PvP - A Year-ish in review

PenguinInACan

I thought it might be fitting to take a break from the normal "this is broke and that is broke" theme of the Alliance War forums (aside from the few new build videos out there) to reflect on all of the changes (good and bad) that have hit the PvP world in the last year-ish.

I'm going to link to a video of my guild, not advertising or boasting seeing as we have moved on to other games etc., but to accurately display what competitive PvP was like a year ago.

Note the following footage was taken by someone who plays far away from the NA server, in groups ranging from 13-23, all recorded a year-10 months ago.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=sSY52GFqEVw

What I would like to discuss is what has changed since then, both within the ESO PvP community, and within the game itself (patches etc).

Orsinium hit in October 2015, Thieves Guild hit in March 2016. Servers were restructured, item sets were introduced, siege mechanics were changed.

What has happened in the past year that we as a PvP community believe could have been handled better or worse by ZOS?/What do you think was handled well?

What has happened within the PvP community (high impact PvP guilds re-rolling, moving to other games, dominating servers, etc.) that you think could have been handled better or worse?

Which direction would you like the PvP community to move (NOT WHAT ZOS IS DOING)? (Eg: more organization on X faction, better dueling control on X server, more/less cross-faction PvP guilds, more/less organized GvG events, more/less just plain AvAvA events)

It is clear that the community of PvP-ers in ESO has a tremendous impact on game performance, mechanics and balance (whether those changes be positive or negative), as seen in the numerous hotfixes adjusting skills, introducing item sets (shield breaker...) and just plain taking out things (mercs).

So what has happened in the last year that's worth discussing? (Please try and keep it civil, as moderation in the Alliance war forums seems to have taken a vacation)

Acts

RIP Tertiary Meat

Rylana

I was in combat when you were pming me today Marek, and I agree with a lot of what you were saying. Because of game design and movement on the part of the dev team, the PvP aspect has watered down to the point where an organized group is almost pointless now.

Might as well just zerg hard, with 100 people, and be a nobody than try to be competitive, since the game no longer supports that playstyle for the most part. What we have seen come out of that, is AD overpopulation on Had zergbadding everything, EP overpopulation on TF zergbadding everything, and we are starting to see Azuras turn blue, time will tell if that becomes a DC zergbad stronghold.

There is no incentive or rewarding content to keep people engaged in the fight, easy mode and path of least resistance all the way. People treat this game like a Korean points grinder instead of an RvRvR now because RvRvR isnt adequately supported. Zerg hard, zerg fast, and gatecamp as much as you can. Thats the story of ESO since 2.0


ZoS's biggest mistake since then was closing Chillrend and changing Azuras to no-cp. That exacerbated the underlying problem. Then lowering AP requirements for alliance war ranks because carebears cried about vigor, proxdet, and caltrops turned everything into a dettrain.

Essentially ZoS screwed up when they started listening to trial/pve mongers who wanted stuff for their PvE grinding, and stopped listening to the PvP playerbase when it regards Cyrodiil. I could well do without random helmets in a PvP vendor for dungeon content, put things back to how they were a year ago.

Not to mention the whole fiasco with rebalance, lag, and loss of first year players to other games. Cyrodiil is now a second string zergers paradise, and oldies like you and I probably all feel the same way - this game has changed too much, way too much from what we loved about it at the beginning.

zyk

I very much enjoyed PVP and Cyrodiil in ESO 2.1.

IC was a lot of fun in Sept when everyone was highly engaged in it. Cyrodiil was also fun in Sept, but it was hard to find action.

Cyrodiil was *awesome* on Trueflame in October. At least to start. We had VE, K-Hole, LoM, Haxus, HK, AC, Victorem and other guilds (especially EP) that I do not recall at this time. No lag. Many awesome 3-way fights. I think it was excellent for around two weeks or so before the guild dynamics changed and the campaign became unbalanced.

2.2 broke a *LOT*. Load screen issues. FPS drop issues. LOD texture issues. These issues persist today, @ZOS_GinaBruno. Many players quit during 2.2. Still, I was able to enjoy it until the lag became completely unbearable in January. Wheeler's incremental patches seemed to make things worse.

2.3 sucks. I won't go into detail as we've been discussing this in this forum since its launch. Aside from testing alchemist, vd and fasalla builds for about a week, I've barely played since January. ZOS should be ashamed of the state of Cyrodiil.

Cinnamon_Spider

I miss you guys

ArgoCye

I remember Exquisite Bedlam. You used to beat my poor Khajit up ... have since escaped to PS4 and enjoying laggy, crashy times.

Tbh, I was pretty happy when 1.6 hit oh so long ago and ZoS could have left it right there as far as I am concerned. But we are here. So where to next?

There are no easy fixes.

The reality is that lots of people on one spot means lots of performance issues. Tweaking effects and adding anti-zerg abilities do nothing. Maybe reducing max pops is the only way to create a playable PVP universe. But then we have these giant, mostly empty, maps ... so maybe reduce the size of those as well. I would like to bring back the deer, too.

Might come back to PC ... miss you guys, too.

forzajuve212

Rylana wrote: »

I was in combat when you were pming me today Marek, and I agree with a lot of what you were saying. Because of game design and movement on the part of the dev team, the PvP aspect has watered down to the point where an organized group is almost pointless now.

