Occult overload / plaguebreak / Vicious death

alternatelder

These pvp sets such as DC and Plaguebreak should be level cp 160 minimum, they've flooded under 50 BGs making it even worse. We already have vets who power level through them, steamrolling new players.
Just remove these sets already. Pvp right now is just a bunch of thumbless, facerolling bombing.

Wolfpaw

PB, VD, & OO are great as is.

ZOS gave you folks no-proc/no-cp campaign to play, stop asking for nerfs in Proc/CP campaigns.

StarOfElyon

alternatelder wrote: »

I don't know about anyone else but I am so sick of the bomb meta right now. VD is fine, it should remain untouched though. The other two are 98% of everyone's death recaps.

I'm with you. Got killed by a 12k occult overload because an aimless button smasher killed an NPC next to me.

StarOfElyon

I simply hate when I don't get an opportunity to show some skill in a fight because some type of proc takes away my agency or ability to play the game. ZOS caters to accessibility but at the same time puts procs in the game that are overwhelming and demoralizing to combat.

Miracle19

React wrote: »

I mean, here is us killing a ballgroup 3v12 using plague/occult. Wouldn't have been possible without those two things.

https://streamable.com/1et2s3

There are two things that need to happen, in order for combating ballgroups to become a reality. First, heal stacking needs to be nerfed. You should not be able to have more than one of a specific HOT on you at a time (so no 6x radiant regens and 6x echoing vigors). Two, they need to do some sort of expoential scaling on AOEs.

For example, if they reduce the tooltips of AOE spammables such as pulsar, steel tornado, cleave, sap essence, necro scythe, dk deep breath, etc, but then added exponential scaling of + 50% per target, there would be much more counterplay to groups stacking via these abilities. Right now you simply cannot even deal damage to ball groups unless you instantly nuke them with a negate + plague + occult + synergy combo, because they have every mitigation buff in the game and 10k+ hps ticking on every player from their stacked heal over times.

If I had the ability to hit 10 people with my aoe spammable and have it deal 500% more damage, even with a much lower base tooltip this would give me the potential to combat players that rely on stacking like ball groups do.

The best part about this? It wouldn't be sets or CP doing all the work for you, like is the case now with PB/occult. The truth about ball groups is that often times, most of the players aren't very indivually skilled and simply rely on absurd amounts of healing and mitigation to stay alive. Meanwhile, they can just spam AOEs and proc sets to deal the damage they need. If they were required to actually hit multiple targets to get effectiveness out of the aoes they are spamming, they would need to be much more skillful about where and when they use their aoes. Simultaneously, they would need to be wary of stacking as they could be hit with exponentially higher AOE damage.

It seems like a pretty obvious solution to a problem zenimax has been trying to solve for years.

While that was a good bomb, to be fair, against a good group, we both know it’s not that simple and they wouldn’t have died from that.

While the PB/Vicious/ occult combo are very lethal, it requires you to kill someone first, which once again against good players and with all of the healing, by the slightest chance you get a kill , it is your only shot to wipe a good group. Balancing things around bad/average players is simply not a good idea, as damage would plummet and you would have stalemates when good players/teams right.

React

Miracle19 wrote: »

While that was a good bomb, to be fair, against a good group, we both know it’s not that simple and they wouldn’t have died from that.

While the PB/Vicious/ occult combo are very lethal, it requires you to kill someone first, which once again against good players and with all of the healing, by the slightest chance you get a kill , it is your only shot to wipe a good group. Balancing things around bad/average players is simply not a good idea, as damage would plummet and you would have stalemates when good players/teams right.

I'm confused about what point you're making here. Are you suggesting that PB/VD/occult are balanced mechanics, and are sufficient to combat ballgroups?

TechMaybeHic

It's a bit much so I agree with that, but I don't think we want to nerf this stuff with the meta we have coming

Dem_kitkats1

Miracle19 wrote: »

While that was a good bomb, to be fair, against a good group, we both know it’s not that simple and they wouldn’t have died from that.

