@ZOS_Kevin @ZOS_GinaBruno Can you share this poll data with the development team?

It's still a problem

Absolutely should. A change like that would hurt pve healing therefore shoulnt go trough. Pvper in this game with their nertf this and nerf that keep hurting pve for the last 9 year. If they make any chage to hot, it should be one that affect only pvp. Maybe a mythic that purge heal from opponent but also yours as a cost?

Billium813 wrote: »

I'd be interested in hearing the explanation for this design from the development team. Or if anyone can dig up quotes on this discussion from the past. There must be some reason the dev team has elected to implement it this way... right?

A long time ago, "AoE" HoTs were "weak" and burst was higher than survivability. However, ZoS wants to raise the floor and lower the ceiling. To do this, they slowed the game down and "standardized" everything. Before, if you had strong HoTs, your burst heal was limited and vice versa.

The manifestation was that, generally, Magicka builds had good burst heals and weak HoTs and Stamina builds had strong HoTs but weak/conditional burst heals. Because "stam group healing" was never intended, the only readily available cross-HoTs were Magicka, which again were weak. The exception was [green] Vigor, which was converted to single target since it broke this logic. (there's more to this related to TTK, burst potential etc. but it's a lot)

Then they got this idea of hybridization to encourage "play your way" build diversity (hybridization does the opposite btw). They started by giving magicka access to strong HoTs via Radiant/Rapid.Than Stam got access to strong burst heals and it just spiralled into full blown "resources are just a color" mentality.

The dev team working on this game have no idea of what class identity is at an ability level.They see a problem in one area (example mag HoTs) see that the problem doesn't exist in another area (stam HoTs) then copy and paste. They don't know the game.

Case and point: Incap buff...this is clearly PvE related. Instead of buffing Swallowing Souls, Cripple or Path (which see virtually no use in PvP but are/used to be staples in PvE) they buff an ability that is used in both areas.Why? Because of standardization, they won't buff path because it meets their AoE standard. Deviating from this spreadsheet formula isn't worth balance.

No understanding of the class. No vision for the game. No appreciation for cross mechanics.

tldr: game has evolved. Devs have not.

Dark_Lord_Kuro wrote: »

Absolutely should. A change like that would hurt pve healing therefore shoulnt go trough. Pvper in this game with their nertf this and nerf that keep hurting pve for the last 9 year. If they make any chage to hot, it should be one that affect only pvp. Maybe a mythic that purge heal from opponent but also yours as a cost?

Problem in game exists:
Players: I want to pay money to make that problem go away.

People love to enable zos to monetize the hell out of this game instead of actually fixing problems huh?

DrNukenstein wrote: »

Limit group size to 4, remove out of group healing (except for ground hots, to add value to them and reduce potential confusion) and buffing, let 4 man groups organize into raids that can work together towards objectives/kills but cannot share buffs or heals.

replace ball group and zerg play with squad based play. It would be cool and fun, probably good for performance, and solve the hot stacking debate for good.

I bet every ball group commander would have just as much fun managing 3-4 specialized squads as they do piloting the videogame equivalent of a blackhole.

crosshealing was disabled previously and they were met with complaints from "solo PvP healers." To each their own, ZoS and the broader community see it as a legitimate playstyle and it has nothing to do with the "play how you want" philosophy but more to do with responding to complaints. The cynical side of me thinks that ball groups and their shills want cross healing disabled so the dirty PUGs don't steal their heals. Disabling crosshealing will be a drop in the bucket that really just winds up poisoning the pool.



A user recently posted about how you can't prove that it's positive healing effects that are causing lag. I question the veracity of this statement, because it's just as true that stacking negative effects also can cause lag but the fact of the matter is that someone causing lag through having negative effects on them dies at some point, so all the server stress they were causing ceases with them. Unless you want to argue that causing a DoT doesn't cause server lag whatsoever to maintain the point that stacking HoTs doesn't cause any lag whatsoever. Fact of the matter is that keeping track of status effects is likely the source of a lot of the lag as one status effect, be it positive or negative, causes an amount of stress. The difference, however, is that positive ones don't disappear until death while negative ones can be purged in most scenarios (some are auto purged, like with Mara's Balm). If you have a group running around where 20+ HoTs are constantly stacked on them while they receive DoTs and any number of other things, while they themselves are throwing out abilities that generate some more points of data, it's going to generate server stress, which causes lag. These groups will have other issues happening as well such as missed skills (rapids won't fire), so they'll have multiple people casting that as well. If you have someone with 20+ DoTs on them, they likely die quickly and the stress they were causing dies with them, but people with 20+ heals and buffs on them will just keep stressing out the servers.

To me, it's silly to see people defend heal stacking with the arguments of "you don't know it's causing lag" or "heals don't make a group invincible! join one of the groups yourself and see!" or finally "it will hurt PvE if you nerf it!"

Heal stacking and building tanky became the meta for many reasons and it has to do with limitations set by ZoS themselves. These reasons can be expanded upon in another topic, but until server infrastructure improves and more players can be in cyrodiil, these metas are likely here to stay. The irony is that the heal stacking drives down server performance and promotes having the player cap, so we are forever stagnate until they do something either technologically speaking (code restructuring, optimization) or in the form of adding limitations (to heal stacking, which is something this topic tries to address).

edward_frigidhands wrote: »

They should always act the way DoTs do.

That is the most balanced approach to this.

Bingo.

Non-stacking HOT/DOT would cause all sorts of issues in PVE.

Stacking HOT/DOT do cause all sorts of isses in PVP.