Melzo wrote: »

Billium813 wrote: »

Mara's Blam

(5 items) When a negative effect is removed from you, restore 1675 Health. This effect can occur once every 1 second.

It is probably impossible to do, but I'd just like to see the set no longer proc when negative effects just fall off or are reapplied. It doesn't really feel like the spirit of the sets intention to me and is EASILY the reason why the set overperforms.

If the player is using actions to purge negative effects (Purge, Break Free, ect), then sure, they should have proc heals from Mara's Balm. It's like stapling a heal to Bull Netch or stapling an extra heal to Extended Ritual synergy or stapling a heal to Expunge. If an ally wants to cast Purge, that should proc a heal, someone took an action to heal you!

But, as it currently works, it doesn't require any actual effort on the players part! When snares auto fall off, they get healed. When Minor Breach gets reapplied by the opponent, they get healed. When DoTs get reapplied, they get a heal. EVERYTHING heals them! This set is INSANE!!! It's just too much and is punching WAYYY above its weight. It isn't about HOW MUCH healing the set gives individually, its on how often to heals. It isn't all about that 15 second major purge heal, it's way more about that 1000 heal every second for absolutely free.

If the set is supposed to work from clearing dot effects on player effort, then the healing should be greatly increased. After nerfs, Mara heals for an amount equal to the damage dealt by the poison or fire status effect. You should be nerfed nerfed nerfed. Nerf everything. I agree to increase the cleanup cooldown to 30 seconds but nerf the healing?? I will then take a set that gives a bunch of armor or daedro armor. There are alternatives, and if Mara is nerfed, then one set will be less. Good luck. We already have almost no sets.

We have almost no sets because obvious choices like Mara's Balm clog up the meta. If they could make Mara's Balm proc only on effects being removed (not just falling off or reapplying), then I am certainly in favor of also upping the healing! Don't you see? That was the original intention of the set and why the healing was what it was. Nerfing the healing is a bandage for the real issue that ZOS is either unwilling to fix, or can't fix. I don't know how complex fixing this issue would be

React wrote: »

The purge is what needed to be adjusted, the value of the per second heal wasn't the problem. While reducing the per second heal does technically reduce the burst heal potential of the purge, it still doesn't solve the issue of the purge itself being on such a short cooldown.

I'd increase the CD on the purge to 25-30s, OR remove the burst heal from the purge entirely.

Even if you do one of these things, it'll still be the strongest defensive set in PVP.

It would not and you can easily compare this to the Wyrd set and its use before this even came out.

*again, all for nerfing this if all specs had access to a reasonable and reliable purge.

Wuuffyy wrote: »

React wrote: »

The purge is what needed to be adjusted, the value of the per second heal wasn't the problem. While reducing the per second heal does technically reduce the burst heal potential of the purge, it still doesn't solve the issue of the purge itself being on such a short cooldown.

I'd increase the CD on the purge to 25-30s, OR remove the burst heal from the purge entirely.

Even if you do one of these things, it'll still be the strongest defensive set in PVP.

It would not and you can easily compare this to the Wyrd set and its use before this even came out.

*again, all for nerfing this if all specs had access to a reasonable and reliable purge.

What do you mean? Wyrd tree was never comparable to this set.

Wyrd tree is just a purge once every 15s, but you have to spend resources to get it.

This set is essentially a HOT, but also has a full purge & burst heal that'll more or less proc every 15s.

Most classes should not have access to a reliable purge. Removing effects in this manner is disgustingly strong, more so than most people understand. This set is problematic because it gives everyone access to a reliable purge.

Even with one of the two aforementioned changes, it's the strongest defensive set in the game.

React wrote: »

Wuuffyy wrote: »

React wrote: »

The purge is what needed to be adjusted, the value of the per second heal wasn't the problem. While reducing the per second heal does technically reduce the burst heal potential of the purge, it still doesn't solve the issue of the purge itself being on such a short cooldown.

I'd increase the CD on the purge to 25-30s, OR remove the burst heal from the purge entirely.

Even if you do one of these things, it'll still be the strongest defensive set in PVP.

It would not and you can easily compare this to the Wyrd set and its use before this even came out.

*again, all for nerfing this if all specs had access to a reasonable and reliable purge.

What do you mean? Wyrd tree was never comparable to this set.

