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Why 20% PvP Blanket Healing Nerf is Bad

IAVITNI
IAVITNI
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It's been historically proven that attempts to reduce effectiveness of healing through blanket healing nerfs has the reverse effect of superimposing healing/tank metas on the player base instead.

Paradox of Blanket Nerfs
In general, when a blanket nerf is used to address issues within certain builds/contexts of play, they tend to harm the average build and indirectly buff their intended targets. This is because those targeted builds still meet the minimum requirements to perform after the nerfs as they exceeded those requirements before the nerf. On the other hand, builds that were meeting the minimum requirements before the nerf now need to reallocate resources to the nerfed aspect of gameplay resulting in an overall nerf for those builds.

We saw this in the Defile meta with the introduction of Befoul, which continued until the proposed Durok change to reduce duration (but not uptime) and again with the current stamcro meta that allows for 100% AoE Major Defile Uptime.

A blanket nerf to healing is actually an indirect buff to high mitigation and high healing builds due to the fact that those builds tend too over mitigate or over heal while the average builds meets minimum requirements in regards to mitigation and healing within the context of PvP. This results in those builds sacrificing either damage or sustain in order to build into mitigation and/or healing in order to continue to survive incoming damage while the high mitigation and high healing builds are not required to make any sacrifices in their builds as they have already invested in the required aspects of gameplay to deal with the reduced healing.

The Issue
The largest issues in relation to the excessively high time-to-kill (TTK) are the cost effectiveness of passive survivability tools and the over-performance of cross-healing in group play (again solely within the context of PvP). The proposed change of the increase of healing reduction from 50% to 60% (a 20% nerf in comparison to live, refer to Quick Maths Spoiler) aims to address TTK but fails to consider the the aforementioned issues.

While a decrease to healing does have an impact on passive survivability it is again a blanket nerf that disproportionately hurts builds that rely on active survivability (Defensive CCs, offensive pressure preventing opponents from going offensive etc.). Within the context of group play, the reduced healing has a smaller impact than other forms of survivability such as high health pools and damage reduction stats. For high mitigation builds, healing tends to be lower in general since they build for damage reduction stats and not heal boosting stats outside of health % based heals. Based on this we can assume that the proposed healing nerf is not done to address high health/mitigation builds but rather to address the over abundance of healing currently in PvP.

Of course the nerf addresses cross-healing directly as those cross heals are nerfed by an additional 10% additive to the current 50% in Battlespirit. However, the issue is that it also harms self healing. If a player is unable to heal themselves on their own than the importance of cross healing rises significantly, having the unintended reverse effect of requiring cross-heals even more. Right now, a lot of healers build for supportive stats such as Major Courage or utility boosts such as higher ultimate uptimes. The healing nerf means that instead of Spell Power Cure for example, these builds will opt to run sets like Sanctuary instead. Assuming group-play runs the minimum number of healers (they tend to run more) what this means is that they will actually further invest into healing while sacrificing damage/utility that is used to help their allies secure kills. Alternatively, groups will run an additional healer. Ultimately, this simply serves to increase the overall healing done, thereby increasing TTK.

Quick Maths:
The additive 10% healing reduction may not seem like much BUT it is actually a 20% nerf in comparison to Live values. Below is a quick explanation and example of how the math works.

To begin, we can reframe the Battlespirit buff like so:
Live: 50% Healing Reduction=50% Healing Received
PTS: 60% Healing Reduction=40% Healing Received

Therefore using 50% as the baseline, you see that 40% Healing Received/50% Healing Received results in 80% of the original Healing Received. This is 20% less than the baseline (100%).

Using an oversimplified example of a healing ability with a tooltip for 1000 Health:
Live: 1000 healing tooltip*50% Healing Reduction=500 Health healed
PTS: 1000 healing tooltip*60% Healing Reduction=400 Health healed

As you can see the difference in healing is 100 Health.
100 Health/500 Health=20%.

This change is in fact a 20% blanket healing nerf. To put things in perspective this is nearly the same as having 100% uptime of Major Defile applied to all players.


Solutions
Cross healing is the issue that should be addressed with the healing change to Battle Spirit.

A very simple solution would be to include a new buff in Battle Spirit that increases Healing Done to Self equal to the increase to the Healing Received reduction.

So using the proposed value as an example, the revised Battlespirit would reduce Healing Received by 60% but an additional Healing Done to Self Buff of 10% would be added in order to avoid nerfing builds that are more sensitive to healing nerfs, i.e. low mitigation/healing builds. From this point, self-healing outliers could than be adjusted to the new standard.