Might as well just zerg hard, with 100 people, and be a nobody than try to be competitive, since the game no longer supports that playstyle for the most part. What we have seen come out of that, is AD overpopulation on Had zergbadding everything, EP overpopulation on TF zergbadding everything, and we are starting to see Azuras turn blue, time will tell if that becomes a DC zergbad stronghold.

There is no incentive or rewarding content to keep people engaged in the fight, easy mode and path of least resistance all the way. People treat this game like a Korean points grinder instead of an RvRvR now because RvRvR isnt adequately supported. Zerg hard, zerg fast, and gatecamp as much as you can. Thats the story of ESO since 2.0


ZoS's biggest mistake since then was closing Chillrend and changing Azuras to no-cp. That exacerbated the underlying problem. Then lowering AP requirements for alliance war ranks because carebears cried about vigor, proxdet, and caltrops turned everything into a dettrain.

Essentially ZoS screwed up when they started listening to trial/pve mongers who wanted stuff for their PvE grinding, and stopped listening to the PvP playerbase when it regards Cyrodiil. I could well do without random helmets in a PvP vendor for dungeon content, put things back to how they were a year ago.

Not to mention the whole fiasco with rebalance, lag, and loss of first year players to other games. Cyrodiil is now a second string zergers paradise, and oldies like you and I probably all feel the same way - this game has changed too much, way too much from what we loved about it at the beginning.

This ^^

zyk wrote: »

I very much enjoyed PVP and Cyrodiil in ESO 2.1.

IC was a lot of fun in Sept when everyone was highly engaged in it. Cyrodiil was also fun in Sept, but it was hard to find action.

Cyrodiil was *awesome* on Trueflame in October. At least to start. We had VE, K-Hole, LoM, Haxus, HK, AC, Victorem and other guilds (especially EP) that I do not recall at this time. No lag. Many awesome 3-way fights. I think it was excellent for around two weeks or so before the guild dynamics changed and the campaign became unbalanced.

2.2 broke a *LOT*. Load screen issues. FPS drop issues. LOD texture issues. These issues persist today, @ZOS_GinaBruno. Many players quit during 2.2. Still, I was able to enjoy it until the lag became completely unbearable in January. Wheeler's incremental patches seemed to make things worse.

2.3 sucks. I won't go into detail as we've been discussing this in this forum since its launch. Aside from testing alchemist, vd and fasalla builds for about a week, I've barely played since January. ZOS should be ashamed of the state of Cyrodiil.

By AC, do you mean Arcane? We used to use AC as our tag so I think you may be referring to us. We flipped between TF and Azuras during that time, if I remember correctly. The fights were really fun for sure!

Zheg

It seems like we've sacrificed 999+ ping for low FPS. There are some nights where I do find the performance to be far better than the old days of 1.6 flag stacking with 50 banners littering the ground. There are also nights where it takes me over an hour to actually get back into the game and stay in the game because I crashed during a large fight. There are also nights (like last night) where there are so many players that enemies just stop rendering and all I see are blue allies and NPCs, but I'm able to repentence 20 invisible dead bodies at once...

The balance in this patch is atrocious, and many warnings were provided well in advance. I think players are so focused on insulting each other that sensible and logical (and now accurate) predictions about the problems that would arise in this patch were dismissed. Being able to say "I told you so" isn't much of a consolation prize when we would have preferred a fun and functional game instead.

For where ZOS can change direction, they need to actually communicate with us. Think about how many dire problems currently exist in this patch and think of how many have been responded to by ZOS, in particular wheeler and wrobel. How can we help focus our feedback if we don't even know if they agree X is a problem. Should we start talking about Y, or should we keep talking about X to convince them that it really is a problem? The secret lab method of upcoming balance changes that we only really get once per quarter needs to stop as well. TG was an experiment by wheeler and wrobel - look at how much they changed. The current patch is what happens when we don't know about these changes ahead of time and can do nothing to stop them.

Jules

PenguinInACan wrote: »

What has happened in the past year that we as a PvP community believe could have been handled better or worse by ZOS?/What do you think was handled well?

Things that were handled well:

1. AP for Undaunted - This was a huge issue one year ago and the issue of forced PVE was something that was a huge turn off to many. Though the traits or sets that are available are not always desirable, they ARE available at some point. Something I never thought I would see.
2. The reintroduction of forward camps - they recognized that the community enjoyed and missed this function of the game, but they also realized that blood porting was an issue. They gave them a cool down which was smart and also made it so you can only res at them if you were within that range. The range was improved from PTS and is very reasonable. All in all, they are functional at this time.
3. The balancing of the champion point system and spell vs. weapon damage - The jumpstart of the CPS should really be on the list below. To release the CPS with magic mitigation but without physical mitigation was a huge blunder. To leave the game with without a spell damage or stam regen mundus until 1.7 was an equally ridiculous oversight. However, the balancing of it that came with 1.7 was a good thing for everyone. You are now able to have both regen and damage on both magicka and stamina builds, and you are able to choose to mitigate others how you see fit.
4. Vigor - Stam builds pre 1.6 were few and far between as they had next to no opportunity to heal and this made them extremely less favorable than magicka builds. The introduction of vigor in the alliance war tree was a positive thing for balance.
5. Allowing multi-faction characters to home the same campaign - Though this was just a convenience thing, it was a huge move on ZOS' part and showed that they understood their community. The opposite faction homing campaigns was simply an annoyance that went on too long. Its departure makes getting into Cyrodiil just a little bit easier.