Wyrd tree is just a purge once every 15s, but you have to spend resources to get it.

This set is essentially a HOT, but also has a full purge & burst heal that'll more or less proc every 15s.

Most classes should not have access to a reliable purge. Removing effects in this manner is disgustingly strong, more so than most people understand. This set is problematic because it gives everyone access to a reliable purge.

Even with one of the two aforementioned changes, it's the strongest defensive set in the game.

To play devils advocate, they are comparable in that they both can remove all negative status effects every 15 seconds.

Except... Mara's Balm also has a HoT, procing for free on everything in the game, and procs every 15 seconds for free while not only removing all negative effects, but also healing for +20k health....

Wyrd Tree's Blessing is an overland set... so we can kinda cut it a break. But Mara's Balm is like Wyrd Tree's Blessing and Rally had a baby who then grew up to be a body builder on steroids.

Wuuffyy wrote: »

Billium813 wrote: »

React wrote: »

Wuuffyy wrote: »

React wrote: »

The purge is what needed to be adjusted, the value of the per second heal wasn't the problem. While reducing the per second heal does technically reduce the burst heal potential of the purge, it still doesn't solve the issue of the purge itself being on such a short cooldown.

I'd increase the CD on the purge to 25-30s, OR remove the burst heal from the purge entirely.

Even if you do one of these things, it'll still be the strongest defensive set in PVP.

It would not and you can easily compare this to the Wyrd set and its use before this even came out.

*again, all for nerfing this if all specs had access to a reasonable and reliable purge.

What do you mean? Wyrd tree was never comparable to this set.

Wyrd tree is just a purge once every 15s, but you have to spend resources to get it.

This set is essentially a HOT, but also has a full purge & burst heal that'll more or less proc every 15s.

Most classes should not have access to a reliable purge. Removing effects in this manner is disgustingly strong, more so than most people understand. This set is problematic because it gives everyone access to a reliable purge.

Even with one of the two aforementioned changes, it's the strongest defensive set in the game.

To play devils advocate, they are comparable in that they both can remove all negative status effects every 15 seconds.

Except... Mara's Balm also has a HoT, procing for free on everything in the game, and procs every 15 seconds for free while not only removing all negative effects, but also healing for +20k health....

Wyrd Tree's Blessing is an overland set... so we can kinda cut it a break. But Mara's Balm is like Wyrd Tree's Blessing and Rally had a baby who then grew up to be a body builder on steroids.

If you quoted that at 20k prior, with this most recent nerf that should be about 13k. However, I’d say this is a stretch also. Just by default with 20 negative effects (that’s a lot)-> 1k x 20= 20 x .45 (battle spirit debuff). 9k. And that isn’t as common. I’d say now it’d be about 5-6k.

I was quoting 20k from before the most recent nerf. I don't know what it's at now, but that 20k was WITH battle spirit (not including buffs like Mending) and in a more extreme 1vX situation where your getting 20 different status effects (debuffs, dots, snares, ect).

On live, that 1675 was consistently more like 1000+ (after battle spirit and buffs), making it essentially like an extra Vigor running! Considering just how many "negative effects" a player can receive, the fact that it removes all of them at once, healing for each makes 15k+ entirely possible and not that uncommon in 1vX scenarios.

Melzo wrote: »

TechMaybeHic wrote: »

Rallying Cry as a defensive really only impacts crits. Maras obviously is loaded up to heal anything and everything and purge so it's kind of an odd comparison.

Inappropriate comparison. One set buffs and works all the time, while the other is still equipped. In this case, the first one buffs the group.

Not sure why you quoted me as I said the comparison doesn't make sense, but not because of that. It's because Rallying Cry is at least half offensive. Often paired with Maras

You can one bar Maras and actually force it to be a greater burst heal that way by swapping to it with much more than 6 negative effects.

The mitigation from the purge is crazy. There's also that purge passive on the left side of the blue tree called Cleansing Revival:
Healing a target under 25% Health removes all harmful effects from them. This effect can occur once every 24 seconds.

This is also a full purge, but you need to

• actually heal
• be low HP
• has longer cooldown (60% longer)

Comparing just the healing part to a Health Recovery set is also interesting. Mara is at least 400 hps, which is the same as 800 health recovery every 2 seconds, which is actually 1600 before battlespirit (= 1230 with major fortitude). And that is just the healing part.

