Is it time to deal with HOT stacking or rework anti-ball group sets?

xylena_lazarow

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

Wolfpaw wrote: »

Don't enjoy this playstyle? No-proc campaign, BG's, & dueling.

Organized groups should come in many flavors and playstyles, not a single oppressive "ball" strat that dominates everything small to large scale. This same ball strat still dominates without procs or cp, as the bulk of its power comes from the stacked healing and mobility buffs that make it nigh unkillable, not so much its damage. The consequence of this power imbalance is that the ball strat is much better at stalling fights than actually taking the flags from the zerg, but this is not so much a problem when the primary goal is to "farm pugs" aka repeatedly kill the same disorganized casuals.

So what you are saying then, is that if I do not enjoy the "playstyle" of joining a competitive group just to stall fights and stomp pugs, that I should leave Cyro? Don't worry, that's exactly what keeps happening. But once upon a time, Cyro was home to all sorts of group and solo playstyles and skill levels, and better lived up to the game's promise of "play how you like."

Wolfpaw

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Wolfpaw wrote: »

Don't enjoy this playstyle? No-proc campaign, BG's, & dueling.

Organized groups should come in many flavors and playstyles, not a single oppressive "ball" strat that dominates everything small to large scale. This same ball strat still dominates without procs or cp, as the bulk of its power comes from the stacked healing and mobility buffs that make it nigh unkillable, not so much its damage. The consequence of this power imbalance is that the ball strat is much better at stalling fights than actually taking the flags from the zerg, but this is not so much a problem when the primary goal is to "farm pugs" aka repeatedly kill the same disorganized casuals.

So what you are saying then, is that if I do not enjoy the "playstyle" of joining a competitive group just to stall fights and stomp pugs, that I should leave Cyro? Don't worry, that's exactly what keeps happening. But once upon a time, Cyro was home to all sorts of group and solo playstyles and skill levels, and better lived up to the game's promise of "play how you like."

You can play how you like, just expect different results.

I'm saying multiple options are available, or join/make an organized group and fight.

neferpitou73

Arcanasx wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

divnyi wrote: »

@neferpitou73 you are talking about organizing, roles etc, but why do you dodging the main point of this thread - organized group has Vigor + Radiant Regeneration stacks, which doesn't require you to fit any role, you spam it regardless of your role.

Vigor heals 3 times less than resolving vigor. Given 12man group, it means you get 4 resolving vigors running all the time just from ONE skill. FOUR. RESOLVING. VIGORS. And I didn't count radiant regens in. How is this fair?

Because I don't think it's an issue. My group only runs Vigor/RR on our healers and we still stomp zergs. It's the group coordination and division of labor that allows ball groups to survive. If I'm on a DD I don't have to worry about keeping myself alive and can just run into groups relying on my talented healers to keep me alive. Likewise my healers can rely on the DDs to just kill everything so they can focus on keeping things alive.

I'm just saying, you guys have had two ball group leads come into this thread to tell you they don't think the heal stacks are the issue but have provided several other reasons why they think groups are dominating/overtuned. And we spend hours theorycrafting these comps so we know what we're talking about. Perhaps we should tackle these things before we mess with healing, which will affect literally every part of the game?

Its almost as if HOT stacking is overtuned when you can just rely on stacking multiple HOTs to keep a group alive. So much that DDs don't have to worry about keeping themselves alive when their healers can carry their survivability for them by simply applying passive HOTs.

Did you miss the part where I said we run 4 healers, who are obviously running more than RR/Vigor?

React wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

divnyi wrote: »

@neferpitou73 you are talking about organizing, roles etc, but why do you dodging the main point of this thread - organized group has Vigor + Radiant Regeneration stacks, which doesn't require you to fit any role, you spam it regardless of your role.

Vigor heals 3 times less than resolving vigor. Given 12man group, it means you get 4 resolving vigors running all the time just from ONE skill. FOUR. RESOLVING. VIGORS. And I didn't count radiant regens in. How is this fair?

Because I don't think it's an issue. My group only runs Vigor/RR on our healers and we still stomp zergs. It's the group coordination and division of labor that allows ball groups to survive. If I'm on a DD I don't have to worry about keeping myself alive and can just run into groups relying on my talented healers to keep me alive. Likewise my healers can rely on the DDs to just kill everything so they can focus on keeping things alive.

I'm just saying, you guys have had two ball group leads come into this thread to tell you they don't think the heal stacks are the issue but have provided several other reasons why they think groups are dominating/overtuned. And we spend hours theorycrafting these comps so we know what we're talking about. Perhaps we should tackle these things before we mess with healing, which will affect literally every part of the game?

I don't know why everyone in this thread glazes over the fact that the ball groups are by far, the largest negative impact on performance that exists. Zenimax themselves acknowledged this back at the beginning of their year of performance testing, and said that the reason they have such a negative impact on server performance is because of the spamming of abilities and the constant calculations related to those abilities.

It is so obvious that having 5 RRs and 5 vigors on you should not exist in the game, and even more obvious that removing the ability to do this will be the easiest way to massively reduce the calculations your "coordinated groups" cause. As the ball group players themselves have said "we'll adapt". So what is the issue with removing this function?

And yet when they did test to see if those abilities were the problem they saw no improvement in performance. And mysteriously when they actually fixed their servers there was no lag even at prime time with several ball groups on the server.

Amottica

neferpitou73 wrote: »

React wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

divnyi wrote: »

@neferpitou73 you are talking about organizing, roles etc, but why do you dodging the main point of this thread - organized group has Vigor + Radiant Regeneration stacks, which doesn't require you to fit any role, you spam it regardless of your role.

Vigor heals 3 times less than resolving vigor. Given 12man group, it means you get 4 resolving vigors running all the time just from ONE skill. FOUR. RESOLVING. VIGORS. And I didn't count radiant regens in. How is this fair?

Because I don't think it's an issue. My group only runs Vigor/RR on our healers and we still stomp zergs. It's the group coordination and division of labor that allows ball groups to survive. If I'm on a DD I don't have to worry about keeping myself alive and can just run into groups relying on my talented healers to keep me alive. Likewise my healers can rely on the DDs to just kill everything so they can focus on keeping things alive.

I'm just saying, you guys have had two ball group leads come into this thread to tell you they don't think the heal stacks are the issue but have provided several other reasons why they think groups are dominating/overtuned. And we spend hours theorycrafting these comps so we know what we're talking about. Perhaps we should tackle these things before we mess with healing, which will affect literally every part of the game?

I don't know why everyone in this thread glazes over the fact that the ball groups are by far, the largest negative impact on performance that exists. Zenimax themselves acknowledged this back at the beginning of their year of performance testing, and said that the reason they have such a negative impact on server performance is because of the spamming of abilities and the constant calculations related to those abilities.

It is so obvious that having 5 RRs and 5 vigors on you should not exist in the game, and even more obvious that removing the ability to do this will be the easiest way to massively reduce the calculations your "coordinated groups" cause. As the ball group players themselves have said "we'll adapt". So what is the issue with removing this function?

And yet when they did test to see if those abilities were the problem they saw no improvement in performance. And mysteriously when they actually fixed their servers there was no lag even at prime time with several ball groups on the server.

Technically Zenimax did see improvement served side when they did those Cyrodiil tests, though they did not get into specifics about which tests showed improvement.

The main takeaway Zenimax provided is that none of the testing showed any meaningful improvements. So you are correct to note that the testing debunked the theory that stacking of hots does not create that much stress on the server compared to anything else based on actual testing and data received by Zenimax looking into this.

Arcanasx

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

neferpitou73 wrote: »

My group only runs Vigor/RR on our healers and we still stomp zergs.

If I'm on a DD I don't have to worry about keeping myself alive and can just run into groups relying on my talented healers to keep me alive.

I may have come off as too literal in my previous post, but the point is, If only your healers are using HOTs and stacking them, and your DDs apparently are not using any heals for themselves, this still proves how ridiculously overperforming cross healing is (HOT stacking especially) when are able to stomp zergs like this in your own words. I'm also certain if you were to look at how much healing is being done, the great majority of it would be coming from HOTs rather than more reactive heals, hence why I mentioned groups are being carried by passive cross HOTs.

The other sentence I've bolded also points out how overtuned cross healing is when you yourself claim that DDs in your group don't even have to worry about their own survivability because of the absurd amount of healing being pumped out by healers these days. What that does is promote passive gameplay over reactive gameplay which ultimately dumbs down the game.

Organized groups do not need access to the amount of healing currently available to play effectively. They already have the advantage of organization, communication, coordination and potential set stacking over unorganized and uncoordinated zerg masses. If anything the ridiculous amount of cross healing achievable these days actually diminishes whatever tactical skill is involved when playing as a group since it allows the group to play more carelessly and get away with arbitrary actions that would have otherwise gotten them killed without the carry that is cross healing right now.

neferpitou73

Arcanasx wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

My group only runs Vigor/RR on our healers and we still stomp zergs.

If I'm on a DD I don't have to worry about keeping myself alive and can just run into groups relying on my talented healers to keep me alive.

