Question for Endgame PvE Players: Necessity of Health-Based Heals for Tanks and Relevance of Healers

HankTwo · December 2020

Stahlor wrote: »

HankTwo wrote: »

Maybe you could instead ask for something more sensible, like increasing the max stam/mag scaling coefficient of skills to something more than ~ 1/10.5 of the weapon/spell damage coefficient.

This would cause PVE players dealing even more damage and people are already complaining about that.

I mainly see dizzy/executioner in my death cap. Sometimes some snipes, but I usually get my head smashed by a bunch of stams spamming dizzy and executioner.

So what do you suggest to give PVP more variety without having unkillable high health damage dealers or any heavy nerfs in PVE?

And why do you think a damage penalty depending on health would be so bad?

I already explained why I think your active damage penalty would be bad, but you didn't really respond to any of my specific points (getting certain passives, getting ayleid well or emp buff, getting healed by warden, ...). Overall I think your idea just goes against the basics of RPG design, that your characters gets stronger when you manage to get extra stats. The penalty for getting flat health enchants or spending attribute points into health should be the stamina or magicka you will be missing, not some artificial debuff. However, the impact of said stam and mag might be too weak, thats why I suggested changing skill scaling could be a possible improvement. You could shift the scaling a bit from weapon/spell damage to stam/mag by reducing one coefficient and increasing the other (or in other words: changing the common ratio of 1/10.5), so that stam & mag become more relevant for damage in PvP again, without really affecting PvE (since they have both anyway). The way the game works rn in PvP is that you dont really need high max resources for damage, especially when it comes to stam builds, since you can compensate by either stacking weapon damage or going for procs, which both compete less with max health when creating a build than stam does.

Other than that most changes for PvP will inevitably have an impact on PvE, since ZOS doesn't want to balance the two game modes differently.

Those unkillable damage dealers you speak of, I just dont see them tbh. When I'm playing with my usual small scale group we kill both harbinger necro tanks and health stacking white werewolfs, which are arguably the most tanky builds atm, but neither of those have good damage. Then you have the health stacking proc tanks, which are still very tanky, but have much better damage compared to the other two. Some of these builds might be pretty much unkillable in 1v1, but they all still die when focused down by even just a small group of good players.

Keep in mind that this is in no CP. Imo CP is pretty busted and creating 'unkillable' (they are still killable but its far harder to kill good players in CP than in no CP) builds is super easy. Last time I ventured into CP was in IC where I had some 2 v 3 small scale fights that honestly took forever. I was on an outdated light armor + pariah magden that would have 24k hp in no CP (should be about 28k in CP) and even with just that I felt pretty much 'unkillable' unless heavily outnumbered.

If you want some insight on builds and playstyle you can pm me if you want. This discussion is meant to be about health-based heals anyway, so it would be nice to stick to the topic from now on.

Grimlok_S · December 2020

Sanguinor2 wrote: »

HankTwo wrote: »

Thanks for the input, this was exactly the information I was looking for since I have admittedly zero experience myself when it comes to vet trial tanking. So, this would mean reworking health-based heals into max stat scaling ones would be a big no go then, unless damage in certain trials also gets adjusted or smart targeting gets reworked.

A shame, really, at least when it comes to PvP imo. Not sure how ZOS could tackle this issue then without screwing PvE.

Well the easiest way would be to do something to health scaling heals with battle spirit. Or if Zos would decide to do sepparate skills in PvE and PvP but atleast the 2nd one is never gonna happen. Alternatively nerfing all the damage tools of the 40k health wardens to only be efficiently usable by max stat builds would also make everything but troll tanks go away.

In older content you would probably get by without health scaling heals in most cases simply because high dps groups nuke everything before it does too much damage and most things dont do very much damage compared to newer content. You might even be able to make it work in newer content but it could always easily go wrong if there is one unlucky high damage window with a burst heal going onto the wrong person. Another case where you would really feel the missing health scaled healing is vCR execute. In there the maintank gets reduced to I think 10% health and then a debuff on them that is like 85% or 90% healing reduction that only goes away if you hit 100% HP. Without the tanks healing healing 30k+ health when working against 85% or 90% reduction really takes a while, and if the debuff is on you for too long you just die.
I think it would be doable but only if healing gets changes so that you can actually make sure you heal your tank and it would require some changes in builds too I guess. Or if it were possible some tanking specific passives that only work in PvE and increase your healing done on yourself.
With full raidbuffs for example a tank can achieve pretty high weapon and spell damage (admittedly I cheesed a bit with being dunmer and having an infused weapon dmg enchant) so depending on the scaling it might be workable, you wouldnt be able to reach the values of the health scaling heals but in the build editor atleast you can hit a 10k coag TT and 18k Vigor TT fully buffed with a bit of cheesing involved. The downside is that to reach those tooltips you´d need: major mending, minor vitality minor and major brutality/sorcery/courage on your tank at all times, while also being a dunmer and having an infused weapon dmg enchant on your backbar instead of crusher and being a more tankyish race (not that race matters too much in tanking since you can tank on pretty much any race).

As a mostly PvPer and casual PvEr I find it both fascinating and strange that you refer to building weapon damage as a means of healing "cheesing" in place of max Health scaling heals.

Quite the opposite in PvP.. stacking weapon damage in order to heal has been the norm for quite some time. The newest aprocalypse has brought back the popularity of Health based heals we'd call cheese.

Qbiken · December 2020

PvP: HP based heals are unhealthy for the game and needs adjustments.

PvE: But tanks needs HP based heals to be self sufficient and stay alive without supports from healers.

Also PvE: Why are healers not needed in PvE content?