While the PB/Vicious/ occult combo are very lethal, it requires you to kill someone first, which once again against good players and with all of the healing, by the slightest chance you get a kill , it is your only shot to wipe a good group. Balancing things around bad/average players is simply not a good idea, as damage would plummet and you would have stalemates when good players/teams right.

You also can't balance things around one playstyle; especially one that's arguably op. Coordinated groups stalemate due to their access to infinite healing and sources of mitigation, and the fact that no one else can get near them. It's not for a lack of damage out there. You can't justify a free slotable, 1 proc mechanic that only empowers coordinated groups to do obscene damage, and leaves others counterless as being balanced. I mean if coordinated groups can't break through the healing and mitigation of others, with that many tools at their fingertips, then I don't know what to say. Nothing more will help with that, not without completely shattering the game balance.

However, outside of coordinated group play Occult/Plaguebreak is absolutely ridiculous and a 1 shot, instakill mechanic for players of any skill. Don't stack and hold block is an abysmal counterplay. This isn't PvE.

Revert Occult back and tone down cross-healing/ h.o.t stacking and the game would be in a much better state IMO.

geonsocal

Wolfpaw wrote: »

PB, VD, & OO are great as is.

ZOS gave you folks no-proc/no-cp campaign to play, stop asking for nerfs in Proc/CP campaigns.

StarOfElyon wrote: »

I simply hate when I don't get an opportunity to show some skill in a fight because some type of proc takes away my agency or ability to play the game. ZOS caters to accessibility but at the same time puts procs in the game that are overwhelming and demoralizing to combat.

i actually agree with both of these statements - how is that even possible

Hexquisite

Wolfpaw wrote: »

PB, VD, & OO are great as is.

ZOS gave you folks no-proc/no-cp campaign to play, stop asking for nerfs in Proc/CP campaigns.

I think what people wanted though was just a NO PROC campaign. We didn't grind out our CP to not be able to use it.

deleted221205-002626

The problem isnt these sets but rush of agony... You cant avoid the bomb cuz they're dropping rush of agony 1st with no cc immunity and then dcon after to pull u back in for the SPLOSION!! They need to add cc immunity to rush of agony and it be 80% better!

xxslam48xxb14_ESO

I feel we have become too used to Dark convergence. There was a time not too long ago when you could actually play melee and not instantly getting pulled into a bomb. Truly tragic. Bombers were a small tiny percentage of the population and we could just avoid them by spreading apart. Now we think its completely fine to watch 3 dcs get dropped at the same time and half our team wiped. Old school bombing took skill! Slap down one single ground aoe for the same effect now. Its getting so tiresome.

We should have never accepted this, we should have demanded it to be removed. Its too late now. There is no nerf that will restore pvp to normal, it should have been deleted. 25 second cd? Really?!?!? Zos please, you know and I know that changes nothing. LOL the 10 other people in the zerg wearing that set will just have to proc theirs instead.

All three of the bomb effects would be substantially less disruptive without dc to nearly guarantee them proccing. What a great new player experience this provides. Imagine being new and you just reached 160cp on your melee dk. You go into cyrodiil for the first time, you charge into the enemies and start chopping away. A big purple circle opens up beneath you and your death recap shows 10k+ damage from 3 different effects. You look at your health pool and realize you only have 30k hp. You never had a chance. Everyone you mention this to just tells you "lmao just don't stand near other players". Next battle you listen to your team mates and realize you cannot get into melee range without getting close to your team mates. You wanted to be a warrior and the game simply won't let you without severe penalty. Maybe you would just deal with it or maybe you would decide eso has terrible pvp and just leave.

Danse_Mayhem

xxslam48xxb14_ESO wrote: »

I feel we have become too used to Dark convergence. There was a time not too long ago when you could actually play melee and not instantly getting pulled into a bomb. Truly tragic. Bombers were a small tiny percentage of the population and we could just avoid them by spreading apart. Now we think its completely fine to watch 3 dcs get dropped at the same time and half our team wiped. Old school bombing took skill! Slap down one single ground aoe for the same effect now. Its getting so tiresome.