Things that were handled poorly:

1. LAG - It has never been fully fixed and has plagued this game since a year ago and even earlier. It is the single biggest failure of this game and is responsible for the mass exodus of players in the last year.
2. AOE Caps - The complete lack of awareness when it comes to AOE caps is astounding. Though I do not believe that a duo should be able to wipe a raid, the smaller group should be able to do their full amount of damage to an opposing larger group for the sake of balance. The community has been nearly unanimous in its support of AOE caps being removed and yet ZOS has turned a blind eye to this.
3. Dynamic Ultimate - Static Ultimate will always favor the larger group and thus, makes larger group stronger again. Dynamic ultimate functioning off of crit may have been too strong, but static ultimate is too weak and does not adjust well to varying group sizes or reward the less numbers with more ultimate. This is totally broken.
4. Nirnhoned. It remained in the game for all of 1.6 and was admittedly incredibly broken by everyone. Nerfed half the community into oblivion.
5. Imperial City- to release the first PVP zone without PVP objectives aside from farm mats was a huge oversight.
6. Lack of PVP incentives - Once you reach Assault and Support rank 10, which now comes at ~Alliance Rank 13, there are exactly ZERO INCENTIVES OR THINGS TO ACCOMPLISH for the remaining 37 alliance ranks. This is a huge, huge issue. Though the A/S passives are very good, there should still be some incentive to being a high alliance rank more than a damn symbol that looks cool. Come on ZOS. Give Brigadier and above, forward camps at 50% cost, the ability to choose your trait for the undaunted vendor. Give Legates and above a sick mount that distinguishes them from others or the old 2% faster ultimate gen of the past. There are so many options that people would love that would make PVPing into higher ranks really worth it. I have seen too many of my friends achieve Grand Overlord, stop receiving Rewards for the Worthy (the irony..) and all in all, abandon their character. They have had zero incentive to even get it to G/O from ZOS, it was all self propelled. It can only be determined as a huge flaw in the system when the linear track that you set your PVPers on has ZERO INCENTIVES in higher ranks. I mean really, what are you thinking?!
7. The lack of arenas or available dueling - The community has begged for an opportunity at small scale PVP for the entire last year and before. The introduction of arenas and dueling would be a lifesaver to many and yet it has not yet been completed and has no ETA.
8. Dragonknight - I don't even have enough time or energy to rehash all of the things that they have done wrong with DK. see here instead
9. Removal of Former Emp Passives - Supposedly done in order to stop emp trading. A much simpler option would have been to not allow an emp to be crowned unless they has 500k on the leaderboard, instead of 50k. It would allow the passives to remain in the game as an incentive at emperor and would also discourage flipping as it would be difficult to farm up 500k very quickly.
10. Prox det - From the beginning, it should have been reworked. It has ALWAYS hit too hard on a single target and in the current meta more than ever. On a magicka NB, I am able to hit a 10k prox det on ONE person in 6 IMPEN. That is broken, no other way to look at it. If it were truly meant to break up zergs, it should do next to no damage on single targets and should scale much higher when hitting multiple people. However, AOE caps prevents it from doing what it was actually intended to do. Also, if you don't want this skill to simply be equipped by larger groups, there should be some function of the skill that nerfs the damage of it immeasurably if another prox det circle is overlapped with it (or something like this)
11. Shields - These are out of control in cyrodiil. 20k+ shields on a high mobility and high damage class is ridiculous and should have never been allowed to continue as long as it has. Shields should not be able to be reapplied until their timer has worn out, or they should not be able to stack on top of one another.
12. Class balance - Many classes and specs are very imbalanced in this patch and the patches before. But simply for example's purpose, you can see that ZOS has really failed when it comes to balance if you simply look at the magicka sorc vs the magicka dragonknight. Sorc has the mobility of streak, the damage combos of velocious/frags, and the tankiness of shields. DK has absolutely no mobility to speak of, dots for damage which are useless in a high burst meta, and tankiness that was gutted over the last year.
13. Shield Breaker set- An awful bandaid fix to the true problem. Shield breaker should not circumvent the target's shield, it should hit the actual shield. Hence, shield breaker. The damage may need to be tweaked in order to make it a viable set still (aka, increased to reflect the 20k shields we see,) but it still never should have been 2k unresistable damage to health.
14. Vicious death set - Also just a bandaid fix to a much larger problem. Zergs and smaller group inferiority. If you truly want smaller groups to be able to blow up zergs, you need to look at how you have made that possible with the Vicious Death set. Do you want smaller groups to be able to insta wipe groups? Because that is what you have given us. It was my understanding that this was an argument against the removal of AOE caps, that the smaller group damage capability would be too strong and they didn't want to see 2-4 blowing up 24. And yet, here we are with Vicious Death equipped by 1 nightblade and proxy and able to wipe a dozen people+ in the blink of an eye. This is not balance, this is laziness. Vicious death was never necessary ZOS. Reintroduce dynamic ulti, reintroduce ground oils, and remove AOE caps and that would function 1000x better than any vicious death set.

