How PvP Specific Skills Should Differ from PvE Skills

Stamicka

Major_Mangle wrote: »

Erickson9610 wrote: »

I'd play a campaign where the only item sets and abilities I could use were balanced against one another for PvP specifically. Even if it means the majority of my abilities and item sets are disabled or changed in some way in this campaign, I'd hope that such an experience would be more engaging.

They tried similar ruleset with no proc and the campaign died off completely. We don't need srict rulesets (and potentially "presets") and its clear that the ingame population doesn't want it either, as no proc wasn't very popular.

Sure the test is poorly worded in my opinion and it opens up for a lot of ways for interpretation, but the way I see it, it looks like they'll force people into
"You're only allow to use these sets/skills and nothing else". ESO doesn't need to take after games like Guild Wars where you've a limit amount of options of what can be used in PvP. All it will do is kill the remaining PvP population (assuming it's later forced into all PvP campaigns rather than a temporary test)

No Proc wasn’t a success for the same reason that 4v4 competitive battlegrounds won’t be. The people who play ESO now just aren’t competitive and don’t like to be on balanced footing with other players. It seems like much of ESO’s population just wants to outbuild or outnumber their opponents and have advantages over them.

The thing is, if this game wants to attract competitive/ more serious PvPers to make new PvP content successful, it needs to stop being so unbalanced. I think the biggest mass exodus of great players that I’ve ever seen happened right after One Tamriel. One Tamriel exploded the number of sets and procs in the game and so many old PvPers just said the game was too uncompetitive and left for MOBAs or team shooters.

It’s just too difficult to balance 100s of sets, especially when some were created without consideration for the consequences they would have in PvP. It would be much easier to balance a handful of special PvP specific sets. In its current state though, ESO will remain skilless and unattractive to any serious PvPer because of the level that you can outbuild others.

Avran_Sylt

Aurielle wrote: »

Here’s my concern with Matt’s wording:

a Cyrodiil campaign

Meaning … one campaign, meaning … it will be as dead as the no proc campaign.

For this to actually work, it needs to be a campaign-wide change. As much as we’d all like to think people will naturally gravitate to the campaign where they can get the best performance and not have to deal with ridiculous population caps, we know from experience that people tend to stay in the “main campaign” (a.k.a. the campaign where ball groups are free to destroy performance for everyone).

Yeah. In all honesty the best place for them to test this out is something small first, like a Battleground event where these skills replace your current skills.

Small-scale testing that you can get people in and out quickly without having to deal with the whole bother that is map traversal and group organization needed in Cyrodiil.

If it works decently in battlegrounds, then see if it can scale up to Cyrodiil.

BXR_Lonestar

Healing Skills
There's no doubt that cross healing is a really big issue in ESO. The biggest culprits are auto targeting and "sticky" heals over time like echoing vigor or radiating regeneration. First, there's no way that this can be good for server performance and secondly it's terrible for the game's balance anyway. I think that these skills should be completely replaced with PvP specific versions that still offer utility, but without the ability to to be abused through heal stacking. There's many ways to go about this and there's lots of great ideas on the forums. It's also important not to introduce any new healing skills that can be abused through heal stacking when new PvP specific skills are added.

IMO this is absolutely the BIGGEST myth that is being promulgated about PVP healing. I'll admit that cross-healing helps the survivability of a group that is playing together, but those groups that are allegedly impossible to kill are "impossible" to kill mostly due to highly skilled healer play. I know this to be true because my group experimented with eliminating healers from the group to see what our survivability was like without dedicated healers, and we got wrecked. Repeatedly.

Without a dedicated healer(s), we were defensive far too often and rarely had offensive windows where we could press the fight. Cross-healing helps to keep your health topped off, but without well timed burst heals and ulti heals, an organized group goes from unstoppable to just plain ordinary.

Do you propose that healing just be removed from PVP altogether? Or phrased another way, do you believe that healers have a place in PVP? Because a healers job is not to get kills but to keep their teammates alive, and when we do our jobs, our guys don't die. Cross-heals mainly help with the piddly attacks that the group absorbs as other people try to build ult on us or kill us from a distance, but they don't do anything to prevent a group from getting killed when they need burst heals at a critical juncture of the fight.

Stamicka

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Healing Skills
There's no doubt that cross healing is a really big issue in ESO. The biggest culprits are auto targeting and "sticky" heals over time like echoing vigor or radiating regeneration. First, there's no way that this can be good for server performance and secondly it's terrible for the game's balance anyway. I think that these skills should be completely replaced with PvP specific versions that still offer utility, but without the ability to to be abused through heal stacking. There's many ways to go about this and there's lots of great ideas on the forums. It's also important not to introduce any new healing skills that can be abused through heal stacking when new PvP specific skills are added.

