Current horrible state of PVP

malistorr · January 28

I've played this game almost since launch and am at max level if you combine PC and Xbox. I've done just about everything in the game except for housing, which I have no interest in. I've gone through the many changes in PVP (Cyrodiil and some IC, don't do BGs) over the years and have had to completely change my play style or even class many times due to changes by ZOS. (Putting out overpowered new class/skills/gear to make money and then repeatedly nerfing things like we all know is their process (this isn't bashing, it's the God honest truth and everyone knows it)) I don't chase meta play styles or sets and just use gear that I like and play how I want to play. I'm in PVP guilds and run around that way a large chunk of my time because you really have to in order to not get zerged down by the reds and yellows in Blackreach. PVP results there are always dictated by who has the biggest zerg at the time. And that's fine I guess as that is how war and a battle would be in real life. If you have numbers you have a huge advantage. This encourages group play. However, for players who are on the other colors at the time, PVP really isn't much fun. If you're playing solo or even in a small group because your guild isn't on at the time, you really can't do much. I guess you can try to take a town or resource and that's about it. You can stay away from the zergs and try to find 1v1s if dueling is your thing. But you really can't do much else. It's either get on and play when your alliance has a zerg going or you won't be doing much of anything.

At the very least there should be other options for solo players or people who want somewhat fair competition even if they're in a different timezone than a lot of other players in their alliance/guild. How about a campaign that just randomly distributes players evenly across the 3 alliances so that at any given time, the player count is somewhat even across the 3 alliances? Sure, maybe if you have a friend on you might be in enemy alliances, but at least there could be even fights and the results would actually be determined by skill instead of by which alliance can bring on 24-players at the right time to zerg empty keeps like reds do in Blackreach (Xbox NA) every night around 10-11 PM Pacific. ZOS should really rethink PVP and decide if they want a fun competitive game here or if they want to leave things in the sorry state it's in now. At least 1 campaign that evens out the odds/numbers is badly needed.

Ball groups with overpowered pulls and bombing may be fun for the 12-people in the group (sounds like it would be incredibly boring to me and this play style isn't actual PVP), but for the other side, who is not comped out or in a ball group themselves, there isn't a way to counter this at all. So does ZOS want to force people to have to play 1-way in order to take or defend a keep? It seems so. The solo or small group players have a choice, they either engage the ball group and get slaughtered by the pulls and bombing or they leave the area to do something else. This isn't encouraging competitive or fun PVP. It's allowing players who are not actually good PVP players to be OP and get lots of AP while destroying any kind of actual PVP competition. So ZOS takes PVP and effectively makes it PVE in a lot of ways. Either group up and play the pull-bomb play style or be useless and leave. Not competitive and NOT fun. People who play that way will defend it with all their breath. They don't want to have to actually be good at PVP and have any skill. Fun for them I guess is running around in a circle spamming a heal button. For the 80+% of PVP players in Cyrodiil who don't want to play that way, fix this ZOS please. Have at least 1 campaign that doesn't allow pulls or bombing. Group heals are OP right now and pretty much always have been. Comp/ball groups are OP without pulls and without bombing. When you combine them all it makes for a horrible PVP experience and many players either have quit because of this or are about to, me included. Please have at least 1 campaign with limited group sizes, no bombing and no pulls. You could even do it where you distribute players across alliances evenly. There should be at least 1 campaign where it's actually real PVP instead of the gimmicks that ZOS has in "PVP" now.

To anyone who likes pulls and ball groups in general. You don't need to comment saying it's real PVP. You'll never change my mind on that. And I didn't say to ban that play style. I asked for a campaign that doesn't allow it so that people who really want to PVP can do so without being pulled half-way across a field and blown up by someone tapping a single button. In PVP I shouldn't be killed because some new player next to me has no defense and low health either.

malistorr · January 28

Comment order was moved around later, weird.

plasmab3ard · January 28

may i suggest battlegrounds?

olsborg · January 28

The pvp meta currently is as dumb as ive ever seen it and ive played(on and off) since 2014. Proccs count for everything and if you dont play like that you are left in the dust. Its pretty sad imo.

