Surprise surprise, the strength of healing is exacerbated by only having 2 team BGs.

Estin · October 31

Theist_VII wrote: »

Estin wrote: »

React wrote: »

Apply a penalty to healing/shields received from other players specifically through battlespirit, and limit stacks of same morph sticky HOTs to two.

This will instantly improve the problem scenarios with overtuned heals/supports as well as group hot/shielding stacking, without hurting solo/uncoordinated players nearly as much. Supports will still be effective and arguably even more in demand, but they won't be as broken as they are right now. Who knows, maybe if we're lucky we'd even be able to move the healthbars of a 60k EHP ballgroup player!

This is exactly how it should be. Simply nerfing healing done by more % or have it scale on something other than w/s damage isn't going to put much if any dent into the problem and would just cause problems elsewhere. It's healing received from other players than needs to be cut down by a lot, as well as the infinite healstacking. It's probably much easier to implement as well without disrupting gameplay everywhere else in the game.

Nope, the best solution would be to make heals scale off of Max Magicka or Max Stamina.

Changing this would have zero effect on PvE as players run either single or bi-stat food while stacking one stat, tanks still have their Max Health heals like Green Dragon’s Blood, and players that want to solo in PvP can still heal themselves by moving Health points into their resources… just like what ball groups and healers would have to do, all while everyone except for tanks benefit from the continued damage scaling off of those stats.

This would force people to consider stat sets once again for survival while reducing the overall procs we see in today’s PvP.

Not rocket science, still unclear why this hasn’t happened yet, as it fixes literally every problem.

What exactly is this going to do? This is just moving stats around to achieve the same strength it's already at now. Dedicated heals and shields will still be insanely strong because you didn't even need high W/S to give out strong heals to begin with. You also say 0 effect, but then say individuals in PvP would need to move points out of health to get more healing for themselves which would make them more of a prime target for a 1 GCD gank. The goal is to make dedicated healers not make every immortal with their high heals by reducing the amount of healing they can give to other players, not make individuals weaker by forcing them to drop points out of health so they can keep themselves alive.

Theist_VII · October 31

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Theist_VII wrote: »

Explain how moving from Tarnished Nightmare to Bone Pirate would devolve your experience

No, I'd be moving from my 64 hp DK brawler into a Sorc or NB that actually benefits from a max stat pool meta. And so would a lot of other minmax tryhards. Forcing solo brawlers into inferior max stat pool builds, that are now strained for density by another stat, accomplishes what exactly? Ball groups don't lose a thing. If you think ball groups can't minmax around this restriction with ease, then you vastly underestimate them, and should talk to more ball group players.

Yes they do, clearly at that.

Every ball group has 12 Regens and 12 Vigors up at all times, when those ticks are no longer 2k each, and instead 250-500 each, from 35k health tanks, you immediately see those groups start to get picked off from high sustained pressure that cannot be helped. Those groups will die irregardless of how skillfully they play.

Then they adapt, and have most of their group switch to Max Magicka or Max Stamina for better cross-healing and become susceptible to burst damage and have to actually react to combat.

With the proposed change, all bases are covered.

Theist_VII · October 31

Estin wrote: »

Theist_VII wrote: »

Estin wrote: »

React wrote: »

Apply a penalty to healing/shields received from other players specifically through battlespirit, and limit stacks of same morph sticky HOTs to two.

This will instantly improve the problem scenarios with overtuned heals/supports as well as group hot/shielding stacking, without hurting solo/uncoordinated players nearly as much. Supports will still be effective and arguably even more in demand, but they won't be as broken as they are right now. Who knows, maybe if we're lucky we'd even be able to move the healthbars of a 60k EHP ballgroup player!

This is exactly how it should be. Simply nerfing healing done by more % or have it scale on something other than w/s damage isn't going to put much if any dent into the problem and would just cause problems elsewhere. It's healing received from other players than needs to be cut down by a lot, as well as the infinite healstacking. It's probably much easier to implement as well without disrupting gameplay everywhere else in the game.

Nope, the best solution would be to make heals scale off of Max Magicka or Max Stamina.

Changing this would have zero effect on PvE as players run either single or bi-stat food while stacking one stat, tanks still have their Max Health heals like Green Dragon’s Blood, and players that want to solo in PvP can still heal themselves by moving Health points into their resources… just like what ball groups and healers would have to do, all while everyone except for tanks benefit from the continued damage scaling off of those stats.

This would force people to consider stat sets once again for survival while reducing the overall procs we see in today’s PvP.

Not rocket science, still unclear why this hasn’t happened yet, as it fixes literally every problem.

What exactly is this going to do? This is just moving stats around to achieve the same strength it's already at now. Dedicated heals and shields will still be insanely strong because you didn't even need high W/S to give out strong heals to begin with. You also say 0 effect, but then say individuals in PvP would need to move points out of health to get more healing for themselves which would make them more of a prime target for a 1 GCD gank. The goal is to make dedicated healers not make every immortal with their high heals by reducing the amount of healing they can give to other players, not make individuals weaker by forcing them to drop points out of health so they can keep themselves alive.

In a balanced game, Healers should be protecting from Damage-Over-Time, HPS should be competing with DPS, not burst damage.

Preventing burst is the responsibility of the player getting hit, which is why we have so many tools in this game to react to it unlike others.

When your targets have less max health, killing targets with 26k health that have 4k HPS within a second is akin to a 30k damage burst instead of a 39k one with the current 35k+ Health we see.

xylena_lazarow · October 31

Theist_VII wrote: »

With the proposed change, all bases are covered.

Except for all the brawler builds that got nuked, pushing solo/smallscale meta even harder into SorcBlade.

Estin · October 31

Theist_VII wrote: »

Estin wrote: »

Theist_VII wrote: »

Estin wrote: »

React wrote: »

Apply a penalty to healing/shields received from other players specifically through battlespirit, and limit stacks of same morph sticky HOTs to two.

This will instantly improve the problem scenarios with overtuned heals/supports as well as group hot/shielding stacking, without hurting solo/uncoordinated players nearly as much. Supports will still be effective and arguably even more in demand, but they won't be as broken as they are right now. Who knows, maybe if we're lucky we'd even be able to move the healthbars of a 60k EHP ballgroup player!

