It seems they might be trying to address this in a campaign next year.

So, we will be experimenting with a Cyrodiil campaign where all classes will have PvP-specific (and more performant) skills that replace the standard player skills with the expectation that we can support more players per campaign

bmnoble wrote: »

What do you expect to happen when you have a group of skilled people often with years of experience playing the game, communicating via voice chat to coordinate their actions and cover for each others weaknesses against people in random groups with minimal coordination beyond, show up to defend/attack this keep/resource etc.. or just people seeing the sword icons on the map showing a battle taking place and heading their to join in.

It's not so different than a pre-made group going up against a pug group in battlegrounds just on a larger scale without the time limits of a match and the swapping out the opponents.



To me one way I see to counter something like that would be a timed handicap that is applied to players who are getting a lot of kills in a short amount of time, gradually making the effects of battle spirit more severe.

That resets back to zero when they are killed or slowly fades away while out of combat for an extended amount of time, think of it as working similar to the bounties in PVE zones, heck just copy that altogether and have an AP bounty that is visible to other players or something.

I don't love solutions that punish people for working together and optimizing sets/skills.

We need some sort of answer that provides something similar to the pve normal vrs vet experience. We need a veteran and normal cyrodiil, so the highly coordinated groups have somewhere they can go and fight each other, while people who are newer can actually learn the map without being steamrolled.

Theignson wrote: »

It's the whole point of the game not to allow god mode, to make a balance between risk and reward. HIgh damage is squishy, super tanky has no damage-- that was the basic equation

ZOS despite hundreds of posts by the most experienced players still does not grasp that in PvP ball groups are now God Mode.

This is really obvious in the hours I play, when it isnt poplocked. One 6 man ball group is god mode. They cannot be killed by the collection of pugs that a 1-2 bar alliance has.

They jump around oblivious to any damage: shrug off any cold fire siege. Any poor sap that tries to fight them just gets 6v1 to death.

Of course its worse when these ball groups are on the alliance with the 3 to 1 population advantage, which for some reason is almost always the case.

God Mode ruins the game. That is so simple and I don't know why they don't understand

Ive rarely seen a 6 man ball group, usually its 12 or so. 6 may be manageable? if you can peel a few off the group.

But other than attempting to pull them off one by one, you cant really kill a ball group. I figure the best way to deal with them is to starve them. Kite wide circles around them, while getting a few useless ranged shots off them. Theyll usually get bored and leave as soon as another battle opens elsewhere.

Ive never seen them attempt to siege a keep on their own. They wait for someone else to start a battle (doesnt matter if their faction is involved or not) and then pour in like a school of piranha. They usually stay only as long as the feeding is good.

But yeah, Id certainly like to see them gone permenantly. Having to resort to tactics such as above is a stupid and boring way to pvp, but Ive not yet figured out a different solution.

Meatbag trebuchet needs to do something like 40K Healing absorption for 6s if it hits.

So simple solution play the game in Cyro the way the devs designed it, as group!
Stop trying to be rambo in a game not designed for you to be rambo.
Want to play solo? Use BGs.

I still feel grouping should be required in Cyrodiil which would stop some of this whining.
Then spruce up BGs more for small scale and solo.
Everybody wins.

karthrag_inak wrote: »

"MMO's have never before allowed God Mode"

Not true. In Star Wars Galaxies, the original Jedi class was unlockable and a fully leveled Jedi knight was capable of easily taking out a group of 20 fully stacked characters at once. Of course, it also exhibited severe death penalties and was exceedingly hard to achieve and level up.

But still, SWG Pre-CU Jedi was most definitely God Mode in a way that the most trolliest of ESO bomblades could not even fathom.

Ahazi server and Pre-CU FTW !!!!

Theignson wrote: »

God Mode ruins the game.

Not if you give ME god mode. Then I could kill all the ball groups. It'd fix everything, trust me bro.

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Theignson wrote: »

God Mode ruins the game.

Not if you give ME god mode. Then I could kill all the ball groups. It'd fix everything, trust me bro.

Here you go…The Sword of a Thousand Truths! 🗡️

Ball groups aren't invincible by any stretch. Look online and you can see countless youtube videos of this ball group wrecking that ballgroup. There is a lot of competition at the high-end of PVP play where ballgroups want to one-up all the other well known ball groups out there, and you do so by going out there and killing them. So clearly, IMO, the perceived invincibility is not from ballgroup players fighting other ballgroup players - its from non-ballgroup players fighting ballgroups. In this case though, why shouldn't a coordinated group have an advantage over non-coordinated players? Honestly, this is the aspect that I really don't have a problem with.

What I do have a problem with though, is that there are items and builds in the game that make you able to allocate your stats elsewhere, and still end up with a tanky character (tanky without healer support) and STILL have enough firepower to kill other players. THIS is really the problem - players running around with 40k+ health that can still burst down even the tankiest of players, where players who have built themselves to be glass cannons would struggle to do half the damage these players do. IMO That is the real problem (and the problem likely gets exacerbated with ballgroup play).

