Ball Groups and Stacking Heals - A Serious Issue

Jsmalls · June 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xylena_lazarow · June 3

Echoing Vigor is the one that gets stacked to 12, what breaks it is how easily it slots onto DDs. The other problem is Snow Treaders turning half the game off. Outside that, leave the ball alone and buff counterplay like Ice Trebs.

Turtle_Bot · June 3

Who could forget the infamous Mara's Balm proc set, that had to be nerfed multiple times due to being so strong on release.

HoT stacking is definitely something that needs urgent addressing though. Limiting it to 2-3 stacks of the same ability would affect PvP without doing anything to PvE (where there's at most 2 healers and maybe a group off heal from a DD).

I miss back when ground based AoE HoTs were the best HoTs, at least those had real counter play with negate, timestop and catapults that could deny those areas of healing. It took actual skill to keep them up properly in GvG battles and required actively moving them around to not lose that healing.

RaidingTraiding · June 3

I don't really think nerfing heal stacking is the silver bullet answer to ball groups. Limiting the number probably wouldn't hurt though, because small groups would still be able to use them without feeling the nerf. Other contributing factors make groups strong. Shield builds are pretty popular now as well as building for more ult gen and always having a barrier up. They also stack a lot of mitigation buffs from cp, and slotting flare for perma major protection. A good majority of ball groups run 6-8 healers also. These are just some examples.

Not to detract too much from the post, but I think a bigger issue is the lack of aoe burst damage. Before the harmony and proxy det nerfs, bombing ball groups with a small group was a lot more doable than it is now, and groups then had to be on the look out more for bombers and small groups because they could actually pose a threat to them. Now they are mostly ignored and only the worst ball groups will die to them. The nerfs to necro also made bombing harder. The scenario the OP mentioned could have possibly wiped the ball group on ram pre proxy det nerf, especially if they were being heavily sieged.

And of course these things were nerfed because of how broken pull sets are. Pull sets made bombing too easy so the answer was to nerf harmony, proxy det, and necro instead of nerfing the pulls themselves. Corrosive armor was also nerfed because of its success when combined with pull sets and masters 2h. Now with these aspects of the game nerfed, the only users of these sets are ball groups, and a few bombers and small groups, which don't have as much success with them as the ball groups. Pull sets also made bombing in ball groups a lot easier by creating a choke point on demand. Groups now don't really need to kite and bait players into chokes as much, so a lot of the skill of movement of these groups isn't as important anymore when you can just group players up with a set. This has lowered the skill level of groups a lot and now a lot of groups that weren't as good before are all of a sudden more competitive and harder to deal with. Because pulls make you lose control of your character for a lot longer than most ccs, its easier to line up and sync damage to burst you down. Because these groups have more players, it's not as hard for them to bomb with the nerfed aoe burst as it is with small groups and solo bombers.

I think the lack of damage is really the key here. If you nerf hot stacking, you still wouldn't have enough damage to put a dent in ball groups, their 6-8 healers would just spam aoe burst heals and barrier more when trying to coordinate an attack. To effectively kill a ball group you need a lot of aoe burst damage in a very small window, enough to burst through their barriers and 40k hp, which was absolutely doable with old harmony, proxy det, and necro. Just something to consider.

Turtle_Bot · June 4

RaidingTraiding wrote: »

I don't really think nerfing heal stacking is the silver bullet answer to ball groups. Limiting the number probably wouldn't hurt though, because small groups would still be able to use them without feeling the nerf. Other contributing factors make groups strong. Shield builds are pretty popular now as well as building for more ult gen and always having a barrier up. They also stack a lot of mitigation buffs from cp, and slotting flare for perma major protection. A good majority of ball groups run 6-8 healers also. These are just some examples.

Not to detract too much from the post, but I think a bigger issue is the lack of aoe burst damage. Before the harmony and proxy det nerfs, bombing ball groups with a small group was a lot more doable than it is now, and groups then had to be on the look out more for bombers and small groups because they could actually pose a threat to them. Now they are mostly ignored and only the worst ball groups will die to them. The nerfs to necro also made bombing harder. The scenario the OP mentioned could have possibly wiped the ball group on ram pre proxy det nerf, especially if they were being heavily sieged.

