PvP Mechanics - Critical Resistance & Crit Self Healing

NxJoeyD

With the onset of subclassing the Crit power creep has gone into orbit. PvP really would benefit from the following adjustments to mechanics:

1) Crit Resistance: The PvP environment clearly does not have enough sources or values of Crit resistance available, period. I’m personally in guilds with players who’s Crit damage modifier is so far above the soft cap that even with 7 pieces of Impen & Rally Cry they’re still outputting at or near the Crit modifier soft cap. This is is game breaking. Some ways we might approach this could be: a) increase the amount of Crit Reist each piece of Impen provides by significant amounts, b) add named Major & Minor buffs that specifically increase Crit resistance.

Personally, I think the Impen adjustment approach is the easiest because it doesn’t require anyone to think about where the access or sources of named buffs might go (scribing, weapon or world skill passives, etc). Impen is already designed to combat Crit it just hasn’t been able to keep up; especially in the Subclassing state.

2) Critical Self Healing: Have self healing that critically applies to one’s self be capped at 25%, flat. The reason is because with high modifiers players are essentially critically healing themselves with such high values that they’re mitigating far too much damage, seeing themselves go from near execute levels of health back to full in one burst. What this adjustment would do is still enable people to heal themselves but it wouldn’t allow them to heal themselves instantaneously.

Now mind you I’m suggesting this ONLY for SELF heals, a healer who is outwardly healing their group would still have the full critical healing modifier apply to maintain a strong healing factor; we just would no longer see “self healers”, which we shouldn’t have anyway.

Self heals should be viewed as a strategic element of combat, not the “get out of jail free cards” that they are right now. This would also work to reinforce healing roles in PvP.

These changes wouldn’t see anyone’s builds “nerfed”, high crit chance builds and high crit damage modifiers would still keep crit scaling and frequency but their targets wouldn’t be guaranteed to take the full amount of that damage because effective counterplay would now be available.

Nobody should be guaranteed that every one of their crits actually deals the full scope of their damage; that’s a lack of balance. That’s like going into battle without armor but just in socks & underwear.

The same goes for crit healing. Everyone should have access to self healing should they choose but self healing should never be a full combat mitigator and in the current state of crit, that’s what it is.

These adjustments would have no impact on PvE; the critical self heal cap of 25% would apply through Battle Spirit.

I think this would go a long way in curbing some of the negative feedback we’re seeing in PvP combat that’s one sided as well as some of the negative feedback we’re seeing from Subclassing.

MincMincMinc

The easiest action plan would be to immediately raise the impen value to account for the difference compared to the old perfectly fine crit meta balance. Then to make traits choices balanced again you would slowly reduce impen each patch as you add other crit resist sources back into the game. Zos would have to remember to do this though, so at the very least impen immediately does the job for them if all else fails.

Before players had roughly 50% crit damage and likely averaged between 60-80% on crit builds. People commonly ran 3050crit resists or 45% mit. Now a days it has swung so wildly with crit damage stacking sources. Normal non crit specific PvP builds sit around 100% crit damage and crit damage builds are hitting 180% to overcap the common 3762(57%) crit resist and hit roughly around the cap of 125%

At the very least we would want our impen no set crit resist to match the average player in todays game and have around 90% crit resist. Base we have 20% so the 7x impen has to make up for 70% or 10% each being 660 crit resist per impen.

NxJoeyD

MincMincMinc wrote: »

The easiest action plan would be to immediately raise the impen value to account for the difference compared to the old perfectly fine crit meta balance. Then to make traits choices balanced again you would slowly reduce impen each patch as you add other crit resist sources back into the game. Zos would have to remember to do this though, so at the very least impen immediately does the job for them if all else fails.

Before players had roughly 50% crit damage and likely averaged between 60-80% on crit builds. People commonly ran 3050crit resists or 45% mit. Now a days it has swung so wildly with crit damage stacking sources. Normal non crit specific PvP builds sit around 100% crit damage and crit damage builds are hitting 180% to overcap the common 3762(57%) crit resist and hit roughly around the cap of 125%

At the very least we would want our impen no set crit resist to match the average player in todays game and have around 90% crit resist. Base we have 20% so the 7x impen has to make up for 70% or 10% each being 660 crit resist per impen.

That would work perfectly and it wouldn’t be hard to do.

YandereGirlfriend

Buff Impen and make Critical Healing Chance its own separately sourced stat.

Sluggy

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Buff Impen and make Critical Healing Chance its own separately sourced stat.

