PvP healing majorly overtuned

Alvedolin · April 27

Healing in PvP is insane and needs to be nerfed. Cant even enjoy DM weekend.

silky_soft · May 2

Don't forget shields and mitigation.

It was so good watching 2 teams heal it out. To make it end fast I just died in there over and over hoping to trigger somone vd. I think 27 deaths was my best.

Jsmalls · May 8

We need to make a bigger deal of this. Heal stacking is a serious problem. Even Tank Healers in a small situations (like BGs) is a problem.

IamDestiny · May 8

Just make a mythic that stops crosshealing.

Araneae6537 · May 8

IamDestiny wrote: »

Just make a mythic that stops crosshealing.

What even is “cross healing”? Damage removes enemy HP and healing restores ally HP. Some heals specifically target caster only or group members only (the latter distinction being irrelevant in BGs).

Is the argument that damage should reign supreme? That mitigation and healing aren’t balid ways to play the game? I don’t agree with that, if so. IMHO, healing should be effective so that the opponent needs to focus damage, perhaps even on the healer, to get kills.

CameraBeardThePirate · May 8

Araneae6537 wrote: »

IamDestiny wrote: »

Just make a mythic that stops crosshealing.

What even is “cross healing”? Damage removes enemy HP and healing restores ally HP. Some heals specifically target caster only or group members only (the latter distinction being irrelevant in BGs).

Is the argument that damage should reign supreme? That mitigation and healing aren’t balid ways to play the game? I don’t agree with that, if so. IMHO, healing should be effective so that the opponent needs to focus damage, perhaps even on the healer, to get kills.

The issue is that there are far more ways to mitigate incoming damage than there are ways to mitigate a Target's healing. Crit Resist, %damage taken modifiers, armor, maim, cowardice, purges and blocking can all mitigate incoming damage.

The only ways to mitigate someone else's healing are defile, cowardice, and heal absorption (which is basically useless and scarcely found). You can't mitigate someone's Crit heals like you can with Crit Damage. You can't purge/dispel someone else's HoTs like you can purge DoTs on yourself.

What that means is that Healing is far more efficient than damage. You can mitigate damage sources with relative ease and stack healing. The damage dealer has options to punch through your mitigation, but basically no options to truly stop you from healing. As you scale up in group size/numbers, healing VASTLY outpaces damage, as there are way more buffs to healing and mitigation than there are debuffs to healing.

Throwing on a single group HoT is therefore WAY more efficient than using a single DoT. In large scale PvP this gets out of hand - groups can easily have 10k+ passive HPS (without using burst heals or shields).

StaticWave · May 9

Remember that healing and damage directly affect each other. While there's a lot of healing in the game right now, there's also a lot of damage. Nerfing healing without nerfing damage would tip the scale and cause everyone to build even tankier.

The best solution imo is this:

1) Remove the 15% damage mitigation from Battle Spirit
2) Remove the ability to stack more than 2 instances of one HoT
3) Reduce Undeath value to 15%
4) Add a soft cap to HP - After 33-35k HP, investment in HP gets diminishing return
5) Remove the base 1000 weapon damage
6) Reduce easy access to critical damage

There can be a few more but those are what I can think of at the top of my head.

Turtle_Bot · May 9

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

IamDestiny wrote: »

Just make a mythic that stops crosshealing.

What even is “cross healing”? Damage removes enemy HP and healing restores ally HP. Some heals specifically target caster only or group members only (the latter distinction being irrelevant in BGs).

Is the argument that damage should reign supreme? That mitigation and healing aren’t balid ways to play the game? I don’t agree with that, if so. IMHO, healing should be effective so that the opponent needs to focus damage, perhaps even on the healer, to get kills.

The issue is that there are far more ways to mitigate incoming damage than there are ways to mitigate a Target's healing. Crit Resist, %damage taken modifiers, armor, maim, cowardice, purges and blocking can all mitigate incoming damage.

The only ways to mitigate someone else's healing are defile, cowardice, and heal absorption (which is basically useless and scarcely found). You can't mitigate someone's Crit heals like you can with Crit Damage. You can't purge/dispel someone else's HoTs like you can purge DoTs on yourself.