malistorr · January 28

BGs are better than nothing I suppose but I'd really like Cyrodiil with actual PVP instead of the horrible state it's in now with all the OP gimmicks. In Blackreach Xbox NA at night a 20-person group of reds comes on each night and takes the map. Good for them, they can zerg down the few players who try to stop them. Why not a mechanism to even out the population unless your goal is just to knock down doors and earn AP for doing nothing? Your choices are to be run over repeatedly with a 10v1, go take a resource on the other side of the map, or join the zerg. That is NOT good gaming. If there was anyone at ZOS that actually played this game they'd know that.

plasmab3ard · January 28

if zos wasnt into zerging, they wouldnt keep making buffsets, so i wouldnt get my hopes up.
also a large part of the eso "pvp" player base appears to be entirely unwilling to have vaguely even numbered fights so i guess this caters to that.

RebornV3x · January 29

PVP in its current state is just the worst ever don't know how anyone on the dev team can see the current state of PVP and be like "yeah this is fine"

Thumbless_Bot · January 29

RebornV3x wrote: »

PVP in its current state is just the worst ever don't know how anyone on the dev team can see the current state of PVP and be like "yeah this is fine"

Pvp, in any form, has a tendency to go off the rails in this game. This is either due to bad balance decisions made by zos or the introduction of broken sets and mechanics. But it can be awesome, like really fricken amazing, at times when those outliers are not part of the specific battle/encounter. The problem is that most people gravitate towards broken stuff because they want to win and these things give them an upper hand and zos refusing to acknowledge or do anything about the bad decisions they make.

MincMincMinc · January 29

malistorr wrote: »

BGs are better than nothing I suppose but I'd really like Cyrodiil with actual PVP instead of the horrible state it's in now with all the OP gimmicks. In Blackreach Xbox NA at night a 20-person group of reds comes on each night and takes the map. Good for them, they can zerg down the few players who try to stop them. Why not a mechanism to even out the population unless your goal is just to knock down doors and earn AP for doing nothing? Your choices are to be run over repeatedly with a 10v1, go take a resource on the other side of the map, or join the zerg. That is NOT good gaming. If there was anyone at ZOS that actually played this game they'd know that.

Those mechanisms existed and were removed because they were "unfair". Look at old wings reflect, or ball of lightning, or harness magicka, or old critsurge, or old siphon attacks, or sunshield. Set wise what happened to old fury or seventh or briar design styles?

This is why we dont see NEW players try to solo pvp, the tools that level the playingfield dont exist. The tradeoff back in the day was you could slot these skills or sets, but group wise you would be stronger stacking more damage since you didnt need to use the bar space. Same goes set wise, groups could slot group sets that are raw and guaranteed, where sets like old fury only worked while being killed by many ticks.

malistorr · January 29

"Pvp, in any form, has a tendency to go off the rails in this game. This is either due to bad balance decisions made by zos or the introduction of broken sets and mechanics. But it can be awesome, like really fricken amazing, at times when those outliers are not part of the specific battle/encounter. The problem is that most people gravitate towards broken stuff because they want to win and these things give them an upper hand and zos refusing to acknowledge or do anything about the bad decisions they make."

It is mostly sets and mechanics IMO, oh yeah, and cheating too. Unfortunately it is rare that these things are NOT part of a PVP fight, at least for me. Also, I keep running into the same 3 or 4 players on yellow and red that seem to be able to fire off 5 skills perfectly within about a half-second and I usually don't even see them hitting me more than once before I'm dead. This is because they're either cheating somehow or taking advantage of exploits and gimmicks in the game that ZOS should care enough about to remove from the game. I have been playing PVP for 7ish years and I'm sure I don't press the buttons on my controller faster than everyone else who plays, but I'm not bad. Another human cannot press 5-buttons and aim all 5-skills perfectly before I can counter. It's literally not humanly possible. And the fact that I can barely land a skill on a few players before getting deleted, while I kill most everyone else, is pretty suspicious. Please ZOS find out how they're cheating and fix this! But we all know PVP is a really low priority and so you have the broken state of PVP that I'm complaining about. It SHOULD be so much better than it is. Either the devs don't care or the bean counters aren't letting them fix it.

The people who come on here and say that nobody cheats, they are the cheaters. They don't want to found and banned or have their advantages taken away. They have no skill and no honor and I'm happy not to be like them. ZOS should have found the bugs/exploits that make a 47,000,000,000 day debuff of poison or fire stay on players and fix that but of course they haven't. They should have fixed the whole "stuck in combat" mess that causes players to have to literally run on foot between keeps but they haven't. IT'S BEEN MANY MANY YEARS! Epic failure.