I may have come off as too literal in my previous post, but the point is, If only your healers are using HOTs and stacking them, and your DDs apparently are not using any heals for themselves, this still proves how ridiculously overperforming cross healing is (HOT stacking especially) when are able to stomp zergs like this in your own words. I'm also certain if you were to look at how much healing is being done, the great majority of it would be coming from HOTs rather than more reactive heals, hence why I mentioned groups are being carried by passive cross HOTs.

The other sentence I've bolded also points out how overtuned cross healing is when you yourself claim that DDs in your group don't even have to worry about their own survivability because of the absurd amount of healing being pumped out by healers these days. What that does is promote passive gameplay over reactive gameplay which ultimately dumbs down the game.

Organized groups do not need access to the amount of healing currently available to play effectively. They already have the advantage of organization, communication, coordination and potential set stacking over unorganized and uncoordinated zerg masses. If anything the ridiculous amount of cross healing achievable these days actually diminishes whatever tactical skill is involved when playing as a group since it allows the group to play more carelessly and get away with arbitrary actions that would have otherwise gotten them killed without the carry that is cross healing right now.

What am I not being clear about here? We run our group like a trial group. Are trial healers OP because their DDs don't have to worry about healing?

You guys have had two group leads come in here to tell you that cross heals are not the problem. When they inevitably nerf cross heals and make the game less enjoyable for everyone (as it always happens when the forums get there way) I look forward to seeing what your excuse is when groups are still kicking everyone's butt.

Ragnaroek93

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Ragnaroek93 wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

HonestLoverr wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

pleximus wrote: »

I honestly do not understand Drac, Tyr, etc are still having fun after all these years spamming in a ball against pugs while being nearly unkillable.

The thing is, a well-organized group will always be superior when facing a group of pugs. They are organized and as a group better prepared. They are also likely on comms which provides even more advantage.

This is and should be the case in Cyrodiil and BGs. It is also what should be expected.

Nearly godmode and oneshotting people at once is definitely something I would call superior too. But should this be the case? No way. This is not some tiny advantage we are talking about. The heal and kill potential of organized groups while literally immune to any kind of CC + movement speed buffs is absolutely broken as hell and needs to be fixed without nerfing everyone outside those groups too much again like it happened several times in the past when ZOS was going for a change.

And yet any group can reach that level of play if they put the time into it; and in a competitive environment of course some are going to do that. Cyrodiil is the only place in the game where large scale groups can fight each other.

When I see people complaining like this all I see is "I didn't want to put the same amount of time in as they did, so please punish them."

Everybody in a ballgroup has literally 34859345893458345954 health per second, what effort are we talking about? Because you're able to organize enough people to play with you deserve to be (almost) unkillable?

Yes. In a group based game mode; a group that organizes itself, divides it's roles among it's members, theorycrafts optimal builds, and trains it's members, will and should always have a major advantage over an unorganized mob. The fact that you don't want to make a group like this does not make it unfair.

EDIT: I do want to add tho, that while I disagree that heal stacking is a major problem, there are aspects of groups that are overtuned mostly based on changes made over the past 2 years by ZOS: namely:

-Snow treaders
-harmony
-Dark Convergence
-Plaguebreak
-The Occult Overload change
-Hybridization (leading to increased stats on DDs and healers)
-Group size reductions (which makes PUGs fend for themselves more)

All of which I have been opposed to. And I have no issue with them targeting these things.

I heavily disagree with that tbh. Crosshealing is the #1 issue by far and it's pretty obvious. Having 10 hots on everybody isn't balanced, period. Nobody fights a ballgroup and thinks "*** snow treaders" afterwards lol. Ballgroups have been an issue way before they introduced any of the stuff you've mentioned.

I also don't understand your argument. An organized group will always have an advantage, no matter if they remove crosshealing or not. Revmoving crosshealing wouldn't take that advantage away, it would make them actually killable, as they should are. Right now healing is so overpowered that it allows bad players to stall a fight against much better players forever. Healing on certain classes is already so strong that solo players can stall a fight forever (while playing significantly worse than their opponent), group healing makes this issue completely gamebreaking.

ESO PvP boils down to good players who avoid fighting each other because most of these fights would be endless stalemates and they go to stomp bad and new players all over again instead. #fun

divnyi

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Did you miss the part where I said we run 4 healers, who are obviously running more than RR/Vigor?

So each member has 4 Vigors and 4 RR.
3 Vigors = 1 Resolving Vigor, 2 RR = 1 Resolving Vigor.

Your group has 3 Resolving Vigors passively.

Passive cross-healing does more to your group than you want to admit.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

divnyi wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Did you miss the part where I said we run 4 healers, who are obviously running more than RR/Vigor?

So each member has 4 Vigors and 4 RR.
3 Vigors = 1 Resolving Vigor, 2 RR = 1 Resolving Vigor.

Your group has 3 Resolving Vigors passively.

Passive cross-healing does more to your group than you want to admit.

Whats the problem with dedicated healers being able to heal group members in this way? The issue is actually just due to heal scaling being based on the same stats as damage. Split healing and damage stats could make things quite interesting. They already split proc sets in this manor just not skills...

neferpitou73

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

divnyi wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Did you miss the part where I said we run 4 healers, who are obviously running more than RR/Vigor?

So each member has 4 Vigors and 4 RR.
3 Vigors = 1 Resolving Vigor, 2 RR = 1 Resolving Vigor.

Your group has 3 Resolving Vigors passively.

Passive cross-healing does more to your group than you want to admit.

Whats the problem with dedicated healers being able to heal group members in this way? The issue is actually just due to heal scaling being based on the same stats as damage. Split healing and damage stats could make things quite interesting. They already split proc sets in this manor just not skills...

I've always thought having resistances affect heals in the same way they affect damage could also be interesting, but I couldn't tell you how balanced that would be.

Ragnaroek93 wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Ragnaroek93 wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

HonestLoverr wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

pleximus wrote: »

I honestly do not understand Drac, Tyr, etc are still having fun after all these years spamming in a ball against pugs while being nearly unkillable.

The thing is, a well-organized group will always be superior when facing a group of pugs. They are organized and as a group better prepared. They are also likely on comms which provides even more advantage.

This is and should be the case in Cyrodiil and BGs. It is also what should be expected.

Nearly godmode and oneshotting people at once is definitely something I would call superior too. But should this be the case? No way. This is not some tiny advantage we are talking about. The heal and kill potential of organized groups while literally immune to any kind of CC + movement speed buffs is absolutely broken as hell and needs to be fixed without nerfing everyone outside those groups too much again like it happened several times in the past when ZOS was going for a change.

And yet any group can reach that level of play if they put the time into it; and in a competitive environment of course some are going to do that. Cyrodiil is the only place in the game where large scale groups can fight each other.

When I see people complaining like this all I see is "I didn't want to put the same amount of time in as they did, so please punish them."

Everybody in a ballgroup has literally 34859345893458345954 health per second, what effort are we talking about? Because you're able to organize enough people to play with you deserve to be (almost) unkillable?

Yes. In a group based game mode; a group that organizes itself, divides it's roles among it's members, theorycrafts optimal builds, and trains it's members, will and should always have a major advantage over an unorganized mob. The fact that you don't want to make a group like this does not make it unfair.

EDIT: I do want to add tho, that while I disagree that heal stacking is a major problem, there are aspects of groups that are overtuned mostly based on changes made over the past 2 years by ZOS: namely:

-Snow treaders
-harmony
-Dark Convergence
-Plaguebreak
-The Occult Overload change
-Hybridization (leading to increased stats on DDs and healers)
-Group size reductions (which makes PUGs fend for themselves more)

All of which I have been opposed to. And I have no issue with them targeting these things.

I heavily disagree with that tbh. Crosshealing is the #1 issue by far and it's pretty obvious. Having 10 hots on everybody isn't balanced, period. Nobody fights a ballgroup and thinks "*** snow treaders" afterwards lol. Ballgroups have been an issue way before they introduced any of the stuff you've mentioned.

I also don't understand your argument. An organized group will always have an advantage, no matter if they remove crosshealing or not. Revmoving crosshealing wouldn't take that advantage away, it would make them actually killable, as they should are. Right now healing is so overpowered that it allows bad players to stall a fight against much better players forever. Healing on certain classes is already so strong that solo players can stall a fight forever (while playing significantly worse than their opponent), group healing makes this issue completely gamebreaking.

ESO PvP boils down to good players who avoid fighting each other because most of these fights would be endless stalemates and they go to stomp bad and new players all over again instead. #fun

No. All of these things are far more important than cross heals. You still had cross heals way back but groups didn't feel near as powerful as they do now. Let me go through the list.

--snow treaders--makes it impossible to lock down ball groups, and given there already high speed this gives them a major advantage in maneuvering

--harmony--esentially free damage, pretty much every DD in every ball group runs harmony on their jewelry and the supports run almost every synergy possible. Heck, when I'm playing DD I even keybind "take synergy" to one of my skill buttons so I can just keep spamming synergies.

--Dark Convergence--an automatic stack creator, we have an entire build created to running just this set and doing CC so we can stack large groups for synergy bombs, and almost every ball group does as well.

