IDK ballgroups are easy enough to mess with. Its really just zerg guilds need to teach their pugs to disperse and counter when they see a group pushing. Even as a duo, Static and I could go mess with ball groups open field in our openworld setups. You just need to counter their engagement timing and they all get messed up. When timing is off that is when your best chance at a pick would be. You can notice really bad groups wont have immunity covering them as they start their engagement timings, so streaking straight through them or any aoe stun really makes them flop and reset.

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The stat and effect ballooning with DLC sure does just inflate the lag though. Is it all necessary for combat to be fun, ehhhhhhhhhh? I only remember back to when there was 10x the pvp population yet group combat revolved around ult timings for bombs. Lets just make more sets that do massive aoe stat change effects which calculate on XYZ and fire off with ABC effects....... except now everyone runs it. What's the point if the lag just balloons further?

Scaling sets based on group size is also a terrible way of isolating out solo, smallman, and casual players. Turning pvp into a popularity contest where it will primarily be full of coordinated groups and guilds. This can be disastrous as guilds disband quickly leaving voids in factions. I would fear cyrodil or GH pvp dies out the same way the lowbie, nocp, and other campaigns all died out becoming underpopulated and unbalanced when the only remaining large guild can bully the uncoordinated factions.

Zos has struggled to understand how to stop players from balling up in tight groups forever. Yet they have mechanics like smart healing encourage having groups to form tight balls. Then you get into other things like whether aoe heals or damage should be as efficient as single targets. Lets say if an aoe can hit 6 players, should it do 6x a single target spammable, could changing this balance push groups to more single target skill composition mixes?

The reality is that counters to ball groups do exist, and they have existed for years. The issue is that effectively countering a ball group requires a highly coordinated group of players within the faction zerg who actually understand how ball groups function, what pressures them, and what is capable of killing or disrupting them consistently.

The problem, however, is that a ball group will almost always remain the strongest option for countering another ball group regardless of the situation. If you want to stop a ball group from farming 12vFaction stack, you can either spend time coordinating a specialized counter comp built specifically to deal with them, while being borderline useless in most other situations, or you can simply ball up yourselves and zerg with the faction, and the latter is generally more effective than anything else you could realistically do.

That is why ball groups remain the most effective tactic available in Cyrodiil. Other playstyles are inherently limited in what they can engage, survive, or accomplish, while ball groups can effectively do everything: zerg, fight outnumbered, hold objectives, push keeps, force their way through siege-filled choke points, and run scrolls with minimal drawbacks.

The next major Battle Spirit balance adjustment, ideally in U50 or U51, needs to directly address shield stacking, the actual mechanic that is, and has been, making these groups so ridiculously strong against the average Cyrodiil pug.