MMO Balancing for PvP 101 - Common Sense to Better PvP

jediodyn_ESO

How to balance the PvP in ESO better? Its really just common sense. I've been holding onto this post for a while but with Wheeler taking over the combat team, I'm hoping that these insights might get some love from the Devs and the community. Here goes -

Problem: PvP and PvE need to be balanced separately. ESO overwhelmingly fails to do this.
Explanation: The core aspects of really fun PvE and really fun PvP are essentially opposite. In PvE, you want to feel like the hero - and you should feel ridiculously powerful (in PvE!)when you gear properly and fire off your moves right. Wading though hordes of enemies pulling off amazing damage explosions (single and multi-target) and feeling nearly immortal when gearing defensively are all parts of PvE. These same mechanics are essentially imbalanced and make for terrible PvP when given the same randomness, up-times, or chain-ability. In PvP the player wearing the perfect gear combined with the perfect skill mechanics to repeatedly massacre groups of others and/or survive indefinitely, or (commonly) both unless someone has slotted the obscure and niche' set of gear and abilities to counter that player (and pretty much only that player) is only fun for the one, while they many decide that PvP is not fun.
Suggested Solution: Implement changes so that many more skills, effects, CP, racial bonuses, and set bonuses react differently in PvP zones than they do in PvE zones. Why ZoS hasn't done more of this from the start blows my mind. It's such a basic and critical concept to having good competition in MMO games.

Problem:This game is a balancing nightmare because the Devs are essentially trying to balance 3 different games at the same time. PvE, No-Cp PvP Battlegrounds, CP-PvP Cyrodiil. Let's just pretend that they aren't even trying to create any balance for Non-Cp PvP Cyrodiil, Sub-50 Pvp, and CP-PvP dueling.
Explanation: Trying to balance all of these would require such a large team and so much time that it would be a waste of resources better applied with lower opportunity cost.
Suggested Solution: Pick one PvP system and stick to it! If possible, balance Cyrodiil and Battlegrounds separately, balance PvE separately (as stated above). Don't bother with trying to balance any of the other pvp modes unless your team (and most of the community) is happy with the way the game plays in Cyrodiil and Battlegrounds. Tweak both of these modes around a core compromise of CP/sets/skill design.

Problem: AE abilities should not be more effective than Single Target abilities. AE abilities are prevalent in the current game's meta. Many AE abilities are spammed for single target damage, because they are both more effective and easier to land than their single target counterparts.
Explanation: Why are the moves that require you to be in the right range while facing the right direction and actually keeping your cursor on your intended target so often so much less effective than spammable AE? There is a great place for AE abilities in competitive MMO games when they are implemented well. One of the core concepts to making AE damage abilities viable competitively is to make them better situationally - in particular, better for killing groups of people than single targets and when used hazards or traps for area control. For competitive healing (in PvP not PvE!), one healer should not be able to passively heal an entire team while spamming self heals. They should be forced to chose who's going to live or die, even if it occasionally means self sacrifice.
Suggested Solution: For most AE Damage abilities the abilities should increasingly scale in strength based off of the number of players hit. For Healing, the opposite should be true. This denies zergs and forces players to observer positioning. Keep in mind that there should be caps and floors, and mechanics (like forcing the caster to stay alive long enough to achieve the effect) to prevent Kamikaze tactics (unless intended) Nobody wants to see the game turn into one big massive mess of Vicious Death bombers. There are many possible ways of implementing this with actual imagination -like bouncing projectiles, arcing projectiles, abilities that gain strength as a they pass through opponents in a straight line, rebounding projectiles, rearming effects, etc.

Problem: How do you figure out what actually is OP, broken, or needs improvement when balancing PvP? What is actually a problem, what is a problem but most people haven't figured it out yet, and what seems like a problem but really isn't because players haven't all caught on to the counter play yet.
Explanation: The community is full of biased players (we ALL love our favorite classes and think THOSE guys are OP, but MY guys need buffs). Players also knee-jerk with complaints, and eventually it becomes such a mess that its hard to really figure out what really needs change and how.
Suggested Solution: Host official ZoS tournaments with superficial but exclusive rewards for the winners. If you really want to get reliable data on what is broken, and have something to point to when people complain about changes, host tournaments which give players a reason to pull out all the stops and do everything capable within the current game system to win.
As the "Combat Balance" Producer, plan 2 days to have a team based BG night, and Guild v Guild night where teams in BG's compete for winner and every guild who wants to fight in Cyroidiil gets a keep, team with the most wins in BG wins, Guild with the most keeps controlled in Cyrodiil after a certain amount of time wins. Make it a Twitch event. Make some money!

