IMO encouraging the immovable, invis bat swarm, pulsar, streak groups with this change really ruins things for me. Ever faction has them, and every faction despises fighting them unless they are in said group. I am not a min/maxer but put in hours into pvp daily. This is not the type of pvp I would like to be forced into just to have the campaign be competitive. As a direct result of this proposal i've unsubbed.

How much of the player base population comprise of these elitist teams? A handful? Great so lets cater to them since they complain the most on the forums. Awesome.

WarrioroftheWind_ESO wrote: »

The dps falloff was something suggested several weeks back but some of the purists kept bawling. Yes ESO skills involve spamming but there should be a flexible rotation. You should still be able to spam aoe and use other skills to whittle down the crowd as well as armor/shield effects for survival.

I was one who added the sug. Glad they are going that way with it.

But hopefully they do good at limiting the ultimate gain with aoe. Personally I think they should cap ultimate gain fron 2 or 3 targets so single target attacks font get totally toasted

. Tho, the unblockable skills such as impulse were the main getters of ultimate. Blocked attacks give less and cant perform crit damage.

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

Sasky wrote: »

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

Eh. I still think a much better solution would be to reduce the damage AOE does the more you stack it. That way you don't have to worry about ultimate generation or balancing problems as nothing changes under normal circumstances.

Look at how much ultimate sorcs were able to get from streak when it was uncapped for ultimate generation. Now consider carve (2h) -- if you hit 20 people with that, not counting crits and damage you'll get 60 ultimate.

Look at drain power (either morph) -- cast that once in a blob and your weapon damage will be hardcapped. Now imagine a batswarm with no target limit based on hardcapped weapon damage.

The point is that he makes well is there's a lot of additional changes beyond just uncapping damage.

Abilities right now are suppose to be capped in the amount of ultimate they give.. so if ya hit 20 people with Carve or 6 you'd only get 15 Ultimate Total (which is suppose to be the max ya get)

You get damage plus bonus from carve. I know ive gotten much more than 15 ultimate from hitting 6 targets with it.

Blackhorne wrote: »

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

Sanct16 wrote: »

Huntler wrote: »

Maybe this is because I'm a healer but if you change aoe caps it should be for both damage and heals... not just one... thats kinda silly.

If they would remove the cap for heals there wouldn't be any changes to aoe blobs because both, damage and heal would be increased to negate each other.

By only increasing the damage, stacking will be less effective. And thats, what the change is intended to do.

Well, honestly, I've run the numbers and even without caps, heals can neither sustain nor burst like damage abilities can.

Great! Show us the numbers, so we can verify them, thanks!

First off: If you are focused fired and one shoted, healing is irrelevant.
Without caps, an area can be wiped on command, and there is nothing an healer can do about it, not even barrier stacking can.
The barrier of entry for one shots is around 10 players, which is a small group.

Secondly: Just check Esohead or your in game abilities, that is all there is to it.
It is all public information. You can work it out yourself and not worry that I cherry picked what I would copy paste.

But in short, what you'll notice is that healing in ESO is either reactive:
- 3 target heals of templars, or the automatic reaction mutagen
- Shields like healing ward (1 target) or Barrier (pbaoe limitations)
- Combat prayer with a cone ability
Or they are heals over time:
- rapid regen (3 targets)
- grand healing
- The many abilities that heal on attacks

In one case, they all take more mana and heal less than damage abilities.
In the other they can be casted non stop but even stacked, they can't out dps an offensive spam.

Of course, this is in the case of plain no aoe target caps.
With that weird soft cap they are considering, maybe uncaped healing would be stronger than dps. But that is somethign we'll need to check with the implementation.

Just out of interest ..did daoc have smart healing ?

I can't wait to see how these changes carry out in actual game play.

A lot of people--including myself--like to think we know how a particular change will affect player behavior. Truthfully, most of us are NOT social gurus. If we were, we'd probably not be here.

I'm hoping that changes like this will make the game more balanced and satisfying to the player population. But, they can just as easily backfire. We'll just have to see.

ghengis_dhan wrote: »

I can't wait to see how these changes carry out in actual game play.

A lot of people--including myself--like to think we know how a particular change will affect player behavior. Truthfully, most of us are NOT social gurus. If we were, we'd probably not be here.

I'm hoping that changes like this will make the game more balanced and satisfying to the player population. But, they can just as easily backfire. We'll just have to see.

The interesting thing is ,we don't have to be humble or social gurus.
We have past experience both in other games and in ESo of how players react in presence of aoe target caps.
it is consistently to stack up when present (Shadowbane, GW2 and eso when it got revealed) or to spread out (daoc, darkfall, warhammer and eso before we knew about caps)

This really is a safe move.

balberith wrote: »

IMO encouraging the immovable, invis bat swarm, pulsar, streak groups with this change really ruins things for me. Ever faction has them, and every faction despises fighting them unless they are in said group. I am not a min/maxer but put in hours into pvp daily. This is not the type of pvp I would like to be forced into just to have the campaign be competitive. As a direct result of this proposal i've unsubbed.