This is exactly how it should be. Simply nerfing healing done by more % or have it scale on something other than w/s damage isn't going to put much if any dent into the problem and would just cause problems elsewhere. It's healing received from other players than needs to be cut down by a lot, as well as the infinite healstacking. It's probably much easier to implement as well without disrupting gameplay everywhere else in the game.

Nope, the best solution would be to make heals scale off of Max Magicka or Max Stamina.

Changing this would have zero effect on PvE as players run either single or bi-stat food while stacking one stat, tanks still have their Max Health heals like Green Dragon’s Blood, and players that want to solo in PvP can still heal themselves by moving Health points into their resources… just like what ball groups and healers would have to do, all while everyone except for tanks benefit from the continued damage scaling off of those stats.

This would force people to consider stat sets once again for survival while reducing the overall procs we see in today’s PvP.

Not rocket science, still unclear why this hasn’t happened yet, as it fixes literally every problem.

What exactly is this going to do? This is just moving stats around to achieve the same strength it's already at now. Dedicated heals and shields will still be insanely strong because you didn't even need high W/S to give out strong heals to begin with. You also say 0 effect, but then say individuals in PvP would need to move points out of health to get more healing for themselves which would make them more of a prime target for a 1 GCD gank. The goal is to make dedicated healers not make every immortal with their high heals by reducing the amount of healing they can give to other players, not make individuals weaker by forcing them to drop points out of health so they can keep themselves alive.

In a balanced game, Healers should be protecting from Damage-Over-Time, HPS should be competing with DPS, not burst damage.

Preventing burst is the responsibility of the player getting hit, which is why we have so many tools in this game to react to it unlike others.

When your targets have less max health, killing targets with 26k health that have 4k HPS within a second is akin to a 30k damage burst instead of a 39k one with the current 35k+ Health we see.

In a balanced game, but your change is not going to balance the game. Much more would need to be done to make your change work the way you think it does.

By the way, your change is not going to make any difference for MagSorcs who already put 64 points into magic because that is what their heal and shield scale off of. Your change will completely break every single damage build that's not magsorc, or sorcs in general because it also scales off max health if it's higher.

Sluggy · October 31

IncultaWolf wrote: »

Maybe healing shouldn't be scaling off weapon/spell damage, instead make it something you have to actually invest in. This issue is probably not an easy thing to fix.

The trouble with that is which stat do you think people will invest in? The one that lets them maybe kill someone and not defend themselves or the ones that lets them survive anything?

Tonturri · October 31

I'm sure there are multiple things that need to be done, but I also want to offer - if I wanted to coat my enemy in multiple DoTs, what're my options?

Very little versus what my enemy has for stacking HoTs. There are bunches of ground-based aoe things that tick over time, but very little that sticks, and then ofc there's purge. People can just move and mobility is sky high, so ground-based stuff is out. Stat scaling is another matter, but generally I don't really mind HoT stacking as a mechanic - but there should be an equivalent option for coating people with DoTs.

Taril · October 31

The fundamental problem with healing is that there are only 2 base stats.

Max Resource - Which scales Damage and Healing
Max Health - Which scales health and some self sustain options (Notably "Tank" skills)

Ergo, no matter what you do, Healing is always going to end up being broken. If it scales of Max Resource, then DPS who stack it for damage get to also do lots of healing. If it scales off Max Health then healers get to be unkillable tanks.

So maybe we say, that healing only scales off a secondary stat similar to Weapon/Spell Damage... But then we a similar problem to now where DPS stack Max Health to become tanky because they don't care about Max Resource and can stack Max Health as a base stat while having W/S Damage as a secondary stat. Having Heals as a secondary stat would lead to again unkillable tank healers who stack Max Health.

Meaning on a fundamental level, they either have to kill diversity and make ONE resource for all Damage and ONE resource for all healing, or create a new base attribute that specifically scales healing.

Meanwhile, they'd need to tone down (Or remove) W/S Damage and put more emphasis on Max Resource (Also, remove the arbitrary facet of Sorc's shield that allows it to scale off Max Magicka for some reason) to reduce the prevalence of Health Stacking DPS who get tons of damage anyway because of secondary stats.

All of which would be a massive undertaking, with revisions to basically every single set that exists in the game on top of tons of rebalancing.

Stafford197 · October 31

Taril wrote: »

The fundamental problem with healing is that there are only 2 base stats.

Max Resource - Which scales Damage and Healing
Max Health - Which scales health and some self sustain options (Notably "Tank" skills)

Ergo, no matter what you do, Healing is always going to end up being broken. If it scales of Max Resource, then DPS who stack it for damage get to also do lots of healing. If it scales off Max Health then healers get to be unkillable tanks.

So maybe we say, that healing only scales off a secondary stat similar to Weapon/Spell Damage... But then we a similar problem to now where DPS stack Max Health to become tanky because they don't care about Max Resource and can stack Max Health as a base stat while having W/S Damage as a secondary stat. Having Heals as a secondary stat would lead to again unkillable tank healers who stack Max Health.

Meaning on a fundamental level, they either have to kill diversity and make ONE resource for all Damage and ONE resource for all healing, or create a new base attribute that specifically scales healing.

Meanwhile, they'd need to tone down (Or remove) W/S Damage and put more emphasis on Max Resource (Also, remove the arbitrary facet of Sorc's shield that allows it to scale off Max Magicka for some reason) to reduce the prevalence of Health Stacking DPS who get tons of damage anyway because of secondary stats.

All of which would be a massive undertaking, with revisions to basically every single set that exists in the game on top of tons of rebalancing.

The issue is easy to solve…. remove Weapon/Spell Damage from our stats. Replace it across the game with %Buffs to specific stats (Physical Damage, Frost Damage, Healing Done, etc) which we can use to increase our power instead of having us stack what is essentially a generic “increase all damage and healing done” stat.

Magicka and Stamina will then remain as the only stats which determine baseline damage and healing before %buffs. This increases their importance, simplifies the character stats/calculations, and makes it harder to stack Health/tankiness unless willing to suffer a big loss of effectiveness.

