Reduce healing dimensions in PvP areas by 50%

Ranger209 · January 2021

Rather than allowing people in a group to heal others, and disallowing people not in groups to heal others, let everyone have the ability to heal, but reduce the dimensions that heals check for injured players by 50%. Make it a battle spirit adjustment to healing. If it is a 28 meter radius, make it a 14 meter radius via battle spirit. If it is a 20 X 10 meter area that the spell normally heals, make it a 10 X 5 meter area. This would reduce the area being checked to 25% of what it currently is. Reducing the area that everyone is checking for heals by that much would be much more server friendly than not letting the 5-10 solo healers per faction be able to heal their allies.

relentless_turnip · January 2021

I think they should make it literally melee range. Meaning you have to be like Jesus and actually touch those who need your aid. Otherwise I agree it would be a decent compromise.

katorga · January 2021

I doubt the size of the area has impact on performance, it is the algorithm used to perform any check at all.

Besides, didn't ZOS say none of the tests had any real impact? The reason they kept the healing changes was to nerf cross healing, not to improve performance.

NeillMcAttack · January 2021

It’s definitely worth it to test this out. I’ve contemplated this myself. A reduced radius check will likely not lead to much performance increase as long as ballgroups are still present on the map as they will notice zero difference. But if you were to try this with grouping completely disabled for week, it would be very interesting to see, without the ability to stack crown.

NeillMcAttack · January 2021

katorga wrote: »

I doubt the size of the area has impact on performance, it is the algorithm used to perform any check at all.

Besides, didn't ZOS say none of the tests had any real impact? The reason they kept the healing changes was to nerf cross healing, not to improve performance.

They said that there was an average of a 25% reduction in server spikes across all the tests. Which is pretty significant I’d say. The reason people make this claim it seems is because Gina continued and mentioned that it didn’t have a significant enough effect on the overall “player experience”, in that Cyro still isn’t where they would like it to be, and it requires further adjustments.

Gilvoth · January 2021

thread title:
Reduce healing dimensions in PvP areas by 50%

i Absolutely agree with this, and i hope Zenimax does do that as it would Greatly help in pvp.
but, i disagree with all the other stuff, i just want the reduced healing part.

Greasytengu · January 2021

Only if you reduce Damage ability AOE's radius as well.

Seriously, I swear you guys just hate healers. Did someone thwart your ganking?

katorga · January 2021

NeillMcAttack wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

I doubt the size of the area has impact on performance, it is the algorithm used to perform any check at all.

Besides, didn't ZOS say none of the tests had any real impact? The reason they kept the healing changes was to nerf cross healing, not to improve performance.

They said that there was an average of a 25% reduction in server spikes across all the tests. Which is pretty significant I’d say. The reason people make this claim it seems is because Gina continued and mentioned that it didn’t have a significant enough effect on the overall “player experience”, in that Cyro still isn’t where they would like it to be, and it requires further adjustments.

That is exactly right, it was a 25% reduction in server spikes, but that reduction resulted minimal increase in performance in real world play. 25% reduction in server spike does not equal 25% performance improvement for users. The amount of work required to rebuild all of the classes and skills ruined by implementing their test scenarios would have been huge.

VaranisArano · January 2021

I like bringing back cross heals for all manner of informal grouping situations, whether small or large scale. It made no sense that I can't heal alliance mates fighting at the same objective or repairing the same wall.

Maybe with range limits we'd even see less players claiming that PVP healers brainlessly spam AOE heals, but I won't hold my breath on that one.

Just be prepared that this suggestion will still impact ball groups much less than their PUG opponents. After all, that's one reason why ball groups pack themselves into a ball - to stay in the radius of their stacked support stacks and their dedicated heals. PUGs without voice comms naturally spread out a lot more. So limiting the radius of heals won't do much to my raid healer. Everyone I'm trying to heal is in close range of me most of the time. As for my PUG healer, most of my groupmates are, ah, doing their own thing farther away from me which limits their healing even with the current ranges.

So compared to where we are now, some limited range cross healing would be better for PUGs than no cross-healing.

But from where we used to be before the healing changes, some limited range cross-healing is going to hurt PUGs worse than ball groups, when PUGs were already at a healing disadvantage vs ball groups.