What that means is that Healing is far more efficient than damage. You can mitigate damage sources with relative ease and stack healing. The damage dealer has options to punch through your mitigation, but basically no options to truly stop you from healing. As you scale up in group size/numbers, healing VASTLY outpaces damage, as there are way more buffs to healing and mitigation than there are debuffs to healing.

Throwing on a single group HoT is therefore WAY more efficient than using a single DoT. In large scale PvP this gets out of hand - groups can easily have 10k+ passive HPS (without using burst heals or shields).

Agreed, cross healing is not the issue here, it's heal over time stacking that far outpaces damage over time stacking both in terms of ease of access and raw numbers.

In particular though, it is the issue of stacking sticky HoTs that is causing so many of the problems.

Back when ground based HoTs were best in slot, it wasn't as much of an issue because you could use negate to delete the healing zone or lay down enough siege fire to cancel out the healing which forces the groups to move out of their healing zone or sets up for bomb plays to actually have a viable window to deal their damage and wipe the ball group.

With sticky HoTs being BiS, that passive healing zone now travels with the group making it impossible to counter that healing zone because it not only travels with the group, but also is an applied buff, not an AoE that can be removed. The biggest offender with this though is echoing vigor, being a stamina based healing ability, negate cannot prevent it from being cast, so even when under a negate, ball groups get to keep recasting their stacked HoT healing zone that travels with them while they move out of the negate meaning the pressure of sieges doesn't work anymore to create that window for a bomb to do its thing.

Limiting the ability to stack the same HoT effect to 2 (or maybe 3) instances per player would more than fix it and would do so in a way that would have negligible impact on PvE.

If ball groups want to keep that passive heal stacking, they will be forced to build differently with different classes and abilities which forces them to give up things to get it, or they forgo it as a crutch and have a more active defense with more healers, which in turn significantly reduces their damage output making it much harder to wipe zergs.
The best groups will always adapt, but at least the rest won't have this broken crutch of a mechanic to carry them (and it is a massive crutch, otherwise they wouldn't be defending it so vigorously).

IncultaWolf · May 9

The real issue is undeath in my opinion. That passive needs to be cut in half at the minimum.

Durham · May 9

-Heal stacking of the same hot is an issue and can be addressed not sure why they will not implement this change. This is something that the community has been identifying as an issue for years now.
-Undeath could be modified for Cyrodil, down to 15% is reasonable.
-Eliminate the + healing around keeps.
-Block cost reduction glyphs should be only half effective in PVP.
-Nerf Snow treaders (this is very OP in ball groups) Make this mythic only work in PVE.

Durham · May 9

Araneae6537 wrote: »

IamDestiny wrote: »

Just make a mythic that stops crosshealing.

What even is “cross healing”? Damage removes enemy HP and healing restores ally HP. Some heals specifically target caster only or group members only (the latter distinction being irrelevant in BGs).

Is the argument that damage should reign supreme? That mitigation and healing aren’t balid ways to play the game? I don’t agree with that, if so. IMHO, healing should be effective so that the opponent needs to focus damage, perhaps even on the healer, to get kills.

Healing should be effective! However smart healing HOTS allows for extreme stacking is broken and not skillful at all!
You should have dedicated healers casting strong effective heals when people need them!

xDeusEJRx · May 10

They need to update battle spirit very badly, reduce mitigation and healing potency

GooGa592 · May 10

Heal stacking is way, way too strong, and has been for years, yet ZOS refuses to address the issue. It's weird too because limiting heal stacking would also almost certainly result in better performance due much fewer calculations server side.

Galeriano2 · May 10

Araneae6537 wrote: »

IamDestiny wrote: »

Just make a mythic that stops crosshealing.

What even is “cross healing”? Damage removes enemy HP and healing restores ally HP. Some heals specifically target caster only or group members only (the latter distinction being irrelevant in BGs).

Is the argument that damage should reign supreme? That mitigation and healing aren’t balid ways to play the game? I don’t agree with that, if so. IMHO, healing should be effective so that the opponent needs to focus damage, perhaps even on the healer, to get kills.

One of the core issues of healing vs dmg in ESO is that healing is way easier to produce than dmg. Some of the reasons are for example the fact that both healing and dmg scale from the same stats but dmg also have one additional stat in the form opf penetration so healing gets a headstart which otfen allows healers to build more tankines when there are also heals that scale from max HP which often allows to create a tanks that are healers. Other thing is that lot of heals often find targets automatically.

