ball groups

deadpool3431 · February 2

I'm sure there have been numerous posts expressing the annoyance of ball groups here but this is getting ridiculous. I've been pvping in ESO off and on since 2017 and it's never been this bad. Ball groups objectively ruin open world for everyone except them. And before everyone is "just negate them, just ignore them" answer me this, why should we be forced to play a sorc class because of them? I don't enjoy playing sorc. Why is negate not on the assault skill line? You can't ignore them. They chase you all over the map. If you flag a keep, they're there. If you're playing small man groups they'll follow you up a tower and bomb you. I was killed in the middle of a field as a single player basically afk in my inventory. Last night there were 3 DC, and one EP ball groups in one keep at the same time completely ignoring each other mowing down the same 6 or 8 AD siegers repeatedly. Most looked like new players. "Welcome to Cyrodiil, you'll have no fun here but you will be farmed en masse because cross healing is exploited". Can nothing be done about it? They nerfed proc sets like caluurion's into the ground because of gankers, buffed detect pots, but how can anyone say that a single player ganking another single player is even remotely as important or annoying as a group of 12 who are basically unkillable without a negate, bombing anything that moves. There is no realistic counterplay.

Kaysha · February 2

not much to add here. This is probably the single most important reason why Cyrodiil is so empty compared to years ago.

RetPing · February 2

Stop going Cyro, I've done that and now I'm enjoying ESO more.
Too tired to continuel arguing when ESO combat team showed plenty of time their support for that playstile.

I had plenty of fun in IC last event where there have been nioce battles without toxic ball group ruinining it for everyone, I'll hope more peopele would come there.

Tommy_The_Gun · February 2

Unfortunately the problem exists and most likely will never be adressed. ZOS has an infamous history of buffing ballgroups instead of nerfing them. And it is not like it is ultra hard to target-nerf PvP group enviroment. For example there are sets that become weaker the larger the group is. Additionally they could limit stacking of same healing effects to like 2 or 3. They don't even have to remove cross healing.

They have means of nerfing ball groups and only ball groups without the nerf affecting anyone else, but so far they have not done it. All we see from patch to patch are ball group buffs.

And this leads me to believe that ZOS most likely considers Ball Groups as their target PvP audience. They don't want them to leave. So they balance PvP for them. I mean if it wasn't the case, Ball group issues would have been adressed long ago, because again - the solution are there.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · February 2

Kaysha wrote: »

not much to add here. This is probably the single most important reason why Cyrodiil is so empty compared to years ago.

This is just wrong. The reason Cyro is so empty is because ZOS nerfed large group play (you know the kind of groups that ball groups were actually originally designed to fight), made everyone hybrid and reduced the population caps.

This had the knock on effects of removing the large social raids that used to happen, removing the skill to player number gap options the game had.

On top of this they also removed large sections of gameplay such as support roles and roles for players who used to not be as good mechanically but could still perform useful tasks.

Necrotech_Master · February 2

ball groups were way less of a problem back when they did that test where they raised the pop caps (which was a great experience, felt like cyro back in the day with large fights going on)

RetPing · February 2

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

This is just wrong. The reason Cyro is so empty is because ZOS nerfed large group play (you know the kind of groups that ball groups were actually originally designed to fight), made everyone hybrid and reduced the population caps.

A lot of people stopped going Cyro disgusted by the toxicity of Ball Groups gameplay.
When you go with your social guild, you do a nice siege and then a ball group come to exploit the open Keep to start going arounfd the wall, how do you think people feel?
And when you open a keep to get scroll and a ball group come, take it and start doing their little dance to attract people using the scroll, how do you think they feel?

Ball group gameplay is just toxic and coward. i'm a talking about the gameplay and not the person doing that,.

Theignson · February 3

This has been posted hundreds of times and the whole range of opinions discussed each time. Clearly ZOS wants ball groups to prosper.

