Fixing the Defensive Meta

The_Titan_Tim · December 2022

Balance is a tricky thing to master in a game as complex as ESO, but one thing has been standing out massively as a determining factor for success in PvP and it’s…

Healing (and how it ties into everything)

Healing has become a massive problem in ESO because it’s too easy to obtain powerful heals, and sustain indefinitely with Champion Points or drinks in their current state making players completely unkillable.

Wearing sets that build into Weapon or Spell Damage, players heal as hard as they attack, fundamentally this is a problem. It has created a meta where max stats only matter to a Magicka Sorcerer, allowing everyone to dump all their points into health, run around with under 25k of their primary resource, 30k+ Health, and through recovery drinks, and or Champion Points, fight forever using stacking Heal-Over-Time abilities. Raising the damage is not enough to address this problem.

What I propose is that Heals receive the Conjured Ward treatment, no longer scaling off of damage, but exclusively off of the casters highest max stat, either Stamina or Magicka.

This change would encourage players to build into their stat of choice, lowering the overall health people see on builds allowing for higher risk gameplay, ending the stalemates of fighting average healers as a mastered DPS. It is of my opinion, that combat should be thought provoking, and punishing if you make a mistake and currently it is not.

Indirectly, adding another stat that players have to build into, would address the proc problems we are facing, as now instead of running two proc sets, it would be necessary to drop one for a stat increasing set.

It’s about time the balance between damage, healing, and sustain were revisited as building into one should make doing the others more difficult, and this would be the least disruptive way to do so as most PvE builds run max stat, essentially facing no changes if this reliance on Stamina or Magicka were to be implemented into the game.

If you’re reading this post and agree that this would be a welcomed change, feel free to comment below and if not, I’d love to hear any reasons why.

ketsparrowhawk · December 2022

The_Titan_Tim wrote: »

Balance is a tricky thing to master in a game as complex as ESO, but one thing has been standing out massively as a determining factor for success in PvP and it’s…

Healing (and how it ties into everything)

Healing has become a massive problem in ESO because it’s too easy to obtain powerful heals, and sustain indefinitely with Champion Points or drinks in their current state making players completely unkillable.

Wearing sets that build into Weapon or Spell Damage, players heal as hard as they attack, fundamentally this is a problem. It has created a meta where max stats only matter to a Magicka Sorcerer, allowing everyone to dump all their points into health, run around with under 25k of their primary resource, 30k+ Health, and through recovery drinks, and or Champion Points, fight forever using stacking Heal-Over-Time abilities. Raising the damage is not enough to address this problem.

What I propose is that Heals receive the Conjured Ward treatment, no longer scaling off of damage, but exclusively off of the casters highest max stat, either Stamina or Magicka.

This change would encourage players to build into their stat of choice, lowering the overall health people see on builds allowing for higher risk gameplay, ending the stalemates of fighting average healers as a mastered DPS. It is of my opinion, that combat should be thought provoking, and punishing if you make a mistake and currently it is not.

Indirectly, adding another stat that players have to build into, would address the proc problems we are facing, as now instead of running two proc sets, it would be necessary to drop one for a stat increasing set.

It’s about time the balance between damage, healing, and sustain were revisited as building into one should make doing the others more difficult, and this would be the least disruptive way to do so as most PvE builds run max stat, essentially facing no changes if this reliance on Stamina or Magicka were to be implemented into the game.

If you’re reading this post and agree that this would be a welcomed change, feel free to comment below and if not, I’d love to hear any reasons why.

I made the same suggestion in another post. Treat heals just like healing proc sets.. scaling with max stats only. I also think healing abilities should be quite a bit more expensive. That way if you want to be a powerful healer, you need to invest in high max stats and sustain. Offensive builds would no longer be able to afford to spam healing abilities.. and even when they do, they will have much lower potency. End result would be less cross healing, and dedicated healers would have much more value in a group. It would also incentivize offensive builds to focus on doing damage since those are their most potent and cost-efficient abilities.

