Idea for tackling ball groups

_adhyffbjjjf12

Hi, Obviously its pie in the sky, but was an interesting challenge. thoughts?


Problem statement

Ball groups are undesirable for gameplay and performance reasons.
A counter to Ballgroups should not be an effective strategy for the ballgroup itself.
The counter to Ballgroups should not force players into a single build.
The counter to the Ballgroup should not affect small groups or single players.

Solution:

A new Siege weapon called 'Lightning tower'
Lightning Towers may only be planted defensively in land owned by the tower owner and take 3 seconds to plant with no interruptions.
Lightning Towers aoe range may not overlap
The lightning tower triggers when more that 5 enemy players are within range X
When triggered the tower will instantly pull all once and apply X% of non mitigatable damage that scales from 5 enemy up. While 5 or more enemy are in range the tower will pulse every X seconds. a group of 10 or more will take lethal damage if they absorb more than 2 pulses
Lightening towers have health and can only destroyed by hand at close range

_adhyffbjjjf12

In addition to above:

Problem statement

We do not want lightning Towers to be placed every X meters across all defended land.

Solution

Lightning towers must be X meters apart as they are intended for choke points.
Lightning towers are required to be refreshed every x minutes.

Amottica

I have yet to understand what people here call a ball group.

Some of the discussion seem to revolve around groups that are hard to kill because they are well organized. It should never be bad for a group to play well.

That seems to be the case here as the suggestion is a means to easily kill an organized group in a PvP environment specifically designed for groups.

Just my thought on the general subject. Just a newish player.

NoodleESO

At this point I think its fair to say there are no "ball groups" anymore, just normal groups of players that newer/solo players don't want to fight.

The proposed solution is basically dark convergence in a siege form, even if the pop cap was way higher and there was no lag, I think its safe to say the player base does not like those kinds of counters to pvp groups.

ssewallb14_ESO

They could be killed before, even without special sets or siege.

It's an issue of counterplay becoming more and more limited.

You could hit them while they were out of their healing springs, but now they can stack regeneration. You could pull them out of the ball and lock them down, but now they have permanent root/snare immunity from Snow Treaders and higher CC immunity uptime from CP. You could even just slowly pick off player by player, but now they have necro resurrection.

Plaguebreak should've helped, but they can just have 8 players back-bar resto and stack so much healing that even coldfire doesn't really matter, making purge redundant in most situations anyway. Healing debuffs? Nerfed into the ground several patches ago.

Personally I think the best solution would be to revisit some of these past changes. Regeneration stacking being the most obvious one.

TequilaFire

Yeah let's just make the game a battle royale, who needs groups in an MMO.

Kwoung

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

Hi, Obviously its pie in the sky, but was an interesting challenge. thoughts?


Problem statement

Ball groups are undesirable for gameplay and performance reasons.
A counter to Ballgroups should not be an effective strategy for the ballgroup itself.
The counter to Ballgroups should not force players into a single build.
The counter to the Ballgroup should not affect small groups or single players.

Solution:

A new Siege weapon called 'Lightning tower'
Lightning Towers may only be planted defensively in land owned by the tower owner and take 3 seconds to plant with no interruptions.
Lightning Towers aoe range may not overlap
The lightning tower triggers when more that 5 enemy players are within range X
When triggered the tower will instantly pull all once and apply X% of non mitigatable damage that scales from 5 enemy up. While 5 or more enemy are in range the tower will pulse every X seconds. a group of 10 or more will take lethal damage if they absorb more than 2 pulses
Lightening towers hav
e health and can only destroyed by hand at close range

I would like to point out, that your suggestion is more likely to decimate the zergs, who are mostly the folks that want to see ball groups go away, because they feel it is "unfair" that a group of 8-12 can wipe their groups of 60 out. Or are you simply mistaking the term ball group?

Nanfoodle

Just adjust sets sets that deal with large groups to be something worth specing for. Problem solved.

xeNNNNN

ssewallb14_ESO wrote: »

It's an issue of counterplay becoming more and more limited.

This has always been the problem and the release of sets that just get used by the same groups and thus any counter given is a counter taken. So it ends up as an endless game of attrition.

