Elvenheart wrote: »

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?

If it's just for stuff like normal Dungeons or the first arcs of Infinite Archive, any DPS build with the Ring of the Pale Order should be sufficient I think.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

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.

Some of the old P2W games also allowed people to buy godmode. I remember one I played had someone decide to jokingly take the "face roll" phrase literally and made a video literally rolling his face on a keyboard and killing like 10 people wearing basic gear.

Whenever someone brings up "God Mode" in an MMO, I always remember back to Warhammer Online and the OP Slayer combo.

Whereby they had a passive that made them auto-attack 50% faster, had a set bonus that made them auto-attack 25% faster and had a weapon proc that made them auto-attack 25% faster.

Which was all additive, not multiplicative. Meaning they had an attack speed of 0.0 seconds. Which resulted in them instantly killing ANY target because they would attack infinite times instantly (Which resulted in a lot of server crashes to boot - Especially when taking out Keep Bosses that are supposed to keep groups of 20-30 people engaged for several minutes, having the Slayer just rock up and auto attack like 1000 times instantly does not jive well with server stability)

Of course, this was on top of your usual "God Mode" ball groups, where it was all full of Bright Wizards/Sorcerers and Slayers/Choppa's and bunches of healers whereby those DD classes outperformed everything else because of the nature of how they were balanced (BW/Sorc got extra damage from stacking up their class resource, but the higher it was they had a chance to damage themselves when casting. While Slayer/Choppa got bonus damage from being fully enraged but took 50% more damage. Both mechanics downsides were completely nullified by having a pocket healer and thus they were just stronger than every class that didn't get these outrageous damage boosts)

Which is generally indicative of overall MMO PvP balance and how players do things. Ball groups are just the most effective ways to do things.

I recall all these ball groups in Warhammer's RvR, running around taking keeps uncontested because you couldn't stop a ball group.

Ball groups in GW2's WvWvW were a major part of my experience with it. With again, a lack of ways to deal with a co-ordinated ball which would just run around taking all objectives.

Even in WoW, it was all about ball groups. For classic's impromtu open world PvP (Crossroads attacks and the like) it was all about having co-ordinated ball groups. This continued for after they made the achievements for taking out captial city bosses (Where you get a ball group and it can not only survive, but take out a raid boss. Despite being outnumbered by literally 100's to 1 because your in the opposing factions main cities). As well as for its short lived open world PvP zone which even had the idea to make it so you have to queue for it so that it could manage the populations it was just about ball groups doing ball group things.

It's just the basic nature of how combat works. Having co-ordinated groups can allow better distribution of supporting effects that compound into a very hard to take down ball (Heck, even in real life. Ye Olde wars were based around formations, with the most notable (And successful) being Roman phalanx/testudo)

Unless you explicitly design things that punish groups heavily (Like Azureblight or Magicka Detonation which deal scaling damage based on numbers of targets) or completely neuter the effectiveness of skills within a group (Such as making effects a static value that is split between targets affected rather than providing the full effect to each target) you generally will always see a lot of ball groups.

But even then, you'd likely still get them... Just they'd co-ordinate enough to spread apart so that these things have less impact rather than all stacking on top of each other... Meaning all that happens is that unco-ordinated groups get nerfed...

Funny thing is no matter what happens, any changes to ball groups will effect the pug and non-optimized groups in cyrodiil as most use the same things, but not to the calibre that a ball group does. Which im sure will *** off a lot of people. All it will do is promote zerging and server stacking even more than there is now.

There are plenty of counters to ball groups. Its just that they require planning and timing (eg negates in pinch points or negating their negates before countering with an ult dump).

As its been said already, these are optimized groups so you cant expect to be able to solo or compete with them with less players. Are they overpowered? Yes. Are they god mode? Definitely not.

This era of ball groups is different than it has been. The usual arguments don't seem to fit any more. Like Xy mentioned above, they can barely kill each other.

My usual disclaimer: I've never had an issue with the ball group play style, I like all flavors in Cyro it keeps it interesting. Zerg, solo, bomber, random drunk spouting obscure song lyrics, and ball groups. I don't blame the ball groups and I'm not here to shame their playstyle.

Something went (extra) wrong at some point with the balance and ball groups, doing as they do, are now very God mode adjacent.

It's very hard to survive it at all, compared to the past. It's very hard to deal with at all, compared to the past. The only choice is to let them do whatever they want and hope they get bored or one or two lags out.

It's really NOT the same age old argument any more.

Soraka wrote: »

This era of ball groups is different than it has been. The usual arguments don't seem to fit any more. Like Xy mentioned above, they can barely kill each other.

My usual disclaimer: I've never had an issue with the ball group play style, I like all flavors in Cyro it keeps it interesting. Zerg, solo, bomber, random drunk spouting obscure song lyrics, and ball groups. I don't blame the ball groups and I'm not here to shame their playstyle.

Something went (extra) wrong at some point with the balance and ball groups, doing as they do, are now very God mode adjacent.

It's very hard to survive it at all, compared to the past. It's very hard to deal with at all, compared to the past. The only choice is to let them do whatever they want and hope they get bored or one or two lags out.

It's really NOT the same age old argument any more.

