Not saying it isn't that simple, but zos says that limiting hots to 1 per named spell is too time consuming a fix, and the debate over the number of sticky hots + the amount of reduction to apply is going nowhere.

Ballgroups power levels after arcanist + subclassing were added to the game went up immensely, and a massive portion of that is damage shielding.

I don't have a log on hand atm, but even my non-ballgroup optimized shielder looks as ridiculous as Kikimanjaro's

Over a couple hours in a 4 to 8 man group, my shielder that's made for Battlegrounds can easily put in 30M - 60M shielding in Cyrodiil.

In a single 8v8 Battlegrounds match with some back and forth, the build can put out as high as 15M shielding - and that's actual damage absorbed, not just overshielding. Shields are ridiculous, full stop.

What if the Spellshredder set instead granted full bypass of shields at the cost of becoming immune to shields yourself (similar to how certain mythics or skills prevent you from being healed by others)? Do you think this might be an effective way to add counterplay against shields?

Kickimanjaro wrote: »

The reason groups appear unkillable is shields. I want more ways to remove shields from opponents or more ways to inflict healing absorption.

I don't have a single heal on my bar but maintain 50% uptime on Gibbering Shelter, here's a 4-hour example from Grey Host NA this past Saturday. I specifically ran this as a test to see if I'd get dispelled while obviously running GIbber for the whole day. I wasn't dispelled once and people kept hitting my shield (letting me *** my shield out to the 11 nearest allies, ayy lmao).


And this is a build that is almost generally considered *** by anyone I show it to; it's just an example of what we can currently build towards in the current meta. I think Gibber is fun, so I build around it, and I'm glad my group lets me bring it occasionally even if this isn't optimal, but I acknowledge that the current meta allowing us to layer shields with decent strength and reapplication intervals makes us effectively unkillable unless our movement can be hindered in siege or another group surprises us with a well-timed combo.

With all that said... Gibber can be countered, but in my tests this weekend no one even tried. There is something wrong with the balance right now, and I want it fixed; but I want it fixed considerately, not reflexively. The ongoing community involvement in this and the willingness by the devs to be more communicative makes me feel good that we're going to end up in a better place.

I'm glad that you add that nobody really tried to counter you, as that is important context for all this discourse.

Like, the goal in reigning-in some of these overpowered features is categorically NOT to make Cyrodiil safe for "Johnny Snipe Spammer" who is bad at the game and who makes easy fodder for organized players by mindlessly chasing them around corners with a bad 20k HP "Alcast PvP Build" and such. Those types of players should always get farmed until they get better and smarter. That is simply the nature of PvP. The goal is to reward excellence rather than to encourage or reward mediocrity.

So with that in mind, we should be thinking of ways to reward smart pugs, small groups, and bombers for making good plays and to enable them to make more of them. Not to reward mindless zerging by low-tier players who cannot be bothered to learn the game beyond "follow the herd and spam ranged skill on target".

Gibbering, for what it's worth, puts out big log numbers but is fairly bad by itself at actually countering burst due to its middling shield size per player and its long refresh interval (4 seconds is a literal eternity when you're facing a coordinated bomb). I know that I am not particularly keen to see ultimates getting nerfed before the most egregious source of power-creep, the Health-scaling Scribing shields, are addressed.

The Scribing shields should be nuked from orbit.

decairn wrote: »

Building into shields - 2 scribed shields can get you 20k shields that can be recast in next 2 cooldowns. Think of the 20k as near instant refillable HP. You extend effective HP by 20k, take the hits, people stay out of execute range, they take less damage overall, AND buy time for other heals to come in. It's a durability multiplier on top of stackable HoTs; meanwhile on the damage side the offense just blew their wad on the first hit and couldn't get through shields, and take longer to recover / get ready again for a burst window.

Yes, this.

And that is the reason why the Scribing shields have to be nerfed into Oblivion.

Regular spammable shields have no business whatsoever being that strong.

Yudo wrote: »

The reason ball groups can stand still and take no damage if they wanted to imo is as simple as everyone maintaining their vigor and that is it. One shielder is actually great, because they can act as the only one absorbing, and provides crit mitigation. But shields by design are diminishing while hots are not in their current state.