IMO this is absolutely the BIGGEST myth that is being promulgated about PVP healing. I'll admit that cross-healing helps the survivability of a group that is playing together, but those groups that are allegedly impossible to kill are "impossible" to kill mostly due to highly skilled healer play. I know this to be true because my group experimented with eliminating healers from the group to see what our survivability was like without dedicated healers, and we got wrecked. Repeatedly.

Without a dedicated healer(s), we were defensive far too often and rarely had offensive windows where we could press the fight. Cross-healing helps to keep your health topped off, but without well timed burst heals and ulti heals, an organized group goes from unstoppable to just plain ordinary.

Do you propose that healing just be removed from PVP altogether? Or phrased another way, do you believe that healers have a place in PVP? Because a healers job is not to get kills but to keep their teammates alive, and when we do our jobs, our guys don't die. Cross-heals mainly help with the piddly attacks that the group absorbs as other people try to build ult on us or kill us from a distance, but they don't do anything to prevent a group from getting killed when they need burst heals at a critical juncture of the fight.

This is probably the most unpopular opinion on the forums. Cross healing is an issue and it’s way stronger than just “topping people off”. The amount of heals per second that can come from multiple stacks of both echoing vigor and radiating regeneration is way more beneficial than what a healer or two is putting out.

I think healers definitely have a place in PvP, but they shouldn’t be extremely tanky and they shouldn’t have 40k+ health. They should be required to invest in a stat just like damage dealers do. In its current form, the fact that healers can just sit around with 50k health, spamming polar wind and still putting out a decent amount of healing while also being extremely difficult to kill is just bad design. We will really see who the good healers are when people can no longer crutch on being so tanky.

Muizer

If they're smart, and the player base is willing to recognize it, they'd start with just single target direct damage and healing and build back up from there. That would be way faster than endlessly trying to experiment with tweaks to the present situation.

LadyGP

Quackery wrote: »

I'm all for it if it means the end of ball groups.

Whatever there do it will not remove ball groups. A 12 person group that spends hours upon hours min/maxing and being fully optimized and knows where their raid lead will be pushing without them saying a word will always beat pugs/zergs.

Now with that being said - ball groups are wayyyy to OP right now and I say that as someone who used to run in one for many years. The only time we run into trouble, generally speaking, is when we fight another ball group.

I'd love to see these changes make it more difficult for ball groups and make it so pugs/zergs can have a better chance at defeating us. Ball groups just want tough and fun fights. Rolling over pugs gets boring real fast.. GVG-ing and no ones health moving each push gets boring really fast.

I welcome these changes.

Aldoss wrote: »

To anyone excited about the idea of "PvP specific skills", ask yourself, "who is going to design these skills?"

The same people that made Jabs and Flurry 2.0 will.

The same people that haven't touched Polar Wind in multiple patches will.

The same people that made Grave Lord's Sacrifice will.

I have 0 faith that they can do this without it flopping, hard.

Few points - first I think you are missing the mark on what they said. I didn't take their message to mean they will be creating NEW skills... I took it to mean they will make it so only certain skills show up in PvP. Meaning, they will take the skills that have a 3x...4x..10x impact on server performance (calculations) and remove them. When they do that though they are going to have to modify some of the lower costly skills to fill the gaps for things like healing and what not.

LadyGP

Aurielle wrote: »

The_Meathead wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

The flipside of this is that success in PVP would become more about physical skill than about sets — which is how most PVP games work. How often have people here bemoaned the fact that they’re getting killed by overtuned sets or class abilities, not by skilled players? Particular guns in FPS games all have the same damage output for all players, but player skill and knowledge of terrain / enemy behaviour is what ultimately determines who wins in a PVP FPS game. FPS games seem to be doing alright despite the lack of build agency…

I have seen a lot of people say that over the years, but I'm not one of them for two reasons.

First, builds are a huge part of ESO's PvP. It would be dull as dirt without full control of them to me, and I'd probably go play another MMO. It's where RPG meets PvP imo, and I don't play FPS games because they lack the same feeling. While OPed outliers often exist and do indeed tarnish things, that's a balance issue that should be corrected quickly and ideally a temporary and infrequent price to be paid for the fun of designing your own character in way that suits your own play.