Goregrinder · January 2021

It should be harder for players to stay alive than it is for them to kill other players. Healing and dealing damage are not equal things when it comes to PVP...they are both required components of PVP, yes...but not equal. It should always be easier to kill other players than to keep them up...

Otherwise no one would ever die, and it would no longer be PVP...it would just be a flashing-light dance contest on who can click the most healing spells before running out of magicka....it's not PVP if people aren't dying.

Imagine if trial bosses never died ever...is it still raiding at that point? Or just target dummy practice with 11 other people?

Ranger209 · January 2021

Greasytengu wrote: »

Only if you reduce Damage ability AOE's radius as well.

Seriously, I swear you guys just hate healers. Did someone thwart your ganking?

Actually I would be 100% for this as well. It would just reduce so many AoE calculations on both ends, damage and healing.
Smart healing is worse than Aoe damage, but both could provide performance value.

UntouchableHunter · January 2021

Greasytengu wrote: »

Only if you reduce Damage ability AOE's radius as well.

Seriously, I swear you guys just hate healers. Did someone thwart your ganking?

Most of the pvpers here are Stam running D Swing and Executioner. They don't see good healer and good mag class at all. They just Wana keep everybody running two handed Stam class spaming Dzswing and execute. Most of them are Stamnecro and Stam Warden infesting the severs with this tankie classes with crazy burst.

Forget to play mag or healer in pvp nobody cares

Ranger209 · January 2021

katorga wrote: »

I doubt the size of the area has impact on performance, it is the algorithm used to perform any check at all.

Besides, didn't ZOS say none of the tests had any real impact? The reason they kept the healing changes was to nerf cross healing, not to improve performance.

Well, I don't know how the algorithm works for certain, but from a logical standpoint in my mind it would work like this:
1. Press ability button to heal.
2. Does radius check to grab potential targets that may qualify for the heal.
3. Runs algorithm on all of potential targets to determine who gets heal.
4. Applies heal.

So if you reduce the area of the radius check by 75% you will have many fewer potential targets to run thru the algorithm. If there are 30 people within a 28 meter radius and only 10 within a 14 meter radius that is a significant drop in targets to run the algorithm on.

relentless_turnip · January 2021

Greasytengu wrote: »

Only if you reduce Damage ability AOE's radius as well.

Seriously, I swear you guys just hate healers. Did someone thwart your ganking?

Damage aoes are already less than half of the current healing radius, in a lot of cases they are a third.

I don't think anyone hates healers, but it is the issues smart healing causes in general. Firstly the radius check that smart healing does is absurd meaning it calculates everyone in a 28 metre radius. Secondly when damage stacks the player dies and no more calculations are performed on the dead player. Where as healing endlessly stacks and performs near endless calculations, because no one dies.

The OP was making a suggestion between the changes the developers made and what healers say they want. Which is to heal their allies.

Ranger209 · January 2021

VaranisArano wrote: »

I like bringing back cross heals for all manner of informal grouping situations, whether small or large scale. It made no sense that I can't heal alliance mates fighting at the same objective or repairing the same wall.

Maybe with range limits we'd even see less players claiming that PVP healers brainlessly spam AOE heals, but I won't hold my breath on that one.

Just be prepared that this suggestion will still impact ball groups much less than their PUG opponents. After all, that's one reason why ball groups pack themselves into a ball - to stay in the radius of their stacked support stacks and their dedicated heals. PUGs without voice comms naturally spread out a lot more. So limiting the radius of heals won't do much to my raid healer. Everyone I'm trying to heal is in close range of me most of the time. As for my PUG healer, most of my groupmates are, ah, doing their own thing farther away from me which limits their healing even with the current ranges.

So compared to where we are now, some limited range cross healing would be better for PUGs than no cross-healing.

But from where we used to be before the healing changes, some limited range cross-healing is going to hurt PUGs worse than ball groups, when PUGs were already at a healing disadvantage vs ball groups.

This is very true, ball groups by the very nature of balling up would be affected to a lesser degree than ungrouped people, or unorganized groups, BUT..

