Nonsense. Level 2600 PVP Main here. I have played solo in all phases of the game since I started. I disable all communications and decline any party invite. I'm fine alone and love every second of it.

Since most of my PvP friends have stopped playing, I've been going solo in PvP for over five years now. It's definitely doable and, honestly, a lot of fun—you just need to stay sharp and keep your wits about you.

At any given point playing solo or 1vX you are just waiting around for combat.

each faction is made up of

• 24man guild zerg running group buffs so each player has 10x your 5 piece bonuses worth of stats.
• two 12 man ball zergs that think they are elite, even though they are just abusing the group set metas to sit with 100x stats
• then the remaining 24-30 players are likely afk at spawn, sitting in keeps, or other 1vX players that just dont want to fight each other out of respect.

Solo or 1vX simply doesnt exist anymore. Maybe with vengeance being developed it may come back to what it used to be. Its going to be fairly boring until we bring the 4x player caps back to actually populate cyrodil.

Even then there has to be rule changes to combat and cyrodil if we want any hope of making solo or smallman gameplay viable again.

• Group limiters like no hot/dot/effect stacking to prevent meta abuse and dogpiling of one BiS effect
• CC reworks for basically every form of cc to be more clear animation and telegraph wise.
• Sets and abilities that scale to help level the playing field. In the old days you would have sets like Warriors fury or 7th legion where when outnumbered you could actually fight back if you survive long enough to build up and hold the stacks. Ability wise you had supporting toolkits like Ball of lighting infinite absorb or DK wings reflect or templar sunshield or NB siphon strikes resource return or Harness magicka restore. Once warden released most of these started to get gutted because zos tried to push that everyone should be on a 1:1 scale.....until more recently group sets started to be pushed again which makes groups who already were winning by numbers start to also scale exponentially based on the number of players they have.
• Resource nodes need to become important again for keep takes. Give a reason to take and guard them during sieges.
• Ganking, as much as I hated being ganked, it broke people away from zergs and forced players to learn how to defend themselves and play solo. It is a necessary evil to get new players that lock themselves away in zerg guilds to finally break free. One of the biggest issues is that mount speed is too fast and sprint/stamina is infinite. However because the server is so dead and unpopulated the game feels like mount simulator.....you ride around at 2x or 3x the old mount speed and still fail to find players. I have better luck playing DayZ and running around Cherno trying to find people to fight.
• Secondary bridges/gates and outpost nodes are too far away with no incentives. Why not edit the map and make a second transitus line so we actually use the famous "goat paths" zos envisioned.

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Biggest obstacle to solo play is lack of action. Ignored on the back lines. No front line zerg to surf.

1vX is still doable, if you can actually find an X that isn't a ball group, sweaty smallscale, or faction zerg.

This is where my post really started from. I tried to solo/1vx last night and it was just not working. I snagged a resource and got swarmed by either mini zergs or comped groups, lol. I think I was able to get a single 1v1

xFocused wrote: »

Stridig wrote: »

It's funny that any group in Cyrodiil is considered a ball group these days. Even groups of 6 are called mini ball groups by some.

12 man is a ball group in my opinion, 6 man is what I’d call small scale.

Ballgroup has little to do with group size at it´s core but rather how you play in said group. Small-scale would be defined as 4 people or less since the game actually ask you if you wanna become "a large group" when going from 4 to 5 players (I´m semi joking but the game kinda defines it by itself with that little question).

A 6 man can 100% be considered a ballgroup (or mini-ball) these days.

JohnRingo wrote: »

Nonsense. Level 2600 PVP Main here. I have played solo in all phases of the game since I started. I disable all communications and decline any party invite. I'm fine alone and love every second of it.

The only groups I join are bgs and 4 person dungeons, though i queue solo for both.

Maybe IA to make the grind go faster.

That's it. I run cyro solo and IC solo. Have since 2014.

Broken sets ruin pvp, not players.

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Going solo is about constantly learning new builds. There's no way you've tried them all already. The patch just dropped.

This. I have a lot of fun just seeing what I can do and learning different styles(snipers, bombing, proc demon etc) here lately I've been playing with "unkillable" tank builds. It amuses me to see how many siege weapons I can burn before I'm finally taken down.

It seems like nowadays everything which is more then a duo is called BG.

Stridig wrote: »

It's funny that any group in Cyrodiil is considered a ball group these days. Even groups of 6 are called mini ball groups by some.

If a group of 6 is playing like a ballgroup and using ballgroup builds with groupsets, groupbuffskills, multitarget heals like echoing vigor/radiating regen, voicechat, synergies, RoA they are a miniballgroup.