Aldoss · October 31

I'm with @React here. Balancing this through battle spirit provides the most opportunity to correct balance within the realm of PvP and not alter the mechanics of combat for PvE.

I'd love to see some huge cut to cross heals and cross shielding - something like 80-90%, BUT you are allowed to take a Blessing, Sigil, or Prayer (whatever fits the lore better) that will basically allow you to claim yourself as a healer. Doing so would give you access to full cross heals, but would increase your damage taken by like 50% or more.

Not saying that above statement is perfect, but it would help solve the cross healing issue, not break solo builds, and take away the ability for healers in PvP to be both Tanks AND Healers. As stated, it wouldn't touch PvE at all because it's being done through Battle Spirit.

You could put a glowy rune underneath a player who takes a Blessing, clearly marking them to all friendlies and enemies alike that that player is a healer.

I say this as a BG PvP healer main for the last two patches.

Estin · October 31

Stafford197 wrote: »

Taril wrote: »

The fundamental problem with healing is that there are only 2 base stats.

Max Resource - Which scales Damage and Healing
Max Health - Which scales health and some self sustain options (Notably "Tank" skills)

Ergo, no matter what you do, Healing is always going to end up being broken. If it scales of Max Resource, then DPS who stack it for damage get to also do lots of healing. If it scales off Max Health then healers get to be unkillable tanks.

So maybe we say, that healing only scales off a secondary stat similar to Weapon/Spell Damage... But then we a similar problem to now where DPS stack Max Health to become tanky because they don't care about Max Resource and can stack Max Health as a base stat while having W/S Damage as a secondary stat. Having Heals as a secondary stat would lead to again unkillable tank healers who stack Max Health.

Meaning on a fundamental level, they either have to kill diversity and make ONE resource for all Damage and ONE resource for all healing, or create a new base attribute that specifically scales healing.

Meanwhile, they'd need to tone down (Or remove) W/S Damage and put more emphasis on Max Resource (Also, remove the arbitrary facet of Sorc's shield that allows it to scale off Max Magicka for some reason) to reduce the prevalence of Health Stacking DPS who get tons of damage anyway because of secondary stats.

All of which would be a massive undertaking, with revisions to basically every single set that exists in the game on top of tons of rebalancing.

The issue is easy to solve…. remove Weapon/Spell Damage from our stats. Replace it across the game with %Buffs to specific stats (Physical Damage, Frost Damage, Healing Done, etc) which we can use to increase our power instead of having us stack what is essentially a generic “increase all damage and healing done” stat.

Magicka and Stamina will then remain as the only stats which determine baseline damage and healing before %buffs. This increases their importance, simplifies the character stats/calculations, and makes it harder to stack Health/tankiness unless willing to suffer a big loss of effectiveness.

Maybe easy to solve on paper, but would be incredibly hard to implement. I don't know why people keep saying Massive Game Change is an easy thing to do because it sounds simple on paper. So much of the game would have to change in order to implement it which would take years. Hybridization started like 4 years ago and it's not even completed, yet on paper it's super easy to solve.

We already have healing done and healing received as stats. A flat reduction to healing done/received to/from allies through battle spirit will address the problem that is currently happening in BGs/cyrodiil, and would be much simpler to implement. Address heal stacking too and the chances of players being immortal through crosshealing drops drastically.

React · October 31

Estin wrote: »

Stafford197 wrote: »

Taril wrote: »

The fundamental problem with healing is that there are only 2 base stats.

Max Resource - Which scales Damage and Healing
Max Health - Which scales health and some self sustain options (Notably "Tank" skills)

Ergo, no matter what you do, Healing is always going to end up being broken. If it scales of Max Resource, then DPS who stack it for damage get to also do lots of healing. If it scales off Max Health then healers get to be unkillable tanks.

So maybe we say, that healing only scales off a secondary stat similar to Weapon/Spell Damage... But then we a similar problem to now where DPS stack Max Health to become tanky because they don't care about Max Resource and can stack Max Health as a base stat while having W/S Damage as a secondary stat. Having Heals as a secondary stat would lead to again unkillable tank healers who stack Max Health.

Meaning on a fundamental level, they either have to kill diversity and make ONE resource for all Damage and ONE resource for all healing, or create a new base attribute that specifically scales healing.

Meanwhile, they'd need to tone down (Or remove) W/S Damage and put more emphasis on Max Resource (Also, remove the arbitrary facet of Sorc's shield that allows it to scale off Max Magicka for some reason) to reduce the prevalence of Health Stacking DPS who get tons of damage anyway because of secondary stats.

All of which would be a massive undertaking, with revisions to basically every single set that exists in the game on top of tons of rebalancing.

The issue is easy to solve…. remove Weapon/Spell Damage from our stats. Replace it across the game with %Buffs to specific stats (Physical Damage, Frost Damage, Healing Done, etc) which we can use to increase our power instead of having us stack what is essentially a generic “increase all damage and healing done” stat.

Magicka and Stamina will then remain as the only stats which determine baseline damage and healing before %buffs. This increases their importance, simplifies the character stats/calculations, and makes it harder to stack Health/tankiness unless willing to suffer a big loss of effectiveness.

Maybe easy to solve on paper, but would be incredibly hard to implement. I don't know why people keep saying Massive Game Change is an easy thing to do because it sounds simple on paper. So much of the game would have to change in order to implement it which would take years. Hybridization started like 4 years ago and it's not even completed, yet on paper it's super easy to solve.

We already have healing done and healing received as stats. A flat reduction to healing done/received to/from allies through battle spirit will address the problem that is currently happening in BGs/cyrodiil, and would be much simpler to implement. Address heal stacking too and the chances of players being immortal through crosshealing drops drastically.

Exactly this. They obviously are not willing to invest much effort, if any, into balancing PVP. Adjusting healing/shielding received values through battlespirit is as simple as tweaking just one or two modifiers. It is low hanging fruit that could easily be utilized to at least test how changing these things would impact the overall balance.

I truly do not understand why they're so hesitant to even try things like this.

Aggrovious · October 31

The problem is that players don't do a lot of damage to prevent the "rubber banding of HP of players with healing". You can jump/heal/block/shield all day long. Its so boring, I do not understand the appeal.