Oblivion_Protocol · January 31

malistorr wrote: »

The people who come on here and say that nobody cheats, they are the cheaters. They don't want to found and banned or have their advantages taken away. They have no skill and no honor and I'm happy not to be like them. ZOS should have found the bugs/exploits that make a 47,000,000,000 day debuff of poison or fire stay on players and fix that but of course they haven't. They should have fixed the whole "stuck in combat" mess that causes players to have to literally run on foot between keeps but they haven't. IT'S BEEN MANY MANY YEARS! Epic failure.

I agree about the stuck in combat and debuff bugs. However, I’ll be the one to say that cheating isn’t the epidemic you think it is. Don’t get me wrong; people cheat and exploit in this game. But your chances of running into them are slim to none.

Your examples of five abilities hitting you at once is easily explainable. A lot of skills have delays between when they’re fired off and when they hit you. Sorc has an entire combo that consist of a bunch of stuff hitting at once.

Also, I don’t know if lag is as bad in console as on PC, but that can absolutely play a factor.

kiwi_tea · January 31

Light attack > Haunting Curse > Light attack > Elemental Susceptibility > Light attack > Streak > Elemental Weapon > Light attack > Light attack > Crystal Frags (if it procs).

I promise it will feel like 5 skills going off at once, especially if they have low ping, and you have high ping, but it's just high APM skill and great timing.

Tcholl · February 12

Unfortunately, solo pvp is utterly dead in this game. Class balance is a joke and they have quit trying and the updates are showing it. We have NBs with 35k health one hit killing people and sorcs jumping around with absurd shields and streaking away as resources didn't exist.

I my point of view, you either find yourself a group to play a little longer before the game is completely dead or don't play at all.

People complain about ballgroups, but it is the only fun thing to do in PvP nowdays. You either ballgroup or zerg, if you want to have some fun.

xFocused · February 13

olsborg wrote: »

The pvp meta currently is as dumb as ive ever seen it and ive played(on and off) since 2014. Proccs count for everything and if you dont play like that you are left in the dust. Its pretty sad imo.

This. Seems like if you're a solo player you don't stand much of a chance right now. Rush of Agony being stacked by BG's and small scale groups on top of stacked heals/shields. That one alliance that seems to stay at 3 bars 24/7 with a emp that never seems to logout. You can't even take a resource solo anymore most days without a zerg chasing after you. PvP in Cyrodiil is just incredibly stale and I don't blame anyone for not playing it in it's current state

xylena_lazarow · February 13

Tcholl wrote: »

People complain about ballgroups, but it is the only fun thing to do in PvP nowdays. You either ballgroup or zerg, if you want to have some fun.

May I suggest 3-4 person X'er style smallscale. It requires certain skills like self-sustain and reading each other's movements, it's a lot of kiting, but if you're dedicated enough for ball grouping, no reason you can't develop those skills. The 8v8 solo BGs is probably the best place to learn this style of PvP since you'll be grouped with players already doing it.

Unlike ball grouping, random zergers have actually told us that we're fun to fight against, I guess since we vary our tactics and go for objectives, not just pull bomb wall running or tower camping. Even though it often looks like the same sort of kill farming, most of them know we will die if they zerg big enough, so there's no unfun hopeless obligation.

Tcholl · February 13

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Tcholl wrote: »

People complain about ballgroups, but it is the only fun thing to do in PvP nowdays. You either ballgroup or zerg, if you want to have some fun.

May I suggest 3-4 person X'er style smallscale. It requires certain skills like self-sustain and reading each other's movements, it's a lot of kiting, but if you're dedicated enough for ball grouping, no reason you can't develop those skills. The 8v8 solo BGs is probably the best place to learn this style of PvP since you'll be grouped with players already doing it.

Unlike ball grouping, random zergers have actually told us that we're fun to fight against, I guess since we vary our tactics and go for objectives, not just pull bomb wall running or tower camping. Even though it often looks like the same sort of kill farming, most of them know we will die if they zerg big enough, so there's no unfun hopeless obligation.