And of course these things were nerfed because of how broken pull sets are. Pull sets made bombing too easy so the answer was to nerf harmony, proxy det, and necro instead of nerfing the pulls themselves. Corrosive armor was also nerfed because of its success when combined with pull sets and masters 2h. Now with these aspects of the game nerfed, the only users of these sets are ball groups, and a few bombers and small groups, which don't have as much success with them as the ball groups. Pull sets also made bombing in ball groups a lot easier by creating a choke point on demand. Groups now don't really need to kite and bait players into chokes as much, so a lot of the skill of movement of these groups isn't as important anymore when you can just group players up with a set. This has lowered the skill level of groups a lot and now a lot of groups that weren't as good before are all of a sudden more competitive and harder to deal with. Because pulls make you lose control of your character for a lot longer than most ccs, its easier to line up and sync damage to burst you down. Because these groups have more players, it's not as hard for them to bomb with the nerfed aoe burst as it is with small groups and solo bombers.

I think the lack of damage is really the key here. If you nerf hot stacking, you still wouldn't have enough damage to put a dent in ball groups, their 6-8 healers would just spam aoe burst heals and barrier more when trying to coordinate an attack. To effectively kill a ball group you need a lot of aoe burst damage in a very small window, enough to burst through their barriers and 40k hp, which was absolutely doable with old harmony, proxy det, and necro. Just something to consider.

The thing is that HoT stacking to the extreme that ball groups are currently abusing is what is making all the damage we currently have feel redundant.

There's plenty of damage still in the game (if there wasn't, we wouldn't be seeing zergs building 40k+ health just to survive more than 2 seconds), but because organized groups are abusing that permanent 30k+ HPS ticking on them from stacked HoTs, underneath those shields/burst heals/high health, the damage/counterplay that we currently have, can't do it's job. Take away that 30k HPS that sticky HoTs give and suddenly you'll see the damage we currently have can do it's job because all the counter play options (negate/time stop/siege) can finally do their jobs of chipping away/disabling the ball groups healing long enough for 1-2 seconds of that pressure damage to grant an opportunity for a bomb.

HoT stacking is passive defense (something that should always be very small compared to active defense) that is currently outperforming active defenses by a lot.

If a ball group is having to actively spam their burst heals/shields, they will run out of sustain much faster (or they have to give up damage/tankiness to enable enough sustain for that healing) due to how much more burst heals (especially AoE heals) and shields cost to use compared to HoTs (typically 4.5-5k per cast compared to the ~3k per cast that HoTs cost). Or at the very least it narrows their options for things they can do while they are defending themselves, restricting their available GCDs that they currently have freely available for utility and damage

Multiply that AoE burst heal over a 10s duration (typical duration for a HoT), that is typically 45-50k resources to sustain that amount of healing over that duration, compare that to stacking 10 HoTs that will only cost 30k resources at most and that 30k is split among the entire group, not just the healers. The current usage of sticky HoTs also allows for groups to comfortably miss 1 or 2 casts and the group likely won't suffer much, where as missing 1 or 2 of those burst heals is a huge detriment to the group because that is 1 to 2 seconds without any incoming healing.

The other thing that HoT stacking allows for ball groups to do is completely ignore the counter measures that already exist such as negate, siege-fire and timestop, because their heals are already applied and ticking so they are not forced out of the negate to keep their incoming healing (echoing vigor doubles down on this, being a stamina heal so it completely by-passes negate entirely as well as being a group sticky HoT).

Lets put some math into this:

Ball groups typically have 40k+ health per player (on average).
They rotate casts of Barrier that adds an effective +25k health per player.
They also layer 30k worth of sticky HoTs that tick every second that adds an effective 30k health per player.
They also rotate group burst heals that add say an effective 15k health per player.

That is a total of 70k effective health per player that the pressure damage has to exceed every single second before you can even attempt to burst through their 40k health pool.