--Plaguebreak--meant to prevent purge spam in ball groups. In actuality it doesn't affect us at all due to CP and additional healers. Instead we just run it on one build to blow up PUGs we fight.

--Occult Overload--now does more effective damage than VD. My group wiped once to another group because an enemy group killed a couple gaurds near us. While I appreciate the effort to reintroduce bombers this wasn't the way to do it.

--Hybridization--If there is a cross-healing problem this is the source of it. The hybridization of stats and sets allowed us to increase our damage and heals by a lot.

For instance this is what we were running in Rough Riders before the stat hybridization:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=372592

This is something more akin to what my group would run now (although I'd change the sets):

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=454867

Notice the ridiculous increase in spell and weapon damage and the regen tooltip.

I haven't even added CP on those builds.

--Decreasing group size--This benefited ball groups for several reasons. First, it made it harder to coordinate zerg groups. You now need 2 people instead of 1 to coordinate the same amount of people. This severely limits faction guilds' such as AoC, ability to handle ball groups. Secondly, it made PUGS even more of a liability to have aground since with a smaller group size it's harder to hide the performance of less skilled players.


In other words, what ZOS has basically done the last few years is make us immune to CC, gave us more efficient sets/passives to stack and kill PUGS, higher damage and heals, and reduce zergs' ability to coordinate against us.

If they want to nerf us they should:
--bring back 24 man groups
--Eliminate PB/DC
--Nerf harmony/swift/expedition
--Nerf O_O back to what it was last patch
--Bring back bombers by un-nerfing mech acuity

And if those things are not successful I'll agree to a change in heal stacks. But I'd rather get rid of the buffs they've given us the last few years than change a fundamental aspect of the game, at least at first.

xDeusEJRx

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

divnyi wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Did you miss the part where I said we run 4 healers, who are obviously running more than RR/Vigor?

So each member has 4 Vigors and 4 RR.
3 Vigors = 1 Resolving Vigor, 2 RR = 1 Resolving Vigor.

Your group has 3 Resolving Vigors passively.

Passive cross-healing does more to your group than you want to admit.

Whats the problem with dedicated healers being able to heal group members in this way? The issue is actually just due to heal scaling being based on the same stats as damage. Split healing and damage stats could make things quite interesting. They already split proc sets in this manor just not skills...

I've always thought having resistances affect heals in the same way they affect damage could also be interesting, but I couldn't tell you how balanced that would be.

Ragnaroek93 wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Ragnaroek93 wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

HonestLoverr wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

pleximus wrote: »

I honestly do not understand Drac, Tyr, etc are still having fun after all these years spamming in a ball against pugs while being nearly unkillable.

The thing is, a well-organized group will always be superior when facing a group of pugs. They are organized and as a group better prepared. They are also likely on comms which provides even more advantage.

This is and should be the case in Cyrodiil and BGs. It is also what should be expected.

Nearly godmode and oneshotting people at once is definitely something I would call superior too. But should this be the case? No way. This is not some tiny advantage we are talking about. The heal and kill potential of organized groups while literally immune to any kind of CC + movement speed buffs is absolutely broken as hell and needs to be fixed without nerfing everyone outside those groups too much again like it happened several times in the past when ZOS was going for a change.

And yet any group can reach that level of play if they put the time into it; and in a competitive environment of course some are going to do that. Cyrodiil is the only place in the game where large scale groups can fight each other.

When I see people complaining like this all I see is "I didn't want to put the same amount of time in as they did, so please punish them."

Everybody in a ballgroup has literally 34859345893458345954 health per second, what effort are we talking about? Because you're able to organize enough people to play with you deserve to be (almost) unkillable?

Yes. In a group based game mode; a group that organizes itself, divides it's roles among it's members, theorycrafts optimal builds, and trains it's members, will and should always have a major advantage over an unorganized mob. The fact that you don't want to make a group like this does not make it unfair.

EDIT: I do want to add tho, that while I disagree that heal stacking is a major problem, there are aspects of groups that are overtuned mostly based on changes made over the past 2 years by ZOS: namely:

-Snow treaders
-harmony
-Dark Convergence
-Plaguebreak
-The Occult Overload change
-Hybridization (leading to increased stats on DDs and healers)
-Group size reductions (which makes PUGs fend for themselves more)

All of which I have been opposed to. And I have no issue with them targeting these things.

I heavily disagree with that tbh. Crosshealing is the #1 issue by far and it's pretty obvious. Having 10 hots on everybody isn't balanced, period. Nobody fights a ballgroup and thinks "*** snow treaders" afterwards lol. Ballgroups have been an issue way before they introduced any of the stuff you've mentioned.

I also don't understand your argument. An organized group will always have an advantage, no matter if they remove crosshealing or not. Revmoving crosshealing wouldn't take that advantage away, it would make them actually killable, as they should are. Right now healing is so overpowered that it allows bad players to stall a fight against much better players forever. Healing on certain classes is already so strong that solo players can stall a fight forever (while playing significantly worse than their opponent), group healing makes this issue completely gamebreaking.

ESO PvP boils down to good players who avoid fighting each other because most of these fights would be endless stalemates and they go to stomp bad and new players all over again instead. #fun

No. All of these things are far more important than cross heals. You still had cross heals way back but groups didn't feel near as powerful as they do now. Let me go through the list.

--snow treaders--makes it impossible to lock down ball groups, and given there already high speed this gives them a major advantage in maneuvering

--harmony--esentially free damage, pretty much every DD in every ball group runs harmony on their jewelry and the supports run almost every synergy possible. Heck, when I'm playing DD I even keybind "take synergy" to one of my skill buttons so I can just keep spamming synergies.

--Dark Convergence--an automatic stack creator, we have an entire build created to running just this set and doing CC so we can stack large groups for synergy bombs, and almost every ball group does as well.

--Plaguebreak--meant to prevent purge spam in ball groups. In actuality it doesn't affect us at all due to CP and additional healers. Instead we just run it on one build to blow up PUGs we fight.

--Occult Overload--now does more effective damage than VD. My group wiped once to another group because an enemy group killed a couple gaurds near us. While I appreciate the effort to reintroduce bombers this wasn't the way to do it.

--Hybridization--If there is a cross-healing problem this is the source of it. The hybridization of stats and sets allowed us to increase our damage and heals by a lot.

For instance this is what we were running in Rough Riders before the stat hybridization:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=372592

This is something more akin to what my group would run now (although I'd change the sets):

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=454867

Notice the ridiculous increase in spell and weapon damage and the regen tooltip.

I haven't even added CP on those builds.

--Decreasing group size--This benefited ball groups for several reasons. First, it made it harder to coordinate zerg groups. You now need 2 people instead of 1 to coordinate the same amount of people. This severely limits faction guilds' such as AoC, ability to handle ball groups. Secondly, it made PUGS even more of a liability to have aground since with a smaller group size it's harder to hide the performance of less skilled players.


In other words, what ZOS has basically done the last few years is make us immune to CC, gave us more efficient sets/passives to stack and kill PUGS, higher damage and heals, and reduce zergs' ability to coordinate against us.

If they want to nerf us they should:
--bring back 24 man groups
--Eliminate PB/DC
--Nerf harmony/swift/expedition
--Nerf O_O back to what it was last patch
--Bring back bombers by un-nerfing mech acuity

And if those things are not successful I'll agree to a change in heal stacks. But I'd rather get rid of the buffs they've given us the last few years than change a fundamental aspect of the game, at least at first.

I don't care too much about ball groups but cross healing is kinda stupid OP. I wish they'd go back to the patch where heals didn't work outside your group. Too many times where zerg surfing players chase me down and I burst them and they run back to the zerg they're surfing with and their group healer saves them and makes it impossible to kill anyone because zerg surfers get saved by cross healing. I think cross healing outside your group is too op and should be limited back to only group members. Because how else do you take out a 20-30 man group filled with zerg surfers and faction stack players that can all heal each other without having any bombers or ball groups to clean up?

DrSlaughtr

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

divnyi wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Did you miss the part where I said we run 4 healers, who are obviously running more than RR/Vigor?

So each member has 4 Vigors and 4 RR.
3 Vigors = 1 Resolving Vigor, 2 RR = 1 Resolving Vigor.

Your group has 3 Resolving Vigors passively.

Passive cross-healing does more to your group than you want to admit.

Whats the problem with dedicated healers being able to heal group members in this way? The issue is actually just due to heal scaling being based on the same stats as damage. Split healing and damage stats could make things quite interesting. They already split proc sets in this manor just not skills...

I've always thought having resistances affect heals in the same way they affect damage could also be interesting, but I couldn't tell you how balanced that would be.

Ragnaroek93 wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Ragnaroek93 wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

HonestLoverr wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

pleximus wrote: »

I honestly do not understand Drac, Tyr, etc are still having fun after all these years spamming in a ball against pugs while being nearly unkillable.

The thing is, a well-organized group will always be superior when facing a group of pugs. They are organized and as a group better prepared. They are also likely on comms which provides even more advantage.

This is and should be the case in Cyrodiil and BGs. It is also what should be expected.

