how do they do it (stupid ball group tricks)

Theignson

A newer ball group is running around PC NA destroying people with grave robber synergy. They leave piles of bodies everywhere. Of course, they are also tanky. They run about 8 people.

When I've gotten hit, it is two Grave robber synergies hitting for 14-17k each -- instant death

I know they must have 3x harmony, but that is only 100% increase, right?

My necro's grave robber synergy is nowhere near 9k without harmony.

Plus I am getting hit for 17k with a tanky build and good resists.

Seems to me this is "Colossus ball" necrto group part two.

Hats off to whoever designed this ball group

NBrookus

Probably 3 harmony and Balorgh and 2 damage sets. With group buffs, DDs can run more extreme builds than they can solo. I've been Grave Robber'ed for 21k -- I assume I had my buffs down.

Taleof2Cities

Yeah, that AD group is pretty decent.

Unless you’re in an organized group, you just need to keep your distance to avoid getting farmed.

Ball groups, especially small ones, hate CC abilities. So, good counters are bombard spam, time stop, and other snare abilities.

DUTCH_REAPER

The group I saw that does that is a DC group. They throw out the negate and 2 necros wearing VD hit colossas. They have really good heals. Every time I have tried bombing them I have failed. Cuz I suck. I’m worthless. I’m going to go uninstall the game now. Goodbye.


...naaaah. Are you kidding. I’m a glutton for pain and will continue to bomb attempt every damn group I see.

TequilaFire

How they do it:

1. Organization with good leader and tactics.
2. Group composition and synergies.
3. Slotting abilities that benefit the group versus solo.

I would hardly call it stupid.

Salix_alba

the alliance doesn't matter all 3 alliances zerg. What I want to know is how can they move so fluidly when everything in their wake and that they approach gets frozen by lag so bad no-one can fight back you know the zerg is coming because of it, its like seeing the water recede before a tidal wave and you are about to get #$%^'ed you cant run you cant fight and somehow they are unphazed something is clearly unbalanced there.

I have jumped into ball groups just to test this and its insane moving with them the lag went away as soon as I let them wander off the lag returned.

Iskiab

TequilaFire wrote: »

How they do it:

1. Organization with good leader and tactics.
2. Group composition and synergies.
3. Slotting abilities that benefit the group versus solo.

I would hardly call it stupid.

Basicly this, it’s the pve equivalent of a trial group fighting against people in solo specs.

There are decent ball groups on all factions, and they can be beat. It just takes coordination and a different philosophy then most solo or small scalers have.

If you’ve never tried it I’d give it a go, it’s fun. It doesn’t have to be a Necro heavy group either, it’s just right now lag is making stam uncompetitive because a lot of stam abilities don’t work in lag.

I’d say more but some of these fights are tight! Drac is probably the best out there (EP), I sorta feel dumb for talking up cleanse so much and should have kept my mouth shut about some good abilities.. I’d like to help, but not so much that we lose.

P.S - if you’re getting hit with a 17k grave robber a nova will one shot you.

JumpmanLane

There’s tricks to fighting ball Zergs.

1. Kite and kite some more. See. Those dummies gotta follow crown. So unless they ALL hate you and focus you. You can kite them. Because the better they are, the more they move as one. The less likely you’ll get focused.
2. KILL THE SQUIRRELS. Theres always some damage dealing dummy that forgets he’s wrecking people because he’s zerging. OR he’ll see YOU and because he hates you, he'll squirrel off and try to kill you. DROP THAT FOOL! And any other squirrel that don’t stack on crown right.

3. Don’t chase. If they back off you back off. Don’t follow them into towers or up their favorite hill. Lure them into the open. Spread them out.

I cut my teeth fighting TKG back in the day. If you really want to be evil slot resource poisons and cowardice poisons and watch them fools melt.

NBrookus

it’s the pve equivalent of a trial group fighting against people in solo specs.

Very well put.

Salix_alba wrote: »

What I want to know is how can they move so fluidly when everything in their wake and that they approach gets frozen by lag so bad no-one can fight back you know the zerg is coming because of it, its like seeing the water recede before a tidal wave and you are about to get #$%^'ed you cant run you cant fight and somehow they are unphazed something is clearly unbalanced there.

It only seems like it. They are fighting the lag too. If anything it's worse when you are outnumbered. There's a lot of purge spam and root immunity skills to even move. For my group build, I constantly waffle back and forth if I can afford to put Race Against Time on my back bar so I can have ONE single target damage skill on my front bar to finish targets. Bar swapping twice is pretty dicey in lag.