Lets say a group is CC'd under a negate, that removes the 15k burst heals and possibly the 25k barrier, that still means that siege fire (or other pressure DPS) has to exceed 30k per second (real damage, not tooltips) to create the opportunity to even attempt to burst that groups 40k health before that group breaks free and moves out of the negate.

Limiting sticky HoT stacking means that the incoming pressure damage only has to be ~5-7k per second to allow the opportunity for a bomb attempt to be made on that group (which can still be easily achieved, especially when factoring in sieges). In fact, when accounting for sieges, that pressure DPS can reach ~15-20k DPS meaning that a bomb attempt under that negate would only realistically be required to deal 25-30k burst instead of 50-55k burst, which is more than achievable with the current "nerfed" bomb builds.

Even outside of negate, the pressure DPS to threaten a ball group only has to reach an effective ~10k DPS to break through barrier/HoTs (assuming barrier is recast on average once every 5 seconds giving it an average of 5k effective HPS) instead of the current 35k DPS that is required.

Even if ball groups stack more shields instead of HoTs, that is heavily reducing the damage that ball groups would have access to because they would be using their ultimates to rotate more barriers (or arc shield ult) instead of rotating more damage/debuff/offensive utility ultimates such as negate.

CameraBeardThePirate · June 4

RaidingTraiding wrote: »

I don't really think nerfing heal stacking is the silver bullet answer to ball groups.

No, it wouldn't be a "silver bullet" because there is no silver bullet to stopping balls.

However, HoT limiting would be an easy change that would affect very little outside of ball groups, and would limit their effectiveness immediately. You cannot argue that it wouldn't make Ball Groups work harder, because it would - they'd have to diversify their abilities much more. No, it wouldn't suddenly make ball groups easy to kill, but that's not a reason to not limit heal stacking.

Dkrewe · June 4

Removing the HoT stacking would force groups to include actual heal builds in their composition, and force them to defend those healer players. DD running the HoT will still be effective to ensure everyone has a HoT running at all times to help the healers, but wouldn't be so BUSTED. They even still have the Arcanist shield bots to help so ball groups will still be a thing.

Right now not even negate helps. Its so easy to dodge roll out of it and re-apply all the stacks immediately for any ball group that knows what they are doing.

Necrotech_Master · June 4

health bars not budging is not entirely a healing problem, its also a shielding problem

most ball groups usually have rotating barriers, or the arcanist one + sets that can proc more shields like the blind

MEBengalsFan2001 · June 4

Here is how I would fix healing in this game and add some additional fixes to PVP.

1) For HoT or AoE heals, limit cross healing to 2 from the base skill or morphs.
2) Healing is only based on max stamina, magic or health. No more weapon or spell damage buffing heals.
3) Make roles matter in PVP by having battle spirit impact a player stats based on role selected. Many possibilities here to improve the game based on role selected.

TechMaybeHic · June 4

I would like a non ultimate DOT that scales as high DPS and duration as Vigor HoT. And across the board like that.
AOE DOTs that match the AOE hots just mirror image. Spammables as high as burt heals can get. Only things that come close are like spectral Bow and people lose their minds.

Or lower all healing and shields in Cyrodiil more with battle spirit.

Dkrewe · June 5

TechMaybeHic wrote: »

I would like a non ultimate DOT that scales as high DPS and duration as Vigor HoT. And across the board like that.
AOE DOTs that match the AOE hots just mirror image. Spammables as high as burt heals can get. Only things that come close are like spectral Bow and people lose their minds.

Or lower all healing and shields in Cyrodiil more with battle spirit.

Used to be able to do that with stacking DoT. The complaints were a tidal wave, and all single-target DoTs got nerfed into what they are now.

TechMaybeHic · June 5

Dkrewe wrote: »

TechMaybeHic wrote: »

I would like a non ultimate DOT that scales as high DPS and duration as Vigor HoT. And across the board like that.
AOE DOTs that match the AOE hots just mirror image. Spammables as high as burt heals can get. Only things that come close are like spectral Bow and people lose their minds.