If they slightly increase player damage while update battle spirit to reduce healing reduced from other players, I think that would be a good balance start.

What I do not want to see is healing being nerfed to the ground that trial groups have to bring self heals.

Soraka · October 31

When they changed battle spirit to increase TTK the creep started. With all the sets and hybridization etc survival is a little too high now. I guess I'm going to have to agree with the people who say change battle spirit again.

Pelanora · October 31

how can a company not understand its own product.

Theist_VII · October 31

Estin wrote: »

Stafford197 wrote: »

Taril wrote: »

The fundamental problem with healing is that there are only 2 base stats.

Max Resource - Which scales Damage and Healing
Max Health - Which scales health and some self sustain options (Notably "Tank" skills)

Ergo, no matter what you do, Healing is always going to end up being broken. If it scales of Max Resource, then DPS who stack it for damage get to also do lots of healing. If it scales off Max Health then healers get to be unkillable tanks.

So maybe we say, that healing only scales off a secondary stat similar to Weapon/Spell Damage... But then we a similar problem to now where DPS stack Max Health to become tanky because they don't care about Max Resource and can stack Max Health as a base stat while having W/S Damage as a secondary stat. Having Heals as a secondary stat would lead to again unkillable tank healers who stack Max Health.

Meaning on a fundamental level, they either have to kill diversity and make ONE resource for all Damage and ONE resource for all healing, or create a new base attribute that specifically scales healing.

Meanwhile, they'd need to tone down (Or remove) W/S Damage and put more emphasis on Max Resource (Also, remove the arbitrary facet of Sorc's shield that allows it to scale off Max Magicka for some reason) to reduce the prevalence of Health Stacking DPS who get tons of damage anyway because of secondary stats.

All of which would be a massive undertaking, with revisions to basically every single set that exists in the game on top of tons of rebalancing.

The issue is easy to solve…. remove Weapon/Spell Damage from our stats. Replace it across the game with %Buffs to specific stats (Physical Damage, Frost Damage, Healing Done, etc) which we can use to increase our power instead of having us stack what is essentially a generic “increase all damage and healing done” stat.

Magicka and Stamina will then remain as the only stats which determine baseline damage and healing before %buffs. This increases their importance, simplifies the character stats/calculations, and makes it harder to stack Health/tankiness unless willing to suffer a big loss of effectiveness.

Maybe easy to solve on paper, but would be incredibly hard to implement. I don't know why people keep saying Massive Game Change is an easy thing to do because it sounds simple on paper.

Making your Max Resources predominately scale your healing would provide the least harm, and is such an easy solution.

You change two % variables in the code. While it might be difficult for someone without years of experience coding, a group of developers could trace the code after repeated trial and error (assuming they don’t have it in a file already documented) and adjust it within a weekend of work. Then they could begin playtesting.

If the code is so tangled that a weekend for your whole team would be an insufficient time frame to isolate two variables, there truly is no hope.

My belief in where the difficulty truly resides, would be getting the several extremely difficult to obtain “Okay” answers from the gatekeepers of positive change within the game. Anyone who’s worked for a company with as many layers as Zenimax Online Studios can attest to how difficult enacting change truly is.

Estin wrote: »

Stafford197 wrote: »

Taril wrote: »

The fundamental problem with healing is that there are only 2 base stats.

Max Resource - Which scales Damage and Healing
Max Health - Which scales health and some self sustain options (Notably "Tank" skills)

Ergo, no matter what you do, Healing is always going to end up being broken. If it scales of Max Resource, then DPS who stack it for damage get to also do lots of healing. If it scales off Max Health then healers get to be unkillable tanks.

So maybe we say, that healing only scales off a secondary stat similar to Weapon/Spell Damage... But then we a similar problem to now where DPS stack Max Health to become tanky because they don't care about Max Resource and can stack Max Health as a base stat while having W/S Damage as a secondary stat. Having Heals as a secondary stat would lead to again unkillable tank healers who stack Max Health.

Meaning on a fundamental level, they either have to kill diversity and make ONE resource for all Damage and ONE resource for all healing, or create a new base attribute that specifically scales healing.

Meanwhile, they'd need to tone down (Or remove) W/S Damage and put more emphasis on Max Resource (Also, remove the arbitrary facet of Sorc's shield that allows it to scale off Max Magicka for some reason) to reduce the prevalence of Health Stacking DPS who get tons of damage anyway because of secondary stats.

All of which would be a massive undertaking, with revisions to basically every single set that exists in the game on top of tons of rebalancing.

The issue is easy to solve…. remove Weapon/Spell Damage from our stats. Replace it across the game with %Buffs to specific stats (Physical Damage, Frost Damage, Healing Done, etc) which we can use to increase our power instead of having us stack what is essentially a generic “increase all damage and healing done” stat.

Magicka and Stamina will then remain as the only stats which determine baseline damage and healing before %buffs. This increases their importance, simplifies the character stats/calculations, and makes it harder to stack Health/tankiness unless willing to suffer a big loss of effectiveness.

Address heal stacking too and the chances of players being immortal through crosshealing drops drastically.

Also want to add, yes, cross-heals need to not stack, but replace/refresh each other when you have two of the same one. That is it’s own problem.

Estin · October 31

Theist_VII wrote: »

Estin wrote: »

Stafford197 wrote: »

Taril wrote: »

The fundamental problem with healing is that there are only 2 base stats.

Max Resource - Which scales Damage and Healing
Max Health - Which scales health and some self sustain options (Notably "Tank" skills)

Ergo, no matter what you do, Healing is always going to end up being broken. If it scales of Max Resource, then DPS who stack it for damage get to also do lots of healing. If it scales off Max Health then healers get to be unkillable tanks.

So maybe we say, that healing only scales off a secondary stat similar to Weapon/Spell Damage... But then we a similar problem to now where DPS stack Max Health to become tanky because they don't care about Max Resource and can stack Max Health as a base stat while having W/S Damage as a secondary stat. Having Heals as a secondary stat would lead to again unkillable tank healers who stack Max Health.

Meaning on a fundamental level, they either have to kill diversity and make ONE resource for all Damage and ONE resource for all healing, or create a new base attribute that specifically scales healing.

