The Balance of Healers and Supports in PvP

NikoSquared · November 15

Hey all! I've wanted to make this post for years now, but never had the drive to put it together until this patch.

I'd like to preface this discussion by noting that everything I am about to say is from the perspective of a PvP healer main. 90% of my playtime has been spent healing in PvP, out of thousands of hours.

To make things easier to discuss, I will be breaking down the issues into multiple categories, and discussing how the developers could deal with them individually, and as a whole.

Note that the developers previously added sets like "Snake in the Stars", which while it does instakill certain HoT spam builds while used, only works if someone wears it. Players shouldn't be forced to hard counter something that someone else is doing to win.

If you'd prefer a video demonstration of this thread, I've provided it here

For reference, I will be using the above build for all tooltips.
This build is able to provide up to 1000 extra Weapon and Spell damage to all players and keep them and myself alive easily.

Healing, and Healing Over Time

To put it lightly, healing tooltips are quite inflated, and the reason is that healers must react to damage taken, and Players can die in a second or less sometimes. However, the inflation is far too strong in both burst heals, and Healing Over Time.

The above tooltip is from my templar healer, with all buffs that I would normally obtain applied. Many DPS Ultimates don't even get that high of a tooltip, and this is just a normal skill!
This number is actually lower than it used to be, as I swapped to a more defensive and less selfish build (more on that later). I also don't have ANY non-passive Warfare stars boosting it!

Not only that, but Healers don't have to worry about Armor, Dodging, Blocking, Line of Sight (mostly), and any other mitigation that most PvP players might have. Thus, the damage that an enemy Player or group of players can deal can be easily negated by a single healer.

Of course, Healing over Time is equally as inflated, just take a look at the below tooltips!

Added together, all these heals combine to 8150 Healing Per Second! That's over 3600 health recovered every second with Battle Spirit active!
All of these buffs can be applied to 6 people in a group, with the low health ones being targeted thanks to Smart Healing, leading to up to 21k total group healing per second in PvP!
Now, multiply this by multiple healers... Oh dear!

Shielding

Shielding typically doesn't have "Shielding Over Time" issues like Healing does, but by stacking multiple shields to your group, it can easily get out of hand, with Shield HP sometimes eclipsing a player's regular HP! These shields can be applied over and over, so the short time limit isn't much of a limiting factor. The Support Ultimate can easily be kept up endlessly with the power of Battery builds, too!

My solution to both the Healing and Shielding problems is simple, and would come as a single addendum to Battle Spirit in all PvP gamemodes.
"Reduce healing and shielding received from other Players by X%"

The X could be up for debate, but personally I believe it should be 50% in all PvP gamemodes. That would be a good start. This would be in addition to current Battle Spirit

Supports and Unique Buffs

Now, healers can heal, and can protect, but they can also provide buffs to the entire team if they play their cards right...
My personal build grants these buffs to everyone near me, some of which are sticky and can apply to an even larger area!

Minor Courage
Major Courage
Minor Resolve
Minor Sorcery
Minor Protection
+180 WD/SD (Pearlescent)
+4200 Armor (Ozezan)
6% Mitigation (Banner)

That's just me though, multiple healers can stack the unique buffs from sets like Pearlescent, Ozezan, Rallying Cry, Lucent Echoes, and many other Unique Buffs that can make a team extremely difficult to stop.

My solution to these issues is also simple.

Unique Support Set buffs are limited by the Minor/Major system in the form of a new buff called "Blessing", which keeps their unique effects but limits how many a Player can receive.

What constitutes a Major or Minor blessing could be up for debate, but any form of unique support Set buff should fall under this system.

Summary

In the end, it's important that playing support is enjoyable, but it can't come at the cost of the fun of anyone who isn't playing a Healer or Support themselves.

When too much healing over time, burst healing, shielding, and support buffs can come from a single player or multiple healers, then an entire team can become an invincible wall. The solution isn't to add "hard counter" sets, rather the solution is to just kill these strategies without harming regular players. And thus, I suggest the following two simple changes be made to the game, as a way to keep healing enjoyable, without it being extremely out of hand like it is now, and keeping self sustain the same as it currently is.

Damage dealers have to sacrifice a lot of power to give out buffs or be able to heal themselves, but healers don't have that penalty, and thus, the roles should be brought into balance. Reducing cross healing and buffing, while keeping self healing the same, should prevent any of the previous issues found with reducing self sustain, while also bringing the healers in line with DPS in terms of balance.