Kilandros

Jules wrote: »

PenguinInACan wrote: »

What has happened in the past year that we as a PvP community believe could have been handled better or worse by ZOS?/What do you think was handled well?

Things that were handled well:

1. AP for Undaunted - This was a huge issue one year ago and the issue of forced PVE was something that was a huge turn off to many. Though the traits or sets that are available are not always desirable, they ARE available at some point. Something I never thought I would see.
2. The reintroduction of forward camps - they recognized that the community enjoyed and missed this function of the game, but they also realized that blood porting was an issue. They gave them a cool down which was smart and also made it so you can only res at them if you were within that range. The range was improved from PTS and is very reasonable. All in all, they are functional at this time.
3. The balancing of the champion point system and spell vs. weapon damage - The jumpstart of the CPS should really be on the list below. To release the CPS with magic mitigation but without physical mitigation was a huge blunder. To leave the game with without a spell damage or stam regen mundus until 1.7 was an equally ridiculous oversight. However, the balancing of it that came with 1.7 was a good thing for everyone. You are now able to have both regen and damage on both magicka and stamina builds, and you are able to choose to mitigate others how you see fit.
4. Vigor - Stam builds pre 1.6 were few and far between as they had next to no opportunity to heal and this made them extremely less favorable than magicka builds. The introduction of vigor in the alliance war tree was a positive thing for balance.
5. Allowing multi-faction characters to home the same campaign - Though this was just a convenience thing, it was a huge move on ZOS' part and showed that they understood their community. The opposite faction homing campaigns was simply an annoyance that went on too long. Its departure makes getting into Cyrodiil just a little bit easier.




Things that were handled poorly:

1. LAG - It has never been fully fixed and has plagued this game since a year ago and even earlier. It is the single biggest failure of this game and is responsible for the mass exodus of players in the last year.
2. AOE Caps - The complete lack of awareness when it comes to AOE caps is astounding. Though I do not believe that a duo should be able to wipe a raid, the smaller group should be able to do their full amount of damage to an opposing larger group for the sake of balance. The community has been nearly unanimous in its support of AOE caps being removed and yet ZOS has turned a blind eye to this.
3. Dynamic Ultimate - Static Ultimate will always favor the larger group and thus, makes larger group stronger again. Dynamic ultimate functioning off of crit may have been too strong, but static ultimate is too weak and does not adjust well to varying group sizes or reward the less numbers with more ultimate. This is totally broken.
4. Nirnhoned. It remained in the game for all of 1.6 and was admittedly incredibly broken by everyone. Nerfed half the community into oblivion.
5. Imperial City- to release the first PVP zone without PVP objectives aside from farm mats was a huge oversight.
6. Lack of PVP incentives - Once you reach Assault and Support rank 10, which now comes at ~Alliance Rank 13, there are exactly ZERO INCENTIVES OR THINGS TO ACCOMPLISH for the remaining 37 alliance ranks. This is a huge, huge issue. Though the A/S passives are very good, there should still be some incentive to being a high alliance rank more than a damn symbol that looks cool. Come on ZOS. Give Brigadier and above, forward camps at 50% cost, the ability to choose your trait for the undaunted vendor. Give Legates and above a sick mount that distinguishes them from others or the old 2% faster ultimate gen of the past. There are so many options that people would love that would make PVPing into higher ranks really worth it. I have seen too many of my friends achieve Grand Overlord, stop receiving Rewards for the Worthy (the irony..) and all in all, abandon their character. They have had zero incentive to even get it to G/O from ZOS, it was all self propelled. It can only be determined as a huge flaw in the system when the linear track that you set your PVPers on has ZERO INCENTIVES in higher ranks. I mean really, what are you thinking?!
7. The lack of arenas or available dueling - The community has begged for an opportunity at small scale PVP for the entire last year and before. The introduction of arenas and dueling would be a lifesaver to many and yet it has not yet been completed and has no ETA.
8. Dragonknight - I don't even have enough time or energy to rehash all of the things that they have done wrong with DK. see here instead
9. Removal of Former Emp Passives - Supposedly done in order to stop emp trading. A much simpler option would have been to not allow an emp to be crowned unless they has 500k on the leaderboard, instead of 50k. It would allow the passives to remain in the game as an incentive at emperor and would also discourage flipping as it would be difficult to farm up 500k very quickly.
10. Prox det - From the beginning, it should have been reworked. It has ALWAYS hit too hard on a single target and in the current meta more than ever. On a magicka NB, I am able to hit a 10k prox det on ONE person in 6 IMPEN. That is broken, no other way to look at it. If it were truly meant to break up zergs, it should do next to no damage on single targets and should scale much higher when hitting multiple people. However, AOE caps prevents it from doing what it was actually intended to do. Also, if you don't want this skill to simply be equipped by larger groups, there should be some function of the skill that nerfs the damage of it immeasurably if another prox det circle is overlapped with it (or something like this)
11. Shields - These are out of control in cyrodiil. 20k+ shields on a high mobility and high damage class is ridiculous and should have never been allowed to continue as long as it has. Shields should not be able to be reapplied until their timer has worn out, or they should not be able to stack on top of one another.
12. Class balance - Many classes and specs are very imbalanced in this patch and the patches before. But simply for example's purpose, you can see that ZOS has really failed when it comes to balance if you simply look at the magicka sorc vs the magicka dragonknight. Sorc has the mobility of streak, the damage combos of velocious/frags, and the tankiness of shields. DK has absolutely no mobility to speak of, dots for damage which are useless in a high burst meta, and tankiness that was gutted over the last year.
13. Shield Breaker set- An awful bandaid fix to the true problem. Shield breaker should not circumvent the target's shield, it should hit the actual shield. Hence, shield breaker. The damage may need to be tweaked in order to make it a viable set still (aka, increased to reflect the 20k shields we see,) but it still never should have been 2k unresistable damage to health.
14. Vicious death set - Also just a bandaid fix to a much larger problem. Zergs and smaller group inferiority. If you truly want smaller groups to be able to blow up zergs, you need to look at how you have made that possible with the Vicious Death set. Do you want smaller groups to be able to insta wipe groups? Because that is what you have given us. It was my understanding that this was an argument against the removal of AOE caps, that the smaller group damage capability would be too strong and they didn't want to see 2-4 blowing up 24. And yet, here we are with Vicious Death equipped by 1 nightblade and proxy and able to wipe a dozen people+ in the blink of an eye. This is not balance, this is laziness. Vicious death was never necessary ZOS. Reintroduce dynamic ulti, reintroduce ground oils, and remove AOE caps and that would function 1000x better than any vicious death set.

