I am still quite concerned about the impact this will have on the servers. Every HOT will now cause the server to do a character sheet check for every tick of the HOT. Add this to every HOT cast or received by every player on the map. How much extra work are we asking the already strained servers to manage?

Or you could actually do something that would make a positive impact on game performance in pvp and simply put a cap on hots on each player at maybe 3-5 hots. This reduced healing plan is a terrible idea, and will do nothing to improve performance.

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!

do we have both options? I mean surely you guys realize that most people want a limit to HoTs being able to stack so highly. And shields are an issue as well. Did you guys see this poll?

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/8418650#Comment_8418650

Not the best name, but it answers the question to what most people think the issue is. Myself included. So is this like a situation where we try this in the short term and move forward with something else in the future? Hopefully not extremely long into the future? @ZOS_Kevin

Ive seen a lot of new and returning players excited for the next update. Many of them coming with streamers that plan on playing or are trying eso now and want to play the new update. Credit where credit is due, the future for eso looks much brighter. But many of these people enjoy pvp, and i just hate to think about what they will find in cyrodiil. An hour que for the only populated camp, only to get in and deal with abysmal lag and the ball groups probably causing some of it. And if they want to play BGs they cant que with their friends because group que never works. So they que solo and its just a one sided steamroll with no logical MMR. Its just a sad state of affairs.

All that is to say, i appreciate the new zos, I appreciate the communication, and addressing long standing issues, I would just hate to see more missed opportunities, to get more players in this game, because of things still taking multiple years to get addressed in a meaningful way. And this issue is one of the biggest for pvp. But still, thanks for what has been done so far.

The issue being persistent HOTs, why not allow only a single (or two) instances of the same HOTs (or shield) on any player at any time, the same way we have unique buffs and debuffs ?

This will keep the defensive power of ball groups in check and allow more counterplays. It also allows best PVPers to take down key targets, which is close to impossible now when they stick together, while keeping group play interesting for those who like it. Direct heals will mater more but are more expensive to run in the long time which will further reward smart casting.

Organised groups will be more interesting due to the strategy in composing them, slotting currently lesser used skills, reviving those less popular ones this way and bringing value to theory-crafting for this demographics of players (especially the group leaders).

Looks to me like the best solution by far, like very far.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

I would much rather see HOT morphs limited to one stack per player to mimic the behavior of named buffs and damage shields.

I agree here. It would require coordinated ball groups to get similar healing. Nothing should beat a coordinated ball group except another coordinated ball group or maybe a very skilled bomber. can take our a chunk of them.

For the majority of ball groups, that just zerg around, This would be a huge nerf for them which could force them into coordinated groups or just be generally less successful.

Another option if the code allows for it is: reduce healing received from other players by X% per other target healing you. scaling multiplicatively so it's never 0.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

For your log post, though, if you broke that out by ability I would imagine that you would find Warding Burst and Warding Conti as the top two skills contributing to that player's shielding output.

In my eyes, those are the two skills that should be in the crosshairs for scaling changes in future updates. Ultimate abilities should be powerful but those regular Scribing shields that a player can spam every GCD for the magnitude of a Barrier have no business being that strong..

Barrier also stacks with all the other shields, so it can be an issue. The healers are running Barrier—this just shows what this one person runs. This person was also doing 50% of the group "healing" through shields. A nerf to healing will just cause them to invest even more into shielding, which is already doing about three times the work that burst healing and HoTs are doing in these groups. Shields are so incredibly overtuned, and ZOS trying to fix it through some half-baked HoT nerf just breaks my heart. They’re so hopelessly lost that they don’t even understand the root cause of the problem.

It's very obvious to anyone who actually knows how ballgroups play or what they use to preform well that shield stacking is the main issue. The people saying to limit shields to only one unique instance of that shield just because they heard someone say the same thing about HoTs as if that changes anything at all is funny. The people in most of these threads have literally zero idea how the skills even work, never mind what makes group strong.

