U51 Feedback Thread for Battle Spirit

ZOS_Kevin

This is the official feedback thread for the Battle Spirit adjustments. Specific feedback that the team is looking for includes the following:

• Do you like the Battle Spirit adjustments?
  • If yes, please let us know why?
  • If no, please let us know why?
• What other adjustments would you like the combat team to consider when looking at Battle Spirit?
• Any other general feedback?

Kickimanjaro

I see that Battle Spirit in IC is specifically named.


We cannot access Cyrodiil to check Battle Spirit there since Vengeance is the only accessible campaign, and Vengeance lacks Battle Spirit.

Will Battle Spirit in Cyrodiil be the same as what we can see present in IC?
If not, will we be able to access Cyrodiil to mess with the Cyrodiil Battle Spirit changes during the U51 PTS cycle?

React

While this is a good attempt at adjusting the shields in PVP (and I applaud the team for continuing to make changes here despite everything going on), I think it misses the mark for a few reasons.

First, it does not address a few of the core issues at play here - maximum HP and HP scaling on heals/shields. A big part of why these shields have become such an issue is that they're rewarding you for stacking into max health compared to magicka/stamina - which "double dips" on the defensive return it is providing. In the past supports/healers would be stacking max stats/WD/SD/crit chance/healing modifiers to increase their output, which in turn meant that those were resources that would not be spent on defensive stats. Now, the most efficient way to build a support/healer is to aim for 40-60k HP - which in most cases is making that support/healer impossible to kill outright.

Here is an example of a shielder-support in an 8 man group with 61k HP, whose health bar is 100% covered by shields. Nothing changes for this player after this battlespirit adjustment.



Max HP scaling heals/shields just should not exist in PVP, full stop. That goes for everything - DK Heart of flame, WW burst heal, all the scribing shields, etc. Nearly every single instance of a health scaling shield/heal is very problematic, and creates opportunities for easy abuse.

Further, the ease of raising your max HP in PVP has reached a point where it is a glaring issue. I would say the majority of players I encounter in PVP as a whole now are sitting in the 35-40k HP range, with many sitting at 40k+. This really needs to be curbed some way, either through a flat out cap of around 35k, or a reduction in the effectiveness of common sources of HP in PVP.

If these things are outside of the teams capability to do at the moment, that is understandable. But if that is the case, than the shield change on the PTS is going to need to be a lot more harsh starting at small group sizes, and slightly more harsh at cap group sizes than it's current value.

As a side note, these are going to be hard things to test on the PTS with such larger numbers of players required.

ArctosCethlenn

You may want to make the battle spirit penalties linger for a few minutes after someone drops or is kicked from group. As things stand, if I'm running a 12-man and someone goes down, the best move is to instantly kick their body out so the remaining 11 get more shielding, and only re-invite once they're alive and with us again.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

Crossposting from https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/697185/unclear-wording-on-battle-spirit-shield-changes

Could you ask the team to clarify the patch note regarding shielding.

5 members - 220%
6 members - 200% ?
7 members - 180% ?
8 members - 160%
9 members - 140%
10 members - 120 % - But the patch note says 80% so which is it?

• Also is this total strength across all shields or individual shields cast?
• Does this apply to 'self shields' or just group shielding skills? For example: is a sorc with self shields now penalized for playing in a 12m pug zerg with friends?

To be clear - the issue is not with individual shield size but with group shielding skills (mostly scribing shields because they scale based on HP of the caster for some bizarre reason). It's really odd why targeted changes can't be made when the skills causing issues and the reason behind those issues is easy to determine. There's always some odd convoluted change made which impacts the casual player base in unintended ways.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

This is the official feedback thread for the Battle Spirit adjustments. Specific feedback that the team is looking for includes the following:

• Do you like the Battle Spirit adjustments?
  • If yes, please let us know why?
  • If no, please let us know why?
• What other adjustments would you like the combat team to consider when looking at Battle Spirit?
• Any other general feedback?

The direction taken with this Battle Spirit shield-stacking nerf is excellent. This is how organized composition groups should be balanced: by penalizing them for every additional member they add. It is something I and many others have suggested across several threads, so despite the time being wasted on mandated Vengeance testing, I am glad some of that feedback appears to have gotten through. I hope the same approach can eventually be applied to healing within ball groups.

