Ball Groups and Stacking Heals - A Serious Issue

divnyi

Hasenpfote wrote: »

If heal would be nerfed, more would build glass cannons and then a coordinated glasscanonballs rolls over a group and everbody cry because they stack damage like crazy.

"The damage is too high, people die way to easily" - said no one ever.

At least coordinated glass cannons would be fun to watch, because they wouldn't tolerate any errors.

Bammlschwamml

divnyi wrote: »

"The damage is too high, people die way to easily" - said no one ever.

Proximity Detonation, Hrothgar, Plaguebreak etc. all nerfed because people complained about the damage.

Stacking damage is easier than stacking heals.

StShoot

Hasenpfote wrote: »

If heal would be nerfed, more would build glass cannons and then a coordinated glasscanonballs rolls over a group and everbody cry because they stack damage like crazy.

Dots can be stacked aswell, also if you do focus damage, to one target, you can kill this target in less than 2 seconds, regardless if it has 200 hots on it.

1. We allready have glass cannon Ballgroups, we also have glass cannon server stacks. If zos would decrease crosshealing/crosshielding (lets say you only get 20% of the og pve heal value if you heal a person other than yourself in cyro) we actual would see a decrease of Glass canons, since the ballgroups need to build more into defenisve, which would mean that their heals and dmg go down, which would enable solo/pug players build more offensive on the other hand since the overall dmg output in cyro would go down. Currently you have to build realy tanky if you want to survive as a solo/pug player, while you can build for max dmg while you are in an organized group. A change like that would make the playingfield a little bit more even in regards of how much dmg you can build for.

2. Comparing Hots and Dots in Eso is almost impossible:
-You cant reliable purge hots or shields from your enemy target, however most of the organized group could run with
a purgebot (not that its needed because crossheal is so insane)
-You cant force an enemy to stand in yoour groundbased AOE dots, they will just take the shortest way out, however a
player can and will choose to stand/ run in/through your groundbased AOE heals.
- Because of Smarthealing (heals target the allied players near you with the lowest health) its easyer to apply sticky heals
than dots, since dots dont look for the target with the lowest health or with the most dots on them.

xylena_lazarow

Bammlschwamml wrote: »

Stacking damage is easier than stacking heals.

It's a matter of risk and punishment. Ranged proc stack gankers are damage builds that take zero risk. Even if they make a mistake, they gotta go braindead to not be able to escape. Any melee brawler or melee ganker puts themselves in the line of fire, risks being zerged or 1v1d by a tryhard, and needs to always be responsible for their own survival.

While the ball strat does take specific knowledge and practice, ball survival is a low skill ceiling. Mid balls can just healblob the flag against lesser numbers and ignore needing to kill anyone. When you've got 10k+ passive sticky heals on you plus whatever else your ball can spam, you can repeatedly go braindead and your hp bar won't even move. The stronger ball groups are the ones that will actually bomb you, not just spam heals and pray they don't get outnumbered.

evLRise

Jsmalls wrote: »

The ability to stack abilities that heal on the entire group has become a mindless and abused mechanism in PvP (both Cyrodiil and BGs).

These two abilities are the most abused, but there are others that are also very strong.

Echoing Vigor - Let loose a battle cry, instilling you and your allies with resolve and healing for 3480 Health over 20 seconds.

Radiating Regeneration - Share your staff's life-giving energy, healing you or up to 3 nearby allies for 3594 over 10 seconds.

As an example we tried overwhelming a ball group stacked together on a Ram at a keep. Multiple Oils and Cold Fire Ballistas along with a Nightblade bomb didn't even budge their heal bars.

The number of stacks for these abilities needs to be limited. Bring back the value of having dedicated heals for groups instead of preemptive 30k HPS heal stacking.

We've had Overtuned healing procs sets in the past that have been balanced example "Earthgore" and heal stacking is the next iteration that needs to be adjusted.

This adjustment would be a great addition to the PvP addition expected in the next update.

"Me and my 4 buddies and I can't kill this super optimized and coordinated group".

That's normal mate. Coordinated group play will always win vs uncoordinated group play. If you would have coordinated your siege, that's a different story.

As a fun fact, ive heard very recently some of the best groups in game saying they've been killed by a small group of bombers a few times.

For the other things you mentioned:


Vigor is already capped at 6 people per cast. You need to realistically cast it 3-4 times to be able to hit your whole group, which is a lot and very taxing on your stamina, especially on a mag character.