Meanwhile, they'd need to tone down (Or remove) W/S Damage and put more emphasis on Max Resource (Also, remove the arbitrary facet of Sorc's shield that allows it to scale off Max Magicka for some reason) to reduce the prevalence of Health Stacking DPS who get tons of damage anyway because of secondary stats.

All of which would be a massive undertaking, with revisions to basically every single set that exists in the game on top of tons of rebalancing.

The issue is easy to solve…. remove Weapon/Spell Damage from our stats. Replace it across the game with %Buffs to specific stats (Physical Damage, Frost Damage, Healing Done, etc) which we can use to increase our power instead of having us stack what is essentially a generic “increase all damage and healing done” stat.

Magicka and Stamina will then remain as the only stats which determine baseline damage and healing before %buffs. This increases their importance, simplifies the character stats/calculations, and makes it harder to stack Health/tankiness unless willing to suffer a big loss of effectiveness.

Maybe easy to solve on paper, but would be incredibly hard to implement. I don't know why people keep saying Massive Game Change is an easy thing to do because it sounds simple on paper.

Making your Max Resources predominately scale your healing would provide the least harm, and is such an easy solution.

You change two % variables in the code. While it might be difficult for someone without years of experience coding, a group of developers could trace the code after repeated trial and error (assuming they don’t have it in a file already documented) and adjust it within a weekend of work. Then they could begin playtesting.

If the code is so tangled that a weekend for your whole team would be an insufficient time frame to isolate two variables, there truly is no hope.

My belief in where the difficulty truly resides, would be getting the several extremely difficult to obtain “Okay” answers from the gatekeepers of positive change within the game. Anyone who’s worked for a company with as many layers as Zenimax Online Studios can attest to how difficult enacting change truly is.

Estin wrote: »

Stafford197 wrote: »

Taril wrote: »

The fundamental problem with healing is that there are only 2 base stats.

Max Resource - Which scales Damage and Healing
Max Health - Which scales health and some self sustain options (Notably "Tank" skills)

Ergo, no matter what you do, Healing is always going to end up being broken. If it scales of Max Resource, then DPS who stack it for damage get to also do lots of healing. If it scales off Max Health then healers get to be unkillable tanks.

So maybe we say, that healing only scales off a secondary stat similar to Weapon/Spell Damage... But then we a similar problem to now where DPS stack Max Health to become tanky because they don't care about Max Resource and can stack Max Health as a base stat while having W/S Damage as a secondary stat. Having Heals as a secondary stat would lead to again unkillable tank healers who stack Max Health.

Meaning on a fundamental level, they either have to kill diversity and make ONE resource for all Damage and ONE resource for all healing, or create a new base attribute that specifically scales healing.

Meanwhile, they'd need to tone down (Or remove) W/S Damage and put more emphasis on Max Resource (Also, remove the arbitrary facet of Sorc's shield that allows it to scale off Max Magicka for some reason) to reduce the prevalence of Health Stacking DPS who get tons of damage anyway because of secondary stats.

All of which would be a massive undertaking, with revisions to basically every single set that exists in the game on top of tons of rebalancing.

The issue is easy to solve…. remove Weapon/Spell Damage from our stats. Replace it across the game with %Buffs to specific stats (Physical Damage, Frost Damage, Healing Done, etc) which we can use to increase our power instead of having us stack what is essentially a generic “increase all damage and healing done” stat.

Magicka and Stamina will then remain as the only stats which determine baseline damage and healing before %buffs. This increases their importance, simplifies the character stats/calculations, and makes it harder to stack Health/tankiness unless willing to suffer a big loss of effectiveness.

Address heal stacking too and the chances of players being immortal through crosshealing drops drastically.

Also want to add, yes, cross-heals need to not stack, but replace/refresh each other when you have two of the same one. That is it’s own problem.

Ok, great. If it's so easy, go work for zos then. Go through every item set in the game and replace anything that gives weapon and spell damage with this new resource. Go through every item set in the game and modify any proc set that scales off of weapon and spell damage so it works with the new resource. Modify every single skill, passive, and CP that affects or is affected by weapon and spell damage. Do the same for every status effect. Make sure you don't forget enemy NPCs because they also have weapon and spell damage applied to their attacks as well. Don't forget about critical heals either. Is this still sounding like an easy weekend project?

I'm sorry, but all of this is coming from the same person who was linking beginner youtube tutorials saying it would be easy to change ESO's engine to Unreal 5. It's unrealistic (no pun intended). But if it's all as easy as you said, maybe you could swap the engines in the same weekend.

peacenote · October 31

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Something has to budge ZOS. Increase the Battle Spirit heal debuff, make Healing Skills scale on something other than offensive stats, eliminate HoT Stacking, re-buff Defile, or all of the above. Heals are just obscene without a third team to pressure a group.

It's been like this for a while, but it's easy to dismiss when it's in Cyro as "oh well that's just a ballgroup". In BGs it was kept in check by the third team applying more pressure, but now it's just absurd - and this is coming from someone that mains a healer/support currently.

My build can spit out 30k shields every 2 globals to my entire team in a Battleground. Thats 15k HPS per target from literally just two skills. 60k total HPS for the group is insane - add on lifesteal, my own HoTs, and my teammates HoTs and you can see just how ridiculous that is.

Personally am a fan of re-buffing Defile.

coop500 wrote: »

I don't think solo players should be crippled alongside grouping players.

I agree 100%.

Parasaurolophus wrote: »

I wouldn't mind completely killing the healer role in pvp, significantly reducing outgoing healing.

I would hate this so, so much. Seriously, why are so many people out to get healers? Some of us legitimately enjoy the role. It provides a nice alternative to being a DPS. If you don't like it, don't play it, but the answer cannot be destroying a play style in order to make another's better. Not an acceptable trade-off, especially not in this case when we are talking about one of the three tenants of an MMO (healer, tank, DPS) as opposed to some kind of niche build situation.

StihlReign wrote: »

Parasaurolophus wrote: »

I wouldn't mind completely killing the healer role in pvp, significantly reducing outgoing healing.

A resto staff skill rework to make skills more targeted vs staff spamming and hitting random targets would be a nice start.