Second, my experience in other MMOs over the past couple decades has shown that when "PvP Templates" or the like are added late in a game's life, it hasn't been a positive despite initial vocal support for the reasons you mentioned. It's been less colorful and fun, less player-driven, and gets reverted back after participation drops off because it's bland, some players always figure out a way to manipulate it, and most of all it takes away the drive to play the game because the reward of greater strength for playing, doing, and "go get the next item or upgrade" is such an integral aspect of continued enjoyment and drive to participate.

You're certainly not wrong that it's a commonly voiced sentiment and absolutely everyone's fully entitled to their own opinion, but in my experience when it's happened elsewhere it hasn't ended well.

Yeah, well I can’t even play the game right now because performance is so bad. I don’t even have it installed on my computer anymore. I’d rather have a smooth, functional experience at the expense of less build diversity, if that’s what it takes. Build diversity is not what drew me to Cyrodiil in the first place — it was the fun of capturing and defending keeps with friends, the fun of stealing scrolls with friends. While theorycrafting can certainly be fun, it’s not the main drive of Cyrodiil for a lot of people.

SAMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

s3dulo

Aldoss wrote: »

To anyone excited about the idea of "PvP specific skills", ask yourself, "who is going to design these skills?"

The same people that made Jabs and Flurry 2.0 will.

The same people that haven't touched Polar Wind in multiple patches will.

The same people that made Grave Lord's Sacrifice will.

I have 0 faith that they can do this without it flopping, hard.

As someone who is fairly new to ESO but a little familiar with software dev I think you have a good point. As ZOS has pointed in out in a post that addressed the criticisms of the infamous PVP live stream that took place recently, the game is vast therefore the devs can't be faulted for not having all of it's knowledge at their fingertips. However, because the game is so vast (really it's like 4 or 5+ games in one) this is why ZOS should be leaning heavily on it's community for guidance.

Where I work we use an IT documentation platform to manage the knowledge of all our software and many processes. I chose this platform for the company to use for a few reasons but a giant one was a page on their website called Roadmap. On this page they had a link to near 2000 feature requests made by all of their users. You could view any of the requests (trending requests were at the top) and once you signed up, you could vote what requests you wanted most, comment on them, or submit your own. Requests with enough votes went into "In Review" status then to "In Progress" and finally "Complete" after implementation. The transparency, communication, and willingness to give the customers what they wanted the most won me over big time.

ZOS needs to do this. The ESO communities combined knowledge of this game is vastly superior to what ZOS could ever hope to have. ZOS needs an official transparent page where players can submit and vote on feature requests so they know what the majority actually wants most. Then we can see what is being worked on. Obviously they can still surprise us with whatever new content the writers and creators can dream up but then important sections of the game won't be neglected.

I also think ZOS needs a dedicated PVP team if they don't already. A team of people who love ESO PVP, play it regularly, and have the sole job of coordinating it's improvement. (Based on community voting)

ZOS not officially and thoroughly leveraging this community in improving the game is an enormous missed opportunity.

Tommy_The_Gun

I am kinda worried that they are simply going to add 5 class skills (or even 5 universal skills so that class would not matter) and those would be the only skills that will be allowed to be used.

If this is going to be the case, then this will basically kill most of builds & homogenises the game to the point in which moba games will have more diversity when it comes to character archetypes.

Far better solution would be to return to the very old concept that once was in the game. For example - NB's Teleport Strike used to have a stun. It was stunning the target. But, it had this simple line: "If the target is a player, they are snared instead of being stunned"

If they would alter how certain skills do work in PvP, so that the usage of the skill will be similar, but effect slightly different then this is definitely better than reducing the amount of selection of the skills we have.

Aldoss

LadyGP wrote: »

Few points - first I think you are missing the mark on what they said. I didn't take their message to mean they will be creating NEW skills... I took it to mean they will make it so only certain skills show up in PvP. Meaning, they will take the skills that have a 3x...4x..10x impact on server performance (calculations) and remove them. When they do that though they are going to have to modify some of the lower costly skills to fill the gaps for things like healing and what not.

Fair point, but I don't think it changes my sentiment. Whether they be new skills or curated skills, I have 0 faith in this combat team to be able to choose balanced skills because the same reasons I posted.

If someone had a history of bankrupting companies, and came to you and asked for investment saying, "trust me", would you trust them? Why should I believe that this time will be any different?

Razmirra

Ball groups and unkillable players is what turns me off from PvP nowadays, and I would be more inclined to dip my toes back into it if these were rectified somehow. ( I know how to PvP, I am not one of those hardcore players who spend all day in BG or Cyro because I have better things to do. )

Jaraal

Stamicka wrote: »

When damage is centered around burst skills, it reinforces the importance of timing, blocking, and rolling. Overall skill expression will be improved since the players are more in control of the damage they deal and receive.