The solution to this is not more nerfs to items, classes, or abilities though. The solution is that they need to take a look at how damage scales when players wear heavy armor and load up on health. IMO, you should suffer a global 6% damage penalty per piece of heavy armor worn, and you should suffer a 2% damage penalty for every point invested in the health attribute. This may sound harsh, but the damage penalty for heavy armor needs to be high because tanky players in PVP are often using at least 3 pieces of heavy armor (18% damage penalty), and Torc players are often using at least 4 pieces of heavy armor if they're on the tanky side (24% damage penalty). Players also need to invest in the health attribute (plus some heavy armor) to get their health above 30k mark, which is a rough approximate target players aim for in PVP as a minimum survivability threshhold for most builds for the average player.

What this would do is this would completely destroy player's ability to be tanky while ALSO being able to do damage. This is really the big problem IMO. If you choose to be a tank - fine, be a tank. But that should come at the opportunity cost of doing damage.

Theignson wrote: »

It's the whole point of the game not to allow god mode, to make a balance between risk and reward. HIgh damage is squishy, super tanky has no damage-- that was the basic equation

ZOS despite hundreds of posts by the most experienced players still does not grasp that in PvP ball groups are now God Mode.

This is really obvious in the hours I play, when it isnt poplocked. One 6 man ball group is god mode. They cannot be killed by the collection of pugs that a 1-2 bar alliance has.

They jump around oblivious to any damage: shrug off any cold fire siege. Any poor sap that tries to fight them just gets 6v1 to death.

Of course its worse when these ball groups are on the alliance with the 3 to 1 population advantage, which for some reason is almost always the case.

God Mode ruins the game. That is so simple and I don't know why they don't understand

They either don't know or don't care. Given the number of posts about this subject over the last year it would be hard for them to claim they don't know about the balance issues with ball groups.

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

DenverRalphy wrote: »

Why isn't a counter to a ball group simply an opposing ball group?

Because two ball groups usually can't even kill each other.

<snip>

If that's the case, then while two ball groups are engaged with each other they're not out steamrolling the rest of the region. No? So why not take that opportunity to send out smaller parties to complete the objective?

Tbh. players were providing good & reasonable answers on to how to convert ball groups from "god mode" cheat-like position into "force to be reckoned with" position. Two often mentioned solutions is to make stuff to scale with group size & it would become weaker the larger the group is (just like with Pale Order ring, but applied to everything via battle spirit). The other way to make ball group play style weaker without affecting everyone else is to remove stacking of healing & dmg shields sourced from the same type of skill (so no 10x Vigors & 10 regens & 10 scribing heals ticking on one player + 10 shields etc).

The issue is that while all those ideas are good & would work, it is ZOS that seems to be the problem here. For whatever reason "Ball Group" play-style actually never received a single nerf or balancing. None. Zero. Nada. Since the game launched, back in 2014, this play-style was never addressed. It just has (for some reason that is unknown to me) "preferential treatment" Over the years it was only getting indirect or even direct buffs. While other play-style with "too good" effort vs result or risk vs reward (Ranged bow Snipe builds or WW for example) were constantly getting adjusted, the ball group play-style was not.

So here we are, and it gotten to the point where "ball group" is so effective and has so good "effort vs result" that it literally converts a total noobie into a god mode. And while I do know that there are more skilled & less skilled "ball groups" (I can clearly recognise that in game), the basic issue is that it is a meta play-style that was never adjusted and even if you are quite literally on a "bot" level (follow one player, spam one skill) - this play style will make you close to immortal with no counter-play at all. ZOS is constantly trying to balance out classes and stuff. Last patch they even adjusted a skill that operated in a same way for like 10 years. Until they do a proper "ball group only" target adjustment & reduce effectives of this play-style, PvP will be kinda dead. There is no reason to play PvP in any other way.

Aside from lag (which is mostly caused by those so called "ball groups") - PvP in this game is not just slowly dying, but imho was literally "killed" by ZOS ignorance here, cuz they allowed that one play-style to be so far out in space above everything else & run rampart like this.

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

What I do have a problem with though, is that there are items and builds in the game that make you able to allocate your stats elsewhere, and still end up with a tanky character (tanky without healer support) and STILL have enough firepower to kill other players.

I want to be this type of character for my solo PVE activities, can you tell me what items and builds I should use?

bmnoble wrote: »

What do you expect to happen when you have a group of skilled people often with years of experience playing the game, communicating via voice chat to coordinate their actions and cover for each others weaknesses against people in random groups with minimal coordination beyond, show up to defend/attack this keep/resource etc.. or just people seeing the sword icons on the map showing a battle taking place and heading their to join in.

It's not so different than a pre-made group going up against a pug group in battlegrounds just on a larger scale without the time limits of a match and the swapping out the opponents.

Exactly!

I can’t help but find it ironic when experienced end-game raiders describe the game as too easy, especially considering the extensive addons they use, the highly coordinated communications , and the wealth of tutorial videos that lay out strategies in detail.

Yet, the game is deemed 'too easy,' and there's a sense of being far more 'elite' than the average player.

This is why I find calls for increased difficulty a bit puzzling—given the tools and resources already available, is it really necessary?

Well, with a difficulty increase, more tools, resources, and tutorials will need to be made to counter the difficulty increase, and then it will be too easy, and then there will be more calls for increased difficulty, and….