PvP Balance Feedback - Offensive Investment Doesn't Feel Rewarding Enough

AlleWk · June 20

Hello Dev Team,

First, thank you for all the work you continue to put into PvP.

I would like to share some feedback regarding offensive and defensive stat scaling in Cyrodiil.

The Core Issue

Currently, it often feels like investing heavily into offensive stats provides a smaller benefit than investing into survivability.

Many players can build very high Health, strong defenses, sustain, and healing while still maintaining enough damage to remain a serious offensive threat.

Meanwhile, players who sacrifice a large amount of survivability to maximize Weapon Damage, Spell Damage, Stamina, or Magicka do not always gain enough offensive power to justify the risk.

Suggested Direction

I believe abilities should scale more strongly with offensive attributes and less with general resource pools.

Some examples:

Increase the contribution of Weapon Damage and Spell Damage to ability scaling.
Reduce the contribution of maximum resource stats to damage scaling.
Consider reducing base ability damage while increasing offensive-stat scaling.
Why This Could Help

This would create clearer build identities:

Tanks would remain durable but would need to sacrifice more damage.
Offensive builds would become a meaningful threat to tanks and off-tanks.
Players who invest heavily into damage would be rewarded more appropriately for the survivability they give up.
Build choices would involve more meaningful trade-offs.

I also believe damage abilities should primarily scale from offensive stats rather than whichever attribute happens to be highest.

If a player chooses to invest heavily into Weapon Damage, Spell Damage, Stamina, or Magicka for offense, that investment should be reflected more strongly in their damage output.

Currently, it sometimes feels possible to gain too much survivability while retaining too much damage.

I am not asking for tanks to be nerfed into uselessness.

I simply believe offensive investment should be rewarded more, and that damage-focused builds should feel more threatening when they sacrifice significant survivability to achieve that role.

Thank you for reading and considering the feedback.

Usureki · June 20

While I'm facing similar issues, the solution is not simple.

We are still having pulse gankers oneshotting anything they find

AlleWk · June 20

Yes, it's possible, but having someone with high and acceptable damage output is also important, as is having someone with high defense. The biggest problem arises when someone has extremely high defense and high damage.

To kill them with Pulse after that, you would have to sacrifice their defense.

It doesn't solve the problem, but it would help.

aLi3nZ · June 21

I have a sorc build with 58k magika, 32k health and 5k spell damage and near resistance caps. Thanks to font of power and conservation of energy.

Stacking into magika was good for this build.,

Tonturri · June 21

Reducing the contribution of resource pools to damage would exacerbate the problem. ZOS has already nerfed that area of the game - I remember when huge resource pools were desired for damage, and now people can easily get away with 20-25k resource pools. People complained about sorcs all the time with low HP, but 40-50k max magicka for huge shields and big damage.

I think the solution is the opposite to what you have outlined - increase the contribution of resource pools to damage and healing while reducing the contribution of weapon/spell damage to healing by a decent amount (super precise calculations going on here, lol) and by a smaller margin to damage.

Builds can currently get strong defense and offense with low resource pools, and I don't think reducing the contribution of max resource pools to damage will result in the change you want. It's possible to get 40k health, high armor, and low resource pools but still have oodles of weapon/spell damage, which imo is where (part of) the issue is. Boosting the contribution of resource to damage and even more to healing while reducing the contribution of wpn/spell dmg stats to damage (by a little) and healing (by much more) would impact tank builds while leaving dedicated offensive setups (which would have resource pools in the 25-30k, or more range) not as impacted.

This would reduce the damage and healing of 40k+ HP builds and force them to either do something about it or just have less damage and healing.

That said, part of the problem is also the same as what ESO has had since forever - procs, OP sets, etc. The power budget allocation of a skill and the contribution to its damage (or healing) tooltip from weapon/spell damage and resource pools is one part of the problem. People being able to get huge spell/weapon damage numbers so easily is another - there aren't enough sources contributing to that total number, so the 'oomph' of the final value is concentrated in just a few stats (or one, rather - weapon/spell damage).