Radiating regen is a bad skill and not really worth casting. Fyi most good groups dont use it at all.

The same way a good player can 1v2 1v3 1v4 etc average players, a good group can 10v20, 10v40 etc.

Jsmalls

@evLRise

The issue is the ease of survival. Individually they can make mistake after mistake and not be punished by it.

That's the difference between skillful 1vX play and skillfull 8-12vX play. That 1 player misses a heal or positions poorly they die. A ball group could miss 4/12 vigors and you'd still have 8 vigors / 4 Regens giving you 16k healing per second.

Let's compare running a Ball Group to running a hard-mode Trial for a second.

You generally have 2 healers, 2 Tanks, and 8 DPS. The healers and DPS run extremely low health to optimize damage. They also generally DON'T slot a heal because if you're spending time healing yourself your DPS is lacking. Positioning matters and can wipe the group. DPS phases where you need to hit a certain threshold need to be obtained or you can wipe the group. Healing performed by the healers need to be on point or the group will wipe. Tanks have various mechanics, that if they fail will wipe the group. List goes on.

What does a ball group need to do in PvP? Cast stackable heals every 10-20 seconds, move around, and activate a set to pull people (usually double pull). They can make mistake after mistake, but HoT stacking is so strong that it doesn't matter. So 12v20ing isn't impressive.... Pick anyone off the street, put the right sets on them and tell them to follow crown and hit vigor and Regen and they are running with the "best" of them.

And...

Have you not walked through a friendly ball group before?

Just breezing through them I have 5 vigors and radiating regens on me. These abilities are being casted constantly.

A ball group will stack ~40k health and a set amount of armor and put the rest to utility sets like pulls, ult gen, group buff sets and sustain. They have 8-12 people all doing damage on a pull. They don't need to each have min maxed damage so they focus on survivability.

It's not that a want Ball Groups to disappear. I want them to require a higher skill level to perform. It's just too easy right now....

Einstein_

The issue is the ease of survival. Individually they can make mistake after mistake and not be punished by it.

That's the difference between skillful 1vX play and skillful 8-12vX play. If that one player misses a heal or positions poorly, they die. In a ball group, even if 4 out of 12 players miss their Vigors, you still have 8 Vigors and 4 Regens giving you 16k healing per second.

No, that's not true. As a ball group, you face more incoming damage, and you can die instantly if you make a mistake. I would argue that you sometimes die even faster. I play a lot of 1vX myself, and a missed roll dodge in a 1v3 scenario is often less punished than the same mistake in a ball group.

P.S. I'm not talking about ball groups that zerg-surf or outnumber other players, but groups that fight against 2-5 times their numbers.


Yes, Ballgroups have 15-25k HPS but they also:
- cant avoid the 2-4 siege weapon stacks.
- cant avoid 4 bombers bombing them on full dmg builds out of the zerg.
- cant avoid high dmg builds spamming Azure blight out of the zerg.
- cant avoid somebody getting pulled and 15+ ppl onetapping him.


But you can't expect a group of 15-20 unorganized players to kill a fully optimized group of 10 players who have years of experience playing together as a cohesive unit. Meanwhile, a group of 4 organized players can take down any ball group if the ball group is not expecting them. On PC/EU, there is a bomb group on the EP side that regularly kills the top ball groups.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY UNORGANIZED ZERGSURFERS EXPECT TO KILL AN ORGANIZED GROUP!!!

Jsmalls

Einstein_ wrote: »

P.S. I'm not talking about ball groups that zerg-surf or outnumber other players, but groups that fight against 2-5 times their numbers.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY UNORGANIZED ZERGSURFERS EXPECT TO KILL AN ORGANIZED GROUP!!!

@Einstein_

Except with the current population caps a single Ball group of 12 players is making up 1/6th to 1/8th of the factions population.

Unless it's a final Emperor keep battle or Volendrung its unlikely that the 12 player group is even fighting outnumbered. And with their constant relocation it's very rare for them to be in a situation where they have 1/2 of the server in one spot going after them...

What ends up happening is a lot of 12v5-10s where the ball group has a massive advantage.

Einstein_

Jsmalls wrote: »

Einstein_ wrote: »

P.S. I'm not talking about ball groups that zerg-surf or outnumber other players, but groups that fight against 2-5 times their numbers.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY UNORGANIZED ZERGSURFERS EXPECT TO KILL AN ORGANIZED GROUP!!!

@Einstein_

Except with the current population caps a single Ball group of 12 players is making up 1/6th to 1/8th of the factions population.