If your are a Dev reading this (which means that the magical unicorn didn't lie to me when it granted me that one wish) then I thank you for your time and consideration.

ChunkyCat

Soooo... on your last point, to find out what’s over performing, your suggestion is to:

-hold a tournament
-identify winners
-reward the winners with a Nerf to their abilities

Makes perfect sense.

jediodyn_ESO

ChunkyCat wrote: »

Soooo... on your last point, to find out what’s over performing, your suggestion is to:

-hold a tournament
-identify winners
-reward the winners with a Nerf to their abilities

Makes perfect sense.

Just because they win doesn't mean they need to be nerfed. However, this would give the devs some reliable, primary source, insight into what performs well and what doesn't.

Also, players could refer to these tournament builds and teams (the way they do in other competitive MMO games) when it comes to debating what is, and isn't over or under effective. Much more reliable than someone's carefully edited youtube video or subjective screenshots.

Joy_Division

People keep saying that AoE abilities are overpowered or stronger than their single target counter-parts, but the vast majority of AoE abilities in the game are lackluster and do not appear on my death recap. If you try to open world and load up your bars on all these supposed OP AoE abilities and expect to actually accomplish something without hiding in a zerg, you going to get tired of dying constantly and start doing what the better solo open world players do: fill your bar with single target abilities because those are the ones that are going to secure killing blows and weed out the "Xers" so you might have a chance to eventually beat them.

There are a grand total of two AoE abilities in this game that are legitimately threatening to a player who knows what they are doing: Sub Assault (which isn't hard to avoid) and steel tornado (which is only dangerous when at low health). Some AoEs are decent tanking or keeping yourself alive like Talons, Deep Breath, Sap, etc, but a 1vXer who throws themself at a group of enemies using those skills is going to be profoundly disappointed,

The same principle is also true for PvE. When VMA was actually difficult before the power creep, by far the best approach to beating the arena was to put high damaging or otherwise strong single target abilities and eliminate the enemies one by one.

And having AoEs scale with the number of players hit is probably a bad idea. Right now there is one skill that does that (proximity detonation) and who has been the prime beneficiary from such a mechanic? Ball groups, precisely the thing the skill was meant to weaken. Ball groups benefit from AoEs far more than ungrouped players because all they ever fight is large number of players, so it's the ideal damage for them and plus they have dedicated healers to free up bar space (which solo players can't do). Having AoEs scale with the number of players hit is likely going to have the opposite effect you want.

That being said, I do agree with you that it's pretty much hopeless to even try to balance CP and non CP. Trying to do so harms both systems and it is high time ZoS puts an end to such a charade.

Tetrafy

Aoe being OP yikes. Yeah ok.

jediodyn_ESO

Joy_Division wrote: »

.

And having AoEs scale with the number of players hit is probably a bad idea. Right now there is one skill that does that (proximity detonation) and who has been the prime beneficiary from such a mechanic? Ball groups, precisely the thing the skill was meant to weaken. Ball groups benefit from AoEs far more than ungrouped players because all they ever fight is large number of players, so it's the ideal damage for them and plus they have dedicated healers to free up bar space (which solo players can't do). Having AoEs scale with the number of players hit is likely going to have the opposite effect you want.

Tetrafy wrote: »

Aoe being OP yikes. Yeah ok.

The issue with AE doesn't really come into play until you are dealing with a group stacking multiple ae abilities. No aiming, no target specification, don't need to even be facing the right direction. Just roll in as a ball and anything that comes near dies. Heals? No problem, those AE stack too. This does not make for good competitive gameplay.

I'm not saying that AE shouldn't exist, I'm saying that it could be done so much better than a move which kills or heals everything in a big circle around the caster (or a big cone in some cases). ESO has devs from RIOT and WHO working on this system now, can't they dig up some of that creative magic that makes/made the moves in those games so unique and interesting and bring it our way?

Waffennacht

The reason AoEs are powerful right now is because their counter-play (get out of it) has been over all nerfed with the decrease to mobility

idk

I had stopped reading after the cp vs non-cp part of the OP as the solution was clearly not common sense. I understand we all think our oppinions are common sense because they make sense to us.

However, a great many players want to use they CP, seemingly most of them. While some clearly some prefer a non-cp campaign.

What is common sense is Zos consider the issues with balance between the wto styles of campaign while they do their revue of the CP system.

The is clearly the common sense approach since Zos is reviewing the CP system which means it is possible for a complete overhaul.

Edit: I understand you mean well and may have not known Zos was going to review CP on the whole.