Yep, thats what I was saying in my post. Last night on GH, there was a bananaball wreaking havoc outside a keep. I just put myself on a high spot, (they dont seem to like wooden stairs) smh and watching the carnage.

I kept yelling to kite them, not to feed them, and when they would mow down a group of 7 or so, Id hop down and rez. Only to climb back up on my perch, so I can watch the same ones I just rezzed charge at them again.

What was the definition of insanity again?

Tigor wrote: »

Ice comet rain or ignore ball groups. Players should keep distance from them otherwise the farming starts.

Absolutely. The only issue is when theyre inside an unflagged keep. But is still possible to starve them there, and if by such luck you happen to find yourself on the track as the train is charging towards you, just jump over the side. This is usually what I do.

Vulsahdaal wrote: »

Tigor wrote: »

Ice comet rain or ignore ball groups. Players should keep distance from them otherwise the farming starts.

Absolutely. The only issue is when theyre inside an unflagged keep. But is still possible to starve them there, and if by such luck you happen to find yourself on the track as the train is charging towards you, just jump over the side. This is usually what I do.

Got your point. They are not welcome in an unflagged keep. Collectively ignoring a ball group is not happening. Maybe announce in zone chat in such a direction. There is always a quiet corner to sit it out or just jump over if they accidentally come on your path.

It's pretty amazing to me that ZOS performed 6 weeks of tests, nearly 5 years ago, and somehow the only change we got from it was 12-man groups instead of 24.

However, it's also notable that the most discussed solution to cyro combat balance was somehow never tested.

@ZOS_MattFiror talked about the benefits of being unshackled from the constraints of an annual chapter by allowing the team to experiment more. I think he should use this opportunity to invigorate the playerbase by announcing that this year they will test out a week or two in cyro where hot stacking, shield stacking, and other direct mitigation effects are no more.

Players should absolutely be incentivized to group up and coordinate their buffs, sets, and abilities, but 12x vigors and 12x regens and 12x shields should never have been a part of that concept. 1 of those that you don't need to source yourself is enough.

Additionally, RoA has been allowed to control the meta for far too long. It was a huge failure of the combat devs to allow for a set to enter the game that broke the combat mechanic rules.

If your agency as a player is forcibly removed from you, you absolutely must become immune to cc. No more 12m pulls (sometimes 15m with cyro lag and server delays) into a fear and immobilize. It's lazy gameplay. It's boring. It perpetuates the tank meta by allowing groups to build tanky, abstain from combat for 30 seconds by staying on their back bar, and then ult dumping on the pull because no one can live from a 40k-100k dmg combo w/ balorgh buffed ults.

It should have been changed years ago, but now is a good time too.

No one is saying an organized coordinated group shouldn't be successful. It's about the effectiveness of such groups vs other play styles which includes mobs of randoms.

The ball group dynamics are just some of many in ESO. There is also the relative power of the solo/duo/small group tower farmers vs randoms for example.

If we consider the past of ESO, we've seen the relative effectiveness of play styles fluctuate.

From my POV as someone who has PVP'd since 2014 and played all styles from completely solo to some of the better ball groups, I have concluded the relative power gap between ball groups and other play styles is higher than ever. At no point in ESO's history have 12 players been able to be so dominant.

Not only is the power gap the highest, it comes with the lowest skill requirements ever. As we know, ZOS has a stated objective of lowering the ceiling and raising the floor. This process has made the ball group style easier and more forgiving than ever to play.

In the past when ESO had higher skill caps, highly skilled ball groups could dominate, but if they made small mistakes, they could easily wipe. From 1.6-3.1ish (2015-2017) I could routinely gank the tails of skilled ball groups if they became too spread out. They were also susceptible to opportunistic VD bombers if they bit off a little more than they could chew.

No longer is this true.

The problem extends far beyond ball groups though. The crucial issue is the low skill cap that makes surviving in a PVP mode WAY TOO EASY. In other play style dynamics it results in a high rate of stalemates. In theory, we could all choose to play the most boring builds and we wouldn't worry so much about ball groups. The main problem would then be no one could die.

IMO, PVP is broken beyond minor adjustments. They need to go back to the drawing board and design an actually good PVP game without regard for the PVE side of the game and then find a way to logically incorporate it with the rest of the game.

I'm not exaggerating when I call it the worst pvp I have ever played. I am not trying to bash anyone. I am trying to provide constructive feedback that hits at the crux of the issue. It is so repulsive to actual enjoyers of PVP that they need to look outside of ESO for constructive feedback on how to improve it. Crucially, good PVP requires high skill caps.

Before anyone considers actioning me for being so blunt, consider Sypher's recent appearance during an ESO event. I don't know him, I haven't talked to him, but I watched the stream. I felt he *really* wanted to like ESO PVP again, but he seemed repulsed by the state of the game. I feel like most serious PVP players would feel that way about a game in which an average player can decide to play a build that is unlikely to be killable in most circumstances, even when matched against somebody much more skilled than they are.

Reginald_leBlem wrote: »

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.

No. Just, no.

Join a decent pvp guild.

Ah yes, another post complaining about coordinated groups playing together in an MMO.

I honestly can’t think of a single MMO where a group of coordinated players couldn’t destroy single pugs or even groups of pugs.

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.

keep those small generic house deeds and factory crates of swoops hot keyed my friends

also Flurry > all