VixxVexx wrote: »

The mitigation from the purge is crazy. There's also that purge passive on the left side of the blue tree called Cleansing Revival:
Healing a target under 25% Health removes all harmful effects from them. This effect can occur once every 24 seconds.

This is also a full purge, but you need to

• actually heal
• be low HP
• has longer cooldown (60% longer)

Comparing just the healing part to a Health Recovery set is also interesting. Mara is at least 400 hps, which is the same as 800 health recovery every 2 seconds, which is actually 1600 before battlespirit (= 1230 with major fortitude). And that is just the healing part.

CP in general is pretty weak. That CP especially is a terrible comparison. Needs to threshold increased and cooldown decreased and they could honestly destroy Mara’s balm at that point.

VixxVexx wrote: »

You guys think we'll get another nerf? I don't think so.
We're too close to live for any meaningful changes. Despite it being 3 weeks away.

GG bros.

I actually expect a few changes this week without enough time to test the ramifications of those changes, of course. Probably not another change to Maras though. ZOS would like a few more months to examine what everyone else already knows.

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Currently, we are keeping a close eye on new sets like Mara's Balm and will continue to tune over time. We need more data for seeing how the sets will be used and in what situations. Then the team will adjust as needed. So please keep up with feedback.

How long is it considered a "new" set?

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

It's still a relatively new set to the meta, since it was only added in U35. The team takes a good look at these sets for several update cycles before determining if it's in a good place after getting player feedback. So it's still a "new" set, all things considered.

And that's the problem. We, the players, also have to look at every obvious problem for a year before something is done about them.

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

It's still a relatively new set to the meta, since it was only added in U35. The team takes a good look at these sets for several update cycles before determining if it's in a good place after getting player feedback. So it's still a "new" set, all things considered.

I am not sure what metrics you are using to determine whether or not this set is balanced, but I assure you that if the people responsible for reading these metrics understood how PVP in ESO works, they would immediately understand why it needs to be further adjusted.

The HOT portion was only an issue prior to receiving it's 1 second cooldown - the recent change to further reduce the HOT value does nothing to solve the issue of the purge + burst heal being too strong for such a short cooldown.

The set NEEDS to receive an adjustment to the cooldown on the purge, or the purge burst heal. Increasing the CD to 25 or 30 seconds, OR removing the burst heal portion from the purge would immediately solve the problem of the set being too strong to overcome, and it would still be the strongest defensive set in the game. You could even revert the HOT portion back to it's previous before the nerf during this PTS cycle, to compensate for the nerf to the problematic part of the set.

Every day that I PVP, I am encountering more and more players using mara's balm. It is a complete joke to try and fight a player one on one who is wearing this set. You can effortlessly survive anyone in this scenario without even trying.

I mean, compare the set to wyrd tree + robes of the hist. Why does it do more than both of these sets?

Edit: I just wanted to add... why does it need to take "several update cycles" to make these adjustments? Why do we need to deal with obviously broken things for 6 months or more, when we test these things for you and tell you exactly why they're broken before they even make it to the live server? It is so beyond frustrating to have the PVP experience deteriorated even further by unreasonably tanky additions like mara's balm, when we already have dealt with poor performance and lack of content for the past 5 years.

React wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

It's still a relatively new set to the meta, since it was only added in U35. The team takes a good look at these sets for several update cycles before determining if it's in a good place after getting player feedback. So it's still a "new" set, all things considered.

I am not sure what metrics you are using to determine whether or not this set is balanced, but I assure you that if the people responsible for reading these metrics understood how PVP in ESO works, they would immediately understand why it needs to be further adjusted.

The HOT portion was only an issue prior to receiving it's 1 second cooldown - the recent change to further reduce the HOT value does nothing to solve the issue of the purge + burst heal being too strong for such a short cooldown.

The set NEEDS to receive an adjustment to the cooldown on the purge, or the purge burst heal. Increasing the CD to 25 or 30 seconds, OR removing the burst heal portion from the purge would immediately solve the problem of the set being too strong to overcome, and it would still be the strongest defensive set in the game. You could even revert the HOT portion back to it's previous before the nerf during this PTS cycle, to compensate for the nerf to the problematic part of the set.