Sigh. Thought we had moved on from the "healers just spam skills" propaganda. Literally regen is the only thing that hits random targets (besides the Ulti) and it's the only 360 heal. Making "more" skills to be targeted would mean that we would have NO skills un-targeted. Grand Healing - targeted area. Blessing of Restoration - allies in front of you. Steadfast ward - lowest ally. Force siphon - allies in the tether. Mender's Bond - linked allies.

React wrote: »

Apply a penalty to healing/shields received from other players specifically through battlespirit, and limit stacks of same morph sticky HOTs to two.

This will instantly improve the problem scenarios with overtuned heals/supports as well as group hot/shielding stacking, without hurting solo/uncoordinated players nearly as much. Supports will still be effective and arguably even more in demand, but they won't be as broken as they are right now. Who knows, maybe if we're lucky we'd even be able to move the healthbars of a 60k EHP ballgroup player!

Could work. I would worry a little about how healers "get credit" -- can healers keep replacing each other's HOTs, or would we be at risk of not getting credit in battles, medals in BGs, etc. if there were too many healers present? I will admit that I am not well versed in how that all works. I only know that as a healer, I seem to earn AP more slowly or miss ticks more often than my DPS counterparts grouped with me or compared to when I play as a DPS.

fizzylu · October 31

Really the easiest solution that wouldn't mess with anything and everything or require Zenimax to actually fix their problematic combat system and balancing is to simply, wait for it--

bring back 4v4v4 (it was thoughtless to remove it to begin with) as the ranked/competitive BG format
keep 8v8 on as a more casual BG option
make 4v4 a new PvP arena mode (like it should have been from the beginning, not a BG) for those that desire the micro Cyrodiil ballgroup fighting, then this mode could also be expanded into 2v2 if players want that and 1v1 aka the ranked dueling some have already said they'd like to see brought to the game

But none of this will probably happen because then Zenimax would have to kind of admit that designing entire features without running them past the playerbase probably isn't the best approach to developing their game and that they were wrong about what would make BGs good. And I'm just saying.... but I think somehow, it all makes sense when you realize that the main person behind the reworking of BGs mains a healer.

Taril · October 31

peacenote wrote: »

Seriously, why are so many people out to get healers?

Mostly because Healers often end up being major sources of PvP imbalance.

Typically because in order for their spot on a limited team to be justified, they have to output enough healing to make up for the loss of an extra damage dealer. Which often results in them outhealing 2 dedicated DD's (Which creates frustration where you need a significant numbers advantage to counter 1 healer)

PvP players tend to like it when fight outcomes are determined based on who utilizes their attacks better, rather than who has the better pocket healer.

P.s. "Don't like it, don't play it" doesn't work when your gameplay is impacted by other people playing healers.

peacenote wrote: »

Not an acceptable trade-off, especially not in this case when we are talking about one of the three tenants of an MMO (healer, tank, DPS)

Yeah, but this is PvP we're talking about. Which generally transcends the typical "Holy Trinity" notably by the fact that Tanks are typically not part of PvP (And usually only exist to cheese certain game modes). With Tanks only becoming meta when they get broken and start being DPS themselves...

On a side note; I personally think it's long past time that the Holy Trinity is updated from Tank/Healer/DPS to Tank/Support/DPS with the Healer role adjusted from being pure healing output, to more of a varied and utile Support with focus on buffs, debuffs, control with a bit of healing to top people up. (Even more so when modern Tank and DPS designs are featuring self sustain options. In some cases Tanks are actually putting out more HPS than healers themselves, I recall many a Raid in WoW where my DK Tank had higher HPS and overall Healing done than my entire Raids collection of healers combined)

Alaztor91 · November 1

We have skills that deal damage over time. We have skills that cleanse them.
We have skills that heal over time. We don't have skills that remove them other than Negate?

Considering how some things in ESO have their ''opposites'' like Resolve/Breach, Expedition/Snares, Protection/Vulnerability, etc I wonder if introducing the ability to remove non-permanent positive effects on a target via certain skills would help.

It would basically do the opposite of what the ''Cleanse Skills'' do, so instead of purging negative effects from you/allies, it would remove positive effects from the enemy. Kinda similar to Negate, but no Silence, not an Ultimate and not restricted to a certain class. This ''buff eater'' effect would be added to a few select Class skills with single target skills being limited to 1 removal per cast and AoE having the options for 3-5.

I wonder if something like this could help, or if having options to remove player buffs with non-ult skills would feel a bit too oppressive.

Aldoss · November 1

Alaztor91 wrote: »

Considering how some things in ESO have their ''opposites'' like Resolve/Breach, Expedition/Snares, Protection/Vulnerability, etc I wonder if introducing the ability to remove non-permanent positive effects on a target via certain skills would help.

It's shocking how amazing an effect like Soldier of Anguish sounds and how awfully it actually performs. The delay is completely unwarranted, especially with how much extra speed has been added into the game since the set was introduced.

There are heal absorption poisons, but they're so low amounts.

I feel like it's clear that ZOS has started to run out of (balanced) ideas when it comes to introducing new sets. There really should be more options that create a heal absorption effect (and not have it completely crippled by a delay longer than a GCD).

Theist_VII · November 1

Estin wrote: »

Theist_VII wrote: »

Estin wrote: »

Stafford197 wrote: »

Taril wrote: »

The fundamental problem with healing is that there are only 2 base stats.

Max Resource - Which scales Damage and Healing
Max Health - Which scales health and some self sustain options (Notably "Tank" skills)

Ergo, no matter what you do, Healing is always going to end up being broken. If it scales of Max Resource, then DPS who stack it for damage get to also do lots of healing. If it scales off Max Health then healers get to be unkillable tanks.

So maybe we say, that healing only scales off a secondary stat similar to Weapon/Spell Damage... But then we a similar problem to now where DPS stack Max Health to become tanky because they don't care about Max Resource and can stack Max Health as a base stat while having W/S Damage as a secondary stat. Having Heals as a secondary stat would lead to again unkillable tank healers who stack Max Health.

Meaning on a fundamental level, they either have to kill diversity and make ONE resource for all Damage and ONE resource for all healing, or create a new base attribute that specifically scales healing.