Max resources don't really have much of a point beyond being a cast limit, either. Sustain is so high that there's no functional difference between 20k and 30k stam/mag. Having resources be just another damage stat that also gives you a few extra casts isn't ideal, either, and imo ZOS should aim at adjusting that - perhaps providing 1-2% regen based on total max stat while reducing other sources of sustain across the board (slightly). For example, providing 2% regen per 10k of a resource, so 20k resources gains 4% regen (800) and 30k gains 6% regen (1600). Admittedly those numbers were pulled from where the sun don't shine and are way too high, but someone getting paid to do math could figure out that the base resource pool is X, the 40k HP high def builds average around 20-25k resources, and adjust base stats while adding extra benefits/regen to max resource pool such that the high def builds stay (relatively) the same or are nerfed a little bit while providing more benefits to higher resource builds. Something like that.

Default values at max are, what, 16k HP, 12k mag and stam, 300 HP recovery and 500 mag/stam recovery? 2.5% of 20000 is 500. There's some rejiggling mathy stuff that could be done here depending on how much time and resources is available to work on how stats function to serve the ultimate goal of nerfing does-everything-all-the-time tank builds while providing room for dedicated offensive setups to shine more.

AlleWk · June 21

Tonturri wrote: »

Reducing the contribution of resource pools to damage would exacerbate the problem. ZOS has already nerfed that area of the game - I remember when huge resource pools were desired for damage, and now people can easily get away with 20-25k resource pools. People complained about sorcs all the time with low HP, but 40-50k max magicka for huge shields and big damage.

I think the solution is the opposite to what you have outlined - increase the contribution of resource pools to damage and healing while reducing the contribution of weapon/spell damage to healing by a decent amount (super precise calculations going on here, lol) and by a smaller margin to damage.

Builds can currently get strong defense and offense with low resource pools, and I don't think reducing the contribution of max resource pools to damage will result in the change you want. It's possible to get 40k health, high armor, and low resource pools but still have oodles of weapon/spell damage, which imo is where (part of) the issue is. Boosting the contribution of resource to damage and even more to healing while reducing the contribution of wpn/spell dmg stats to damage (by a little) and healing (by much more) would impact tank builds while leaving dedicated offensive setups (which would have resource pools in the 25-30k, or more range) not as impacted.

This would reduce the damage and healing of 40k+ HP builds and force them to either do something about it or just have less damage and healing.

That said, part of the problem is also the same as what ESO has had since forever - procs, OP sets, etc. The power budget allocation of a skill and the contribution to its damage (or healing) tooltip from weapon/spell damage and resource pools is one part of the problem. People being able to get huge spell/weapon damage numbers so easily is another - there aren't enough sources contributing to that total number, so the 'oomph' of the final value is concentrated in just a few stats (or one, rather - weapon/spell damage).

Max resources don't really have much of a point beyond being a cast limit, either. Sustain is so high that there's no functional difference between 20k and 30k stam/mag. Having resources be just another damage stat that also gives you a few extra casts isn't ideal, either, and imo ZOS should aim at adjusting that - perhaps providing 1-2% regen based on total max stat while reducing other sources of sustain across the board (slightly). For example, providing 2% regen per 10k of a resource, so 20k resources gains 4% regen (800) and 30k gains 6% regen (1600). Admittedly those numbers were pulled from where the sun don't shine and are way too high, but someone getting paid to do math could figure out that the base resource pool is X, the 40k HP high def builds average around 20-25k resources, and adjust base stats while adding extra benefits/regen to max resource pool such that the high def builds stay (relatively) the same or are nerfed a little bit while providing more benefits to higher resource builds. Something like that.

Default values at max are, what, 16k HP, 12k mag and stam, 300 HP recovery and 500 mag/stam recovery? 2.5% of 20000 is 500. There's some rejiggling mathy stuff that could be done here depending on how much time and resources is available to work on how stats function to serve the ultimate goal of nerfing does-everything-all-the-time tank builds while providing room for dedicated offensive setups to shine more.

I think we're actually pretty close in our views.

My point isn't that Weapon/Spell Damage should become even more important. I agree that Max Stamina and Max Magicka should matter more.

I would like to see the 64 attribute points have a bigger impact on build identity. Players investing heavily into Stamina or Magicka should gain more offensive power and sustain, while players investing heavily into Health should gain survivability but sacrifice more damage and resource recovery.