Or lower all healing and shields in Cyrodiil more with battle spirit.

Used to be able to do that with stacking DoT. The complaints were a tidal wave, and all single-target DoTs got nerfed into what they are now.

Strong DoT patch was the best IMO. Maybe matching winds up too much and it could be adjusted. And ball groups were immune to it at the time but plaguebreak didn't exist yet. Any more, it feels like they can just ignore purging and just stack HoTs

RaidingTraiding · June 8

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

There's plenty of damage still in the game (if there wasn't, we wouldn't be seeing zergs building 40k+ health just to survive more than 2 seconds), but because organized groups are abusing that permanent 30k+ HPS ticking on them from stacked HoTs, underneath those shields/burst heals/high health, the damage/counterplay that we currently have, can't do it's job. Take away that 30k HPS that sticky HoTs give and suddenly you'll see the damage we currently have can do it's job because all the counter play options (negate/time stop/siege) can finally do their jobs of chipping away/disabling the ball groups healing long enough for 1-2 seconds of that pressure damage to grant an opportunity for a bomb.]

I really don't think there's plenty of damage. If 2 evenly skilled groups fight each other now (they actually do contrary to popular belief) many times it's a stalemate, or they only lose a couple of players at a time. Even with pulls, groups have trouble killing each other. This is due to a large imbalance between damage output and survivability. Often times I see people say in the forums that the only ones who can kill a ball group is another ball group, so if another ball group has trouble accomplishing that (and they have the highest damage output of any given group of players), it tells me that either damage is too low, survivability is too high, or both. So imo, both aspects need to be considered. Now the reason I lean more towards saying damage is too low is because before certain aoe damage skills were nerfed, these same gvgs with the same amount of hots (hots haven't been touched since before these nerfs) you would often see one side full wipe the other in one coordinated bomb. Again, nerfing hots would help, but groups would adapt accordingly (just like purge spamming stopped when plaguebreak was introduced) and the ones who would actually have enough damage to kill a group would still be very limited if damage was left as is. I think groups can min max defensively to a certain point. When burst damage is high enough, there's not a lot they can do to adapt to that, which is why before you were able to bomb groups (be it solo, small group, or another large group) without them finding ways to fully counter it.

StShoot · June 17

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

health bars not budging is not entirely a healing problem, its also a shielding problem

most ball groups usually have rotating barriers, or the arcanist one + sets that can proc more shields like the blind

I always thought that crosshealing was refering to all ways to save another player, including crossshields even though shields arnt heals xD

Durham · June 17

I do wish they would address some PvP issues. I hate ball group strategy but not the players they are just taking advantage what the game provide. We try our best to avoid them not because they are killing us we very rarely wipe to a ball group all you have to do is spread! We simply drop and camp rez the 2 or 3 players they kill with 12. However, the lag is crazy! Then you are stuck in combat for an hour you either have to kill yourself or Q to IC. Sometimes the lag created by two or more ball groups creates so much lag that you are stunned locked on the pull and you can't do anything.

Drakyl · June 18

I've said this to my guildies many times. They should limit the amount of heals over time that can be stacked. Not only would this help reduce how tanky ball groups are, but I wager it would prob help server performance too, but I could be wrong on that last part.

Turtle_Bot · June 19

Drakyl wrote: »

I've said this to my guildies many times. They should limit the amount of heals over time that can be stacked. Not only would this help reduce how tanky ball groups are, but I wager it would prob help server performance too, but I could be wrong on that last part.

It 100% would help balance out ball groups in PvP, just have to look at how vigorously ball group players defended that mechanic (with every excuse in the book) in previous threads to see just how effective it would have been in balancing that playstyle.

As for server performance, it's fairly easy to understand why it would help in that aspect too. Just watching a ball group move around between keeps with a minimum of 3-4 casts of vigor/radiating (along with all the calcs resulting from those casts) every GCD while they blob themselves between keeps is easily draining plenty of the servers resources, let alone everything else that occurs once they actually engage in "combat".