Meanwhile, they'd need to tone down (Or remove) W/S Damage and put more emphasis on Max Resource (Also, remove the arbitrary facet of Sorc's shield that allows it to scale off Max Magicka for some reason) to reduce the prevalence of Health Stacking DPS who get tons of damage anyway because of secondary stats.

All of which would be a massive undertaking, with revisions to basically every single set that exists in the game on top of tons of rebalancing.

The issue is easy to solve…. remove Weapon/Spell Damage from our stats. Replace it across the game with %Buffs to specific stats (Physical Damage, Frost Damage, Healing Done, etc) which we can use to increase our power instead of having us stack what is essentially a generic “increase all damage and healing done” stat.

Magicka and Stamina will then remain as the only stats which determine baseline damage and healing before %buffs. This increases their importance, simplifies the character stats/calculations, and makes it harder to stack Health/tankiness unless willing to suffer a big loss of effectiveness.

Maybe easy to solve on paper, but would be incredibly hard to implement. I don't know why people keep saying Massive Game Change is an easy thing to do because it sounds simple on paper.

Making your Max Resources predominately scale your healing would provide the least harm, and is such an easy solution.

You change two % variables in the code. While it might be difficult for someone without years of experience coding, a group of developers could trace the code after repeated trial and error (assuming they don’t have it in a file already documented) and adjust it within a weekend of work. Then they could begin playtesting.

If the code is so tangled that a weekend for your whole team would be an insufficient time frame to isolate two variables, there truly is no hope.

My belief in where the difficulty truly resides, would be getting the several extremely difficult to obtain “Okay” answers from the gatekeepers of positive change within the game. Anyone who’s worked for a company with as many layers as Zenimax Online Studios can attest to how difficult enacting change truly is.

Estin wrote: »

Stafford197 wrote: »

Taril wrote: »

The fundamental problem with healing is that there are only 2 base stats.

Max Resource - Which scales Damage and Healing
Max Health - Which scales health and some self sustain options (Notably "Tank" skills)

Ergo, no matter what you do, Healing is always going to end up being broken. If it scales of Max Resource, then DPS who stack it for damage get to also do lots of healing. If it scales off Max Health then healers get to be unkillable tanks.

So maybe we say, that healing only scales off a secondary stat similar to Weapon/Spell Damage... But then we a similar problem to now where DPS stack Max Health to become tanky because they don't care about Max Resource and can stack Max Health as a base stat while having W/S Damage as a secondary stat. Having Heals as a secondary stat would lead to again unkillable tank healers who stack Max Health.

Meaning on a fundamental level, they either have to kill diversity and make ONE resource for all Damage and ONE resource for all healing, or create a new base attribute that specifically scales healing.

Meanwhile, they'd need to tone down (Or remove) W/S Damage and put more emphasis on Max Resource (Also, remove the arbitrary facet of Sorc's shield that allows it to scale off Max Magicka for some reason) to reduce the prevalence of Health Stacking DPS who get tons of damage anyway because of secondary stats.

All of which would be a massive undertaking, with revisions to basically every single set that exists in the game on top of tons of rebalancing.

The issue is easy to solve…. remove Weapon/Spell Damage from our stats. Replace it across the game with %Buffs to specific stats (Physical Damage, Frost Damage, Healing Done, etc) which we can use to increase our power instead of having us stack what is essentially a generic “increase all damage and healing done” stat.

Magicka and Stamina will then remain as the only stats which determine baseline damage and healing before %buffs. This increases their importance, simplifies the character stats/calculations, and makes it harder to stack Health/tankiness unless willing to suffer a big loss of effectiveness.

Address heal stacking too and the chances of players being immortal through crosshealing drops drastically.

Also want to add, yes, cross-heals need to not stack, but replace/refresh each other when you have two of the same one. That is it’s own problem.

Ok, great. If it's so easy, go work for zos then. Go through every item set in the game and replace anything that gives weapon and spell damage with this new resource. Go through every item set in the game and modify any proc set that scales off of weapon and spell damage so it works with the new resource. Modify every single skill, passive, and CP that affects or is affected by weapon and spell damage. Do the same for every status effect. Make sure you don't forget enemy NPCs because they also have weapon and spell damage applied to their attacks as well. Don't forget about critical heals either. Is this still sounding like an easy weekend project?

To someone unknowing of dependent code, this must seem like a massive undertaking. I get it.

Every line of code that does a specific action is tied to another, finding the root multiplier that was assigned for damage and then the one for healing, and then changing the assigned values, would cause an echo of mathematical corrections to each of the following “problems” you’ve named.

Now, that’s assuming the code is unraveled and clean. If random values have different inherent multipliers, then you would have a mess to solve.

ZOS boast that they took a year of performance, and that they’ve cleaned up their code.

Changing the value of X-X1(0%) and X-X2(100%) should be nothing to a professional under those circumstances, they would just need the approval from leadership.

Theist_VII · November 1

Alaztor91 wrote: »

We have skills that deal damage over time. We have skills that cleanse them.
We have skills that heal over time. We don't have skills that remove them other than Negate?

Considering how some things in ESO have their ''opposites'' like Resolve/Breach, Expedition/Snares, Protection/Vulnerability, etc I wonder if introducing the ability to remove non-permanent positive effects on a target via certain skills would help.

It would basically do the opposite of what the ''Cleanse Skills'' do, so instead of purging negative effects from you/allies, it would remove positive effects from the enemy. Kinda similar to Negate, but no Silence, not an Ultimate and not restricted to a certain class. This ''buff eater'' effect would be added to a few select Class skills with single target skills being limited to 1 removal per cast and AoE having the options for 3-5.

I wonder if something like this could help, or if having options to remove player buffs with non-ult skills would feel a bit too oppressive.

While I don’t believe this would fix the problem, I would love to see more “Sapper” build tools.

We have so many ways to build ourselves and our friends up but like you said, almost nothing to tear down opponents.

Great suggestion!

Skoomah · November 1

I think time to kill is fine. There’s enough back and forth to make fights meaningful. Players can build more offensive or defensive depending on what kind of impact they want to make. It’s all matter of taste, I think the current style of play and outcomes is fine. Damage dealers are fine and so are defensive minded healers. Most classes have some kind of unique role to play and can be fun if you build into a class’s or playstyle’s strengths.