Concise and spot on. Agree with everything here.

KenaPKK

Jules wrote: »

PenguinInACan wrote: »

What has happened in the past year that we as a PvP community believe could have been handled better or worse by ZOS?/What do you think was handled well?

[snip]

Kilandros wrote: »

Jules wrote: »

PenguinInACan wrote: »

What has happened in the past year that we as a PvP community believe could have been handled better or worse by ZOS?/What do you think was handled well?

Things that were handled well:

1. AP for Undaunted - This was a huge issue one year ago and the issue of forced PVE was something that was a huge turn off to many. Though the traits or sets that are available are not always desirable, they ARE available at some point. Something I never thought I would see.
2. The reintroduction of forward camps - they recognized that the community enjoyed and missed this function of the game, but they also realized that blood porting was an issue. They gave them a cool down which was smart and also made it so you can only res at them if you were within that range. The range was improved from PTS and is very reasonable. All in all, they are functional at this time.
3. The balancing of the champion point system and spell vs. weapon damage - The jumpstart of the CPS should really be on the list below. To release the CPS with magic mitigation but without physical mitigation was a huge blunder. To leave the game with without a spell damage or stam regen mundus until 1.7 was an equally ridiculous oversight. However, the balancing of it that came with 1.7 was a good thing for everyone. You are now able to have both regen and damage on both magicka and stamina builds, and you are able to choose to mitigate others how you see fit.
4. Vigor - Stam builds pre 1.6 were few and far between as they had next to no opportunity to heal and this made them extremely less favorable than magicka builds. The introduction of vigor in the alliance war tree was a positive thing for balance.
5. Allowing multi-faction characters to home the same campaign - Though this was just a convenience thing, it was a huge move on ZOS' part and showed that they understood their community. The opposite faction homing campaigns was simply an annoyance that went on too long. Its departure makes getting into Cyrodiil just a little bit easier.




Things that were handled poorly:

