Groups out-healing Coldfire and Flaming Oil

Gaeliannas

VaranisArano wrote: »

NotTaylorSwift wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Groups just standing in red circles trivially out-healing every siege in the game except Meatbags, which they easily move out of. They often don't even need Siege Shield. Is this how siege battles are intended to play out? And no, we don't need to consider disorganized pug zergs in this discussion, they still die to everything.

I mean, to say they dont need siege shield is just not true. In raids the majority of our group wipes come from huge amounts of sieges, specifically oils, since we can't purge anymore due to plaguebreak. Siege shield is a must. Only thing keeping us alive is hot stacking, optimized cps and builds, and movement. Idk where you see groups trivially out healing 5 or 6 oils but it doesn't happen.
(ballgroup)

My experience is that when I'm the one pouring oil on an organized group, I'm griping, "It's like they aren't even taking any damage!"

When I'm the group healer having boiling oil poured on my head, I'm healing up a storm while low-key panicking every time our Crown's health bar takes a big dip.

Which is to say that good groups make it look easy from the outside.

I think it is lag not showing you their updated health honestly, I have experienced the same from both sides as well. Health ping pongs up and down even with massive healing, but I think it happens so fast those on the outside never see the dip. I hit a zerg dead center with a cold stone treb and to me it looked like it didn't budge their health, which is somewhat impossible.

Tiphis

I mean ball groups have been buffed every single patch, more so than literally every single playstyle/ build possible. It's long past the writing on wall and more like a giant neon sign being shoved into your face.

Gaeliannas

Tiphis wrote: »

I mean ball groups have been buffed every single patch, more so than literally every single playstyle/ build possible. It's long past the writing on wall and more like a giant neon sign being shoved into your face.

Most of the stuff added has been to support smaller groups. Unfortunately the changes never get thought through or the feedback from PTS considered, and we end up with coordinated groups being able to take better advantage of the new set or change than most. Most of these changes BTW, have been made to address player complaints and issues... just goes to show, be careful what you wish for.

MISTFORMBZZZ

How do you guys enjoy pvp ? You want siege to do all the job for you and to oneshot everyone or what ? Why even make builds , just buy some siege weapons and lets go ^^

Honestly siege needs a big nerf actually and not the opposite , so the siegelings start to do pvp again instead of placing meatbags openfield - which i see too often atm.

xylena_lazarow

MISTFORMBZZZ wrote: »

How do you guys enjoy pvp? placing meatbags openfield

The siege is something I love and what sets Cyrodiil apart from other PvP games. Placing a meatbag open field is one of the few ways to sorta deal with a heal blob indefinitely running around stalling, and it gives me decent 1vPotato fights with the guys that run over to try to burn my meatbag.

Tiphis

Gaeliannas wrote: »

Tiphis wrote: »

I mean ball groups have been buffed every single patch, more so than literally every single playstyle/ build possible. It's long past the writing on wall and more like a giant neon sign being shoved into your face.

Most of the stuff added has been to support smaller groups. Unfortunately the changes never get thought through or the feedback from PTS considered, and we end up with coordinated groups being able to take better advantage of the new set or change than most. Most of these changes BTW, have been made to address player complaints and issues... just goes to show, be careful what you wish for.

Well the massive buff to major and minor courage and proxy det buff were pretty significant when they happened. The hybridization allowed for yet more maelstrom RR spam, proxies. Camo Hunter now works for magbombers. Nerfs to crit made transmutation optional. Snow treaders was made pretty much specifically for them. The reworking of plaguebreak to be a new VD was in their favor when purging became irrelevant.

I'm not pointing t any single patch where they were buffed incredibly, rather they've had quite a few small but still significant buffs to "pull the slingshot farther back" so to speak.

xylena_lazarow

Tiphis wrote: »

I'm not pointing t any single patch where they were buffed incredibly, rather they've had quite a few small but still significant buffs to "pull the slingshot farther back" so to speak.