In my mind the most important skill of being in a ball group and not being Crown is the ability to stay on Crown. The second most important ability is to quickly get back on Crown when you get pulled off Crown. The most important ability of Crown is to not outrun your group. Staying together in a cohesive group is what makes it work, without that people get picked off and it falls apart. The most successful ball groups are the ones whose members stay on crown. The weaker ball groups have stragglers that can't keep up and get picked off before they can get back within the safety net of the Crown.

In essence what this would do is reduce the cast size area of that safety net by 75%. Now all those people following Crown would have to stay twice as close, and that margin of error starts getting very tight. The way it is now borders on too tight for some ball groups. Cut that radius in half and now more people in the ball are not close enough to get the heal/purge/buff. Tightening this safety net will have an impact.

Right now you could have a healer 14 meters south of Crown and a DPS 14 meters north of crown in need of a heal, and that DPS would get the heal. Reducing that radius by half means now that DPS has to be within 7 meters of Crown and the healer also within 7 meters of crown (if Crown is centered in group), or at least within 14 meters of the DPS in need of that heal (If Crown is on the edge of group). Doing this reduces the area of the safety net by 75% which I think ball groups would find very significant.

wheem_ESO · January 2021

People using heals in Battlegrounds shouldn't be penalized for the sake of Cyrodiil zerging, so it can't be something that's 100% tied to Battlespirit.

VaranisArano · January 2021

Ranger209 wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

I like bringing back cross heals for all manner of informal grouping situations, whether small or large scale. It made no sense that I can't heal alliance mates fighting at the same objective or repairing the same wall.

Maybe with range limits we'd even see less players claiming that PVP healers brainlessly spam AOE heals, but I won't hold my breath on that one.

Just be prepared that this suggestion will still impact ball groups much less than their PUG opponents. After all, that's one reason why ball groups pack themselves into a ball - to stay in the radius of their stacked support stacks and their dedicated heals. PUGs without voice comms naturally spread out a lot more. So limiting the radius of heals won't do much to my raid healer. Everyone I'm trying to heal is in close range of me most of the time. As for my PUG healer, most of my groupmates are, ah, doing their own thing farther away from me which limits their healing even with the current ranges.

So compared to where we are now, some limited range cross healing would be better for PUGs than no cross-healing.

But from where we used to be before the healing changes, some limited range cross-healing is going to hurt PUGs worse than ball groups, when PUGs were already at a healing disadvantage vs ball groups.

This is very true, ball groups by the very nature of balling up would be affected to a lesser degree than ungrouped people, or unorganized groups, BUT..

In my mind the most important skill of being in a ball group and not being Crown is the ability to stay on Crown. The second most important ability is to quickly get back on Crown when you get pulled off Crown. The most important ability of Crown is to not outrun your group. Staying together in a cohesive group is what makes it work, without that people get picked off and it falls apart. The most successful ball groups are the ones whose members stay on crown. The weaker ball groups have stragglers that can't keep up and get picked off before they can get back within the safety net of the Crown.

In essence what this would do is reduce the cast size area of that safety net by 75%. Now all those people following Crown would have to stay twice as close, and that margin of error starts getting very tight. The way it is now borders on too tight for some ball groups. Cut that radius in half and now more people in the ball are not close enough to get the heal/purge/buff. Tightening this safety net will have an impact.

Right now you could have a healer 14 meters south of Crown and a DPS 14 meters north of crown in need of a heal, and that DPS would get the heal. Reducing that radius by half means now that DPS has to be within 7 meters of Crown and the healer also within 7 meters of crown (if Crown is centered in group), or at least within 14 meters of the DPS in need of that heal (If Crown is on the edge of group). Doing this reduces the area of the safety net by 75% which I think ball groups would find very significant.

Okay, so if even ball groups find their safety net greatly reduced, what do you expect the impact to be on PUGs?

The way I see it, they'd get more cross-healing than they do now, but much less compared to before. After all, friendly healing springs will only have a 4m radius. Echoing Vigor will have a 8m radius. Good placement of skills helps, but you can only heal as many players as are packed into your radius and PUGs don't play near as tightly as even mediocre ball groups. Nor can PUG healers spam heals to make up for the smaller radius the way that raid healers can.

(Of course, maybe that's my experience with PUGs back when we had 24-player raids talking. For non-guild raids, "Stay on Crown" seems to mean "Stick somewhere in the vague vicinity of Crown." Maybe they've gotten better at sticking together since?)

