Major_Mangle wrote: »

Cuwen wrote: »

moo_2021 wrote: »

not nerf. kill healers.

all healing, shields and buffing only work for oneself, including set effects.

I like to play as a healer. I don't work with ball groups, just a small 7-8 person group. Are you saying I shouldn't be allowed to play the role I want to? ZoS's big thing a few years ago was that they were making updates to the game so that we could play the way we wanted to.

7-8 isn't a small group......

7-8 players is considered a relatively small group of players. It's not a full group of 12, and most times, we see ball groups of comped players numbering 15-20 players now.

The debate here is not "for or against ballgroups", but how to make their existence within Cyrodiil satisfactory for everyone.

Xarc wrote: »

Cuwen wrote: »

Why is the response to always nerf heals? I'm a healer and have been for the past 6+ years. We have been nerfed into oblivion. We honestly can barely do anything. Rush of agony right now is the biggest problem. That has to be nerfed. Also, one-hit deaths with over 30k damage is ridiculous. There are supposed to be big groups in Cyrodiil. It's supposed to be an army scenario. Battlegrounds is more for small player scenarios. I would like to see a set, though, that causes groups of the opposite faction to be pushed apart and disbanded. Kind of like the opposite of rush of agony.

it is possible to nerf heals only for groups, for example:
- if you are in a group, the healing and shields given to other members of the group are reduced by 2% per additional number of people starting from 2.
or:
- add an incantation delay on aoe healing
- etc

Should be. I think RC works the same way.

But you have to think about it that this will also hit the zerg more then the BGs. So i personally dont think that this will be change anything.

I knew we had all around 7-9k weapon / spelldamage some of our cro bomber was over 10k. So imo there are several aspects the whole sets that buff the BG. They need to cap shields and heals on a normal amount. How could it be that you can stack several rapid regens and vigor. As zerg you will never have this damage the ticks of this skills will outheal the most of the damage they get.

I think there is a general problem in the way builds are made on ESO.
Someone strong should not do big damages, and vice versa.
I imagined this little system that opposes resistance with damage, shield power against penetration, and regen against criticals. This would balance the builds and solve the problem of ballgroups or builds actually overpowered, in my opinion



Like the character creation mechanism (body and face), we should be able to choose what type of character we want and not have everything as is currently the case.
Note that this can be applied to both pvp and pve

The real answer is to bore them.

Don't fight them, at all.
Let them take the keep, go take another one instead of defending that one.
If they are inside a keep waiting for it to be attacked, go to a different one.

There is nothing worse than not getting fights, or fun fights, as an organised group. Just feels like you are wasting your time.

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

You guys honestly over exaggerate the "oppressiveness" of ballgroups. You do realize that if it wasn't for ballgroups, Cyrodil would be nothing but zerg or be zerged right? Meaning that the only thing that would really dictate outcomes is numbers. At that point, you might as well just log on, see which alliance has a population advantage, and make your decision whether or not to play based only on that metric. That isn't healthy for the game either.

Ballgroups can be killed and are often killed. I play in one, and we get killed. I see others play in ball groups and I've watched them get killed. Across all alliances. Red, yellow, Blue. They all get killed. Playing as a ballgroup doesn't make you unkillable, it just makes it harder for players to kill you (so long as you are playing as a unit), and it gives you better ability to kill other players. But you are not unstoppable.

It's against my own personal interest to tell you exactly what kills us the most or how we die the most, and how to attack the ball group, but that part of the game I think is more L2P than anything, but that is where PVP skill and experience comes into play.

A few things here. Coming from someone who has played in organized groups since 2014.

I sometimes hear this rationale as if the rest of PvP population should be grateful that ball groups are providing some sort of necessary service that actually makes Cyrodiil more fun. No. Their "service" is about as welcome as the IRS. The only time I have ever said to myself, "it would be convenient for a ball group to come right now" is when there is an enemy ball group that is mercilessly farming the faction's PuGs. In short, they create the very problem for which they are ever needed.