"Reduce healing and shield received from other Players by X%"

The X could be up for debate, but personally I believe it should be 50% in all PvP gamemodes. That would be a good start. This would be in addition to current Battle Spirit

Unique Support Set buffs are limited by the Minor/Major system in the form of a new buff called "Blessing", which keeps their unique effects but limits how many a Player can receive.

What constitutes a Major or Minor blessing could also be up for debate, but any form of unique support Set buff should fall under this system.

React · November 15

Great post. Cross healing/shielding in particular have been completely out of control for quite some time now. Making adjustments to the power of cross healing/shielding by reducing the values received from others players via battlespirit is such an easy way for zenimax to test the waters without impacting non-PVP players.

Buff sets are definitely an issue as well. An interesting example I had a while ago was to consider the value of the stats an emperor has. They get 100% regens, 100% ult gain, 75% max stats, and 50% healing received when at full value.

The players in any properly built ball group are all individually more stat dense than a solo emperor with every keep.

We effectively have groups of 12 emperor-stat players running around, benefiting from the overperforming cross healing and warding in addition to their absurd stat density.

It's beyond me how people are still defending this.

Estin · November 15

Good ideas. Relating to the second, I would also say it would be important to limit the amount of similar sticky hots a player can have at the same time. Part of the problem is also that players can run around with multiple stacks of echoing vigor and radiant regeneration which adds an absurd amount of extra healing.

Thumbless_Bot · November 15

Great post Niko. Agree with your thoughts

MincMincMinc · November 15

I would disagree that healing from other players should be cut by any % mainly because you would be saying healers should be worth half a player. Instead most of the issues present in pvp are stacking buffs. In the days of old buff wise you only had a handful of sets and buffs available which didnt stack. Now there are 10x the sets and buffs available that CAN stack on top of stackable hots/aoe.

OLD: 10 players each have 1 hot == 10 ticks/s

Stackable: 10 players with 1 hot == 100 ticks/s

2 set effects 10 players 1 hot(stackable) == 300 ticks/s

Pretty quickly this gets out of control over a normal duration rotation.....
Lets add in another 4 gcds == 700ticks/s

Ingame Example:

Say we have a 1v1 of equal players and suddenly it becomes a 1v2. The damage the solo player sees doubles. Now replace that second dmg dealer with a healer, what should happen? IMO the solo should now have to go through twice the healing. Here is the important question. At what point should a player start to become worth less in this scenario? If we have a zerg of 30 people, should they all be perfectly efficient?

IMO group 'scaling' or player efficiency should follow an exponential decay. Easiest implementation is to make over time effects not stack. This goes for skills, sets procs. Just imagine if you couldn't have 5 tarnished nightmares proc on you at the same time. Anyone remember the sloads meta.... literally wouldn't have been a thing if it didn't stack.

Aggrovious · November 15

Yeah just adjust battle spirit, easy fix yes?

mocap · November 15

That's great and all til you get 30k vd proc from 3 pve guys who instadie near you.

darvaria · November 15

mocap wrote: »

That's great and all til you get 30k vd proc from 3 pve guys who instadie near you.

Yeah until there is a substantial VD nerf. I refuse to get close to anyone at Cyro now because of VD. You should only get ONE hit from VD. NOT 2. NOT 3. NOT 4. NOT 5 .... etc. ONLY ONE HIT from VD.

chessalavakia_ESO · November 15

I'd agree that healing and shielding can be a bit out of control but, I think the issue needs more of a scalpel than a sledgehammer because the issue isn't present to the same degree with every build.

You could easily hit the point of making healing other players pointless for everyone that isn't min-maxed and still end up with the min-max groups of players being nearly impossible to kill.

I'd also question why self healing/shielding should miss out on getting nerfed.

NikoSquared · November 15

MincMincMinc wrote: »

I would disagree that healing from other players should be cut by any % mainly because you would be saying healers should be worth half a player. Instead most of the issues present in pvp are stacking buffs. In the days of old buff wise you only had a handful of sets and buffs available which didnt stack. Now there are 10x the sets and buffs available that CAN stack on top of stackable hots/aoe..

The issue is that a single healer can easily apply 5 of these HoTs or more, like my build is able to.