Silversmith · December 2022

Your ideas don't fix the healing problem. As long as Healing scales off of an Offensive stat it will be broken.

You will have to make a new stat like "Healing Power" and redo several sets and force people to choose between dealing more damage or healing more.

Heals that scale with Health are pretty terrible right now and players can't stack into them and still be offensive. Also Health basing healing and shield mechanics right now are super weak compared to Spell/Attack Power ones.

The_Titan_Tim · December 2022

Silversmith wrote: »

Heals that scale with Health are pretty terrible right now and players can't stack into them and still be offensive. Also Health basing healing and shield mechanics right now are super weak compared to Spell/Attack Power ones.

Agreed, IMO healing should not scale off of health, it either overperforms or doesn’t work. And as a Templar main, Sun Shield is a joke in its current state, I would love a magicka based morph, maybe Blazing Shield?

Silversmith wrote: »

Your ideas don't fix the healing problem. As long as Healing scales off of an Offensive stat it will be broken.

The misunderstanding you have with what I posted is clear, the issue is healers are stacking too high of health to be bursted, allowing their heals, that tie into everything wrong with ESO PvP currently, to scale off of their passively high spell damage, to get buffed by major sorcery, to heal too much over time, that the burst window needed to kill them is unreachable. Stamina and Magicka add a negligible amount of Offensive benefits, laughable even, with the stat’s I’m about to post, I am able to heal indefinitely, even in Battlegrounds getting jumped on by a ball group, and do enough burst to kill other players when they get separated from their completely unkillable healers, playing at the highest MMR.

As a Bruiser build? I have over 30k health, something people would mock me for in PvP back in 2015, even without Battle Spirit. Forget about it, look at my unbuffed stats and how they correlate to the other screenshots.

chessalavakia_ESO · December 2022

I think you'd want to make it scale less off of the max weapon/spell power rather than not have it scale at all.

I could be mistaken but, my impression is most of the healers in the game are slanting towards weapon/spell damage because it does more healing and more damage.

If you swap it to doing 0 healing all of those healers builds will be worthless overnight.

You also ram into the issue that the game has like 15 sets that have bonuses that scale on your maximum stat so your choices would end up being a bit limited.

The_Titan_Tim · December 2022

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

I think you'd want to make it scale less off of the max weapon/spell power rather than not have it scale at all.

I could be mistaken but, my impression is most of the healers in the game are slanting towards weapon/spell damage because it does more healing and more damage.

If you swap it to doing 0 healing all of those healers builds will be worthless overnight.

You also ram into the issue that the game has like 15 sets that have bonuses that scale on your maximum stat so your choices would end up being a bit limited.

At the very least, that might help a bit, but I’m afraid max health would still be outrageous, healers can afford slightly weaker heals, something more drastic might be necessary as this would only hinder solo players, not dedicated healers. They would remain unkillable because none of their sets or stats would change significantly. Currently a group of 4 players in Battlegrounds can sit there and attack a great healer and nothing will come of it, even if they are great damage dealers, or their burst is very high. The less knowledgeable the healer, the less people they are tanking. But even an average healer can take getting beat on by two people, and if there are two healers on a team? Good luck.

Healing and Tanking have become synonymous in PvP, and when the healer turns everyone around them into a Tank aswell through massive HoTs, stacking with their already powerful ones, you’re left with unkillable DDs, until you kill the Healer who also happens to be immortal.

React · December 2022

I'd like to see them address the far more egregious imbalances before making adjustments to a core scaling mechanic that has been in the game forever.

Undeath, combat medic, HOT stacking/cross healing potency, healing CP nodes, survival instincts, and maximum HP are all things that need adjustment currently.