This sounds great on paper, but apparently you haven't been experiencing the lag, latency, high ping, packet loss, skill delay and whatnot that most of us get in Cyrodiil in a daily basis. And even if everything on your end is perfect, your lagging opponent can have all their inputs delayed so that they all appear to hit you at once in an unfair "one shot." Didn't matter that you block weaved perfectly or not.

Until performance is fixed, this is all a moot point.

Estin

I do hope that they port over the majority of skills. I doubt every single skill is unperformant, especially the ones that target only 1 player. Ground based and smart targeting skills I can see being very straining, and those type of skills are usually heal skills.

Also from what I understand with their proposed experiments is that if something they implement isn't popular, they're not going to keep it in the game. This change is only going to be in a new campaign, so I hope it gets tested enough and receives enough feedback so it can become the ideal cyrodiil. It's too early to make any assumptions though. I hope with their new seasonal layout they can stop being so secretive about their plans. 1 month is nowhere near enough time to take in and implement feedback.

loosej

Avran_Sylt wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Here’s my concern with Matt’s wording:

a Cyrodiil campaign

Meaning … one campaign, meaning … it will be as dead as the no proc campaign.

For this to actually work, it needs to be a campaign-wide change. As much as we’d all like to think people will naturally gravitate to the campaign where they can get the best performance and not have to deal with ridiculous population caps, we know from experience that people tend to stay in the “main campaign” (a.k.a. the campaign where ball groups are free to destroy performance for everyone).

Yeah. In all honesty the best place for them to test this out is something small first, like a Battleground event where these skills replace your current skills.

Small-scale testing that you can get people in and out quickly without having to deal with the whole bother that is map traversal and group organization needed in Cyrodiil.

If it works decently in battlegrounds, then see if it can scale up to Cyrodiil.

Maybe they already are testing it. For all we know the plan could be to enter this campaign and choose between the werewolf and the vampire form from Chaosball.

LadyGP

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Healing Skills
There's no doubt that cross healing is a really big issue in ESO. The biggest culprits are auto targeting and "sticky" heals over time like echoing vigor or radiating regeneration. First, there's no way that this can be good for server performance and secondly it's terrible for the game's balance anyway. I think that these skills should be completely replaced with PvP specific versions that still offer utility, but without the ability to to be abused through heal stacking. There's many ways to go about this and there's lots of great ideas on the forums. It's also important not to introduce any new healing skills that can be abused through heal stacking when new PvP specific skills are added.

IMO this is absolutely the BIGGEST myth that is being promulgated about PVP healing. I'll admit that cross-healing helps the survivability of a group that is playing together, but those groups that are allegedly impossible to kill are "impossible" to kill mostly due to highly skilled healer play. I know this to be true because my group experimented with eliminating healers from the group to see what our survivability was like without dedicated healers, and we got wrecked. Repeatedly.

Without a dedicated healer(s), we were defensive far too often and rarely had offensive windows where we could press the fight. Cross-healing helps to keep your health topped off, but without well timed burst heals and ulti heals, an organized group goes from unstoppable to just plain ordinary.

Do you propose that healing just be removed from PVP altogether? Or phrased another way, do you believe that healers have a place in PVP? Because a healers job is not to get kills but to keep their teammates alive, and when we do our jobs, our guys don't die. Cross-heals mainly help with the piddly attacks that the group absorbs as other people try to build ult on us or kill us from a distance, but they don't do anything to prevent a group from getting killed when they need burst heals at a critical juncture of the fight.

Agree with this. Yes, cross healing/ "sticky heals" are a problem and have to be addressed ( I say this as someone who has ran in ball groups for many years) but those heals aren't the heals keeping ball groups alive.

100% a solid core of healers that know when to burst and where to burst will make or break your core.

Those sticky heals aren't what is making them stay alive.. it's the situational burst heals.

LadyGP

Aldoss wrote: »

LadyGP wrote: »

Few points - first I think you are missing the mark on what they said. I didn't take their message to mean they will be creating NEW skills... I took it to mean they will make it so only certain skills show up in PvP. Meaning, they will take the skills that have a 3x...4x..10x impact on server performance (calculations) and remove them. When they do that though they are going to have to modify some of the lower costly skills to fill the gaps for things like healing and what not.

