PvP HoT Stacking Follow-Up

Kickimanjaro · June 2

My apologies for necroing this thread from U49 cycle instead of just posting this thread first, but for those who may not be aware, this conversation took place earlier this year: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/688010/poll-pvp-hot-stacking-options-for-update-49

The result of this, which has now been live for some time, is that while Battle Spirit is active having 8 or more heal-over-time effects on your character reduces your healing received by 33%.

Personally, I do not think that this change had the intended effect, that 8 is too high of a number and that perhaps 6 would have achieved the desired result better... With that said, I want to hear the communities' thoughts on this as well. How has this change affected your experience of PvP? Do you think it achieved what was intended? What do you think could or should be done differently?

It would also be nice if we could get an update from the devs on this. What data do they have to back up whether or not this was an effective change? What are their future plans for balancing group survivability in PvP? What about shields?

Thanks, and sorry for necroing that post earlier...

CameraBeardThePirate · June 2

They went too light. 50% at 2 may have been too harsh, and while I personally would've liked to see that happen just for a patch to see how the meta shakes up, I think 50% at 4 or 5 would've been a solid middle ground.

8 HoTs is a lot, and 33% is peanuts compared to how much healing large optimized groups can push.

Not to mention this nerf did nothing to curb shielding which is arguably even stronger than healing.

Luneca · June 2

There's a number of reasons why it won't work either way:

1. Other heals can still be used to achieve the same thing. Even without HoT stack, you can heal a lot with other heals and achieve the same thing. I've long dropped both vigor and regeneration on live in anticipation of it being nerfed, so the changes to HoTs have zero effect when I heal.

2. The problem isn't actually "healing" alone, it's being able to heal the damage done consistently with no real threat of that damage ever overtaking healing -- damage reduction itself in the game is too powerful as well; defense is way overturned in the game. Nerfing healing won't matter as long as there's a way to consistently reduce or negate incoming damage to nothing or under 1000 points.

3. Relative power of an organized group will always be more powerful than a disorganized one because of proc sets and other automated systems like smart healing. This is actually where the most power comes from and it needs to be addressed if they care about balance. But it means a fundamental change in how the game is played, at least from a healing perspective. Not many "healers" will have the skill to adapt to smart healing being gone.

The only probable "true" solution will be to cut smart healing out so that healers actually have to matter and focusing them makes a real difference. When you have the game essentially being half-played for you with targeting and positioning not mattering, then it make it a lot easier to keep people alive as a healer and it lets you output a lot more heals without mistakes than you would otherwise.

When I'm not on a siege (rare), I heal and I can sit on breach and heal with 0 armor rating and have no real threat of dying thanks to smart healing, roll, and the block button. if I'm healing even if it's outnumbered 5:1 and the entire faction with emp, hammer, scroll, enemy ball group, etc. it's not going to matter.

Now, some may say that is skill. That I know healing out the back of my dark mind. And it's true, it's not even stressful in the slightest. But the idea that one person, with no armor and max defile, and even being negated, can still sit on the breach and heal their faction to victory 19/20 times is a problem.

And I can tell you that the secret sauce under that extra cheese pizza is not HoT stacking, or even shielding; it's smart healing that enables so many targets to be covered effortlessly. And until that changes, they will never ever nerf ball groups or the healers you see changing the battlefield.

Fortunately for PC NA and EU I rarely ever do anything besides just fire siege.

CatoUnchained · June 3

Luneca wrote: »

There's a number of reasons why it won't work either way:

1. Other heals can still be used to achieve the same thing. Even without HoT stack, you can heal a lot with other heals and achieve the same thing. I've long dropped both vigor and regeneration on live in anticipation of it being nerfed, so the changes to HoTs have zero effect when I heal.

2. The problem isn't actually "healing" alone, it's being able to heal the damage done consistently with no real threat of that damage ever overtaking healing -- damage reduction itself in the game is too powerful as well; defense is way overturned in the game. Nerfing healing won't matter as long as there's a way to consistently reduce or negate incoming damage to nothing or under 1000 points.

3. Relative power of an organized group will always be more powerful than a disorganized one because of proc sets and other automated systems like smart healing. This is actually where the most power comes from and it needs to be addressed if they care about balance. But it means a fundamental change in how the game is played, at least from a healing perspective. Not many "healers" will have the skill to adapt to smart healing being gone.

The only probable "true" solution will be to cut smart healing out so that healers actually have to matter and focusing them makes a real difference. When you have the game essentially being half-played for you with targeting and positioning not mattering, then it make it a lot easier to keep people alive as a healer and it lets you output a lot more heals without mistakes than you would otherwise.

When I'm not on a siege (rare), I heal and I can sit on breach and heal with 0 armor rating and have no real threat of dying thanks to smart healing, roll, and the block button. if I'm healing even if it's outnumbered 5:1 and the entire faction with emp, hammer, scroll, enemy ball group, etc. it's not going to matter.

Now, some may say that is skill. That I know healing out the back of my dark mind. And it's true, it's not even stressful in the slightest. But the idea that one person, with no armor and max defile, and even being negated, can still sit on the breach and heal their faction to victory 19/20 times is a problem.

And I can tell you that the secret sauce under that extra cheese pizza is not HoT stacking, or even shielding; it's smart healing that enables so many targets to be covered effortlessly. And until that changes, they will never ever nerf ball groups or the healers you see changing the battlefield.

Fortunately for PC NA and EU I rarely ever do anything besides just fire siege.

You're clearly not a PvP player.

The PvP community has been posting for years what the fix is. ZOS knows. They just haven't even tried it.

NxJoeyD · June 6

I agree with the OP, 8 stacks is WAY too high in the current game state.

IMO they did it under the premise that everyone was slotting either Healing Contingency or Healing Soul but the problem is that approach only works if the player is scribing for Sages Remedy, which most aren't; most are scribing Gladiators or Crusader's and using Vigor as their HoT as each tick is far stronger and then only using the scribed skills for the burst.

The game does have a lot of sources of damage reduction but diminishing returns is a real thing and the typical ceiling for all sources still floats around 70-ish percent; and this has been the case since before subclassing so damage reduction sources aren't playing a bigger role now in tanky-ness now than they were before.

IMO a viable answer here is a hard cap on crit modifiers in PvP. The PvP cap on Crit is soft enabling players to allocate resources above the cap so as to offset crit resistance counterplay. Because of subclassing there's no longer enough reliable sources of crit resistance now and what sources we do have address the crit damage output of a target player but not their ability to crit heal themself, seeing that player keeping a strong heal potential even if their crit damage is reduced.

PvP crit needs a hard cap. This would make current counterplay more reasonably effective in terms of damage & mitigation. For critical healing the factor could scale to, say, 75% of the current player's modifier while Battle Spirit is active. Players would still be able to critically strike a heal and that critical heal would still not be subject to any opponent counter play but at the same time critical heal scaling would no longer allow players to spam with impunity in combat like they can now.

Kartalin · June 6

It's not horrible, but definitely could be more impactful. I think our 12-person group runs 5-6 sticky hots just in case we catch some strays from pugs.

But now lets do the same thing for shields