But not all groups are ball groups, and on PC NA the current ball groups are mostly pretty small. A guild stacking multiple raids -- which is usually when you feel that lag wave precede the horde -- usually is anything but highly coordinated. Same for faction stacks following a streamer, or a hammer, or a scroll, or whatever.

Iskiab

NBrookus wrote: »

it’s the pve equivalent of a trial group fighting against people in solo specs.

Very well put.

Salix_alba wrote: »

What I want to know is how can they move so fluidly when everything in their wake and that they approach gets frozen by lag so bad no-one can fight back you know the zerg is coming because of it, its like seeing the water recede before a tidal wave and you are about to get #$%^'ed you cant run you cant fight and somehow they are unphazed something is clearly unbalanced there.

It only seems like it. They are fighting the lag too. If anything it's worse when you are outnumbered. There's a lot of purge spam and root immunity skills to even move. For my group build, I constantly waffle back and forth if I can afford to put Race Against Time on my back bar so I can have ONE single target damage skill on my front bar to finish targets. Bar swapping twice is pretty dicey in lag.

But not all groups are ball groups, and on PC NA the current ball groups are mostly pretty small. A guild stacking multiple raids -- which is usually when you feel that lag wave precede the horde -- usually is anything but highly coordinated. Same for faction stacks following a streamer, or a hammer, or a scroll, or whatever.

I’ve noticed that too. It’s opponents that cause lag moreso then anything else. It’s also tied to the memory leak, the longer you play the worse it gets, until eventually aoe abilities take 3+ button presses to fire. When there’s a 100+ EP Zerg going and they charge, it’s like a free stun for them and free crashes.

About RAT, definitely worth it. I just started adding it about a month ago and found it’s great. Main thing that it helps with is repositioning and sometimes getting ahead of a group. Odd as it sounds, both the safest spot and most effective spot is by the ball group’s healers.

Kadoin

Well now you know better. You ain't about to use a tanky ball group setup and ignore all damage in the game.

Remember, necro is weak and needs a buff...!

NBrookus

Iskiab wrote: »

About RAT, definitely worth it. I just started adding it about a month ago and found it’s great. Main thing that it helps with is repositioning and sometimes getting ahead of a group. Odd as it sounds, both the safest spot and most effective spot is by the ball group’s healers.

RaT is essential. It's whether I must have it on my front bar that is the lag dilemma.

Theignson

"P.S - if you’re getting hit with a 17k grave robber a nova will one shot you."

Nah, nothing one shots me, that is what is strange. I run about 25k resists (more if BS goes off) and 3100 crit resists on my stam warden who is pretty hard to kill usually. That is why I'm amazed by these huge synergies.

"I would hardly call it stupid."

Sorry, it was a play of words on "stupid pet tricks" which are also not really stupid but skillful.

"What I want to know is how can they move so fluidly when everything in their wake and that they approach gets frozen by lag so bad no-one can fight back you know the zerg is coming because of it, its like seeing the water recede before a tidal wave and you are about to get #$%^'ed you cant run you cant fight and somehow they are unphazed something is clearly unbalanced there."

Yes to this. Somehow I get caught by them, if I'm positioned in front of their ball, 15m or more away stunned/rooted and unable to move before they blast with their synergies.
The key is never be in front of them but to the sides.

"Ball groups, especially small ones, hate CC abilities. So, good counters are bombard spam, time stop, and other snare abilities."

More than 50% of time I get "target is immune" when I try to cc ball groups. But yeah, I try to approach from the side, pick off stragglers.

technohic

NBrookus wrote: »

it’s the pve equivalent of a trial group fighting against people in solo specs.

Very well put.

Salix_alba wrote: »

What I want to know is how can they move so fluidly when everything in their wake and that they approach gets frozen by lag so bad no-one can fight back you know the zerg is coming because of it, its like seeing the water recede before a tidal wave and you are about to get #$%^'ed you cant run you cant fight and somehow they are unphazed something is clearly unbalanced there.

It only seems like it. They are fighting the lag too. If anything it's worse when you are outnumbered. There's a lot of purge spam and root immunity skills to even move. For my group build, I constantly waffle back and forth if I can afford to put Race Against Time on my back bar so I can have ONE single target damage skill on my front bar to finish targets. Bar swapping twice is pretty dicey in lag.

But not all groups are ball groups, and on PC NA the current ball groups are mostly pretty small. A guild stacking multiple raids -- which is usually when you feel that lag wave precede the horde -- usually is anything but highly coordinated. Same for faction stacks following a streamer, or a hammer, or a scroll, or whatever.