Right now, tanky builds can often maintain strong survivability, damage, healing, and sustain at the same time. If resource recovery scaled more with Max Stamina and Max Magicka, tank builds would need to invest more into recovery through jewelry, sets, or other choices, creating more meaningful trade-offs.

Vaqual · June 21

People will always build as tanky as they need to be to not get one-shot by unavoidable combos. People don't just favor bruiser setups because they like to make others miserable, but because it is absolutely frustrating if you have no room for counterplay. Everytime ZOS allows bigger bursts, people build tankier. It isn't healthy for the game to allow glass cannons to basically "bully" tankier players into a defensive loop without counterplay. If anything, healing and sustain needs to be the weak spot. A DPS player should be able to deplete a tankier players resources to achieve a kill. That would mean that both the glass cannon setup and the bruiser setup have to make multiple correct plays to achieve victory.
However, ZOS is sadly going exactly in the wrong direction with their recent changes, buffing heal and sustain across the board. This absolutely favours bruisers and I recognize why glass cannon players may take issue with that. Increasing burst potential on glass cannons/neutering damage scaling for bruisers is still not the right approach to fix this.

AlleWk · June 21

Vaqual wrote: »

People will always build as tanky as they need to be to not get one-shot by unavoidable combos. People don't just favor bruiser setups because they like to make others miserable, but because it is absolutely frustrating if you have no room for counterplay. Everytime ZOS allows bigger bursts, people build tankier. It isn't healthy for the game to allow glass cannons to basically "bully" tankier players into a defensive loop without counterplay. If anything, healing and sustain needs to be the weak spot. A DPS player should be able to deplete a tankier players resources to achieve a kill. That would mean that both the glass cannon setup and the bruiser setup have to make multiple correct plays to achieve victory.
However, ZOS is sadly going exactly in the wrong direction with their recent changes, buffing heal and sustain across the board. This absolutely favours bruisers and I recognize why glass cannon players may take issue with that. Increasing burst potential on glass cannons/neutering damage scaling for bruisers is still not the right approach to fix this.

So in fact, the high resource gain is the main problem.

But what do you think of the wp dmg allocation?
Instead of having so much Weapon Damage come from the weapon itself, what if more of it came from your main attribute (Max Stamina/Magicka)?

For example, a player stacking Health would still be tanky, but would naturally have lower damage, while a player investing into Stamina or Magicka would get more offensive power.

Tonturri · June 21

AlleWk wrote: »

Tonturri wrote: »

Reducing the contribution of resource pools to damage would exacerbate the problem. ZOS has already nerfed that area of the game - I remember when huge resource pools were desired for damage, and now people can easily get away with 20-25k resource pools. People complained about sorcs all the time with low HP, but 40-50k max magicka for huge shields and big damage.

I think the solution is the opposite to what you have outlined - increase the contribution of resource pools to damage and healing while reducing the contribution of weapon/spell damage to healing by a decent amount (super precise calculations going on here, lol) and by a smaller margin to damage.

Builds can currently get strong defense and offense with low resource pools, and I don't think reducing the contribution of max resource pools to damage will result in the change you want. It's possible to get 40k health, high armor, and low resource pools but still have oodles of weapon/spell damage, which imo is where (part of) the issue is. Boosting the contribution of resource to damage and even more to healing while reducing the contribution of wpn/spell dmg stats to damage (by a little) and healing (by much more) would impact tank builds while leaving dedicated offensive setups (which would have resource pools in the 25-30k, or more range) not as impacted.

This would reduce the damage and healing of 40k+ HP builds and force them to either do something about it or just have less damage and healing.

That said, part of the problem is also the same as what ESO has had since forever - procs, OP sets, etc. The power budget allocation of a skill and the contribution to its damage (or healing) tooltip from weapon/spell damage and resource pools is one part of the problem. People being able to get huge spell/weapon damage numbers so easily is another - there aren't enough sources contributing to that total number, so the 'oomph' of the final value is concentrated in just a few stats (or one, rather - weapon/spell damage).