I am sure that would be fire! My issue is that I only have friends playing on the ballgroups runs nowdays. Most of the players I know quit the game. I used to play solo and small men groups a lot.

I do play BGs, despite all the issues there, but would love to have a couple friends to run small scale cyro again.

Veinblood1965 · February 13

Face it, proc sets/buff sets sell. It keeps a good portion of PVPers buying new expansions who otherwise have no inclination to PVE or explore new zones. I finally threw in the towel and am running the sets myself. Turns out to be kind of fun really.

RealLoveBVB · February 13

xFocused wrote: »

This. Seems like if you're a solo player you don't stand much of a chance right now.

You mentioned rush of agony yourself. If you want to play solo and still want to kill groups, then its the perfect set.

Tcholl · February 13

Veinblood1965 wrote: »

Face it, proc sets/buff sets sell. It keeps a good portion of PVPers buying new expansions who otherwise have no inclination to PVE or explore new zones. I finally threw in the towel and am running the sets myself. Turns out to be kind of fun really.

It is not just a matter to jump in the proc sets and be gud. Those cheese builds will not work on every class, so good luck facing a proc nb with the same build using another class.

Some classes are so overloaded with passives and free stuff, that it is just a matter of using a proc cheese to make it very hard to beat. This is not healthy for the game at all.

Joy_Division · February 13

Tcholl wrote: »

Unfortunately, solo pvp is utterly dead in this game. Class balance is a joke and they have quit trying and the updates are showing it. We have NBs with 35k health one hit killing people and sorcs jumping around with absurd shields and streaking away as resources didn't exist.

I my point of view, you either find yourself a group to play a little longer before the game is completely dead or don't play at all.

People complain about ballgroups, but it is the only fun thing to do in PvP nowdays. You either ballgroup or zerg, if you want to have some fun.

I wouldn't say ballgroups are now fun (I have experience playing in them since 2014) - certainly a lot less so now that the only tactic is RoA and Guild Vs Guild is a snoozefest with all the shielding and HoTs. Rather, being in a ball group is probably now the only way to actually have an impact on AvAvA unless you are a really good player or have an over-inflated sense of how important light attacking from a castle roof is during a siege..

That's settling. That size of the current PvP population is all that really needs to be said

Sluggy · February 14

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Tcholl wrote: »

People complain about ballgroups, but it is the only fun thing to do in PvP nowdays. You either ballgroup or zerg, if you want to have some fun.

May I suggest 3-4 person X'er style smallscale. It requires certain skills like self-sustain and reading each other's movements, it's a lot of kiting, but if you're dedicated enough for ball grouping, no reason you can't develop those skills. The 8v8 solo BGs is probably the best place to learn this style of PvP since you'll be grouped with players already doing it.

Unlike ball grouping, random zergers have actually told us that we're fun to fight against, I guess since we vary our tactics and go for objectives, not just pull bomb wall running or tower camping. Even though it often looks like the same sort of kill farming, most of them know we will die if they zerg big enough, so there's no unfun hopeless obligation.

And that's exactly the difference between fighting against ballgroups and fighting against just people playing together. In the latter case, lack of skill can be made up for with numbers which is a kind of self-balancing mechanic. Against ballgroups, stacking numbers against them really doesn't make more of a difference, except for the size of the bombs they get, I guess. It's pretty much just down to the ballgroup lead paying attention and not making a any particularly dumb moves. Both styles require coordinated effort to work but one is so far beyond anything else simply due to stacking mechanics that it becomes impossible to close that gap.

xFocused · February 14

Sluggy wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Tcholl wrote: »

People complain about ballgroups, but it is the only fun thing to do in PvP nowdays. You either ballgroup or zerg, if you want to have some fun.

May I suggest 3-4 person X'er style smallscale. It requires certain skills like self-sustain and reading each other's movements, it's a lot of kiting, but if you're dedicated enough for ball grouping, no reason you can't develop those skills. The 8v8 solo BGs is probably the best place to learn this style of PvP since you'll be grouped with players already doing it.

Unlike ball grouping, random zergers have actually told us that we're fun to fight against, I guess since we vary our tactics and go for objectives, not just pull bomb wall running or tower camping. Even though it often looks like the same sort of kill farming, most of them know we will die if they zerg big enough, so there's no unfun hopeless obligation.

