MincMincMinc wrote: »

There is also the other angle ive seen everyone here ignoring

WHY ARE PEOPLE RUNNING SO MANY HOTS

Hots and health recovery act as HP bar rebound dampers. The more you have the quicker you respond to incoming events back up to your ideal max hp.

The reason you would need more stability is if too many wild swings are happening to your healthbar.....This would be attributed to the current state of the game.

1. Crit resist does not have alot of sources, thus to equalize out the crit damage we would need to bump up the only few sources we have like impen. On the other hand the number of crit damage sources in a build has probably more than doubled since zos gutted impen. This dynamic leaves us guessing whether hits are actually going to hurt or not. Some players ults tickle, while other players who know to abuse crit damage will do 10-15k hits per burst skill.
2. Access to timed/burst skills that are beyond bloated. Look at the most popular subclassing and we see things like sub assault and merciless bow at the same time. We should be wondering why we have bloated basic skills to be so strong they are better than most ultimates.
3. Health recovery might aswell be mentioned since it nolonger exists in pvp and would normally help stabilize builds, but the 50% cut made it pointless to ever slot.

I honestly dont know how you go about solving the issue of allowing multiple timed/burst skills. Considering these skills can stack with other skills, their standard probably shouldnt be equivalent damage to ultimates first of all. If I was to redo classes I would probably lock the 5th skills behind the pure class requirement. Or only nightblades can access the nightblade 5th skill which would be merciless. So we could move defining skills like sub assault to the last spot. No more streak+sub+merci builds

ceruulean wrote: »

AD42 wrote: »

Do you prefer to be the best among the worst?

Your question makes no sense. The longer a game is live, the more skilled the playerbase becomes. The paper acknowledges this trend. ESO is 12 years old; the players who remain PvPing should be extremely skilled by this logic. The worst players are already gone, or leave quickly.

Anyway, the writing is on the wall. ZOS is going to give trade bars and event goodies to Vengeance mode Cyrodiil only. They are unwilling to cap HOT stacking because the skills in Blackreach/Greyhost are connected to PvE where players are used to HOT stacks. If ZOS tries to cap Echoing Vigor to 4 players, the 12 man vOC HM prog groups where 8 DDs stack vigor are going to complain.

ceruulean wrote: »

AD42 wrote: »

Listening to people who play poorly is a terrible idea. Why listen to players who can only defeat even weaker players with superior numbers? This will lead to a worse gaming experience.

"With deprioritized skill, returning player rate was down significantly for 90% of players. The 10% of highest skilled players came back in increased numbers [during the experiment], but in aggregate, we see meaningfully fewer players coming back to the game.... This is a concern for all players, including the top 10%, as if this pattern is allowed to continue, players will exit the game in increased numbers [if skill is deprioritized in matchmaking after the experiment ends, it will cause a negative feedback loop]. Eventually a top 10% player will become a top 20% player, and eventually a top 30% player, until only the very best players remain playing the game. Those original top players will become increasingly likely to not return to the game. Ultimately, this will result in a worse experience for all players, as there will be fewer and fewer players available to play with. "

From "Matchmaking Series: The Role of Skill in Matchmaking" by Activision Publishing, Inc.
https://research.activision.com/publications/2024/07/Call-of-Duty-Matchmaking-Intel-02

The publishers of Call of Duty, a series that makes much more profit than ESO, has determined that making the top 10% happier is not a good idea, because it makes the 90% unlikely to return.

People speak with their feet.

React wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone,

First, thanks to everyone for providing so much feedback in this thread, and especially for those that were able to hop on the PTS this week to try out this change in real time. We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear – both from this thread and other sources – and we’d like to let you know we are planning to revert the Heal over Time on Battlespirit in next week’s PTS patch.

For additional context, the initial reasoning behind this change was to help with a common complaint we’ve seen over the years that healing feels too strong, most notably with stacked HoTs. Transparently, we simply don’t have the time or bandwidth to fully change healing capabilities without significantly affecting future class reworks, which is why we landed with this option, but it clearly missed the mark.

We’ll explore other options to address concerns around healing and damage shields in PvP to be released in a future update, and we’ll share some ideas prior to it hitting the PTS so you can be more involved in the process. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts here, and again, you can expect the revert to occur in next week’s PTS patch.