Max resources don't really have much of a point beyond being a cast limit, either. Sustain is so high that there's no functional difference between 20k and 30k stam/mag. Having resources be just another damage stat that also gives you a few extra casts isn't ideal, either, and imo ZOS should aim at adjusting that - perhaps providing 1-2% regen based on total max stat while reducing other sources of sustain across the board (slightly). For example, providing 2% regen per 10k of a resource, so 20k resources gains 4% regen (800) and 30k gains 6% regen (1600). Admittedly those numbers were pulled from where the sun don't shine and are way too high, but someone getting paid to do math could figure out that the base resource pool is X, the 40k HP high def builds average around 20-25k resources, and adjust base stats while adding extra benefits/regen to max resource pool such that the high def builds stay (relatively) the same or are nerfed a little bit while providing more benefits to higher resource builds. Something like that.

Default values at max are, what, 16k HP, 12k mag and stam, 300 HP recovery and 500 mag/stam recovery? 2.5% of 20000 is 500. There's some rejiggling mathy stuff that could be done here depending on how much time and resources is available to work on how stats function to serve the ultimate goal of nerfing does-everything-all-the-time tank builds while providing room for dedicated offensive setups to shine more.

I think we're actually pretty close in our views.

My point isn't that Weapon/Spell Damage should become even more important. I agree that Max Stamina and Max Magicka should matter more.

I would like to see the 64 attribute points have a bigger impact on build identity. Players investing heavily into Stamina or Magicka should gain more offensive power and sustain, while players investing heavily into Health should gain survivability but sacrifice more damage and resource recovery.

Right now, tanky builds can often maintain strong survivability, damage, healing, and sustain at the same time. If resource recovery scaled more with Max Stamina and Max Magicka, tank builds would need to invest more into recovery through jewelry, sets, or other choices, creating more meaningful trade-offs.

Maybe I am misunderstanding your point, or we just agree on the end goal but diverge on the ideal method. I'm mostly pointing at your words here:

"Increase the contribution of Weapon Damage and Spell Damage to ability scaling.
Reduce the contribution of maximum resource stats to damage scaling.
Consider reducing base ability damage while increasing offensive-stat scaling."

Because:
- Weapon and spell damage are already super high, easy to get, and very impactful
- Max resource stats already have low contribution to damage scaling
- The third point is a fair option, but has similar issues to #1 imo.

If you're trying to say that weapon/spell damage shouldn't become even more important, but max resources should, then I agree, but the way I read the rest of your post it seems there's a contradiction there.

Just based off your reply though - yes, absolutely. Investing 64 points into health is a *huge* increase in durability, while investing 64 points into mag or stam is a marginal increase to damage and...Basically nothing else (maybe some regen depending on class, for example sorc class mastery w/blood magic scales with max resources, so you do technically gain more sustain there, but even so).

AlleWk · June 21

Tonturri wrote: »

AlleWk wrote: »

Tonturri wrote: »

Reducing the contribution of resource pools to damage would exacerbate the problem. ZOS has already nerfed that area of the game - I remember when huge resource pools were desired for damage, and now people can easily get away with 20-25k resource pools. People complained about sorcs all the time with low HP, but 40-50k max magicka for huge shields and big damage.

I think the solution is the opposite to what you have outlined - increase the contribution of resource pools to damage and healing while reducing the contribution of weapon/spell damage to healing by a decent amount (super precise calculations going on here, lol) and by a smaller margin to damage.

Builds can currently get strong defense and offense with low resource pools, and I don't think reducing the contribution of max resource pools to damage will result in the change you want. It's possible to get 40k health, high armor, and low resource pools but still have oodles of weapon/spell damage, which imo is where (part of) the issue is. Boosting the contribution of resource to damage and even more to healing while reducing the contribution of wpn/spell dmg stats to damage (by a little) and healing (by much more) would impact tank builds while leaving dedicated offensive setups (which would have resource pools in the 25-30k, or more range) not as impacted.

This would reduce the damage and healing of 40k+ HP builds and force them to either do something about it or just have less damage and healing.