We should have never accepted this, we should have demanded it to be removed. Its too late now. There is no nerf that will restore pvp to normal, it should have been deleted. 25 second cd? Really?!?!? Zos please, you know and I know that changes nothing. LOL the 10 other people in the zerg wearing that set will just have to proc theirs instead.

All three of the bomb effects would be substantially less disruptive without dc to nearly guarantee them proccing. What a great new player experience this provides. Imagine being new and you just reached 160cp on your melee dk. You go into cyrodiil for the first time, you charge into the enemies and start chopping away. A big purple circle opens up beneath you and your death recap shows 10k+ damage from 3 different effects. You look at your health pool and realize you only have 30k hp. You never had a chance. Everyone you mention this to just tells you "lmao just don't stand near other players". Next battle you listen to your team mates and realize you cannot get into melee range without getting close to your team mates. You wanted to be a warrior and the game simply won't let you without severe penalty. Maybe you would just deal with it or maybe you would decide eso has terrible pvp and just leave.

Totally agree. It’s just sets that do all of the work now.
1 bomber for every 20 players in cyro used to be somewhat normal, but now pretty much every second player is the same copy / paste necromancer with dark convergence and plaguebreak. Group fights tend to be a stalemate until one side gets a PB / OO proc on a low hp player or NPC and then the fight is instantly over for everyone involved. It’s trash combat and has nothing at all to do with player skill - Just who can get the most dark convergence procs with plaguebreak going.

We as a community did actually scream at ZOS throughout the PTS of dark convergence and say this is a terrible idea for a set. I’ve made other threads about that set but briefly, it just serves as a tool to benefit larger groups far more than it does the smaller ones, and enhances how busted these other proc sets are. It still pulls off walls and it still pulls from way further than the visual effect. But this feedback has been consistently ignored, no matter how many people bring it up.

So much to balance here IMO. At very least for now, just remove guards from being able to proc plaguebreak and occult overload. The fact we cannot fight along side OUR OWN guards because they are walking bombs is crazy. Same goes for taking new players into cyro to show them the ropes, or having random lower levels / inexperienced and non tanky builds hang around you open world who are outside of the group.

I get the idea was to combat larger crowds, but When you have full zergs and 90% of the cyro population running the same 2-3 sets and mostly getting kills with an overtuned CP slottable, then surely it’s time to balance those things. Cyro is getting so stale with this bomb meta.

Lynxyn

Danse_Mayhem wrote: »

Dear ZOS, please review these procs.

I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of “hurr durr if these bother you then you’re a zergling”

No, 2 of these things proc on GUARDS.

Playing solo = No chance whatsoever against ball groups stacking.

Playing with even one other person or anywhere near NPCs = You are at a huge risk of taking 12800 oblivion damage from a single slottable CP (which everyone has on now) + VD/PB.

This is doing -nothing- to bust open ball groups / zergs. All it achieves is another tool for organised ball groups to decimate small group play / solo players who get too close to NPCs

Back in the day it was a viable tactic to use guards as line of sight if you were defending a keep and severely outnumbered… Now if you do that, you just get nuked by occult overload / Plaguebreak from NPCs who get in the way.
We have a situation where it’s more viable to wait for an enemy Zerg to wipe out your defenders and THEN try to fight back. And on the flip side, when attacking, it’s more effective to just dark convergence a load of guards towards enemy players and get a few occult overload / plaguebreak procs on the guards to kill enemy players, rather than even targeting the players…

Occult overload was in a good place at 4000 damage last patch. Why triple it??

Every.Single.Player. In the midyear event is a copy paste bomber build and almost every group fight ends with one side instantly blowing up to one or more of these proc sets.

My suggested solution ;

Please stop plaguebreak and occult overload from proccing on guards, and reduce occult overload back to its previous form. It’s genuinely the most broken OP slottable CP in the game.

How the *** is anyone meant to kill people who are stacking 40k health with full impen and 33k resists without these procs being overtuned? Zos can nerf the ever living *** out of these when they fix the fact that everyone and their mother has like 2 tank sets on and can still damage, heal or whatever else basically unimpeded. Magblade has one single thing going for it and it can be completely negated by some kid spamming mage light, chugging detect pots and using the CP that's in fitness or the rp tree (can't remember which one) that increases your stealth detection radius.