I'd argue the biggest impact was the reworks to RR and EV alongside Snow Treaders, which enable the indefinite run-and-stall gameplay patterns that make the "ball" strat miserable to fight against for pugs. I'd 100% prefer a meta where the ball would decisively win on the flags 10v60... or wipe trying to do so. Indefinitely stalling the fight just to keep bombing the same disorganized casuals over and over with no regard for the objective... it's a similar sort of one-sided fun as 40k damage stealth inferno attacks, so none should be surprised we're still having these discussions.

A more interesting question may be why do casual players not consider using organized ball strats to be "fun" despite the massive power available for those willing to embrace the playstyle. I know I personally "should" be doing my smallscale in an mdk/magplar duo group rather than solo sdk... but my heart just isn't in it.

Tiphis

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Tiphis wrote: »

I'm not pointing t any single patch where they were buffed incredibly, rather they've had quite a few small but still significant buffs to "pull the slingshot farther back" so to speak.

I'd argue the biggest impact was the reworks to RR and EV alongside Snow Treaders, which enable the indefinite run-and-stall gameplay patterns that make the "ball" strat miserable to fight against for pugs. I'd 100% prefer a meta where the ball would decisively win on the flags 10v60... or wipe trying to do so. Indefinitely stalling the fight just to keep bombing the same disorganized casuals over and over with no regard for the objective... it's a similar sort of one-sided fun as 40k damage stealth inferno attacks, so none should be surprised we're still having these discussions.

A more interesting question may be why do casual players not consider using organized ball strats to be "fun" despite the massive power available for those willing to embrace the playstyle. I know I personally "should" be doing my smallscale in an mdk/magplar duo group rather than solo sdk... but my heart just isn't in it.

I think some of it is that they don't play with the same people and may not stick around long enough to care to try it, not to mention the difficulty new pvp healers have without much support in mostly pve healing gear/builds. And then a lot of the better/best players don't because they don't like being terrible in 1v1s or smaller fights and having to run around doing what somebody else tells them to.

Cuwen

As someone who only plays a healer... I love that healers are finally getting some love again. We have been nerfed into infinity for the past 2 years, so much so that you now need multiple healers for a small group. We needed some kind of boost after all of that. And siege was getting ridiculously OP, anyway.

Cuwen

Tiphis wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

ive always felt the siege to be a little on the weak side because:
A) siege dmg can be resisted/shielded and
B ) even before this update i always noticed most people would outheal siege dmg due to point A

it just sounds like the problem is getting worse and honestly siege dmg should probably be straight up oblivion at this point

The issue isn't so much that siege is weak rather group healing is op right now. If you are solo with no healers on a ram it still hurts. Now as it can be blocked it allows more block based builds to almost ignore it so long as they have the stam to block it all. But totems and fear traps and other unblockable ccs help alot against those.

The balance issue is how to increase siege damage on groups with healers while not making it absolutely destroy new players. Which would be not to touch siege but rather the healing.

I always thought they should have heals scale with amount of people effected, almost like reverse proxy det. Make radiating regen lose X% of overall healing when affecting more than 2 people. Could also throw in other aoe heals too. Make it tied to pvp only so that it doesn't effect pve. It wouldn't effect solos/small scale players much. Could also just make heals not stackable, wouldn't really effect solo/small scale players much if at all again.

This should not be a thing in Cyrodiil. I could see it for Battlegrounds, but not Cyro. A lot of people seem to forget that Cyro is a WAR simulation. You want to play solo or as a very small group, go to BGs. Large groups should not be punished because they're doing what Cyro was designed for.

Crown

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Groups just standing in red circles trivially out-healing every siege in the game except Meatbags, which they easily move out of.

Nah, we out heal those too, we're just lazy and moving a bit out of them lets us not have to mash buttons as hard..

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

They often don't even need Siege Shield.

[snip]

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Is this how siege battles are intended to play out?

We all know.. "no".

