What power level should the game be balanced around?

Atherakhia

I'm primarily a magicka player as I just can't quite get the knack of stam in PvP in this game. While I enjoy MagSorc, I don't find their playstyle overly engaging or rewarding. They basically have 2 precast abilities you put on a target, you spam a spammable until you get a free proc, and you hope some of the precasted stuff coincides with either a spammable crit or a proc crystal frag. This gives them a lot of free time to focus primaraily on their defensive abilities which are also similarly pretty straight forward. You cast a shield and maintain it the best you can and you have a movement skill that not only moves you a great distance away, but also does damage and stuns everyone and everything it comes into contact with regardless if they're blocking, dodging, etc. The MagTemplar is in a very similar boat. An amazing toolkit available that has literally everything a player could ever want and no real effort required to deliver impressive results.

Contrast this to something like the MagDK. A DOT class by design but a collection of DOTs that don't do any appreciable damage and lacking any tools to ensure DOTs remain in their targets or a way to punish opponents that remove them. It then also wasn't given any real defensive tools to stay in an engagement long enough for those DOTs to work because the few defensive skills they do have are easily countered and players are immune to their reapplication usually long enough to completely nullify any pressure the meager DOTs were capable of if not completely outmatch the DK and win the engagement. A very similar story can be found with both MagNecros and MagBlades.

So I'm left wondering... what direction should we hope PvP balance goes moving forward? As powerful as MagSorcs and MagPlars are, and for as long as they have reigned supreme with no real effort made to tone them down, I'm left assuming they are the baseline Mag classes are going to be balanced around. However, MagDKs, MagCros, and MagNBs have been left in a miserable state with no effort or attention to their issues for just as long. I'm legitimately curious what, if any, effort ZOS is going to make to entice the PvP community to continue to hang around while they 1.) can't provide them a stable arena to PvP in, and 2.) don't appear to have any real interest in making it balanced.

VaranisArano

No CP PVP is balanced around the quick TTK that ZOS wants in Battlegrounds.

CP PVP is balanced around the group v group combat that happens in Cyrodiil and the desire to prevent true 1vX like we had pre-Morrowind.

Specific classes will rise and fall in the meta rankings as ZOS creates horizontal progression for both PVE and PVP. So if your hope is for specific classes to get adjustments, its worth considering how that will play out in both areas. For example, I play a MagDK in PVP, but I never expect buffs simply because we're still excellent PVE tanks. ZOS would presumably like to avoid buffing us to be the best tanks ever, why would you play anything else. Any buffs will take that into account.

As to what ZOS intends to do to keep its PVP players?
I suspect they mean to coax us along with the usual slate of events, periodic new rewards, and horizontal progression while trying to fix performance.
Ultimately, it'll take fixing performance, but constant horizontal progression and periodic rewards actually drags out the "I love this! -> I'm bored" process better than actual balance does.

Major_Lag

Atherakhia wrote: »

So I'm left wondering... what direction should we hope PvP balance goes moving forward?

Fixing performance.
It's impossible and futile to try and "balance" a game where abilities don't even work half of the time unless you play at maximally off-peak times or PvDoor in empty campaigns.

eKsDee

Once performance gets fixed, CP and non-CP need to be combined into the one ecosystem, which is then brought to a middleground, as it's impossible to properly balance PvP when it functions in two distinct extremes. Axe one, bring the other up to a middleground.

exeeter702

Zos knew a lateral non vertical progression mmo was inevitably going to plateau in terms of player growth and in their shortsighted way, they introduced the champion point system without considering what it would cause in the long term. Fast forward and now you have this arbitrary devide between two wildly different play environments. They realize it now ofc and it's why it's taken so damn long for them to even mention their plans for the supposed restructured cp system they announced nearly 2 years ago.

It was one of the reasons I was so annoyed when I went to the greymoor announcement event in vegas. It was a glorified sales pitch for people to preorder the chapter instead of an interesting sitdown where rich and team could discuss the foundational future of the game. Not a single word on the plans to fix the CP system.

There are three groups of players here (roughly)

seasoned players who feel entitled to the cp points they "earned" and will riot if zos "takes them away". They attribute the cp aquired to property and power they want to hang on to if it means they can use that difference in power to influence an outcome more advantageously then one who has not earned a similar amount.

Seasoned players who view cp as a byproduct of simply playing the game and care more about game balance in general. Cp to them is simply a number, and it matters not how much they have compared to other players so long as they are at the highest level for end game content and balance revolves around player ability and not time spent generating statistical power creep.

And new players who have to deal with parsing the various activities they should and shouldnt do once they hit the lvl 50, cp160, and cp300 benchmarks, while zos keeps selling them dlc content that strictly adheres to those 3 level stages in different ways. These players enter the game and are faced with a fairly decent grind.

It's why zos has been so generous with xp scrolls and double xp events. They desperately want to push as much of the player population well into the 800+ cp range so whatever cp system overhaul they implement, will sting that much less.

Maulkin

VaranisArano wrote: »

No CP PVP is balanced around the quick TTK that ZOS wants in Battlegrounds.

CP PVP is balanced around the group v group combat that happens in Cyrodiil and the desire to prevent true 1vX like we had pre-Morrowind.

Agree to (vehemently) disagree on the above statements.

I have severe doubts that the state of BG TTK is anything else than an unintended side effect of them trying to balance CP Cyro as well as make some shiny new items and the chapter they come in desirable for purchase. And that's only because I 'm being kind to them. The Battle Spirit changes make no sense for no-CP and it can only be because the BS is shared across modes that they were also applied to no-CP. I cannot fathom that they looked at the BG TTK in Harrowstorm which was already low, and took a conscious decision to lower it further.

Furthermore, I don't believe (not any more at least) that it's actually possible to reasonably balance between CP and no-CP PvP. The divergence has become quite dramatic. CP still has pretty high surviveability as well as builds focused on max stats. No-CP has extremely low survivability and builds that are focused on proc sets. They make changes and introduce new sets to lower surviveability in CP Cyro, which is obviously not required in BGs in the first place and the net effect is arguably negative.

kaithuzar

I agree with the majority of the responses here.
The hope I have, with no evidence of it becoming real, is that a CP overhaul will happen, it will increase performance, it will do-away with NoCP, and it will be a push for balancing the game in a single direction under a single umbrella.
I typically fall within the group that are seasoned veterans who feel they have worked for their champion points and do not want them to be useless. However, I would be fine with ZOS making champion points only applicable in a PVE environment.
I’m not saying CP or NoCP pvp is better I’m saying they need to be unified and that method actually makes the most sense from a performance standpoint.

Amksed1991

Mmmmm about 9000.