I recall when dark convergence and Hrothgar came out, they were destroying ball groups. It was actually humorous. ZOS quickly nerfed them such that only ball groups and small groups benefit from Dark convergence, and Hrothgar is useless.

Ball groups are much worse since Arcanist. On top of 10+ HOTS etc etc they now run tons of shields.

I test this with cold fire. It used to be cold fire would damage the ball groups with each tick, but due to heals and partial shields, it wouldn't really harm them.

Cold fire is 10k per tick x three. Now with the shields, you can hit the whole ball with cold fire (or 10/12), and 25,000 of the 30,000 is absorbed by shields!

It is so stupid. Now even 6 man groups with arcanist can be virtually immortal. So they run around and around trolling everyone, build their Ulti, then:

Pull/fear/Bomb.

Again, and Again, And Again, for two years now. so boring, so stale.

My approach to ball groups: rep a wall while they run around and around. As soon as you get a d-tick, rep a wall again, get more d-ticks. This is the one thing ball groups are good for.

xFocused · February 4

I crown a ball group. I get the hate BG's get in this game, when I'm playing solo I don't like fighting them either so I can honestly say why non BG players have a bad opinion on them, fair points all around.

However...to blame the population decrease, quality of gameplay, etc...on ball groups alone is just silly. There's a ever growing list of bugs, glitches and overall problems that have existed long before ball groups were ever a thing honestly.

Stuck in combat bug, skills not working, unable to swap bars/get into keeps during big fights, bluescreens/disconnects, lag lag & more lag, players dropping scrolls/hammer for their buddies on other alliances...I could go on but you get the point, and before anyone says "ball groups cause lag!" then please explain to me how my 12 man group can fight another 12 man group and there's hardly any issue however if my 12 man group is fighting 40-50 enemy players at a keep we're instantly lagging, freezing, disconnecting and so forth.

PvP in general barely gets any worthwhile updates other than some new sets and festivals. We get a population increase which is something but there's just waaaaaayyyyy more important issues that need addressing other than pesky ball groups, lol. How about server performance in general?

Kartalin · February 5

RetPing wrote: »

When you go with your social guild

I'm going to stop you right there. Do you feel like there's a reasonable expectation that a casual pick up group should be able to defeat a non-casual organized group that is to some degree min-maxed? You brought a knife to a gun fight my dude.

Best PVE comparison is normal pug trial versus a vet trial progression group.

WaywardArgonian · February 6

Theignson wrote: »

I recall when dark convergence and Hrothgar came out, they were destroying ball groups. It was actually humorous. ZOS quickly nerfed them such that only ball groups and small groups benefit from Dark convergence, and Hrothgar is useless.

That is simply not true.

Hrothgar got a hotfix because it was bugged and didn't scale as was explained in the tooltip. Dark Convergence was adjusted/nerfed over the course of several patches (iirc Dark Convergence didn't get changed until the next big update 3 months later, so not so 'quickly' either) not because it was 'destroying ballgroups' but because almost everyone was using that set, and with its low cooldown and ability to bypass CC immunity people were just ping-ponged across the map every night. This was also with the old servers still in place, so the game became quite literally unplayable. You can find plenty of threads on this forum with non-ballgroup players complaining about the Dark Convergence meta.

RetPing · February 6

Kartalin wrote: »

RetPing wrote: »

When you go with your social guild

I'm going to stop you right there. Do you feel like there's a reasonable expectation that a casual pick up group should be able to defeat a non-casual organized group that is to some degree min-maxed? You brought a knife to a gun fight my dude.

Best PVE comparison is normal pug trial versus a vet trial progression group.

Have you read all my post or just stopped there?
I never said my social group should be able to defeat a ball group. We just avoid them.

But ball groupers are always so brave, they don't siege a keep thmselves because they are too afraid of having to stop to do their little dance for a moment, they just love to exploit other people work and wait for keep to be opened to enter and do the little run around the wall making things very frustrating for every one else.