A more extensive solution would be to continue with a blanket nerf but buff self healing abilities such as Vigor and Rally but create new conditions to heals such as Resistance Flesh and Breath of Life that heal the caster for an additional % equal to the healing reduction nerf.

Conclusion
Blanket nerfs tend to harm builds in the middle of the spectrum more than the over performing builds. In order to counter-act blanket nerfs to healing, self heals need to be compensated either directly by buffing the abilities or by introducing a new Healing Done to Self Buff into Battle Spirit.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_RichLambert @ZOS_BrianWheeler @ZOS_Gilliam
Edited by IAVITNI on April 24, 2020 10:55PM
  • Galarthor
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    While I agree with your assessment of the underlying issue, I disagree with your solution.

    The issue is TTK. And as you said it is mainly caused by Passive Mitigation and Cross Healing. So that's what has to be addressed.

    1) Reduce effectiveness of passive mitigation tools. They already outperform active mitigation tools, which in and of itself is ridiculous, given that latter requires player input and skill and bears considerable risk of misjudging the situation or being surpirsed while the former does not.

    2) Reduce cross healing. Simply reduce the healing done by AoE and multi-target abilities. That way, self-sustained survivability is not negatively affected while cross healing is reduced.

    Both of these things should also affect the code and thus performance less adversly since you just tweak the numbers and don't have to run additional calculations when in PvP. The sleaker the code the better. Performance in PvP is already atrocious.
  • xylena
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    This blanket healing nerf only reinforces the meta of heal blobs and holding SnB block.
    Retired until we break the Tank Meta
  • IAVITNI
    IAVITNI
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    Galarthor wrote: »
    While I agree with your assessment of the underlying issue, I disagree with your solution.

    The issue is TTK. And as you said it is mainly caused by Passive Mitigation and Cross Healing. So that's what has to be addressed.

    1) Reduce effectiveness of passive mitigation tools. They already outperform active mitigation tools, which in and of itself is ridiculous, given that latter requires player input and skill and bears considerable risk of misjudging the situation or being surpirsed while the former does not.

    2) Reduce cross healing. Simply reduce the healing done by AoE and multi-target abilities. That way, self-sustained survivability is not negatively affected while cross healing is reduced.

    Both of these things should also affect the code and thus performance less adversly since you just tweak the numbers and don't have to run additional calculations when in PvP. The sleaker the code the better. Performance in PvP is already atrocious.

    You're saying the same thing as me.

    I did not address Passive Mitigation because there was no change that aims to do so this PTS.

    My suggestions reduce cross-healing using the same approach as ZoS (via Battle Spirit) but does not reduce self healing. In fact, your approach would have negative impacts in PvE. Cross-healing needs to be addressed via Battle Spirit to avoid that. I proposed a 10% increase healing reduction across the board but a 10% increase to self healing. So self healing sees a net 0 change whereas all non-self healing (i.e. cross healing) sees a 10% nerf (equal to 20% in comparison to live).
  • Galarthor
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    I agree, we want the same thing. We just prefer different ways to get there.

    Imo, cross healing in PvE is also too strong. You lay down a Healing Spring, a Ritual, and/or some other HoTs and you can basically be a DD the rest of the time. As an emergency safe you slot Earthgore, just incase somebody drops low. It will even get automatically triggered by your HoTs. It would be a lot more enjoyable if PvE Healing required more active healing. I enjoy my templar and necro healers' concepts and toolkits, but god damn are they boring to play in PvE.

    You solution might be faster to implement, but it will put more strain on the server and client. A reduction of the AoE and Multi-target Hots by 10% or 20% should be far easier on the system. And lags are an issue.

    Plus, passive mitigation is in a dire need of a downwards adjustment. It offers greater rewards at a lower risk than active mitigation. That is as imbalanced as it gets.

    One easy solution for the passive mitigation problem would be to adjust Armor passives. Let them keep the % Mitigation as is, but significantly reduce the damage they are dealing (e.g. 50%). PvE tanks will still be tanky but PvP builds will have to decide whether they want to be super tanky or deal some meaningful damage. Right now they get to do both and it killing diversity in PvP. For years heavy armor stamina builds have be dominating everything.
  • IAVITNI
    IAVITNI
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    Galarthor wrote: »
    I agree, we want the same thing. We just prefer different ways to get there.