ScruffyWhiskers

I try to stay away from AoE personally as I melt very quickly but despite the fact that spin to win is great it's not the same as the old age of impulse. The spin to winners are super fast now though. Stam sorcs especially. There is major evasion as a pretty good mitigator but nobody seems to want to run that.

heavier

disagree

coj901

It would be easy to just remove CP PvP from the game. That make balance much easier.

heavier

coj901 wrote: »

It would be easy to just remove CP PvP from the game. That make balance much easier.

it would be easy to remove cp from the game
it would not make balancing any easier for devs, actually it'd make it harder for the player to balance their builds.

Crixus8000

There are different kinds of powerful. Some things are completely balanced in a 1v1 situation but are very overpowered and offer little to no counterplay when you outnumber someone. A lot of these skills I really hate. For example, soul assault, snipe, pol ect.They are fine in 1v1 but when outnumbered they do way too much and the counterplay to the skills is often impossible.

And some things overperform more against certain classes than others ect. To get a balance zos would need to look at it from all angles, but they seem to do this very badly. They often add sets and make changes that buff groups and xv1 gameplay, making it hard for the solo/smaller groups to survive. For example nerfing all speed but keeping larger groups to have rapids and adding sets/abilities that work much better when you outnumber your enemy.

heavier

Crixus8000 wrote: »

There are different kinds of powerful. Some things are completely balanced in a 1v1 situation but are very overpowered and offer little to no counterplay when you outnumber someone. A lot of these skills I really hate. For example, soul assault, snipe, pol ect.They are fine in 1v1 but when outnumbered they do way too much and the counterplay to the skills is often impossible.

And some things overperform more against certain classes than others ect. To get a balance zos would need to look at it from all angles, but they seem to do this very badly. They often add sets and make changes that buff groups and xv1 gameplay, making it hard for the solo/smaller groups to survive. For example nerfing all speed but keeping larger groups to have rapids and adding sets/abilities that work much better when you outnumber your enemy.

I use soul assault in group PvP and I chose it because it is powerful. it stops people from cloaking to cancel the incoming damage which I consider to be a bad mechanic and it is decent DPS.
I agree that the highest tooltips for SA are sort of OP but mine is only around 52k. it caps at 80k+
magicka builds are too mobile in heavy armor so the tradeoff for having massive magicka dps just isn't there.

there are ground AoE ults with comparable DPS to my SA which allows the caster to stack debuffs and additional DPS while you're already taking huge damage.

I would be in favor of a tooltip ceiling where it gets hard to push above a certain point and then peaks.
I have viewed DPS as being similar to audio mastering. stuff first is put in overdrive and then it clips.

this is the direction MMO often heads after a few years of balances:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

unfortunately there aren't any other MMO that have balanced PvP at the moment so we can't point to it and tell the devs to get experience PLAYING a balanced game just to see what it is like...

>fueling of zerg intensifies

jediodyn_ESO

heavier wrote: »

coj901 wrote: »

It would be easy to just remove CP PvP from the game. That make balance much easier.

it would be easy to remove cp from the game
it would not make balancing any easier for devs, actually it'd make it harder for the player to balance their builds.

The “common sense” part is that if they can’t balance even just one PvP mode, then they shouldn’t be trying to balance 3 (or more). Many other MMO games have some sort of talent (CP) system for PvP, and the best ones have a separate page of them just for PvP. Surely there has to be some middle ground between “no cp” and 900 cp, and couldn’t that middle ground include CP options that are just for PvP? Nobody in a hardcore raid wants players to come in without respecing their PvP cp build, and no hardcore raider wants to spend the time, effort and good to enjoy a match or two/hour two of PvP before raiding.

Additionally, a separate PvP CP tree would allow ZoS to keep giving classes CP options to feel like awesome heroes in PvE without those same features getting messed with because of PvP balance. Seems like common sense to me.

ak_pvp

AoEs should be powerful tbh. They should be used to be able to fight groups bigger than yourself. But the entire combat system is such that a group can be used to supplement your own shortcomings way too easily so they are weaker when used by a single player and stronger when used in ball groups.

AoEs should be more targeted or "chain" spells. So you have to use your brain to actually land them. Healing should be more targeted and smart healing removed (in pvp) and you should have to build more roundly.

CompM4s

A large portion of the pvp community need to accept that they will sometimes lose. Every class is better balanced than it was before. Some classes do better against others but can still be killed with skill. If you run a weak build and attempt to facetank everybody in pvp, you will lose. Calling everyone meta chasers and crying for nerfs wont help. After the nerfs you will still lose.

katorga

Fix lag and performance and I bet you see use of AOE's fall.

Still, you only have so many skill slots. Multi-purpose skills will dominate.