1. LAG - It has never been fully fixed and has plagued this game since a year ago and even earlier. It is the single biggest failure of this game and is responsible for the mass exodus of players in the last year.
2. AOE Caps - The complete lack of awareness when it comes to AOE caps is astounding. Though I do not believe that a duo should be able to wipe a raid, the smaller group should be able to do their full amount of damage to an opposing larger group for the sake of balance. The community has been nearly unanimous in its support of AOE caps being removed and yet ZOS has turned a blind eye to this.
3. Dynamic Ultimate - Static Ultimate will always favor the larger group and thus, makes larger group stronger again. Dynamic ultimate functioning off of crit may have been too strong, but static ultimate is too weak and does not adjust well to varying group sizes or reward the less numbers with more ultimate. This is totally broken.
4. Nirnhoned. It remained in the game for all of 1.6 and was admittedly incredibly broken by everyone. Nerfed half the community into oblivion.
5. Imperial City- to release the first PVP zone without PVP objectives aside from farm mats was a huge oversight.
6. Lack of PVP incentives - Once you reach Assault and Support rank 10, which now comes at ~Alliance Rank 13, there are exactly ZERO INCENTIVES OR THINGS TO ACCOMPLISH for the remaining 37 alliance ranks. This is a huge, huge issue. Though the A/S passives are very good, there should still be some incentive to being a high alliance rank more than a damn symbol that looks cool. Come on ZOS. Give Brigadier and above, forward camps at 50% cost, the ability to choose your trait for the undaunted vendor. Give Legates and above a sick mount that distinguishes them from others or the old 2% faster ultimate gen of the past. There are so many options that people would love that would make PVPing into higher ranks really worth it. I have seen too many of my friends achieve Grand Overlord, stop receiving Rewards for the Worthy (the irony..) and all in all, abandon their character. They have had zero incentive to even get it to G/O from ZOS, it was all self propelled. It can only be determined as a huge flaw in the system when the linear track that you set your PVPers on has ZERO INCENTIVES in higher ranks. I mean really, what are you thinking?!
7. The lack of arenas or available dueling - The community has begged for an opportunity at small scale PVP for the entire last year and before. The introduction of arenas and dueling would be a lifesaver to many and yet it has not yet been completed and has no ETA.
8. Dragonknight - I don't even have enough time or energy to rehash all of the things that they have done wrong with DK. see here instead
9. Removal of Former Emp Passives - Supposedly done in order to stop emp trading. A much simpler option would have been to not allow an emp to be crowned unless they has 500k on the leaderboard, instead of 50k. It would allow the passives to remain in the game as an incentive at emperor and would also discourage flipping as it would be difficult to farm up 500k very quickly.
10. Prox det - From the beginning, it should have been reworked. It has ALWAYS hit too hard on a single target and in the current meta more than ever. On a magicka NB, I am able to hit a 10k prox det on ONE person in 6 IMPEN. That is broken, no other way to look at it. If it were truly meant to break up zergs, it should do next to no damage on single targets and should scale much higher when hitting multiple people. However, AOE caps prevents it from doing what it was actually intended to do. Also, if you don't want this skill to simply be equipped by larger groups, there should be some function of the skill that nerfs the damage of it immeasurably if another prox det circle is overlapped with it (or something like this)
11. Shields - These are out of control in cyrodiil. 20k+ shields on a high mobility and high damage class is ridiculous and should have never been allowed to continue as long as it has. Shields should not be able to be reapplied until their timer has worn out, or they should not be able to stack on top of one another.
12. Class balance - Many classes and specs are very imbalanced in this patch and the patches before. But simply for example's purpose, you can see that ZOS has really failed when it comes to balance if you simply look at the magicka sorc vs the magicka dragonknight. Sorc has the mobility of streak, the damage combos of velocious/frags, and the tankiness of shields. DK has absolutely no mobility to speak of, dots for damage which are useless in a high burst meta, and tankiness that was gutted over the last year.
13. Shield Breaker set- An awful bandaid fix to the true problem. Shield breaker should not circumvent the target's shield, it should hit the actual shield. Hence, shield breaker. The damage may need to be tweaked in order to make it a viable set still (aka, increased to reflect the 20k shields we see,) but it still never should have been 2k unresistable damage to health.
14. Vicious death set - Also just a bandaid fix to a much larger problem. Zergs and smaller group inferiority. If you truly want smaller groups to be able to blow up zergs, you need to look at how you have made that possible with the Vicious Death set. Do you want smaller groups to be able to insta wipe groups? Because that is what you have given us. It was my understanding that this was an argument against the removal of AOE caps, that the smaller group damage capability would be too strong and they didn't want to see 2-4 blowing up 24. And yet, here we are with Vicious Death equipped by 1 nightblade and proxy and able to wipe a dozen people+ in the blink of an eye. This is not balance, this is laziness. Vicious death was never necessary ZOS. Reintroduce dynamic ulti, reintroduce ground oils, and remove AOE caps and that would function 1000x better than any vicious death set.

Concise and spot on. Agree with everything here.

Same. Well put, Jules.

PainfulFAFA

What jules said.

Zenetrax

From what I know they only nerfed stam by putting a penalty on repeatedly dodgerolling. How about magicka? They should also put a penalty on repeatedly spamming/casting one skill. But... looking forward for that AvAvA events tho never participated in one think it would be fun

Minno

Jules wrote: »

PenguinInACan wrote: »

What has happened in the past year that we as a PvP community believe could have been handled better or worse by ZOS?/What do you think was handled well?

Things that were handled well:

1. AP for Undaunted - This was a huge issue one year ago and the issue of forced PVE was something that was a huge turn off to many. Though the traits or sets that are available are not always desirable, they ARE available at some point. Something I never thought I would see.
2. The reintroduction of forward camps - they recognized that the community enjoyed and missed this function of the game, but they also realized that blood porting was an issue. They gave them a cool down which was smart and also made it so you can only res at them if you were within that range. The range was improved from PTS and is very reasonable. All in all, they are functional at this time.
3. The balancing of the champion point system and spell vs. weapon damage - The jumpstart of the CPS should really be on the list below. To release the CPS with magic mitigation but without physical mitigation was a huge blunder. To leave the game with without a spell damage or stam regen mundus until 1.7 was an equally ridiculous oversight. However, the balancing of it that came with 1.7 was a good thing for everyone. You are now able to have both regen and damage on both magicka and stamina builds, and you are able to choose to mitigate others how you see fit.
4. Vigor - Stam builds pre 1.6 were few and far between as they had next to no opportunity to heal and this made them extremely less favorable than magicka builds. The introduction of vigor in the alliance war tree was a positive thing for balance.
5. Allowing multi-faction characters to home the same campaign - Though this was just a convenience thing, it was a huge move on ZOS' part and showed that they understood their community. The opposite faction homing campaigns was simply an annoyance that went on too long. Its departure makes getting into Cyrodiil just a little bit easier.