The health-scaling shields (Warding conti + burst, shelter) are overtuned and probably shouldn't scale off of health, because you shouldn't be able to build defensive stats to increase either your healing or damage to others. In the case of the shields, changing them to scale off either the caster's max mag or stam, or the recipients' max health would pretty decently nerf the scribing shielder role, in a way that wouldn't particularly hurt non-ball gameplay.

if you want it to be somewhat effective make it include 'shields' as well as 'Sticky HoTs' i.e. 8 'on player' heals cause it but It's not the right solution too.

fizzybeef wrote: »

MeridiaFavorsMe wrote: »

Honestly, running a forum poll asking players what the “appropriate nerf” should be feels like asking a 5-year-old to weigh in on the optimal monetary policy response to a liquidity trap under New Keynesian DSGE modeling with rational expectations and the zero lower bound. This kind of poll is going to be dominated by people voting for whatever they personally hate fighting, not what actually solves the underlying survivability problem.

You could propose a flat 99% healing nerf in 12-man groups at all times and a huge portion of the forum would still vote yes, because the poll is capturing frustration more than balance.

Not making ingame surveys but asking this in a forum wich 1% of playerbase max are using, is scandalous anyway

If they based their balance on in game surveys cyrodiil would last about 10 seconds. The pvp playerbase is a very small percent of the population and the general population of the game doesn't have the first clue about game balance. The only thing the survey might tell you is how they feel.

Ball groups are an even smaller percent of that small pvp population. The majority of players will always vote against them. The fact that this poll didn't heavily skew towards the hot nerf just shows how unpopular it actually is.

The nerf needs to target shields first before we start touching Hots.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

This is legit bait. Shield CAN'T overheal unless you recast your own shield on top of your own shield. They will hit the full value assuming you don't stack the same shield.
Shields are generally bad vs pressure and are used as a burst counter when encountering similar groups.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

HoTs are not reactive. It's something you keep up in between damage pushes.

Most shields are used reactive fyi ( barrier, burst shields, gibbering shelter etc. )

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

I swear every item on this list is either bait and / or misinformation.

Shields make healing look WEAKER than they are. In the vast majority of cases, the damage that the shields absord would have been covered by HoTs. Therefore, shields artificially inflate overheal value of heals and boost log numbers even tho in most cases it's a completely dead cast ( Imagine you're in a solo scenario vs a DoT DK, and instead of allowing your vigor to heal for example, you have vigor up but you also cast a shield on top of it, making the vigor useless since all the DoTs eat your shield instead. By the time the shield is down, you have to recast vigor again ). It's not even that hard to understand this concept.

Shields won't absorb incoming damage when your average shield gives like 4k shield, has a horrible range / radius and you take 4000 DPS during a fight. Also most shields are capped at 6 targets or less. With the rather low radius they have you will never be able to shield the whole group consistently in any group of 7+. Not only that, shields will always prioritize the same targets due to their "smart" casting rules, which means you have to move around the group in a way that excludes some people that already received shields in order to get it on the other people. By the time you do that the first shield is already dead.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.”

Literally what I wrote above. You can slap a Soul Burst from scribing with Shield Focus script, jump in a trial and see how "easy" it is to keep shields up on semi-stationary targets.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

How do you achieve coordinated burst if not through coordinated group play? It's definitely not something that a bunch of solo players will do unless all the stars happen to allign.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

I had no trouble surviving 3 years ago when playing in group despite having 0 shields aside from 1-2 people with a barrier.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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

Small scale fights won't have 8 HoTs. Open field brawls won't have 8 HoTs. Outnumbered groups don't have 8 HoTs and even if they spam HoTs, with the HoT target cap of 6 you won't hit enough people to reach those numbers unless you press it like 4 times during it's uptime. Which non-ball groups don't do. Ever.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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

Again, fake info and not interpreting logs correctly.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

"Me see big number on log. Me know it's OP" is not exactly accurate. Shields are a supplement to healing, and most of the log they just eat chip damage that would have been healed by the HoTs underneath, so it makes virtually 0 difference whether a shield even existed there or not, as they simply eat heals to boost shield number on logs in the majority of cases. Shields are useful in burst situation, where you need a quick recovery moment, and to prepare against incoming burst if you know the timing ( fighting another group ).