The BIG difference between fighting a zerg and a ball group is that enemy players in a zerg die and they rarely use that awful Rush of Agony set (and when they do, I'm not feared and insta-killed so I don;t care). That actually makes fighting them fun unlike ball groups.

Yes, we know ball groups die. Eventually. The problem is that it takes too much collective effort to even slow them down, let alone stop or kill them. The ease in which ball groups can have immunity to slows/snares, permanent major/minor expedition, permanent minor/major evasion (which provides a free 30% damage reduction to the very damage meant to counter them), immediate access to powerful AoE shielding, are all relatively recent "improvements" given to us by ZOS that have made ball groups far, far more resilient and tanky then they ever were. Zergs have none of this.

Everyone who has ever played in a ball group has invariably gotten the hate whispers that come from the people they farm. Even healers/support get them. These whispers are frequent, and almost always joked about in coms as a source of pride. So, no, I don;t agree the oppressiveness is exaggerated. It is quite clear that the "service" being provided by organized groups is unwanted and unwelcome.

Now, I do kind of feel bad. Because I know most ball group players just want to run with their friends and honestly believe in the idea that grouped PvP is a fun and essential element in AvAvA format. I do think they ought not to be bullied or shamed when participating in what is a perfectly normal form of PvP that many other MMOs somehow manage to do with a semblance of balance. The problem is that that ZOS basically stopped paying attention to how PvP was being played and made awful decisions that put us where we are today. I cannot unsee the BG stream ZOS ran and it's crystal clear to me that if some devs once had a vague idea of how people actually PvPed, they do not now and have not for quite a long time.

What is most frustrating is that for years, people have voiced consistent and overwhelming consensual feedback regarding broken mechanics such as HoT stacking . No reaction or even response from ZOS other than crickets. It's like they aren't even trying and can;t be bothered to tell us why they are silent on this much requested change. I personally do not feel that HoT stacking is what keeps these groups alive. But hey, I'm all for just giving it a try to see what happens because Cyrodiil is now no longer something I find fun at all. It was something I used to play 4,5 nights a week.

For me personally, I'm totally fine with groups of players designing good comps and playing well to synergize themselves so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The problem is there are too many disruptive and easily accessible defensive/healing mechanics in ESO that makes the "whole" far too strong with what offensive tools are available, It is *extremely* frustrating to feel that the skills you use have null effect - which literally happens all the time now because ball groups are immune to slows/snares and are constantly absorbing the incoming damage done to them. This is an awful feeling, and every RPG I've played since Advance Dungeons and Dragons explicitly warned its Game Masters to avoid ever doing to their PCs. And now we're going to gift these groups a set like Rush of Agony that breaks the core rules of the game, and deprives players of their ability to control their characters after being forcibly moved? That is beyond stupid and is about as oppressive of a gaming environment there could be.

Have an organized group with everyone on comms and a leader who knows what they are doing, can arrange the group to use specific skills and sets that are actually needed instead of what someone might want, and ensure that the players follow the leader's commands when in combat.

That is a group that is more likely to succeed in combat.

Also buff sieges

Reduction to evasion mitigation to 8 and 16% on top of removing the sources for immunity to snares, roots and stuns, would fix most of the problems. Also, make rush of agony give immunity to pulls/stuns for 7s too. Good ideas. Cap healing type per player wouldn't help much because they would just use other sources.

The core issue here is over healing and defense stacking. You need a way to bypass these mitigations, the best way is using Oblivion damage. A set proc that's a niche towards healer targeting would be the right solution. My idea is a set that debuffs a target by making all their heals deal a % Oblivion damage to thier other group members based on max health (enough to out pace thier heal over time). Thus with all the heals they put on their group members, they will end up killing them from over healing. Combo something like this with Snake in the Stars, Occult Overload, and all other available Oblivion damage sources and your a group killer.

Plan b a mythic set that boosts your damage done by an additive % to grouped targets, but disables grouping for you.

