Ball Groups Redux

Marneman

Ceaveat: I know there was that flurry of tests that ZoS was doing on the live servers, and I must confess that I haven't had the time yet to go off and research what the results were, so apologies if this has already been discussed or tried.

Tonight there were like 50-60 of us against a ball group in cyro. It was maddening. The lag was bad enough, but the inability for us to even compete against them was insane. It's like a pseudo Volendrung. There just doesn't seem to be any sort of natural "counter" to them.

At any rate, I had a few ideas and thought I would share them, FWIW.

Limit on Healer Slots?

I know there was quite a bit of discussion about group healing and the like in cyro. Has a limit of healer "slots" in the group been suggested or tested? Sort of like in Undaunted dungeons, when you queue up. I don't know how many healers a "typical" ball group would have, but I wonder what the impact would be if there were only 1, or 2, or whatever. Granted, in the Undaunted dungeon queue, you can queue up as a DPS or tank, and actually be a healer, so I'm not sure how that would work in Cyro, but it was just something that popped into my head.

Same-Group Aoe Heal Cooldowns?

This may have been tried already as well ( know there were some tests on cooldowns, just don't what they were - some at least were at the player level, not group level, I think), but another twist might be to have a "same group cooldown" for AoE group heals. e.g. if someone in the group has recently cast an AoE group heal, no one else in the group can cast it until it cools down. Dunno.

Same-Group Damage Bonus

Another notion might be to give siege weapons or even certain skills/abilities a bonus if they hit a certain percentage of the members of the same group at once. We were sitting there slamming this ball group with several meatbag catapults and it was like a flea bite to them lol. The thought here being that it wouldn't prevent people from forming ball groups if they wanted to, but it would allow some sort of "counter" to them, other than just waiting for them to make some mistake in their rotations, movement, etc. (I've no idea how they work really, as I've never been in a ball group).

At any rate, I hope some sort of balance can be found that won't discourage grouping altogether. This ball group rampage fest every night really takes a great deal of fun out of Cyro, at least for me.

Off to try and find any sort of posts about the testing and what is to come, if anything.

renne

Marneman wrote: »

Limit on Healer Slots?

I know there was quite a bit of discussion about group healing and the like in cyro. Has a limit of healer "slots" in the group been suggested or tested? Sort of like in Undaunted dungeons, when you queue up. I don't know how many healers a "typical" ball group would have, but I wonder what the impact would be if there were only 1, or 2, or whatever. Granted, in the Undaunted dungeon queue, you can queue up as a DPS or tank, and actually be a healer, so I'm not sure how that would work in Cyro, but it was just something that popped into my head.

[snip]

Even if they make genuine healer builds entirely obsolete in Cyro, not just eliminating solo healers, literally anyone in a ballgroup no matter their build can slot a heal that targets multiple people and purge, because these are skills available to everyone. And I'm pretty sure that's what people are actually complaining about when they complain about "healers" in Cyro - the cross-heals and purge ball group spam that EVERYONE has access to. It's not the people with actual healer builds.

If you're still getting this problem now then all it's really done is prove that the solo/ungrouped healers that ZoS has already driven from Cyro aren't even a part of the problem (which I guess they already confessed they knew weren't because the changes they made weren't even about reducing the server calculations, but were ~bEhAvIoRaL cHaNGeS~).

[Edited to remove Baiting]

Mr_Nobody

Or just do the following step:

Nerf Purge.

I guess they would start PvE'ing soon after.

Yellow_Monolith

Nerf purge and stop hot's stacking. Make it so there can be only one hot active on a player in pvp at a time. That's how you reduce lag and remove ball groups.

YandereGirlfriend

Buddy_Cactus wrote: »

Nerf purge and stop hot's stacking. Make it so there can be only one hot active on a player in pvp at a time. That's how you reduce lag and remove ball groups.

One instance of each unique HoT is a better solution. You wouldn't want your Vigor canceled out by some random Radiating Regen cast. Doing this would also make group composition much more in-depth and interesting.

This should also be implemented for DoTs and procs.

Yellow_Monolith

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Buddy_Cactus wrote: »

Nerf purge and stop hot's stacking. Make it so there can be only one hot active on a player in pvp at a time. That's how you reduce lag and remove ball groups.

One instance of each unique HoT is a better solution. You wouldn't want your Vigor canceled out by some random Radiating Regen cast. Doing this would also make group composition much more in-depth and interesting.

This should also be implemented for DoTs and procs.

Maybe the best way to go about it is in pvp, you can have only one hot from other players on you at a time.

Cirantille

Buddy_Cactus wrote: »

Nerf purge and stop hot's stacking. Make it so there can be only one hot active on a player in pvp at a time. That's how you reduce lag and remove ball groups.

I have a better idea

Let us not allow people to heal each other if they are not in a group while 12 different sets proc, 12 different AOEs on ground, 5 stuns applied and 12 purge per second casted

But I am sure people not being able to heal each other would help to reduce the lag

Yeah, I feel like a genius now

Oh wait...

Taleof2Cities

The healer role in PvP is already endangered after the ZOS change to allow cross-healing in groups only (as pointed out in posts above mine).

Let's not make it harder on healers than it already is.

idk

Marneman wrote: »

Limit on Healer Slots?

We do not have a true healer role to start with. Skilled and experienced players have run hybrid roles since the game was in beta. We can all heal ourselves as well as do damage.

Marneman wrote: »

Same-Group Aoe Heal Cooldowns?

I do not know how Zos tracked AoE cooldowns with the tests but a same group AoE cooldowns would need to track this with everyone and considering everyone can have an AoE heal it becomes a mess server-side and seems to defeat the purpose.

Marneman wrote: »

Same-Group Damage Bonus

This also adds more computations to the sever-side. Not only does the sever need to determine who all was hit and calculate the damage they take but the server also needs to check how many people in their group were hit and compound that with more than one group may be affected by the AoE damage.

I am not knocking thinking of different ideas and bringing them up. That is great that you have put your ideas out there. I doubt Zos came up with all those testing ideas in a vacuum.

idk

I would also like to remind everyone that almost seven years ago we had many more players in Cyrodiil which meant we had many more players at a given keep fight when the campaign was pop-locked. It was amazing how many players would be at a keep fight at a given time.

During those early days, we have 24 man groups and lots of players in the group and not in the group healing everyone. While the server performance was not perfect, it was significantly better than it is now.

This is the only MMORPG I have played with performance has degraded over time. The problem is not us or how we play the game.

AyaDark

Ball groups are problems only because 3 things:
1)Lugs , skill do not press you can not use combo.
2)To less combos that can one shot.
3)After dot patch, where dots were nerf and dot heals have power like dots before.

So 1 time heals heal so small amount and dot heals heal so much, that if you put 3 dot heals it is like you heal each second with the power of best solo heal.
It is bad idea because it us like you heal in stuns, fears and have no restriction on it.

And it do not need any skill for it. You are just fat.

To kill such fat you need assist of 3-5people, but - skills do not work !!! And when they run you can not just normally press skills. It is like game bug abusing !

If it is no lug you can as example put 5 mines in 1 place, use chain = 1 member dead.

But because of lugs - you only put mine if it even work, enemy already are far away, you can not even use chain, because i need 3-4 seconds to cast any skill in lags !

Skill do not press, very limited number of combos you can oneshot - so all play now is running fat bodys with no skill that are extreamly fat.

To be passive fat no skill is needed, but some of them even do not understand it .

Vlad9425

I don’t think there will ever truly be a good way to nerf ball groups however in game negates and timing ultimate dumps against them is a truly viable way to shut down ball groups.