Open that nice log of yours, press the overheal button and you'll see that 10m healing was 70m heal pumped out during the same raid. If the shield went on the person that didn't actually need healing in that moment, then it's just a dead useless cast to artifically boost numbers. Shield effectiveness also drops drastically after you have more than 6 people in your group due to target caps. Your "spammable" shields - scribing shields - can only go around you. In general you'll be in the middle of the group when casting them. People who are most exposed to pressure and damage ( front / backline ) have the most inconsistent shields applied to them, so they're not that effective in pressure situation where 1 person gets separated. Running more than 1 person with shields is also dumb as they don't stack. So in a situation where pressure is actually high enough to go through your heals, the shields provide close to no value as around half the group will most probably die.

Since you keep posting logs, why dont you give more context? Your cute picture with contingency, soul burst amd gibbering shield - how many people are in the group? What's the build being played? Average casts are 10k shield for contingency and 7.2k for soul burst. In a 4-man group that's 2500 + 1800 shields per 2 casts for an amazing total of 4.3k.

If it's a 6-man group that's 10000/6 + 7.2/6 for an amazing total of 1.6k + 1.2k shields. A grand total of 2.8k. That is definitely what keeps people alive, no?

Even considering stuff like "its lower than actual value since it didn't hit 6 people everytime" - that's just a testament to how bad the range is.

If it's a 12-man group, its rather the same. 2.8k on 6 people while the other 6 get nothing. Or a grand average of 1.4k shield on the whole group. Applying these amazing 4k shields to the whole 12-man takes 4 seconds, 18k mag ( if you invest in max HP to scale them, that's your complete mag pool by the way ) and they get deleted from half a fire ballista tick.

Stop spreading misinformation.

I would like to see much more sources of heal absorption to counter the healing rather than this kind of proposed flat cap after a certain number of HoTs. Do multiple instances of a heal absorption ability stack? Maybe they should. Maybe defile could become an absorb rather than a % reduction, that could be a pretty significant change because I'm almost always either completely overhealing my group or they died before I could get a heal off (so a 30% reduction in my healing done doesn't actually really hurt me at all, I can still pump out a lot of healing and there's probably like 2-3 other healers doing the same thing). More heal absorbs would *** us, significantly, but I'd only want to see this if it required some considerations re: timing (I don't want to die because someone used a certain skill, I want to die because they used it at the right time).

I would also like to see more sets or something that can punish positioning more than anything else. I am thinking of Azureblight, which was disproportionately effective against the same groups that people say abuse HoTs. The way we had to play to survive during the Azureblight meta involved watching the stacks and stepping out of group when they got close to blowing up. I had fun with that, and people clearly had fun using it against us due to how many times we all blew up spectacularly. Heck, add a new "siege weapon" that's just a wall. Like let people place little barricades. If we suddenly try to run around a corner on the 3rd floor of a keep into a small little wall that stops our movement but can maybe be killed by regular attacks or something; that'd be huge for counterplay against us! (And I'd have fun getting drunk and placing them everywhere and calling for folks to join me on the barricades while re-enacting a scene from Les Mis and singing loudly.)

Maybe there could be consideration about the effectiveness of heals. Should they scale off of Weapon/Spell damage? Or should they scale off of max stats? Right now, damage dealers casting Vigor is partly so powerful because our damage dealers consistently have 7k+ WD and their Vigors slap (plus, there's probably 4 of them). I guess this delves deeper into balance issues revealed with the hybridization change. I'd be curious to see what would happen if all damage abilities only scaled off of the highest of your max damage stat, if all heals would scale off the higher of your max resources, and all shields off max health. This would gut the current ballgroup meta (of which I'm a participant) of stacking health above magicka or stamina and maybe make folks consider something other than 50+ points into health.

Coordinated PvP groups in Cyrodiil is the primary way I have played this game since I started at launch and while I've taken breaks it's always been what brought me back. There's nothing else like it. It's not that I like being invincible it's that I like being challenged, and the dynamic nature of PvP means that no fight is ever the same. The limit to group size down to 12 has meant we have to optimize what each member brings to the group, and this is a fun side of the game that I don't think gets appreciated. I love trying to think up new ways to squeeze just a little more out of our group and spend hours talking with other guild members about this. It's the chaos and unpredictability of the big battles combined with the knowledge of our group composition in how to respond that I love so much. But we roll over anyone not in a group and when we fight a group it's this weird game where we fight to 3 deaths and then let the others rez so we can go again because those are the best fights we can get. We have to create our own rules to fight each other because the current system doesn't let us do it more naturally.