Fair point, but I don't think it changes my sentiment. Whether they be new skills or curated skills, I have 0 faith in this combat team to be able to choose balanced skills because the same reasons I posted.

If someone had a history of bankrupting companies, and came to you and asked for investment saying, "trust me", would you trust them? Why should I believe that this time will be any different?

Oh, don't get me wrong my "trust" in ZoS is at an all time low. But, Kevin has pointed out on more than one occasion that their goal this year is to begin building trust again with the community.

I've moved onto other games because performance is so poor in ESO ATM I can't play much at all. I do jump in from time to time to see if it is fixed but so far it hasn't for me.

But, to your point... my trust for them is very low and they have said "all the right things" many times before so what makes this time different? For me... this time is different because of just how many issues they have had this year and now many players are leaving the game in mass. Theres zero doubt in my mind that they are seeing a massive dip in revenue.

So... to me... this time is different.. because if they don't figure it out.. and fast... a lot of people may be out of jobs.

Desiato

My takeaway is the emphasis is going to be on restoring large scale combat in Cyrodiil, not necessarily returning us to the low ttk, higher skill cap days of pre-2017. I don't think small scalers will necessarily be pleased with the changes at a mechanical level.

I expect a drastic simplification of abilities, passives and procs. Movement speed and resource regen could be reined in as well.

I think they would want to adjust 5 piece set bonuses as well, but at the same time they will want pvp players to continue to be motivated to grind pve content, so I'm not sure how that will work out.

LadyGP

Desiato wrote: »

My takeaway is the emphasis is going to be on restoring large scale combat in Cyrodiil, not necessarily returning us to the low ttk, higher skill cap days of pre-2017. I don't think small scalers will necessarily be pleased with the changes at a mechanical level.

I expect a drastic simplification of abilities, passives and procs. Movement speed and resource regen could be reined in as well.

I think they would want to adjust 5 piece set bonuses as well, but at the same time they will want pvp players to continue to be motivated to grind pve content

Damn do I miss those big large scale battles.

I remember a when they lifted the cap (yes performance was dog poo) but there was a fight at a keep and it was a tri faction fight. We were protecting the inner keep and the outer had like 5 walls down and the inner had both posterns and ifd down.

We pushed both factions out and got everything repped and they started hitting again. Got back to inner before we pushed them back out. This was almost a 2 hour fight. The entire server was at this one keep and it was one of the most epic experiences I've had in a game. Zone chat was lit and everyone was having a blast.

Now imagine if we had that again AND we didn't crash 5-10 times during those two hours.

Yeah, do whatever you need to do to make that happen - I'm here for it.

moosegod

It's sad that the game is in a state where to improve performance in Cyrodiil they are looking at fundamentally changing the gameplay through PvP specific skills. I assume they will be simple abilities with basic animations to not overload the servers. Those sort of skills sound familiar...like I may have experienced something like that many years ago.

Avran_Sylt

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Healing Skills
There's no doubt that cross healing is a really big issue in ESO. The biggest culprits are auto targeting and "sticky" heals over time like echoing vigor or radiating regeneration. First, there's no way that this can be good for server performance and secondly it's terrible for the game's balance anyway. I think that these skills should be completely replaced with PvP specific versions that still offer utility, but without the ability to to be abused through heal stacking. There's many ways to go about this and there's lots of great ideas on the forums. It's also important not to introduce any new healing skills that can be abused through heal stacking when new PvP specific skills are added.

IMO this is absolutely the BIGGEST myth that is being promulgated about PVP healing. I'll admit that cross-healing helps the survivability of a group that is playing together, but those groups that are allegedly impossible to kill are "impossible" to kill mostly due to highly skilled healer play. I know this to be true because my group experimented with eliminating healers from the group to see what our survivability was like without dedicated healers, and we got wrecked. Repeatedly.

Without a dedicated healer(s), we were defensive far too often and rarely had offensive windows where we could press the fight. Cross-healing helps to keep your health topped off, but without well timed burst heals and ulti heals, an organized group goes from unstoppable to just plain ordinary.

Do you propose that healing just be removed from PVP altogether? Or phrased another way, do you believe that healers have a place in PVP? Because a healers job is not to get kills but to keep their teammates alive, and when we do our jobs, our guys don't die. Cross-heals mainly help with the piddly attacks that the group absorbs as other people try to build ult on us or kill us from a distance, but they don't do anything to prevent a group from getting killed when they need burst heals at a critical juncture of the fight.

I mean you said it yourself:

"Without a dedicated healer(s), we were defensive far too often and rarely had offensive windows where we could press the fight."

