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Cyrodiil Healing Nerf!!

  • MincMincMinc
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    Frooke wrote: »
    Increasing the number of HoTs required to 5 seems like the best option to me (of course, this should be a temporary change and tested for a while). Solo players rarely go beyond 3 HoTs; this change would mainly impact those who play in groups, even small ones, which still feels like a fair mechanic to me.
    It would likely make any type of player, at any group size, killable, and that sounds fun. It would force players to focus on movement and survival mechanics instead of relying solely on a stack of numbers. Go on. Let’s test this for a while

    What do you do about people healing from outside of group then? You have to remove it for this to work and a lot of people are very against this.

    We always see these arguments of NO CROSSHEALING or WE WANT CROSSHEALING......ok why not just ask zos to do both. Make one heal morph go to groups and the other to allies only.

    Plenty of doors to open with new skills in the future.

    They are already trying to minimize what they do, Ginas second comment said they didn't want anything in depth at all, which IMO ruins the idea of true balance, but I think what I proposed is fine to deal with the issue of shield stacking (which is worse than HoTs and other healing) as well as keep groups from avoiding the nerf altogether. You would have to change a lot of skills, look at the list @YandereGirlfriend posted a while back. You would have to make every single HoT that can hit friendlies apply to only group members, or you make it so that healing only hits people in your own group to begin with. If they are pressed for dev resources they would just go with disabling it outside of group. I don't think they will do that but it's much easier.

    RIght the only fixes involve editing the skills and how they work. Or the overall game buff stacking rules.

    Otherwise its just a blanket character sheet debuff being on the table with some condition. I mean that doesn't leave us with alot. Seems like we cant even target specific types of skills to debuff otherwise why didnt they make it so if you had 3 sticky hots your sticky hots are reduced by 50%. They are simply able to make a call event which applies an existing stat debuff.

    There is no stat debuff way to get the outcome we want. All you can do is figure out a condition where you do a random all encompassing debuff a group of people.
    I only use insightful
  • Lord_Hev
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    I feel like group shielding should only be an ultimate and sets exclusive thing. Not sure how to really address that though without gutting a skill like the arcanist one, can't remember the name off the top of my head. But the scribe shields are an easy enough fix of just having them reduced.
    Qaevir/Qaevira Av Morilye/Molag
    Tri-Faction @Lord_Hevnoraak ingame
    PC NA
  • MeridiaFavorsMe
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    Lord_Hev wrote: »
    I feel like group shielding should only be an ultimate and sets exclusive thing. Not sure how to really address that though without gutting a skill like the arcanist one, can't remember the name off the top of my head. But the scribe shields are an easy enough fix of just having them reduced.

    The problem is the ult gen and number of players in these groups is so high that they can be hitting an ultimate for shields every 5 seconds if they really wanted to. They would really need to limit it to 1 shield per person in these large groups so they can't stack different ultimates and limit the maximum size.
    Edited by MeridiaFavorsMe on January 16, 2026 6:07PM
  • Teeba_Shei
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    Lord_Hev wrote: »
    I feel like group shielding should only be an ultimate and sets exclusive thing. Not sure how to really address that though without gutting a skill like the arcanist one, can't remember the name off the top of my head. But the scribe shields are an easy enough fix of just having them reduced.

    The problem is the ult gen and number of players in these groups is so high that they can be hitting an ultimate for shields every 5 seconds if they really wanted to. They would really need to limit it to 1 shield per person in these large groups so they can't stack different ultimates and limit the maximum size.

    It needs some type of tuning. I would want a proper solution though. I don't want some half-baked idea like the one currently on the table.
  • MincMincMinc
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    Lord_Hev wrote: »
    I feel like group shielding should only be an ultimate and sets exclusive thing. Not sure how to really address that though without gutting a skill like the arcanist one, can't remember the name off the top of my head. But the scribe shields are an easy enough fix of just having them reduced.

    The problem is the ult gen and number of players in these groups is so high that they can be hitting an ultimate for shields every 5 seconds if they really wanted to. They would really need to limit it to 1 shield per person in these large groups so they can't stack different ultimates and limit the maximum size.