Currently, we lose fights in these three ways:
- Too many oils or coldfire that we weren't paying attention to (fun deaths!)
- One person got knocked/pulled out of a keep (effective counterplay, only applicable in specific cases, less fun but understandable)
- Another group kills us (fun deaths!)

I admit that's not enough counterplay for ungrouped players, but I don't think simply nerfing the same skills they use but in our group is the answer. Give us all the same tools and let us choose how to use those tools most effectively.

I also want to thank you all for being so communicative about this and other changes lately, it is greatly appreciated and I also appreciate so many of the community joining in and discussing this. We all love this game and want the best for it, and I love to see us all working towards that together.

evLRise wrote: »

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

This is legit bait. Shield CAN'T overheal unless you recast your own shield on top of your own shield. They will hit the full value assuming you don't stack the same shield.
Shields are generally bad vs pressure and are used as a burst counter when encountering similar groups.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

HoTs are not reactive. It's something you keep up in between damage pushes.

Most shields are used reactive fyi ( barrier, burst shields, gibbering shelter etc. )

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

Shields won't absorb incoming damage when your average shield gives like 4k shield, has a horrible range / radius and you take 4000 DPS during a fight. Also most shields are capped at 6 targets or less. With the rather low radius they have you will never be able to shield the whole group consistently in any group of 7+. Not only that, shields will always prioritize the same targets due to their "smart" casting rules, which means you have to move around the group in a way that excludes some people that already received shields in order to get it on the other people. By the time you do that the first shield is already dead.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.”

Literally what I wrote above. You can slap a Soul Burst from scribing with Shield Focus script, jump in a trial and see how "easy" it is to keep shields up on semi-stationary targets.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

How do you achieve coordinated burst if not through coordinated group play? It's definitely not something that a bunch of solo players will do unless all the stars happen to allign.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

I had no trouble surviving 3 years ago when playing in group despite having 0 shields aside from 1-2 people with a barrier.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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

Small scale fights won't have 8 HoTs. Open field brawls won't have 8 HoTs. Outnumbered groups don't have 8 HoTs and even if they spam HoTs, with the HoT target cap of 6 you won't hit enough people to reach those numbers unless you press it like 4 times during it's uptime. Which non-ball groups don't do. Ever.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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

Again, fake info and not interpreting logs correctly.

Teeba_Shei wrote: »

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.

"Me see big number on log. Me know it's OP" is not exactly accurate. Shields are a supplement to healing, and most of the log they just eat chip damage that would have been healed by the HoTs underneath, so it makes virtually 0 difference whether a shield even existed there or not, as they simply eat heals to boost shield number on logs in the majority of cases. Shields are useful in burst situation, where you need a quick recovery moment, and to prepare against incoming burst if you know the timing ( fighting another group ).

Open that nice log of yours, press the overheal button and you'll see that 10m healing was 70m heal pumped out during the same raid. If the shield went on the person that didn't actually need healing in that moment, then it's just a dead useless cast to artifically boost numbers. Shield effectiveness also drops drastically after you have more than 6 people in your group due to target caps. Your "spammable" shields - scribing shields - can only go around you. In general you'll be in the middle of the group when casting them. People who are most exposed to pressure and damage ( front / backline ) have the most inconsistent shields applied to them, so they're not that effective in pressure situation where 1 person gets separated. Running more than 1 person with shields is also dumb as they don't stack. So in a situation where pressure is actually high enough to go through your heals, the shields provide close to no value as around half the group will most probably die.

Since you keep posting logs, why dont you give more context? Your cute picture with contingency, soul burst amd gibbering shield - how many people are in the group? What's the build being played? Average casts are 10k shield for contingency and 7.2k for soul burst. In a 4-man group that's 2500 + 1800 shields per 2 casts for an amazing total of 4.3k.