Unless it's a final Emperor keep battle or Volendrung its unlikely that the 12 player group is even fighting outnumbered. And with their constant relocation it's very rare for them to be in a situation where they have 1/2 of the server in one spot going after them...

What ends up happening is a lot of 12v5-10s where the ball group has a massive advantage.

12v5-10 is just zerging. no serious group is doing that or wants fights like that.
Still the same argument, why should 5-10 randoms be able to even scratch a 12 man organized group??

My Ballgroup downsized to 8 players because indeed with 12 ppl you often don't find interesting fights, because a 12v20 is actually boring. But that's just arguing about what you wanna do or don't.

In the end a organized group will and should always have a big advantage over the same or even higher amount of enemy's if they are unorganized !!!

Joy_Division

Jsmalls wrote: »

Einstein_ wrote: »

P.S. I'm not talking about ball groups that zerg-surf or outnumber other players, but groups that fight against 2-5 times their numbers.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY UNORGANIZED ZERGSURFERS EXPECT TO KILL AN ORGANIZED GROUP!!!

@Einstein_

Except with the current population caps a single Ball group of 12 players is making up 1/6th to 1/8th of the factions population.

That is correct and a huge reason why ZOS needs to raise pop caps.

Unless it's a final Emperor keep battle or Volendrung its unlikely that the 12 player group is even fighting outnumbered. And with their constant relocation it's very rare for them to be in a situation where they have 1/2 of the server in one spot going after them...

What ends up happening is a lot of 12v5-10s where the ball group has a massive advantage.

This is not. From experience, I can say that organized groups quickly get bored of that and will soon jump into slaughterfish or wait the 2 minutes it takes for keep guards to kill them so they can go somewhere else. That somewhere else is either going to be where an enemy guild is or Nikel/Bleakers/Sej or the third floor of a tri-keep with the intended goal of facing 30+ randoms.

It is in fact too common that 1/2 the server does chase them around, which means more lag, less responsiveness, and not much action going on anywhere else on the map.

evLRise

Jsmalls wrote: »

@evLRise

The issue is the ease of survival. Individually they can make mistake after mistake and not be punished by it.

That's the difference between skillful 1vX play and skillfull 8-12vX play. That 1 player misses a heal or positions poorly they die. A ball group could miss 4/12 vigors and you'd still have 8 vigors / 4 Regens giving you 16k healing per second.

Why do we even compare solo play potential with organized group potential? Since when its 1 player supposed to be as impactful as 12?

Aside from that not being the case ( generally it's easy to recover from a mistake when solo'ing than from a big mistake when playing in a group, with particular exceptions of course ), that's like me saying oh... It's unfair that if i die in an arena, cuz its over, but those people running 12-stack in trials have it on easy mode!

Jsmalls wrote: »

They also generally DON'T slot a heal because if you're spending time healing yourself your DPS is lacking.

If i could taunt in PvP, i would just run a handful of block tanks and the rest nothing but glass cannon gankers. But you can't decide who takes damage, who does what "mechanic". The whole group takes damage kinda equally, therefore you build in a way that heals the whole group.

Jsmalls wrote: »

Positioning matters and can wipe the group.

A single person not blocking in a 0.5s time window, not blocking a pull, not moving out of a siege etc can plaguebreak and delete the group instantly. Having the lead or speed die can make it impossible to recover in a very high pressure situation.

Jsmalls wrote: »

DPS phases where you need to hit a certain threshold need to be obtained or you can wipe the group.

If i push a big group and a single DD is out of position and i fail to kill the stack because of it, i commit resources for something that alleviates 0 pressure, makes everyone low resource and put the group in a very dangerous spot which potentially leads to unrecoverable pressure and wipe.

Jsmalls wrote: »

Healing performed by the healers need to be on point or the group will wipe.

Healing in PvP is actually more dynamic than PvE. If i have my healers fail to react in a window as small as half a second, I can and will wipe / half wipe at a super consistent rate. Funnily enough this is a rather popular topic for feedback after runs.

Jsmalls wrote: »

Tanks have various mechanics, that if they fail will wipe the group.

Your lead calls for damage countdowns, calls out pretty much all ults and who cast each ult when, calls for most synergy casts, directs where the group moves at all times, needs to call for heals as soon as someone drops below 75-80% HP, puts the group in wipe danger on failed pulls, tracks your group's and enemy groups timers simultaneously and has to adapt decision making and gameplay around it, to name a few "mechanics".