Miracle19

React wrote: »

Miracle19 wrote: »

While that was a good bomb, to be fair, against a good group, we both know it’s not that simple and they wouldn’t have died from that.

While the PB/Vicious/ occult combo are very lethal, it requires you to kill someone first, which once again against good players and with all of the healing, by the slightest chance you get a kill , it is your only shot to wipe a good group. Balancing things around bad/average players is simply not a good idea, as damage would plummet and you would have stalemates when good players/teams right.

I'm confused about what point you're making here. Are you suggesting that PB/VD/occult are balanced mechanics, and are sufficient to combat ballgroups?

The point is, in the games current state, you'd have lots of stalemates without it on equal terms, and then outnumbered fights(4v20 for example) wouldn't be nearly as viable as it is now. Those sets are designed to punish over cross-healing ballgroups, and they do such.

Lynxyn

jaws343 wrote: »

geonsocal wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

A few of us brought up Occult Overload as OP as soon as we saw the change to it. Not sure why it hasn't been addressed since then. Maybe for PvE it's working as intended?

for pvp it is working as intended...as is plaguebreak, as is vicious death...watch your spacing...

Kind of hard to watch your spacing against NPCs that literally follow you in melee range. Like, just taking a resource alone could get you killed with Occult Overload.

Watch your spacing should be a Player interaction only. Not also having to worry about NPCs.

?? In order for this to be true you would have to be EP fighting AD guards and getting bombed by DC. Your faction guards don't run after you and they can't kill their own guards.

React

Miracle19 wrote: »

React wrote: »

Miracle19 wrote: »

While that was a good bomb, to be fair, against a good group, we both know it’s not that simple and they wouldn’t have died from that.

While the PB/Vicious/ occult combo are very lethal, it requires you to kill someone first, which once again against good players and with all of the healing, by the slightest chance you get a kill , it is your only shot to wipe a good group. Balancing things around bad/average players is simply not a good idea, as damage would plummet and you would have stalemates when good players/teams right.

I'm confused about what point you're making here. Are you suggesting that PB/VD/occult are balanced mechanics, and are sufficient to combat ballgroups?

The point is, in the games current state, you'd have lots of stalemates without it on equal terms, and then outnumbered fights(4v20 for example) wouldn't be nearly as viable as it is now. Those sets are designed to punish over cross-healing ballgroups, and they do such.

But they hardly punish ball groups - often the only time a ball group is being wiped by these things is when they're in the presence of ungrouped, low health players that die first. On the flip side, these tools provide far more power TO the ball groups, who can use them to output enormous AOE potential and essentially just instantly nuke anything they walk into.

I understand the "4v20" fight argument. I've done solo, or small scale outnumbered with my 2-3 close friends for 6 years now. We've been through every meta the game has ever offered.

Our opinion of the current meta for groups like us is that it is skill-less and unrewarding. Walking into a group of 20 people, pulling them with dark convergence, killing one guy and instantly popping all 20 of them with sets & CP is just terrible gameplay. You don't get to outplay or outmaneuver your opponents, the sets and CP practically play the game for you. There used to be a time where you had to carefully plan your "hits" on the larger groups, kiting them until they entered an area where they were forced to stack, rather than just forcefully stacking them with DC. Alternatively you could play a playstyle where you pick them off 1v1 as you kite, like we used to do on our high mobility stam builds & magsorcs. You used to need to run really high damage builds in your small scale so that you'd have the damage to kill players through their healing - now you just spam synergies and deal enough instant burst that the lowest health guy dies.

I guess I'd just like to see a return to a time where all these things mattered again. Having the exponential scaling AOEs become the primary tool for anti-ballgroup and just anti-stack makes for far more rewarding gameplay. Removing things like rushing agony and DC forces people to actually think about what they're doing movement wise when fighting outnumbered. Removing PB/occult forces people to run high damage and burst ults, etc.

