Cyrodiil Healing Nerf!!

CameraBeardThePirate · January 14

The problem is you literally can't test a change like this on PTS. PTS testing of something this big for Cyrodiil needs to be tested on the live server because you're never going to see ball groups fighting zergs on PTS.

ZOS_GinaBruno · January 14

Hi all, thanks for the continued feedback provided in this thread. We recognize that many of you would still like to see this issue addressed – we do too! – and reverting this change doesn’t mean we are shelving it. Again, this first try was exactly that – it was a first try and just didn’t land. This is all part of development being a bit more fluid moving forward and allowing us the space to iterate and try different things.

We do still plan to revert this change which you’ll see in next week’s PTS patch, but in the spirit of iteration and talking through options, here are a couple options (it would need to be one or the other) we may be able to explore for Update 49:

We could reduce the 50% modifier to a lower value, such as 33%
We could increase the number of HoTs it takes to trigger the modifier, maybe to 5

There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread, but realistically, many require time-consuming code changes and bandwidth is currently very tight with everything else the team is working on. Also keep in mind any options we lay out for Update 49 don’t and won’t prevent us from considering a longer-term option later. We are definitely open to discussing a short-term solution, though, and are interested to hear what you think of the two options presented above.

gariondavey · January 14

@ZOS_GinaBruno can you instead just not let the same hots and shields stack? Please! That is simple and much better.

The_Meathead · January 14

Love the interaction and intent, Gina! thank you VERY much for that.

The second option seems much better to me if still flawed, if I'm forced to choose from only the two, but is limiting HoTs and Shields to a single one of each truly off the table?

Teeba_Shei · January 14

These are still terrible solutions. If the goal is to nerf hot healing then the healing debuff should only be targeting hots or you could limit the total number of sticky hots. Reducing all healing just because you reach some arbitrary threshold of hots feels bad.

This will disproportionately impacts specific builds and classes where the class naturally apply many small hots. This also encourages awkward or degenerate behavior that pushes players toward gaming the system rather than playing intuitively. It also forces players to track all the hots active which increases complexity and opacity. Most players won’t be able to easily tell how many hots are active or when the penalty kicks in. Trying to play around this feels impossible.

Players may respond by:

- Avoiding certain abilities to stay below the hot threshold
- Letting hots fall off intentionally
- Favoring burst heals even when thematically or mechanically inappropriate
- Intentionally trolling teammates

A better solution would be to limit the total number of sticky hots to 6-8 or something along those lines. The hot problem only kicks in when you start to reach 10-14 hots. This solution would have the added benefit of reducing the number of calculations on the server.

L_Nici · January 14

But it was a good change. For anyone not in a ballgroup it was a dream come true, a miracle. 5 HoTs is to much already, 3 was good, it wouldn't affect solo players much but demolish the insane healing power of ballgroups. People act like they would get no healing at all after 3 HoTs, which is not the case, its just 50% so now you just need 2 HoTs instead of one for the same healing...if you have to change it, and that are our options then take the 5 HoTs instead, do not lower the punishment for healstacking.

Yet please consider alternatives like Hardcapping the number of HoTs and Shields on players too.

Radiate77 · January 14

Option 2 shouldn’t impact small scale groups of around 3 people, and is something that I would be willing to try. 3 HoTs was just too dangerous.

3 HoTs would have absolutely effected a solo player depending on your build, as most solo players that have a clue what they’re doing build into HoTs to stay alive under pressure, while shared sticky HoTs are much less common in smaller groups.

All that said, having Heals refresh same-name morphs would be the least invasive option that could include the entire game, not just Battle Spirit. I’ve never heard of a Trial including more than 2 healers, and a little coordination with the new free respec system would keep them from overlapping skills.

React · January 14

Thanks for this update. It is good to hear that in the future the team would consider a better solution than the one offered here. I really do think the "same morph hots don't stack" option that has been proposed over and over is the best possible outcome, and hope we get some confirmation as to whether that will be possible or not. It would also be great to have this same logic applied to damage shields, which are an equally problematic pain point compared to the HOTs. Damage shields have less discussion around them because they've been power crept more recently as a result of scribing and subclassing, but they ARE a problem.

Out of the two proposals in your comment, the number of hots being increased makes the most sense. There are still issues with this - such as being able to circumvent the limit by using things such as powersurge and cauterize, which are sticky hots for the caster and not their groupmates. But I would certainly prefer the team at least try this and see how it impacts the live environment.

I'm not sure the 33% value would have any impact on these larger groups. They're already stacking healing so far in excess of the damage they're taking.