Jsmalls wrote: »

What does a ball group need to do in PvP?

To survive in a group in PvP i need to have every person in the group with 90% uptimes on heals ( not gonna talk about the need to more or less have people burst healing almost non stop ). Also both mentioned skills are capped with how many people they can hit ( 6 per cast for vigor 4 for RR , and they only target those closest to you ). Im sure it looks like oh they just spam vigor. I strongly invite you to go to a resource with 10 people from your alliance, and try to get your vigor on all of them while stationary ( Fun fact, you might not even get it on all 10 of them with RR before one expires ).

Then try the exact same scenario while moving and having lots of additional tasks.

Basically out of a 16 seconds window - I need to cast vigor ~ 4 times. I want to cast my 3 damage burst skills, my major evasion, my group buff ( which can be anything from a bone surge, a major resolve skill etc ), 2 break frees, about 2 spammables, and afterwards burst heal once or twice since we disregard healing while dealing damage and need to recover. That's 15 things to do with 16 GCDs! Since im not hitting a target dummy, i can't do this as a rotation. I have to actually look around and see what's happening around me. If my lead calls a countdown for damage, i'm probably gonna waste half a second to wait for the timing in order to sync it. When i need to heal, im gonna need some time to look around and actually heal where i should. When i need to deal damage, i might not cast anything for a whole second since i want to be in the proper spot. So pretty much like your trial comparison, if I fail to cast my "rotation" proper, i will hurt my group, which will lead to a wipe. It's just not as visual as you'd expect ( a mistake now will lead to an issue 20s later, leading to someone dying, leading to the group slowly wiping, much like a PvE group might slowly wipe when trying to res the tank that did a mistake for example ).

What a lot of people fail to understand is that what makes the group tanky vs pugs is the combination of heals and damage distribution. If im chased by 40 people which use mostly single target skills, that's an average of 4 skills hitting everyone from my group ( in a 10-man stack ), which is something that 7-8 vigors+ other HoTs can handle ( consistently you'll have about 7-8 vigors up with 85-90% uptime in the whole group ). If enemies would use predominantly AoE skills, that would be a different story.

Jsmalls

I'm in a phone so I'm not gonna do the fancy quoting each section, sorry!

Wasn't comparing solo play potential because group play, I think it's obvious that a group is going to have a bigger impact than one person (short of bombers).

The point was you don't have 11 other people's skills keeping you alive in a 1vX.


It's niche but there are a lot of group damage absorption sets in the game that function in PvP. Obviously this would take some theory crafting to work out, and when everyone slotting vigor for heals is EZ mode no sense in trying.


Except groups are built to withstand this. Hence the 40k health minimum. You'd need 2-3 players to die to even be threatened by the plague/vicious explosion. And they'd have to all die simultaneously because a second later and you'll have recovered 15-25k health. Once again EZ mode survival, takes a lot of mistakes to drop 40k health with 20k HPS.


Makes everyone low in resources? Are we playing the same game in 2024? Sustain hasn't been an issue for like 3 years. Especially in a 12 man with all the group buffs that are possible.


Sure popping barrier / Gibbering can be a reaction based event and I'm sure this has wiped groups. But it takes A LOT of incoming damage to threaten 40k health players stacked with 20k HPS. This is likely for 12v12 organized play (which y'all seem to mostly avoid).


Agreed Group lead takes skill. Now if only we got rid of the EZ mode portions then it would require 12/12 skillful players.


LOL I spam echoing vigor to farm AP a couple casts and I can't count the number of green heals I see. It's not hard man.

I want 12 man groups to exist. But I also want it to require skillfull play. Bring back true dedicated healers, give groups reasons to separate depending on the situation to regroup, stop influencing 40k health tanks that do mediocre damage x12 in pulls then run away until their next ult.

evLRise

Jsmalls wrote: »

I'm in a phone so I'm not gonna do the fancy quoting each section, sorry!

Wasn't comparing solo play potential because group play, I think it's obvious that a group is going to have a bigger impact than one person (short of bombers).

The point was you don't have 11 other people's skills keeping you alive in a 1vX.

Which is perfectly normal. You also don't go against 12-man ballgroups when playing solo. If you do, not only it's on you, but complaining that you can't kill them alone is like i'd start crying that i don't have a tank, some healers and Ele Catalyst, Lucent, Sax, SPC, PA, z'en etc. when im farming Vateshran.

