ACD: The Battle for PVP Improvements

HeroOfNone

Good Afternoon Citizens of Cyrodiil!

This week's Arm Chair Developer focus is on PVP. I've broken this out into 3 seperate related topics:
ACD: Top 10 PVP issues of 2016
ACD: Fixing Proc Sets, ZOS's Roadmap to Success or Ruin
ACD: The Battle for PVP Improvements

In this post, we'll be discussing ideas that will change the way many play in Cyrodiil. While some of this refers to specific combat & skills, they should have a larger impact on the alliance war. Many of these ideas were made to help deal with the top 10 issues in 2016 and some come from various player suggestions I've gotten over the last few weeks. Make sure to dig into the details to find some interesting potential changes.

Also, I tried not to harp in this ongoing fixes and battlegrounds, we know those are coming, and you can check my profile for long in depth discussions about them =3.

1. Rebalance of abilities to work better/only with certain armor & weapons.

- Shuffle, immovable, & annulment only to work with 5 pieces of their respective armor type (@sribes)
- Mages guild ultimate requires a Mages guild ability sloted. Fighters guild ultimate requires a Fighters guild ability slotted
- This would force certain over powered skills to take a nerf while also preventing enemies from so easily stacking them on top of one another.

2. One more weekly campaign with a rotating ruleset.

Rules can include:

- reduced effective CP effect, 50% of assign values & passives
- Regenerations turned off but heavy attacks & potions return more resources
- Siege damage on players increased 100%, battle spirit turned off in the imperial city
- Damage reduced 60%, increase health by 50%, healing reduced 90-100%, ability cost increased 60%, potion cooldown increased 200%, health regen reduced 100%
- Magicka damage raise by 20%, but damage shields and healing reduced 20%. debuffs are also 50% more effective.
- Other player submitted ideas! place what you think would shake up cyrodiil.

- Rotating the ruleset weekly can give further insight in how to adjust abilities, adjust battle spirit,
- Gives PVPers a new meta challenge each week.

3. Scale debuffs with player stats instead of just a generic buff

- A lack of utility builds since all buffs & debuffs are the same, players can out build the debuffs easily
- Debuffs can affect things like regenerations, stamina, & magicka, so as not to interrupt the PVE side
- Buffs can work on crit reduction, crit damage reduction, certain debuff reductions, and CC/snare reductions, limiting interference to PVE.
- With proper scaling, alternatives to pure damage or pure mitigation can be made.

4. Rechargeable reaction runes similar to Elder Scrolls Legends

- Could be set to trigger at 50%, 70% & 30%, or other marks.
- Certain armor sets like white strakes, Ogrims scales, and others could be set to trigger on the loss of a rune
- Class abilities could include free stealth to nightblades, clensing for templars, temporary armor to dragonknights, or a damage shield for sorcerers.
- At minimum could grant a free break free or roll dodge to wounded players
- This would allow players a chance to react when they have a sudden drop in health, giving them a chance to fight back, especially Magicka users with low stamina to break free.
- The out of combat cool down makes it so it's not spamable in a fight, and nerfs certain armor procs as well.

5. Give snares & roots increased cost on gap closers

- A lot of enemies will ignore movement CC by using gap closers and taking advatage of the update delay.
- The strength of the snare helps determine the cost increase. For example a 50% snare will increase the cost for crit rush or blink by 50%.
- This will give more options to pure ranged builds verses opponents without abilities to clear snares & roots or those without stamina to roll dodge out of roots.

6. Give more classes & builds, especially stamina builds, access to cleansing abilities

- Currently mostly templars & magicka builds can get rid of almost any debuff or DOT
- It seems we can't improve debuff and utility builds because there is only one type of class & build that can hard counter them.
- Even most sets that remove debuffs are magicka or tanky sets.