ZhuJiuyin wrote: »

Limiting stacking of the same type of healing might work, as it would force people to use healing provided by other sets as a source, which may not be as effective or have more stringent conditions. But this will also affect the zerg groups, and perhaps to a greater extent.
A more effective approach would be to have sets like Dark Convergence scale their damage to the raid more, and to increase the effectiveness of Defile from 6/12% to 10/20%, while also making healing absorption more accessible. Since BG members are closer together, increasing the damage of sets like Dark Convergence should be more effective in destroying BGs, while increasing the effects of Defile and healing absorption will ensure that the total amount of healing done by BGs is reduced.
What we need is a rock-paper-scissors matchup, where BG has an advantage over zerg groups, zerg groups are stronger than single players, and single players (bombers) can deal severe damage to BG. (For example, in some dice games, 6>5>4>3>2>1>6)
For example, designing a new set, the bonus for 5 pieces is: When you are not in a group, when you use the ability that leaves a damaging effect on the ground, a vortex will be created, which will Defile the target within 8 feet after 1.3 seconds and absorb 30,000 points of healing, while causing 10,000 points of damage. The damage is increased by 100% for each additional target.

ZOS has tried to balance things by introducing sets for years and it's never been fun. The set is either useless and doesn't get used or OP, with little in between. We have sets that give increased weapon damage when attacks are dodged instead of addressing the absurdly long iframes of dodges, we got the shieldbreaker set back in the day instead of...literally anything else, and so on.

I'd much prefer things be more available in the form of slotted skills, ults, etc, instead of making the counter some gear set. There are already things that apply healing absorption - a morph of the Psijic AoE CC, scribing skills can apply it, and probably others I'm forgetting. We already have bombing sets and they've been effective - or rather, were and seem a little diminished now. Instead of making more or buffing the bombing sets, I'd rather address power creep. Doubling or tripling the healing absorption available on the psijic CC would be sweet - I think it's 4-5k at the moment? And that just gets wiped out immediately.

I think if average health and resistances go back down and ability to do damage without sacrifice goes back down, plus a few targeted adjustments to things like the Evasion Buffs that really only help ball groups, plus scattering some healing absorbs around and giving scribing skills some *much* needed tuning, we'd be in a much more manageable spot. Combined with nerfing overperforming sets that players have been complaining about for years and I think we'd be at least 80-90% of the way there. I'd be super wary of limiting heal stacking as I think the ability of players to Do Stuff To Each Other Equally(TM) is something that should only be adjusted as a last resort, but on the flip side it's very possible that this is also what's contributing to a lot of performance issues, and if that's the case we can just bite the bullet.

In my opinion, the way to combat ball groups and other silliness in ESO PvP would be to modify the combat engine so as to introduce "fatigue" into the equation.

The greater a character's fatigue, the more their base movement speed degrades. A recent study of medieval armor out of Switzerland showed that volunteers wearing armor and performing physical tasks used 1.9 times more energy while running and 2.3 times more energy while walking when wearing armor.

This would mean if they modeled a toon wearing 8 pieces of medium armor as the base fatigue curve, that could be adjusted with modifiers for each piece of heavy armor worn, with heavy chest, legs and head causing a higher fatigue modifier than hands, feet and belt. Conversely, each piece of light armor would cause a lower fatigue modifiers.

Then as fatigue increases, a toon's movement speed decreases more and more until they become "winded" and must rest. Such a system would keep ball groups from zipping around interminably inside a keep ultidumping on hapless zerglings.

The members of the ball group wearing more heavy armor would naturally start moving more slowly as their fatigue increased more than other party members wearing light and heavy armor. This would cause the ball group to have to move only at the pace of their slowest member thereby mitigating their ability to run around for long periods. If they fail to do slow down their fastest members then the group would more naturally thin out and be susceptible to attacks.

This same fatigue curve would apply to the towerh**pers who are all in heavy armor running up and down stairs because the fatigue curve would be more affected by running upstairs than it is when running on a flat ground like the top floor of a keep.

The key would then be to know when to disengage from a battle before fatigue overtakes your toon and they collapse. It would take effort to build fatigue modifiers into a combat engine but if ZOS and other MMOs wanted to do it they could and it would make it less possible for groups to stay balled up without stopping more than they do today.