Nearly godmode and oneshotting people at once is definitely something I would call superior too. But should this be the case? No way. This is not some tiny advantage we are talking about. The heal and kill potential of organized groups while literally immune to any kind of CC + movement speed buffs is absolutely broken as hell and needs to be fixed without nerfing everyone outside those groups too much again like it happened several times in the past when ZOS was going for a change.

And yet any group can reach that level of play if they put the time into it; and in a competitive environment of course some are going to do that. Cyrodiil is the only place in the game where large scale groups can fight each other.

When I see people complaining like this all I see is "I didn't want to put the same amount of time in as they did, so please punish them."

Everybody in a ballgroup has literally 34859345893458345954 health per second, what effort are we talking about? Because you're able to organize enough people to play with you deserve to be (almost) unkillable?

Yes. In a group based game mode; a group that organizes itself, divides it's roles among it's members, theorycrafts optimal builds, and trains it's members, will and should always have a major advantage over an unorganized mob. The fact that you don't want to make a group like this does not make it unfair.

EDIT: I do want to add tho, that while I disagree that heal stacking is a major problem, there are aspects of groups that are overtuned mostly based on changes made over the past 2 years by ZOS: namely:

-Snow treaders
-harmony
-Dark Convergence
-Plaguebreak
-The Occult Overload change
-Hybridization (leading to increased stats on DDs and healers)
-Group size reductions (which makes PUGs fend for themselves more)

All of which I have been opposed to. And I have no issue with them targeting these things.

I heavily disagree with that tbh. Crosshealing is the #1 issue by far and it's pretty obvious. Having 10 hots on everybody isn't balanced, period. Nobody fights a ballgroup and thinks "*** snow treaders" afterwards lol. Ballgroups have been an issue way before they introduced any of the stuff you've mentioned.

I also don't understand your argument. An organized group will always have an advantage, no matter if they remove crosshealing or not. Revmoving crosshealing wouldn't take that advantage away, it would make them actually killable, as they should are. Right now healing is so overpowered that it allows bad players to stall a fight against much better players forever. Healing on certain classes is already so strong that solo players can stall a fight forever (while playing significantly worse than their opponent), group healing makes this issue completely gamebreaking.

ESO PvP boils down to good players who avoid fighting each other because most of these fights would be endless stalemates and they go to stomp bad and new players all over again instead. #fun

No. All of these things are far more important than cross heals. You still had cross heals way back but groups didn't feel near as powerful as they do now. Let me go through the list.

--snow treaders--makes it impossible to lock down ball groups, and given there already high speed this gives them a major advantage in maneuvering

--harmony--esentially free damage, pretty much every DD in every ball group runs harmony on their jewelry and the supports run almost every synergy possible. Heck, when I'm playing DD I even keybind "take synergy" to one of my skill buttons so I can just keep spamming synergies.

--Dark Convergence--an automatic stack creator, we have an entire build created to running just this set and doing CC so we can stack large groups for synergy bombs, and almost every ball group does as well.

--Plaguebreak--meant to prevent purge spam in ball groups. In actuality it doesn't affect us at all due to CP and additional healers. Instead we just run it on one build to blow up PUGs we fight.

--Occult Overload--now does more effective damage than VD. My group wiped once to another group because an enemy group killed a couple gaurds near us. While I appreciate the effort to reintroduce bombers this wasn't the way to do it.

--Hybridization--If there is a cross-healing problem this is the source of it. The hybridization of stats and sets allowed us to increase our damage and heals by a lot.

For instance this is what we were running in Rough Riders before the stat hybridization:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=372592

This is something more akin to what my group would run now (although I'd change the sets):

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=454867

Notice the ridiculous increase in spell and weapon damage and the regen tooltip.

I haven't even added CP on those builds.

--Decreasing group size--This benefited ball groups for several reasons. First, it made it harder to coordinate zerg groups. You now need 2 people instead of 1 to coordinate the same amount of people. This severely limits faction guilds' such as AoC, ability to handle ball groups. Secondly, it made PUGS even more of a liability to have aground since with a smaller group size it's harder to hide the performance of less skilled players.


In other words, what ZOS has basically done the last few years is make us immune to CC, gave us more efficient sets/passives to stack and kill PUGS, higher damage and heals, and reduce zergs' ability to coordinate against us.

If they want to nerf us they should:
--bring back 24 man groups
--Eliminate PB/DC
--Nerf harmony/swift/expedition
--Nerf O_O back to what it was last patch
--Bring back bombers by un-nerfing mech acuity

And if those things are not successful I'll agree to a change in heal stacks. But I'd rather get rid of the buffs they've given us the last few years than change a fundamental aspect of the game, at least at first.

I've read a lot of your replies and I'm a little confused.

On one hand you think cross-healing isn't very beneficial, but you are defending taking it away. So either it is an advantage or it isn't.

Two healers spamming rr and vigor can put 10k ticks on everyone else in the group in short order. That's not counting any other active or passive heals they are laying down, or any other health buffs they are adding (such as minor toughness from warden).

There is nothing skillful about running a ballgroup except for the coordination. That takes time to get down. But most ballgroups rely on the advantages the game gives them that are not based on skill alone. It's not my fault I can't blow up that tower or that tree or that rock the ballgroup keeps dancing around for 20 minutes. It's not my faut they run snowtreaders to block the skills and sets that at one point in time were effective against ballgroups.

Most ballgroups go to a combat marker, run inside the keep and find a tower or get inside the inner. They then spend as much time possible kiting enemies around, until finally enough opposing numbers show up they either die or run away.

Let's go through your suggestions.

24 man groups. Okay. Do you not remember 24 man ballgroups? The problem doesn't change.

PB/DC. The issue with these two sets is they are usable by ballgroups and emps, and not very effective anymore on other players. They could use some tuning up.

Harmony/Swift/Expedition. So we want to kill these very usable traits and buff because of ball groups? No, I don't think so. Ballgroups make up a very small percentage of the population. I don't think nerfing anything that is beneficial to everyone else just because it -might- hurt ballgroups is a very good idea. It wouldn't, by the way. You'd just make everyone a little slower. They've also already nerfed harmony once.

The one thing you said that I 100% agree with is bringing back NB bombers via mechanical. A few coordinated bombers could wipe a ballgroup. They could wipe a dumb zerg just mindlessly eating up the map. The only reason they were taken away is because last summer during midyear the forums blew up (as they usually do during midyears because of inexperienced players getting killed). It's no coincidence that the following update had MA gutted.

Revert MA with the condition that it cannot crit other proc sets (or just remove proc set crits again). NBs with MA had to work harder than they currently due, but had over 5 seconds better killing power. So you had more time to defend against the burst, but good players would win out. NB bombers were great equalizers and are sorely missed.

Cuddlypuff

TheEndBringer wrote: »

The one thing you said that I 100% agree with is bringing back NB bombers via mechanical. A few coordinated bombers could wipe a ballgroup. They could wipe a dumb zerg just mindlessly eating up the map. The only reason they were taken away is because last summer during midyear the forums blew up (as they usually do during midyears because of inexperienced players getting killed). It's no coincidence that the following update had MA gutted.

Revert MA with the condition that it cannot crit other proc sets (or just remove proc set crits again). NBs with MA had to work harder than they currently due, but had over 5 seconds better killing power. So you had more time to defend against the burst, but good players would win out. NB bombers were great equalizers and are sorely missed.

There needs to be a way for a solo bomber to wipe a ball zerg. The real nerf to NB bombing was the proxy det adjustment that removed all offensive threat w/o tether and completely gutted the playstyle between bombs. I've switched to harmonycro and cleaveDK since then, which are also OP bombers but would never be BIS for one simple reason: lag. Tether bombers can preload all their buffs and damage and stealth in for a single button press of ulti, while all the other bombers rely on complex kiting and combos and extremely tight burst windows that just don't happen up against the lag generated by ball zergs.

DrSlaughtr

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

Cuddlypuff wrote: »

TheEndBringer wrote: »

The one thing you said that I 100% agree with is bringing back NB bombers via mechanical. A few coordinated bombers could wipe a ballgroup. They could wipe a dumb zerg just mindlessly eating up the map. The only reason they were taken away is because last summer during midyear the forums blew up (as they usually do during midyears because of inexperienced players getting killed). It's no coincidence that the following update had MA gutted.

Revert MA with the condition that it cannot crit other proc sets (or just remove proc set crits again). NBs with MA had to work harder than they currently due, but had over 5 seconds better killing power. So you had more time to defend against the burst, but good players would win out. NB bombers were great equalizers and are sorely missed.

There needs to be a way for a solo bomber to wipe a ball zerg. The real nerf to NB bombing was the proxy det adjustment that removed all offensive threat w/o tether and completely gutted the playstyle between bombs. I've switched to harmonycro and cleaveDK since then, which are also OP bombers but would never be BIS for one simple reason: lag. Tether bombers can preload all their buffs and damage and stealth in for a single button press of ulti, while all the other bombers rely on complex kiting and combos and extremely tight burst windows that just don't happen up against the lag generated by ball zergs.

So the issue with necro bombers is that it fully reliant on proc sets and self synergy, but also you can stack other synergies there too because of harmony. This means it's very useful to have necro bombers in groups, even ballgroups, or zergs. So they aren't effective tools against ballgroups or zergs, as they make up a good portion of them.

