half of them when around and now you're sandwiched and dead. You got a great bomb off against one part of a giant zerg and killed like 24 people? That's great but while you were pushing in the other 24 people were charging their attacks and now they're pushing into YOU while your tank is empty, many proxies, dead. And as above, this is completely normal and expected and nothing should be done to change it (not that anything actually could be done). Fighting larger groups is hard. Numbers mean something. Even if you have the best mind games on the planet, a large enough group of extremely average individuals are going to eventually overtake you. It should only be when the opponents completely and repeatedly fail to do literally anything right that troop numbers should stop meaning anything.

Sandman929

Ajax_22 wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

Ahtu wrote: »

Crown wrote: »

Preliminary draft is up here: https://goo.gl/dBqnAE

I'm hoping to finish it over the weekend when I have more time.

You're all welcome to comment here or in the Google Doc itself.

How do you defeat an army? Form your own army and have competent raid leads. An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.

Is that a Jack Handy quote? Because that doesn't make sense at all. Wouldn't the army of lions beat the one leader lion then kill the sheep?

Alexander the Great actually.

He wasn't great with the quotes...either that, or he didn't understand the animal kingdom very well.

Ajax_22

Sandman929 wrote: »

Ajax_22 wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

Ahtu wrote: »

Crown wrote: »

Preliminary draft is up here: https://goo.gl/dBqnAE

I'm hoping to finish it over the weekend when I have more time.

You're all welcome to comment here or in the Google Doc itself.

How do you defeat an army? Form your own army and have competent raid leads. An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.

Is that a Jack Handy quote? Because that doesn't make sense at all. Wouldn't the army of lions beat the one leader lion then kill the sheep?

Alexander the Great actually.

He wasn't great with the quotes...either that, or he didn't understand the animal kingdom very well.

Or maybe he was talking about personality, since lion and sheep don't actually form armies.

Sandman929

Ajax_22 wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

Ajax_22 wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

Ahtu wrote: »

Crown wrote: »

Preliminary draft is up here: https://goo.gl/dBqnAE

I'm hoping to finish it over the weekend when I have more time.

You're all welcome to comment here or in the Google Doc itself.

How do you defeat an army? Form your own army and have competent raid leads. An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.

Is that a Jack Handy quote? Because that doesn't make sense at all. Wouldn't the army of lions beat the one leader lion then kill the sheep?

Alexander the Great actually.

He wasn't great with the quotes...either that, or he didn't understand the animal kingdom very well.

Or maybe he was talking about personality, since lion and sheep don't actually form armies.

You just blew my mind.

casparian

Crown wrote:

Nova (Templar Ult): Forget about it. It might show up 20 seconds late on the other side of the map.

Bold of you to assume that you know better than ZOS does where your Nova is needed most.

Dreyloch

You know I love you Crown, but just name this for what it is. How to "possibly" beat a certain guild on Vivec.

I played last night and your faction went to a home keep of the faction that contains this guild you hate so much. The 3rd faction's scroll was there. The lag had me well over 300 ping. The guild your making this manifesto for, was not even on. Please move your blame for lag to ZoS. Also realize, this information could be used against your guild as well.

Until ZoS steps in, I don't see much of anything happening to change the state of Vivec or PvP itself =(

Crown

@Dreyloch I don't hate them, and I believe that the underlying intent that @_Crow has is a good one - to bring more people into Cyrodiil and have fun. What I don't agree with is his willingness and even eagerness to cause other people to crash by overloading what the server can handle in a given area. The AotP groups don't experience it as much because they're all pre-rendered. The bizarre desire he has to have a mega zerg fight a mega zerg would result in everyone crashing, so that's not going to happen. The solos and small groups out there don't know how to fight multiple stacked groups, so I'm trying to help them. The large organized min/max groups win egagements vs AotP most of the time - or rather after killing 50-70 of them the remaining 30 manage to recover and wipe a group of 16. If 16 can kill 50+ before dying, I consider that a success. Living would be better of course, but when you have half your group crash out before the end of the engagement, that's more than enough to satisfy me.

Ajax_22

Sandman929 wrote: »

Ajax_22 wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

Ajax_22 wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

Ahtu wrote: »

Crown wrote: »

Preliminary draft is up here: https://goo.gl/dBqnAE

I'm hoping to finish it over the weekend when I have more time.

You're all welcome to comment here or in the Google Doc itself.

How do you defeat an army? Form your own army and have competent raid leads. An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.

Is that a Jack Handy quote? Because that doesn't make sense at all. Wouldn't the army of lions beat the one leader lion then kill the sheep?

Alexander the Great actually.

He wasn't great with the quotes...either that, or he didn't understand the animal kingdom very well.

Or maybe he was talking about personality, since lion and sheep don't actually form armies.

You just blew my mind.

I know. Crazy right? Almost broke my brain when someone told me that.

Ruckly

The other method to fight groups of 48+ is to out maneuver them and if you do fight them fight at the outer walls of a keep and drag the battle on. Time is an enemy to large groups. If they are committed and making no progress that is 48+ less of that faction to defend critical points. If DC knows a 48+ group is pushing into AD territory DC should push into EP territory. If AD knows a 48+ group is pushing into DC territory they should push into EP territory. Otherwise EP wins over and over especially if they can get the score between DC and AD large enough since they can faction stack whoever is in first relentlessly and there are people who for whatever reason play for second and will hit that same target that is getting faction stacked.