Trancestor

Dont agree with anything you wrote and even if i did, ZOS would never do any of those suggestions, the real common sense to balancing pvp is to fix clearly over performing things that dont require much thought or skill to use but are extremely effective, like snipe and snares to list a few.

jediodyn_ESO

Trancestor wrote: »

Dont agree with anything you wrote and even if i did, ZOS would never do any of those suggestions, the real common sense to balancing pvp is to fix clearly over performing things that dont require much thought or skill to use but are extremely effective, like snipe and snares to list a few.

Oh really? why?

Because you see, based on your comment, you do actually agree with what I've posted.

Here, let me help you. You say snipe is clearly overperforming, but is it overperforming in PvE? Do you see it in almost every stam character's PVE damage rotation? No, because ranged stamina damage "bow style" isn't even a thing in any vet raiding. For stamina PvE you see almost the exact same set up with the same two abilities which mostly exist only to give added damage over time. It's "get out your blades and hack away or go home". Snipe doesn't even make it onto the bar, because in PvE, it's terrible and needs a huge buff. This of course, would only make the problem worse in PvP.

Your'e right, snipe does need to be fixed, but it needs to be fixed so that it (or whatever they replace it with) is actually fun and somewhat balanced in both PvP and PvE. Ranged stamina "bow damage characters" should be a thing, in both PvE and PvP, but it needs to get balanced separately and not exist in the gross, buggy, warningless, insta-kill gank mechanic that it exists in today.

Then again, you're probably just here being toxic and trolling. In which case I've already wasted too many words on you. Words which, you will probably never read, because for most trolls when they read too many words in a row they get sleepy.

Trancestor

The thing is im being realistic and trying to suggest things that ZOS can and are actually willing to do, they said they are not going to separate pve and pvp so what you're doing here is just talking to a wall, all your suggestions are too "complicated" for ZOS who go for straight forward balancing like nerfing or reworking abilities and nothing beyond that like changing whole game mechanics, and the thing is that it's actually possible to balance PvP without hurting PvE, the things over performing in PvP are absolutely worthless in PvE, here are the biggest examples:

Snipe - the biggest issues with it is that it applies major defile - useless in pve, it can stun from stealth - useless in pve, health desync - doesn't affect pve, remove all of that and snipe would be way less aids in pvp.

Snares - mostly useless in pve, incredibly OP in pvp.

Oblivion damage - absolutely useless in pve, incredibly OP in pvp.

Defile = absolutely useless in pve, incredibly OP in pvp.

bleeds - it's ignoring of resistances isn't useful in an optimized group in pve, really strong in pvp.

So yeah sorry for offending you but everything you're suggesting won't happen and what i'm suggesting is the actual common sense that ZOS has yet to figure out.

TheBonesXXX

Bring a bowblade and give them the special mission of killing AoE people you don't like.

And a negate sorc, they're neat too.

RMerlin

Joy_Division wrote: »

People keep saying that AoE abilities are overpowered or stronger than their single target counter-parts, but the vast majority of AoE abilities in the game are lackluster and do not appear on my death recap.

Quite surprising since you actually PvP in Vivec as I do. Quite often my death recap contains both Dawnbreaker and Steel Tornado. And that's even when fighting 1v1 or 1v2 - it's not a zerg thing.

Even myself, I've been trying to replace KB with Steel Tornado lately, as it saves one hotbar slot, and it still behaves like an execute.

RMerlin

AEs should scale with the number of targets, to ensure they are only used in situation where they do make sense. Steel Tornado for instance should do less damange against a single target. And it probably should also lose its execute ability, so people will revert to only using it when they do want to hit multiple targets.

RMerlin

coj901 wrote: »

It would be easy to just remove CP PvP from the game. That make balance much easier.

Then you lose a lot of potential customization to builds. Too cookie-cutter IMHO.

heavier

jediodyn_ESO wrote: »

Trancestor wrote: »

Dont agree with anything you wrote and even if i did, ZOS would never do any of those suggestions, the real common sense to balancing pvp is to fix clearly over performing things that dont require much thought or skill to use but are extremely effective, like snipe and snares to list a few.

Oh really? why?

Because you see, based on your comment, you do actually agree with what I've posted.

0-0

=_=

-_-

0_0

heavier

RMerlin wrote: »

coj901 wrote: »

It would be easy to just remove CP PvP from the game. That make balance much easier.

Then you lose a lot of potential customization to builds. Too cookie-cutter IMHO.

I considered what it'd be like to have multiple CP distributions
would be neat to have that and a slider between them so that you can balance between two metas with a kind of gradient...
I was initially put off by the idea by having 2 fixed slots for CP loadouts and stopped thinking about it, but hmmm I like the idea of being able to slide between them.