I don't think this is punishing enough to make a difference. These groups are healing many times in excess of the damage theyr'e taking, so a 33% reduction probably won't phase them. If it is too punishing, they'll stack 7 HOTS and shift their efforts to shields and burst burst heals, maybe with a few ground HOTs mixed in. At least when it was being proposed at 5, that was a number thst would actually be difficult to avoid having.

As for the stacking mechanics, please explore this further. Times have changed, and in this post youre referencing something from 5+ years ago. This isn't the same game or community thet it was 5+ years ago. Healing is exponentially stronger than it was back then, and every other aspect of survivability has been power crept as well.

Making it so same morph HOTS don't stack would instantly solve the hot issue.

Hope to see shields addressed in a future patch!

Thank you for the continued, amazing communication to the point where the community is actually involved in core tasks that will potentially save you time and energy. We see you!

I voted 33% modifier over 8 hots, but I agree; 8 is far too high, and 33% is far too low, but it's a great start and I'd love to see how it evolves.

Overall, I'd prefer a mechanic that scaled with the more hots you had. Whether it's robust with 10 stages or at minimum 3 to reduce server strain. I'd also hope that it only effects incoming healing from allies so you can still rely on yourself at the end of the day.

For example: -15% healing and shields taken from allies above 4 or more effects, up to a maximum of -75%.

Also I'm in the camp against removing heal stacking. Doing so would just enable highly coordinated groups to excel further as they specifically design every player with "unique" hots vastly over performing pug groups that solely rely on common heals like Vigor or Regen that would ultimately not work. Coordination is already strong, we don't need an extra exclusive hidden layer related to unique sources of heals. That would force dead casts on players too, no one finds that enjoyable.

React wrote: »

I don't think this is punishing enough to make a difference. These groups are healing many times in excess of the damage theyr'e taking, so a 33% reduction probably won't phase them. If it is too punishing, they'll stack 7 HOTS and shift their efforts to shields and burst burst heals, maybe with a few ground HOTs mixed in. At least when it was being proposed at 5, that was a number thst would actually be difficult to avoid having.

As for the stacking mechanics, please explore this further. Times have changed, and in this post youre referencing something from 5+ years ago. This isn't the same game or community thet it was 5+ years ago. Healing is exponentially stronger than it was back then, and every other aspect of survivability has been power crept as well.

Making it so same morph HOTS don't stack would instantly solve the hot issue.

Hope to see shields addressed in a future patch!

HARD AGREE, from an old pvper here. You would instantly solve the issue if over time effects didnt stack. Sadly we dug a 10 year deep hole. Code wise I believe this has to be done per skill and cant be done through battlespirit. Meaning pve and pvp would need split skills and double the workload during each balance patch. Not to mention having to do a pass recoding every over time effect in the game skill and set wise.

You can implement this bad blanket and it will atleast prevent hot stacking in favor of more instant active defense. However smart groups will simply avoid using 8 hots. The other way to implement this is to stage it up so 4 hots = 10% debuff. 6 hots = 20%, 8 hots = -30%.

Half the ballgroup issue isnt just hot stacking too, its the abuse of permanent immunity through snowtreaders. Which zos already removed group wide snare/root immunity on rapids because it was abused for years. How long till we address snowtreaders?

React wrote: »

I don't think this is punishing enough to make a difference. These groups are healing many times in excess of the damage theyr'e taking, so a 33% reduction probably won't phase them. If it is too punishing, they'll stack 7 HOTS and shift their efforts to shields and burst burst heals, maybe with a few ground HOTs mixed in. At least when it was being proposed at 5, that was a number thst would actually be difficult to avoid having.

As for the stacking mechanics, please explore this further. Times have changed, and in this post youre referencing something from 5+ years ago. This isn't the same game or community thet it was 5+ years ago. Healing is exponentially stronger than it was back then, and every other aspect of survivability has been power crept as well.

Making it so same morph HOTS don't stack would instantly solve the hot issue.

Hope to see shields addressed in a future patch!

"Making it so same morph HOTS don't stack would instantly solve the hot issue."

This solution creates great problems and screws non-balls players too. For example, all kinds of players often use Echoing Vigor because its a great healing skill, but since it is quite common (and the other morph is cast on yourself only), that would truly screw healers up as procing healer sets on allies such as SPC or Transmutation will be almost impossible, as only 1 player will heal them with that skill.