Obviously things like heal stacking need to be nerfed too for all this to matter- so many people have been saying this for so long now, its hard to believe zenimax hasn't addressed it. Low hanging fruit that has a large negative impact on both balance and server performance.

etchedpixels

Miracle19 wrote: »

The point is, in the games current state, you'd have lots of stalemates without it on equal terms, and then outnumbered fights(4v20 for example) wouldn't be nearly as viable as it is now. Those sets are designed to punish over cross-healing ballgroups, and they do such.

They don't work for that unfortunately. What you actually need to do is limit cross healing amounts a bit.

In EU noCP (nobody seems to play NA noCP) we often get into big battles and there are stalemates for a while but usually a second hole in the keep wall and a few meatbags breaks it, or a well judged sally by the defence. If anything it's added to the play giving some fairly epic larger scale keep battles. If they'd just upgrade the EU servers it would actually be quite fun.

AndreNoir

NordSwordnBoard wrote: »

DigiAngel wrote: »

Hmmm...that does not seem to be in the description:

Dealing direct damage to an enemy, who is not a Plague Carrier, turns them into a Plague Carrier for 10 seconds, dealing 1715 Disease Damage over the duration. If the plague is removed early, it explodes, infecting enemies within 8 meters of the carrier and dealing 712 Disease Damage. The explosion deals an additional 50% damage per enemy hit. This effect can occur once per attack and scales off the higher of your Weapon or Spell Damage.

Again..am I missing something?

Yes try testing it yourself. Death = removed early.

And this shouldn't be like this at all since Inevitable Detonation doesn't explode on death. I have no idea why no fix on it still

neferpitou73

Hexquisite wrote: »

Wolfpaw wrote: »

PB, VD, & OO are great as is.

ZOS gave you folks no-proc/no-cp campaign to play, stop asking for nerfs in Proc/CP campaigns.

I think what people wanted though was just a NO PROC campaign. We didn't grind out our CP to not be able to use it.

You know, somewhat ironically I think if they had made the no Proc campaign CP and the proc campaign no CP I think we would have seen a better distribution of the populations than what we have now.

charley222

i just comeback from 2 or 3 year off

pvp is just so bad

good build or bad build end the same , if one player die around you , Occult Overload make around 25k

bomber build are just so bad and unskillfull

i think right now is the worst pvp meta eso have , just brainless

over 30 year playing video game and eso pvp combat always find a way to be worst , this just blow my mind ,

1- eso buff simulator , buff your self every 15 sec and stress the server for nothing
2- the purpose or heavy armor that have no purpose all your armor is pen


every mmo have strong healer , but also melee have strong healing debuff sadly not eso , oh eso have Occult Overload

, anyway better to stay far and spam arrow , at leat i will dont get bomb for no reason

Holycannoli

Last night in IC it was nothing but Dark Convergence + Colossus/Fire Rune spam plus the Occult Overload. Nonstop. Over and over and over.

I'm normally not such an opponent of DC but last night showed how toxic it could be. Seemed like everyone was running it lol. Couldn't take ten steps without needing to block because a large pool of purple appeared under you.

There wasn't any Plaguebreak spam that I saw. It didn't appear in my death recap. The streets were painted purple with DC.

Iriidius

Getting killed from plaguebreak and occult overload from guards is really stupid. Defenders could hide behind their guards, now attackers are hiding behind the guards. Getting killed by plaguebreak at least requires a group of guards, that the enemy has to pull together before killing them while beeing attacked. After a a few death you learn to avoid this. occult overload however needs only 2 dead guards to kill you. I am fighting enemy Zerglings in the courtyard of a castle and get killed by 25600 oblivion dmg from 2 guards i didnt even noticed i was standing beneath.
Problem with bombing is that it doesnt punish you for outnumbering. It only punishes you for zerging with players that die and not excluding squishy, inexperienced and bad players(=the ones that have to zerg because they are too bad to play solo)) and for not using group buffs and cross heals that keep
alive even the most stupid members of your group.
And Zergs that often zerg also get used to getting bombed and will prepare for it while players rarely playing in zerg do not. big and regulary zergs often have flare, daedric mines, fear traps, volcanic rune and other stun traps that stun bombers on the ground and look-outs with detection skills looking for bombers.
Problem is that you have to kill a player to activate vicious death, plaguebreak and occult overload and it isnt easy to kill a tanky enemy player with 32k hp that gets healed by 20 rapid regens and echwhile you get attacked by 40 enemy players. You need a strong group to do this yourself. You can only kill members of enemy groups if the group is not too much stronger than you. If a member of your group dies it usually means he was bad or the enemy group isnt much weaker than you, probably stronger than you.
But werent these tools created to help outnumbered players fight Zergs?
You shouldnt get punished for zerging if your group is fighting equal size/strenght or bigger enemy groups. You should get punished if your group attacks and chases smaller groups or solo players or takes keeps without resistance.