If it's a 6-man group that's 10000/6 + 7.2/6 for an amazing total of 1.6k + 1.2k shields. A grand total of 2.8k. That is definitely what keeps people alive, no?

Even considering stuff like "its lower than actual value since it didn't hit 6 people everytime" - that's just a testament to how bad the range is.

If it's a 12-man group, its rather the same. 2.8k on 6 people while the other 6 get nothing. Or a grand average of 1.4k shield on the whole group. Applying these amazing 4k shields to the whole 12-man takes 4 seconds, 18k mag ( if you invest in max HP to scale them, that's your complete mag pool by the way ) and they get deleted from half a fire ballista tick.

Stop spreading misinformation.

I can see you put a lot of effort into attempting to find a way around addressing the issue, supplemented by conclusions based on misunderstanding. I'm not even going to begin to ask you why you think the shield amounts are being divided and instead ask, do you think an effective HP of 65k at all times is healthy?

master_vanargand wrote: »

33%? That's a stupid number.
It's pointless and a fraud.
Need make damage shields non-stackable.

Yeah don’t do that you’ll cripple solo play most mag source and other builds run 2/3/4 damage shields and that’s fine

evLRise wrote: »

DovahkiinHealsYou wrote: »

I can see you put a lot of effort into attempting to find a way around addressing the issue, supplemented by conclusions based on misunderstanding. I'm not even going to begin to ask you why you think the shield amounts are being divided and instead ask, do you think an effective HP of 65k at all times is healthy?

Shield amounts are divided because if a cast says 5k shield, that's the amount of total shielding you did PER CAST. Meaning that among the people which received your shields, which can be anywhere between 1-6 ( capped as 6 targets ), the sum of the shields provided is 5k.

Effective 65k at all time lul. Send me a log with actually dangerous damage taken DPS, where shield uptimes are not 100% as you mention, not 80%, not 60%, just 50% is enough. I'm waiting. Take all the time you need. I'll be here for a while. Shouldn't be hard, no?

Here's a spoiler alert for you just in case, a random log piece from last week:



Uptimes are also dependent on the fight. If I'm fighting 6 people that can't break through 10k shields, my uptimes will obviously be higher. If I'm getting non stop nuked by 5 ballistas, DoTs, oils etc., Chances are that even if I spent time casting the exact same shield non stop and nothing else, my uptime won't even get close to 100%.

For people who don't understand how logs work - the uptime is on the person casting, not on the group. Since you ALWAYS get your own cast, often group members don't due to being out of range / outside of the 6-person target cap etc., therefore uptime on the group itself is significantly lower.

As a matter of fact, feel free to join my group and show me how you keep up so amazing uptimes.

Barrier also stacks with all the other shields, so it can be an issue. The healers are running Barrier—this just shows what this one person runs. This person was also doing 50% of the group "healing" through shields. A nerf to healing will just cause them to invest even more into shielding, which is already doing about three times the work that burst healing and HoTs are doing in these groups. Shields are so incredibly overtuned, and ZOS trying to fix it through some half-baked HoT nerf just breaks my heart. They’re so hopelessly lost that they don’t even understand the root cause of the problem.

To give you an actual understanding of what's going on, in this lovely picture, our friend left out the fields on top which display what each column is.

First column with the bar is the total amount of shield provided. Second column is total casts. 3rd column is average cast - meaning the sum of shields your cast did. you see stuff like 10k for contingency, which means that if you hit 5 people on average, each get 2k shield from that skill cast .4rd Column is number of hits. But then you have a really cool column which is called Avg Hit on column #5. Which displays 1.1k, 1.1k, 1.3k. That is the average shields you give per person / per cast during the raid. It takes all your casts from the log, and divides the casts & hits to see how much individual shield you pump out on average from a skill cast.

It looks lovely and OP beyond reason doesn't it?

For reference, here's a random burst heal log from the same raid from a DD ( not even a healer ), with no powered trait or ritual mundus:



Would you look at that! The average cast is kinda the same as the Soul Burst EVEN with 80% overheal! The average hit is even bigger! Meaning the skill is way more impactful and doesn't just artifically boosts log numbers. That's crazy!

TLDR: Don't use logs as an argument if you don't understand what you're reading on the logs.