Vulkunne · January 14

17 Pages whoa!!!

It's good to see so many interested in this topic. Pleassse don't make these cHaNgEs, it's gonna be really badddd for our groups... organized groups with comms right? mhmm...

Yep. Everyone's here contributing now, and I think that's great. It was also good to see this many replies and this much interest shown at various points in time over the last several years when a precious few of us complained about ball groups including the heal stacking exploit(s). Which I was one of the original ones who helped really get that conversation started and moving with purpose... albeit against about as much criticism.

Good to see forums participants showed this much interest in those conversations as well. Because, like we had said, if memory serves correctly, it was a complicated issue that needed to be addressed in a fair, professional and reasonable way. But no one wanted to hear that, then. In fact, I scarcely recall any suggestions offered to fix the problem(s). No one else really chimed in (and certainly not to this extent when they did) and so now, these issues are going to have to get the hard fix because the healing issues, among other things have gotten so out of hand, something meaningful has to be done.

ZOS, After this I'll say no more on the subject. However, when making these types of adjustments to correct the exploitive nature of group play in Cyrodiil (or just PvP in general), I ask you to please remember the fact that these ball groups, a group consisting of maybe I dunno we'll say 7 to 15 people could wipe entire factions for hours without suffering virtually any casualties whatsoever. I don't know the fix is, I know you're going to be up against alot of resistance but please, think of us. Think all of us who had our time wasted and were denied or otherwise interrupted PvPing because of these jokers.

They exploited group mechanics to their hearts content, they set themselves up above the rest of us, they offered showed no kindness or friendliness to both others in their same faction OR to the ones they fought against. They cared for neither fairness nor for what was right. They just wanted everything their way. These are the kinds of people they are, them on top, and chat logs with potentially hundreds of kills over the life of that group... walls maxed out with siege, including the courtyard at times, hitting them multiple times with Cold Fire, Lancers, Cats, other Ballistas, rocks, harsh language, ill tidings, whammies, everything else you could possibly think of and no damage dealt. Not even slowing down a little bit.

You don't have to like me or agree with me, that's fine. However, when fixing these exploits, please remember to stop and consider of how they have done everyone else ... for years and the fact that everyone else in PvP is so completely forcibly capitulated, disenfranchised and made utterly miserable by their presence in PvP.

The_Meathead · January 14

I feel like Self-Healing should never be reduced, no matter what someone else puts upon you.

It seems ludicrous to me that as a solo player, I could put two or three HoTs of my own on my character, receive an additional HoT or two from some well-meaning ally, and suddenly POOF, my *own* healing is cut in half? That doesn't seem right, and it's a strange way to focus what's actually problematic - the stacking of 10+ Vigors of the same kind and other BiS abilities by 12 man groups.

Five HoTs being the breaking point is less problematic than three, and might offer a little relief from Ball Groups before they handily adjust a day later with a major lean on Shields and careful avoidance of over-HoTing, but it's still really missing the obvious and solid solution: Clip HoTs and Shields to one of each kind, and then put a healing reduction on groups over certain size if it's still not enough.

From there, we should then go on and evaluate other problematic things like RoA, Warden Charm, and Snow Treaders one by one after the HoT/Shield reduction, and trim whatever needs it most, but start there. Cut HoTs and Shields down to one of each kind, and don't overthink a solution into something that will impact non-BGers potentially every bit as much or (invariably) more than the BGers.

EDIT: Do NOT ignore Shields. Reducing HoTs without also limiting Shields will lead to an obvious shift in usage but not net power reduction for BGs, and may even favor them more than before.

aetherix8 · January 14

Thank you for this revert, and for this improved communication and reactivity, Gina and team. I've been out of Cyro for some time now so I don't know whether this solution was good or bad, but it didn't sound too great to me personally (it's just an excessively uncontrollable debuff for an ungrouped player to be happy about).

I've read about 12 pages of this thread, and I have the impression that the devs are still missing the mark. We can read in the post about "fully chang[ing] healing capabilities", but is that really necessary? When I think about all the posts I've read mentioning healing in PvP there's usually another term there: stacking. If I understand correctly, what players are complaining about is how the stacking mechanic works in general, be it dots, hots or shields (too much stacking is possible rn).

Is limiting stacking equal to fully changing abilities? Is it being explored as an option to test at some point?

CameraBeardThePirate · January 14

This is great to hear Gina. As React said, the better option would certainly be option B, increasing the # of HoTs to 5. That would make this cap pretty difficult to hit for solo/small scale players for any more than a brief moment (unless everyone in the 4-5 man is running Echoing), but would heavily target the larger groups.