Magblade bombers, on the other hand, were mostly solitary, or you'd see a few in one group. The way they operated was based completely around skills, with one set giving 5 seconds of crit guarantee. They were not useful at all in ballgroups. Ballgroups running proxy put it on necros/sorcs/etc. They also preferred more often than not to avoid zerging, as that limits bombing. So you had a class and build perfectly suited to slow down or stop ballgroups/zergs without being a tool for them to use.

Arcanasx

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Arcanasx wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

My group only runs Vigor/RR on our healers and we still stomp zergs.

If I'm on a DD I don't have to worry about keeping myself alive and can just run into groups relying on my talented healers to keep me alive.

I may have come off as too literal in my previous post, but the point is, If only your healers are using HOTs and stacking them, and your DDs apparently are not using any heals for themselves, this still proves how ridiculously overperforming cross healing is (HOT stacking especially) when are able to stomp zergs like this in your own words. I'm also certain if you were to look at how much healing is being done, the great majority of it would be coming from HOTs rather than more reactive heals, hence why I mentioned groups are being carried by passive cross HOTs.

The other sentence I've bolded also points out how overtuned cross healing is when you yourself claim that DDs in your group don't even have to worry about their own survivability because of the absurd amount of healing being pumped out by healers these days. What that does is promote passive gameplay over reactive gameplay which ultimately dumbs down the game.

Organized groups do not need access to the amount of healing currently available to play effectively. They already have the advantage of organization, communication, coordination and potential set stacking over unorganized and uncoordinated zerg masses. If anything the ridiculous amount of cross healing achievable these days actually diminishes whatever tactical skill is involved when playing as a group since it allows the group to play more carelessly and get away with arbitrary actions that would have otherwise gotten them killed without the carry that is cross healing right now.

What am I not being clear about here? We run our group like a trial group. Are trial healers OP because their DDs don't have to worry about healing?

You guys have had two group leads come in here to tell you that cross heals are not the problem. When they inevitably nerf cross heals and make the game less enjoyable for everyone (as it always happens when the forums get there way) I look forward to seeing what your excuse is when groups are still kicking everyone's butt.

Cross healing isn't just a ball group issue. Its also an issue when two small groups fight each other and in BGs as well because of the stalemates they cause. The fact that a dedicated healer can often negate the incoming damage of three separate DDs is obviously a problem. Even more so that a dedicated healer can heal enough that for every one there is, three DDs don't even have to worry about staying alive as is apparently the case for your own group. Imagine if the roles were reversed where in order to negate the damage output of one DD, you needed to have three dedicated healers; does that seem fair and balanced to you?

I also wouldn't try using PvE as a reason to justify what's currently happening in PvP. What works in PvE shouldn't always be the case for PvP. I'm sure your PvP trial-like group doesn't include any dedicated tanks; context matters.

Organized groups do not need access to the amount of healing currently available to play effectively.

And yes, as I've already said in my other post and repeating it now, organized groups are still going to dominate even if cross healing is gutted just because of their advantages I had previously mentioned. They'll just have to try a little harder to do so and play more carefully.

neferpitou73

TheEndBringer wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

divnyi wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Did you miss the part where I said we run 4 healers, who are obviously running more than RR/Vigor?

So each member has 4 Vigors and 4 RR.
3 Vigors = 1 Resolving Vigor, 2 RR = 1 Resolving Vigor.

Your group has 3 Resolving Vigors passively.

Passive cross-healing does more to your group than you want to admit.

Whats the problem with dedicated healers being able to heal group members in this way? The issue is actually just due to heal scaling being based on the same stats as damage. Split healing and damage stats could make things quite interesting. They already split proc sets in this manor just not skills...

I've always thought having resistances affect heals in the same way they affect damage could also be interesting, but I couldn't tell you how balanced that would be.

Ragnaroek93 wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Ragnaroek93 wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

HonestLoverr wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

pleximus wrote: »

I honestly do not understand Drac, Tyr, etc are still having fun after all these years spamming in a ball against pugs while being nearly unkillable.

The thing is, a well-organized group will always be superior when facing a group of pugs. They are organized and as a group better prepared. They are also likely on comms which provides even more advantage.

This is and should be the case in Cyrodiil and BGs. It is also what should be expected.

Nearly godmode and oneshotting people at once is definitely something I would call superior too. But should this be the case? No way. This is not some tiny advantage we are talking about. The heal and kill potential of organized groups while literally immune to any kind of CC + movement speed buffs is absolutely broken as hell and needs to be fixed without nerfing everyone outside those groups too much again like it happened several times in the past when ZOS was going for a change.

And yet any group can reach that level of play if they put the time into it; and in a competitive environment of course some are going to do that. Cyrodiil is the only place in the game where large scale groups can fight each other.

When I see people complaining like this all I see is "I didn't want to put the same amount of time in as they did, so please punish them."

Everybody in a ballgroup has literally 34859345893458345954 health per second, what effort are we talking about? Because you're able to organize enough people to play with you deserve to be (almost) unkillable?

Yes. In a group based game mode; a group that organizes itself, divides it's roles among it's members, theorycrafts optimal builds, and trains it's members, will and should always have a major advantage over an unorganized mob. The fact that you don't want to make a group like this does not make it unfair.

EDIT: I do want to add tho, that while I disagree that heal stacking is a major problem, there are aspects of groups that are overtuned mostly based on changes made over the past 2 years by ZOS: namely:

-Snow treaders
-harmony
-Dark Convergence
-Plaguebreak
-The Occult Overload change
-Hybridization (leading to increased stats on DDs and healers)
-Group size reductions (which makes PUGs fend for themselves more)

All of which I have been opposed to. And I have no issue with them targeting these things.

I heavily disagree with that tbh. Crosshealing is the #1 issue by far and it's pretty obvious. Having 10 hots on everybody isn't balanced, period. Nobody fights a ballgroup and thinks "*** snow treaders" afterwards lol. Ballgroups have been an issue way before they introduced any of the stuff you've mentioned.

I also don't understand your argument. An organized group will always have an advantage, no matter if they remove crosshealing or not. Revmoving crosshealing wouldn't take that advantage away, it would make them actually killable, as they should are. Right now healing is so overpowered that it allows bad players to stall a fight against much better players forever. Healing on certain classes is already so strong that solo players can stall a fight forever (while playing significantly worse than their opponent), group healing makes this issue completely gamebreaking.

ESO PvP boils down to good players who avoid fighting each other because most of these fights would be endless stalemates and they go to stomp bad and new players all over again instead. #fun

No. All of these things are far more important than cross heals. You still had cross heals way back but groups didn't feel near as powerful as they do now. Let me go through the list.

--snow treaders--makes it impossible to lock down ball groups, and given there already high speed this gives them a major advantage in maneuvering

--harmony--esentially free damage, pretty much every DD in every ball group runs harmony on their jewelry and the supports run almost every synergy possible. Heck, when I'm playing DD I even keybind "take synergy" to one of my skill buttons so I can just keep spamming synergies.

--Dark Convergence--an automatic stack creator, we have an entire build created to running just this set and doing CC so we can stack large groups for synergy bombs, and almost every ball group does as well.

--Plaguebreak--meant to prevent purge spam in ball groups. In actuality it doesn't affect us at all due to CP and additional healers. Instead we just run it on one build to blow up PUGs we fight.

--Occult Overload--now does more effective damage than VD. My group wiped once to another group because an enemy group killed a couple gaurds near us. While I appreciate the effort to reintroduce bombers this wasn't the way to do it.

--Hybridization--If there is a cross-healing problem this is the source of it. The hybridization of stats and sets allowed us to increase our damage and heals by a lot.

For instance this is what we were running in Rough Riders before the stat hybridization:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=372592

This is something more akin to what my group would run now (although I'd change the sets):

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=454867

Notice the ridiculous increase in spell and weapon damage and the regen tooltip.

I haven't even added CP on those builds.

--Decreasing group size--This benefited ball groups for several reasons. First, it made it harder to coordinate zerg groups. You now need 2 people instead of 1 to coordinate the same amount of people. This severely limits faction guilds' such as AoC, ability to handle ball groups. Secondly, it made PUGS even more of a liability to have aground since with a smaller group size it's harder to hide the performance of less skilled players.


In other words, what ZOS has basically done the last few years is make us immune to CC, gave us more efficient sets/passives to stack and kill PUGS, higher damage and heals, and reduce zergs' ability to coordinate against us.

If they want to nerf us they should:
--bring back 24 man groups
--Eliminate PB/DC
--Nerf harmony/swift/expedition
--Nerf O_O back to what it was last patch
--Bring back bombers by un-nerfing mech acuity

And if those things are not successful I'll agree to a change in heal stacks. But I'd rather get rid of the buffs they've given us the last few years than change a fundamental aspect of the game, at least at first.

I've read a lot of your replies and I'm a little confused.

On one hand you think cross-healing isn't very beneficial, but you are defending taking it away. So either it is an advantage or it isn't.

Two healers spamming rr and vigor can put 10k ticks on everyone else in the group in short order. That's not counting any other active or passive heals they are laying down, or any other health buffs they are adding (such as minor toughness from warden).