But then there is the other problem of people not wanting to slot specific things to deal with them because 'muh build'.

A while ago (years now) there was a group of sorcerers at chalman, maybe 20 ish of them. None of them wanted to slot negate.. all of them were like "nah its good we can kill them" *Proceeds to get farmed for 30 minutes straight* so I switched, jumped on my sorc and put negate on and negated them on the back flag and all of a sudden they started dying.

This has repeated itself multiple times as well. These types of players are their own worst enemies and those of us who do slot ability counters and such but cannot play every class at once. People really need to stop slacking if they want to push back groups that organise.

dinokstrunz

Or you just just nerf what really makes ball groups powerful, cross healing & Earthgore.

Kwoung

dinokstrunz wrote: »

Or you just just nerf what really makes ball groups powerful, cross healing & Earthgore.

Pretty sure "the year of tests" proved that inaccurate, they will adapt no matter what you toss at them. And as was pointed out two posts above, that is why they win, they adapt. Zerglings don't, they just keep asking for new more powerful sets so they can "solo" a ball group, instead of loading a couple key skills on their bars and working with others around them to actually make it happen.

dinokstrunz

Kwoung wrote: »

dinokstrunz wrote: »

Or you just just nerf what really makes ball groups powerful, cross healing & Earthgore.

Pretty sure "the year of tests" proved that inaccurate, they will adapt no matter what you toss at them. And as was pointed out two posts above, that is why they win, they adapt. Zerglings don't, they just keep asking for new more powerful sets so they can "solo" a ball group, instead of loading a couple key skills on their bars and working with others around them to actually make it happen.

It's a known fact that ball groups cause lag, when they wipe the lag usually eases up. What keeps ball groups alive, healing. We've been saying it for years.

Urzigurumash

There is no Debuff to Healing Done.

Not directly anyhow - but most Heals scale off Weapon/Spell Damage and Weapon/Spell Crit. So there are in fact some Debuffs: Cowardice and Uncertainty.

However, the sources for these Debuffs are few, and they are too weak to make much of a difference. There is no source of Major Uncertainty.

That's why I propose a large PvP-only buff to Vykosa, which conveys Major Cowardice. I wrote a thread about it:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/590101/add-a-0-to-vykosas-tooltip-for-pvp#latest

kargen27

Situational awareness is the best way to deal with ball groups. Stagger your siege weapons so they can't straight line through the entire siege line taking everybody out. Get off your siege when you see them coming. Before you set siege look around and try to determine where they might come from and where best to get out of their path.

A ball group runs usually really tight so it is possible to get out of their path. If you are on an inner door or at one of the outposts like Bleakers set up either near the side or by a pillar and know where you will go to take advantage of line of sight defense. If you are in a group coordinate ultimates. Ball groups coordinate and the best way to stop them is coordinate. Many ball groups will run a path of destruction then spend time recovering resources . Try to save your resources when the ball group does their first pass by doing enough to keep yourself alive but don't attack. After the ball group does its pass that is when you want to try and pressure. Don't follow them into a choke point though. That is often a trap.

After a while you can recognize patterns. There is one really successful group leader that does the same thing when they are entering a keep almost every time if there is good defense. They stack to the right of the door when the door is about down. They wait until the over zealous run in. The over zealous usually agro the guards and get the first barrage of defense. Either way the ball group waits a moment then when they cross through the door near the wall to the left ending up in that enclave. They pause there for only a few seconds then go past both flags up the left stairs and around the top coming back down the left stairs and then stack on the back flag. It is very rare they do anything else.
You can watch how a ball group moves and you can learn how to have a better chance of dealing with them. They are successful because they stay tight and they coordinate. That means they can be predictable. You just gotta learn to use that. A bunch of randoms in a zerg aren't going to be effective but a few players working together can do enough disruption to give the zerg a chance.
Solo and small group best strategy is live to fight another day. Just run and hide maybe pick off a tag along straggler.