Imagine if ZoS would add damage ability to the game that would have high tooltip, 100% penetration, high range or big radius and would automaticallly find targets that can be most likely killed with it. People would boycot ability like that immidiatelly yet this is almost excatly how healing works. Healing in ESO is way easier to apply than dmg, this is why in BGs one average healbot can decide on the matches outcome way more than one good DD.

xDeusEJRx · May 10

Galeriano2 wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

IamDestiny wrote: »

Just make a mythic that stops crosshealing.

What even is “cross healing”? Damage removes enemy HP and healing restores ally HP. Some heals specifically target caster only or group members only (the latter distinction being irrelevant in BGs).

Is the argument that damage should reign supreme? That mitigation and healing aren’t balid ways to play the game? I don’t agree with that, if so. IMHO, healing should be effective so that the opponent needs to focus damage, perhaps even on the healer, to get kills.

One of the core issues of healing vs dmg in ESO is that healing is way easier to produce than dmg. Some of the reasons are for example the fact that both healing and dmg scale from the same stats but dmg also have one additional stat in the form opf penetration so healing gets a headstart which otfen allows healers to build more tankines when there are also heals that scale from max HP which often allows to create a tanks that are healers. Other thing is that lot of heals often find targets automatically.

Imagine if ZoS would add damage ability to the game that would have high tooltip, 100% penetration, high range or big radius and would automaticallly find targets that can be most likely killed with it. People would boycot ability like that immidiatelly yet this is almost excatly how healing works. Healing in ESO is way easier to apply than dmg, this is why in BGs one average healbot can decide on the matches outcome way more than one good DD.

Not to mention that ways to counter healing are much more limited than counters to damage. The only direct counters to healing are defiles(which are weak besides Jerall mountain warchief), heal absorption (which has very limited sources and those sources are weak), and damage over time skills (which are a lot weaker than they used to be before the u35 update)

Whereas damage has tons of counters and sources of counters such as: mitigation, resistances, burst heals/HoTs, CP sources, blocking, roll dodging.

There's a HUGE disparity in ways to defend yourself from damage and MUCH less ways to reduce healing power which is a MAJOR factor in why people survive fights

Desiato · May 10

We may not all agree on the root cause or the solution, but it's pretty clear that a majority of players recognize there's a problem.

Hasenpfote · May 12

It can be easily fixed by changing deadra damage.

Instead of deadra damage does damage, it reduces max life instead for 20 seconds, stackable, not cleansable.

For balancing purpose, a healer should be able to outheal 2 dps with similar equipment.
If this is not the case, would render healers an obsolete spec and the team with a healer is in disadvantage by definition.

xylena_lazarow · May 12

Desiato wrote: »

We may not all agree on the root cause or the solution, but it's pretty clear that a majority of players recognize there's a problem.

This is salient and more players should notice. Players agreeing on a problem is what gets devs' attention.

Players arguing over proposed solutions is just noise that gets in the way of problems being addressed.

Everything I've read says devs prefer players stick to identifying problems, developing solutions is the devs' job.

Near everyone who PvPs agrees there's too much healing, but there are so many factors contributing to overpowered healing that need to be untangled, let the devs figure that out, they're paid professionals and we're unpaid laypeople.

ProudMary · May 12

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Desiato wrote: »

We may not all agree on the root cause or the solution, but it's pretty clear that a majority of players recognize there's a problem.

This is salient and more players should notice. Players agreeing on a problem is what gets devs' attention.

Players arguing over proposed solutions is just noise that gets in the way of problems being addressed.

Everything I've read says devs prefer players stick to identifying problems, developing solutions is the devs' job.

Near everyone who PvPs agrees there's too much healing, but there are so many factors contributing to overpowered healing that need to be untangled, let the devs figure that out, they're paid professionals and we're unpaid laypeople.