That said, part of the problem is also the same as what ESO has had since forever - procs, OP sets, etc. The power budget allocation of a skill and the contribution to its damage (or healing) tooltip from weapon/spell damage and resource pools is one part of the problem. People being able to get huge spell/weapon damage numbers so easily is another - there aren't enough sources contributing to that total number, so the 'oomph' of the final value is concentrated in just a few stats (or one, rather - weapon/spell damage).

Max resources don't really have much of a point beyond being a cast limit, either. Sustain is so high that there's no functional difference between 20k and 30k stam/mag. Having resources be just another damage stat that also gives you a few extra casts isn't ideal, either, and imo ZOS should aim at adjusting that - perhaps providing 1-2% regen based on total max stat while reducing other sources of sustain across the board (slightly). For example, providing 2% regen per 10k of a resource, so 20k resources gains 4% regen (800) and 30k gains 6% regen (1600). Admittedly those numbers were pulled from where the sun don't shine and are way too high, but someone getting paid to do math could figure out that the base resource pool is X, the 40k HP high def builds average around 20-25k resources, and adjust base stats while adding extra benefits/regen to max resource pool such that the high def builds stay (relatively) the same or are nerfed a little bit while providing more benefits to higher resource builds. Something like that.

Default values at max are, what, 16k HP, 12k mag and stam, 300 HP recovery and 500 mag/stam recovery? 2.5% of 20000 is 500. There's some rejiggling mathy stuff that could be done here depending on how much time and resources is available to work on how stats function to serve the ultimate goal of nerfing does-everything-all-the-time tank builds while providing room for dedicated offensive setups to shine more.

I think we're actually pretty close in our views.

My point isn't that Weapon/Spell Damage should become even more important. I agree that Max Stamina and Max Magicka should matter more.

I would like to see the 64 attribute points have a bigger impact on build identity. Players investing heavily into Stamina or Magicka should gain more offensive power and sustain, while players investing heavily into Health should gain survivability but sacrifice more damage and resource recovery.

Right now, tanky builds can often maintain strong survivability, damage, healing, and sustain at the same time. If resource recovery scaled more with Max Stamina and Max Magicka, tank builds would need to invest more into recovery through jewelry, sets, or other choices, creating more meaningful trade-offs.

Maybe I am misunderstanding your point, or we just agree on the end goal but diverge on the ideal method. I'm mostly pointing at your words here:

"Increase the contribution of Weapon Damage and Spell Damage to ability scaling.
Reduce the contribution of maximum resource stats to damage scaling.
Consider reducing base ability damage while increasing offensive-stat scaling."

Because:
- Weapon and spell damage are already super high, easy to get, and very impactful
- Max resource stats already have low contribution to damage scaling
- The third point is a fair option, but has similar issues to #1 imo.

If you're trying to say that weapon/spell damage shouldn't become even more important, but max resources should, then I agree, but the way I read the rest of your post it seems there's a contradiction there.

Just based off your reply though - yes, absolutely. Investing 64 points into health is a *huge* increase in durability, while investing 64 points into mag or stam is a marginal increase to damage and...Basically nothing else (maybe some regen depending on class, for example sorc class mastery w/blood magic scales with max resources, so you do technically gain more sustain there, but even so).

In that part I was talking about the base damage of the abilities.

For example, Silvershard has a higher base damage than Poison Inject.

The idea would be for the base damage before adding WP damage to be lower, and the multiplier on top of the WP damage to be higher.

Let's say that 1 ability deals 100 base damage + 90% WP damage.

What I meant in that part would be to set the base damage to 80 + 100% WP damage.
Sorry if that part wasn't clear.

Vaqual · June 21

AlleWk wrote: »

Vaqual wrote: »

People will always build as tanky as they need to be to not get one-shot by unavoidable combos. People don't just favor bruiser setups because they like to make others miserable, but because it is absolutely frustrating if you have no room for counterplay. Everytime ZOS allows bigger bursts, people build tankier. It isn't healthy for the game to allow glass cannons to basically "bully" tankier players into a defensive loop without counterplay. If anything, healing and sustain needs to be the weak spot. A DPS player should be able to deplete a tankier players resources to achieve a kill. That would mean that both the glass cannon setup and the bruiser setup have to make multiple correct plays to achieve victory.
However, ZOS is sadly going exactly in the wrong direction with their recent changes, buffing heal and sustain across the board. This absolutely favours bruisers and I recognize why glass cannon players may take issue with that. Increasing burst potential on glass cannons/neutering damage scaling for bruisers is still not the right approach to fix this.