Super disappointing to see the team cave to complaining coming primarily from the people that benefit from HOT stacking being so absurdly overpowered, without having a backup solution in mind. I mean there is one offender in particular who has posted 65+ comments in this thread alone...

This issue has gone unaddressed for years now. You have to start somewhere with adjustments. This solution may not have been ideal for a number of reasons, some of which I even agree with - but letting the issue continue to go unaddressed is arguably worse than just testing this out and seeing how things change.

Really hope we get some clear paths forward laid out to target this issue in the very near future. You cannot continue to allow these balance issues to remain if you want the game to make a comeback in 2026.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

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:

1. We could reduce the 50% modifier to a lower value, such as 33%
2. 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.

TheLoreMaster420 wrote: »

Some simple math for people who haven't yet. This is for mid-large sized groups that actively siege on the front lines as well as those who go off on their own to try and take keeps.

Lets imagine you have a 6 man group of players. Lets say one of them has a resto and the others are all running echoing vigor. If we have all 6 running echoing vigor and the healer also running radiating this is 7 hots for a total of around 9k HPS in open world, for a 6 man group that is pretty good, but lets see how it actually looks in practice.

Remember healing reduction is multiplicative not additive. Lets completely ignore Jerall (this would make it even worse)

The 9k HPS immediately becomes 4,050 because of the 55% reduction from battle spirit.
The 4,050 becomes 3,807 with 6% reduction from minor defile
3,807 becomes 3,350 with the 12% reduction from major defile.
3,350 becomes 1,675 with one flaming oil on you, 837 with 2 flaming oils on you, and 419 with 3 flaming oils on you. (For some reason this debuff stacks and it is MASSIVE, you can also be affected by more but I will keep the example to 2 for now)
837 is your effective HPS, this is without the proposed change.
The first iteration of the change would bring this to 419 if it were 50% or with the second iteration it would be 561 with a 33% reduction.

A 561 HPS is laughable in real scenarios and I would encounter this often as a 6 man group. As a 12 man you have more healing but you are often met with huge amounts of pug pressure and the oil debuff could bring the total number of HPS to less than what you'd even get with 6 in group if the opposing faction met you with pressure.

I say this to ask, what would this mean for those scenarios where healing is already hard under siege pressure, without even meeting pressure from people actively trying to bomb you, snipe/forcepulse you, negate you? Will oils finally be addressed as well, bringing another necessary action from the dev team, or will this be ignored just for the sake of appeasing the smaller groups of people who are upset that a larger group, who should logically beat them, beats them?

Are we really willing to change cyro just for the sake of those players who will be given the option to go to vengeance once it becomes permanent anyway? Most people dislike vengeance as was evident by the test and its lack of population once it was seen side by side with GH, some people wanted it removed entirely. I have advocated for keeping it open alongside GH and just let people play where they want, but why do we need to ruin the existing PvP server for the sake of people who want to be able to compete as a solo or duo against a group of 12?

Wolfshade wrote: »

Dmg and healing is in Cyro actually and already reduced by 50%.

How they wrote, they simply can`t, they can`t do other solutions cause all the knowlege about that is gone. So pls, dont expect any serious game development anymore beside some animations here, some weired stuff there. Reducing it again, that will definetively affect the main Battleareas, Gates, Flags, short Objectives. So thats what is Ava, thats what is Cyro and thats what it makes it obsolet.

Poor design by poor players and even more poor as Pvp-Designer in BG`s.

Artisian0001 wrote: »

That in mind, with all the other issues, this change is just not thought out enough and aims to fix some problem that doesn't really exist aside from a vocal minority of people who will still just complain about the next thing once this is changed.

Radiate77 wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

That in mind, with all the other issues, this change is just not thought out enough and aims to fix some problem that doesn't really exist aside from a vocal minority of people who will still just complain about the next thing once this is changed.

Do you actually believe this? Be honest.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

MeridiaFavorsMe wrote: »

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.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

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:

1. We could reduce the 50% modifier to a lower value, such as 33%
2. 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.

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.

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.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

MeridiaFavorsMe wrote: »

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.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

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:

1. We could reduce the 50% modifier to a lower value, such as 33%
2. 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.

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.

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.

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.

I literally wrote about aoe in the post.

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

Lagzee wrote: »

TheLoreMaster420 wrote: »

Some simple math for people who haven't yet. This is for mid-large sized groups that actively siege on the front lines as well as those who go off on their own to try and take keeps.