Shield stacking was completely out of control, especially in 12-player groups. While this change addresses the worst offenders—the 10-to-12-player groups—it still leaves plenty of room for smaller organized groups to abuse the mechanic. Six-to-eight-player groups are barely affected and can largely continue stacking shields as they do now. Because of that, I would suggest two changes.

First, I believe the cap at five group members should be considerably lower, perhaps somewhere between 100% and 120% of maximum health, followed by a further 10% reduction for each additional member. This would discourage six-player composition groups from relying so heavily on shield stacking while also preventing 12-player ball groups from simply splitting into two groups of six to avoid most of the penalty.

Second, I am glad this group-size-based approach was taken with shielding, because it makes far more sense than the current “sticky” HoT penalty. That mechanic is still terribly implemented. Ball groups simply limit themselves to seven sticky HoTs and compensate with burst healing and AoE HoTs that do not count toward the penalty.

Healing should therefore be addressed in the same way as shielding. Starting at five group members, the group could receive a 7.5% reduction to all healing received, followed by an additional 2.5% reduction for every extra member. The exact values could be adjusted depending on how heavily the shield changes affect organized groups.

This would punish excessive healing and HoT stacking regardless of which specific abilities are being used, apply pressure to organized groups of every size, and remove the exploitable—and frequently griefable—mechanics created by the current sticky HoT system.

Darkivel

My concern is that this will also punish non-comped groups for filling up to 12.

Any solution based on group size is going to be more of a punishment for pugs and guilds that don't run comped groups. This is going to be a much bigger issue for a group already struggling for healing when trying to fight comped balls and bomber/ganker stacks.

@React Makes an excellent point that HP stacking is part of the big problem with shields. That's something that should be looked at.

But the real issue is the interactions of multiple, carefully-constructed shielders and healers grouped together. Reducing based on group size is one thing, but a group of 12 random players is not the same as a comped group of 12. Non-comped groups are already struggling against the ball groups. Please don't make it harder for those groups in your attempt to deal with the shield issues.

RedMamba

@ZOS_Kevin can we get answers to the above questions?

Tonturri

I'm thrilled the team is taking a look at shield stacking. However, I don't think battle spirit is the best and only way to go about it. I think it's pretty clear that the accessibility of scribing AoE absorb shields combined with how easy and rewarding HP is to stack is what's resulted in the current situation.

Why not just change the two scribing AoE shields to give a higher absorb to the caster and a lower one to allies? Either instead of or in addition to using battle spirit. This would let less balancing load rest in battle spirit, and personally I think the skills themselves are just too strong, which makes battle spirit the wrong method to address them, especially since this is also a huge issue in PvE.

Old content was already easy due to power creep, but now having 20k+ shields on everyone at all times makes even more content trivial.

Anyway, back to PvP. I hope the team takes a serious look at health stacking and scaling in PvP...Dare I say it, I don't think health stacking is necessarily super duper OP (although perhaps it could use a reduction). Rather, I think a big part of the issue is that max stats are effectively useless in comparison. I can put all 64 stat points into health and get a huge boost in defensiveness, which lets me invest everything else into whatever else I might want with no real trade off.

On the flip side, 64 points into max mag or max stam (or 32 into stam and 32 into mag, if we're feeling spicy) provides...Damage and healing, but not near enough to be a worthwhile comparison to the benefit of 64 points into health. I can get more damage, healing, sustain, etc from 64 points into health than I can from 64 points into max mag or stam because the former provides so much defensive benefit I I don't need to invest much else into defensiveness - I can get just get damage. And there's an argument to be made for health compounding more than other stats (heavy armor, undaunted passive), which I think would also be worth a look, but the key gist here is:

Stam and mag don't do enough. Sustain is effectively not a consideration for a lot of builds due to subclassing or class masteries (*waves in sorc*).

Similarly, I don't think HoT stacking needs a huuuuuge reduction, though it could use some, but imo the issue is more that it's just so ridiculously easy to cover the entire group with HoTs compared to the difficulty of covering an enemy group with DoTs/debuffs.

I'm glad battle spirit is available to provide balance differences between PvP and PvE, but I hope it doesn't become the go-to solution band-aid fix. That's not good for the game's health.

