Stridig wrote: »

I treat people in ball groups as exploiters. They know how to cleverly use broken game mechanics which make them nearly unkillable and they know there is a stuck in combat bug that has been around for years. The minute you engage a ballgroup, you are stuck in combat. You can't slot seige, swap skills, Mount, use keep recall stones or open mails. This remains until they die which could be a while, or until you relog. They know this. Its a horrible thing to do when you know it's broken. And no I'm not just salty because I've been killed by them. It has actually ruined PvP in this game.

Thankfully they're only on in the evenings for 2-3 hours at a time usually so the rest of the day the PvP is actually pretty fun.
And though I don't have a very positive opinion of the play-style I wouldn't go as far as to call them exploiters since that usually refers to taking advantage of programming flaws to induce unintended behaviors in a game. But at this point it's painfully clear that the Devs are intentionally encouraging the behaviors of stacking group buffs and healing to the point a group becomes basically invincible. The Devs seem to see it as a completely legit and valid way to play in Cyrodiil no matter the detrimental effects to the experience of everyone else NOT in the ballgroup.The fact that AOE pull sets are still a thing despite how badly they've been abused by them makes it pretty clear to me.
Bottom line though I completely agree it absolutely ruins the experience when those groups are on the map. Instead of large armies fighting dynamic battles in fields and keeps back and forth across the map you get a whole faction chasing 12-24 people in a circle around the top of a keep for an hour.
If they can't balance these groups through tweaks to skills or sets they could at least add a mechanic to allow guards to ramp up in numbers/damage/toughness when an enemy group is inside an unflagged keep for a reasonable amount of time. Like make it when you kill an interior guard they respawn after five minutes with double the health, mitigation, damage and agrro range each time so after 15 minutes and three respawns they become more than just Plaguebreak nukes waiting to go off on allies and start to seriously help gang up with players to take down the interlopers. Would probably be even more fun for the ballgroup too, it would make the tactic like playing a survival mode PvP&E, the challenge would be how many waves of guards spawns can they last.

@Zama666

Most groups you'll run into probably aren't what an experienced player would call a "ball group". It's one thing to group up with 12 guildies that try to stay close by and heal each other. Those groups will certainly have an advantage over a few ungrouped pugs. Still when outnumbered 2 or 3 to 1 those groups go down as quickly as anyone else usually.
It's a whole other thing when you get a fully optimized group in which the sets they all wear and skill rotations they all do have been carefully planned out to give nearly 100% uptime on just about every buff you can possibly give each other. For example 1 person wearing Phoenix Moth, 1 wearing SPC or Olorime and 1 wearing Powerful Assault can spam heals to give a group 1K extra wd/sd and 10% extra crit damage. Then between all the group members they still have 21 more 5 piece set openings, 12 monster/other 2piece set spots and over a hundred ability slots for skills like Warhorn they can use to give each other even more damage buffs, regular and crit resist buffs, healing buffs, ulti gen buffs and recovery buffs. A 12 person group that really builds well can indefinitely shrug off the damage and debuffs of 50 people WHILE eating cold fire for breakfast and bathing in luxurious pools of meatbag's and scattershot.
They're not cheating in any way so we shouldn't use terms that imply that. But it is taking advantage of the games legitimate mechanics to give themselves an unsportsmanlike competitive advantage and I question the ethics of those that would do it on a consistent basis.

Sorry should have said the first when you posted but good job and congratulations. Keep at it and you'll get better and better. It's a steep learning curve and for most of us it takes awhile to git good. Never be afraid to fight people better than you are, just try to learn something if and when you get beat. Repetition will hone your skills. I've been playing for a long time and I recently came to the conclusion I had to get better at blocking so I've been working at it and now sometimes I'll block a dragonleap from having developed the instinct which always amazes me.

Zama666 wrote: »

@Thecompton73

Thank you very much!

Blocking - hmmmm....I should try that....

Do you run Sword n Board?

Nah, no Sword n Board for me. Usually play on my NB with DW and Bow. But I'm not talking about holding block and taking an extended beating. Just learning to hold it for a second or two at the right time in somebody's combo to cut the big damage portion in half and avoid the stun from a Dragonleap or DB. If I eat 20 K from a combo and am stunned it's game over, if I only take 10K and am not stunned I can usually recover.