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

And no, we don't need to consider disorganized pug zergs in this discussion, they still die to everything.

While your statement may be true, balance decisions tend to be made favouring the masses.

[Edited for Censor Bypass and Inappropriate Language]

kadar

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Groups just standing in red circles trivially out-healing every siege in the game except Meatbags, which they easily move out of. They often don't even need Siege Shield. Is this how siege battles are intended to play out? And no, we don't need to consider disorganized pug zergs in this discussion, they still die to everything.

Our min/maxed 12 man frequently loses people under oils without meatbags even present. There is nothing "trivial" about sieging under oil, it's quite hard. And we absolutely need siege shield -- 2 up on rams at all times cause we'll explode without it lol.

The only reason a group can ever park under siege is because they are highly optimized to handle the incoming damage (these players make up maybe 5% of cyrodiil's active population and only run for a few hours per week). It doesn't make sense to balance siege power against their relative success.

I actually agree that healing is overtuned, but siege is plenty powerful (just ask the people wearing a certain set and jumping around to keeps spamming a certain siege engine for devastating effect )and shouldn't be used to balance the power of healing. Look at battle spirit and/or sustain to reign in healing in Cyro for example.

MEBengalsFan2001

VaranisArano wrote: »

Ball groups purge through siege fire.
Plaguebreak punishes purges.
Instead of purging, ball groups move to outhealing siege fire.

Update 33, and ZOS buffs cross-heals.
Ball group crossheals get stronger.
Ball groups outheal siege better than ever.

I mean, it's not hard to see how ZOS got us to this point. There were even ball group players warning them about it before the update. Did they listen? No

(For those of you suggesting that siege get buffed, I see you don't remember what happened during the Summerset siege buffs: everyone who wasn't in a ball group got melted. Those buffs got reverted for a reason.)

Heals need to be adjusted to not include spell/weapon damage. Healing should be only based on our highest resource pool (magika or stamina) and if you don't have a specific amount, say 40K, of that resource your heals will be subpar.

This would improve both PVP and PVE healing. Right now in PVE you really don't need healers because of the strength of self healing that players have due to these changes.

FannyWarden

Just made a video of 3 DC toons running around Sejanus taking less than 100 dmg from direct hits on siege weapons. The same DC toons were also 1 shot-ing guards and players. Observed this from up top Sejanus over 10 min. Sending to ZOS. I have no idea how they withstand 4-5 players spamming attacks while taking hits from cold fire ballistas and meatbags with no blocking or dodge rolling (or at least a single animation of them doing so) or siege weapons consistently over a 10 min period, but I am moving on and sending my video to ZOS to deal with. I expect I will see these same players in game for at least 6 months when ZOS finally bans them or they get tired of using hacks in a video game to compensates for their low self esteem.

Either healing is broken or people found new ways to glytch a game that is already incredibly easy to play without hacks. It still bewilders me today why someone needs to exploit in a video game so easy to play.

To all you players using hacks - what is the point? You use a hack to kill someone. Big deal. You killed someone with a hack. Oh wow! You die while using a hack, well then, you really suck! What is the point?

DrSlaughtr

FannyWarden wrote: »

Just made a video of 3 DC toons running around Sejanus taking less than 100 dmg from direct hits on siege weapons. The same DC toons were also 1 shot-ing guards and players. Observed this from up top Sejanus over 10 min. Sending to ZOS. I have no idea how they withstand 4-5 players spamming attacks while taking hits from cold fire ballistas and meatbags with no blocking or dodge rolling (or at least a single animation of them doing so) or siege weapons consistently over a 10 min period, but I am moving on and sending my video to ZOS to deal with. I expect I will see these same players in game for at least 6 months when ZOS finally bans them or they get tired of using hacks in a video game to compensates for their low self esteem.

Either healing is broken or people found new ways to glytch a game that is already incredibly easy to play without hacks. It still bewilders me today why someone needs to exploit in a video game so easy to play.

