AoE damage and faction stacking

Irylia

Should aoe damage have some form of aoe scaling much like proxy so that it does less vs a single or few enemies and scales when more enemies are present.
Instead of applying this to the skill like proxy you could incorporate it into battle spirit to read aoe’s do
10/20/30/40%etc more damage for x player increase variables.

Campaigns have devolved into less strategy and tactics and more brute force outnumber and war of attrition to take objectives.

If aoe scaling was done this way you could alter ground siege damage and siege in general.
Persisting siege applies debuffs but doesn’t damage.
Ballista do the damage to players.

There needs to be a better way to combat stacks of players and I mean actual stacks where you have 40-60 chasing and all focusing on one location of the map rather than spreading out and hitting multiple targets.
The game allows players to take the easy road when they aren’t as mechanically sound by stacking numbers. But that should be the only advantage they get, numbersz but at the risk of taking more damage because they have the aoe healing and various ultimates to counter or alleviate damage.

Thoughts

Iskiab

Things are fine as is.

Dunning_Kruger

But what about the 24 man group small scalers fighting 1v2 .

Irylia

Dunning_Kruger wrote: »

But what about the 24 man group small scalers fighting 1v2 .

There are a lot of those players huh. Guess they should use the rocks and trees as los instead of players.

wheem_ESO

At the very least, certain abilities would need to be exempt from such a rule. If a Warden's Shalks were to do reduced damage when hitting only 1 target, as well as being blockable (as they are on the PTS), Magicka Warden's already mediocre offense would be diminished even further.

The same would hold true for the upcoming Magicka Necromancer, who will probably be stuck relying on their Blastbones just as hard as Magicka Warden does on the Shalks.

Iskiab

About all this faction stacking discussion. I’m relatively new to the game and started 9 months ago. When I started AD was constantly outnumbered and dominated.

I can’t help but think all these faction stacking complaints are due to a stronger AD presence so they can fight back.

If half of the people now complaining about faction stacking really believed it’s an issue, why did you continue to play on the heavily populated faction? Why is it only an issue now when AD can finally field enough people to fill the entire 200 people and be pop locked? Seems disingenuous.

If anything faction stacking is less of an issue now then it’s ever been where I play in the 30 day no-CP campaign because all sides are pop locked in prime time.

Janoy

@Irylia

I think that’s a cool idea, I just wonder how the servers would handle all of those additional calculations, especially in Vivec.

Irylia

Iskiab wrote: »

About all this faction stacking discussion. I’m relatively new to the game and started 9 months ago. When I started AD was constantly outnumbered and dominated.

I can’t help but think all these faction stacking complaints are due to a stronger AD presence so they can fight back.

If half of the people now complaining about faction stacking really believed it’s an issue, why did you continue to play on the heavily populated faction? Why is it only an issue now when AD can finally field enough people to fill the entire 200 people and be pop locked? Seems disingenuous.

If anything faction stacking is less of an issue now then it’s ever been where I play in the 30 day no-CP campaign because all sides are pop locked in prime time.

Faction stacking as in your entire population travels everywhere together
Not one faction is pop and the others 1

Irylia

wheem_ESO wrote: »

At the very least, certain abilities would need to be exempt from such a rule. If a Warden's Shalks were to do reduced damage when hitting only 1 target, as well as being blockable (as they are on the PTS), Magicka Warden's already mediocre offense would be diminished even further.

The same would hold true for the upcoming Magicka Necromancer, who will probably be stuck relying on their Blastbones just as hard as Magicka Warden does on the Shalks.

I’m meaning more ground/stationary/mobile effects or skills like steel tornado where they scale in execute anyways.
That way steel nado is doing its base + execute to one person

Destro/sleet/nova/standard/liquid lightning/blockade/

Could either have those skills continue doing the base damage that they currently do and then scale from there.
Or focus on ults just scaling like proxy

But good point

HowlKimchi

Good concept.

It's gonna be hard to consider which skills would be affected by this imo. A problem would be how "aoe" skills which have small aoe's would be affected by this. Or a dawnbreaker or shalk which is often used on single targets. It would wreck the balance of those skills, and going through each and every aoe skill to adjust it would be painful and time consuming.

It would be good if this was incorporated on an item set instead of battle spirit. The 5th piece could be something like "scale your aoe's damage to players by 70%-150% depending on the number of players hit." It should be easy to obtain, probably similar to impregnable, available in light medium or heavy. This way the players themselves have the choice to slot the armor set, and slot their skills accordingly.

I would imagine that ball groups would be using this set a lot, but they will be giving up another 5 pc set for it, so the 2-3-4 piece of this set should be crap for ball groups (probably health recovery or something *** for a group who already has a dedicated healer) so it's an opportunity cost kind of thing.

DeadlyRecluse

I think putting this style of scaling on some skills might be cool, but I don't think it needs to be a core part of every AOE.

ZOS seems to be willing to mess around with different activation conditions (new Whip, for instance), so I think you could get more creative than just a %damage per target hit, too.

Ideas (undeveloped, off the top of my head:

If Inhale hits 6 or more players, the secondary hit gets an extra damage buff.
If a surge/hurricane tick hits 6 or more players, it gives a spell/weapon damage buff to the user.
Solar Barrage increases damage by 5% per tick, per player hit (resetting to 0% buff if it ticks without hitting anyone).

Stuff like that could be fun and actually require building around, rather than a default AOE mechanic.