Cyrodiil Healing Nerf!!

MincMincMinc · January 16

Artisian0001 wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

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.

Lord_Hev · January 16

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.

MeridiaFavorsMe · January 16

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.

Teeba_Shei · January 16

MeridiaFavorsMe wrote: »

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 · January 16

MeridiaFavorsMe wrote: »

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.

Artisian0001 · January 16

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 · January 16

MincMincMinc wrote: »

MeridiaFavorsMe wrote: »

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.

YandereGirlfriend · January 16

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 · January 16

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

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.

acastanza_ESO · January 16

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

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)

Artisian0001 · January 16

acastanza_ESO wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

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 · January 16

Artisian0001 wrote: »

acastanza_ESO wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

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.

J18696 · January 16

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

ZOS_Hadeostry · January 17

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.

This thread has been reopened

As a reminder, 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.

Ryder45790 · January 25

Hello @ZOS_GinaBruno and @ZOS_Kevin

I did a long read through this forum chat, so I am hoping to post something positive to read. I am happy to see the willingness to adjust the long problem of heal stacking.
I have been playing for a long time but rank myself as a mid-tier player, I do not have the full skill and experience as some of the others in the forum but a lot of the comments have been overwhelmingly negative, so this response from me is going to be genuine and meant for positive reinforcement/changes.

From what I gathered above with comments and ZoS posts, the project to change healing for 1 instance of unique healing would be too lengthy and involved on a coding level to achieve with current projects on the table.

My proposal: What if instead of changing the healing received, flip the debuff in battle spirit to healing done instead. This change will allow for minor counterplay against the battle spirit passive while not gutting heals entirely because you can apply major/minor mending, CP, 20% in keep. As you said your goal is to discourage heal stacking, not fully get rid of it. Adjusting healing done on the front end will have closer to your intended results then healing received, so others will likely disagree but I suggest reducing healing done by 50% after 4 HoTs as this will yes effect burst heals IF you are HoT stacking WHILE allowing for some counter play against the passive to not completely discourage HoTs but rather to encourage the use other abilities.

Overall: Large groups will likely still heal stack but have slightly less healing but will adjust strategy to ground/burst heals, small 4-6 player groups will likely just adjust strategy in order to not proc passive, and solo players don't typically go over 3 HoTs due bar space. In my opinion this is an effective compromise for all parties involved and I am looking forward to seeing others' opinions on my proposal, and to say it bluntly this is a test server for a reason so making large changes to the game is the essence of effective testing.

Thank you for reading

JustLovely · January 25

Why not use battle spirit to limit heal stacking to only one instance of any given heal at any given time?

@ZOS_Kevin
@ZOS_GinaBruno
@ZOS_BrianWheeler

This would solve the problem with heal stacking in PvP while not Borking it for PvE trials. It seems like the code to do it would be easier than what has been proposed too. And wouldn't this option result in fewer server side calculations than what has been proposed?

....but I have to admit I know almost nothing about coding for this kind of thing.

MincMincMinc · January 25

How about we go for more two in one solutions. How can we cull server calculations while also helping fix group play shield and hot stacking issues? I am sure we can think of more, but here's a simple spitball.

Why not have zos revisit things like Heal absorbtion to strip shields or strip hots? Maybe other support ults can gain similar stripping effects like unused warden green balance ult. Or how about nova synergy? Plenty of doors open for zos to use.

Artisian0001 · January 25

J18696 wrote: »

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

Considering Gina Bruno literally said verbatim "but realistically, many require time-consuming code changes and bandwidth is currently very tight with everything else the team is working on." I don't think they are looking for changes that are even slightly difficult for them to make, and considering the ones they gave after hundreds of suggestions, it's safe to say they want it to be as simple as possible. For that reason I think it should avoid multiple different checks and to keep cyro healthy, a max HP shield of 20k would be very beneficial for less work than the proposed alternatives as well as keeping healing to inside of group only.

YandereGirlfriend · January 25

MincMincMinc wrote: »

How about we go for more two in one solutions. How can we cull server calculations while also helping fix group play shield and hot stacking issues? I am sure we can think of more, but here's a simple spitball.

Why not have zos revisit things like Heal absorbtion to strip shields or strip hots? Maybe other support ults can gain similar stripping effects like unused warden green balance ult. Or how about nova synergy? Plenty of doors open for zos to use.

Heal Absorption doing what it says on the can is a good and under-used idea. The sources of it are rare (and mostly bad) and the tuning of it is very conservative, likely because ZOS is rightfully concerned with like a Soldier of Anguish meta 2.0 returning. But there likely exists a middle ground where Heal Absorption can be a legitimate factor without being oppressive, especially in an Xv1 context.

Stripping buffs and HOTs feels very fraught because of how that would scale in an Xv1 context. The side with more players could simply zero-out the defenses of an outnumbered enemy through basic spam of those abilities rather than because they are doing anything particularly skillful. Small groups and solos would get absolutely bodied by such a change.

Heal Absorption, if done right, feels like it has much more of a potential for skill expression and use in intentional combos. The absolutely wrong way to do that would be like, "Bombard now deals damage, Immobilizes, AND absorbs 10k worth of Healing!" as that would make it Zerglings' Delight and overnight you would have 60 zerg guild players with one-button builds spamming it on anything that moved in Cyrodiil.

Turtle_Bot · 2:12AM

Limiting heal absorption to healing over time effects (that way reactive burst heals are not impacted) with a ramping scale based on number of HoTs a target has could be a good way to implement it to more skills.

e.g. Bombard now deals damage, immobilizes and absorbs the next 5k worth of healing over time healing. The healing absorption increases by 25% for each heal over time effect the target has up to 75%. can only be affected by 1 instance of "bombard heal absorb" at a time.

Sure a zerg can spam bombard and reduce your healing over time to minimal levels, but your burst heals are unaffected and it would require coordination to stack this with a shield absorb/dispel otherwise damage shields would ignore this as well.

There does need to be something for shields as well, but shields are trickier to design an "absorb" or "dispel" for without having too much impact on solo/small scale shield builds, so not sure how to design this one.

Maybe something that reduces the timer, or a percent reduction instead of full dispel/flat reduction?

tomofhyrule · 2:50AM

Artisian0001 wrote: »

J18696 wrote: »

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

Considering Gina Bruno literally said verbatim "but realistically, many require time-consuming code changes and bandwidth is currently very tight with everything else the team is working on." I don't think they are looking for changes that are even slightly difficult for them to make, and considering the ones they gave after hundreds of suggestions, it's safe to say they want it to be as simple as possible. For that reason I think it should avoid multiple different checks and to keep cyro healthy, a max HP shield of 20k would be very beneficial for less work than the proposed alternatives as well as keeping healing to inside of group only.

The thing that's tight is getting something in the patch that releases in just over a month. They're not doing the "lol we're gonna go the easy way out because we hate PvP" solution that some people are trying to suggest.

They said they're looking into better, more long-term solutions (including the one that literally every person is presenting like they're the first person to have thought of it: making it so heals of the same type don't stack), but because U49 is releasing very soon, the only options that U49 can release with are: a) nothing changes or b) a global heal nerf if you have X HoTs on you.

Please note that neither of those is the desired end solution and ZOS is still coming up with something else, but whatever else will not make it into U49. They will likely have a different solution for U50 or U51 when they have had time to make something that is better.