Simply buffing impen isn't really the best option. A slight buff would be fine, say 10% or so. But you can't buff it to the point that it would negate the current level of crit damage otherwise we'd end up in the same spot as before - where there is exactly and precisely one valid trait to use on all armor. It would also effectively nerf crit to the point that it has no more value. It would also mean that everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too. They can change nothing , sacrifice nothing and suddenly gain a significant damage reduction for free.

Again, I think a slight increase to impen would be great but really there should be other sources of crit resists. One that makes us hem and haw and stress about making choices with our builds. Another set that provides it to the wearer alone and without the bonus to damage like on RC. Another CP star in the red tree that provides it. Another mundus. Another food. Transform one of those useless Undaunted skills into something that gives us a crit resist buff for twenty seconds. Maybe make Reguards actually have a useful passive for once in seven years? The world is our oyster so why pigeonhole ourselves with such limited and boring options as simply buffing impen?

NxJoeyD

Sluggy wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Buff Impen and make Critical Healing Chance its own separately sourced stat.

Simply buffing impen isn't really the best option. A slight buff would be fine, say 10% or so. But you can't buff it to the point that it would negate the current level of crit damage otherwise we'd end up in the same spot as before - where there is exactly and precisely one valid trait to use on all armor. It would also effectively nerf crit to the point that it has no more value. It would also mean that everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too. They can change nothing , sacrifice nothing and suddenly gain a significant damage reduction for free.

Again, I think a slight increase to impen would be great but really there should be other sources of crit resists. One that makes us hem and haw and stress about making choices with our builds. Another set that provides it to the wearer alone and without the bonus to damage like on RC. Another CP star in the red tree that provides it. Another mundus. Another food. Transform one of those useless Undaunted skills into something that gives us a crit resist buff for twenty seconds. Maybe make Reguards actually have a useful passive for once in seven years? The world is our oyster so why pigeonhole ourselves with such limited and boring options as simply buffing impen?

I agree that more sources of Crit resistance should be in the game but that takes time to plan and execute.

CP is not a good idea because then BG’s & non-CP PvP would be overrun by Crit.

In combat Crit is supposed to be a “chance” an incidental factor, not an “every attack occurrence”.

Making builds that utilize critical strikes as part of a build strategy is one thing; to make a build that is solely reliant on them is a whole other issue. In a balanced scenario the opportunity cost to achieve such a strong crit factor would see such a build exposed in some other area, most often, durability. But since healing can crit scale too these players don’t have to worry about their defense because they can single burst themselves to full health, negating the logic of balance in builds.

Increasing Impen is the quickest and easiest thing the Devs could do to address their mess in the here & now. The amount of an Impen increase is debatable and would also rely on whether or not an adjustment to crit damage modifier was also installed; meaning an adjustment that wouldn’t allow a player to exceed the soft cap for crit modifiers; this would make current crit resistance more effective and reduce the need for as high of Impen.

I’d prefer just the Impen because it’s easy and it gives everyone time and it allows the devs to separately adjust the critical self healing factor without destroying current crit damage.

This wouldn’t be destroying current crit damage it would simply ensure that crit damage wasn’t a guarantee, which it shouldn’t ever be.

Part of this conversation also includes a consideration for how much of a factor critical striking and critical damage should play in PvP combat. Some would argue that 80% crit chance while also at max modifier is excessive. Should “Critical” be able to be “Constant”? If we look at other mechanics there’s a significant trade off for that; in most cases a player can proc an attack to always Crit but only if a resource is below a certain point; exposing the player to a risk vs reward factor.

The current Crit environment doesn’t do that; it’s allowing for “always on”, “always high” Crit attacks paired with healing that’s also Crit scaling and enabling the player to mitigate so much damage. At that point where are the combat strategies? Where are the tactics when all one has to do is indiscriminately spam and yield more damage and healing than anyone else in the field?

As Minc said, once we have more broad sources of Crit Resitance then Impen can go back to normal values and it would be up to builds as to how much and what sort of Critical resistance they want to include, but in the meantime we need an interim patch. Subclassing has dialed what was an already existing issue up to 11 and has now made it far worse.

YandereGirlfriend

Sluggy wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Buff Impen and make Critical Healing Chance its own separately sourced stat.

Simply buffing impen isn't really the best option. A slight buff would be fine, say 10% or so. But you can't buff it to the point that it would negate the current level of crit damage otherwise we'd end up in the same spot as before - where there is exactly and precisely one valid trait to use on all armor. It would also effectively nerf crit to the point that it has no more value. It would also mean that everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too. They can change nothing , sacrifice nothing and suddenly gain a significant damage reduction for free.