    I dont think there is a simple limit you are envisioning. It would be better to just push players to not be able to get ult level shields so easily. Normal skills in the game have bloated so much that many skills are eclipsing ultimates. Just for example go look at merciless resolve and find an ult with a higher tooltip on the pts.......... Just go compare deep fissure vs most ultimates and you would probably rather have deep fissure. By deflating the ballooned basic skills you could make ultimates worth more in combat.

    Ults always felt like they held more weight back in the day. Now adays half of your skills feel like they match your ult for impact.
    I only use insightful
  • Artisian0001
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    Just put the cap at 20k on a person at any time and change the HP scaling from 55% to 30-40% and call it a day for shields. I think that's still decently high but I'm generally not in favor of huge nerfs right off the bat, it it's still not enough nerf it again.
  • Lord_Hev
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    Lord_Hev wrote: »
    I feel like group shielding should only be an ultimate and sets exclusive thing. Not sure how to really address that though without gutting a skill like the arcanist one, can't remember the name off the top of my head. But the scribe shields are an easy enough fix of just having them reduced.

    The problem is the ult gen and number of players in these groups is so high that they can be hitting an ultimate for shields every 5 seconds if they really wanted to. They would really need to limit it to 1 shield per person in these large groups so they can't stack different ultimates and limit the maximum size.

    I dont think there is a simple limit you are envisioning. It would be better to just push players to not be able to get ult level shields so easily. Normal skills in the game have bloated so much that many skills are eclipsing ultimates. Just for example go look at merciless resolve and find an ult with a higher tooltip on the pts.......... Just go compare deep fissure vs most ultimates and you would probably rather have deep fissure. By deflating the ballooned basic skills you could make ultimates worth more in combat.

    Ults always felt like they held more weight back in the day. Now adays half of your skills feel like they match your ult for impact.

    Yea this is a big problem that has kind of flown under the radar. Now ults are just treated as just "another damage source" to try to layer with resolve and shalk for burst lol.
    Qaevir/Qaevira Av Morilye/Molag
    Tri-Faction @Lord_Hevnoraak ingame
    PC NA
  • YandereGirlfriend
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    Teeba_Shei wrote: »
    I’m not actually sure that healing is what’s causing the issue. I think it might be solely shields at this point. You can see groups running around with 60k shields constantly. There really should be a 55% max-health shield nerf on all shield skills, including ultimates, in Cyrodiil.

    This would mean that if you had 40k HP and cast a Barrier with a tooltip of 50k, you would only get a shield of 22k. You should probably only be able to have the largest shield effect active at any given time. For example, if you already had a Barrier and someone cast Contingency, you shouldn’t gain any additional shields.

    People can have Barriers with tooltips of around 30k AFTER Battle Spirit, while healing abilities like Soul Tether have a tooltip of 14k burst healing followed by 35k HoT healing BEFORE Battle Spirit. A lot of this healing can be wasted, but with Barriers you instantly gain that value as effective HP. The effectiveness between these two abilities is staggering.

    This leads to people walking around with 100k effective HP. Shielding is simply too strong for ball groups.

    My suggestion for reigning-in shields would be to make the Scribing shields, which are the biggest outliers by far since they are spammable, scale off of Max Stats rather than Max Health.

    Max Health is for self-targeted tank shields and it never made an ounce of sense why the Scribing group shields scaled off of Health, the resource that everybody stacks in PvP.

    That single change would massively curtail the power of shields and weight them back toward ultimate abilities, which ought to be powerful, rather than mundane spammable skills.
  • MincMincMinc
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    Teeba_Shei wrote: »
    I’m not actually sure that healing is what’s causing the issue. I think it might be solely shields at this point. You can see groups running around with 60k shields constantly. There really should be a 55% max-health shield nerf on all shield skills, including ultimates, in Cyrodiil.

    This would mean that if you had 40k HP and cast a Barrier with a tooltip of 50k, you would only get a shield of 22k. You should probably only be able to have the largest shield effect active at any given time. For example, if you already had a Barrier and someone cast Contingency, you shouldn’t gain any additional shields.

    People can have Barriers with tooltips of around 30k AFTER Battle Spirit, while healing abilities like Soul Tether have a tooltip of 14k burst healing followed by 35k HoT healing BEFORE Battle Spirit. A lot of this healing can be wasted, but with Barriers you instantly gain that value as effective HP. The effectiveness between these two abilities is staggering.