Healers will not become "half of a player", they're currently worth double that a minmaxed DPS is if they play their cards right. I just want the Healer/Support role's power in PvP to be brought in line with the DPS role.

HoTs aren't the main culprit problem either, because burst heals can be spammed over and over alone to keep a player alive against multiple DPS even if they aren't doing anything to defend themselves, which should not be possible. Self sustain should be the main defense a player has, the Healer should only be able to help prevent someone from dying, not guarantee it.

Thumbless_Bot · November 15

I was in a 4v4 dm two nights ago and the other team was so focused on healing i was able to leave in the middle of a round and go to the fridge to get a drink without fear that someone on the other team might actually try to kill me in a death match.

To be clear, I was not on the team with the healers. I was trying to do damage at first but then I was literally afk for about 90 seconds with my toon standing in the middle of a small map bg without worrying about dying. If that doesn't completely suck the excitement and exhilaration out of the game I can't imagine what it would take and what it would take to prove to zos that this is terrible

Arcanasx · November 15

Healers and support sets have been overperforming for a long time and the new BG format has been making this even more obvious. I've had 4v4 solo games where half or more of the lobby are healers and tanks and I can say that none of those games were fun.

The difference between a mediocre DD and a mediocre healer is that one of them can still be highly effective, and make the difference between that team winning or losing decisively.

YandereGirlfriend · November 15

Much better idea is to de-couple healing and damage so that you actually have to BE a healer in order to heal like a healer.

Allowing DDs to stacking healing (including cross-healing) via stacking damage stats is one of the most bizarre design decisions I have ever seen.

Talk about having your cake and eating it, too.

NikoSquared · November 16

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Much better idea is to de-couple healing and damage so that you actually have to BE a healer in order to heal like a healer.

Allowing DDs to stacking healing (including cross-healing) via stacking damage stats is one of the most bizarre design decisions I have ever seen.

Talk about having your cake and eating it, too.

This thread is more about the healer aspect and how they can dish out millions of healing more than damage dealers can deal damage over time. Halving crosshealing would help mitigate the HoT stacking from ballgroups as well.

Iriidius · November 16

darvaria wrote: »

mocap wrote: »

That's great and all til you get 30k vd proc from 3 pve guys who instadie near you.

Yeah until there is a substantial VD nerf. I refuse to get close to anyone at Cyro now because of VD. You should only get ONE hit from VD. NOT 2. NOT 3. NOT 4. NOT 5 .... etc. ONLY ONE HIT from VD.

You should absolutely get hit by multiple hits of vicious death when multiple people near you die, otherwise there is no difference in vicious death damage received if you play with one ally who dies near you(or duell an enemy who gets killed by third alliance) or stack with 30 allies on flag who get bombed. Vicious death is intended to kill stacks of players to punish them for stacking and playing with too many players at one location. Limiting hits to one is against the Intention of this set.

Unfortunately it only punishes players for stacking when they die and not when they all stay alive by healing/shielding/buffing each other

Major_Mangle · November 16

A lot of the problems with healing and shielding being overtuned has a lot to do with the steadily increased power-creep the game has gotten the last few years. There are obviously many things that caused this but looking back the things that pops up on the top of my head as major reasons for this would be:

* Hybridization: Now this rework brought some decent stuff like the armor passive being hybridized. But making every other skill scale with max stats definitely opened up for more tools for survivability and utility (for better or worse). I can´t remember exactly when, but around Blackwood/Deadlands update when ZOS reworked the CP system, they also added 1k weapon/spell damage to the base stat. If you ask me this should be reverted due to how un-necessary that additional extra stat was and how much it contributed to inflated damage and healing numbers. I do however don´t think this is as big of a culprit as some of the points I´m about to list.

* More and more buff/utility sets added to the game: Looking back a few years there weren´t too many sets that buffed your group. Looking from a PvP perspective you would most of the time have SPC/Olorime and Powerfull assault covered. You did have some more niche utility sets such as Arkasis but outside of bigger groups (6-12 man) you would often have a hard time to reach those really obscene stat values you see today. In today´s PvP environment we´ve more buff/utility sets than we can almost cover in a full 12 man group, and some really overtuned stat dense ones at that. And we don´t even need to look at large group sizes such as 12, even a 4-6 man group that got the "correct" buff sets covered will reach stat values that makes even an Emperor look pale in comparison. As much as I understand that you as a developer need to create sets that are attractive to farm and use, there needs to be a rebalance of a lot of these buff sets. Even sets like Wretched Vitality is a problem in my opinion with the absurd amount of sustain it offers (almost 1k mag/stam sustain depending on what recovery buffs you have), or rallying cry which in a solo setting offers 25% damage mitigation vs crits (sure it has a penalty for every group member, but the stat density of the set is just obscene to me).