Again, I think a slight increase to impen would be great but really there should be other sources of crit resists. One that makes us hem and haw and stress about making choices with our builds. Another set that provides it to the wearer alone and without the bonus to damage like on RC. Another CP star in the red tree that provides it. Another mundus. Another food. Transform one of those useless Undaunted skills into something that gives us a crit resist buff for twenty seconds. Maybe make Reguards actually have a useful passive for once in seven years? The world is our oyster so why pigeonhole ourselves with such limited and boring options as simply buffing impen?

There's an entire canon of "How to buff Crit Res" material strewn across various threads, so my short form answer would be, "Yes, of course!"

Like, we have two un-hybridized Weapon/Spell Damage Mundus that could be merged and then replaced with a Crit Res Mundus. We should have better availability of Minor Enervation as well as a new Major Enervation debuff so that they match the Force series. My personal pet issue is buffing Sturdy Horn, etc. We could probably use another group Crit Res set like Transmutation as well. You could add Crit Res to Alchemy, etc.

So, yes, let's do all of those things along with buffing Impen.

MincMincMinc

NxJoeyD wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

The easiest action plan would be to immediately raise the impen value to account for the difference compared to the old perfectly fine crit meta balance. Then to make traits choices balanced again you would slowly reduce impen each patch as you add other crit resist sources back into the game. Zos would have to remember to do this though, so at the very least impen immediately does the job for them if all else fails.

Before players had roughly 50% crit damage and likely averaged between 60-80% on crit builds. People commonly ran 3050crit resists or 45% mit. Now a days it has swung so wildly with crit damage stacking sources. Normal non crit specific PvP builds sit around 100% crit damage and crit damage builds are hitting 180% to overcap the common 3762(57%) crit resist and hit roughly around the cap of 125%

At the very least we would want our impen no set crit resist to match the average player in todays game and have around 90% crit resist. Base we have 20% so the 7x impen has to make up for 70% or 10% each being 660 crit resist per impen.

That would work perfectly and it wouldn’t be hard to do.

The funny thing is that Impen is actually fairly balanced based on the other traits. If anything nirn and reinforced is out of wack. Zos had balanced impen down so traits were all fair choices......but forgot that impen first and foremost had to be balanced against crit damage. They put on the blinders for the rest of the game and only looked at traits compared to themselves. Taking off the blinders we see impen could be upwards of 10% like I said and still kinda not enough to balance out the amount of available stacking crit damage.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Buff Impen and make Critical Healing Chance its own separately sourced stat.

Think of how many dlc proc set quotas zos could fulfill if they actually had more stats be useful or available. Health recovery anyone?

Sluggy

@YandereGirlfriend @NxJoeyD
I guess my big mistake here is thinking with my gameplay designer hat instead of my business hat. The truth is that they stopped making any real efforts for PvP almost half a decade ago now and the effort they are putting in now seems... unrelated to any of this.

Indeed a simple buff to impen would be the fastest and easiest fix. I suspect it would also be the permanent fix but that's a whole other can of worms.

NxJoeyD

Sluggy wrote: »

@YandereGirlfriend @NxJoeyD
I guess my big mistake here is thinking with my gameplay designer hat instead of my business hat. The truth is that they stopped making any real efforts for PvP almost half a decade ago now and the effort they are putting in now seems... unrelated to any of this.

Indeed a simple buff to impen would be the fastest and easiest fix. I suspect it would also be the permanent fix but that's a whole other can of worms.

I agree with you, but here’s the hard truth for the Devs, the competition in the realm of MMO’s is picking up and it’s fairly common that endgame content in MMOs float heavily around PvP content.

ESO isn’t like Fallout 76 in terms of the endgame engagement. If the Devs want to maintain a consistent player base and, more importantly, subscription base; then they need to start giving overall PvP more attention, otherwise they risk endgame players taking a look at other titles and, realistically, all those other titles need to do is polish some of their PvP aspects and ZoS Devs could see an exodus.

One of the saving graces for ZoS is that their competitors haven’t really “nailed it” in terms of PvP in an MMO but we all know they’ve come out swinging, and pretty respectably for a first attempt in some cases.

I 100% agree with you that dynamic sources of crit resistance from a design standpoint are the absolute way to go. Ultimately that’s what I would hope the Devs consider. But in the meantime I’m in guilds, multiple ones, with people who are both running the crit meta and admit that it’s beyond broken and also with players who aren’t running the crit meta and are VERY quickly getting tired of engaging in PvP content. Where they feel as though subclassing has punished them for what should be adequate builds but are getting absolutely steam rolled by the meta mechanics to the point where they just don’t want to play anymore.

I don’t want to see people getting such a bad taste in their mouth for the franchise that they land someplace else for the next 2+ years getting into another title.

warm_blanket

Counterplay to getting crit on is using the block button.