Healers get Kills indirectly, by allowing frontline players (typically geared for damage) to persistently overpower targets without rest or needing to tend to their own defenses, against those that are themselves not getting the same kind of healing support.

Ideally you'd have some kind of melee assassin tool to be useable to single-target burst down a healer, (Like maybe if a Berserker Strike cast with 500 Ult dealt 50,000 damage after battle-spirit calcs), but ZoS has methodically killed off all kinds of high-damage sources like that because "No fair in Duels!".

MincMincMinc

Their statement is unsurprisingly unclear much like the general direction they want to take other systems in.

You can interpret the statement in 3 ways.

1. PvP will now have fundamentally different skills. As in certain skills will be missing portions like major buffs or secondary effects. Imagine something like dizzy now nolonger doing offbalance or a snare.
2. Pvp will now have new rules on skills that do not fundamentally change how they work. For instance you can no longer have 12x stacks of echoing vigor and rapid regen on you doing 200% of your healthbar per tick. Or heals do not cross out of group. Or aoe caps again.
3. PvP will flat out ban certain skills.

IMO zos is far more likely to choose option 2 as it is easier to implement, while also hardly affecting the user experience. Likely ball groups would now be soft capped, zerlings wont tell a difference because they are casting into a black hole of 50+people. Solo players and smallman may need to change a morph or two.

---

As for the conversation about stuns I think many of you are missing a big point. Zos has ruined most cc counterplay. With proper counterplay design, these mechanics shouldnt feel like a plague on the game. Too many flashy animations for dumb skills exist and hide any possible telegraphs that SHOULD be flashy instead.

Dizzy swing and offbalance is the perfect example. Dizzy used to be a straightforward skill that was fun to use and so easily outplayable it was rarely used in dueling. The long charge up cast time was a clear telegraph for the enemy to react to. Failure to react within 6 average human reaction times resulted in a knockup.
Now, dizzy is really quick and applies a debuff.....sometimes if the enemy themselves is not on a cooldown. A cooldown that you cant see, otherwise it'll apply a snare for some reason. Then if you or anyone else light attack+1ms the enemy they will fall over without any animation to warn them.
Please tell me which one of these is more clear from a counterplay perspective? Old dizzy you had to look for one telegraph, new dizzy there are like 4 or 5 very situational telegraphs that can be hidden by other mechanics or animations.

For any argument about stuns, pulls, or hard cc in general. Just reiterate the point of the caster must have a clear telegraph after cast. THEN the hard CC happens if you fail to react. If this dynamic doesnt exist, the CC shouldnt exist

Stamicka

MincMincMinc wrote: »

As for the conversation about stuns I think many of you are missing a big point. Zos has ruined most cc counterplay. With proper counterplay design, these mechanics shouldnt feel like a plague on the game. Too many flashy animations for dumb skills exist and hide any possible telegraphs that SHOULD be flashy instead.

Dizzy swing and offbalance is the perfect example. Dizzy used to be a straightforward skill that was fun to use and so easily outplayable it was rarely used in dueling. The long charge up cast time was a clear telegraph for the enemy to react to. Failure to react within 6 average human reaction times resulted in a knockup.
Now, dizzy is really quick and applies a debuff.....sometimes if the enemy themselves is not on a cooldown. A cooldown that you cant see, otherwise it'll apply a snare for some reason. Then if you or anyone else light attack+1ms the enemy they will fall over without any animation to warn them.
Please tell me which one of these is more clear from a counterplay perspective? Old dizzy you had to look for one telegraph, new dizzy there are like 4 or 5 very situational telegraphs that can be hidden by other mechanics or animations.

For any argument about stuns, pulls, or hard cc in general. Just reiterate the point of the caster must have a clear telegraph after cast. THEN the hard CC happens if you fail to react. If this dynamic doesnt exist, the CC shouldnt exist

I actually agree with you about how the off balance stun is badly designed in terms of counterplay against it. People will just mindlessly hold block if they see they are off balance. Also without addons there’s sometimes a glitch where the game doesn’t even tell you when you set someone off balance. It’s just so badly designed and not intuitive all around. Also yes, since medium attacks can happen so quickly a lot of players won’t even understand why they got stunned. The invisible cooldown is also stupid and they actually limit the amount of control the player has against their target.

Someone else brought up the fact that off balance stun is unique because it’s an off GCD stun. I can somewhat agree with this, but I think instead there should be a skill that clearly makes your weapons glow or something and while that skill is active your medium and heavy attacks stun for x seconds (x being small preferably). This would be a much better design because it’s much more clear to both the person using the skill and the opponent. It also gives players a bit more control over the stun and frees them from the invisible cooldown.