So in fact, the high resource gain is the main problem.

But what do you think of the wp dmg allocation?
Instead of having so much Weapon Damage come from the weapon itself, what if more of it came from your main attribute (Max Stamina/Magicka)?

For example, a player stacking Health would still be tanky, but would naturally have lower damage, while a player investing into Stamina or Magicka would get more offensive power.

It might be possible to fine tune the system that way, although I do not expect a dramatic change without really gimping weapons. But if we look at what enables the bulk of damage on bruiser specs, we can usually see that it is optimal to let your "base" stats work for you by increasing the number of damage instances. That means procs, delayed burst, dots and status effects. While WD/SD and resources do scale damage reasonably well from a DPS PoV, it is often a far greater net increase to try and stack effects for bursts. That is why a bruiser with good timing can easily hit critical mass, when trying to beat up squishier targets. The target has the option to counterplay, e.g. by reading shalks or BB, but due to effect clutter, ever tighter combo reset windows and multiple delayed burst options, this has also gotten much harder.

When subclassing was proposed I suggested a lock-out time for delayed burst abilities, similar to the proc set rule. But I am not sure they ever considered something like that, as they basically built DK in a way where the kit itself offers multiple delayed hits, dots and high burst killshots.

Tldr: I do not think we have to look at stats, but rather damage instances.

AlleWk · June 21

Vaqual wrote: »

AlleWk wrote: »

Vaqual wrote: »

People will always build as tanky as they need to be to not get one-shot by unavoidable combos. People don't just favor bruiser setups because they like to make others miserable, but because it is absolutely frustrating if you have no room for counterplay. Everytime ZOS allows bigger bursts, people build tankier. It isn't healthy for the game to allow glass cannons to basically "bully" tankier players into a defensive loop without counterplay. If anything, healing and sustain needs to be the weak spot. A DPS player should be able to deplete a tankier players resources to achieve a kill. That would mean that both the glass cannon setup and the bruiser setup have to make multiple correct plays to achieve victory.
However, ZOS is sadly going exactly in the wrong direction with their recent changes, buffing heal and sustain across the board. This absolutely favours bruisers and I recognize why glass cannon players may take issue with that. Increasing burst potential on glass cannons/neutering damage scaling for bruisers is still not the right approach to fix this.

So in fact, the high resource gain is the main problem.

But what do you think of the wp dmg allocation?
Instead of having so much Weapon Damage come from the weapon itself, what if more of it came from your main attribute (Max Stamina/Magicka)?

For example, a player stacking Health would still be tanky, but would naturally have lower damage, while a player investing into Stamina or Magicka would get more offensive power.

It might be possible to fine tune the system that way, although I do not expect a dramatic change without really gimping weapons. But if we look at what enables the bulk of damage on bruiser specs, we can usually see that it is optimal to let your "base" stats work for you by increasing the number of damage instances. That means procs, delayed burst, dots and status effects. While WD/SD and resources do scale damage reasonably well from a DPS PoV, it is often a far greater net increase to try and stack effects for bursts. That is why a bruiser with good timing can easily hit critical mass, when trying to beat up squishier targets. The target has the option to counterplay, e.g. by reading shalks or BB, but due to effect clutter, ever tighter combo reset windows and multiple delayed burst options, this has also gotten much harder.

When subclassing was proposed I suggested a lock-out time for delayed burst abilities, similar to the proc set rule. But I am not sure they ever considered something like that, as they basically built DK in a way where the kit itself offers multiple delayed hits, dots and high burst killshots.

Tldr: I do not think we have to look at stats, but rather damage instances.

Interesting. It's true that all the ideas thrown around here would have to be tested with changes of no more than 5%, and even then balanced on the test server.
But it would be worthwhile to at least have some direction on how to resolve these bottlenecks.

Triipzzz · June 25

I'm not sure what the solution is but there is definitely a trend to dishing out major and minor buffs that were previously very hard to achieve.