I'm glad to see that a stop-gap solution is on the table while the team explores future changes to this! As others have said, Shields and HoTs need to be the sole target of any nerfs, as direct heals simply are not an issue in Cyrodiil.

Yudo · January 14

Not really the right direction I am afraid, though appreciate communicating the available wiggle room.
Option two would be nothing more than a test imo, only to distract. The nature of option 1 is destructive, and so the modifier does not matter here.

Rather let you iterate one more time to find a better solution.
There are only really that many cross heals: Vigor + radiant healing. With scribing I guess Conti and burst provides 2 more.
We are literally talking about 2(4) problematic skills that are able to stack. This is the root cause.

In fact you already, in the current solution, filter for "sticky" you can just add a white list check for these few skills which allows you to test these type of solutions with minimal change and gather targeted feedback, while working on systemic filters or ID based solutions. I ofc don't want to presume too much but just trying to give feedback.

DestroyerPewnack · January 14

I'm getting PTSD from the early Dark Convergence days... They introduce things to counter ballgroups, but, because they don't know how their own game works, the ballgroups end up taking full advantage of those things, and we end up suffering for months, before the devs realize they did something wrong.
Here we go again.

CameraBeardThePirate · January 14

Important to note that shields are already limited to one of a kind, and furthermore, the limit applies to the base skill, meaning that even 2 different morphs of the same shield cannot stack.

Shielding will need a bigger change to nerf it. Large groups rely on 4 primary shields; Contingency, Chakrams, Barrier, and Arcanist's Bubble ultimate. There are other shields that are also large offenders, such as Soul Burst and Wield Soul, but these shields are slightly less efficient and thus not as commonly used.

The best route to nerfing shields is to either 1) reduce each subsequently stacked shield by a percentage, so that each shield you stack is weaker than the last, or 2) cap the total shielding amount of a player to a % of their health, rather than having a cap for each individual shield (as it doesn’t matter that an individual shield caps at 60% of a target's health when 3 can be combined to double or triple someone's healthbar).

For option 2 I could see Ultimate sourced shields being exempt, but given that Barrier is one of the largest offenders in Ball Groups, something needs to give.

MeridiaFavorsMe · January 14

These healing changes feel stupid. You seem to be trying to target the most optimized 12 mans, but all the proposed changes will be disproportionality hitting people that are playing small scale groups.

These healing changes feel fundamentally misdirected. The stated goal appears to be curbing highly optimized 12-man groups, but both options you’ve outlined disproportionately punish small-scale and outnumbered play instead.

A flat hot-based healing penalty barely impacts large groups, because their survivability comes from stacking mitigation, hots, shields, and burst healing—not simply raw hot uptime. Meanwhile, small groups and solo players rely on hots to survive being outnumbered, since they don’t have the luxury of constant cross-heals, shields, or coordinated ultimates, huge numbers of targets to spread out the damage.

Reducing the modifier to 33% doesn’t solve this problem; it just makes the penalty less extreme while still applying it to the wrong players. Increasing the hot threshold to 5 similarly misses the point—small-scale builds frequently hit that number just to stay functional under pressure, while ball groups will still comfortably operate above it.

In practice, these changes lower the skill ceiling for coordinated groups while lowering the survivability floor for everyone else. That pushes Cyrodiil further toward burst-or-be-bursted gameplay, which historically leads to less counterplay, less build diversity, and less reason to engage when outnumbered.

If iteration is the goal, then the current hot-count modifier isn’t a good foundation to iterate on. It doesn’t meaningfully target the behaviors causing performance or balance issues, and instead erodes one of the few tools small-scale PvP still has to function in Cyrodiil.

Poss · January 14

Just reduce the amount of times vigor, regen and shields can stack. Simple. There is no need for echoing vigor to stack a million times and there’s no need for overall healing, whether you’re solo or in a group, to be affected depending on a variable outside of your control

Teeba_Shei · January 14

This is basically why Vengeance sucks as a campaign. Without good cross-healing and AoE, you can’t fight outnumbered. The bigger group always wins, and it’s super boring.

This seems to be what the iterative process is pushing toward. The real problem is that people are never prepared to fight ball groups, while ball groups are always prepared to fight anything. With the latest changes allowing respecs anywhere, this may change, but it isn’t even being given a chance to see if it’s going to work.

There are so many counters to ball groups, but you can never swap to them because you are always stuck in combat.