I dunno. Seems like the ball groups got bigger over the past year or so. Like I think Drac used to run 12-16 but now I see some that look like a full raid balled up

Lag effects everyone, you are just more likely to get hit with something either the more people firing stuff off. Heals and damage alike. The struggle with ball groups is IMO, other MMOs or games that have dedicated healers or all out damage dealers in a group, you counter by focusing heals then damage, then tanks last. With ESO crappy targeting, any focused target can be absorbed into the LOS of the ball.

Iskiab

technohic wrote: »

NBrookus wrote: »

it’s the pve equivalent of a trial group fighting against people in solo specs.

Very well put.

Salix_alba wrote: »

What I want to know is how can they move so fluidly when everything in their wake and that they approach gets frozen by lag so bad no-one can fight back you know the zerg is coming because of it, its like seeing the water recede before a tidal wave and you are about to get #$%^'ed you cant run you cant fight and somehow they are unphazed something is clearly unbalanced there.

It only seems like it. They are fighting the lag too. If anything it's worse when you are outnumbered. There's a lot of purge spam and root immunity skills to even move. For my group build, I constantly waffle back and forth if I can afford to put Race Against Time on my back bar so I can have ONE single target damage skill on my front bar to finish targets. Bar swapping twice is pretty dicey in lag.

But not all groups are ball groups, and on PC NA the current ball groups are mostly pretty small. A guild stacking multiple raids -- which is usually when you feel that lag wave precede the horde -- usually is anything but highly coordinated. Same for faction stacks following a streamer, or a hammer, or a scroll, or whatever.

I dunno. Seems like the ball groups got bigger over the past year or so. Like I think Drac used to run 12-16 but now I see some that look like a full raid balled up

Lag effects everyone, you are just more likely to get hit with something either the more people firing stuff off. Heals and damage alike. The struggle with ball groups is IMO, other MMOs or games that have dedicated healers or all out damage dealers in a group, you counter by focusing heals then damage, then tanks last. With ESO crappy targeting, any focused target can be absorbed into the LOS of the ball.

Well, one trick or thing ball groups typically use is they don’t use a lot of targeted abilities. I’ve noticed that a lot of abilities that require a target just stop working with lag: onslaught, etc.,, I mean, you can restart your client every hour to make them work, but who wants to do that? Instead what’s used are prox det and destro ults that move with you.

As for lag and moving as a group quickly: immovability pots, race against time, and cleanse.

Theignson wrote: »

"P.S - if you’re getting hit with a 17k grave robber a nova will one shot you."

Nah, nothing one shots me, that is what is strange. I run about 25k resists (more if BS goes off) and 3100 crit resists on my stam warden who is pretty hard to kill usually. That is why I'm amazed by these huge synergies.

"I would hardly call it stupid."

Sorry, it was a play of words on "stupid pet tricks" which are also not really stupid but skillful.

"What I want to know is how can they move so fluidly when everything in their wake and that they approach gets frozen by lag so bad no-one can fight back you know the zerg is coming because of it, its like seeing the water recede before a tidal wave and you are about to get #$%^'ed you cant run you cant fight and somehow they are unphazed something is clearly unbalanced there."

Yes to this. Somehow I get caught by them, if I'm positioned in front of their ball, 15m or more away stunned/rooted and unable to move before they blast with their synergies.
The key is never be in front of them but to the sides.

"Ball groups, especially small ones, hate CC abilities. So, good counters are bombard spam, time stop, and other snare abilities."

More than 50% of time I get "target is immune" when I try to cc ball groups. But yeah, I try to approach from the side, pick off stragglers.

You’re doing it right. Some tips on fighting them:
- go on the sides
- Don’t stack with small groups on your faction
- drop all dots and focus on burst
- dodge to the sides and not back, so the equivalent of circle straffing them

The small groups who weigh in on big battles make a big difference and help a lot. With that being said, there are some players who weaken their faction, I’ve noticed this most on AD and EP. They’ll be close to the organized group to Siphon heals, and usually end up being the VD proc that takes the group down. A couple times Drac went down recently I’m pretty sure they’d have survived without people ‘helping’ them.

NBrookus

On the lag wave effect, my belief is that it's server latency and the group is actually much closer than they appear. It's like when you get time stopped or remote totem'd and you are well outside the red zone. Your position on screen is not where the server thinks you are.

technohic wrote: »

I dunno. Seems like the ball groups got bigger over the past year or so. Like I think Drac used to run 12-16 but now I see some that look like a full raid balled up

Drac is still running 10-16. Tyr, Vanguard, QB, Cutest Boys are all in the 12-16 range. Of course these guilds all only officially run 2-3 nights a week and that doesn't mean their members might not be zerg surfing at other times.