Having played PvP religiously over the past few years the nerf to pulls has made it hard to kill tanky groups and there is a general trend towards building tanky to avoid death. They don't care if they can kill anyone.

If you try to build a decent bomber it is really hard to get pops for this very reason and whatever damage you increase as OP suggests does not feel like it is making a tangible difference.

BXR_Lonestar · June 26

Triipzzz wrote: »

I'm not sure what the solution is but there is definitely a trend to dishing out major and minor buffs that were previously very hard to achieve.

Having played PvP religiously over the past few years the nerf to pulls has made it hard to kill tanky groups and there is a general trend towards building tanky to avoid death. They don't care if they can kill anyone.

If you try to build a decent bomber it is really hard to get pops for this very reason and whatever damage you increase as OP suggests does not feel like it is making a tangible difference.

The problem isn't just that people are building tanky. The problem is that every time they make changes to radically increase damage in PVP, groups just keep getting bigger. At the end of the day, survivability is based on how many healers/shielders your group is carrying. When I started ballgrouping, a "Ballgroup" was a group of 12 with 3-4 healers, 7 damage, and a pull.

Then as power has continued to progress, the trend was to increase the number of healers in the 12 man group to 6. Then 8.
Then we saw groups adding a whole second group. A second pull often. But another group with healers and maybe a couple of damage. Its hard to tell how the groups are organized, but there is definitely more than 12 running together - quite often 18-20. And as far as we can tell, at least 10+ healers, running every buff-set in the game. Every defensive set, every offensive set, every sustain set. All making it so they have to invest in nothing but health.

Shields are stacking (or at least they seem to be stacking) over 100k+ per person in the ball, and then you throw on all the cross heals and ulti heals and the damage in these groups can have insane survivability even while running around in Plaguebreak + Vicious Death (yes, we've seen them running both), and they have extreme damage burst thanks to balorgs.

There are Tanky small groups sure, but a sweaty enough group can wipe them with enough patience and pressure. But the major problem i see at this point is because of the damage pressure being so high, many comped groups are basically comped zerging at this point.

AlleWk · June 27

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Triipzzz wrote: »

I'm not sure what the solution is but there is definitely a trend to dishing out major and minor buffs that were previously very hard to achieve.

Having played PvP religiously over the past few years the nerf to pulls has made it hard to kill tanky groups and there is a general trend towards building tanky to avoid death. They don't care if they can kill anyone.

If you try to build a decent bomber it is really hard to get pops for this very reason and whatever damage you increase as OP suggests does not feel like it is making a tangible difference.

The problem isn't just that people are building tanky. The problem is that every time they make changes to radically increase damage in PVP, groups just keep getting bigger. At the end of the day, survivability is based on how many healers/shielders your group is carrying. When I started ballgrouping, a "Ballgroup" was a group of 12 with 3-4 healers, 7 damage, and a pull.

Then as power has continued to progress, the trend was to increase the number of healers in the 12 man group to 6. Then 8.
Then we saw groups adding a whole second group. A second pull often. But another group with healers and maybe a couple of damage. Its hard to tell how the groups are organized, but there is definitely more than 12 running together - quite often 18-20. And as far as we can tell, at least 10+ healers, running every buff-set in the game. Every defensive set, every offensive set, every sustain set. All making it so they have to invest in nothing but health.

Shields are stacking (or at least they seem to be stacking) over 100k+ per person in the ball, and then you throw on all the cross heals and ulti heals and the damage in these groups can have insane survivability even while running around in Plaguebreak + Vicious Death (yes, we've seen them running both), and they have extreme damage burst thanks to balorgs.

There are Tanky small groups sure, but a sweaty enough group can wipe them with enough patience and pressure. But the major problem i see at this point is because of the damage pressure being so high, many comped groups are basically comped zerging at this point.

I understand your point, and I agree that ball groups are a different issue.

What I'm talking about is more about individual character balance. Right now, a single player can have very high survivability, strong self-healing, and still deal a surprising amount of damage. That makes dedicated damage, tank, or healer builds feel less meaningful because the trade-offs aren't as clear as they should be.

For ball groups, I think Battle Spirit could help by applying additional PvP-specific adjustments. Another possible approach would be making resource management more demanding, so maintaining high survivability and sustain at the same time becomes harder.