Lynxyn wrote: »

Danse_Mayhem wrote: »

Dear ZOS, please review these procs.

I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of “hurr durr if these bother you then you’re a zergling”

No, 2 of these things proc on GUARDS.

Playing solo = No chance whatsoever against ball groups stacking.

Playing with even one other person or anywhere near NPCs = You are at a huge risk of taking 12800 oblivion damage from a single slottable CP (which everyone has on now) + VD/PB.

This is doing -nothing- to bust open ball groups / zergs. All it achieves is another tool for organised ball groups to decimate small group play / solo players who get too close to NPCs

Back in the day it was a viable tactic to use guards as line of sight if you were defending a keep and severely outnumbered… Now if you do that, you just get nuked by occult overload / Plaguebreak from NPCs who get in the way.
We have a situation where it’s more viable to wait for an enemy Zerg to wipe out your defenders and THEN try to fight back. And on the flip side, when attacking, it’s more effective to just dark convergence a load of guards towards enemy players and get a few occult overload / plaguebreak procs on the guards to kill enemy players, rather than even targeting the players…

Occult overload was in a good place at 4000 damage last patch. Why triple it??

Every.Single.Player. In the midyear event is a copy paste bomber build and almost every group fight ends with one side instantly blowing up to one or more of these proc sets.

My suggested solution ;

Please stop plaguebreak and occult overload from proccing on guards, and reduce occult overload back to its previous form. It’s genuinely the most broken OP slottable CP in the game.

How the *** is anyone meant to kill people who are stacking 40k health with full impen and 33k resists without these procs being overtuned? Zos can nerf the ever living *** out of these when they fix the fact that everyone and their mother has like 2 tank sets on and can still damage, heal or whatever else basically unimpeded. Magblade has one single thing going for it and it can be completely negated by some kid spamming mage light, chugging detect pots and using the CP that's in fitness or the rp tree (can't remember which one) that increases your stealth detection radius.

I killed 2 troll tank Zerglings by plaguebreak on guards. It was funny and they deserved it(for Xv1ing and beeing unkillable v1, not for standing beneath guards), but it is a broken mechanic and should be fixed. To combat tanky zerglings there has to be a way to proc vicious death, plaguebreak and occult overload on them without killing them.

Lynxyn wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

geonsocal wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

A few of us brought up Occult Overload as OP as soon as we saw the change to it. Not sure why it hasn't been addressed since then. Maybe for PvE it's working as intended?

for pvp it is working as intended...as is plaguebreak, as is vicious death...watch your spacing...

Kind of hard to watch your spacing against NPCs that literally follow you in melee range. Like, just taking a resource alone could get you killed with Occult Overload.

Watch your spacing should be a Player interaction only. Not also having to worry about NPCs.

?? In order for this to be true you would have to be EP fighting AD guards and getting bombed by DC. Your faction guards don't run after you and they can't kill their own guards.