My biggest concern with splitting the damage and heal scaling is that it will severely harm solo/small scale PVP, without actually doing anything to the people that spec purely into defense, who are the real problem currently. In my experience, the majority of players in PVP are content to sacrifice all of their own kill potential in order to be "unkillable", and a change like this wouldn't affect them at all. At the same time as a solo player, if I have to sacrifice a significant portion of my damage in order to properly heal myself, I won't be able to kill anything.

The_Titan_Tim · December 2022

React wrote: »

I'd like to see them address the far more egregious imbalances before making adjustments to a core scaling mechanic that has been in the game forever.

Undeath, combat medic, HOT stacking/cross healing potency, healing CP nodes, survival instincts, and maximum HP are all things that need adjustment currently.

Couldn’t agree more on Undeath and the Champion Point systems being toned down, but that wouldn’t address the fact that in Battlegrounds a good healer won’t even hit execute unless bombed by two ultimates at once at the very least and then the HoTs have them back to half health before an execute even hits.

Years ago, healing used to scale more heavily with maximum stats and small scale and solo play worked better than they do today. Players had lower maximum health, and had to make more impactful skill-based decision-making while fighting. Prioritizing taking out a healer, then proceeding to go and accomplish that, dodging a heavy hitting attack instead of healing through several, and general faster gameplay. At the highest MMR, Deathmatch games don’t end before the time runs out because securing kills against teams with one healer are next to impossible.

To build high Magicka, you would either have to drop a proc set like Winter’s Respite for Crafty or a set with Max Magicka stacks in its 2, 3, and 4 piece bonuses, or take points out of Health and put them into Magicka, addressing the issue.

Healers healing extremely large amounts is okay when they can be bursted, Maximum Health is the main factor preventing that.

Thecompton73 · December 2022

I'd argue the strength of heals (apart from heal stacking in ball groups) is perfectly acceptable. What is not acceptable is that you can currently have strong heals, strong damage, strong mitigation and strong recovery/cost reduction. Something in that formula needs to come up short somewhere in order for TTK in PvP to be back to where it should be. If damage comes up short, that's a PvP tank. If you don't have strong healing or mitigation a reasonable amount of damage will allow you to either be burst all the way down or keep you from healing back to full as quickly when you lose a significant amount of health. And if you've got all the others but less recovery/cost reduction you might be able to kill quickly while surviving lots of incoming damage, but only for short periods, no running around rocks or towers for 20 minutes spamming heals indefinitely.

DrNukenstein · December 2022

I don't think it's that the heals are big, it's that the pools are big.

If you're playing meta and with an average amount of skill there's always another roll, always another breakfree, and most definitely another full heal. It's not hard to get someone down to 33% health in one combo. It's hard to get that follow up in before they breakfree roll and heal all in the same second.

Everyone just has too much gas and they never run out. Rather than gut mitigation or healing, I'd rather see hits to base stam and mag. This should go along with a higher resource to damage conversion rate to incentivize building stam/mag over health. Going further, perks that give bonus % pool, should give a larger % resource to damage conversion rate. Going the furthest, with smaller pools it would probably make it easier from a balance POV for points in stam and mag to both contribute to damage.

Silversmith · December 2022

CP doesn't function in Battlegrounds. Cyro has too many problems to deal with.

Maximum Hitpoints doesn't matter if you can't heal. You'll get chipped away and die.

It is such a poor garbage design to let every class heal, block, dodge, deal damage, and tank.

The_Titan_Tim · December 2022

Silversmith wrote: »

CP doesn't function in Battlegrounds. Cyro has too many problems to deal with.

Maximum Hitpoints doesn't matter if you can't heal. You'll get chipped away and die.

It is such a poor garbage design to let every class heal, block, dodge, deal damage, and tank.

For the sake of making the argument about CP providing too much, I included that screenshot, but generally all I did with that character to make him an unkillable healer dps was change my mundus from the Lover to the Serpent.

The_Titan_Tim · December 2022

DrNukenstein wrote: »

I don't think it's that the heals are big, it's that the pools are big.