MincMincMinc

Stamicka wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

As for the conversation about stuns I think many of you are missing a big point. Zos has ruined most cc counterplay. With proper counterplay design, these mechanics shouldnt feel like a plague on the game. Too many flashy animations for dumb skills exist and hide any possible telegraphs that SHOULD be flashy instead.

Dizzy swing and offbalance is the perfect example. Dizzy used to be a straightforward skill that was fun to use and so easily outplayable it was rarely used in dueling. The long charge up cast time was a clear telegraph for the enemy to react to. Failure to react within 6 average human reaction times resulted in a knockup.
Now, dizzy is really quick and applies a debuff.....sometimes if the enemy themselves is not on a cooldown. A cooldown that you cant see, otherwise it'll apply a snare for some reason. Then if you or anyone else light attack+1ms the enemy they will fall over without any animation to warn them.
Please tell me which one of these is more clear from a counterplay perspective? Old dizzy you had to look for one telegraph, new dizzy there are like 4 or 5 very situational telegraphs that can be hidden by other mechanics or animations.

For any argument about stuns, pulls, or hard cc in general. Just reiterate the point of the caster must have a clear telegraph after cast. THEN the hard CC happens if you fail to react. If this dynamic doesnt exist, the CC shouldnt exist

I actually agree with you about how the off balance stun is badly designed in terms of counterplay against it. People will just mindlessly hold block if they see they are off balance. Also without addons there’s sometimes a glitch where the game doesn’t even tell you when you set someone off balance. It’s just so badly designed and not intuitive all around. Also yes, since medium attacks can happen so quickly a lot of players won’t even understand why they got stunned. The invisible cooldown is also stupid and they actually limit the amount of control the player has against their target.

Someone else brought up the fact that off balance stun is unique because it’s an off GCD stun. I can somewhat agree with this, but I think instead there should be a skill that clearly makes your weapons glow or something and while that skill is active your medium and heavy attacks stun for x seconds (x being small preferably). This would be a much better design because it’s much more clear to both the person using the skill and the opponent. It also gives players a bit more control over the stun and frees them from the invisible cooldown.

Yeah, I brought that up about 50x in the past anytime people bring up this issue. If people dont remember zos also had just done a change to make most ults cast timed skills instead of instant. The reasoning was that too quick or off gcd heavy hitting effects were too powerful.............Then they went and gutted dizzyswing which was the most clearly telegraphed and unique ability in the game, and made it now have an off gcd stun.

Varana

Avran_Sylt wrote: »

Healers get Kills indirectly, by allowing frontline players (typically geared for damage) to persistently overpower targets without rest or needing to tend to their own defenses, against those that are themselves not getting the same kind of healing support.

But that's the point of teamwork. Like, playing together in a group, supporting each other so everyone can focus on different things and the sum is greater than its parts.
It's the whole point of being in a group that "frontline players" can forego some of their self-defense and self-healing because there are dedicated group members taking care of that aspect.

It sometimes seems as if the ideal "grouping" experience for many would be everyone just running alongside each other and doing their own thing. Which is a really weird idea, to be honest, for an MMO.

Avran_Sylt

Varana wrote: »

Avran_Sylt wrote: »

Healers get Kills indirectly, by allowing frontline players (typically geared for damage) to persistently overpower targets without rest or needing to tend to their own defenses, against those that are themselves not getting the same kind of healing support.

But that's the point of teamwork. Like, playing together in a group, supporting each other so everyone can focus on different things and the sum is greater than its parts.
It's the whole point of being in a group that "frontline players" can forego some of their self-defense and self-healing because there are dedicated group members taking care of that aspect.

It sometimes seems as if the ideal "grouping" experience for many would be everyone just running alongside each other and doing their own thing. Which is a really weird idea, to be honest, for an MMO.

Tell me if you notice something:

Healer A heals player B with a Single-target heal
Player B heals 10K HP

Healer A heals 10 players with an AoE heal
Each player within the AoE is healed 7K Hp.
Total Health healed and needing to be damaged through is now equal to 7K time the number of players healed.

Healing does have a place, but AoE heals are grossly outperforming.

Tannus15

In my opinion this is all missing the point entirely.

Let's be honest here, the only thing that matters for cyrodil is performance. Everything else can be made to work if the game runs smoothly.

I'm in favour of them making the most bare bones, cut down version and get it HUMMING. Then slowly reintroduce options and functionality to see where the problems lie.