There is nothing skillful about running a ballgroup except for the coordination. That takes time to get down. But most ballgroups rely on the advantages the game gives them that are not based on skill alone. It's not my fault I can't blow up that tower or that tree or that rock the ballgroup keeps dancing around for 20 minutes. It's not my faut they run snowtreaders to block the skills and sets that at one point in time were effective against ballgroups.

Most ballgroups go to a combat marker, run inside the keep and find a tower or get inside the inner. They then spend as much time possible kiting enemies around, until finally enough opposing numbers show up they either die or run away.

Let's go through your suggestions.

24 man groups. Okay. Do you not remember 24 man ballgroups? The problem doesn't change.

PB/DC. The issue with these two sets is they are usable by ballgroups and emps, and not very effective anymore on other players. They could use some tuning up.

Harmony/Swift/Expedition. So we want to kill these very usable traits and buff because of ball groups? No, I don't think so. Ballgroups make up a very small percentage of the population. I don't think nerfing anything that is beneficial to everyone else just because it -might- hurt ballgroups is a very good idea. It wouldn't, by the way. You'd just make everyone a little slower. They've also already nerfed harmony once.

The one thing you said that I 100% agree with is bringing back NB bombers via mechanical. A few coordinated bombers could wipe a ballgroup. They could wipe a dumb zerg just mindlessly eating up the map. The only reason they were taken away is because last summer during midyear the forums blew up (as they usually do during midyears because of inexperienced players getting killed). It's no coincidence that the following update had MA gutted.

Revert MA with the condition that it cannot crit other proc sets (or just remove proc set crits again). NBs with MA had to work harder than they currently due, but had over 5 seconds better killing power. So you had more time to defend against the burst, but good players would win out. NB bombers were great equalizers and are sorely missed.

Yes, I do remember 24 man ball groups. Still weren't as big an issue as today's groups. It was possible to coordinate a zerg group to put up more resistance. Pop caps were also higher which provided much stronger resistance.

PB and DC were unnecessary. Period. Cost scaling on purge would've had a much greater effect. As it is we just ignore PB. DC should never have been added. It serves absolutely no purpose besides buffing balls. Snowtreaders should never have been added as well.

I will concede your point on nerfing the traits. Although I will still argue that harmony deserves a bit more of a nerf. And outside of niche builds, llke Necro bombers I don't think it's going to be missed.

Bombers we are absolutely in agreement on. I long for the days of Icehouse.

Arcanasx wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Arcanasx wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

My group only runs Vigor/RR on our healers and we still stomp zergs.

If I'm on a DD I don't have to worry about keeping myself alive and can just run into groups relying on my talented healers to keep me alive.

I may have come off as too literal in my previous post, but the point is, If only your healers are using HOTs and stacking them, and your DDs apparently are not using any heals for themselves, this still proves how ridiculously overperforming cross healing is (HOT stacking especially) when are able to stomp zergs like this in your own words. I'm also certain if you were to look at how much healing is being done, the great majority of it would be coming from HOTs rather than more reactive heals, hence why I mentioned groups are being carried by passive cross HOTs.

The other sentence I've bolded also points out how overtuned cross healing is when you yourself claim that DDs in your group don't even have to worry about their own survivability because of the absurd amount of healing being pumped out by healers these days. What that does is promote passive gameplay over reactive gameplay which ultimately dumbs down the game.

Organized groups do not need access to the amount of healing currently available to play effectively. They already have the advantage of organization, communication, coordination and potential set stacking over unorganized and uncoordinated zerg masses. If anything the ridiculous amount of cross healing achievable these days actually diminishes whatever tactical skill is involved when playing as a group since it allows the group to play more carelessly and get away with arbitrary actions that would have otherwise gotten them killed without the carry that is cross healing right now.

What am I not being clear about here? We run our group like a trial group. Are trial healers OP because their DDs don't have to worry about healing?

You guys have had two group leads come in here to tell you that cross heals are not the problem. When they inevitably nerf cross heals and make the game less enjoyable for everyone (as it always happens when the forums get there way) I look forward to seeing what your excuse is when groups are still kicking everyone's butt.

Cross healing isn't just a ball group issue. Its also an issue when two small groups fight each other and in BGs as well because of the stalemates they cause. The fact that a dedicated healer can often negate the incoming damage of three separate DDs is obviously a problem. Even more so that a dedicated healer can heal enough that for every one there is, three DDs don't even have to worry about staying alive as is apparently the case for your own group. Imagine if the roles were reversed where in order to negate the damage output of one DD, you needed to have three dedicated healers; does that seem fair and balanced to you?

I also wouldn't try using PvE as a reason to justify what's currently happening in PvP. What works in PvE shouldn't always be the case for PvP. I'm sure your PvP trial-like group doesn't include any dedicated tanks; context matters.

Organized groups do not need access to the amount of healing currently available to play effectively.

And yes, as I've already said in my other post and repeating it now, organized groups are still going to dominate even if cross healing is gutted just because of their advantages I had previously mentioned. They'll just have to try a little harder to do so and play more carefully.

I fundamentally disagree with this suggestion. That is the entire point of a healer. You can argue that healing as a whole needs a nerf if you like so that you have to run more healers.

Wrong : ) We do run tanks

The entire point of my responses has been that you are trying to restructure a major game system to fix an issue caused entirely by the changes ZOS has added over the last couple of years. I'd like to try fixing some of those before we change how healing works.

Regardless this conversation doesn't seem to be productive anymore so I'll refrain from responding.

React

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

Amottica wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

React wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

divnyi wrote: »

@neferpitou73 you are talking about organizing, roles etc, but why do you dodging the main point of this thread - organized group has Vigor + Radiant Regeneration stacks, which doesn't require you to fit any role, you spam it regardless of your role.

Vigor heals 3 times less than resolving vigor. Given 12man group, it means you get 4 resolving vigors running all the time just from ONE skill. FOUR. RESOLVING. VIGORS. And I didn't count radiant regens in. How is this fair?

Because I don't think it's an issue. My group only runs Vigor/RR on our healers and we still stomp zergs. It's the group coordination and division of labor that allows ball groups to survive. If I'm on a DD I don't have to worry about keeping myself alive and can just run into groups relying on my talented healers to keep me alive. Likewise my healers can rely on the DDs to just kill everything so they can focus on keeping things alive.

I'm just saying, you guys have had two ball group leads come into this thread to tell you they don't think the heal stacks are the issue but have provided several other reasons why they think groups are dominating/overtuned. And we spend hours theorycrafting these comps so we know what we're talking about. Perhaps we should tackle these things before we mess with healing, which will affect literally every part of the game?

I don't know why everyone in this thread glazes over the fact that the ball groups are by far, the largest negative impact on performance that exists. Zenimax themselves acknowledged this back at the beginning of their year of performance testing, and said that the reason they have such a negative impact on server performance is because of the spamming of abilities and the constant calculations related to those abilities.

It is so obvious that having 5 RRs and 5 vigors on you should not exist in the game, and even more obvious that removing the ability to do this will be the easiest way to massively reduce the calculations your "coordinated groups" cause. As the ball group players themselves have said "we'll adapt". So what is the issue with removing this function?

And yet when they did test to see if those abilities were the problem they saw no improvement in performance. And mysteriously when they actually fixed their servers there was no lag even at prime time with several ball groups on the server.

Technically Zenimax did see improvement served side when they did those Cyrodiil tests, though they did not get into specifics about which tests showed improvement.

The main takeaway Zenimax provided is that none of the testing showed any meaningful improvements. So you are correct to note that the testing debunked the theory that stacking of hots does not create that much stress on the server compared to anything else based on actual testing and data received by Zenimax looking into this.

This is untrue. Zenimax cited ball groups as the number one contributor to the heavy calculations that strained the servers, and following the tests they did confirm that they saw a noticeable reduction in strain on the servers during their tests specifically targeting these groups.

What you're glossing over is that the tests were done on the old server hardware, which we now know was the most major part of the issue. Since PC NA has had its hardware replaced, we have seen what I would call a near 80-90% recovery in server performance in cyrodiil - the only time the game lags or becomes "unplayable" is when there are several ball groups present and spamming heals.

The tests did prove that ball groups severely strain the servers, and the PC NA hardware replacement has shown us that ball groups might be the only remaining thing holding us back from "around the clock" near perfect performance in cyrodiil.

DrSlaughtr

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

neferpitou73 wrote: »

I will concede your point on nerfing the traits. Although I will still argue that harmony deserves a bit more of a nerf. And outside of niche builds, llke Necro bombers I don't think it's going to be missed.

The issue with that is harmony is used on tanks in PVE. They already got kicked in the nuts with the first nerf. Further killing it because it's exploitation in PVP isn't fair. The harmony bombing is an issue stemming from necro's ability to self synergized their own graveyard, which allows them to bomb without requiring an ally to drop a synergy. I'm not saying take that away, because it's very class identity for them, but the fact they introduced a whole set that can only be used by them effectively because of that ability is rough.

My issue with DC is all the effects. It really should just be rush of agony, but of course it can't because rush of agony exists. But that way it would require more teamwork without the free damage proc.