How much of the player base population comprise of these elitist teams? A handful? Great so lets cater to them since they complain the most on the forums. Awesome.

Think about it again. This change won't affect you or your friends if you run a small group since you probably rarely stack up anyways and if you do, you'd already get hit with the 6 target cap in place.

This change targets the zerg-blobs that run 20+ people withing a few square feet. The reason they do this is that since spells can only hit 6 people, it's like if it "missed" the other 18 guys. The next AoE landing isn't likely to hit the same people either.
Then the non-random smart healing will heal those 6 people up.

So running in a big pile of people is the best defense to AoE attacks.
How does that make sense?

Redlags wrote: »

Rune_Relic wrote: »

Just out of interest ..did daoc have smart healing ?

No smart healing. PBAoE's had a cast time that locked you into place though. It was more balanced. Yet, 250k boxes sold turned to 10k subs fast in a few bad decisions and randoms getting farmed by guilds.

Spells were REALLY easy to interrupt in DAoC too. Getting hit by literally anything would stop your casting for 3 seconds.

I've never even once heard anyone complain about AoE or heard the term "AoE cap" in DAoC even though AoE was potentially MUCH stronger than in ESO.

The reason DAoC "died" was PvE related, WoW did it better.



** SI, TOA are the first two expansions to the game, NF was their New Frontier - I guess you could call it - PvP expansion...

kevlarto_ESO wrote: »

I wonder how sieges will go with the cap removed ? getting through that breach will be very interesting, I think the whole aoe cap thing is about to open up a new can of worms, and bring a different set of problems, there is more trouble in cyrodill than boom boom trains. I guess time will tell /shrug

They need to remove the ability to put FCs down inside a keep. They also need to remove the ability to spawn at an FC if you are not within a set radius. That would solve some of the problems.

Also, it is pretty easy to open 2 holes in a wall and try to get around the focused aoe or develop other strats etc.

Gecko wrote: »

Also, it is pretty easy to open 2 holes in a wall and try to get around the focused aoe or develop other strats etc.

That's how we used to do it in beta. We thought there was no AOE cap so we'd open multiple holes because running through just one as a zerg would be suicide. We often attacked more than one wall rather than open multiple holes in the same wall.

What they are suggesting isn't solid. It's a good step in the right direction, and it is better than nothing, but it can go wrong.
Any kind of falloff based on player number would still be random and a type of damage mitigation favoring stacking.
They are aware of that, hence why they keep healing abilities caped.

However, falloff is not necessary:

Many seem to not remember the times before we knew about the target caps, or didn't play much in large fights not involving stacking.
In those fights, you really rarely hit more than 6 targets. Even a wall breach is large enough that you can't hit all of it at once.
The largest ranged aoes, aside from caltrops, have a radius of only 6m.
Most are lower.

If you look at healing and buffing spells, you can see they heal less per second and take mostly more mana than attacking spells. Even healing springs, the most sustainable healing spell, needs to be stacked 6 times on one location to heal enough per second to out heal the dps of two attacks.
So even if the entire group is made of healers healing non stop, a stacking group has no way of surviving, even with uncapped healing spells.
And smart healing is the primary culprit of lag.

In short, there is no fear of removing the caps without falloffs, there are rarely any situations in normal gameplay where it would take effect anyway, and the few times it would, aoes need to do full damage.
And healing needs to be uncaped as well, because smart healing is costly.

The first iteration should be to uncap everything, then, if some abilities are OP, address them individually.

darkdruidssb14_ESO wrote: »

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

What they are suggesting isn't solid. It's a good step in the right direction, and it is better than nothing, but it can go wrong.
Any kind of falloff based on player number would still be random and a type of damage mitigation favoring stacking.
They are aware of that, hence why they keep healing abilities caped.

However, falloff is not necessary:

Many seem to not remember the times before we knew about the target caps, or didn't play much in large fights not involving stacking.
In those fights, you really rarely hit more than 6 targets. Even a wall breach is large enough that you can't hit all of it at once.
The largest ranged aoes, aside from caltrops, have a radius of only 6m.
Most are lower.

If you look at healing and buffing spells, you can see they heal less per second and take mostly more mana than attacking spells. Even healing springs, the most sustainable healing spell, needs to be stacked 6 times on one location to heal enough per second to out heal the dps of two attacks.
So even if the entire group is made of healers healing non stop, a stacking group has no way of surviving, even with uncapped healing spells.
And smart healing is the primary culprit of lag.