Lets imagine you have a 6 man group of players. Lets say one of them has a resto and the others are all running echoing vigor. If we have all 6 running echoing vigor and the healer also running radiating this is 7 hots for a total of around 9k HPS in open world, for a 6 man group that is pretty good, but lets see how it actually looks in practice.

Remember healing reduction is multiplicative not additive. Lets completely ignore Jerall (this would make it even worse)

The 9k HPS immediately becomes 4,050 because of the 55% reduction from battle spirit.
The 4,050 becomes 3,807 with 6% reduction from minor defile
3,807 becomes 3,350 with the 12% reduction from major defile.
3,350 becomes 1,675 with one flaming oil on you, 837 with 2 flaming oils on you, and 419 with 3 flaming oils on you. (For some reason this debuff stacks and it is MASSIVE, you can also be affected by more but I will keep the example to 2 for now)
837 is your effective HPS, this is without the proposed change.
The first iteration of the change would bring this to 419 if it were 50% or with the second iteration it would be 561 with a 33% reduction.

A 561 HPS is laughable in real scenarios and I would encounter this often as a 6 man group. As a 12 man you have more healing but you are often met with huge amounts of pug pressure and the oil debuff could bring the total number of HPS to less than what you'd even get with 6 in group if the opposing faction met you with pressure.

I say this to ask, what would this mean for those scenarios where healing is already hard under siege pressure, without even meeting pressure from people actively trying to bomb you, snipe/forcepulse you, negate you? Will oils finally be addressed as well, bringing another necessary action from the dev team, or will this be ignored just for the sake of appeasing the smaller groups of people who are upset that a larger group, who should logically beat them, beats them?

Are we really willing to change cyro just for the sake of those players who will be given the option to go to vengeance once it becomes permanent anyway? Most people dislike vengeance as was evident by the test and its lack of population once it was seen side by side with GH, some people wanted it removed entirely. I have advocated for keeping it open alongside GH and just let people play where they want, but why do we need to ruin the existing PvP server for the sake of people who want to be able to compete as a solo or duo against a group of 12?

Most people dont like vengeance. But even if you had it your way, then what? You play in a dead GH? Is that the idea? Telling people to go to vengeance because they want heal stacking balanced is a wild solution. I honestly cant imagine how like 5 of you still deny that its a problem. Everyone knows it, its obvious to anyone that plays. Ball groups, heal stacking, and shield stacking, have been an issue for the last couple of years, but especially since subclassing and scribing. Its undeniable.

And yes this is not the ideal change. Ideally they just change heal stacking so 12 people cant stack 12 vigors, for example. Maybe they reduce it to 3 per skill, but ideally imo its just one. There is way too much survivability in this game, and heal stacking like it is now is simply overkill. But i still think they should try to test things, and if its bad remove it. Its not the end of the world, as long as they are willing to revert it.

if i had it my way they would adjust heal/shield stacking with battle spirit but it doesnt seem like they will.

Artisian0001 wrote: »

The_Meathead wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

That in mind, with all the other issues, this change is just not thought out enough and aims to fix some problem that doesn't really exist aside from a vocal minority of people who will still just complain about the next thing once this is changed.

What problem do you think is being addressed that "doesn't exist?"

I'm genuinely curious what exactly you mean by this, because I started to respond a couple times to different assumptions on my part with more than a little indignation, but held off. I'd like you to further define just what you're saying, if you're willing.

That ballgroups are some extreme unkillable entity. I've literally had people in here tell me groups are 2v50ing or 4 people vs the entire 3 bar population of other factions and it's just fake. The best ballgroup, on the best server, doesn't even do that, acting like some other random groups do, while providing zero proof is silly. Other people were acting like ballgroups go around taking keeps, fighting to control the map, and make it a pain for pugs to get points in the campaign when in reality they usually go to a keep, take it, fight some pugs on the 3rd floor, get the keep capped while they are still at it, get exploited off the keep by someone pulling with warden gate, and then just leave the keep. They also die to siege almost every time I have watched them play. The other half of the people try to act like groups don't GvG away from pugs and they are only ever killing random people when they very often look to just fight each other. There was multiple groups on today as well that walked away from a keep to just fight each other for like half an hour and not even involve anyone else. People don't engage seriously with anything said and just make up some random things about how good ballgroups are, or the way they behave and it's just odd and impossible to even have a conversation with because they don't live in the same reality.