To all you players using hacks - what is the point? You use a hack to kill someone. Big deal. You killed someone with a hack. Oh wow! You die while using a hack, well then, you really suck! What is the point?

Between the high mitigation right now and high healing it's easy to absorb all that damage on half the classes in the game.

darvaria

ESO mentioned that they were going to buff siege on groups. Make it like a VD effect, where the groups couldn't purge and it would hit harder. They said it in a press release about 6 months ago. But it never happened.

Exeter411

Defensive seige is mostly useless right now, and is completely useless against any kind of coordinated group.

Realistically, though, when you look at how PVP has evolved over the past few years, it's obvious that the current situation is what ZOS has been aiming for, a game where groups using optimized gear and tight coordination using external tools like Discord completely dominate. Nothing wrong with that, just a disconnect with expectations when compared against the other Elder Scrolls games, which are solo games. Solo or casual players in PVP will not be competitive.

My analogy for ESO PVP is a field at a local park where a group of families decides to have a pick up game of football. Then a squad of players from a Big 10 college shows up in full gear and procedes to wipe the floor with them. It's the game ZOS wants, so adjust your expectations.

xylena_lazarow

Exeter411 wrote: »

it's obvious that the current situation is what ZOS has been aiming for, a game where groups using optimized gear and tight coordination using external tools like Discord completely dominate. Nothing wrong with that

There's definitely something wrong with their model when the PvP population continues to decline and new/casual PvPers can't overcome the ridiculously high barrier of entry. Even partially coordinated groups that stack heals are pretty miserable to fight against (they won't bomb or wipe anyone, but they also won't die until zerged by a much larger force of randoms). There's also the issue of what happens when competitive groups stacking heals fight against each other, see: stalled BGs matches going to timer. Stall metas are widely considered "unfun" in pretty much every game.

There would be nothing wrong with pushing this game as a competitive team esport if it actually had the infrastructure to support such a thing, but BGs don't, and Cyrodiil definitely doesn't. The closest this game comes in that regard is player-organized tournaments with player-enforced rulesets.

neferpitou73

Cuwen wrote: »

Tiphis wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

ive always felt the siege to be a little on the weak side because:
A) siege dmg can be resisted/shielded and
B ) even before this update i always noticed most people would outheal siege dmg due to point A

it just sounds like the problem is getting worse and honestly siege dmg should probably be straight up oblivion at this point

The issue isn't so much that siege is weak rather group healing is op right now. If you are solo with no healers on a ram it still hurts. Now as it can be blocked it allows more block based builds to almost ignore it so long as they have the stam to block it all. But totems and fear traps and other unblockable ccs help alot against those.

The balance issue is how to increase siege damage on groups with healers while not making it absolutely destroy new players. Which would be not to touch siege but rather the healing.

I always thought they should have heals scale with amount of people effected, almost like reverse proxy det. Make radiating regen lose X% of overall healing when affecting more than 2 people. Could also throw in other aoe heals too. Make it tied to pvp only so that it doesn't effect pve. It wouldn't effect solos/small scale players much. Could also just make heals not stackable, wouldn't really effect solo/small scale players much if at all again.

This should not be a thing in Cyrodiil. I could see it for Battlegrounds, but not Cyro. A lot of people seem to forget that Cyro is a WAR simulation. You want to play solo or as a very small group, go to BGs. Large groups should not be punished because they're doing what Cyro was designed for.

Thank you. The solution to small-scaler/solo player problems is finding ways to make it more Impactful on the mpa/make BGs/IC more appealing. Not ruin group gameplay.

kadar wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Groups just standing in red circles trivially out-healing every siege in the game except Meatbags, which they easily move out of. They often don't even need Siege Shield. Is this how siege battles are intended to play out? And no, we don't need to consider disorganized pug zergs in this discussion, they still die to everything.