It wouldn't solve the ball group problem completely, but it could help.

Another idea I had is to make Weapon/Spell Damage depend more on your offensive attributes (Max Stamina or Max Magicka) rather than so much on the weapon's base damage. That way, dedicated DPS builds would keep their damage, while full Health tanks would naturally deal less damage without needing direct nerfs to tank classes.
Another possible solution would be to limit shield stacking in PvP.

Instead of allowing multiple shields to stack indefinitely, Battle Spirit could limit the number of active shields on a player or apply a cap to the total amount of shield value that can be active at the same time.

This would mainly affect extreme cases, such as highly coordinated groups, while having much less impact on normal gameplay.
There was something similar in the last Battle Spirit update that reduces the amount of stacked healing.

Kickimanjaro · June 29

I invested in getting that new mythic and... oop!

Luneca · July 5

Kickimanjaro wrote: »

I invested in getting that new mythic and... oop!

Now you know the pattern...I mean, what happened with the first mythics that came out? Does no one remember Sloads? Didn't someone push over 13K WD/SD before it got cut to mediocrity...? Someone in a ball was choking on voice chat saying he had over 14K at the time of that patch. He sure deleted people with 0 counter.

It's strange that ZOS repeats the same cycle and pattern over and over again by accident. It must be accidental, because it couldn't be intentional ...could it?

Avran_Sylt · July 5

Vaqual wrote: »

People will always build as tanky as they need to be to not get one-shot by unavoidable combos. People don't just favor bruiser setups because they like to make others miserable, but because it is absolutely frustrating if you have no room for counterplay. Everytime ZOS allows bigger bursts, people build tankier. It isn't healthy for the game to allow glass cannons to basically "bully" tankier players into a defensive loop without counterplay. If anything, healing and sustain needs to be the weak spot. A DPS player should be able to deplete a tankier players resources to achieve a kill. That would mean that both the glass cannon setup and the bruiser setup have to make multiple correct plays to achieve victory.
However, ZOS is sadly going exactly in the wrong direction with their recent changes, buffing heal and sustain across the board. This absolutely favours bruisers and I recognize why glass cannon players may take issue with that. Increasing burst potential on glass cannons/neutering damage scaling for bruisers is still not the right approach to fix this.

And long ago they nerfed sapper builds into the ground in PvP because it “isn’t fun” (which I get, but it removes targeted resource attrition gameplay).

Resource poisons are a joke, down from 30% to 10%. Immobilization and Snare immunity windows being introduced.

‘Member slapping on an ice staff and using wall of elements and ice reach to lock down a player till their stamina depleted and they were stuck immobilized. Though I was still a noob and didn’t have the build to actually kill the player. Totally unfun I know, but that kind of sapping isn’t possible nowadays.

NxJoeyD · July 11

AlleWk wrote: »

What I'm talking about is more about individual character balance. Right now, a single player can have very high survivability, strong self-healing, and still deal a surprising amount of damage. That makes dedicated damage, tank, or healer builds feel less meaningful because the trade-offs aren't as clear as they should be.

I've suggested something like this to the Devs and in other threads before. IMO a system that individually balances a players build based on the choices they make is the most viable solution here.

With subclassing now being a thing it's hard to think that any "global" balancing system is going to be able to be successful given the extremely broad scope of skill & mechanical combinations that can be introduced into PvP now. I don't think any sort of global balancing would ever work, more over, it would either a) get it wrong and empower the wrong builds while nerfing ones that it shouldn't or b) players will simply figure out how to juke around it.

Nothing is going to stop players from cherry picking the most over performing skills and sets in the game and building up to the meta, so long as there is one. Sadly, the direction the Devs took combat mechanics in, these metas reward senseless spamming rather than actual combat strategy. The skill floor has been lowered with mechs that reward button mashing that it's hard to separate experience from meta simply by looking at data.

Individual balance of performance could solve a lot of this by preventing these meta "lack-of-counterplay" builds by adjusting tooltip values based on the players chosen rose. In this way they can build strongly into their role however they like, but, what they wouldn't be able to do is limit their viable counterplay by mitigating nearly everything.