Artisian0001 wrote: »

The_Meathead wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

The_Meathead wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

That in mind, with all the other issues, this change is just not thought out enough and aims to fix some problem that doesn't really exist aside from a vocal minority of people who will still just complain about the next thing once this is changed.

What problem do you think is being addressed that "doesn't exist?"

I'm genuinely curious what exactly you mean by this, because I started to respond a couple times to different assumptions on my part with more than a little indignation, but held off. I'd like you to further define just what you're saying, if you're willing.

That ballgroups are some extreme unkillable entity. I've literally had people in here tell me groups are 2v50ing or 4 people vs the entire 3 bar population of other factions and it's just fake. The best ballgroup, on the best server, doesn't even do that, acting like some other random groups do, while providing zero proof is silly. Other people were acting like ballgroups go around taking keeps, fighting to control the map, and make it a pain for pugs to get points in the campaign when in reality they usually go to a keep, take it, fight some pugs on the 3rd floor, get the keep capped while they are still at it, get exploited off the keep by someone pulling with warden gate, and then just leave the keep. They also die to siege almost every time I have watched them play. The other half of the people try to act like groups don't GvG away from pugs and they are only ever killing random people when they very often look to just fight each other. There was multiple groups on today as well that walked away from a keep to just fight each other for like half an hour and not even involve anyone else. People don't engage seriously with anything said and just make up some random things about how good ballgroups are, or the way they behave and it's just odd and impossible to even have a conversation with because they don't live in the same reality.

To be very straight forward on my side of the picture: I think you don't fully comprehend just how out of hand the power bloat has become. You're very myopic because you've invested heavily in a dynamic and done well with it, deservedly so (I mean that), and excelled within the parameters of what's been allowed. Kudos, sincerely. It takes time, scheduling, and effort.

At this point, though, even mediocre or poorly run Ballgroups are so ridiculously advantageous in terms of buffs, healing, shields, and movement that it's diminishing the larger game. A number of tremendously(!!) objective Ballgroup players in this thread alone seem willing to admit that and to bless the efforts towards reigning in how far it's gone, and honestly that's beyond impressive on their part. (Yandere, Chimpanzee, certainly come to mind.)

To be clear, I personally admire the theorycrafting, communication, and leadership that go into good Ballgrouping and make them so damn successful. I also feel that even if the rather obscene power stacking mechanics they receive currently were reduced in some format (like the one we're hopefully working towards), those same strengths would still make the best of them tremendously successful, while perhaps freeing the rest of us from the pretty off-putting scale-tipping that current stacking and buffing allow and making the mediocre ones far less of a dominant force.

So too do I sincerely believe that Ballgroups impact Server performance, because of stacking, simply from first-hand viewing of their impact. Deny it if you like, I think most veteran players are extremely aware.

I don't fault Ballgroupers for taking full advantage of how things are, as that's the player's "job." I fault ZOS for allowing it to get SO out of hand. This is ZOS admitting, defining, and focusing on a solution to what they've allowed for too long. I think you are incorrect when you say it doesn't exist.

You can read my comment history here, even though I don't think the problem exists, at the very least not anywhere near as much as people make it out to be, I still advocated for some sort of nerf, just one that made sense, as nothing proposed did. My most recent proposition was a scaling heal debuff up to 25% on groups that hit 12 people, but as someone who doesn't even play in a 12 man group I don't want to see 12 man groups be diminished because of this change. As annoying as it is for smaller groups to fight this, or solos to run into them (they often times don't even kill people they outnumber unless they are taking something) this is an MMO and you shouldn't be punished IMO for playing with friends. A 33% change to healing that would also affect a 4 man group makes no sense at all. 4 man groups are not ruining cyro, neither is a 6 man group. The best 12 man groups can be annoying but they are easily killed even by zone pugs with the right methods, the issue is people want to be able to do something about a 12 man coordinated group as someone who is uncoordinated in a 5 man group running 5 rallying crys and wretched vitality.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

Iriidius wrote: »

Crosshealing makes fighting outnumbered harder and helps the biggest group survive dmg that would otherwise kill them.

Then why would they try to nerf it? You aren't making any sense. The ball groups are constantly fighting outnumbered. Are you saying they should buff ball groups?