The elephant in the room: pvp tankiness

Jman100582 · July 2023

At this point it is pretty common knowledge that tankiness in all its forms (mitigation/heal stacking) is out of tune in pvp. While some classes are bigger contributors than others, for the most part it is extremely easy to build a “well-rounded” dps build that is still very tanky. I myself have some suggestions to help reduce it

1). Nerf undeath. There is already a post here on it so I won’t get into it too much. Every class takes it for a reason: it’s simply too broken to pass up
2). Utilize battle spirit. There are a lot of ways you can do this to accomplish reducing pvp tankiness, here are some ideas:
-make battle spirit reduce max health by a flat amount to counter health-stacking builds
-make battle spirit increase core combat ability costs in order to reduce sustain. This way players need to either sacrifice tankiness or damage in order to have a build that is functional
-adjust the reduced damage taken from battle spirit to be lower. Perhaps between 45-50% would be a good start, instead of the current 55% I think it is
3). Incentivize building into max-stats again. With the current damage formula, running more than 23k max stat (stamina/magicka) or so is simply not worthwhile. It adds little to nothing. This causes players to instead dump all their points into health. If max-stat contributed more to a build, it would cause players to actually have to choose something. Max health is simply the superior choice at the moment
4). Probably the least popular one, remove cross healing again. It would also help performance issues
5). Re-standardize set bonuses. Many once popular damage sets (mostly ones that stack weapon/spell damage ie fury, nma, bsw, ravager, clever alc etc) are simply not strong enough. Proc sets offer more in the vast majority of cases and eclipse these sets. Set balance is very much out of wack, and is worth considering a revisit imo. There is a reason the most popular setup is just masters dw/vate ice/maarselok or zaans. It doesn’t feel fun feeling forced to use at the very least two of those options to have a “competitive” build. Not saying other setups cannot work, but most are just inferior to the copy paste proc build

But anyways yeah. Something needs to be done about it because at this point there have been very little actual balance changes that are meaningful/impactful that are going to fix this issue

katorga · July 2023

ZOS specifically enabled this, some classes better than others, but generally splitting skill lines between damage, healing, tanking.

But you solve it very simply:

Heals scale off of max mag or stam, whichever is higher
Damage scales off max weapon/spell damage
Block cost and mitigation percentage scales off max health
Roll dodge cost scales off max stamina
Sprint cost and speed percentage scales off max magicka
Wards scale off health

Now you have to choose and can't have it all.

FWIW, historically the player base will complain more about a high damage meta than a tanky meta.

Jman100582 · July 2023

katorga wrote: »

ZOS specifically enabled this, some classes better than others, but generally splitting skill lines between damage, healing, tanking.

But you solve it very simply:

Heals scale off of max mag or stam, whichever is higher
Damage scales off max weapon/spell damage
Block cost and mitigation percentage scales off max health
Roll dodge cost scales off max stamina
Sprint cost and speed percentage scales off max magicka
Wards scale off health

Now you have to choose and can't have it all.

FWIW, historically the player base will complain more about a high damage meta than a tanky meta.

I think the playerbase complains about high damage meta more because the penalty for dying can be very rough. Oh you died? Wait 4 mins for a camp. Oh you have bad mount speed? Have fun slowly making you way to a keep just for the fight to be over when you get there because you died. Zos prides itself in “fast, fluid, and engaging” combat but actually GETTING to the combat itself is slow

Necrotech_Master · July 2023

i think most people are actually in favor of #4 (in the previous performance tests limiting the healing to only inside groups did not actually affect performance according to the devs, but empowered ball groups because randoms had no cross healing)

i dont know if removing it entirely is the best idea, but definitely needs to be capped to only like the strongest 2 instances of it

i also agree that they could do more with battle spirit such as hard capping resistances, mitigation, or any of the other dozens of stats that buffs affect

Jman100582 · July 2023

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i think most people are actually in favor of #4 (in the previous performance tests limiting the healing to only inside groups did not actually affect performance according to the devs, but empowered ball groups because randoms had no cross healing)

i dont know if removing it entirely is the best idea, but definitely needs to be capped to only like the strongest 2 instances of it

i also agree that they could do more with battle spirit such as hard capping resistances, mitigation, or any of the other dozens of stats that buffs affect

I meant unpopular more so from zos’s perspective. They have shown that they really don’t want to reduce cross healing when they reintroduced it AFTER removing it. Even though it had positive effects on the game. It’s definitely one of the easier solutions though, it’s not like they would have to recode much since they’ve already done it in the past

edward_frigidhands · July 2023

The reason people build tanky is to survive large scale group vs group PvP where things die fairly fast, with the exception being ball groups.

Large scale PvP is where things die and what Cyro is all about. Balancing around small scale combat is not a sensible way to proceed when Cyro is the primary source of PvP.

Drastically reducing the option to build tanky while maintaining the options to build damage is not how the game is setup in any area and nor should it be for a game that allows you to "play how you want".

Large group vs group PvP is most of Cyro. However, the first way to address ball groups would be with their mobility rather than their ability to heal each other.

Currently, outside of the event of there being ball groups that simply use their mobility to evade death while line of sighting in towers or around the edges of fortresses, damage potential is fairly high.

Do you have any recent videos demonstrating that people are too tanky in actual large scale group vs group combat?

I am not trying to invalidate your input, I am just saying there seems to be a massive difference between what you and I see and I usually pvp in when there's large groups fighting.

Jman100582 · July 2023

edward_frigidhands wrote: »

The reason people build tanky is to survive large scale group vs group PvP where things die fairly fast, with the exception being ball groups.

Large scale PvP is where things die and what Cyro is all about. Balancing around small scale combat is not a sensible way to proceed when Cyro is the primary source of PvP.

Drastically reducing the option to build tanky while maintaining the options to build damage is not how the game is setup in any area and nor should it be for a game that allows you to "play how you want".

Large group vs group PvP is most of Cyro. However, the first way to address ball groups would be with their mobility rather than their ability to heal each other.

Currently, outside of the event of there being ball groups that simply use their mobility to evade death while line of sighting in towers or around the edges of fortresses, damage potential is fairly high.

Do you have any recent videos demonstrating that people are too tanky in actual large scale group vs group combat?

I am not trying to invalidate your input, I am just saying there seems to be a massive difference between what you and I see and I usually pvp in when there's large groups fighting.

I would say I myself am more of a small scale player, I play with “the boys” (group can range from anywhere between 4-8 players, but we don’t hyper optimize our group or anything crazy). I don’t really pug in cyrodiil. That being said, I do encounter both small scale and large scale pvp fairly regularly

I would not say things die “fairly fast” at least not compared to other patches. The average build has 30-35k hp (outside of health stacking wardens) and sure there’s always some magsorc or nb with 25k hp that’s an easy two shot. But the average player is built quite thicc and honestly I think it’s TOO EASY to build a defensively sound character. For example, my build i run with my group is mechanical acuity frontbar, Phoenix moth backbar, trainee/coil and malubeth. 5 medium 1 light 1 heavy. I have 35k hp without a warden buff on a kahjiit in medium armor. With no defensive 5 piece set. That’s a little crazy imo

I wouldn’t say bringing down only defensive options is healthy. Like I said in one of my points, I think offensive stat-based sets need a revisit in order to become more relevant again. My list of ideas isn’t saying “let’s do ALL of these” I’m saying that any mix of two of these options would result in a healthier game. Imo anyway. “Full damage builds” are more tanky than ever, it’s not exactly balanced when a build can simultaneously fill multiple group rolls (damage dealer, healer, and tank) with relative ease