The current state of AvA seems to be severely lacking in options and diversity and a lot of this seems due to balance issues. I truly wonder how many developers or policy makers actually play PvP on a regular basis. My gut feeling is the answer is 0.

Balance issue #1 - AoE caps. The lack of AoE caps means zergballs > everything else. This AoE cap is presumably to prevent huge Ultimate generation via AoE. The unintended consequence is that my zergball can out heal and out dps your capped AoE. Recommendation - Remove AoE cap and add AoE ultimate generation cap.

Balance issue #2 - Shield stacking. Shield stacking is the way you see players effectively take 0 damage from 8 guys hitting them at once. Examples are hardened ward, annulment, healing ward. Shields are "stacked" so that a user gets the full benefit of annulment (50% less spell dmg) while all shields hold, whereas normally the spell is consumed on ~350 damage being taken. This shield stacking lack of balance does several things. First, it severely limits stamina builds survivability because they cannot generate damage shields at the rate of magicka builds. Second, it means some players (with utility and rotation + pots) are almost unkillable for the average player or in some cases group of players. This has the unintended consequence of making some players think the game is "broken" or severely imbalanced. This is especially true because all classes but NB's have class-based shields. Therefore if you are a NB you cannot exploit this broken mechanic as easily as other classes. Recommendation - make damage shields unable to coexist with other damage shields.

Balance issue #3 - Ultimate generation outside of combat. Right now only restoration staff can consistently generate ultimate outside of combat. The more people affected, the better the ultimate generation. This means any character who hasn't slotted restoration staff cannot consistently generate ultimate outside of combat. The unintended consequence is that groups of raiders who outnumber defenders can easily generate ultimate all times during combat downtime while it is significantly harder for a small group of defenders to do so. Recommendation - make ultimate generation outside of combat not scale based on allies affected. Further boost this with a limit to AoE ultimate generation as part of #1.

Balance issue #4 - Death is not to be avoided, and at some cases is sought out. Death has no real negative side affects, in many cases. Other times, people suicide just to quickly move all the way across the map to use a FC. The unintended consequence of this logic is that skill isn't as important as zerging people down with endless numbers/camps. Recommendation - make FC's group/range required, and give players an increasing cooldown as they take deaths during a set time interval. If this is limited by code, the simple fix is to drastically increase the cost of an FC. Make battlefield rezzes mean something. The other option is to allow soul gems to work...but require the gems have a PvP soul to function in Cyrodil

Fun Issue #1 - No one likes dying where they don't get a single command in. This is especially so once you hit v12. We should try and limit cases where a player dies without getting a single command, whether a victim of snipe or just gang-cc'd and killed.

Fun Issue #2 - Outside of roots/snares, we cannot maledict enemies. It would be awesome if we had some skills that drained stamina/magicka or spells that caused shields to be dispelled etc. It would open up a lot of other tactics if we could have spells/skills that reduced or affected enemy spells/skills. If an enemy now has multiple shields up I have no option but to wait them out and hope they don't recast them. That puts me at the mercy of the enemy to dictate the fight.

Community Issue #1 - Not enough ways to measure our epeens. Sounds stupid...right? What I mean is we love the leaderboards, we just need more granularity. Right now the leaderboards are reflective of who has the most free time. Give us a more granular set of rankings...like kills/hour points/hour, heals/hour, keeps/day taken etc. The more people competing, the more people wanting to play your game. Then give us this same stat board, and the ability to aggregate that by guild. Voila! Guild with highest kills/hr now can brag. Guild with highest deaths/hour now has to admit they are zergers.


I've got more but this is already a wall of text so hopefully this leads to some discussions.