Shields don't provide crit mitigation.

The main benefit of shielding is an anti-burst tool since it takes significantly more damage to cut through 40k health and 20-30k shielding at once than just 40k health. Helps to keep people from dropping to execute range and just generally gives more time to react to incoming damage. Also slightly improves uptimes on stuff like SPC and ozezan which proc from overhealing.

Yudo wrote: »

By mitigation I meant shields cannot take crit damage, so in a sense keeping a layer on you is a form of mitigation.

no. wrong.

Yudo wrote: »

ArctosCethlenn wrote: »

Yudo wrote: »

The reason ball groups can stand still and take no damage if they wanted to imo is as simple as everyone maintaining their vigor and that is it. One shielder is actually great, because they can act as the only one absorbing, and provides crit mitigation. But shields by design are diminishing while hots are not in their current state.

Shields don't provide crit mitigation.

The main benefit of shielding is an anti-burst tool since it takes significantly more damage to cut through 40k health and 20-30k shielding at once than just 40k health. Helps to keep people from dropping to execute range and just generally gives more time to react to incoming damage. Also slightly improves uptimes on stuff like SPC and ozezan which proc from overhealing.

We don't need to go deep on what HOTs and Shields are used for really, we just need to know which one is considered more powerful. Consider this: a ball relying only on shields with one hot ticking, and a ball relying only on HOTs with one shield ticking, just to answer this question. I know which one will be OP and which one is wasting APM.

HOTs is a click and forget with longer duration that is always effective when healing is needed.
Shields cannot reach the same tooltip for the same APM ever. They overlap and have like a 6s duration.
Some of you talk about 20K shields, but you must have forgotten battle spirit.
I get it, shields are still strong, there is a reason why you don't even have to try when they cast barrier.
This is why this question should not be either or.

By mitigation I meant shields cannot take crit damage, so in a sense keeping a layer on you is a form of mitigation.

Balls were balling just fine with HoT stacking before scribing, and now they have even more tools.
I just believe the more accurate answer to OP question is HOTs.

I would agree that the log performance of HOTs vs. shields is fungible (as most damage absorbed is chip damage that otherwise would be replenished via HOTs) to a great degree. But the point made about shields providing insulation to incoming burst damage is the more important observation.

For example, you can completely counter stacked HOTs if you global (which is to say, kill someone in <1 GCD) a target. Vigor and Radiating tick every 2 seconds and ideally a target is dead before those stacked HOTs ever get the chance to tick on them.

A bomber can global a group, a group can global a targeted player in a GvG, a small-scaler can global another small-scaler, etc.. That is fundamentally high-level skill expression because it takes tight coordination as well as an effective damage and CC combo to pull it off. It is the true, albeit difficult to achieve, counter to the stacked HOTs mechanic.

However, with shields providing such a crazy degree of anti-burst insulation... that mission becomes almost impossible barring catastrophic error on the part of your target. Even ballgroups in GvGs have huge difficulty penetrating the full nested shield stack of their targets plus the actual Health bar. And if that is a challenge for a ballgroup then it is almost impossible for anyone else.

I largely agree with the previous arguments about how powerful scribing shields are specifically.

How impactful do yall think it would be to reduce the range of these from 8m to 6m (or even shorter)?

Context: I think 6m used to be the range for Magma Shell (U49 increases this to 28m, lol, barrier remains 12m). I had previously experimented with replacing one of our Barriers with a Magma Shell but found that the 6m range was too much of a burden to justify condensing our group to cast and reverted to Barrier. I believe this places the scribing shields as the ones with the shortest range in U49, but perhaps that's not short enough. This is, of course, not a great comparison because one is an ult that costs around 200 and the others are spammables costing regular resources... but it was the range that stood out to me as something not talked about a lot in this space.

ArctosCethlenn wrote: »

Yudo wrote: »

By mitigation I meant shields cannot take crit damage, so in a sense keeping a layer on you is a form of mitigation.

no. wrong.