Your guards follow the enemy players and the enemy players follow you.

pcar944

you will never be able to "balance" group play vs solo/small team play

because of a reason react alrady pointed out

groups run specific gear slots/skills that make indivisual players "weak" but when they are in their group - impossible to kill

and thats the way it should be

either group up and make your own ball, join another group and learn group play, or go somewhere else on the map and ignore them because you WON'T and SHOULDN'T as a SOLO player or grouped with 2-3 peopel to take out a stacked 12 man

because when you make SOLO and 2-3 player groups be able to wipe a STACKED and BUILD 12 man you will take away their fun and they may quit like so many other's have already quit

and also, as a lot of people will know, these ball group players ALSO play solo, a lot, and zerg surf like everyone else, and you can tell when fighting them individually who is a GOOD player and who simply relies on their ball group to get kills etc

but at the end of the day its about having fun, stop fighting zergs and ball groups solo and I promise you will have fun again

olsborg

3 reasons that i dont play cp or procc camps.

heng14rwb17_ESO

ONE FOR ALL !
ALL FOR ONE !
HAPPY AP FARMING !

biminirwb17_ESO

There have always been bombers in ESO PVP, originally, they were mainly magnb running detonation and VD after soul tether. Things evolved over time, with new sets and cp, eventually all classes could bomb - some better than others.

So, the issue is that npcs are proccing PB and OO in pvp. Well yes, they are, and they should.

If you want to stand next to the gate npc trying to range attack an attacker and get killed its bad situational awareness, you know they can explode, don't be surprised when it happens.

There is a metric bazillion ways to die in Cyrodiil because that's the way it is if you don't like getting killed roll a 60k health Perma block tank.

Danse_Mayhem

pcar944 wrote: »

you will never be able to "balance" group play vs solo/small team play

because of a reason react alrady pointed out

groups run specific gear slots/skills that make indivisual players "weak" but when they are in their group - impossible to kill

and thats the way it should be

either group up and make your own ball, join another group and learn group play, or go somewhere else on the map and ignore them because you WON'T and SHOULDN'T as a SOLO player or grouped with 2-3 peopel to take out a stacked 12 man

because when you make SOLO and 2-3 player groups be able to wipe a STACKED and BUILD 12 man you will take away their fun and they may quit like so many other's have already quit

and also, as a lot of people will know, these ball group players ALSO play solo, a lot, and zerg surf like everyone else, and you can tell when fighting them individually who is a GOOD player and who simply relies on their ball group to get kills etc

but at the end of the day its about having fun, stop fighting zergs and ball groups solo and I promise you will have fun again

I appreciate the input but you miss the issue so hard (and many others do too) when you just go with “the bigger side will always win”

It will always win, for sure. Has done since beta and that isn’t likely to ever change. But these proc sets (including dark convergence) just kill any kind of enjoyable action when the fight is going on for a while and then one side instantly pops because of a proc set and a CP node.

No one is debating that trying to solo a ball group is a bad idea, that’s beyond obvious. But playing in any size group, funnels you into this same meta of having 5 dark convergence/ plaguebreak builds in group where you just spam attempts to bomb over and over and over. In between bomb attempts, players just turtle up and heal so it becomes mostly turn based combat where you’re just trading DC procs and hoping the other sets kill just one person, then the whole group v group fight is over.

This is -terrible- pvp. It makes so many skills, classes and sets utterly pointless when the only way to go is using a harmony magcro with Dark convergence / rush of agony with either plaguebreak / vicious death. CCs are all redundant now because of the pull sets, and dots are pointless because everyone is a bomber just one shotting each other. People are funnelled into one play style and if your solution is “bomb or be bombed” then pvp is truly dead because that is a terrible fix.

I’ll say it again… if you think this pvp is even remotely balanced / varied / structured then you either haven’t been playing long enough to know cyrodil from before this garbage, or you aren’t a PvP main.

CharlieFreak

Holycannoli wrote: »

Last night in IC it was nothing but Dark Convergence + Colossus/Fire Rune spam plus the Occult Overload. Nonstop. Over and over and over.

I'm normally not such an opponent of DC but last night showed how toxic it could be. Seemed like everyone was running it lol. Couldn't take ten steps without needing to block because a large pool of purple appeared under you.

There wasn't any Plaguebreak spam that I saw. It didn't appear in my death recap. The streets were painted purple with DC.

The entire event was like that. Couldn't find any good fights at all in IC which used to be fun. The bombers are increasing daily.