Im a Solo-only gamer and permanentely switch between Cyrodiil, IC and BGs.
Works fine!

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Biggest obstacle to solo play is lack of action. Ignored on the back lines. No front line zerg to surf.

1vX is still doable, if you can actually find an X that isn't a ball group, sweaty smallscale, or faction zerg.

I've stopped playing now because I'm not a big fan of subclassing but this was pretty much my experience. It was actually incredibly hard to find a fight as a solo player where it was not just 20+ man groups around. even 1v4 those 4 players will just run away if you start winning.

you might be one of the last voices of reason this forum xylena

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Alchimiste1 wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Biggest obstacle to solo play is lack of action. Ignored on the back lines. No front line zerg to surf.

1vX is still doable, if you can actually find an X that isn't a ball group, sweaty smallscale, or faction zerg.

I've stopped playing now because I'm not a big fan of subclassing but this was pretty much my experience. It was actually incredibly hard to find a fight as a solo player where it was not just 20+ man groups around. even 1v4 those 4 players will just run away if you start winning.

you might be one of the last voices of reason this forum xylena

Basically why I hardly play cyro unless I get a smallman now.

Solo at best you get a 5 piece giving 600wd
Daily Zerg guilds run 24mans even at 300wd thats 7200wd difference per 5 piece set worth
Ballgroups run 12 man with stacking sets so 300*12*12 = 43,200wd basically

They make up like 70-80% of cyro's current population. The remaining 20% is probably afk at spawn or another 1vX player

Most „soloplayers“ I know don’t go Cyrodiil without a group anymore either and/or do only Alikr duells or battlegrounds now or stopped PvPing.
Have endured solo PvP as long as I could but I am tired of getting chased to death every time I see a non 1vXable group despite trying everything to avoid them. Cyrodiil is constantly telling you to quit if you do not have premade group. And ZoS keeps buffing groups to make them stronger than the sum oftheir parts as if they arent strong enaugh already.

Alchimiste1 wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Biggest obstacle to solo play is lack of action. Ignored on the back lines. No front line zerg to surf.

1vX is still doable, if you can actually find an X that isn't a ball group, sweaty smallscale, or faction zerg.

I've stopped playing now because I'm not a big fan of subclassing but this was pretty much my experience. It was actually incredibly hard to find a fight as a solo player where it was not just 20+ man groups around. even 1v4 those 4 players will just run away if you start winning.

you might be one of the last voices of reason this forum xylena

Well said. My intention with this post wasn’t about not trying new builds or anything like that but more of I logged in on a new subclassing build I actually like and trying to find 1v1/1vX fights was incredibly difficult due to as you stated above, everyone is in either large zergs, small scale comped groups or ball groups. I wasn’t trying to say it’s completely gone but solo play is definitely phased out more by players these days lately

i typically only play solo in cyro

granted im not usually 1vXing or anything sweaty, but i know how to read the map to where fights are going and try to support whats going on (attacks, defenses)

usually if its a ball group ill tend to ignore it unless theres absolutely no other action going on in the map (which lately is quite frequently)

katorga wrote: »

Play ranged, kite, and pull the teeth from current meta.

Not sure if it is best but since everyone is crit/crit resistant, i went max pen.

Yeah not sure why zos did it, but with subclassing and monomyth people essentially got given a free 50% crit damage. So until we get comparable crit resist options, we are going to be in a yoyo meta healthbar wise. 33-35khp is basically the sweetspot. This is after zos also gutted impen to help pve players get into cyrodil on their divines builds......so really there is no counter to the crit meta, simply there is no building around it. Rallying cry is pretty much mandatory and still not enough.

After stacking crit damage and crit resists, and hitting your 33k-35k hp threshold, next you stack your pen and breach up to the average enemy resist value which is about 25-30k resists this patch. Then just grab up whatever resists vs speed vs WD you feel happy with. Generally you shouldnt need recovery with imperial+bearhaunch. Some people do and drop a set for either wretched or roksa. Wretched is pretty good considering its worth like 780 recovery which is equivalent to WD trade wise. Granted only if it is even needed and you can trade somewhere else for it. (no dropping bear haunch for an all max stat food is not efficient) At best wretched lets you avoid needing inefficient recovery jewlery glyphs or wellfitted trait for impen.

In PvP generally speaking if you compare 2-4 piece bonuses. A line of WD will provide about 50% more damage than a line of max stat. Next, a line of Pen will provide about 50% more damage than the line of WD. Think of this as a tiered damage system of resources < damage/heals < raw damage. Also generally pen is equivalent to %damage done which is equivalent to CritDamageDone*critchance.