You want to do your little dance on the walls? At least open a keep yourself.

Necrotech_Master · February 6

WaywardArgonian wrote: »

Theignson wrote: »

I recall when dark convergence and Hrothgar came out, they were destroying ball groups. It was actually humorous. ZOS quickly nerfed them such that only ball groups and small groups benefit from Dark convergence, and Hrothgar is useless.

That is simply not true.

Hrothgar got a hotfix because it was bugged and didn't scale as was explained in the tooltip. Dark Convergence was adjusted/nerfed over the course of several patches (iirc Dark Convergence didn't get changed until the next big update 3 months later, so not so 'quickly' either) not because it was 'destroying ballgroups' but because almost everyone was using that set, and with its low cooldown and ability to bypass CC immunity people were just ping-ponged across the map every night. This was also with the old servers still in place, so the game became quite literally unplayable. You can find plenty of threads on this forum with non-ballgroup players complaining about the Dark Convergence meta.

hrothgar had 1 nerf and 1 bug fix

the bug was that it was ignoring battle spirit

the nerf cut its potential dmg in half (26% sum of enemy resist down to 13% sum of enemy resist)

so between the fix from battle spirit and the nerf, it effectively lost about 75% of its dmg from when it was first released

personally i think the nerf was almost unwarranted once they fixed the battle spirit bug

the other problem i think the set had is that its supposed to be anti tank, but at the same time it requires proccing on a CC which a lot of tanks are immune to either from blocking or immovable pots

WaywardArgonian · February 7

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

hrothgar had 1 nerf and 1 bug fix

the bug was that it was ignoring battle spirit

the nerf cut its potential dmg in half (26% sum of enemy resist down to 13% sum of enemy resist)

so between the fix from battle spirit and the nerf, it effectively lost about 75% of its dmg from when it was first released

personally i think the nerf was almost unwarranted once they fixed the battle spirit bug

the other problem i think the set had is that its supposed to be anti tank, but at the same time it requires proccing on a CC which a lot of tanks are immune to either from blocking or immovable pots

After the hotfix (of an unintended bug), Hrothgar was already a non-factor in Cyrodiil. A few people kept on using it but it lost its status as a go-to set. As such, the narrative that 'it was quickly fixed because it worked too well against ballgroups' is simply false.

Sylosi · February 7

Your actual problem is that your "PvP" playerbase is the least PvP I've ever seen, so has zero interest in skilled, competitive or frankly decent PvP. (even by the low standards of MMORPGs)

That goes for both your pugs and your "ball groups". (and the sheer number of roleplayers who think winning the campaign matters)

Your pugs seem laughably adverse to any real organisation, this is going to come as a shock, but in other games with similar PvP if you actually intend to fight (rather than PvDoor) then generally as pugs you get on Discord, play proper group builds. What you don't do is randomly invite people to a group, playing whatever they want and then have some guy trying to lead with in-game text chat. Watching a pug group not even be able to do the most basic of things like push through a wall / door as one is truly laughable.

Cyrodiil is not DOTA 2 at The International, it is relatively low skilled in the grand scheme of PvP games. So if your 40 pugs all getting farmed at some keep, instead got on Discord, played proper builds, put anyone vaguely competent on damage, the rest on heals/support, you would flatten most ball groups after a bit of practice. Because contrary to the delusions on this forum most are pretty bad. ESO is not the place leet PvP gamers flock to, it's not even the MMO where people who like to tryhard at this sort of PvP mostly ended up. Build / comp / cheese and a bit of organisation carries so, so hard in a game like this. So you only have yourselves to blame in that respect.

As for the "ball groups", in other games most of them would be mocked by real guilds and be considered trash tier PvE guilds, because for the most part they look to fight pugs (and ESO pugs at that...), rather than other "ball groups". A comparison between last time I played Cyrodiil in an organised group and last time I played a certain other game in the same manner sums it up.