_adhyffbjjjf12

There is clearly a problem, otherwise we would not have attempted fixes like dark convergence. Ignoring solutions for the moment. Looking at the problem again:

Problem statement

Ball groups are undesirable for gameplay and performance reasons.
A counter to Ballgroups should not be an effective strategy for the ballgroup itself. (DC fail)
The counter to Ballgroups should not force players into a single build. (DC fail)
The counter to the Ballgroup should not affect small groups or single players. (recent DC patch addresses this at least)

No solution we have seen so far satisfies all these aspects, and they all have to be satisfied together if we just ping pong between botched patches to the problem, and that's where a well tailored and targeted type of siege provides options.

AuraNebula

Are nightblade tether bombers dead in deadlands? Because 2 to 3 coordinated tether bombers are pretty effective against ball groups.

FluffWit

Ball groups (or whatever you want to call them) can't really be stopped. They're highly optimized and just adjust to whatever changes are made to try and stifle them. For instance the latest attempts at stifling them (Hrothgar, Plaguebreaker and Dark Convergence) seem to have made them stronger if anything. Because they're better at exploiting this stuff then us casual players.

The only counter player we've ever had that really worked was 24 person groups. The ball groups almost always max out at around 12 players. When we could run 24 it was a much fairer fight.

Unfortunately they cut the group limit in half to improve performance. It has not helped whatsoever and has made pvp less fun.

MEBengalsFan2001

How about limit group size to four players.

NordSwordnBoard

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

Hi, Obviously its pie in the sky, but was an interesting challenge. thoughts?


Problem statement

Ball groups are undesirable for gameplay and performance reasons.
A counter to Ballgroups should not be an effective strategy for the ballgroup itself.
The counter to Ballgroups should not force players into a single build.
The counter to the Ballgroup should not affect small groups or single players.

Solution:

A new Siege weapon called 'Lightning tower'
Lightning Towers may only be planted defensively in land owned by the tower owner and take 3 seconds to plant with no interruptions.
Lightning Towers aoe range may not overlap
The lightning tower triggers when more that 5 enemy players are within range X
When triggered the tower will instantly pull all once and apply X% of non mitigatable damage that scales from 5 enemy up. While 5 or more enemy are in range the tower will pulse every X seconds. a group of 10 or more will take lethal damage if they absorb more than 2 pulses
Lightening towers have health and can only destroyed by hand at close range

So, if a ball group captures a resource, they can plant a tesla coil there, but not the zerg or solos? What if they can siege the keep wall from that resource? Any solos get killed one by one coming at the ball group, and if a group similar to the ball group goes there, they get zapped by the ball group's tesla coil.
In order to prevent my ball group from wiping/taking damage from your tesla coil, we need to split up and pass by it in groups of 3-4 in case randos pass by also. The ball group now has 2-4 DDs spin to win it down. Healers & the rest stay 20 meters away. People who do not communicate will have difficulty doing this. Auto defense could cause sieges to take longer, as more breaches may be preferable to getting zapped. Anything causing AoE server checks that damage based on # players is causing additional lag. This would also be the first "auto-fire" mechanism added to PvP.

Equipment can't adapt to counter tactics faster than people can adapt to counter equipment. Lightning towers/Tesla coils are just Dark Convergence II: The Siege Engine.

neferpitou73

FluffWit wrote: »

Ball groups (or whatever you want to call them) can't really be stopped. They're highly optimized and just adjust to whatever changes are made to try and stifle them. For instance the latest attempts at stifling them (Hrothgar, Plaguebreaker and Dark Convergence) seem to have made them stronger if anything. Because they're better at exploiting this stuff then us casual players.

The only counter player we've ever had that really worked was 24 person groups. The ball groups almost always max out at around 12 players. When we could run 24 it was a much fairer fight.

Unfortunately they cut the group limit in half to improve performance. It has not helped whatsoever and has made pvp less fun.

Exactly. The only thing the reduction in group size did (besides killing pops) was make it easier for groups to farm solo players.

gariondavey

Heal over time abilities of the same name don't stack.
Ball groups die.
Simple as that

auz

gariondavey wrote: »

Heal over time abilities of the same name don't stack.
Ball groups die.
Simple as that

Whoa whoa whoa. Stop making sense and using logic to solve problems. It's against the terms and conditions.