The only other areas of the game that sees that sort of ability spam is in vet/HM trials (which are instanced and capped at 12 players) and new zone world bosses/events (which also get laggy with enough players despite better server resources available for these).

Joy_Division · June 19

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

Drakyl wrote: »

I've said this to my guildies many times. They should limit the amount of heals over time that can be stacked. Not only would this help reduce how tanky ball groups are, but I wager it would prob help server performance too, but I could be wrong on that last part.

It 100% would help balance out ball groups in PvP, just have to look at how vigorously ball group players defended that mechanic (with every excuse in the book) in previous threads to see just how effective it would have been in balancing that playstyle.

As for server performance, it's fairly easy to understand why it would help in that aspect too. Just watching a ball group move around between keeps with a minimum of 3-4 casts of vigor/radiating (along with all the calcs resulting from those casts) every GCD while they blob themselves between keeps is easily draining plenty of the servers resources, let alone everything else that occurs once they actually engage in "combat".

The only other areas of the game that sees that sort of ability spam is in vet/HM trials (which are instanced and capped at 12 players) and new zone world bosses/events (which also get laggy with enough players despite better server resources available for these).

When ZOS finally gets around to doing this, the server will still lag because the server sucks and they will spam something else (which they already have thought about long ago) that the server will have to keep track of.

GooGa592 · June 19

That ZOS has not addressed the heal stacking issue after all these years of players pointing out the problems it creates sends the players the message that ZOS isn't even trying to improve performance or balance in PvP.

The fix is easy. Just make it so a player can only have one instance of each HoT on them at any given time. Let the HoT refresh, but limit them to only one instance.

mariuszeb17_ESO5 · June 19

Hm , for me the most annoying thing is the speed of movement Ball Groups. I would like in the pvp environment working debuff ( don't purgeable) -> If you are in a large group, each HOT slows your movement speed down by 10% up to 60%.

divnyi · June 20

mariuszeb17_ESO5 wrote: »

Hm , for me the most annoying thing is the speed of movement Ball Groups. I would like in the pvp environment working debuff ( don't purgeable) -> If you are in a large group, each HOT slows your movement speed down by 10% up to 60%.

I don't like player speeds in pvp overall. High speeds is what makes LoS breaking consistent. I won't mind if they did -20% speed in battle spirit or something.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · June 20

divnyi wrote: »

mariuszeb17_ESO5 wrote: »

Hm , for me the most annoying thing is the speed of movement Ball Groups. I would like in the pvp environment working debuff ( don't purgeable) -> If you are in a large group, each HOT slows your movement speed down by 10% up to 60%.

I don't like player speeds in pvp overall. High speeds is what makes LoS breaking consistent. I won't mind if they did -20% speed in battle spirit or something.

Honestly just remove Celerity CP it would be enough of a difference

As for groups you could adjust snow treaders so that instead of not allowing sprinting, they instead don't allow any benefit from movement enhancing effects (major/minor expedition, Steed, Swift trait etc). This way it would be a more interesting choice.

Necrotech_Master · June 20

StShoot wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

health bars not budging is not entirely a healing problem, its also a shielding problem

most ball groups usually have rotating barriers, or the arcanist one + sets that can proc more shields like the blind

I always thought that crosshealing was refering to all ways to save another player, including crossshields even though shields arnt heals xD

i see healing and shielding as separate things

shields act like temporary HP, if you take dmg and are at 75% of your max hp, using a shield does not heal that, but it does help protect you while you are hitting a heal for example (which is why the sorcs hardened ward is very strong right now as it does both heal and shield)

the combination of healing + shielding is why there is a huge survivability, in most cases health bars not budging is lots of shields (which are far far more obvious to see now with the new health bar stuff), the hots just help keep players topped off in the case the shield is broken

kurbbie_s · June 26

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

StShoot wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

health bars not budging is not entirely a healing problem, its also a shielding problem

most ball groups usually have rotating barriers, or the arcanist one + sets that can proc more shields like the blind