Things that were handled poorly:

1. LAG - It has never been fully fixed and has plagued this game since a year ago and even earlier. It is the single biggest failure of this game and is responsible for the mass exodus of players in the last year.
2. AOE Caps - The complete lack of awareness when it comes to AOE caps is astounding. Though I do not believe that a duo should be able to wipe a raid, the smaller group should be able to do their full amount of damage to an opposing larger group for the sake of balance. The community has been nearly unanimous in its support of AOE caps being removed and yet ZOS has turned a blind eye to this.
3. Dynamic Ultimate - Static Ultimate will always favor the larger group and thus, makes larger group stronger again. Dynamic ultimate functioning off of crit may have been too strong, but static ultimate is too weak and does not adjust well to varying group sizes or reward the less numbers with more ultimate. This is totally broken.
4. Nirnhoned. It remained in the game for all of 1.6 and was admittedly incredibly broken by everyone. Nerfed half the community into oblivion.
5. Imperial City- to release the first PVP zone without PVP objectives aside from farm mats was a huge oversight.
6. Lack of PVP incentives - Once you reach Assault and Support rank 10, which now comes at ~Alliance Rank 13, there are exactly ZERO INCENTIVES OR THINGS TO ACCOMPLISH for the remaining 37 alliance ranks. This is a huge, huge issue. Though the A/S passives are very good, there should still be some incentive to being a high alliance rank more than a damn symbol that looks cool. Come on ZOS. Give Brigadier and above, forward camps at 50% cost, the ability to choose your trait for the undaunted vendor. Give Legates and above a sick mount that distinguishes them from others or the old 2% faster ultimate gen of the past. There are so many options that people would love that would make PVPing into higher ranks really worth it. I have seen too many of my friends achieve Grand Overlord, stop receiving Rewards for the Worthy (the irony..) and all in all, abandon their character. They have had zero incentive to even get it to G/O from ZOS, it was all self propelled. It can only be determined as a huge flaw in the system when the linear track that you set your PVPers on has ZERO INCENTIVES in higher ranks. I mean really, what are you thinking?!
7. The lack of arenas or available dueling - The community has begged for an opportunity at small scale PVP for the entire last year and before. The introduction of arenas and dueling would be a lifesaver to many and yet it has not yet been completed and has no ETA.
8. Dragonknight - I don't even have enough time or energy to rehash all of the things that they have done wrong with DK. see here instead
9. Removal of Former Emp Passives - Supposedly done in order to stop emp trading. A much simpler option would have been to not allow an emp to be crowned unless they has 500k on the leaderboard, instead of 50k. It would allow the passives to remain in the game as an incentive at emperor and would also discourage flipping as it would be difficult to farm up 500k very quickly.
10. Prox det - From the beginning, it should have been reworked. It has ALWAYS hit too hard on a single target and in the current meta more than ever. On a magicka NB, I am able to hit a 10k prox det on ONE person in 6 IMPEN. That is broken, no other way to look at it. If it were truly meant to break up zergs, it should do next to no damage on single targets and should scale much higher when hitting multiple people. However, AOE caps prevents it from doing what it was actually intended to do. Also, if you don't want this skill to simply be equipped by larger groups, there should be some function of the skill that nerfs the damage of it immeasurably if another prox det circle is overlapped with it (or something like this)
11. Shields - These are out of control in cyrodiil. 20k+ shields on a high mobility and high damage class is ridiculous and should have never been allowed to continue as long as it has. Shields should not be able to be reapplied until their timer has worn out, or they should not be able to stack on top of one another.
12. Class balance - Many classes and specs are very imbalanced in this patch and the patches before. But simply for example's purpose, you can see that ZOS has really failed when it comes to balance if you simply look at the magicka sorc vs the magicka dragonknight. Sorc has the mobility of streak, the damage combos of velocious/frags, and the tankiness of shields. DK has absolutely no mobility to speak of, dots for damage which are useless in a high burst meta, and tankiness that was gutted over the last year.
13. Shield Breaker set- An awful bandaid fix to the true problem. Shield breaker should not circumvent the target's shield, it should hit the actual shield. Hence, shield breaker. The damage may need to be tweaked in order to make it a viable set still (aka, increased to reflect the 20k shields we see,) but it still never should have been 2k unresistable damage to health.
14. Vicious death set - Also just a bandaid fix to a much larger problem. Zergs and smaller group inferiority. If you truly want smaller groups to be able to blow up zergs, you need to look at how you have made that possible with the Vicious Death set. Do you want smaller groups to be able to insta wipe groups? Because that is what you have given us. It was my understanding that this was an argument against the removal of AOE caps, that the smaller group damage capability would be too strong and they didn't want to see 2-4 blowing up 24. And yet, here we are with Vicious Death equipped by 1 nightblade and proxy and able to wipe a dozen people+ in the blink of an eye. This is not balance, this is laziness. Vicious death was never necessary ZOS. Reintroduce dynamic ulti, reintroduce ground oils, and remove AOE caps and that would function 1000x better than any vicious death set.

Dynamic/static ulti system does need review.
But I'd counter and say the static system promotes utilizing skills, items and light attack weaves to generate ulti. To me, this system is more dynamic in that you can use certain sets (blood spawn) and skills (dawns wraith Templar) to help generate ulti. The old system was tied to crit and too easy to allow cookie cutter builds.

It's not perfect, but needs anotger balance review. Instead of vicious death, we should have gotten sets to increase ultimate tbh.