Overall, I think its worth considering that while this solution is a step up from where PUGs are at now with cross-heals, its a mixed bag as far as overall PUG healing is concerned. I'm specifically reminded of the Summerset patch when ZOS buffed siege weapon damage. Everyone struggled to cope with the extra damage, including ball groups. It was the hardest my healer has worked to get our guild through siege fire, before or since, and we lost sieges because of the increased damage. However, as the update went on, it became apparently that good ball groups were the only groups with enough healing to withstand the increased firepower on a regular basis, while PUGs got slaughtered. ZOS reverted that change.

So while I understand the temptation to spring on something that seems like a solid nerf to ball groups who can't stick on Crown properly, its important to keep one eye on what this does to everyone else, especially PUGs. Otherwise, we end up with a change that leaves ball groups mostly functional, PUGs getting slaughtered, and eventually ZOS reverting the change.

Faded · January 2021

I'm surprised they didn't try this in their tests, it would be less of a pain in the ass to adapt to than ability cooldowns.

It's almost as if they weren't focused on healing being self-evidently bad, and that's just a popular scapegoat in an echo chamber or two. 🤔

VaranisArano · January 2021

Faded wrote: »

I'm surprised they didn't try this in their tests, it would be less of a pain in the ass to adapt to than ability cooldowns.

It's almost as if they weren't focused on healing being self-evidently bad, and that's just a popular scapegoat in an echo chamber or two. 🤔

In their defense, I think they were more concerned with testing ways to reduce AOE spam. If you reduce my heal radius, I'm going to have to cast more AOE heals to cope.

Faded · January 2021

VaranisArano wrote: »

Faded wrote: »

I'm surprised they didn't try this in their tests, it would be less of a pain in the ass to adapt to than ability cooldowns.

It's almost as if they weren't focused on healing being self-evidently bad, and that's just a popular scapegoat in an echo chamber or two. 🤔

In their defense, I think they were more concerned with testing ways to reduce AOE spam. If you reduce my heal radius, I'm going to have to cast more AOE heals to cope.

Ha, fair point.

SgtNuttzmeg · January 2021

This is a terrible idea that would only make the current lag problems worse. Let's not actually address the issue of too many calculations being done and instead force everybody into a tighter VD clump. All this would do is buff bombers and make harmony stronger.

Ranger209 · January 2021

VaranisArano wrote: »

Faded wrote: »

I'm surprised they didn't try this in their tests, it would be less of a pain in the ass to adapt to than ability cooldowns.

It's almost as if they weren't focused on healing being self-evidently bad, and that's just a popular scapegoat in an echo chamber or two. 🤔

In their defense, I think they were more concerned with testing ways to reduce AOE spam. If you reduce my heal radius, I'm going to have to cast more AOE heals to cope.

It is a compromise between where we are now and where we were. How much rapids spam is there currently to keep a 12 man group layered 3 or 4 deep combined with purging, buffing, and other heal spam? Can it really get any worse? Serious question there.

VaranisArano · January 2021

Ranger209 wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Faded wrote: »

I'm surprised they didn't try this in their tests, it would be less of a pain in the ass to adapt to than ability cooldowns.

It's almost as if they weren't focused on healing being self-evidently bad, and that's just a popular scapegoat in an echo chamber or two. 🤔

In their defense, I think they were more concerned with testing ways to reduce AOE spam. If you reduce my heal radius, I'm going to have to cast more AOE heals to cope.

It is a compromise between where we are now and where we were. How much rapids spam is there currently to keep a 12 man group layered 3 or 4 deep combined with purging, buffing, and other heal spam? Can it really get any worse? Serious question there.

In that comment, I was speaking to why ZOS didn't test reduced heal range in the first round of testing. They were trying a lot of things to reduce AOE spamming which they thought was the major culprit causing performance issues, including putting cooldowns on AOEs. That's a hard reduction on the number of AOE heals cast...but it turns out that reducing the amount of AOEs cast didn't make a big overall difference in Cyrodiil performance. That's confirmed by ZOS not touching the biggest source of AOE spam in Cyrodiil: ball groups.