I always thought that crosshealing was refering to all ways to save another player, including crossshields even though shields arnt heals xD

i see healing and shielding as separate things

shields act like temporary HP, if you take dmg and are at 75% of your max hp, using a shield does not heal that, but it does help protect you while you are hitting a heal for example (which is why the sorcs hardened ward is very strong right now as it does both heal and shield)

the combination of healing + shielding is why there is a huge survivability, in most cases health bars not budging is lots of shields (which are far far more obvious to see now with the new health bar stuff), the hots just help keep players topped off in the case the shield is broken

its the proc sets and the new scribing skills. everyone, i mean eveyone has a shield on their entire hp bar now

xylena_lazarow · June 26

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

Honestly just remove Celerity CP it would be enough of a difference. As for groups you could adjust snow treaders

Even as a speed addict, agree Celerity doesn't need to exist. It just makes the entire game 10% faster for no good reason. Snow Treaders don't need to exist in PvP either, give them an "outside PvP zones" treatment or something. Hard turning off so much counterplay is part of the reason pugs vs ball is so damn miserable for the pugs.

divnyi · June 26

While I agree about Celerity, I want to stress out that I'm not playing CP PvP. Speed is just very high in general. When people start dancing around some column, you cannot react for their next move, you can only guess. This is what makes LOS so efficient. Which is one of the most broken form of defense in this game, if you cannot start a skill then it doesn't matter how much damage it's gonna do.

Maybe flat speed% increases is a bad idea overall, and it should be logarithmic or something idk.

Necrotech_Master · June 26

kurbbie_s wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

StShoot wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

health bars not budging is not entirely a healing problem, its also a shielding problem

most ball groups usually have rotating barriers, or the arcanist one + sets that can proc more shields like the blind

I always thought that crosshealing was refering to all ways to save another player, including crossshields even though shields arnt heals xD

i see healing and shielding as separate things

shields act like temporary HP, if you take dmg and are at 75% of your max hp, using a shield does not heal that, but it does help protect you while you are hitting a heal for example (which is why the sorcs hardened ward is very strong right now as it does both heal and shield)

the combination of healing + shielding is why there is a huge survivability, in most cases health bars not budging is lots of shields (which are far far more obvious to see now with the new health bar stuff), the hots just help keep players topped off in the case the shield is broken

its the proc sets and the new scribing skills. everyone, i mean eveyone has a shield on their entire hp bar now

yup, the shielding is definitely more noticeable now with scribing for sure, which just compounds the issues with healing

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · June 27

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

Honestly just remove Celerity CP it would be enough of a difference. As for groups you could adjust snow treaders

Snow Treaders don't need to exist in PvP either, give them an "outside PvP zones" treatment or something. Hard turning off so much counterplay is part of the reason pugs vs ball is so damn miserable for the pugs.

I disagree, Snow Treaders as a build choice is interesting. It potentially needs some balancing (as do a number of sets e.g. Rushing Agony) but I really disagree with taking away yet more build diversity.

Wycks · June 27

HoT stacking is passive defense (something that should always be very small compared to active defense) that is currently outperforming active defenses by a lot.

A+

This is an important decisions lost on the devs as a core part of the gameplay and immersion. Passive defenses should in no way be as powerful as the current form, including shields. Anything passive and even insta should be minimized in terms of group gameplay. The solution to ballgroups is not to penalize them with counter abilities or sets, since these ideas have always instead been adopted by the very ball groups they are meant to mitigate.

Instead they should try to reduce stacking by making heals/shields an active decision via ground targeting and cooldowns.

This allows for strategic negate during ball group rushes, which makes the skill someone useful again. Even with snow treaders a negated group will have to move to another location for a large heal and actively stand in it, which opens of more dynamic gameplay.

Active healing which requires the player to actually move to get healed/buffed (similar to how a solo player has to often move into a healing circle) open up the doors for more strategic gameplay with the added bonus of reducing lag.

Current ballgroups have gotten worse over time, it's often the case they are just completely ignored due to it being impossible to counter or even dmg, which is pitiful gameplay, since they just get bored and log off, and so does everyone else.