Yudo · January 14

Exactly this.
Balls would be forced to "bring" more healing to their comp if cross healing was limited. Literally only a few skills like vigor, radiant, conti or burst. Puts a hard on how much it can scale, forces more healing into comps to survive, without affecting those below the cap. Ball groups will find a way around anyway, but this is a healthier step forward.

CameraBeardThePirate · January 14

Healing isn't the reason you can't fight outnumbered in Vengeance; the reason you can't fight outnumbered in Vengeance is because of AoE damage caps.

If Vengeance was exactly the same as it is now, but you removed the target cap for all AoE damage abilities, you'd instantly have way more ability to bomb large groups. AoE Damage caps prevent you from coordinating an ult dump with your group, because instead of everyone damaging the same group of enemies, the game decides that you all damage different enemies and no one dies.

Teeba_Shei · January 14

Yeah limiting the total number of sticky hots is a better solution than some arbitrary number of sticky hots before all healing gets reduced. Not only does the proposed solution suck, as I explained before(see previous post), but it also creates more server load.

All of these solutions are extremely heavy-handed. This isn’t really such a big problem that it even needs to be addressed, but if you feel compelled to do something, you should be barely placing your thumb on the scale rather than jumping straight to an extreme "solution".

Radiate77 · January 14

If we end up going with the 5, there needs to be something visual that is easy to indicate when you’re at that threshold.

Maybe a health bar overlay?

My biggest concern is not knowing when this is active or not, and feeling like I’m hit by this every time a player is running Jarall.

Teeba_Shei · January 14

I literally wrote about aoe in the post.

Without good cross-healing and AoE, you can’t fight outnumbered.

WaywardArgonian · January 14

Hello.

It's good that the team is actively looking into new ways of addressing the problem. That being said, I am still of the opinion that the proposed options are less severe variations of an ultimately problematic approach, and I think there are relatively low-effort alternatives that you could consider instead. I'll try to explain everything in full, so excuse the length of my response.

First the number: 33% is still significant. For comparison: stacking Minor Defile (6%) with Major Defile* (12%) gets you to an 18% reduction in healing received. Major Defile by itself is already a noticeable stat you do not want to have on you in normal gameplay.

This brings me back to the problem with this entire approach. I presume that the goal of this effect is to curb the skewed effects of HoT stacking on group survivability. This, by itself, is a good and necessary change, and you would essentially reach this goal with the current proposal. However, in addition to hitting ballgroups, it would also have effects on all other forms of PVP.

You are giving players the option to give a debuff almost twice the intensity of Major Defile to anyone, whether they are in a ballgroup, a small group, a zerg, or in no group at all. You could ruin a solo player's day by just showing up and putting some HoTs on them. The issue gets worse when you realize that this could happen both unintentionally (a lot of PVP'ers don't keep up, and run very outdated builds) and intentionally - and trust me, people *will* use this to grief others.

In summary, the core issue for me is hitting healing abilities across the board. I've been on both sides: I have healed ballgroups, and I have tried healing people against ballgroups. That latter job would also have been impossible under the proposed system, and since ballgroups are much quicker at adapting to the meta, there is a good chance that casual/random groups would eventually suffer more. Increasing the number of HoTs to 5 would dampen the effects I've described above somewhat, but not remove them.

So, what do I think is the best solution for now? As I understand it, complex changes - such as ones that rely on scaling by group size - are not feasible for the dev team in the short term. Knowing that, perhaps they could target overperforming HoT abilities - primarily Echoing Vigor - and nerf them specifically. Since Radiating Regen got nerfed some years ago, most ballgroups already consider it less essential and some of them don't even run it anymore. Even something drastic like cutting Echoing Vigor's healing value in half would be justifiable. Other options would be to reduce the number of people it targets from 6 to 3 (like during Vengeance), or reduce its maximum duration from 16 to 10 or even 8 in order to make it more resource-heavy. PVP healers typically do not have a big stamina pool, so such options would already have a significant effect in my view.

From there, you could start to target other specific abilities, such as scribing shields. This per-ability approach would perhaps not create an immediate fix for the HoT and shield stacking issue, but I truly do think that the current proposals would create an 'out of the frying pan, into the fire' effect that'd give the devs a lot of extra work anyway. Dismantling the issue with HoTs and shields methodically will lead to better results, and it'll probably prevent the community managers from getting flooded with new complaints about every PVP healing scenario in the game.

*I realize that the Defile effects also target Health Recovery, but since that stat is pretty irrelevant in today's meta, I don't think that alone makes the 33% proposal proportionate.