Since their initial hypothesis failed, that means ZOS is likely to look in other directions for the second round of tests. Those might just include looking at reduced healing range in order to reduce calculations. I think it would make for a good test when ZOS restarts testing and I'd be willing to give it a try.

Ranger209 · January 2021

VaranisArano wrote: »

Ranger209 wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Faded wrote: »

I'm surprised they didn't try this in their tests, it would be less of a pain in the ass to adapt to than ability cooldowns.

It's almost as if they weren't focused on healing being self-evidently bad, and that's just a popular scapegoat in an echo chamber or two. 🤔

In their defense, I think they were more concerned with testing ways to reduce AOE spam. If you reduce my heal radius, I'm going to have to cast more AOE heals to cope.

It is a compromise between where we are now and where we were. How much rapids spam is there currently to keep a 12 man group layered 3 or 4 deep combined with purging, buffing, and other heal spam? Can it really get any worse? Serious question there.

In that comment, I was speaking to why ZOS didn't test reduced heal range in the first round of testing. They were trying a lot of things to reduce AOE spamming which they thought was the major culprit causing performance issues, including putting cooldowns on AOEs. That's a hard reduction on the number of AOE heals cast...but it turns out that reducing the amount of AOEs cast didn't make a big overall difference in Cyrodiil performance. That's confirmed by ZOS not touching the biggest source of AOE spam in Cyrodiil: ball groups.

Since their initial hypothesis failed, that means ZOS is likely to look in other directions for the second round of tests. Those might just include looking at reduced healing range in order to reduce calculations. I think it would make for a good test when ZOS restarts testing and I'd be willing to give it a try.

You bring up the point though of having to spam it more if it is less effective, if the range is reduced. I guess one question is how much more can a ball group healer spam it than they currently are? Ball groups healers would be the most susceptive to this as that is their primary assignment, and theoretically their group mates are in close proximity at most times. Are they currently hitting regen 3 out of every 5 seconds? If it is less than that, how much more could they possibly spam it? If reducing the radius or area of these types of spells would increase the frequency of them being spammed would they have to combine it with a longer cooldown? Maybe that is the answer. Maybe they are also looking at individual cooldown requirements on a case by case basis.

I don't see doing something like this having a dramatic effect of increasing spamming these heals by ungrouped healers. They may spam them more in breeches, but other than that they will actually have to run farther to get to people in need of heals when they are spread out which will slow down how often these abilities are activated. This again pushes for a way to get healing back to ungrouped healers.

A toggle ability to make heals in PvP self only could also work with doing this. I am guessing here, but in a cluster of 50 ungrouped players how many are pure healers, 5, 10? I think the number is quite small as it is a somewhat ineffective approach to PvP in my mind if you are not grouping. I mean if you get caught alone riding somewhere and have virtually no offensive power what chance do you have of defeating the person(s) that caught you, and arriving at your destination? I personally only play my 2 healers, vs my 12 non healers, when trying to get transmutes. BUT, there are people who wish to play them, and they should be able to effectively. Healing alliance members should be a thing in AvAvA. But for the 40 to 45 players who wish for their healing to be selfish only, a toggle would allow this while at the same time singling the majority of ungrouped people out of the smart healing algorithm conundrum, leaving only the 10 percent or so that are playing ungrouped healers to contribute to usage of these algorithms.

I think there are combinations of things that could be utilized to significantly reduce the calculations per second in Cyrodiil. Reducing AoE range, offensive and defensive both, could be one of those variables. Offensive limitation has the melee/range division to respect as shrinking something too much offensively could make a ranged ability act like, or be considered a melee ability. Heal stacking...another conversation, and another part of the problem.

Pauls · January 2021

It will only favor ballgroups which are already dominate everything. *** no

Ranger209 · January 2021

Pauls wrote: »

It will only favor ballgroups which are already dominate everything. *** no

How will making them run twice as tight as they currently are to receive heals and purges help them? Right now if a healer casts purge it hits people within 18 meters. If that is reduced to 9 meters there will be more people in that ball group that do not get purged because they are too far away. The smaller that the radius of effects becomes the more difficult it becomes for the ball group to stay within it, meaning some members won't get heals, or purges that were getting them before. When this happens those individuals become vulnerable.