I have no issue with plague these days. But that's probably because I rarely RARELY get caught in it. I imagine I'm not the average player in that regard.

Arcanasx

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Wrong : ) We do run tanks

Guess I'll concede on that point. With the amount of heals these days, healers can also simultaneously play as dedicated tanks and passively taunt multiple attackers as they laughingly shrug off incoming damage with easy heals.

Cuddlypuff

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Yes, I do remember 24 man ball groups. Still weren't as big an issue as today's groups. It was possible to coordinate a zerg group to put up more resistance. Pop caps were also higher which provided much stronger resistance.

I've actually always been curious about one thing with ball zergs, and that's the issue of group size. I can make a 4-6 man bombing setup that wipes 24 zerglings on keep 3rd level without any problems. Why would you use a 24 man group and lose out on 6x the AP if it's all diminishing returns from ~4 members onwards. You already get 90% buff/rapids coverage, 4 stacks of crossheals, more than enough cc/damage/synergies to wipe zerg clumps.

I just assumed that groups larger than that were rather casual arrangements where you just accommodated more members for the social factor, rather than any real performance gain.

DrSlaughtr

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

Cuddlypuff wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Yes, I do remember 24 man ball groups. Still weren't as big an issue as today's groups. It was possible to coordinate a zerg group to put up more resistance. Pop caps were also higher which provided much stronger resistance.

I've actually always been curious about one thing with ball zergs, and that's the issue of group size. I can make a 4-6 man bombing setup that wipes 24 zerglings on keep 3rd level without any problems. Why would you use a 24 man group and lose out on 6x the AP if it's all diminishing returns from ~4 members onwards. You already get 90% buff/rapids coverage, 4 stacks of crossheals, more than enough cc/damage/synergies to wipe zerg clumps.

I just assumed that groups larger than that were rather casual arrangements where you just accommodated more members for the social factor, rather than any real performance gain.

As often is the case when it comes to why players choose to do something, the answer quite simply is "because they can."

I used to do ballgroups. I was in a 24 man group. The AP is secondary. The primary goal is to mow over as many players as possible and/or drag as big a zerg as you can around a keep until they finally get the better of you. That's the thrill. I personally found it boring so I stopped. Every time I see a ball group running up and down the stairs in Sej I just shake my head at how mind-numbing dull that is. And yet players keep doing it.

You had 24 man ball groups because there were more players available to fight them. A 24 man coordinated group will fare a lot better against 60 enemies than 12. If they made the group number 24 again but player population stayed the same, it would be hilariously awful.

neferpitou73

Cuddlypuff wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Yes, I do remember 24 man ball groups. Still weren't as big an issue as today's groups. It was possible to coordinate a zerg group to put up more resistance. Pop caps were also higher which provided much stronger resistance.

I've actually always been curious about one thing with ball zergs, and that's the issue of group size. I can make a 4-6 man bombing setup that wipes 24 zerglings on keep 3rd level without any problems. Why would you use a 24 man group and lose out on 6x the AP if it's all diminishing returns from ~4 members onwards. You already get 90% buff/rapids coverage, 4 stacks of crossheals, more than enough cc/damage/synergies to wipe zerg clumps.

I just assumed that groups larger than that were rather casual arrangements where you just accommodated more members for the social factor, rather than any real performance gain.

This I'll answer. It's because we like playing with friends

Ragnaroek93

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

Arcanasx wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Arcanasx wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

My group only runs Vigor/RR on our healers and we still stomp zergs.

If I'm on a DD I don't have to worry about keeping myself alive and can just run into groups relying on my talented healers to keep me alive.

I may have come off as too literal in my previous post, but the point is, If only your healers are using HOTs and stacking them, and your DDs apparently are not using any heals for themselves, this still proves how ridiculously overperforming cross healing is (HOT stacking especially) when are able to stomp zergs like this in your own words. I'm also certain if you were to look at how much healing is being done, the great majority of it would be coming from HOTs rather than more reactive heals, hence why I mentioned groups are being carried by passive cross HOTs.

The other sentence I've bolded also points out how overtuned cross healing is when you yourself claim that DDs in your group don't even have to worry about their own survivability because of the absurd amount of healing being pumped out by healers these days. What that does is promote passive gameplay over reactive gameplay which ultimately dumbs down the game.

Organized groups do not need access to the amount of healing currently available to play effectively. They already have the advantage of organization, communication, coordination and potential set stacking over unorganized and uncoordinated zerg masses. If anything the ridiculous amount of cross healing achievable these days actually diminishes whatever tactical skill is involved when playing as a group since it allows the group to play more carelessly and get away with arbitrary actions that would have otherwise gotten them killed without the carry that is cross healing right now.

What am I not being clear about here? We run our group like a trial group. Are trial healers OP because their DDs don't have to worry about healing?

You guys have had two group leads come in here to tell you that cross heals are not the problem. When they inevitably nerf cross heals and make the game less enjoyable for everyone (as it always happens when the forums get there way) I look forward to seeing what your excuse is when groups are still kicking everyone's butt.

Cross healing isn't just a ball group issue. Its also an issue when two small groups fight each other and in BGs as well because of the stalemates they cause. The fact that a dedicated healer can often negate the incoming damage of three separate DDs is obviously a problem. Even more so that a dedicated healer can heal enough that for every one there is, three DDs don't even have to worry about staying alive as is apparently the case for your own group. Imagine if the roles were reversed where in order to negate the damage output of one DD, you needed to have three dedicated healers; does that seem fair and balanced to you?

I also wouldn't try using PvE as a reason to justify what's currently happening in PvP. What works in PvE shouldn't always be the case for PvP. I'm sure your PvP trial-like group doesn't include any dedicated tanks; context matters.

Organized groups do not need access to the amount of healing currently available to play effectively.

And yes, as I've already said in my other post and repeating it now, organized groups are still going to dominate even if cross healing is gutted just because of their advantages I had previously mentioned. They'll just have to try a little harder to do so and play more carefully.

They should just rework healers to be more of a supporter in my opinion. Healers in ESO are the most broken iteration of healers which I've ever seen in a MMO. You can't allow a healer to negate several dds if you don't allow any counters to it, period. CC doesn't matter in this game, none of the heals can be interrupted like in other games, ressources don't matter either and "healers" are tanks on top of everything. Doing something against the sheer amount of cross healing is the bare minimum which ZOS should do (instead of nerfing offensive CP lol).

doesurmindglow

These threads are always filled with pugs that don't seem to remotely understand what it is that's causing their difficulty: Which is, unsurprisingly, previous threads exactly like these they have long since forgotten about.

HOT stacking is today's purge: the apparent silver bullet nerf that will finally stop organized, coordinated group play for good.

If or when this nerf happens, I fully expect most of the same people to be right back here complaining that somehow the nerf intended to make disorganized, uncoordinated solo play more viable had the opposite effect.

doesurmindglow

Cuddlypuff wrote: »

I've actually always been curious about one thing with ball zergs, and that's the issue of group size. I can make a 4-6 man bombing setup that wipes 24 zerglings on keep 3rd level without any problems. Why would you use a 24 man group and lose out on 6x the AP if it's all diminishing returns from ~4 members onwards. You already get 90% buff/rapids coverage, 4 stacks of crossheals, more than enough cc/damage/synergies to wipe zerg clumps.

I just assumed that groups larger than that were rather casual arrangements where you just accommodated more members for the social factor, rather than any real performance gain.

Properly comped ball groups are the same thing as your "4-6 man bombing setup" but they add healers and speed that make it so they can survive indefinitely rather than the usual 1 or 2 good bombs before they're zerged. That's it, that's the whole difference. Imagine the bombing setup but you can keep bombing basically until a 60 man zerg stacks up that can kill you with siege, and you have a standard ball group.

The AP is better, I promise, as someone who has run extensively with both.

doesurmindglow

Arcanasx wrote: »

Cross healing isn't just a ball group issue. Its also an issue when two small groups fight each other and in BGs as well because of the stalemates they cause. The fact that a dedicated healer can often negate the incoming damage of three separate DDs is obviously a problem. Even more so that a dedicated healer can heal enough that for every one there is, three DDs don't even have to worry about staying alive as is apparently the case for your own group. Imagine if the roles were reversed where in order to negate the damage output of one DD, you needed to have three dedicated healers; does that seem fair and balanced to you?

I also wouldn't try using PvE as a reason to justify what's currently happening in PvP. What works in PvE shouldn't always be the case for PvP. I'm sure your PvP trial-like group doesn't include any dedicated tanks; context matters.

Organized groups do not need access to the amount of healing currently available to play effectively.

And yes, as I've already said in my other post and repeating it now, organized groups are still going to dominate even if cross healing is gutted just because of their advantages I had previously mentioned. They'll just have to try a little harder to do so and play more carefully.

I tend to agree with the core point in bold but the problem with this solution is it overlooks how thoroughly the disorganized groups are carried by crossheals also.

RIght now, the many attempts to add "penalties" to "organizing a group" in Cyrodiil has made it a minefield of 26k HP pugs that pop easily for huge bombs on groups of all sizes, and these are most punishing when the group isn't prepared or built for it.