7. Give keeps the ability to level and grow stronger the longer they are held

- Gives more reason to hold onto important keeps
- AP could be dynamically increased to reward a capture
- Slower siege decay/harder enemy siege placement, more stonger guards/traps placed grounds, stronger walls/stronger doors, traps, and other morph choices
- Objectives can still effect keep health but also include things like scouts, upgrade times, and more

8. AP bonuses for capturing consecutive objectives on a streak or within a time limit

- Capturing adjoining objectives gives a bonus to encourage pushing objectives.
- Capturing adjoining keeps would give a higher bonus, building up till death or by turning in a quest.
- Bonuses could also be given by objectives on the next target to hit
- If given a a timed quest, could be used to artificially spread forces out (depending on player objectives given out)

9. Return siege damage numbers to high numbers for near direct hits

- Direct hit would be no bigger than 1m for 100% more damage, then damage would fall out to 50% more damage at 3m and then standard for an thing over the distance.
- Coldharbor gives significant damage while most bought siege is ignored.
- Stationary nature of siege gives players time to react
- Rewards accurate players, punishes lazy ones
- Consider giving siege an arming time, similar to how oil has a fall distance, to prevent tight quarters farming.

10. Cyrodiil Generals, weaker emperor like characters for the top players in a faction

- Could get 50% or 25% weaker buffs than emperor, but not as strong
- Could be given special set of buffs when signing up at base camp.
- Each side is given a general(s), based on who's online in the campaign.
- In one example, AD, DC, EP each get 3 generals,. if EP gets Emperor they get 2 Generals and the Emperor.
- If a higher AP scorer joins in and goes grnersl, the lowest is kicked out of their rank.
- Opt out system to pass the general onto another canidate
- Possibly marked or able to mark a map to call allies to their location.

Thank you for reading, now it's time to reply with YOUR feedback. What ideas did you like? Did you like them all? And what new changes would you like to see for PVP?

Remember: we pushed for accoutability on hackers & exploiters and they acted. We complained on Imperial City and they have made some improvements. It's time we push through on some clear ideas on what we want so we are not disappointed with the result.

HeroOfNone

Surprised this has gotten such little attention with so many asking for something new in PVP. I guess more would prefer to complain they are bored rather than think up some new challenge to take on.

Taylor_MB

Don't have the time to reply properly now (maybe never), but honestly no one has replied because most of these suggestions are way to complicated and will never be considered by zos and/or create more unbalance and/or utterly pointless.

Few very quick reactions:
1) Yes
2) We don't need to spread the population thinner
3) The major/minor buff system is amazing and shouldn't change, all the buffs and debuffs are effective. We already have (essentially) regen debuffs in the form of poisons and they are stupid OP as it is.
4) So like... potions?
5) Interesting idea, but with the amount of things that snare in this game it would not be wise to implement, especially when all it does is empower snipe spammers.
6) Alliance War > Support > Purge. What point in making another identical skill?
7) Keeps do grow stronger the longer they are held.
8) 90% AP should always be awarded for killing players, it's PvP.
9) Yes, but tone down siege dmg for the non-vet campaign, siege is already stupid in there.
10) The usurper suggestion has been floating around for a while. Defintely not multiple generals, we don't need every group you run into to have an overbuffed player.

Rickter

I think these are some great proposals man. good job and i appreciate the hard work!

I just think ESO pvp is going through a "change of the guard" type dynamic at the moment and thats why i think you arent getting a lot of feedback. let me explain:

So when this game first launched, there was obviously a lot of excitement and hype surrounding the pvp. Of course when the game first launched, most of the "enthusiastically inclined pvpers" were around you saw the most solely pvp oriented "mega guilds" at that particular time period etc.

Over time, a lot of these players dropped out of ESO - for one reason or another. Even the ones that stuck around have basically given up - not because PVP has gotten worse, but because they failed to adapt. Balancing of the game made them feel less "elite". Think about it: STAM and MAG builds are more even than they have ever been in ESO - im not saying perfect, im saying the most even. Remember when STAM sucked? at everything? yeah no one is saying "Elder Staves Online" anymore.