* Scribing: Probably the heaviest contributor to the power creep the game has ever seen. ZOS really opened Pandora´s box when they added this to the game. Giving every class access to more or less "everything" in terms of utility and buffs has caused the power creep to go completely out of control. When it comes to the overtuned shield support builds we see more and more lately (outside of arcanist and it´s class toolkit), we´ve the scribing system to blame.

If you ask me the game needs a significant stat-squish across the board. More or less a "One-Tamriel 2". It´s wishful thinking but ZOS really needs to stop the power-creep for the sake of a healthy game in both PvP and PvE.

Jierdanit · November 16

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Much better idea is to de-couple healing and damage so that you actually have to BE a healer in order to heal like a healer.

Allowing DDs to stacking healing (including cross-healing) via stacking damage stats is one of the most bizarre design decisions I have ever seen.

Talk about having your cake and eating it, too.

The only thing that would do is make organized groups even more overpowered and force everyone to play with a healer if they want to be in any way competitive.

Cross-healing between DDs is not the problem. Designated healers making groups almost immortal and easily outhealing the damage of 2 or more DDs is a much bigger issue.

Redguards_Revenge · November 16

I say 100% get rid of ALL HEALS IN PVP. Only rely on the POT. NO CLASS HEALS, SET HEALS, OR PET HEALS. EVERYTHING OFF EXCEPT THE POT. NO CLEANSE EITHER. Let's start using Roll, Block, etc.

Let's see what happens after that....Call the new chapter "The End of Restoration."

Iriidius · November 16

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Much better idea is to de-couple healing and damage so that you actually have to BE a healer in order to heal like a healer.

Allowing DDs to stacking healing (including cross-healing) via stacking damage stats is one of the most bizarre design decisions I have ever seen.

Talk about having your cake and eating it, too.

This would make healers and supports and dds without selfhealing relying on them even stronger as they would have to stack only healing stats and solobuilds weaker as they would have to stack dmg and healing stats.
It is the opposite of what OP wants and making his problem even worse.
It reduces rather than increases build options as it destroys solobuilds while healers, supports and dds already do fine in organized groups.

But as a ballgroup player you probably already know and intent exactly that.

React · November 16

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Much better idea is to de-couple healing and damage so that you actually have to BE a healer in order to heal like a healer.

Allowing DDs to stacking healing (including cross-healing) via stacking damage stats is one of the most bizarre design decisions I have ever seen.

Talk about having your cake and eating it, too.

That last part is extremely ironic, coming from a ball group player.

There is nothing wrong with DDs having good self healing by building damage. This is exactly what has enabled the solo and small scale PVP many of us have enjoyed since launch. Decoupling these stats would make people rely on healers, or would force people to lower their damage to survive - both things would be bad for the game.

DD cross healing is only an issue in the case of HOT stacking - which is almost exclusively exploited by ball groups. Reducing healing received from others players via battle spirit would go a long way towards addressing the cross healing issues and is a great starting point. Limiting same morph hot stacks would be am even better approach. Decoupling healing from damage stats would hardly affect ball groups, who are the ones most in need of adressing.

Aldoss · November 16

PvP healer main. I support this message.

The relative ease that I'm able to see rounds where I'm doing 2-4M in healing, compared to how much harder I have to work to do that much dmg in the same BG is crazy. The power differential is so blatantly obvious when you go from one to the other.

When you switch from DD to being a healer, you stop having to kite as much, you become way tankier, you get to make way more mistakes, and you get to win via boredom/sustain as opposed to actually outbuilding or out strategizing your enemy.

My personal build is a HOT spam necro. The only thing that actually kills me (outside of me being an idiot and running out of resources, or a vast array of other low IQ plays) is Snake in the Stars.

NikoSquared · November 17

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

I'd agree that healing and shielding can be a bit out of control but, I think the issue needs more of a scalpel than a sledgehammer because the issue isn't present to the same degree with every build.