The PvP community has been pretty clear for years on the heal stacking issue being the problem with ball groups. ZOS has ignored this consistent feedback for going on 5 years now....or longer. This is not a new issue, and the solution is obvious and not overly difficult to implement. Just make it so a player can only have one instance of any given heal on them active at any given time. This would also reduce lag as well.

xylena_lazarow · May 12

ProudMary wrote: »

The PvP community has been pretty clear for years on the heal stacking issue being the problem with ball groups. ZOS has ignored this consistent feedback for going on 5 years now....or longer. This is not a new issue, and the solution is obvious and not overly difficult to implement. Just make it so a player can only have one instance of any given heal on them active at any given time. This would also reduce lag as well.

It's a popular sentiment, but proposed player solutions often won't do what their proponents hope they'll do. You're also making some pretty bold assumptions on how game development works. That's the noise I'm talking about.

It would be more useful to focus on identifying specific problems. Not solving them. For example, Echoing Vigor is the one that gets stacked 12x, this seems like the obvious outlier, it gives each ball member orders of magnitude more passive healing than anyone outside a ball. It wasn't a problem when balls had to use Healing Springs, which they still stacked, but it was stationary (not passively sticky) and demanded using Resto so you couldn't easily jam it on every DD.

There's a lot of different ways this could be solved, sometimes players have good ideas, but when there are multiple different good ideas that could solve the problem... no need for players to argue, that's what professional game devs are for. They could carefully limit the stacking, they could nerf it into useless dust, they could rework it into something new, etc...

Durham · May 22

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

ProudMary wrote: »

The PvP community has been pretty clear for years on the heal stacking issue being the problem with ball groups. ZOS has ignored this consistent feedback for going on 5 years now....or longer. This is not a new issue, and the solution is obvious and not overly difficult to implement. Just make it so a player can only have one instance of any given heal on them active at any given time. This would also reduce lag as well.

It's a popular sentiment, but proposed player solutions often won't do what their proponents hope they'll do. You're also making some pretty bold assumptions on how game development works. That's the noise I'm talking about.

It would be more useful to focus on identifying specific problems. Not solving them. For example, Echoing Vigor is the one that gets stacked 12x, this seems like the obvious outlier, it gives each ball member orders of magnitude more passive healing than anyone outside a ball. It wasn't a problem when balls had to use Healing Springs, which they still stacked, but it was stationary (not passively sticky) and demanded using Resto so you couldn't easily jam it on every DD.

There's a lot of different ways this could be solved, sometimes players have good ideas, but when there are multiple different good ideas that could solve the problem... no need for players to argue, that's what professional game devs are for. They could carefully limit the stacking, they could nerf it into useless dust, they could rework it into something new, etc...

You made some good points, I agree with you!

olsborg · May 22

Healing, sure. Mitigation, more sure. Undeath being the main contributor to ppl not dying imo.

IncultaWolf · May 22

olsborg wrote: »

Healing, sure. Mitigation, more sure. Undeath being the main contributor to ppl not dying imo.

Yes, undeath needs a nerf. I abuse this passive myself and I want it gone.

MEBengalsFan2001 · May 29

Healing is high in PVP due to various buffs from gear, CP, stats from gear/CP, and cross healing.

The first thing to do to improve PVP is removing the ability to have more than two heals from the same HoT/AoE skill. You should not be able to stack extended ritual or regeneration beyond 2 for each. This would significantly reduce cross healing.

The second thing to do is to update battle spirit so that the role selected for group content impacts the players stats. For instance, damage dealer and healers have lower damage mitigation compared to tank. Another example is that tanks and damage dealers have their healing out % decreased further as they are not healers. Etc...

The third thing is monitor the game and see how these changes impact PVP. Make further adjustments as needed.

Alvedolin · June 4

Thanks for replying everyone hopefully we can get a fix for this.

Bluestin · June 7

It's somewhat disturbing, the Vampirism pandemic that has overtaken Cyrodiil. The fact that Undeath has remained as it has for this long in spite of how much it imbalances PvP and provides such a distinct edge in PvP (over being a werewolf or just a mortal) is strange. Entire builds hinging their survivability primarily on Undeath.

Cross-healing is another long standing bizarre issue; that the game allows stacking of the same heal each as a unique instance of that heal instead of only allowing the strongest heal of that type to be applied (only allowing a single instance of Vigor; preferring the strongest Vigor cast) I also think adding minor resolve to vigor was not the best choice.