Differentiating Battle Spirit

Somnilux

I've been playing a long time but relatively new to the forums (due to misplacing my original invite link), but I'm wondering if the idea of differentiating the battle spirit mechanic between Arena and Cyrodiil/Imperial City has been considered or addressed by the developers. We're seeing ever increasing negative impacts of decisions made mechanically that are designed around battlegrounds that negatively impact cyrodiil, and I suspect there may be situations in reverse as well, since the needs, style and gameplay are very different. Arena combat can and should be faster, as there is a lot more moment to moment decision making that can be predicted as the environment is controlled much more precisely. The maximum number of targets of effects can be better sorted, and it can be much easier to evaluate when a particular skill or class is considered unbalanced in this enviroment. At the same time however, it means that much of the games focus on pvp gameplay design gets balanced around that set environment. Players are likely to be only so far away, or have predictable obstacles between them, movement speeds and latency are much more predictable, and therefore for example we have ended up with the current state of snares, immobilizations and movement buffs, where a major expedition buffed player moves less than 100% speed from a 'minor' snare automatically applied by a simple attack. Its more designed because the goal is always one player versus another, or a situation where getting back to a particular target or goal is short.

I feel arena health pools, defenses, movement and general speed of play are in a health/fun state, or as close to one as a game as complex as ESO is mechanically can be. I don't think adjustments to battle spirit here would be warranted.

However, I do feel cyrodiil is definitely in need of being slowed down significantly. Health pools are too small, healing is too high, burst damage is often the only valuable damage, and movement restricting effects are compounded in effect and importance. Because of the huge latency and performance issues in cyrodiil that may not ever be solved to the liking of most players, and I think it would be wise of the devs to consider slowing things down a bit here. It would make large scale combat more strategic and accessible, and less frustrating and intense for newer players. I think a lot of this can be fixed through changing the buff you get in cyrodiil versus the arena, and I definitely think this is something that could be easily done on the back end without as much investment, and more easily modified and balanced for everyone's liking.

My personal thoughts are that the benefits to slowing down gameplay by increasing health pools significantly, reducing healing further, and reducing burst damage would all help to reach these goals and I want to know what people would think if it happened beyond my scope, and how this might impact small groups from people outside my own experience running with organized guild group play and small group play in cyrodiil.

Battle Spirit for Cyrodiil modified to the following:

All players gain 25% critical damage reduction, this means a baseline of around 1500ish impen. The goal of this would be to reduce the dependance on impenetrable gear as a trait and give more flexibility to use a wider degree of traits in pvp situations. It would slow down burst damage baseline, make the whole pvp thing have less of a steep learning curve, without nerfing impen directly which is relatively balanced as is for the amount of actual damage it reduces and hurting the arena gameplay balance.

Increase Health by 20000. This number would put people's health well outside the range of any individual attack. Even a player with no buffs, or food is going to be sitting at 35k health, and take a few seconds to take down. It also wouldn't push players who stack health up to around 30k, into a territory that are impossible to kill at 50k health. The side effect to this is I see health glyphs and bonuses becoming less valuable, I think overall this would be a positive shift. I think the main people who would find this change something to be unhappy about would be gankers, but I'm not sure how many people actually like this type of gameplay existing and how valuable it is to the overall play.

Reduce Damage by 50% (unchanged)

Reduce Healing by 75% (a further havling of heals). The reason the current meta overvalues burst skills in general and CCs over resource management is because of this imbalance and speed of gameplay. A single crit heal can heal for 18k. A single harmony buffed nova can crit for 18k. Currently acceptable health pools for cyrodiil are 25-30k, which means a single global cooldown can bring a player up 70% of their life, or reduce an infinite amount of targets by 70% of their health.

Reduce all snares by 50% effectiveness (not duration). This would allow a major expedition to counter a minor snare, and a major snare would still keep someone from moving as fast. This wouldn't reduce the effects, impact bgs. The only thing I can foresee this being an issue for is with 1vxing.

There's a lot going on in this game, and I think these shifts while large on paper, would actually be a very practical way of getting cyrodiil to a more fun and healthy state. I just want to see what other people think about this kind of approach.

Karm1cOne

I like the thought process of these, but I would like to see any sweeping changes done in small increments. This would allow both Zos and players to evaluate and adapt. I am a big fan of smaller, more frequent changes, so as to allow easier equilibrium to be reached.

Iskiab

I don’t think reducing healing to 75% is a good idea. There’s nothing wrong with the healing values as is in cyrodiil. If you reduce healing it will become more like battlegrounds where people spec half tank and expect there not to be a healer.

Adding more to the health pool is a good idea though. Although if I got a baseline 1500 crit resist I might keep impen anyways.

The only issue I see right now is aoe damage and healing is too high, I don’t know how you’d fix that.

TBois

I do like the overall idea and reasoning behind this, but I personally wouldn't advocate for so many drastic changes all at once. Like tweak health see how it goes, then tweak crit resist and see how it goes, and so on. This does seem like a really easy way to adjust the difference of guards and siege damage in CP and noCP. I hope the spaghetti code aligns with how easy it seems.

Somnilux

A few further things: the best part of the campaign system is it would hopefully be pretty easy to run test campaigns with the modified battle spirit (so long as the backend code allows for the different battle spirits based on location or instance. That's really the key.

As for advocating large changes, I think without total evaluation of the end goal, incremental tweaks would be a big issue. However things could be stepped up so long as healing is reduced at the same time crit resistance and health are buffed.

I'm definitely not saying my numbers are exactly right or that every one of the suggestions is exactly what is needed, that is my instinct though on a general balance that would properly slow combat down without breaking the gameplay as it currently is. Tweaking just one of them will weigh the game down so that people become unkillable or just die super easily.

I take it though the core idea or differentiated battle spirit is not an idea that has been bounced around before? What do people think about the concept of tweaking battle spirit for each type of pvp?

Somnilux

Iskiab wrote: »

There’s nothing wrong with the healing values as is in cyrodiil.

The only issue I see right now is aoe [] healing is too high, I don’t know how you’d fix that.

Just gonna say that is some cognitive dissonance that.

^_^

I disagree. I main a healer and I feel healing is too strong as it currently stands. Its possible that they might need to tweak vigor or some specific class healing or give some additional healing options to non healers. Or if specifically AOE healing was lets way the issue then they could put a separate additional aoe healing reduction debuff on battle spirit. The idea really is to push for more game balance by addressing the content separately more rather than trying to just always tweak the base abilities or gear when you are trying to balance very different pve and bg style gameplay along with cyrodiil.