In short, there is no fear of removing the caps without falloffs, there are rarely any situations in normal gameplay where it would take effect anyway, and the few times it would, aoes need to do full damage.
And healing needs to be uncaped as well, because smart healing is costly.

The first iteration should be to uncap everything, then, if some abilities are OP, address them individually.

Damage falloff is necessary or you end up with a game like Warhammer Online. 1 player shouldn't be able to drop an entire group. Plus we don't know what the percentages are for damage falloff yet and we do know they are increasing some abilities damage (cleave) to put it on par with Impulse.

Also what about damage shields and purge that prevent players from taking damage?

Heals might not be able to out heal much damage, but there are plenty of ways to get access to damage shields and groups already spam purge. Both of those abilities prevent players from taking all of the damage they would without them. So I think it's wise to increase the number of targets you can hit without increasing the number of targets you can heal since healing isn't the only thing stopping people from dying.

It isn't necessary.

The radius of aoes are not very large in ESO. Aside from caltrop, all of them are bellow 6m radius. So to hit more than 6 targets, you'd need a very high concentration of players, which is very rare in normal gameplay.

Aoes also don't do much damage. Factoring penetration and resistance, one single aoe does an average of 10%-15% total health damage.
You can't drop an entire group, not with one player.
In theory you'd need 10 players to one shot a group, but then again, this depends on that group being within a 6m radius circle and not avoiding the very visible red circles on the ground.

Pbaoes got a slightly wider radius, 8m for impulse and 10 for batswarm, but that's also the extent of their reach. All other abilities have a reach of 27m + half of their radius.
In a meta where players aren't always stacked up, being almost 3 times closer to the enemy to barely start hiting one of them means you are taking a large risk and made yourself an easy target.
This balances out the risk vs reward ration.

Regarding buffs, they are mostly pbaoes, meaning they need to group up to use them and take the risk of any benefits be lost by an enemy with good reaction time.
Barrier can at most add 1500hp if combined with annulement, which means you spent your ultimate to gain 3 to 5 hits worth of hp.
It's situational ,when you absolutely have to go trough a choke point, but it isn't worth stackin non stop. And it is the same for purge.
A lot of these abilities seem important nowadays because of the current stacking meta game, but in "normal" play, they are barely situational and will have to compete with more relevant abilities.

The majority of healing spells in the game are capped to 3 targets, this will not change. But those that were under the general cap of 6, like grand healing, can be uncapped safely as they are just heals over time or have a cast time. It will add sustainability, but not burst healing.
And it will make the morphs increasing radius be worth it compared to other ones. What's the point of increased radius if it doesn't increase targets impacted?

There really is no need to add any limitation on a global basis.
If individual abilities do act up, then those can be dealt separatly after play testing.

effinshiddy wrote: »

Snip

But as we keep saying, it's not true PvP and having caps creates the cheap turtle tactics that are raging across AvA and you see in GW2 as well. It's a bloody cancer that needs to be treated and this is in the right direction.

Find other ways to balance it like adding a fall off like PBAoE had in DAoC just don't have target caps which shouldn't be there. It's like placing a duct tape over a pipe leak... it's not gonna work and more problems will arise from it.

Davadin wrote: »

Here's a question. If AoE caps is removed, how about CC skills? Like, Burning Talons?

Can I guy with Immovable drops in middle of a pain-train, pop Burning Talon and EVERYONE in the vicinity got rooted?



Or Volcanic Rune. If I lay one down in the middle of a zerg-blob, will I see 20 skeletons enemies flying through the air?

Yes, but since they have dedicated Purge spammers and since all of them use Immovable, any form of CC will be useless.

Anyhow, removing the AoE caps will be a huge step forward to fighting and/or getting rid of these blobs. Anyone telling you otherwise, to be honest, is smoking some serious pot.

Davadin wrote: »

Here's a question. If AoE caps is removed, how about CC skills? Like, Burning Talons?

Can I guy with Immovable drops in middle of a pain-train, pop Burning Talon and EVERYONE in the vicinity got rooted?



Or Volcanic Rune. If I lay one down in the middle of a zerg-blob, will I see 20 skeletons enemies flying through the air?

You assume players won't react to the change and would continue to play like they would in the current meta.
However, players will always adapt, and the first time they get all CCd or bombed is the last time they'll stack on purpose.

So there won't be any pain train to one shot nor any zerg balls to throw into the air. Unless mistakes or very specific situations, you'll rarely see more than 4 targets in the radius of a single aoe.

You can see that in some of the launch videos, where people thought there were no caps. Even in a full large scale melee, talons and such spells would hit at most 6 targets.

The meta game will just revert to something like that, with spread out fights and tactical use of abilities to avoid, control or breach through chokepoints.

It will lower the barrier of entry for most players, no need to have a group to stack with, but at the same time increase the skill ceiling as new varied tactics will now open up. (flanking and such)