    This leads to people walking around with 100k effective HP. Shielding is simply too strong for ball groups.

    My suggestion for reigning-in shields would be to make the Scribing shields, which are the biggest outliers by far since they are spammable, scale off of Max Stats rather than Max Health.

    Max Health is for self-targeted tank shields and it never made an ounce of sense why the Scribing group shields scaled off of Health, the resource that everybody stacks in PvP.

    That single change would massively curtail the power of shields and weight them back toward ultimate abilities, which ought to be powerful, rather than mundane spammable skills.

    Yeah we really started abandoning max stats after so many things even heals became maxhp based scaling. I wanna say it got mainstream when stamwardens really started relying on polar maxhp based heals.
    I only use insightful
  • acastanza_ESO
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    Teeba_Shei wrote: »
    I’m not actually sure that healing is what’s causing the issue. I think it might be solely shields at this point. You can see groups running around with 60k shields constantly. There really should be a 55% max-health shield nerf on all shield skills, including ultimates, in Cyrodiil.

    This would mean that if you had 40k HP and cast a Barrier with a tooltip of 50k, you would only get a shield of 22k. You should probably only be able to have the largest shield effect active at any given time. For example, if you already had a Barrier and someone cast Contingency, you shouldn’t gain any additional shields.

    People can have Barriers with tooltips of around 30k AFTER Battle Spirit, while healing abilities like Soul Tether have a tooltip of 14k burst healing followed by 35k HoT healing BEFORE Battle Spirit. A lot of this healing can be wasted, but with Barriers you instantly gain that value as effective HP. The effectiveness between these two abilities is staggering.

    This leads to people walking around with 100k effective HP. Shielding is simply too strong for ball groups.

    My suggestion for reigning-in shields would be to make the Scribing shields, which are the biggest outliers by far since they are spammable, scale off of Max Stats rather than Max Health.

    Max Health is for self-targeted tank shields and it never made an ounce of sense why the Scribing group shields scaled off of Health, the resource that everybody stacks in PvP.

    That single change would massively curtail the power of shields and weight them back toward ultimate abilities, which ought to be powerful, rather than mundane spammable skills.

    I would suggest simply that shields don't stack. Period. Larger Damage Shields replace smaller damage shields (so if you only have 500 HP left on your Barrier, a Warding Burst would overwrite it with a 3500 HP Warding Burst shield), but this way a 10000 HP Barrier and a 3500 Ward wouldn't ever result in a 13500 shield. Ideally this would be coupled with smart targeting to unshielded group members but either way, this would eliminate the major problems with the current level of damage shielding, dramatically curtailing the amount of shielding-buffed "effective" HP it is possible to stack, while skill keeping multiple sources of shielding valuable.

    (I'm not in opposition to changing the scaling resource either though)
    Edited by acastanza_ESO on January 16, 2026 8:59PM
  • Artisian0001
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    Teeba_Shei wrote: »
    I’m not actually sure that healing is what’s causing the issue. I think it might be solely shields at this point. You can see groups running around with 60k shields constantly. There really should be a 55% max-health shield nerf on all shield skills, including ultimates, in Cyrodiil.

    This would mean that if you had 40k HP and cast a Barrier with a tooltip of 50k, you would only get a shield of 22k. You should probably only be able to have the largest shield effect active at any given time. For example, if you already had a Barrier and someone cast Contingency, you shouldn’t gain any additional shields.

    People can have Barriers with tooltips of around 30k AFTER Battle Spirit, while healing abilities like Soul Tether have a tooltip of 14k burst healing followed by 35k HoT healing BEFORE Battle Spirit. A lot of this healing can be wasted, but with Barriers you instantly gain that value as effective HP. The effectiveness between these two abilities is staggering.

    This leads to people walking around with 100k effective HP. Shielding is simply too strong for ball groups.

    My suggestion for reigning-in shields would be to make the Scribing shields, which are the biggest outliers by far since they are spammable, scale off of Max Stats rather than Max Health.

    Max Health is for self-targeted tank shields and it never made an ounce of sense why the Scribing group shields scaled off of Health, the resource that everybody stacks in PvP.

    That single change would massively curtail the power of shields and weight them back toward ultimate abilities, which ought to be powerful, rather than mundane spammable skills.