Anyway, just a thought exercise. I only play ESO once a week now because of the stupid tank/ball group meta in Cyrodiil. If ZOS ever tries to actually address it. Perhaps some of us will return.

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Arrow312 wrote: »

Xarc wrote: »

Cuwen wrote: »

Why is the response to always nerf heals? I'm a healer and have been for the past 6+ years. We have been nerfed into oblivion. We honestly can barely do anything. Rush of agony right now is the biggest problem. That has to be nerfed. Also, one-hit deaths with over 30k damage is ridiculous. There are supposed to be big groups in Cyrodiil. It's supposed to be an army scenario. Battlegrounds is more for small player scenarios. I would like to see a set, though, that causes groups of the opposite faction to be pushed apart and disbanded. Kind of like the opposite of rush of agony.

it is possible to nerf heals only for groups, for example:
- if you are in a group, the healing and shields given to other members of the group are reduced by 2% per additional number of people starting from 2.
or:
- add an incantation delay on aoe healing
- etc

Should be. I think RC works the same way.

But you have to think about it that this will also hit the zerg more then the BGs. So i personally dont think that this will be change anything.

I knew we had all around 7-9k weapon / spelldamage some of our cro bomber was over 10k. So imo there are several aspects the whole sets that buff the BG. They need to cap shields and heals on a normal amount. How could it be that you can stack several rapid regens and vigor. As zerg you will never have this damage the ticks of this skills will outheal the most of the damage they get.

I don't think the heals are the issue TBH. The constant HOT's are less of an issue than the timed burst heals that allow ball groups to survive ulti-drops and damage barrages, but that is skilled healer play, not the result of HOT Stacking.

IMO, the problem isn't the HOT stacking as much as it is tanky players ALSO being able to do damage. You can build your character to have 35k+ resistances and still reach grotesque levels of weapon/spell damage and penetration - meaning even though you've effectively built as a tank, you can deal damage as good or better than players who went pure glass-cannon. That shouldn't be a thing. They need to go back and revisit the combat system and make it so that damage scales negatively with armor and health so that there is actually tradeoffs between dealing damage and being survivable. If they did this, then surviviablity in a ball group would necessarily go down because the damage players would have to focus purely on damage and lower their survivability.

if everybody in the group keep the heals up you will get around 10k or more healing without burstheals or shields. Then you have the set combos which allows them to have this high resis and damage.

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Arrow312 wrote: »

Xarc wrote: »

Cuwen wrote: »

Why is the response to always nerf heals? I'm a healer and have been for the past 6+ years. We have been nerfed into oblivion. We honestly can barely do anything. Rush of agony right now is the biggest problem. That has to be nerfed. Also, one-hit deaths with over 30k damage is ridiculous. There are supposed to be big groups in Cyrodiil. It's supposed to be an army scenario. Battlegrounds is more for small player scenarios. I would like to see a set, though, that causes groups of the opposite faction to be pushed apart and disbanded. Kind of like the opposite of rush of agony.

it is possible to nerf heals only for groups, for example:
- if you are in a group, the healing and shields given to other members of the group are reduced by 2% per additional number of people starting from 2.
or:
- add an incantation delay on aoe healing
- etc

Should be. I think RC works the same way.

But you have to think about it that this will also hit the zerg more then the BGs. So i personally dont think that this will be change anything.

I knew we had all around 7-9k weapon / spelldamage some of our cro bomber was over 10k. So imo there are several aspects the whole sets that buff the BG. They need to cap shields and heals on a normal amount. How could it be that you can stack several rapid regens and vigor. As zerg you will never have this damage the ticks of this skills will outheal the most of the damage they get.

I don't think the heals are the issue TBH. The constant HOT's are less of an issue than the timed burst heals that allow ball groups to survive ulti-drops and damage barrages, but that is skilled healer play, not the result of HOT Stacking.