Same thing with strict HoTs amount limits, a guy has 5 HoTs, many heals will do nothing to them -> you are frustrated as healer.

The fairest solution I see would be the first X HoTs are unchanged, and any additional one gets -X% strength (If you go back below 6 HoTs it would need to updated dynamicaly tho). You can proc your sets and passives needing you to heal allies, you still heal your allies even with the reduction and ball groups are more vulnerable but not obliterated.

I would have prefered the original idea. That could be toned down if people agreed that it were to much.

BixenteN7Akantor wrote: »

"Making it so same morph HOTS don't stack would instantly solve the hot issue."

This solution creates great problems and screws non-balls players too.

Agree that it hurts pugs more than comp groups, who will update their comps with every possible uniquely named effect in the game, while pugs are stuck overwriting each others' heals.

Can the devs' proposed solution scale with the number of hots being stacked? I agree that below a certain threshhold there should be no penalty, but above that each additional hot/shield could inflict -X% penalty, so deliberate massive effect stacking is punished more than incidental stacking from randoms or smaller comp groups, and YES SHIELDS NEED TO BE AFFECTED TOO.

I would personally prefer any change right now and see how it affects the game. Long term I´d prefer a version where it´s a ramping healing reduction, where each additional instance of a heal does less. First vigor=100%, 2nd vigor=80%, 3rd vigor=60% or something along those lines, down to a cap of maybe ~20%. I also feel like shields need to be tuned as well, maybe with a ramping cost per cast, like streak, so you cannot just spam contingency/soul burst 20 times in a row.

condition stacking is the ideal solution.

So when you get a dot or hot on you you get a "condition stack" of whatever that skill type is. When someone else casts the same or similar skill the dot timer refreshes itself as you can only have one of these effects. However when this happens you gain a condition stack along with the refresh. If multiple people cast the same type skills you keep getting stacks and the original skill is just refreshed with the new attacker. You cannot advance your own conditions. Only other players can advance a condition stack from a skill. After the last stack is applied only the duration is refreshed. This is compatible with existing gameplay as "stacks" are quite common in many skills and armor effects.

additionally there would be some room for cross ability play where a certain proc and skill would share the same generic dot and thus allow player condition stacking if they were set up for it, at the cost of one of the effects damage.

basically there would be a condition stack for each dot and hot type. The first time the skill is on you there is no stack and each time after advances the stack. Each stack will confer specific buffs and debuffs depending on the skill.

so for a dot lets take the case of poison injection
first cast on you gets you the dot.
if the dots still on you the second cast refreshes the dot but also adds a condition stack of poison.
if you have a stack on you the next time your hit with the same skill you gain another stack.
the stacks and dots will have the same timer. Only the highest stack effect counts.

stack 1: minor defile for the dots duration, poison status x1
stack 2: major defile for the dots duration, poison status x2
stack 3: major and minor defile at the same time for the dots duration. poison status x3 . Non purge-able.

and the case for a hot like regenerating

stack 1: minor fortitude for the duration
stack 2: major fortitude for the duration
stack 3: both at the same time. When the effect ends you are purged as well.

The idea here is to reduce the number of active hots/dots of each type to one but not completely discount the other players contributions through advancing the stacks with crippling or beneficial effects. To make it interesting when you get to max stacks of a dot you can no longer purge it. Max stacks of a hot gives you a free purge when the effect ends.

these condition stacks would be independent of the existing "status effects" and thus no changes would be required to them. In order to make the stacks efficient they would always have standard effects, no crit, no proc and cause no enchants or other status effects.

this makes a single effect more reasonable while keeping some tangible benifit to stacking effects while dramatically reducing resources required.

this system can work for sheilds as well using the same procedure, so you get some tangible benifit, but not the full benifit.

sheilds would have the same 3 stack process and use the timer for sheilds but you can only have one active group shield and one active personal sheild. After that you get stacks of protection which gives you minor then major protection, then both for the duration of the sheild which augments the sheild by making it more efficient.

this could also have a pve application for bosses who might use the same rules, requiring a more diverse arrangement of skills from players to maximize damage since everyone doing the same thing will advance the stacks and there is only limited gain from doing this, but alot of gain if multiple kinds of stacks are active on a boss.

I have a question for the PVPer
Which is the Main Hot off all Ball groups? For me as a PVP noob i would say Echoing Vigor which already stack per person who use it... So i understand that every Ball group member has it slotted. Wouldn't it be better to set a limiter how many stacks are possible with the echoing vigor for example a maximum up to 3 stacks or do i understand it wrong...