    Imo, cross healing in PvE is also too strong. You lay down a Healing Spring, a Ritual, and/or some other HoTs and you can basically be a DD the rest of the time. As an emergency safe you slot Earthgore, just incase somebody drops low. It will even get automatically triggered by your HoTs. It would be a lot more enjoyable if PvE Healing required more active healing. I enjoy my templar and necro healers' concepts and toolkits, but god damn are they boring to play in PvE.

    You solution might be faster to implement, but it will put more strain on the server and client. A reduction of the AoE and Multi-target Hots by 10% or 20% should be far easier on the system. And lags are an issue.

    Plus, passive mitigation is in a dire need of a downwards adjustment. It offers greater rewards at a lower risk than active mitigation. That is as imbalanced as it gets.

    One easy solution for the passive mitigation problem would be to adjust Armor passives. Let them keep the % Mitigation as is, but significantly reduce the damage they are dealing (e.g. 50%). PvE tanks will still be tanky but PvP builds will have to decide whether they want to be super tanky or deal some meaningful damage. Right now they get to do both and it killing diversity in PvP. For years heavy armor stamina builds have be dominating everything.

    Right now healing is fine in PvE. Active healing translates into spamming burst heals which is brain dead. Right now healers at the high end are expected to rotate buffs while maintaining HoTs.

    Your suggestion would actually dumb down healer roles since instead of rotating buffs they would just be spamming a burst heal. I've been main healer for several guilds, right now as a healer you drop HoTs, dish out all the buffs/damage you can and keep burst heals ready for high damage mechanics. Any more "active" healing would just be spamming shrooms/BoL etc. and that is actually far less engaging. Good PvE healers have actual rotations.

    Again, not discussing passive mitigation as that requires a skill pass.
  • Taleof2Cities
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    If you've been a main healer for several PvP guilds, @IAVITNI, aren't you nerfing yourself with your proposed changes?

    Your biggest issue is cross-healing, but that's exactly what PvP healers do.
  • Teeba_Shei
    Teeba_Shei
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    The problem with these blanket nerfs is that they are being used to address resolving vigor, rapid regen, and radiating regen doing too much healing. Other healing abilities that weren't buffed during the dotPOCalypse patch fell behind and now are falling either further behind.

    Resolving vigor and rapid regen just need slight nerfs. Radiating regen and echoing vigor should only stack 3 times instead of infinite. If you're in a group in cyrodiil radiating regen will account for around 70 to 80% of the group healing. Players just run around spamming it constantly. Most of the players who wouldn't die were also using BRP DW, which is being nerfed next patch. If you insist on doing a blanket nerf it should start at 55% to see where it lands. No CP shouldn't be touched by this nerf because the TTK in there is already extremely fast.

    Players also shouldn't be able to heal people outside their groups. This will help reduce lag, the TTK problem, and promote actual group play where TTK isn't as much of a problem.
    Edited by Teeba_Shei on April 22, 2020 5:36AM
  • IAVITNI
    IAVITNI
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    If you've been a main healer for several PvP guilds, @IAVITNI, aren't you nerfing yourself with your proposed changes?

    Your biggest issue is cross-healing, but that's exactly what PvP healers do.

    I main heal in PvE atm though I have healed PvP at some points.

    While I have not done so recently, I've been able to keep a small group alive as a magplar in fortified brass and transmutation with 0 restoration passives and base healing springs. We wiped a group 3 times our size several times.

    Fact is PvP healers don't need to spec into healing because they overheal. Cross-healing is too strong, period. A lot of people also don't realize that high cross-healing indirectly results in lag. The more cross healing, the less people die which means the more time people have to call in reinforcements. This means that what was intended to be a 5 minute fight turns into 10, then 15 etc. with more bodies piling up into 1 area. Cyro populations tend to clump together and this is a huge issue.

    Speaking from experience as s a solo/small scaler and a prior officer for several large-scale guilds, there is a stark difference in population density today compared to say 2 years ago. Groups used to be more spread out, however, because cross heals are so high (and easy) what happens is you need numbers to defeat enemy groups. 2 years ago for example, you would have a single 24-man group fight another 24-man group. However, today you have multiple 24-man groups fighting in the same spot and they constantly ask for reinforcements because the average group needs a significantly greater number of people to fully kill another co-ordinated group. These fights take longer and are far laggier and they are a direct result of excessive cross-healing.

    The argument of "well you are nerfing yourself" is also unnecessary. If one is adverse to balance simply because they are biased then their point is irrelevant within the context of a balance discussion.
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