Solariken · November 1

Agree with OP of course, PvP healtanks are an abomination and the result of incredibly lazy combat design.

Honestly many of the party support heals should be made to exclude self.

Matriarch for example should heal allies only; Sorc can run Ward or Clannfear etc if they need self survival.

Additionally, more healing should require targeting. I had high hopes when they added heal targeting to the game with Warden vines; I thought they would be retrofitting older skills with that same mechanic which would make combat way more interesting. Smart heals that automatically go to the ideal target is a pretty dumb idea. Healing should require more skill and awareness rather than just holding block and mashing a win button.

Skoomah · November 1

There are lots of players and teams that are built to take out overly tanky players and teams. Of course there are outliers but the vast majority of tanky players can be ignored because they don’t hit for that much or a good burst on damage dealers leaves healers worthless because their teammates are dead. Healers scale well but so can specific damage dealer builds too.

Einar_Hrafnarsson · November 2

DPS simply can heal themselves to much, that in combination with a good Healer makes them nearly immortal.

Introducing new Runes and or Different Enchantments/traits that JUST increase Healing by certain percentages while removing the healing boost Attack Power or Spell Power has would fix a lot of those problems. Only Healers would use those new options since these do not contribute ANYTHING to Damage.

Sadly i can already see all the DPS mains jumping at me because they don't wanna lose the ability to just burstheal themselves. They would rather see Healers removed than having a balanced Game.

Stafford197 · November 2

Estin wrote: »

Stafford197 wrote: »

Taril wrote: »

The fundamental problem with healing is that there are only 2 base stats.

Max Resource - Which scales Damage and Healing
Max Health - Which scales health and some self sustain options (Notably "Tank" skills)

Ergo, no matter what you do, Healing is always going to end up being broken. If it scales of Max Resource, then DPS who stack it for damage get to also do lots of healing. If it scales off Max Health then healers get to be unkillable tanks.

So maybe we say, that healing only scales off a secondary stat similar to Weapon/Spell Damage... But then we a similar problem to now where DPS stack Max Health to become tanky because they don't care about Max Resource and can stack Max Health as a base stat while having W/S Damage as a secondary stat. Having Heals as a secondary stat would lead to again unkillable tank healers who stack Max Health.

Meaning on a fundamental level, they either have to kill diversity and make ONE resource for all Damage and ONE resource for all healing, or create a new base attribute that specifically scales healing.

Meanwhile, they'd need to tone down (Or remove) W/S Damage and put more emphasis on Max Resource (Also, remove the arbitrary facet of Sorc's shield that allows it to scale off Max Magicka for some reason) to reduce the prevalence of Health Stacking DPS who get tons of damage anyway because of secondary stats.

All of which would be a massive undertaking, with revisions to basically every single set that exists in the game on top of tons of rebalancing.

The issue is easy to solve…. remove Weapon/Spell Damage from our stats. Replace it across the game with %Buffs to specific stats (Physical Damage, Frost Damage, Healing Done, etc) which we can use to increase our power instead of having us stack what is essentially a generic “increase all damage and healing done” stat.

Magicka and Stamina will then remain as the only stats which determine baseline damage and healing before %buffs. This increases their importance, simplifies the character stats/calculations, and makes it harder to stack Health/tankiness unless willing to suffer a big loss of effectiveness.

Maybe easy to solve on paper, but would be incredibly hard to implement. I don't know why people keep saying Massive Game Change is an easy thing to do because it sounds simple on paper. So much of the game would have to change in order to implement it which would take years. Hybridization started like 4 years ago and it's not even completed, yet on paper it's super easy to solve.

We already have healing done and healing received as stats. A flat reduction to healing done/received to/from allies through battle spirit will address the problem that is currently happening in BGs/cyrodiil, and would be much simpler to implement. Address heal stacking too and the chances of players being immortal through crosshealing drops drastically.

Well hold on a sec. Isn’t this an unreasonable line of thinking?

Your claim is that my Character Stats overhaul suggestion would be “incredibly hard” for ZOS to implement. Okay that’s fine.

You then back up your claim with the evidence that ZOS attempted a Hybridization overhaul, and yet still haven’t finished it after 4 years. In other words, we must work within the confines of these low expectations.

And then afterwards, within the same post, you ask for a Healstacking/Crosshealing Core Functionality + balancing overhaul of your own. See the issue? The evidence you brought shuts down both of our suggestions, not just my own.

The point is let’s not make excuses for ZOS. They are capable of a lot but will purposefully do minimal work on the Combat balance side of things. Case in point, they let a spreadsheet balance classes now, and still haven’t found time to combine Major Sorc/Brutality after 4 years…. our suggestions have no chance of ever happening.

Iriidius · November 3

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Theist_VII wrote: »

Nope, the best solution would be to make heals scale off of Max Magicka or Max Stamina

This obliterates most solo builds in the game, while having no significant impact on minmax comp groups, they slightly change their minmax then continue doing the same exact thing. It would basically force an MMO trinity type system on PvP, severely restrict solo play, and widen the gap between comp and randoms. Wrong direction.

As I already explained, it would severely nerf groups too because it would demolish DPS cross heals. DPS cross heals are where the majority of the passive healing of groups comes from. True healers are really only there for defending against and recovering from big combos/dumps.

If you scale heals off of max stat, you now have to pick between 2 of 3 things - max damage, max healing (mag/stam), or max health. Right now you can have all 3, and that's the core issue.

It would not nerf groups as healers need no dmg only healing and can pick max healing(stam/mag) and dds would pick max dmg but soloplayer needs all 3 as noone is doing the other for him.

DPS cross healing is not majority of passive healing but just a part when there are 6dds having only echoing vigor and 4 healer 2 support also having radiant regen and multiple other healing skills.
But how unproblematic max mag scaling heals would be you can see when taking a look at 60k max magsorc using hardened ward. They still get less dmg than when stacking wpn dmg what would not be a problem for groups if healers stacking mag would only heal the whole group and not deal dmg and the dds stacking wpn dmg deal dmg.