And that's exactly the difference between fighting against ballgroups and fighting against just people playing together. In the latter case, lack of skill can be made up for with numbers which is a kind of self-balancing mechanic. Against ballgroups, stacking numbers against them really doesn't make more of a difference, except for the size of the bombs they get, I guess. It's pretty much just down to the ballgroup lead paying attention and not making a any particularly dumb moves. Both styles require coordinated effort to work but one is so far beyond anything else simply due to stacking mechanics that it becomes impossible to close that gap.

The big problem with these ball groups these days is the way they can stack so many heals and shields, not to mention, stacking a set like Rush, and this is coming from someone who has played in multiple ball groups, there’s a lot of broken mechanics at play here. BG’s have always been a problem but now there’s barely any counter to them unless you’re stacking multiple negates. Siege does almost next to nothing, they outheal most counter attacks so really all you can do is either let them farm an empty keep or keep feeding them free AP.

Tcholl · February 14

The problem is that every player have min 35 k health and can spam heals and shields. There is way too much passives and free stats. Scribing just made everything worse.

Ballgroups are using the best tatics avalilable, so of course they will be very hard to kill in this meta.

darvaria · February 19

Until they nerf bombers and make things like Vicious Death ONLY hit players in the same group, players are mostly hanging on walls and sieging. And then you have unkillable ball groups circling around an unflagged keep, camping the transit for over an hour, who wants to really fight. Or you see 4 or 5 unkillable players picking off weaklings in tower humping fights.

I'm not standing on any flags, front doors or repairing any more. And when I see the ball groups, I stay well out of range. And I don't go up in towers any more either. Who cares if they recap resources.

xFocused · February 20

darvaria wrote: »

Until they nerf bombers and make things like Vicious Death ONLY hit players in the same group, players are mostly hanging on walls and sieging. And then you have unkillable ball groups circling around an unflagged keep, camping the transit for over an hour, who wants to really fight. Or you see 4 or 5 unkillable players picking off weaklings in tower humping fights.

I'm not standing on any flags, front doors or repairing any more. And when I see the ball groups, I stay well out of range. And I don't go up in towers any more either. Who cares if they recap resources.

I wouldn't say bombers are the problem here, it's comped groups that are able to stack multiple heals and shields that can withstand almost everything including multiple siege weapons which is a little absurd if you think about it, then you have broken sets like Rush outperforming just about everything right now. If Zos would make adjustments to cross heals and shields, fix Rush of Agony and make siege actually viable against groups Cyrodiil would be in a better spot

master_vanargand · February 21

The game creators must be playing ball groups.
Otherwise they wouldn't make the game so badly balanced.
Players wanting to be invincible in PVP have destroyed and messed up ESO's PVP.

Tigor · February 21

Complaints about ball groups again. Why is this playstyle still possible? Would be nice if it would be less pushy.

xFocused · February 21

Tigor wrote: »

Complaints about ball groups again. Why is this playstyle still possible? Would be nice if it would be less pushy.

Or at least give us a reliable, effective counter to them. Siege does nothing, the stacking of heals and shields is too much, they killed snake in the stars which should have been the counter to them

Getsugatenso · February 21

primeiro de tudo precisa rebalancear todos os sets do game, que são muitos

xylena_lazarow · February 22

Tcholl wrote: »

Ballgroups are using the best tatics avalilable, so of course they will be very hard to kill in this meta.

It's not just that they're hard to kill, it's that zergs aren't even allowed to have tools that can counter their strat. Azureblight was killed, Magicka Detonation was killed, Snake was killed on PTS, Soldier of Anguish was killed on PTS...

xFocused · February 22

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Tcholl wrote: »

Ballgroups are using the best tatics avalilable, so of course they will be very hard to kill in this meta.

It's not just that they're hard to kill, it's that zergs aren't even allowed to have tools that can counter their strat. Azureblight was killed, Magicka Detonation was killed, Snake was killed on PTS, Soldier of Anguish was killed on PTS...

It definitely feels like ZOS wants to kill any and all type of solo play. Last night was incredibly boring as a solo player because literally every campaign and IC was nothing but comped out groups wiping the entire map. I logged because there was no point as there’s nothing anymore that you can do, especially when other solo players don’t coordinate to kill these groups