If you're playing meta and with an average amount of skill there's always another roll, always another breakfree, and most definitely another full heal. It's not hard to get someone down to 33% health in one combo. It's hard to get that follow up in before they breakfree roll and heal all in the same second.

Everyone just has too much gas and they never run out. Rather than gut mitigation or healing, I'd rather see hits to base stam and mag. This should go along with a higher resource to damage conversion rate to incentivize building stam/mag over health. Going further, perks that give bonus % pool, should give a larger % resource to damage conversion rate. Going the furthest, with smaller pools it would probably make it easier from a balance POV for points in stam and mag to both contribute to damage.

This could work, anything to get people spending more on other attributes, effectively lowering health, would at least encourage the switch from two proc sets to at least one damage or max attribute set as a form of compensation.

The_Titan_Tim · December 2022

Thecompton73 wrote: »

I'd argue the strength of heals (apart from heal stacking in ball groups) is perfectly acceptable. What is not acceptable is that you can currently have strong heals, strong damage, strong mitigation and strong recovery/cost reduction. Something in that formula needs to come up short somewhere in order for TTK in PvP to be back to where it should be. If damage comes up short, that's a PvP tank. If you don't have strong healing or mitigation a reasonable amount of damage will allow you to either be burst all the way down or keep you from healing back to full as quickly when you lose a significant amount of health. And if you've got all the others but less recovery/cost reduction you might be able to kill quickly while surviving lots of incoming damage, but only for short periods, no running around rocks or towers for 20 minutes spamming heals indefinitely.

Exactly my thoughts, there always has to be a trade off in a game about balance.

chessalavakia_ESO · December 2022

The_Titan_Tim wrote: »

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

I think you'd want to make it scale less off of the max weapon/spell power rather than not have it scale at all.

I could be mistaken but, my impression is most of the healers in the game are slanting towards weapon/spell damage because it does more healing and more damage.

If you swap it to doing 0 healing all of those healers builds will be worthless overnight.

You also ram into the issue that the game has like 15 sets that have bonuses that scale on your maximum stat so your choices would end up being a bit limited.

At the very least, that might help a bit, but I’m afraid max health would still be outrageous, healers can afford slightly weaker heals, something more drastic might be necessary as this would only hinder solo players, not dedicated healers. They would remain unkillable because none of their sets or stats would change significantly. Currently a group of 4 players in Battlegrounds can sit there and attack a great healer and nothing will come of it, even if they are great damage dealers, or their burst is very high. The less knowledgeable the healer, the less people they are tanking. But even an average healer can take getting beat on by two people, and if there are two healers on a team? Good luck.

Healing and Tanking have become synonymous in PvP, and when the healer turns everyone around them into a Tank aswell through massive HoTs, stacking with their already powerful ones, you’re left with unkillable DDs, until you kill the Healer who also happens to be immortal.

Might slightly enhancing Defile be useful for bringing the healing down more for PvP if it's still needed?

I wasn't doing PvP in the days when Defile was higher but my impression from what I read about it back then was that it was quite impactful at times.

The_Titan_Tim · December 2022

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

Might slightly enhancing Defile be useful for bringing the healing down more for PvP if it's still needed?

I wasn't doing PvP in the days when Defile was higher but my impression from what I read about it back then was that it was quite impactful at times.

Defile was extremely impactful due to the fact that the value was near doubled, then you could add more defile through the old CP system. This was nice for taking people down when heals hit harder, as they scaled with both damage and max resources much more heavily.

Dark Flare became essential on my Magicka Templar, in the games current state though, rebuffing Defile would be overkill on solo players. Just having around 25k of your stat of choice was enough back in the day to be proficient with your heals as a solo player, presuming they leaned on the maximum stats becoming the determining factor for heals, at around 25 to 30k of our stat, healing would have to be around where it’s at now on standard non-healer builds for the problems with this meta to be addressed.

Healers in PvP aren’t even reaching 24k Magicka on most proficient builds.