Lord_Hev · January 14

Is it possible we could get an explanation why HoTs are able to act as a trigger for this calculation, but burst heals cannot? Or the reason why outside sourced sticky hots the individual user has no control or agency over can't be identified separately from the individual user's own individually sourced healing on themselves?

MincMincMinc · January 14

You could increase the mandatory value to 5 or 6 or 10 or 20. However this just raises the bar to who you want targeted. WHO are you targetting with this change?

Solo players might have builds with 3-4 hots on them
Duo players might get 6-8
4-6 man may get 15
Ballgroup you will have 12 people running 2-3 aoe hots each making everyone in your group have 24-36 hots each doing 1k per tick.........Thats 24-36khp per tick. THIS IS THE MAIN ISSUE, where these groups can stack the same BIS hots on all their players resulting in them getting guaranteed NONCRIT heals equivalent to their entire healthbar each tick. Then factor in crit heals doubling this value and no wonder there is an issue that is out of control.

Not to mention there are workarounds like solo players can run pale order which avoids all group interactions(crazy design for an mmo item IMO, why cant i play with friends and have a lifesteal build) Ballgroups will just swap to spamming shields and ground hots that dont trigger the heal cut.

We cant have the value of the condition be under 10 hots atleast, otherwise it is possible for someone to go and troll other players on their team and make them get the healcut so they die.

We also have to realize BGs matches have 8 people on a team, are you supposed to hope that your allies even know about the rule? Are BG matches just going to be determined by which team doesnt have a healer now?

This is why ESO pvp really needs dots/hots/proc effects to not stack. Sadly I understand gamedev wise that this requires coding an entire different line of skills for pvp that operate this way. Something like this likely doubles your workload which is why it isnt really plausible. However before you go and recode and rebalance all of the skills in the game this is a MAJOR decision that must be talked about with the team.

The_Meathead · January 14

Thank you for the correction, Camera.

Very well worded, and yes- absolutely in agreement.

ArctosCethlenn · January 14

Your best bet is a cap on each of the problematic hots (echo and radiating, potentially funnel health and the scribing secondary script hots). Reduced healing from having too many hots is completely nonsensical and unintuitive because it still puts supports in a position where getting involved weakens your own team.

Consolidating these hots into a new major buff and minor buff, scaling off of the buffed person's stats, would probably further reduce server load since then only one character's stats would matter in the formula, though I get that that would take a code rework.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee · January 14

Hi Gina, thank you again for staying in the thread and for being open about iterating.

I don’t really want to focus on the two tuning options yet, because changing the number or the percentage does not solve the core issue.

What needs to go, completely, is the potential for griefing and sabotage caused by out of group healing interacting with this system. If players outside your group can apply sticky HoTs that count toward the trigger, or can override, refresh, or otherwise interfere with your group’s HoTs, then the mechanic becomes something people can weaponize. Even at a lower value, that is still a serious problem, because it gives other players a way to intentionally push someone into a healing taken penalty at the worst possible time.

So before discussing 33% vs 50%, or 3 vs 5 HoTs, the priority has to be making this strictly group scoped, both for counting toward the trigger and for any replacement or refreshing behavior. If that safeguard is not in place, no amount of tuning makes it safe to ship.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · January 14

@ZOS_GinaBruno

I think most people here (whether for or against changes in this area) agree that this isn't really the right way to go, however I think players would also be somewhat happy to see some change in this area tried as long as it wasn't a permanent thing and the team still worked on it in the next / subsequent patches. The playerbase is somewhat weary of such changes because in the past they have been all or nothing, and then never updated / communicated on further to reflect the new pvp environment.

It will take some trust on both sides to get used to a new way of working with you guys to find the right solutions.

If it is possible I would recommend trying the following: 6-8 HoTs, same modifier whilst working on better solutions such as:
1) changing it so that self-healing is unaffected. i.e. if people place too many HoTs onto you the healing you get from external sources is reduced but your own self-healing is unaffected (this prevents the issue for solo/smallscale as most players are self-healing in those scenarios and removing the healing from external sources when there's too many HoTs is less of an issue.

2) Looking at adjusting the stacking of multiple HoTs (personally I disagree with this on a fundamental level as its a core mechanic of being in a group and many sets rely on HoTs for their proc mechanics but maybe there's some ideas you and others have).

3) Adjusting the strength of Shields via similar rules & looking at the power of shields in general - especially scribed shields.

4) Adjusting the power of group sets, especially those sourced from Trials (for example buffing recovery convergence means that recovery in groups doesn't matter any more).