I don't think this is the best solution, but I think this does a good job of highlighting the problem. What if regens were not provided by default, but came from max stats. Give players 2% compounding for every 10k of a max resource, so 10k max stam -> 2% (200) stam regen. 20k max stam -> 4% (800, this is around the base for a setup with minimal or no investment) regen. 30k max stam -> 6% (1800 regen...) Okay this is too much regen, so maybe 1/2/3% or 1.5/3/4.5% would be better. Regardless, it's so, so easy to run with 40k+ HP, ~20k max resource pools and minimal regen, and be totally fine. That just shouldn't be possible, imo. Folks just roll around with high crit, weapon/spell damage, high health/armor/durability in general, and certain stats just aren't strong enough to be worth investing into.

Of course, then there are specs/classes who can't do the above as well, which has obvious results. Templar/necromancer for example have sustain issues and predictably suffer for it.

TLDR: Battle spirit can be useful but shouldn't be the whole solution here, imo. Increase the shielding for the caster while reducing it for allies on scribing skills, then look at each other skill causing absorb problems individually (barrier, that one arcanist skill I can't remember the name of that's basically barrier but better, cheaper, and over time), and so on and so forth.

DrGIggles80

shields can stack to over 100k is ridiculous even after this change. Shields should never give more than 100% of health no matter how many you stack. The fact you can run 2 shielders in group and keep constant 100k plus worth of shields stacks is what ruins pvp. then toss in rewarding them for stacking max health because it makes the shields even bigger. should work the other way higher the health less effective shielding is.

tesority

I think it's a bad decision to only tweak the shield stack mechanic for large groups, leaving it as is for smaller ones. They could play as two groups of 6 and create the same mess. Also, small groups are just as annoying. We fought one recently. It was just 4 DKs. They were standing by the teleporter in the keep and killing the same guys over and over after they respawned. This broken mechanic leads to grifting no matter who uses it.

And in general, I don't see why the stack of sticky HoTs and the stack of shields should exist at all. They're fine (but limited) for competitive modes like Group Battlegrounds where you can gain a tactical advantage by using them. But in an open world like Cyrodiil, they're just game-breaking - they take the comped groups that use them to a whole new level, and they are playing some other game. It ruins the experience for other players. I hope you make it work and make PvP fun again.

Wolfchild07

Add all nerfs to battle spirit only, not PvE also.

BigPlays420

tesority wrote: »

I think it's a bad decision to only tweak the shield stack mechanic for large groups, leaving it as is for smaller ones. They could play as two groups of 6 and create the same mess. Also, small groups are just as annoying. We fought one recently. It was just 4 DKs. They were standing by the teleporter in the keep and killing the same guys over and over after they respawned. This broken mechanic leads to grifting no matter who uses it.

And in general, I don't see why the stack of sticky HoTs and the stack of shields should exist at all. They're fine (but limited) for competitive modes like Group Battlegrounds where you can gain a tactical advantage by using them. But in an open world like Cyrodiil, they're just game-breaking - they take the comped groups that use them to a whole new level, and they are playing some other game. It ruins the experience for other players. I hope you make it work and make PvP fun again.

I completely agree that the baseline nerf should be more severe. Like someone already suggested in this thread, shields should probably be capped much lower and then scale with group size. Something like a 90–100% HP cap at 5 players, followed by an additional 5% reduction for each member beyond that, would be a much healthier implementation.

You’d still end up around the same 60-ish% cap for a 12-man, but it would also punish smaller comp groups abusing the same mechanics and heavily discourage 12-man ball groups from simply splitting into two groups of 6 to circumvent the penalty.

BigPlays420

Darkivel wrote: »

My concern is that this will also punish non-comped groups for filling up to 12.

Any solution based on group size is going to be more of a punishment for pugs and guilds that don't run comped groups. This is going to be a much bigger issue for a group already struggling for healing when trying to fight comped balls and bomber/ganker stacks.

@React Makes an excellent point that HP stacking is part of the big problem with shields. That's something that should be looked at.

But the real issue is the interactions of multiple, carefully-constructed shielders and healers grouped together. Reducing based on group size is one thing, but a group of 12 random players is not the same as a comped group of 12. Non-comped groups are already struggling against the ball groups. Please don't make it harder for those groups in your attempt to deal with the shield issues.

I strongly disagree. Non-comp groups are not hit nearly as hard by changes like this as organized comp groups are. When you specifically target shield stacking, the impact is disproportionately felt by groups that are deliberately building around coordinated shield and healing layers.

Combined with the HoT stacking nerfs that have already been implemented—and ideally eventually adjusted into a similar scaling format—comp groups should see a meaningful decline in performance. Pug groups, on the other hand, are mostly people vibing on solo builds with little actual coordination, so they are barely affected by this in practice.