So for anyone wondering: yes, this person is a member of the same ball group I pulled the logs from. And now they’re trying to run interference to keep shield stacking off the chopping block while pushing nerfs onto HoTs instead because the hot nerf won't hurt them.

Here’s the problem with their entire argument:

1) “Shields are divided so it’s not 65k effective” is a dodge

Nobody is claiming one single cast gives 65k to one person.

The issue is total shield output per second across the group, and the fact that:

- different shields stack on top of each other
- prevent damage from ever touching HP
- don't have any real counterplay
- are front-loaded (you get value instantly)
- can be spammed pre-emptively before any pressure even lands

Whether a cast hits 3 people or 6 people doesn’t change the point:
the group is constantly buffered by multiple shield sources at once.

So “it’s divided across targets” doesn’t make it balanced — it just means it’s providing full raid-wide damage negation instead of “one guy is tanky.”

2) “Uptime is on the caster not the group” is also a dodge

Yes, logs show uptime per caster.

But ball groups aren’t relying on one caster.

They run multiple shield sources at the same time:

- multiple casters
- multiple skills
- overlapping durations
- staggered casts
- and 6-target cap “coverage cycling”

So even if one player’s uptime isn’t 100% on every group member, the combined group-wide uptime is still extremely high because coverage overlaps.

This is literally how ball groups function:
redundancy + overlap + constant refresh.

That doesn’t make it less broken — it makes it more broken.



3) The screenshot proves the problem (90% uptime = 90% damage denial)
The screenshot shows Warding Contingency and Warding Burst at around 90% uptime.

That means for ~90% of the fight, people attacking you aren’t interacting with your HP bar at all — they’re just hitting shields. Their damage isn’t creating pressure, it isn’t forcing healing, and it isn’t opening kill windows. It’s being erased before it even matters.

And saying “uptime depends on the fight” doesn’t change that — it proves the point. If shields only drop when you’re being nuked by siege + oils + stacked DoTs + multiple coordinated players, then it takes an extreme scenario just to make your group play by normal rules.

90% shield uptime = 90% of the fight where pressure is deleted before it becomes meaningful. That’s exactly why shield stacking needs adjustment, not HoTs.


Shields aren’t supporting the group — they’re invalidating the fight. And let’s be real — you know it’s overpowered. That’s exactly why you’re in here running defense for your ball group instead of addressing the actual issue.

evLRise wrote: »

It looks lovely and OP beyond reason doesn't it?

For reference, here's a random burst heal log from the same raid from a DD ( not even a healer ), with no powered trait or ritual mundus:



Would you look at that! The average cast is kinda the same as the Soul Burst EVEN with 80% overheal! The average hit is even bigger! Meaning the skill is way more impactful and doesn't just artifically boosts log numbers. That's crazy!

TLDR: Don't use logs as an argument if you don't understand what you're reading on the logs.

Blessing of Restoration is a terrible comparison to shields because overhealing and shielding do not interact with survivability the same way at all.

If you overheal someone, nothing changes. Their current HP stays the same. Their max HP stays the same. Their time-to-death stays the same.

An overheal is literally wasted output unless damage is already incoming.

Shields work the opposite way.

A shield functionally increases effective max HP the moment it’s applied, regardless of whether damage is currently happening. Even if the shield absorbs zero damage, it still:

• Raises the damage threshold required to kill the target
• Forces enemies to chew through extra HP before real health is touched
• Prevents burst kills that would otherwise land

That means shields are proactive survivability, while healing is reactive.

Comparing a heal log with 80% overheal to shield values is meaningless because overheal does nothing to prevent deaths. A shield always does.

And that’s before you even get into stacking.

In organized ball groups you can easily stack 30–40k+ effective HP worth of shields across multiple sources. That is not “log padding” — that is a massive increase in kill difficulty. You’re no longer trying to burst a 40k HP player; you’re trying to burst a 70k+ effective HP target that is also receiving real healing at the same time.

No healing skill — especially one that overheals — changes the kill math like that.

So yes, the average numbers might look similar in logs, but mechanically they are doing completely different things:

• Overheal inflates logs
• Shields inflate survivability

And survivability is what actually decides fights.