Our min/maxed 12 man frequently loses people under oils without meatbags even present. There is nothing "trivial" about sieging under oil, it's quite hard. And we absolutely need siege shield -- 2 up on rams at all times cause we'll explode without it lol.

The only reason a group can ever park under siege is because they are highly optimized to handle the incoming damage (these players make up maybe 5% of cyrodiil's active population and only run for a few hours per week). It doesn't make sense to balance siege power against their relative success.

I actually agree that healing is overtuned, but siege is plenty powerful (just ask the people wearing a certain set and jumping around to keeps spamming a certain siege engine for devastating effect )and shouldn't be used to balance the power of healing. Look at battle spirit and/or sustain to reign in healing in Cyro for example.

Ours too. I would encourage anyone who actually thinks that what ball groups do is easy to play in one first and see how "easy" it actually is.

A lot of these posts strike me the same as the "magblade bomber is OP" posts a while back. Where people only see the positive results of the playstyle and not the several other failed bombs/wipes that the player(s) suffers that night.

At the same time, I also agree that healing is overtuned at the moment. And I'll also point out that the changes that ZoS has made favoring ball groups the last few patches have been called out by several ball group leads (including myself). I actually LOL'd when I saw that they added DC to take care of zergs and groups because it was going to be such a ridiculous way of stacking people. Indeed our current group logs bear out the efficacy of DC for our style of play (for reference, when I'm running in a group without DC, my health drain enchant does more damage than VD).

The changes to proc sets and hybridization and of stats has only made it easier to get damage, since now we can not only raise our stats with medium armor passives, but have access to the execute abilities like s2w on magicka/VD bombers (heck the VD tooltip on our current VD bomber is 45k and it regularly hits for 8-10k according to our logs, even against other optimized groups). Not to mention the easy access to major evasion on most every build making everyone more tanky. Heck some groups even run medium armor healers just to take advantage of the raw heals from the extra stats.

ZOS' insistence on taking a spreadsheet like approach to their game modifications instead of actually talking to people who play with and against the playstyle in question has lead to the current state of affairs. And it's been a long process. That's why I don't think any of the "magic bullet" solutions proposed in this thread are going to be positive for the game. It's going to be a long road back to a balanced game.

NotTaylorSwift

if you guys love sieging so much why do you use the wrong sieges? Firepot treb, coldfire treb, oil and meatbag for ballgroup... but even then. There's nothing stopping us from just walking out of the oils/meatbag. It's like you expect to pour some oils and just wipe the group. It's not how it works. If you're putting a lot of pressure on enemy group siege and they cant even get into the keep then you've won. Like... when you're shooting ur fancy antiquity sieges or coldfire ballista's or w/e it's not doing anything. You use the wrong tools and also expect the wrong outcome :S

If you let them inside keep you've lost sorry. Then you can try different sieges but you probably don't even realise they exist or what they do cos no one uses them.

xylena_lazarow

NotTaylorSwift wrote: »

if you guys love sieging so much why do you use the wrong sieges?

There shouldn't be any "wrong sieges." That's part of the problem. There's 3 or so sieges that might actually do something in a keep battle, and nothing in the game explains which ones or why. Effective siege is important for creating dynamic combat that's still accessible to new/casual players, and for countering stack-heal-stall. It currently fails to do that.

Someone today in zone chat called this PvP something like "groups of tanks that ult dump once every 30 seconds" and it's pretty sad how correct that is. It's a one strat meta. You're either playing like this, or losing to it. You can keep telling people to git gud at this one strat, but in a game advertised as "play how you like" ...people would rather leave.