PenguinInACan

Zenetrax wrote: »

From what I know they only nerfed stam by putting a penalty on repeatedly dodgerolling. How about magicka? They should also put a penalty on repeatedly spamming/casting one skill. But... looking forward for that AvAvA events tho never participated in one think it would be fun

Some AvAvA events would be really fun to organize/participate in. I know from watching the GvG's both on NA and EU everyone involved had a lot of fun and the feedback was amazing. Unfortunately with the lack of servers and scheduling it seems a pretty daunting task, but if people put their heads together I would love to be in/spectate some fun.

Be it IC 3 faction world boss skirmishes, Cyro dungeon raids (each faction starts at a separate part of the dungeon and fights their way to the middle etc) or just plain old open world organized fun. People are just stuck on "ZOS messed up so we are either going to quit or conform". There are lots of opportunities for user created content in Cyro, they just need some organization and the will to progress.

Also I am aware that any AvAvA event will eventually destroy server performance, but so be it. If we can crash a server while having fun once a month and communicate that to ZOS maybe we can get something back from them. It seems to me that it would be a better to say "we lagged/crashed the server collectively in an organized/fun fashion" than "this guild zerged/lagged the server and they are horrible and ZOS is terrible" (which has been the running theme over the last year)

HoloYoitsu

Zenetrax wrote: »

From what I know they only nerfed stam by putting a penalty on repeatedly dodgerolling. How about magicka? They should also put a penalty on repeatedly spamming/casting one skill. But... looking forward for that AvAvA events tho never participated in one think it would be fun

The dodge roll nerf hurts magicka builds more than stam, cuz stam builds already have higher stam pools, more dodge roll cost reduction, and more stam regen.

PenguinInACan

HoloYoitsu wrote: »

Zenetrax wrote: »

From what I know they only nerfed stam by putting a penalty on repeatedly dodgerolling. How about magicka? They should also put a penalty on repeatedly spamming/casting one skill. But... looking forward for that AvAvA events tho never participated in one think it would be fun

The dodge roll nerf hurts magicka builds more than stam, cuz stam builds already have higher stam pools, more dodge roll cost reduction, and more stam regen.

The biggest problem I've noticed with mag builds and roll dodging is magicka is "supposed" to be able to put out higher damage numbers to offset the need to roll around. I mean, lore-wise, a tiny dunmer shouldn't be able to hit me with a giant sword as hard as he can hit me with a fully charged flame staff attack. That hasn't been the case without softcaps and the synergies in some weapon skill trees.

It is very difficult to match the raw damage of some of the stamina builds that benefit from the lack of softcaps and the mobility of their primary resource pool with a magicka build that needs to spec into a separate world skill line just to be able to mitigate damge and move a little faster at the same time. (discounting sorc streak)

How to fix that is a lot more complicated. Early day magicka builds were perfect (in my opinion) on damage and resource management if we ignore softcaps. Pre-Orsinium stam builds were very well done and comparative to 1.5 mag builds damage output (again in my opinion, ignoring softcaps). The problem comes with adding those two together, taking into account the CP variabilities, and whatever was added post Orsinium in gear/skill tweaks.

The major question I've always asked when making a new build, is "would I rather be able to tank a hit, dodge a hit, or out dps a hit?" All of those questions can be answered by just rolling a stam build currently and that is something that has and will continue to change with more patches.

Zenetrax

HoloYoitsu wrote: »

The dodge roll nerf hurts magicka builds more than stam, cuz stam builds already have higher stam pools, more dodge roll cost reduction, and more stam regen.

Agree. They didn't put penalty on magicka builds tho so magicka people are free to spam like nightblades doing cloak and cloak and cloak to run. I do it on my magblade too and find it really useful.

HoloYoitsu

Zenetrax wrote: »

HoloYoitsu wrote: »

The dodge roll nerf hurts magicka builds more than stam, cuz stam builds already have higher stam pools, more dodge roll cost reduction, and more stam regen.

Agree. They didn't put penalty on magicka builds tho so magicka people are free to spam like nightblades doing cloak and cloak and cloak to run. I do it on my magblade too and find it really useful.

Right around IC Jessica or Gina posted that they were "looking into changes to Cloak" so that it couldn't be "spammed". They didn't want to add a cost increase like dodge roll or bolt escape because 'reasons', but they were supposedly going to "remove magicka regen while in Cloak". Funny how that never happened.

Aerem

I was about to tag you @KenaPKK as I thought it was very well written and on point. But you already saw this sooo.

I completely agree with everything Jules said, I want this game to succeed, but at this point it takes a lot of effort to not rage quit on a nightly basis.

Morozov

Jules wrote: »

PenguinInACan wrote: »

What has happened in the past year that we as a PvP community believe could have been handled better or worse by ZOS?/What do you think was handled well?

Things that were handled well:

...stuff and things...

Things that were handled poorly:

...more stuff and things which totally are spot on...

4. Nirnhoned. It remained in the game for all of 1.6 and was admittedly incredibly broken by everyone. Nerfed half the community into oblivion.

...more things...

9. Dragonknight - I don't even have enough time or energy to rehash all of the things that they have done wrong with DK. see here instead

...even more stuff that's totally spot on

as a magDK back in that time of the +5 items with nirn on it or gtfo of group; it made my gameplay as follows:

my role in group -
1: stack magicka+nirn and talon-spam everything to root people in place
2: don't die (which never happened till everyone else in group had already done so and I was left alone)

I can't begin to tell you how effective I was at spamming my one button. The mitigation at this time was so dumb. So so dumb.