Thanks kind of important info, cant believe I missed this.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

However, with shields providing such a crazy degree of anti-burst insulation... that mission becomes almost impossible barring catastrophic error on the part of your target. Even ballgroups in GvGs have huge difficulty penetrating the full nested shield stack of their targets plus the actual Health bar. And if that is a challenge for a ballgroup then it is almost impossible for anyone else.

I understand this. I was more thinking in lines of zos finally agreeing to remove cross healing or shielding, but we are only allowed to pick one. Are we really going to pick shields?

Removing cross shielding does nothing to the existing ball setup. Everything will continue to run as it is. The only thing that can hurt them is if you remove barrier from the game. I do understand they are will be easier to kill without the cross shielding they have access to now.

But removing cross healing immediately forces new setups, the existing balls cannot exist as they are, and power would have to shift.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

This is definitely a "por que no los dos?" situation. Nerf HOTs and shields.

Abso-frigging-lutely.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

The Scribing shields should be nuked from orbit.

This.

Health should not scale any heal or shield that can affect a target other than the caster. Health scaling defensive tools should only work on the caster, as they are made for tanks.

When you allow Health scaling abilities to affect others, you're left with a build like the Clown Form shielder: a 20s window of time where someone with 150k effective Health is spamming 20k effective Health on their entire group every second, stacking up to 40k shields in just 2 globals on everyone. Oh and the best part? That build doesn't even use Barrier.

A truly all out shield stacking group could theoretically output up to 90k shielding on everyone, with high uptime.

It's ludicrous.

Hots before Scribing, nowadays its both.

The thing is that shields and hots achieve a different kind of tankiness.

Shields are a capacity build tool much like max health. For any given DPS this tells you how long you can survive. If a given meta has players outputting 10kdps, having 30khp means you will survive 10s. Shielding with 30k buys you another 3s. This deficit type tankiness is for running in and running out of situations which is why it always worked with sorcerer's dive in dive out kit. Most ballgroups now are fully immune with near max movement speed running in and out.

Hots are a constantly sustained form of tankiness which you would use if you were planning on staying in the damage and soaking in it. Which just helps extend your above maxhp shields incase anything gets through.

---

The shields, immunity, and movement speed are certainly a major issue that makes it practically on the ballgroup player to mess up and get caught out. Much like how shieldsorcs always had the capacity to live through anything so long as they got out with streak to recover again.

There just isn't really a good way other than preventing stacking of over time effects to softcap groups from stacking the same BIS hot over and over. This is too hard for zos to implement unless they split pve and pvp skill code and double all their future balancing work. Most of all the other proposed blanket ideas would end up affecting solo and smallman vs targeting the actual issue which is stacking group play. The only notable blanket idea was have battlespirit cut healing and shielding based on group size....but again this is kinda too broad and doesnt target a specific issue.

A better start for shields would probably be looking at what they scale off of, perhaps we shouldnt have so many shields that scale with max health. Having a tanky stat make you double tanky has never been a good plan, especially HP which is so readily available in the current stat system. The only good plan to allow things like tanks to have health scaling shields is to make it scale based on %missing hp so it must be used tactically instead of spammed.

Ballgroups will always be a problem, so long as group buffs are able to go to 12 people in a pvp setting. You wanna limit ballgroups? Besides limiting hots and shields, you have to limit group sets. Every (good) comp group runs the following core sets: olo, rally, pa. These core weapon damage sets let a group reach 7k spell damage easily with the proper buffs rolling. This also enables alkosh, which gives them lots of pen. Defensive sets, a good comp group fits in gossamer, meritorious, ozezan. These sets (besides rally cry) don’t get weaker or are limited to the amount of targets the effect. In a 12 man group you can fit every single effective group play set in the game, because these sets aren’t limited to who they can affect. Limiting some of these sets to only effect 4 people would drastically reduce the effectiveness of ball groups. Making trial sets only able to work while unaffected by battle spirit or making sets like alkosh or crimson oath only effect monsters would reduce ball group damage by a lot. A strong 6 man comp with competent players can fight a servers worth of uncoordinated players and still win, let alone a 12 man with double the sets