Shielding Is the Real Problem in Ball Groups — Not HoTs

Logs show it clearly: shielding is doing the heavy lifting

In the screenshot below from the logs of a ball group:

Shielding is circled in blue

Healing is circled in red

What stands out immediately is that a huge portion of the healing is overhealing, because the group is constantly sitting behind layers of shields. The healing isn’t “too strong” — it’s often not even being used effectively because damage isn’t reaching health bars in the first place.

I really think the dev team is trying to address an issue that doesn’t actually exist.

Healing isn’t the problem in ball groups — shielding is.

Right now the proposed change to nerf HoTs by applying a heal reduction when you have more than 8 HoTs active doesn’t meaningfully impact what’s making 12-man ball groups so durable. It mainly punishes healing in situations where healing is already not the reason groups are surviving.

Why shields are stronger than healing in a ball group

Shields outperform healing in organized 12-man groups for a few reasons:

1) Shields prevent damage instead of reacting to it
Healing is reactive — it only matters after damage happens.
Shields are proactive — they stop burst damage from ever creating pressure.

2) Shields make healing look stronger than it is
When shields are constantly absorbing incoming damage, healing turns into mostly overhealing, which means it’s not actually contributing to survival in the way people think it is.

3) Shields scale better the more coordinated the group is
The more stacked and organized a group is, the easier it is to maintain near-permanent shield uptime. That creates a situation where damage has to break multiple layers before anyone is even “in danger.”

4) Burst windows get erased
In smaller fights, coordinated burst and target swaps can break through healing.
In ball groups, shields often erase those burst windows completely, so fights become less about timing and pressure and more about whether you can overwhelm layers of mitigation.

The HoT nerf doesn’t fix the actual problem

The proposed HoT cap/heal reduction mechanic doesn’t really address the thing that makes ball groups unkillable, because:

- ball groups aren’t surviving because they’re receiving too many HoTs

- they’re surviving because they aren’t taking real health damage most of the time

So this change ends up being a weird “healing tax” that mainly impacts:

- smaller scale fights

- open field brawls

- outnumbered groups trying to survive pressure

- builds that rely on sustained healing to function

Meanwhile, the core ball group problem remains intact, because shields are still doing what they’ve always done: preventing damage from mattering.

This is a 12-man issue, not a general healing issue

This isn’t even a problem in smaller scale groups.

In 4–8 player fights, healing actually has counterplay:

- pressure sticks

- burst creates kill windows

- healing has to work to keep people alive

But in 12-mans, with coordinated stacking and constant shield uptime, healing becomes secondary — it’s mostly just topping people off behind shields.

TL;DR

If the goal is to reduce ball group survivability, nerfing HoTs is targeting the wrong system.
Shield stacking is what’s preventing pressure from sticking and creating kill windows.
The logs already show it: healing is often overhealing because shields are covering the group constantly.

This change ends up nerfing active/burst healing along with passive HoT stacking, while your intended goal is trying to target HoTs specifically—not punish direct healing that actually requires timing and decision-making.

THESE ARE LOGS FROM AN ACTUAL BALL GROUP. ALMOST ALL HEALING IS OVERHEALING. SHIELDING IS WHAT IS TOO EFFECTIVE NOT HOTS.

Implement a 33% modifier which would trigger after 8 HoTs, to be implemented during PTS and go live with Update 49, seems good

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone!

Last week, we had shared two options to help address healing in PvP - most notably with stacked HoTs - after removing the initial change on the PTS: reducing the modifier to a lower value, or increasing the number of HoTs it would take to trigger the modifier. There was a lot of back-and-forth discussion in the original thread and, understandably, some pretty strong opinions.

As we start to finalize what will be going into Update 49, we’d like to ask what you would ultimately like to see, knowing our current bandwidth limitations. As we mentioned before, this is not the end all, be all; we do still intend to explore other options in the future beyond Update 49.

The two poll options below are currently the only options for Update 49. We did see many of you asking about not allowing the same type of heals to stack; this is something that was actually in the game years ago, and the sentiment was so poor that we removed it from the game. It’s something we could explore or iterate on in the future, but not for Update 49. We look forward to hearing and seeing what everyone is leaning toward for this update!

I understand the want to address this quickly, which is why I'd imagine plenty of people choose the first option, but changes made hastily will lead to further issues, like the DoT patch.