Theignson

Noone will ever reach consensus about this. ZOS seemed to recognize an issue and made sets, but then nerfed them so they were useless.

If you look at the stream of the ball groups you can instantly see the problem. They are running around with ~36 buffs, including (on average) 6 rapid regens and 6 eternal vigors each. They run full speed and are almost never snarable/rootable.

So you see their health almost never goes down even if 50 pugs are shooting at them.

EZ solution and I dont see why it would be a problem: You can only have one (1) rapid regen and/or one (1) eternal vigor at any given time.

End of problem

As it is these guys just run around until their ulti is up, they use DC to pull people in then hit them with proxi and ultis. Then they run around and around for an hour or so.

gamma71

Just what we need more pulls in this game.....

neferpitou73

Theignson wrote: »

Noone will ever reach consensus about this. ZOS seemed to recognize an issue and made sets, but then nerfed them so they were useless.

If you look at the stream of the ball groups you can instantly see the problem. They are running around with ~36 buffs, including (on average) 6 rapid regens and 6 eternal vigors each. They run full speed and are almost never snarable/rootable.

So you see their health almost never goes down even if 50 pugs are shooting at them.

EZ solution and I dont see why it would be a problem: You can only have one (1) rapid regen and/or one (1) eternal vigor at any given time.

End of problem

As it is these guys just run around until their ulti is up, they use DC to pull people in then hit them with proxi and ultis. Then they run around and around for an hour or so.

Forums: "ZOS nerf AOE spam, it causes lag and makes ball groups impossible to beat!"

ZOS does test showing this has no effect

Forums: "ZOS get rid of proc sets so we can finally kill ball groups"

Ball groups dominate even without proc sets

Forums: "ZOS nerf heal stacking it makes ball groups invincible!"

Any bets how round 3 will play out?

gamma71

Best way to beat a ball group is another ball group giving us sets like Dc to break them up doesn't work because the ball groups use the same sets against you.

Kory

Best for another ball group to face another ball group. But with the PvP population being so low nowadays (GreyHost being the exception most of the time) it's difficult to deal with. Almost impossible because of how ballgroups work.

divnyi

xeNNNNN wrote: »

A while ago (years now) there was a group of sorcerers at chalman, maybe 20 ish of them. None of them wanted to slot negate.. all of them were like "nah its good we can kill them" *Proceeds to get farmed for 30 minutes straight* so I switched, jumped on my sorc and put negate on and negated them on the back flag and all of a sudden they started dying.

I understand what you say but it's a bit ridiculous that a group needs very specific single CLASS ultimate to stand a chance, right?

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Forums: "ZOS nerf heal stacking it makes ball groups invincible!"

Any bets how round 3 will play out?

Players would beat ball groups consistently. With no heal stacking, best thing ball groups can do is having dedicated healers spamming AoE heals, which costs and that player don't provide damage output. Add in the fact that plaguebreak still exist and multiple players applying DoTs will now hurt, as they won't be offset with HoTs.

Only reason not to remove heal stacking is not PvP reason, it's PvE reason. We are gutting PvE once again.

LarsS

As had been said again and again, a group of people beeing on voice com, who build for supporting each other and stack damage will win against randoms even if the randoms are 2-3 times more. There is no way to change that, in fact I think its fair.

Still the difference can't be to big or both the balls and other pvp players will find the game frustrating. I think that the difference is to big today at least on CP campaigns. To make pvp balanced ZOS have to reduce the difference between casual and hardcore. At the moment the non-CP non-proc better meets these conditions. I think that was ther reason ZOS provided that alternative.

McTaterskins

Or.... just fix healing.

LarsS

McTaterskins wrote: »

Or.... just fix healing.

Any so called fix wont work, if you would remove cross heal and/or heal stack the zerg would suffer much more than the balls. An organized group will always have an advantage. What zos can do is to reduce the disadvantage for new and unorganized players. No-CP makes it more even for new ESO players and no proc sets reduces the raids ability to optimize build composition. Thus the advantage for balls are smaller.