Jsmalls wrote: »

It's niche but there are a lot of group damage absorption sets in the game that function in PvP. Obviously this would take some theory crafting to work out, and when everyone slotting vigor for heals is EZ mode no sense in trying.

Try to get 7-9 other buddies of yours, slap some AoE vigors and RRs instead of the solo ones and see how far that gets you.

Jsmalls wrote: »

Except groups are built to withstand this. Hence the 40k health minimum. You'd need 2-3 players to die to even be threatened by the plague/vicious explosion. And they'd have to all die simultaneously because a second later and you'll have recovered 15-25k health. Once again EZ mode survival, takes a lot of mistakes to drop 40k health with 20k HPS.


Makes everyone low in resources? Are we playing the same game in 2024? Sustain hasn't been an issue for like 3 years. Especially in a 12 man with all the group buffs that are possible.

DDs are looking at about 15-20% block rate the whole raid to survive, and use mainly costly AoE skills. Healers are looking at 10-15% blocking. I have to cast a skill pretty much every GCD, with builds that have skills with 6-7k stam cost which needs to be refreshed every 7-8s. I can't start line of sighting unlike when im solo cuz then i guaranteed die if i'm away from the rest for too long. I don't have cloak, shade, streak, sanctum, stam to rolldodge till i hit a box room. I have an AoE vigor and a burst heal, which barely heals when it's just my own vigor and the burst i can drop 3-4 times. Being separated from the group for even 2-3s is very often guaranteed death if the whole group doesn't instantly react.

Jsmalls wrote: »

Sure popping barrier / Gibbering can be a reaction based event and I'm sure this has wiped groups. But it takes A LOT of incoming damage to threaten 40k health players stacked with 20k HPS. This is likely for 12v12 organized play (which y'all seem to mostly avoid).

You have to react all the time to big threats, multiple times a minute, more often than you can have defensive ults up.

Organized group play is similar to 1vXing. You build to withstand way more pressure than your own team size, and damage comes from coordination. It would make 0 sense for 12 randoms to be able to kill an organized 12-man. Same way 4-5-6 pugs can't touch an organized 4-man.

The reason you don't see many 12v12s is because people go in isolated places to avoid the overly excited pug dropping coldfire trebs on the hills and ruining the fight.

Jsmalls wrote: »

LOL I spam echoing vigor to farm AP a couple casts and I can't count the number of green heals I see. It's not hard man.

I want 12 man groups to exist. But I also want it to require skillfull play. Bring back true dedicated healers, give groups reasons to separate depending on the situation to regroup, stop influencing 40k health tanks that do mediocre damage x12 in pulls then run away until their next ult.

I'm fairly confident most people saying organized group play is low skill wouldn't make it past the tryout phase in a group, due to low skill.

As a fun fact, pretty much every really strong group player i know is good at - Xing, theorycrafting, smallscaling, dueling and quite often PvE as well.

Best advice is - join a decent group, if only to see how it is. Not only you'll learn a lot of things ( most group leads will be happy to give you literally hours of proper feedback if they see you're actually willing to learn and invest the time ), some which are also very useful when you're solo and clash with such groups, but mostly because your perspective will change a lot.

Random idea: If i'm not able to properly time and hit my shalk and DB combo vs a single person and stay alive while doing it, I definitely won't be able to heal others as well while doing the same thing, while also coordinating with 11 other people and having some extra skills and buffs to manage. Just random food for thought.

MEBengalsFan2001

With scribing skills you can get two additional types of hot, more buffs and debuff.

Formed a group of 6. Two players were using kynmarcher. Two ran seducer neck. Our warden provided us with major resistance. DK provided major brutality/sorcery. I provided cleanse as needed on my Templar. We had two bombers. In total we had 13 HoTs on us at any given time. Even if someone was hit for 10k dmg they were healed right up. We were killing many players without much effort as long as we were within the seducer circle. Game is so broken and clearly having that much healing was an overkill. Imagine having 6 more players to add additional heals and additional buffs and debuffs.

Healing stacking is a significant issue. What’s worse is that my group didn’t spend hours, we simply got online talked about what each of us would try out and went with it. Losing one player hurt as we lost around 2k in healing per a second and the burst that HoTs have.

Ball groups typically don’t siege because they have to spread out a bit and they can’t keep up their heal stacking to stay alive.

Ball group play is for AP farming and IMO removing heal stacking of the same type of HoT would go a long way to improve this game and even make PVE a bit harder.

I am all for removing healing stacking.