To add to what someone else said, the real issue, as someone who plays in a smaller group and often sees ballgroups running around, is shielding. If you ever look at logs from a ballgroup you will see how much of an issue it is. Additionally, attacking direct healing, which is an active solution to taking burst damage is not the right way to address this either. A 33% reduction to HoTs and shielding rather than all healing would be a better solution. There are still plenty of solutions greater than this, but this alone is 100x better.

While there are plenty of changes that would be better than the one hastily proposed, the real issue is not addressed. How does this work for players outside of group? This has yet to be addressed. Can a group with 3 HoTs have 2 people who's sole purpose it to put another group above the HoT limit come and put 6 sticky HoTs on them to put them over that limit and reduce their healing from all heals by 33%? Why has this not been addressed? You HAVE to remove healing from outside of group if you want to implement this change at all, without doing so you just increase the likelihood that people will go around maliciously, or even ignorantly and hurt those not running this many HoTs.

All this to say, the "solution" proposed will just be avoided by stacking more shields or more ground based heals to begin with. If shielding in general is nerfed, like I have said countless times, by reducing the shield scaling for group shields from 55% to 40% to start, as well as limiting the value of shields you can have on you to around 20-25k.

Major_Mangle wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

React wrote: »

I don't think this is punishing enough to make a difference. These groups are healing many times in excess of the damage theyr'e taking, so a 33% reduction probably won't phase them. If it is too punishing, they'll stack 7 HOTS and shift their efforts to shields and burst burst heals, maybe with a few ground HOTs mixed in. At least when it was being proposed at 5, that was a number thst would actually be difficult to avoid having.

As for the stacking mechanics, please explore this further. Times have changed, and in this post youre referencing something from 5+ years ago. This isn't the same game or community thet it was 5+ years ago. Healing is exponentially stronger than it was back then, and every other aspect of survivability has been power crept as well.

Making it so same morph HOTS don't stack would instantly solve the hot issue.

Hope to see shields addressed in a future patch!

HARD AGREE, from an old pvper here. You would instantly solve the issue if over time effects didnt stack. Sadly we dug a 10 year deep hole. Code wise I believe this has to be done per skill and cant be done through battlespirit. Meaning pve and pvp would need split skills and double the workload during each balance patch. Not to mention having to do a pass recoding every over time effect in the game skill and set wise.

You can implement this bad blanket and it will atleast prevent hot stacking in favor of more instant active defense. However smart groups will simply avoid using 8 hots. The other way to implement this is to stage it up so 4 hots = 10% debuff. 6 hots = 20%, 8 hots = -30%.

Half the ballgroup issue isnt just hot stacking too, its the abuse of permanent immunity through snowtreaders. Which zos already removed group wide snare/root immunity on rapids because it was abused for years. How long till we address snowtreaders?

Not only snowthreaders, but also the banner that offers snare/root immunity, which is actually a lot more common in larger groups than snowthreaders these days. Personally don´t think there should be any mythic or skill that offers either permanent or group wide snare and root immunity. It´s one of these things that each player should´ve to spend a GCD to get rid of themselves (for the sake of balance).

Edit:
Appreciated that you create a poll and asking for feedback. The communication during this PTS has been very appreciated and I hope it can continue like this in future updates/PTS cycles.

Yeah good to point that out aswell, banner is just as bad.

I have been suggesting that snowtreaders should give you -50% sprint speed. Then you only have the immunity while sprinting. Essentially trading sprint for immunity on demand. This doesn't allow you to ignore roots and snares completely.

NEITHER do what many people have suggested and make it one instance of healing/shielding per skill best option in everyone’s opinion I’ve seen multiple times

MXVIIDREAM wrote: »

NEITHER do what many people have suggested and make it one instance of healing/shielding per skill best option in everyone’s opinion I’ve seen multiple times

Everyone? Let me be the first to disagree then?

Major_Mangle wrote: »

MXVIIDREAM wrote: »

NEITHER do what many people have suggested and make it one instance of healing/shielding per skill best option in everyone’s opinion I’ve seen multiple times

One instance is just too low tbh, it makes the healer/support role completely redundant. "Diminishing returns" or debuff above a certain threshold is a much better approach.

Exactly, it accomplishes the same goal without completely invalidating your skill casts or forcing groups to coordinate 10 different unique heals and shields, just to end up just as powerful, if not more than before. How is that even a viable solution to anyone?