The only large groups (raid size or more) that I can think of now on PC NA Kaal are Chapterhouse (zone pug), GAO (zone pug) and Homicide. And they aren't ball groups.

Iskiab wrote: »

You’re doing it right. Some tips on fighting them:
- go on the sides
- Don’t stack with small groups on your faction
- drop all dots and focus on burst
- dodge to the sides and not back, so the equivalent of circle straffing them

Also:
- don't let yourself get funneled into a choke point or around a corner
- tab target the raid lead or one of the bombers so you can see where they are moving

Qbiken

A bit off topic but I think it woud be alot healthier to cap group size in pvp to 12 instead of the current 24. (Organized guilds will manage to coordinate multiple 12 man if desired)

TequilaFire

But you need the extra 12 to make up for the 12 that blue screened. lmao

Iskiab

TequilaFire wrote: »

But you need the extra 12 to make up for the 12 that blue screened. lmao

Agreed!

Capping group size at 12 would help smaller groups if ZoS wants to go in that direction. I don’t know what ZoS wants to do, there are up and down sides.

The effect would be more of an advantage for smaller groups because group buffs wouldn’t be able to hit as many people. A big negative would be it would make pvp more elitist.

For example, I run in homicide and we have a lot of low CP players. They’re typically still working on their sets and can’t contribute much outside crafted sets. We don’t care because the player > the gear, and people will eventually gear up, but really it’s only the CP 810+ players who have the luxury of switching up sets based on today’s comp. We’re a lot more casual then other pvp guilds. Things balance out for us because rolling as 24 fighting groups of 12-18 has some advantages and evens out some other guilds being better on average.

NBrookus

Qbiken wrote: »

A bit off topic but I think it woud be alot healthier to cap group size in pvp to 12 instead of the current 24. (Organized guilds will manage to coordinate multiple 12 man if desired)

Guilds and pug groups stack multiple 24 man groups already. At that size, you just follow the blob. Instead, a cap at 12 would hurt the mid-sized groups more. And unfortunately there are no small or mid scale objectives, so that 12 man is still going to have to fight 60 that come to <insert name of insignificant outpost or resource> where an extra negate on player #13 could make the difference.

Theignson

"A couple times Drac went down recently I’m pretty sure they’d have survived without people ‘helping’ them."

Yes, I've learned to stay clear from Drac when they are on-- it is fatal to be near them since they are usually outnumbered 4:1 , any solo pug is going to get massacred!

Thanks all for the comments.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

technohic wrote: »

I dunno. Seems like the ball groups got bigger over the past year or so. Like I think Drac used to run 12-16 but now I see some that look like a full raid balled up

We actually reduced the size of our raid to focus on 12m gameplay since Elsweyr / Scalebreaker. 16 just feels too much with the current populations and fights available. So depending on the night we're likely between 10-14.

technohic

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

technohic wrote: »

I dunno. Seems like the ball groups got bigger over the past year or so. Like I think Drac used to run 12-16 but now I see some that look like a full raid balled up

We actually reduced the size of our raid to focus on 12m gameplay since Elsweyr / Scalebreaker. 16 just feels too much with the current populations and fights available. So depending on the night we're likely between 10-14.

Yeah I dont know that I've seen you guys lately so I'll take your word for it. There are a few "wannabe " groups though and they sure look like full raids. Of course; I think I see them run with faction stacks where when I've seen you guys, its usually by yourself.

I give Drac more respect because I've seen you break away to take on similar groups.

Iskiab

technohic wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

technohic wrote: »

I dunno. Seems like the ball groups got bigger over the past year or so. Like I think Drac used to run 12-16 but now I see some that look like a full raid balled up

We actually reduced the size of our raid to focus on 12m gameplay since Elsweyr / Scalebreaker. 16 just feels too much with the current populations and fights available. So depending on the night we're likely between 10-14.

Yeah I dont know that I've seen you guys lately so I'll take your word for it. There are a few "wannabe " groups though and they sure look like full raids. Of course; I think I see them run with faction stacks where when I've seen you guys, its usually by yourself.

I give Drac more respect because I've seen you break away to take on similar groups.

Yea, Drac is the best on PC-NA. We call the other guilds ‘mini-drac’, ‘baby-drac’, and other names like that who’re trying to emulate them.