A random shielder in a 12-man pug is not going to save that group from a coordinated 12-man ball group push. If anything, reducing the effectiveness of the defensive stacking that comp groups rely on should narrow that gap rather than widen it.

master_vanargand

Couldn't the damage shield scaling issue simply be addressed by splitting a 12-player group into three smaller teams and coordinating via Discord or similar platforms?
That way, "ball groups" could still maintain massive shields.
It would significantly nerf PUGs (pick-up groups) while potentially making ball groups even stronger.
Does this even make sense?
Instead of scaling, wouldn't it be better to just set a flat cap—say, at 60%?
Personally, I think there should be a 30% cap for both groups and solo players.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee

master_vanargand wrote: »

Couldn't the damage shield scaling issue simply be addressed by splitting a 12-player group into three smaller teams and coordinating via Discord or similar platforms?
That way, "ball groups" could still maintain massive shields.
It would significantly nerf PUGs (pick-up groups) while potentially making ball groups even stronger.
Does this even make sense?
Instead of scaling, wouldn't it be better to just set a flat cap—say, at 60%?
Personally, I think there should be a 30% cap for both groups and solo players.

No, and I think suggestions like this show a misunderstanding of how a properly built ball group actually functions. You cannot just divide a 12-man into three groups of four and expect it to retain the same effectiveness while taking advantage of larger shields.

A 12-man split into two groups of six is at least plausible, but anything smaller than that is almost certainly a net loss because of how many sets, buffs, heals, and group-limited skills stop reaching the entire composition. Splitting into three groups would make the overall 12-man significantly weaker regardless of the extra shield size they gain.

Even splitting into two groups of six may already cost enough group-specific buffs and set coverage that it isn't necessarily worth doing under the current proposed scaling. Lowering the baseline cap to around 90–100% and then scaling downward from there would make that tradeoff much clearer and essentially remove the incentive for 12-man ball groups to split at all, rather than leaving it as a potentially viable workaround.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

master_vanargand wrote: »

Couldn't the damage shield scaling issue simply be addressed by splitting a 12-player group into three smaller teams and coordinating via Discord or similar platforms?
That way, "ball groups" could still maintain massive shields.
It would significantly nerf PUGs (pick-up groups) while potentially making ball groups even stronger.
Does this even make sense?
Instead of scaling, wouldn't it be better to just set a flat cap—say, at 60%?
Personally, I think there should be a 30% cap for both groups and solo players.

No, and I think suggestions like this show a misunderstanding of how a properly built ball group actually functions. You cannot just divide a 12-man into three groups of four and expect it to retain the same effectiveness while taking advantage of larger shields.

A 12-man split into two groups of six is at least plausible, but anything smaller than that is almost certainly a net loss because of how many sets, buffs, heals, and group-limited skills stop reaching the entire composition. Splitting into three groups would make the overall 12-man significantly weaker regardless of the extra shield size they gain.

Even splitting into two groups of six may already cost enough group-specific buffs and set coverage that it isn't necessarily worth doing under the current proposed scaling. Lowering the baseline cap to around 90–100% and then scaling downward from there would make that tradeoff much clearer and essentially remove the incentive for 12-man ball groups to split at all, rather than leaving it as a potentially viable workaround.

This assumes that ballgroups will religiously stick to 12m when they split which in most cases these days is very unlikely.
If a group isn't already running significantly lower than 12 they are far more likely to run more than 12 to retain the same power. (Just like old 24m groups back in the day would often run far more comfortably).

for example 2x 8m with 40k base hp still has a shield cap of 160% hp. 64k shields is more than enough to be as oppressive as current shields.


Again so things are super clear for ZOS the problems are (with shielding specifically there are other problems too)
1) Multi target/aoe Shields should not scale with HP (single target shields are fine to do so) (e.g. Soul Burst, Contingency, Bone Shield)
2) Grouping up should not be punished, Skills and sets which are over tuned in terms of the reward they provide by being in a group should be adjusted instead.
3) Hybridisation has caused main stats (stam/mag) to essentially be irrelevant and due to this HP Stacking is too rewarding. Especially because attributes and bonuses/enchants scale more favourably with HP.
For example tri-stat glyphs award free off-stat with no 'cost' since players are trying to boost their health anyway. They need to be nerfed so that you receive all 3 stats but at a reduced amount.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom @ZOS_Kevin

Any chance of a dev comment if any adjustments are being planned to this could be included in the Week 3 summary?