Every day that I PVP, I am encountering more and more players using mara's balm. It is a complete joke to try and fight a player one on one who is wearing this set. You can effortlessly survive anyone in this scenario without even trying.

I mean, compare the set to wyrd tree + robes of the hist. Why does it do more than both of these sets?

25 -> 30 seconds is nothing. If the burst heal is really the issue, perhaps a cap on how much healing it can do? With that change, it could even lower to proc more often depending on the cap.

The removal of all negative effects is already a really good effect and requires no effort on the players part! My biggest issue with Mara's Balm is that it procs on literally everything in the game and require no effort on the wearers part to do anything. It might as well just say

(5 items) Adds 900 Health Recovery. Every 25 seconds, remove all negative effects and heal for 15000 health.

That's pretty good for a Tank set.

Thecompton73 wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Currently, we are keeping a close eye on new sets like Mara's Balm and will continue to tune over time. We need more data for seeing how the sets will be used and in what situations. Then the team will adjust as needed. So please keep up with feedback.

Can you please explain the reasoning behind using this model for adjusting sets? Using long term metrics to balance sets that immediately introduce wild game play imbalances and thus become meta for months just doesn't seem ideal. I understand completely changing the functionality of a set or skill completely might take time. But surely things such as length of cooldown, the size of a radius effect and the damage or healing coefficients of a set or skill could be adjusted more frequently to fine tune them when simply playing for a few hours a week on the different classes makes it clear when something is over/under performing.
It felt like things were headed in a good direction when the Devs listened to the well reasoned feedback on Snake in the Stars and made logical adjustments to the set so quickly. But this statement significantly dims my hope that we might be seeing a better correlation between well reasoned feedback from people with hundreds and thousands of hours of actual game play experience and prompt, smaller and more frequent adjustments from the Devs to keep game-play healthy.

If they nerf it into the ground, no one will play it anymore and all feedback will stop on it. They seem to be going for very minor, gradual changes so that the spirit of the set remains, but it wont be as oppressive. They want to dial it in JUUUUUUSSSTTT until its right on the edge or playability. We'll have to see how the recent change holds up on Live.

The larger issue in my estimation is PTS vs Live, especially for PvP content. It's unfortunate that we have the development cycle that we have because changes one PvP aspects take a long time to be changed, even though it's a short time to test. Feedback on PTS is not necessarily a good metric for balancing sets. Oh, we can find bugs and get those fixed. But balancing can only really happen after Live receives changes. The frustration is when something releases broken, then 3 months later is changed to fix it, but its still broken. So, we have to wait another 3 months even though it's obvious to players on Live there is still a problem.

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Thecompton73 wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Currently, we are keeping a close eye on new sets like Mara's Balm and will continue to tune over time. We need more data for seeing how the sets will be used and in what situations. Then the team will adjust as needed. So please keep up with feedback.

Can you explain the reasoning behind using this model for adjusting sets? Using long term metrics to balance sets that immediately introduce wild game play imbalances and thus become meta for months just doesn't seem ideal. I understand completely changing the functionality of a set or skill completely might take time. But surely things such as length of cooldown, the size of a radius effect and the damage or healing coefficients of a set or skill could be adjusted more frequently to fine tune them when simply playing for a few hours a week on the different classes makes it clear when something is over/under performing.
It felt like things were headed in a good direction when the Devs listened to the well reasoned feedback on Snake in the Stars and made logical adjustments to the set so quickly. But this statement significantly dims my hope that we might be seeing a better correlation between well reasoned feedback from actual game play experience and prompt, smaller and more frequent adjustments to keep game-play healthy.

Ultimately, it boils down to to seeing more player metrics for how something performs. And that's not to say we are not testing and balancing before items go into the wild. We are testing and balancing to the best of our ability before and after hitting PTS. A wider group of players are bound to use items and skills in different ways. Players are very crafty! PTS is great for seeing early indicators of this. But having something on live and having PC/ Xbox/ and PlayStation users all using an item or skill give a better holistic view really helps to compare against PTS comments and adjust accordingly. Not saying this is perfect, but it is helpful for the team.

"Players are crafty" is the reason that players figure out the negative implications of changes during week one of any given PTS, consistently? Or is it just that devs want to give their bad ideas a few months in the sun simply because they refuse to accept the findings?