Maybe 3 years ago I encountered someone in ESO I vaguely knew from back when I did GvG in these sort of games, after talking a while, he invited me to play with his "ball group" later that week. The outcome was that after maybe an hour I made my excuses and left, the real reason I left was sheer boredom. We spent most of that hour sitting in (or around) one keep "fighting" clearly unorganised players. We fought another "ball group", maybe twice and that was only because they were doing the same in another keep, but they came back and "defended" their keep a couple of times when they eventually died at the other keep.

Now compare that to the other game that I played at around at the same time, again someone I knew got me into a guild raid. First thing to note is we avoided the map where the pugs (the bad ones) and bad guilds go (the other game has 4 maps per "campaign"), we ended up with 4 other guilds taking turns to fight each other. Imagine actually wanting decent, challenging, skilled, competitive PvP (again by the low standards of MMOs), rather than wanting to faceroll and farm like PvE players...

Probably the most telling comparison to the other game is that even many of the pug groups (which granted include a fair number of people in guilds who simply don't have a guild raid that night or time) are much more 'PvP' than most ballgroups in this game. There is an overflow map in that game for when queues are too large, it does not give out most to of the rewards you get from the normal "campaign" maps and is usually used by guilds to do GvG vs guilds from other "campaigns". But even some of the pug groups go there to do 50 vs 50, just to get decent fights when they can't get decent fights in the actual "campaign".

Your playerbase is the main reason why your PvP in Cyrodiil is trash and a big reason as to why it has always been less popular than the other game's "Cyrodiil".

Necrotech_Master · February 7

WaywardArgonian wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

hrothgar had 1 nerf and 1 bug fix

the bug was that it was ignoring battle spirit

the nerf cut its potential dmg in half (26% sum of enemy resist down to 13% sum of enemy resist)

so between the fix from battle spirit and the nerf, it effectively lost about 75% of its dmg from when it was first released

personally i think the nerf was almost unwarranted once they fixed the battle spirit bug

the other problem i think the set had is that its supposed to be anti tank, but at the same time it requires proccing on a CC which a lot of tanks are immune to either from blocking or immovable pots

After the hotfix (of an unintended bug), Hrothgar was already a non-factor in Cyrodiil. A few people kept on using it but it lost its status as a go-to set. As such, the narrative that 'it was quickly fixed because it worked too well against ballgroups' is simply false.

the place where i remember it being complained about a lot was BGs lol

i did do some BGs during that time too and would sometimes get slapped by a 13-14k hrothgars proc (that ignored resistances, though i think because it was still typed as frost dmg it can still be mitigated a little by raw mitigation such as major/minor protection)

Theignson · February 8

WaywardArgonian wrote: »

Theignson wrote: »

I recall when dark convergence and Hrothgar came out, they were destroying ball groups. It was actually humorous. ZOS quickly nerfed them such that only ball groups and small groups benefit from Dark convergence, and Hrothgar is useless.

That is simply not true.

Hrothgar got a hotfix because it was bugged and didn't scale as was explained in the tooltip. Dark Convergence was adjusted/nerfed over the course of several patches (iirc Dark Convergence didn't get changed until the next big update 3 months later, so not so 'quickly' either) not because it was 'destroying ballgroups' but because almost everyone was using that set, and with its low cooldown and ability to bypass CC immunity people were just ping-ponged across the map every night. This was also with the old servers still in place, so the game became quite literally unplayable. You can find plenty of threads on this forum with non-ballgroup players complaining about the Dark Convergence meta.