"Ball groups" is the term people use for group compositions that are optimized to fully exploit that killing potential while also minimizing their impact from it. Nerfing crossheals will affect the latter for sure, as I think many people intend; but it will ALSO, and much more importantly, exacerbate the former: now instead of a minefield of 26k HP pugs that proc VD/PB/DC/OO/(more future bomber mech abbreviations here), we'll have a minefield of 26k HP pugs that proc VD/PB/etc and cannot be healed.

For the record, I'm not actually against a limit on HOT stacking as I think it would force groups to be more creative about how they defend themselves. But you're delusional if you think such a change will do anything besides make ball groups stronger.

Arcanasx

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

doesurmindglow wrote: »

Arcanasx wrote: »

Cross healing isn't just a ball group issue. Its also an issue when two small groups fight each other and in BGs as well because of the stalemates they cause. The fact that a dedicated healer can often negate the incoming damage of three separate DDs is obviously a problem. Even more so that a dedicated healer can heal enough that for every one there is, three DDs don't even have to worry about staying alive as is apparently the case for your own group. Imagine if the roles were reversed where in order to negate the damage output of one DD, you needed to have three dedicated healers; does that seem fair and balanced to you?

I also wouldn't try using PvE as a reason to justify what's currently happening in PvP. What works in PvE shouldn't always be the case for PvP. I'm sure your PvP trial-like group doesn't include any dedicated tanks; context matters.

Organized groups do not need access to the amount of healing currently available to play effectively.

And yes, as I've already said in my other post and repeating it now, organized groups are still going to dominate even if cross healing is gutted just because of their advantages I had previously mentioned. They'll just have to try a little harder to do so and play more carefully.

I tend to agree with the core point in bold but the problem with this solution is it overlooks how thoroughly the disorganized groups are carried by crossheals also.

RIght now, the many attempts to add "penalties" to "organizing a group" in Cyrodiil has made it a minefield of 26k HP pugs that pop easily for huge bombs on groups of all sizes, and these are most punishing when the group isn't prepared or built for it.

"Ball groups" is the term people use for group compositions that are optimized to fully exploit that killing potential while also minimizing their impact from it. Nerfing crossheals will affect the latter for sure, as I think many people intend; but it will ALSO, and much more importantly, exacerbate the former: now instead of a minefield of 26k HP pugs that proc VD/PB/DC/OO/(more future bomber mech abbreviations here), we'll have a minefield of 26k HP pugs that proc VD/PB/etc and cannot be healed.

For the record, I'm not actually against a limit on HOT stacking as I think it would force groups to be more creative about how they defend themselves. But you're delusional if you think such a change will do anything besides make ball groups stronger.

I'm well aware that a cross healing nerf will also affect pugs and make them easier to kill. I'm not even specifically acting against ball groups when I say I want cross healing toned down; I mentioned that it was absurd that cross healing is strong enough that sometimes DDs don't even have to worry about their own survivability. This goes for whether they belong to a ball group or if they happen to be zerg surfing. OP cross healing is negatively effecting all forms of pvp that involves more than two players.

A large part of why cross healing is bad right now is because its offering a significant buffer of safety that allows players to perform on "autopilot" as many of the mistakes they can make are made inconsequential, as well as prolonging fights far more than they should last.

For the record, I'm not actually against a limit on HOT stacking as I think it would force groups to be more creative about how they defend themselves. But you're delusional if you think such a change will do anything besides make ball groups stronger.

It will be a nerf for mediocre groups who overly depend on healing. It might even be a buff for good groups who are able to more effectively mitigate the loss in heals compared to unorganized zergs and turn it into an advantage when it comes to killing said zergs.

DrSlaughtr

Disallow multiple rapid/radiating regeneration procs to stack and instead have the highest heal available take precedent

I don't buy the "hot stacking will hurt pugs" argument because if you aren't in a group with a dedicate healer spamming rr and vigor, you aren't getting stacked hots. If you're lucky you might leech one tick off a passing healer.

I am not anti-ballgroups. I am anti-advantages that have no counters. There's nothing I can do about 10 players having multiple rr and vigor ticks on them courtesy of two healers that only have to worry about those two skills and heavy attacks. Negate? They will just avoid it and reapply as necessary. If someone has a revolving 10k tick on them every second, there's very little you can do until you out number them 3 to 1.

Either way, even if I'm running with one healer and they are reigning down HOTs on me, that's not balanced either. One skill should equal one tick. If the two ball healers want to drop other heals on top of RR and vigor, so be it, at least then they are being forced to work harder.

Hey remember when PVP healers had to actually wear healer gear? Now they can just go tanky with some damage and heal like maniacs because they only have to worry about having the sustain to run two skills non-stop, and a resto heavy is enough to refill them.

Yes, if you eliminated hot stacking ball groups would adjust, but any adjustment will make them inherently easier to kill, which will force them to adjust further. Maybe they start specking their DDs to be tankier, but that means their damage goes down, making them less effective in wiping bigger groups of enemies. Maybe their healers have to wear healing gear and have less sustain because they're having to run more healing skills. That means the healer isn't a bloody tank and can be killed easier by the enemy.

doesurmindglow

TheEndBringer wrote: »

I don't buy the "hot stacking will hurt pugs" argument because if you aren't in a group with a dedicate healer spamming rr and vigor, you aren't getting stacked hots. If you're lucky you might leech one tick off a passing healer.
...
Yes, if you eliminated hot stacking ball groups would adjust, but any adjustment will make them inherently easier to kill, which will force them to adjust further. Maybe they start specking their DDs to be tankier, but that means their damage goes down, making them less effective in wiping bigger groups of enemies. Maybe their healers have to wear healing gear and have less sustain because they're having to run more healing skills. That means the healer isn't a bloody tank and can be killed easier by the enemy.

I mean most pugs are in a group with a dedicated healer spamming RR and vigor, they just don't realize it because they're not coordinating actively with that person in the way a ball group does. But it's happening regardless.

I mean to be clear: I'd be entirely fine with this change, as I run with ball groups pretty regularly and nerfing crossheals will make it so much easier to kill pugs by depriving them of heals, and it would have no real downside for our groups. Ball groups don't even have to use crossheals at all to be tanky and effective; they could easily swap to compositions focused on sustain and damage mitigation and rely entirely on more powerful self-heals if they needed to.

But I don't really think that's the outcome a lot of people here are imagining, just as HOT stacking wasn't the outcome they were imagining when they called for purge to be nerfed. Everyone has clearly forgotten now how that was the same kind of silver bullet that wouldn't at all be a problem for pugs -- "they don't have dedicated purgebots anyway!" -- and how it was going to solve this problem for good, but some of us do remember.

Cuddlypuff

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Yes, I do remember 24 man ball groups. Still weren't as big an issue as today's groups. It was possible to coordinate a zerg group to put up more resistance. Pop caps were also higher which provided much stronger resistance.

doesurmindglow wrote: »

Cuddlypuff wrote: »

I've actually always been curious about one thing with ball zergs, and that's the issue of group size. I can make a 4-6 man bombing setup that wipes 24 zerglings on keep 3rd level without any problems. Why would you use a 24 man group and lose out on 6x the AP if it's all diminishing returns from ~4 members onwards. You already get 90% buff/rapids coverage, 4 stacks of crossheals, more than enough cc/damage/synergies to wipe zerg clumps.

I just assumed that groups larger than that were rather casual arrangements where you just accommodated more members for the social factor, rather than any real performance gain.

Properly comped ball groups are the same thing as your "4-6 man bombing setup" but they add healers and speed that make it so they can survive indefinitely rather than the usual 1 or 2 good bombs before they're zerged. That's it, that's the whole difference. Imagine the bombing setup but you can keep bombing basically until a 60 man zerg stacks up that can kill you with siege, and you have a standard ball group.

The AP is better, I promise, as someone who has run extensively with both.

Few things to point out here.
1. Solo or duo bombing is the best AP in the game without even breaking a sweat. No ball zerg or small scale group in PCNA GH gets anywhere near our AP/h (not a flex or even a skill related thing, just facts).
2. We don't need to run 4-6 man because it only takes 2 bombers to wipe pugs reliably. 2 bombers can often pull off anywhere between 2 and 4 bombs, for 20-30 kills all within 30-120 seconds. It's probably the most fun you can have in PVP right now. Extra healing, survivability, damage, speed, tower/keep humping etc are just training wheels that many people think they need but will do just fine without. I spent most of last campaign as a Redguard writ alt with missing passives, wrong trait/weight gear and the build was already so OP I didn't even bother to optimize.
3. 4-6 man groups can and have farmed for over 30 minutes on keep top floors simply due to the layout. The problem is the AP gain pretty much flatlines after the initial 5 min and each subsequent kill is worth <100 AP. You'd be lucky to get one upgraded D-tick and that's only if pugs are not bright enough to take RSS or pressure groups off flags.
4. 1-2 man bombing gets all the full value AP from the initial kills and the upgraded interim D-tick. You are also free to die/bloodport and move on to the next bomb, rather than feeling obligated to stay and run around in circles, gain trash AP and having to camp back again and again. This pretty much sums up why we refuse to join any groups or ball zergs.