Additional sources of impen to trade into is not a bad idea, but unlikely to happen if you've been keeping up with things.

Impen had a small buff a while ago, so the precedent is already there. Playing with fire here by asking for another buff (mara's, vamp3, content creator builds, IYKYK).

Better press block!

BXR_Lonestar

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Buff Impen and make Critical Healing Chance its own separately sourced stat.

Healing in general should be based off its own stats and multipliers. Its stupid and bad design to have healing be based on the same stats as DPS. That means that most DPS are actually BETTER healers than dedicated healers from the standpoint of healing output. Typically healers prioritize group buffs over build stats and end up with suboptimal crit chance and suboptimal spell damage and crit modifier.

I've been saying this for a long time.

The combat system in this game overall is meh and needs a complete and total overhaul from the foundation up.

MincMincMinc

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Buff Impen and make Critical Healing Chance its own separately sourced stat.

Healing in general should be based off its own stats and multipliers. Its stupid and bad design to have healing be based on the same stats as DPS. That means that most DPS are actually BETTER healers than dedicated healers from the standpoint of healing output. Typically healers prioritize group buffs over build stats and end up with suboptimal crit chance and suboptimal spell damage and crit modifier.

I've been saying this for a long time.

The combat system in this game overall is meh and needs a complete and total overhaul from the foundation up.

The part of eso building that makes it great is that the system was supposed to have tension across all the stats. Healing does have its own stats in a sense because on a healer you would aim to stack more crit chance. Where crit chance for damage is almost never the optimal choice. You can see this on UESP if you play around with weapon traits. Precise is usually the worst to increase your effective output. Same used to go for regen, where healers would stack regen for the higher costs. Most pvp players going dps never used to sustain this well, but power creep and systems being added never lead zos to cut back on regen sources or modifiers.

So in reality eso's system is designed so there is no single stat answer. Where other games you may just have a single heal% stat or something of that sort. ESO is designed to have efficiency differences across a bunch of stats.

NxJoeyD

warm_blanket wrote: »

Counterplay to getting crit on is using the block button.

Additional sources of impen to trade into is not a bad idea, but unlikely to happen if you've been keeping up with things.

Impen had a small buff a while ago, so the precedent is already there. Playing with fire here by asking for another buff (mara's, vamp3, content creator builds, IYKYK).

Better press block!

No.

Yes, block is a “thing” and definitely needs to be utilized but perma-block isn’t a generally supported combat strategy. ZoS adjusted block costs some time ago to curtail excessive blocking for that reason.

Factor in the increase in “unblockables” and crit damage without telegraphs and you can see where block falls short of proper counter play.

The issue here isn’t whether a player blocks or not; the issue is that the only resources players have that are designed to specifically address offensive crit can be made to be 100% useless; that’s the problem.

Yes, block is a part of proper combat but it’s not comprehensive anymore.

NxJoeyD

MincMincMinc wrote: »

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Buff Impen and make Critical Healing Chance its own separately sourced stat.

Healing in general should be based off its own stats and multipliers. Its stupid and bad design to have healing be based on the same stats as DPS. That means that most DPS are actually BETTER healers than dedicated healers from the standpoint of healing output. Typically healers prioritize group buffs over build stats and end up with suboptimal crit chance and suboptimal spell damage and crit modifier.

I've been saying this for a long time.

The combat system in this game overall is meh and needs a complete and total overhaul from the foundation up.

The part of eso building that makes it great is that the system was supposed to have tension across all the stats. Healing does have its own stats in a sense because on a healer you would aim to stack more crit chance. Where crit chance for damage is almost never the optimal choice. You can see this on UESP if you play around with weapon traits. Precise is usually the worst to increase your effective output. Same used to go for regen, where healers would stack regen for the higher costs. Most pvp players going dps never used to sustain this well, but power creep and systems being added never lead zos to cut back on regen sources or modifiers.

So in reality eso's system is designed so there is no single stat answer. Where other games you may just have a single heal% stat or something of that sort. ESO is designed to have efficiency differences across a bunch of stats.

That’s the crazy part isn’t it? the devs left modifiers in game as they are but yet we see signs where they were at least “somewhat” attentive to inward vs outward healing at some point back in the day.

We know there’s baseline mechanics in the game to differentiate and in all this time it never occurred to them that, sure, healing roles should still maintain the current stat structure so as to not hurt the role, but somehow went out to lunch on the idea that those stats could also enable self healing that’s stronger than what should exist?! … Like, I’m surprised that at some point this didn’t come up to them.

Running around in PvP where literally every heal burst and every 8 out of 10 HoT ticks are a crit is defiantly going to result in crazy sustain.