You could easily hit the point of making healing other players pointless for everyone that isn't min-maxed and still end up with the min-max groups of players being nearly impossible to kill.

I'd also question why self healing/shielding should miss out on getting nerfed.

Self healing has been nerfed to the past and usually led to DoT metas that would end up with dying no matter what after DoTs were applied. It also led to a resurgence of one shot builds as recovering after the initial burst was too difficult post nerf. Players need to be able to self sustain to survive. This post is mostly about bringing Healers/Supports viability in PvP in line with DPS.

Reducing crosshealing and cross-shielding by 50% via Battle Spirit (or whatever number is necessary) will help in breaking ball groups as well, they will still be very resilient but the ball group breaker sets would be able to do their job more effectively. The "Blessing" change would also reduce the amount of unique buffs they can stack.

NikoSquared · November 17

I think this match I just healed demonstrates the issue even more so than the video does, an extremely powerful DPS team loses to two healers, simply because the healers can output so much healing off of (mostly) burst heals and thus keeping eachother and their team alive.

With a 50% crosshealing penalty, we would have been unable to keep the dragonknights (and possibly eachother) alive to win the game, unless we sacrificed our own survivability in our build, to have strong enough healing to help them.

Stamicka · November 17

Honestly, when it comes to ESO, the game has regressed so much that people are coming up with solutions to new problems that ZOS created out of nothing. I think it's often most useful to ask "why wasn't this a big problem in ESO's early days?" Healing was in a decent spot in both PvE and PvP without any needed adjustments to battle spirit in ESO's first 3 years or so.

One of the biggest things that threw things out of balance was the change to Healing Springs. Healing Springs used to be a weaker heal, but you were able to cast it multiple times in the same area. This was important, because in PvE where it's often ok for players to be relatively close to each other, getting a good amount of heals per second was still possible. In PvP however, the situation is a bit different. When getting decent healing depends on standing in a ground based healing AOE, then there is now a trade off between getting healed or moving. Also, in PvP if everyone is stacked in a ground based AOE, they are more susceptible to being bombed or hit by VD. One of the worst things about the current state of cross healing is that it's done via skills that auto target and stick to a player while they are moving. What is now Radiating Regeneration used to be a different skill called Mutagen that was a weaker heal over time that got consumed and would purify you if your health was low. The only way to get a sticky auto targeting HoT before the changes to healing springs and mutagen was vigor. In some ways, stacking resolving vigor was a bit of a problem back then, but a lot of the ball groups then ran mag builds, so vigor wasn't used by a majority of the members in the group.

Long story short, I think we need to go back to a point where most healing over time from others is AOE and ground based because of the tradeoff that I mentioned. This would make ball groups vulnerable while moving because they would have way less healing. They would also be able to be bombed when they have to stack in a ground based heal. To take it a step further, I don't think that sticky HoTs that auto target should be a thing. I think that ZOS could learn a lot from the rarely used Psijic skill called Mend Wounds or the Warden skill, Nature's Grasp. You should actually have to put your reticle on your ally to throw them a sticky heal over time. This would probably improve server performance too. As it stands though, the fact that sticky HoTs auto target is super low skill and doesn't really have counterplay or trade offs .

Also yea, at this point the amount of buff sets in the game is out of control and there's really no tradeoff for putting one on. For example, back barring Olorime wouldn't even be a bad option as a solo player because it's so strong. In a group it just becomes even better.

Stamicka · November 17

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Much better idea is to de-couple healing and damage so that you actually have to BE a healer in order to heal like a healer.

Allowing DDs to stacking healing (including cross-healing) via stacking damage stats is one of the most bizarre design decisions I have ever seen.

Talk about having your cake and eating it, too.

No, the fact that healing scales with damage stats was one of my favorite things about ESO's combat system. The problem is that the game strayed from being centered around burst by increasing health pools and mitigation. Think about it, even if you have breath of life tooltipping for 40k, but you only have 20k health and low mitigation, the tooltip doesn't matter if you get bursted for your whole health bar before you can hit your burst heal. Things really started to get bad when players started having 35k health, vampire mitigation, and other sources of mitigation. With high health pools and mitigation, you probably won't die from a clean 100 to 0 burst, instead you'll live to get the chance to spam burst heals, or get HoTs ticking to get back to full health. Heal potency would matter significantly less if the game got back to a point where people would lose their entire health bar from not blocking or rolling at the right time.