Cuddlypuff

I'm just so confused by how the PVP meta works. The excuse "people don't like to die" gets trotted out so much but I don't think there's any truth to that. The last two "damage" metas were no-proc and Blackwood, yet during these patches there weren't that many tanky builds. Since then there's been nerfs to a lot of the 1 shot gank and bomb options yet almost everybody now is tanky and don't have the damage to kill anything else outside of an ulti window

xFocused

Seeing all the comments here about nerfing siege...I just can't agree to that. Siege should be dealing significant damage and should be more of a threat. When oils do more damage then a coldfire ballista, I would say that's a issue. I've shot so many people with coldfire and they just withstand it like I'm poking them with it, lol. Siege definitely needs a buff, not a major one, not so that it's wiping large groups or getting kills every time it hits someone, but it definitely needs to be more of a threat than it is currently

MidniteOwl1913

I don't know about meta, but from what I can see it's almost impossible to defend against siege. If this was meant to in any way mirror real warfare this would not be the case in the 10-20 minutes the overthrow takes.

doesurmindglow

VaranisArano wrote: »

I mean, it's not hard to see how ZOS got us to this point. There were even ball group players warning them about it before the update. Did they listen? No

Yeah, I was one such. I'm becoming despondent on the topic, content to let changes go live despite my knowledge that they just keep making ball groups stronger and the alternatives increasingly frustrating.

But where are the devs on this question? Next patch, they're giving us a set that will allow 100% uptime on barriers. Imagine trying to siege down a ball group through that.

It's silly. Truthfully, nerfing cross-heals or preventing them from stacking isn't a panacea either. There was a time where we said nerfing purge would eliminate ball groups, but it's clearly only buffed them as all it does is give them a weapon to use against pugs still running purges. Targeting cross heals will have the same effect -- ball groups will shift to damage shields and self-heals supported by more investment in sustain, and we'll be back here asking for nerfs to those, and so on.

doesurmindglow

This all being said, ball groups are actually only killed by two things generally:

1. Other ball groups
2. Siege.

I'm confident after High Isle that siege probably won't be the case either, leaving "other ball groups" the only option. Incoming changes are going to make the OP's observation worse, not better.

Cuddlypuff

doesurmindglow wrote: »

This all being said, ball groups are actually only killed by two things generally:

1. Other ball groups
2. Siege.

I'm confident after High Isle that siege probably won't be the case either, leaving "other ball groups" the only option. Incoming changes are going to make the OP's observation worse, not better.

I dunno about that lol, the average ball group is getting slapped around by a few pugs and bombers now that lag is gone.

doesurmindglow

Cuddlypuff wrote: »

I dunno about that lol, the average ball group is getting slapped around by a few pugs and bombers now that lag is gone.

That's not been my experience at all. Ball groups are a lot stronger without faction stacks inducing lag. Maybe I'm not running with "average" ball groups though.

Gaeliannas

.

doesurmindglow wrote: »

Cuddlypuff wrote: »

I dunno about that lol, the average ball group is getting slapped around by a few pugs and bombers now that lag is gone.

That's not been my experience at all. Ball groups are a lot stronger without faction stacks inducing lag. Maybe I'm not running with "average" ball groups though.

I was also figuring the wannabe ball groups would get hit pretty hard with the removal of lag. A lot of the builds/strategies they use were built for it, and the lag has been around a very long time. The good groups will adapt as always though.

doesurmindglow

Yeah, I'm not here to parse out which ball groups are "average" or "wannabe." I can only speak to my own experience in a ball group, and the only thing that kills us is either another ball group or siege.

The OP's complaint is that ball groups are too easily outhealing the latter. I personally tend to agree -- cross-heals are very strong right now, and ball groups have a lot of tools to maximize their killing power between VD, PB, H&S, and Dark Convergence, which are all once imagined as "anti-ball group sets" but are now potent features of their compositions.

I guess if others feel that ball groups wipe easily now since the lag has been abated, then so be it; we can leave cross-heals and set bonuses where they're at. But that's not been my experience personally, is the opposite of what the OP is expressing as I understand it, and I don't think is actually the experience of most people in PVP. I've generally given up on the notion that ball groups can be reined in. At this point, I'm mostly just left with asking devs not to further buff them with proposed changes and new sets, which is itself a suggestion that's generally ignored.