What is the logic behind some recent changes?

Fawn4287

We are in what is literally called the “tank meta” and for good reason.

Nearly every build runs an incredibly high health pool by old standards, with nearly everyone running 26-30k+ health pools making it much harder to burst people down and making a lot of burst combos longer and harder to finish. Combined with potentates sword and board (5%) combined with the cost reduction and increased damage blocked with a sword and board, with temporal guard on the backbar (minor protection 8%), every second stam build runs deep slash (minor maim 15%), nearly every magica build and alot of stam builds runs swift (10%), necro has easy access to major protection (30%) on top of the spirit guardian which is the same as night blade bow (10%). Then many builds run vampire getting up to 33% when low on health and 75% on mist form.


With all this flat % mitigation so easily accessible on top of the ridiculously high resistances many builds already run it shows just how easy it is to build incredibly tanky. On top of this already huge problem the amount and number of cross/off heals is ridiculous, templar circles, warden spores, rapid regen spamming, resto plus warden and templar healing ults just to name a few combined with cheesy proc healing sets like earthgore, bogdan and the recently nerfed troll king which still offer terrific group utility just make it so hard to kill grouped players. To top this off ZOS have decided to add cheesy 1 piece mythic set giving a 25% Non criting damage set and a set which makes you immune to snares like killing cleanse spamming zergs and ballgroups wasn’t hard enough already.


Yet with all of these which aren’t getting nerfed as of yet in the coming patch the combat team has decided that healing taken was the problem? Do the dev team really think the problem causing players and groups are really taking a hit with that? Just from seeing this I have immediately thought less healing = build tankier, as what else is there to do when your healing is insufficient? The painfully obvious fix is to nerf off/cross healing, nerf % mitigation, nerf sets like pariah, nerf mist form, nerf the raw damage mitigation of blocking (In PVP only of course), cut max group size to 12 and bring back aoe caps for healing. Nerfing player healing will literally have the opposite of the intended effect and make PvP more zergy and slower.

MincVinyl

In terms of pvp I would not say we are in a tank meta, it is not like it is impossible to ever kill the opposing target. I have always favored high flat burst damage however so it does not bother me to have to line up burst. I can see where newer players who just learned pvp through the previous dot/burn meta would have a harder time.

I will agree with you that the amount of % mit that zos has put in the game is troubling, necro is the worst case since they can have major prot up 40% of the time just off of the corpses for free. Near 80-100% with brpdw currently. On top of that they have the spirit along with other random %s tagged on to each ability that are unnecessary

Now it is worth noting that % modifiers are multiplicative so the more they stack the more they become inefficient, but as it stands it is still more efficient than getting armor. On top of that pen does not affect it so there is no need to worry about next patch stuhn's

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As for the healing I agree the blanket change was a terrible idea, zos probs just heard feng complain one too many times about healing being too strong. Imo for pvp healing should only affect group members if you are in a large party(4+members). Group sizes could be reduced to 12. Just doing that would solve the issue of too much healing and would most likely reduce the lag by a decent chunk.

Sneaky-Snurr

I had to retract my agree for OP when he blamed high resistance builds are the cause and should be nerfed. I have some agreement with OP but not in the regard of flat number Phys & Spell Resistance buff.

Respectfully, I disagree that a flat number armour bonus is the cause for tankiness.
Spell & Phys Resistance are not the main issue to the tank debacle we've seen this past month. Armour set like Pariah is very much balanced since it is not providing any other bonuses (damage/heal-wise) other than being tanky from an increase in Spell and Phys Resistances and poses a well thought-out risk-reward ratio.

However, I do agree the problem from this so-called 'tank meta is OP' arises from the insane amount of %-based damage mitigation buffs that is easily and readily available for dmg builds to utilise and make them seem tanky.

Thus, I've come out with a few suggestions to sort this issue out. Hopefully you could comment something in my thread in hopes that it can catch the devs' attention.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/521939/so-is-everyone-going-to-ignore-battle-spirit-changes-which-is-uncalled-for#latest