IMO, the problem isn't the HOT stacking as much as it is tanky players ALSO being able to do damage. You can build your character to have 35k+ resistances and still reach grotesque levels of weapon/spell damage and penetration - meaning even though you've effectively built as a tank, you can deal damage as good or better than players who went pure glass-cannon. That shouldn't be a thing. They need to go back and revisit the combat system and make it so that damage scales negatively with armor and health so that there is actually tradeoffs between dealing damage and being survivable. If they did this, then surviviablity in a ball group would necessarily go down because the damage players would have to focus purely on damage and lower their survivability.

When we played as BG and had all off heals up we had min 10k every 2 sec. with the burstheals we was at 100 % again i think we was 2 full heals. But this was around 2020-2022 now you much more possibilities to build around and uses other sets.

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

You guys honestly over exaggerate the "oppressiveness" of ballgroups. You do realize that if it wasn't for ballgroups, Cyrodil would be nothing but zerg or be zerged right? Meaning that the only thing that would really dictate outcomes is numbers. At that point, you might as well just log on, see which alliance has a population advantage, and make your decision whether or not to play based only on that metric. That isn't healthy for the game either.

Ballgroups can be killed and are often killed. I play in one, and we get killed. I see others play in ball groups and I've watched them get killed. Across all alliances. Red, yellow, Blue. They all get killed. Playing as a ballgroup doesn't make you unkillable, it just makes it harder for players to kill you (so long as you are playing as a unit), and it gives you better ability to kill other players. But you are not unstoppable.

It's against my own personal interest to tell you exactly what kills us the most or how we die the most, and how to attack the ball group, but that part of the game I think is more L2P than anything, but that is where PVP skill and experience comes into play.

No, we aren't exaggerating the oppressiveness of ball groups. You are attempting to defend your position as a participant in the oppression and exploitation of heal and shield stacking system ZOS refuses to try and balance.

Stx wrote: »

DarthKitana wrote: »

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

First you need to understand why there are ballgroups to begin with. In my alliance, where you are routinely outnumbered by at least a bar every night (and where reds and yellows refuse to actually engage in serious combat against the other), Ball grouping is really the only way to combat overwhelming numbers. If it were not for ball groups, 30 man + groups would rule Cyrodil all day long. They outnumber you, they can outseige you. And without ballgroups, the ONLY thing that would dictate outcomes is who has the numbers advantage. Is that really what players want? If it is and they get their way, people will just log on, look at the population bar to see if its favorable, and either switch to the color that has the most players, or they won't play at all.

So understand this: ballgroups aren't a "problem." They're a response to a problem, which is zerging. And I see no issue with it. Its basically highly coordinated PVP very similar to high end PVE. And just like in PVE, there are low tier players, mid tier players, and high tier players - and you need to be a high tier player in addition to build for maximum group synergy in order to actually be a serious threat as a ballgroup.

So no, I don't believe that any nerfs are necessary here. And having played in one, I know exactly how to counter them, but I don't want to share "TOP TEN THINGS THAT IRK BALLGROUP PLAYERS" because then I'll see that a lot more on the battlefield, which I don't really want to do.

I know the perception is that ballgroups have no counter, but that is simply not true. If you watch big ballgroup fights and you start taking notice of what factors cause one group to fail vs the other, or if you see huge battles in which ballgroups are participants, you can see what things will bog down the group, you can figure it out. It's actually really not that difficult. But it requires players to be more than thoughtless potatoes charging into a situation that they have no plan of attack and no coordination with their other teammates who are present on the battlefield.

what we really want is zero ball groups , actually play the game and stop relying on pocket heals. Like thats the whole point of large scale pvp . Stop defending ball /zerg groups .

“Actually play the game” LOL. So playing the game = be bad? The point of large scale PvP is to.. not heal each other??? What am I reading? Large scale PvP is LITERALLY about zerging / organized groups.

Yes Zerg and Organized groups are fine.

“Ballgroups” are ruining PvP. For players that don’t understand the difference between an organized group and a “ballgroup” have simply not PvP’d enough; are a leader of a ball group themselves.

Ball groups aren’t fun.
People only run bal groups because it’s an easy way to dominate the server.
Nerf ball groups, nerf domination—->more fun and challenge for everyone on the server.
It’s a win, win