So we the players got everything we complained about. those that failed to adapt, or clung onto old mentalities, left.

So what you see now is a few old school faithful who arent necessarily really concerned with how ESO pvp is (because theyve accepted/adapted) theyre more concerned with who they can catch exploiting, or what video montages they can post participating in "small scale" and what zergs they can bust. Thats basically what ESO PVP has devolved into. not that it was ever much more arguably. . .

So back to my change of the guard comment - i think there are a lot of eso pvpers. A LOT. its addictive, fun, fluid, and despite whatever the 1% of forum goers say, many people get hooked and come back for more. but thats the thing, they arent on the forums. this game experienced a tremendous influx of fresh new players and a lot of them are on console. those players arent necessarily going to visit and participate o nthe forums.

Anyway that was my long winded opinion on why your truly awesome post isnt getting more attention

HeroOfNone

Taylor_MB wrote: »

Don't have the time to reply properly now (maybe never), but honestly no one has replied because most of these suggestions are way to complicated and will never be considered by zos and/or create more unbalance and/or utterly pointless.

Few very quick reactions:
1) Yes
2) We don't need to spread the population thinner
3) The major/minor buff system is amazing and shouldn't change, all the buffs and debuffs are effective. We already have (essentially) regen debuffs in the form of poisons and they are stupid OP as it is.
4) So like... potions?
5) Interesting idea, but with the amount of things that snare in this game it would not be wise to implement, especially when all it does is empower snipe spammers.
6) Alliance War > Support > Purge. What point in making another identical skill?
7) Keeps do grow stronger the longer they are held.
8) 90% AP should always be awarded for killing players, it's PvP.
9) Yes, but tone down siege dmg for the non-vet campaign, siege is already stupid in there.
10) The usurper suggestion has been floating around for a while. Defintely not multiple generals, we don't need every group you run into to have an overbuffed player.

Complicated? This is nothing compared to the length I normally take per idea. But I suppose I can use smaller words that drunken nords or senile Bretons can follow.

2. It could be a conversion of an existing server as well. But I think you'd see a resurgence of players with weekly changes this campaign could deliver.
3. Not saying all major/minor buffs/debuffs should be touched, as it would affect PVE, but specific abilities geared toward helping fights of attrition with heavy armor builds would go to players who properly stack debuffs.
4. Not really, potions you can't use while locked down and you can use more the longer you wait. A rune only lasts once per battle, it's gone and takes non battle time to remove. It may save you from an initial gank hit or a mistake, but you only get one (maybe 2, depending the balance you want to give it). It might seem to favor the victim, but realize if your rune breaks, you're at an a disadvantage.
5. There are several items like evasion, foward momentum, rapid maneuvers, clense, purge, stc. That can remove snares. In addition most of the snares are minor ones (10 to 30%). This change wouldn't increase all costs either, just any gap closes and maybe movement abilities (streak). I feel it would be interesting way to make ranged builds stronger without just raising the damage
6. Purge is expensive and magicka based. If we want to improve debuff & debuff builds without making them over powered we have to allow other classes the ability to remove them, otherwise you'll just die every time and complain.
7. They get stronger but you don't raise or grow a keep. This suggestion let's you invest a little time into a keep while shaping which way it goes, so you have a bit more investment into it. Not sure how the guild system would go though, I'd imagine they get first Crack at choosing buffs, but if no one does after a few moments, the alliance can have a majority vote determine it.
8. It's Open PVP & War, objectives should count toward something more than just farming spots to pump up the AP. Also I doubt that folks would earn more than 10% with this system anyway, given how hard taking some objectives can be. But if High AP rewards are the concern, additional rewards like siege weapons, set pieces, exp, & gold could also be given, If not just a bit more than what you get now.
9. Siege should always be king IMO, it's the great equalizer from lowbie to high player if either one is going to stand in red
10. I left it opened to multiple since I didn't want the top players constantly bickering over the spot until the keeps were captured. There will always be politics though.