    I would suggest simply that shields don't stack. Period. Larger Damage Shields replace smaller damage shields (so if you only have 500 HP left on your Barrier, a Warding Burst would overwrite it with a 3500 HP Warding Burst shield), but this way a 10000 HP Barrier and a 3500 Ward wouldn't ever result in a 13500 shield. Ideally this would be coupled with smart targeting to unshielded group members but either way, this would eliminate the major problems with the current level of damage shielding, dramatically curtailing the amount of shielding-buffed "effective" HP it is possible to stack, while skill keeping multiple sources of shielding valuable.

    (I'm not in opposition to changing the scaling resource either though)

    These things are much harder to code. Keep it simple, 20k max and change the scaling.
  • acastanza_ESO
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    Teeba_Shei wrote: »
    I’m not actually sure that healing is what’s causing the issue. I think it might be solely shields at this point. You can see groups running around with 60k shields constantly. There really should be a 55% max-health shield nerf on all shield skills, including ultimates, in Cyrodiil.

    This would mean that if you had 40k HP and cast a Barrier with a tooltip of 50k, you would only get a shield of 22k. You should probably only be able to have the largest shield effect active at any given time. For example, if you already had a Barrier and someone cast Contingency, you shouldn’t gain any additional shields.

    People can have Barriers with tooltips of around 30k AFTER Battle Spirit, while healing abilities like Soul Tether have a tooltip of 14k burst healing followed by 35k HoT healing BEFORE Battle Spirit. A lot of this healing can be wasted, but with Barriers you instantly gain that value as effective HP. The effectiveness between these two abilities is staggering.

    This leads to people walking around with 100k effective HP. Shielding is simply too strong for ball groups.

    My suggestion for reigning-in shields would be to make the Scribing shields, which are the biggest outliers by far since they are spammable, scale off of Max Stats rather than Max Health.

    Max Health is for self-targeted tank shields and it never made an ounce of sense why the Scribing group shields scaled off of Health, the resource that everybody stacks in PvP.

    That single change would massively curtail the power of shields and weight them back toward ultimate abilities, which ought to be powerful, rather than mundane spammable skills.

    I would suggest simply that shields don't stack. Period. Larger Damage Shields replace smaller damage shields (so if you only have 500 HP left on your Barrier, a Warding Burst would overwrite it with a 3500 HP Warding Burst shield), but this way a 10000 HP Barrier and a 3500 Ward wouldn't ever result in a 13500 shield. Ideally this would be coupled with smart targeting to unshielded group members but either way, this would eliminate the major problems with the current level of damage shielding, dramatically curtailing the amount of shielding-buffed "effective" HP it is possible to stack, while skill keeping multiple sources of shielding valuable.

    (I'm not in opposition to changing the scaling resource either though)

    These things are much harder to code. Keep it simple, 20k max and change the scaling.

    "We shouldn't even consider asking for a better solution because I think it might be "too hard" to code"?! I don't think that's a reasonable position to take.

    There is no reason to think it'd be any more difficult a check than a shield cap.
    we're taking about something that could reasonably be considered a single line of code, along the lines of if val(newShield) > val(shieldVal) then shieldVal = newShield else return". Now I'm sure it's not that simple in ZOS's game engine, but to think that this is some unfathomably difficult calculation is pants-on-head.
    Edited by acastanza_ESO on January 16, 2026 10:45PM
  • J18696
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    I dont think we have seen a single dev comment saying they are against something "hard todo" ive seen them time and time again push the point that anything is on the table for discussion but changes on the scale of giving them control over limiting hots in such away most people here have suggested would require to much resources to the point it would derail current efforts so if they could happen at all it would be in the future
    PC NA Server
    @J18696
    Characters
    Pridē - Dragonknight
    Vanıty - Arcanist
  • ZOS_Hadeostry
    Greetings,

    We want to thank everyone for the feedback so far. We are going to temporarily close this thread, to allow some time to cool things down. We understand this is a topic of significant importance. We will be reopening this thread on Tuesday morning.

    When the thread is reopened, anyone trying to derail the conversation, appropriate actions will take place. If you have a differing take, you need to start a new thread rather than derail.
    Staff Post
This discussion has been closed.