Forget balance. Forget burst vs dots or ball groups or any of that. None of it matters while the game is unreliable and non functional.

cut everything. add a campaign where you get the same 5 skills regardless of class and no back bar. all the skills as literally the same, none of the gear sets do anything, no cp. cut the whole damn thing and make certain is runs smoothly with full, 2014 pop.

If that goal can't be achieved, then they either give up on the whole thing or rewrite it from the ground up. but they have to start with proof that it is fit for purpose.

robwolf666

With any luck it mean PvP and PvE will be completely separated so they don't keep interfering with each other when one gets tweaked.

BXR_Lonestar

Tell me if you notice something:

Healer A heals player B with a Single-target heal
Player B heals 10K HP

Healer A heals 10 players with an AoE heal
Each player within the AoE is healed 7K Hp.
Total Health healed and needing to be damaged through is now equal to 7K time the number of players healed.

Healing does have a place, but AoE heals are grossly outperforming.

I hear this kind of thing, and what I hear is "heals to strong, I should be able to kill someone who is getting healed." If a player or players can be killed while a healer is burst healing them, then there is absolutely ZERO point in having a healer be there to heal you. So no, you shouldn't be able to kill people who are getting burst healed just by trying to do raw damage. If healers did not make a difference in combat, there is absolutely zero reason to have a healer instead of another DPS in the group.

I get it. It's frustrating to fight against a group that has one or more good healers, but that is high-end coordinated PVP. Many times my ball group hits a group and does literally nothing. Maybe 3-4 hits. Then that 4th or 5th hit people pop. That's also part of the game. We hit them, they hit us, and its all about who pops first - and what may determine that is whether the healers are on point or have sufficient resources to do their job. As a healer, that requires me to be on point for every single time they press the offensive window, and I need to know what abilities to use when right at the mesh point (and when to block and bail so I don't get focused) and If I'm not, the entire group could lose.

Now this is one thing I will agree on: there should be more counters to healing. Currently, the only viable counter is a negate bubble, and that is only available on 1 class. There is no silence spell, and the scribing dispel ability and heal absorption have some potential, but they need some tweaks as to how they are actually deployed before they can be considered useful.

But outside of that, I think healing is fine as is. What there needs to be is more available counters to it such as silence, heal absorption, etc. that is available on more than one class.

katanagirl1

I didn’t read it as a new campaign for Cyrodiil. I hope that is not the intent. This could be bad for us on console, we can barely fill Gray Host during prime time hours now. We can’t split up the playerbase any more.

Avran_Sylt

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Tell me if you notice something:

Healer A heals player B with a Single-target heal
Player B heals 10K HP

Healer A heals 10 players with an AoE heal
Each player within the AoE is healed 7K Hp.
Total Health healed and needing to be damaged through is now equal to 7K time the number of players healed.

Healing does have a place, but AoE heals are grossly outperforming.

I hear this kind of thing, and what I hear is "heals to strong, I should be able to kill someone who is getting healed." If a player or players can be killed while a healer is burst healing them, then there is absolutely ZERO point in having a healer be there to heal you. So no, you shouldn't be able to kill people who are getting burst healed just by trying to do raw damage. If healers did not make a difference in combat, there is absolutely zero reason to have a healer instead of another DPS in the group.

I get it. It's frustrating to fight against a group that has one or more good healers, but that is high-end coordinated PVP. Many times my ball group hits a group and does literally nothing. Maybe 3-4 hits. Then that 4th or 5th hit people pop. That's also part of the game. We hit them, they hit us, and its all about who pops first - and what may determine that is whether the healers are on point or have sufficient resources to do their job. As a healer, that requires me to be on point for every single time they press the offensive window, and I need to know what abilities to use when right at the mesh point (and when to block and bail so I don't get focused) and If I'm not, the entire group could lose.

Now this is one thing I will agree on: there should be more counters to healing. Currently, the only viable counter is a negate bubble, and that is only available on 1 class. There is no silence spell, and the scribing dispel ability and heal absorption have some potential, but they need some tweaks as to how they are actually deployed before they can be considered useful.

But outside of that, I think healing is fine as is. What there needs to be is more available counters to it such as silence, heal absorption, etc. that is available on more than one class.

I don't think you get the point.

In one GCD, a healer healed 10K hp at the cost of 4K Magicka in one GCD.

In another, a healer healed upwards of 70K HP using 4K MAgicka in one GCD.

Basically: Ballgroups make you more resource efficient with AoE heals.