What I said was precisely true, let me explain for you in case English is a second language:
1) "dark convergence and Hrothgar came out, they were destroying ball groups."
This is exactly true. Ball groups were getting destroyed and some of them stopped running
2) " ZOS quickly nerfed them " This is exactly true. Between the hot fix (which was quick) and the second nerf, Hrothgar became useless.
3) "such that only ball groups and small groups benefit from Dark convergence"
This is the phrase you may not understand. "such that" does not mean: ZOS nerfed them so that only ball groups can benefit"
""Such that" means, essentially, "As a result, only ball groups and small groups can benefit ".
You can also read "such that" to mean: "as a consequence of which". You can see it is much easier in English to say "such that", but many people may be unfamiliar with the phrase.
If you read it (as apparently is the case from your subsequent posts) as ""so that only ball groups"...this is not what the phrase means in English.

Rohamad_Ali · February 8

So make a cyrodiil for solo's only. There.

WaywardArgonian · February 8

Theignson wrote: »

WaywardArgonian wrote: »

Theignson wrote: »

I recall when dark convergence and Hrothgar came out, they were destroying ball groups. It was actually humorous. ZOS quickly nerfed them such that only ball groups and small groups benefit from Dark convergence, and Hrothgar is useless.

That is simply not true.

Hrothgar got a hotfix because it was bugged and didn't scale as was explained in the tooltip. Dark Convergence was adjusted/nerfed over the course of several patches (iirc Dark Convergence didn't get changed until the next big update 3 months later, so not so 'quickly' either) not because it was 'destroying ballgroups' but because almost everyone was using that set, and with its low cooldown and ability to bypass CC immunity people were just ping-ponged across the map every night. This was also with the old servers still in place, so the game became quite literally unplayable. You can find plenty of threads on this forum with non-ballgroup players complaining about the Dark Convergence meta.

What I said was precisely true, let me explain for you in case English is a second language:
1) "dark convergence and Hrothgar came out, they were destroying ball groups."
This is exactly true. Ball groups were getting destroyed and some of them stopped running
2) " ZOS quickly nerfed them " This is exactly true. Between the hot fix (which was quick) and the second nerf, Hrothgar became useless.
3) "such that only ball groups and small groups benefit from Dark convergence"
This is the phrase you may not understand. "such that" does not mean: ZOS nerfed them so that only ball groups can benefit"
""Such that" means, essentially, "As a result, only ball groups and small groups can benefit ".
You can also read "such that" to mean: "as a consequence of which". You can see it is much easier in English to say "such that", but many people may be unfamiliar with the phrase.
If you read it (as apparently is the case from your subsequent posts) as ""so that only ball groups"...this is not what the phrase means in English.

Don't try to patronize me with your twopenny English language course, please.

Dark Convergence and Hrothgar were powerful in any context, such as Battlegrounds as someone else pointed out above. The combination was used by bombers to get easy kills without the usual risk associated with bombing since you could do it from range.

Hrothgar was powerful specifically because it was bugged. As soon as that was hotfixed, it disappeared from the meta. Any adjustment it got after is irrelevant; it was not used by or against ballgroups after the hotfix.

Dark Convergence, even in its original form, was always more effective against zergs and was used more effectively by ballgroups. The developer commentary in the patch notes even mentions its intended purpose as an anti-zerg set, which was its primary function during its time in the meta. Its first nerf came after 3 months. Not quite 'quickly' by MMO standards. Even after that first nerf, it was still effective as a solo bombing set; it was the significant increase of the cooldown, which came much later, that made it fall out of favor, also with ballgroups. You could say it was nerfed multiple times """such that""" the set lost relevance across the board.

You can go into semantics all you like, but you still said that we at one point finally got 2 sets that worked against ballgroups and ZOS nerfed them. Your statement that "ZOS wants ballgroups to prosper" suggests that this was by design. This is not true. To any decent ballgroup, Dark Convergence was always more blessing than curse. Any nerf it got was fully justified, since nearly everyone at the time agreed that it was overpowered. Its claimed effectiveness against ballgroups had nothing to do with it.

There actually was a set released during that cycle that was destroying ballgroups left and right: Plaguebreak. It then took 2 days for them all to stop purging and the problem was solved, because that is how these things usually go.