The thing I noticed is when looking at the alliance ranks of all the bombers I came across, most were new. It's like every person has now decided to make a bomber. These are clearly not new players, but rather experienced pvpers that are making bombers by the dozens. It feels like the pvp in this game has turned into nothing but hordes of DKs and bombers.

Sometimes I just stand back and watch battles and I'll see 3 and 4 colossi going off at a time in various places. The often close quarters of IC makes this super frustrating. Do not DARE to chase anyone down an alley or into a building, unless you are alone, because you're going to spend your whole time blocking and praying that the guy next to you survives.

This is what pvp has become: Fight DKs spamming 8k whips until you finally get caught by one of the million cookie cutter bombcros. Everyone has become so used to it that no one even complains anymore.

kadar

React wrote: »

I mean, here is us killing a ballgroup 3v12 using plague/occult. Wouldn't have been possible without those two things.

https://streamable.com/1et2s3

There are two things that need to happen, in order for combating ballgroups to become a reality. First, heal stacking needs to be nerfed. You should not be able to have more than one of a specific HOT on you at a time (so no 6x radiant regens and 6x echoing vigors). Two, they need to do some sort of expoential scaling on AOEs.

For example, if they reduce the tooltips of AOE spammables such as pulsar, steel tornado, cleave, sap essence, necro scythe, dk deep breath, etc, but then added exponential scaling of + 50% per target, there would be much more counterplay to groups stacking via these abilities. Right now you simply cannot even deal damage to ball groups unless you instantly nuke them with a negate + plague + occult + synergy combo, because they have every mitigation buff in the game and 10k+ hps ticking on every player from their stacked heal over times.

If I had the ability to hit 10 people with my aoe spammable and have it deal 500% more damage, even with a much lower base tooltip this would give me the potential to combat players that rely on stacking like ball groups do.

The best part about this? It wouldn't be sets or CP doing all the work for you, like is the case now with PB/occult. The truth about ball groups is that often times, most of the players aren't very indivually skilled and simply rely on absurd amounts of healing and mitigation to stay alive. Meanwhile, they can just spam AOEs and proc sets to deal the damage they need. If they were required to actually hit multiple targets to get effectiveness out of the aoes they are spamming, they would need to be much more skillful about where and when they use their aoes. Simultaneously, they would need to be wary of stacking as they could be hit with exponentially higher AOE damage.

It seems like a pretty obvious solution to a problem zenimax has been trying to solve for years.

A real ball group is simply the highest level of organization, optimization, and coordination you can get in a group. I think by this point we all realize that ball groups continue to be strong because every measure ZOS implements to nerf ball groups also affect non-ball groups, zergs, and pugs - proximity can be forced. Your suggestions go through, 1 week to adjust comps, and ball groups are just as strong. For example,

1) Nerf cross healing: we would run 1 instance of every HoT in the game both sets and abilities, reallocate healing power stats into mitigation, drop some stat sets for shield sets. Now the small-man groups, "solo" players, and zergs also can't get cross-healing from pug healers. The ball group now has less healing to rip through.

2) Scale AOEs exponentially: would definitely hit ball groups harder. Except that balls will also now hit everyone else harder. 90% of the movement a ball group does is to create a stack of players to bomb who would now be the recipients of 500% increased damage. If you scale AOEs we only need 2-3 DDs instead of the 4-5 most groups run. That means 1-2 more healers in our comp, mitigating the increased damage and the "nerf" from #1. We won't be able to kill a lone player with AOE spam as easily so that's a benefit if you're actually by yourself, I agree, but a decent ball group doesn't care about doing that anyway.

I agree on your last points that often ball groupers aren't skilled and crutch on the group. Most randos aren't skilled either tho. Consider all the "small-man" players who are just tanks with just enough damage to kill brand new CP 160 1v1 - just crutching on 1h/shield ult and LoS to stay alive. Mechanical skill levels vary no matter the PVP context -- I've ball grouped with players who win dueling tourneys and players who couldn't duel a potato.

As an avid ball-grouper on PC NA, I'm not opposed to any of these ideas. They just won't really affect ball groups in the intended way. It's hard to nerf teamwork.