Self-healing and DR PvP rework

arbitrarity

I have some (what I think to be) simple ideas for changing PvP mechanics, narrowing gear gap, and fixing the sustain problem that currently plagues PvP. These are mostly class-independent, though there is a DC buff to compensate for their being effectively nerfed 3-4 times with these changes.


Increase tenacity's base effects, and reduce tenacity scaling. This has the danger of making the PvP stat tradeoff for tenacity seem unappealing, but properly calibrated, it should remain fairly good. Right now, at 0 tenacity, you get 20% DR, arpen resist, critical strike resist, and control resist. At 2000 tenacity, you get 40% DR, 60% arpen resist, 40% critical strike resist, and 40% control resist. Finally, at around the highest you can viably get (that is, still using artifact belt/neck), around 3500, you get 45% DR, 70% arpen resist, 45% critical strike resist, and 45% control resist.

The issues here are twofold. First off, that first 2000 points of stats are upwards of 5 to 10 times as effective as any stat besides armor penetration. You gain not just 20% DR, at a rate 5x that of Defense, but 40% arpen resistance, which accounts for at least another 24% DR against most opponents. And critical strike resistance, and control resist. On top of this, all of these stats become much more efficient the more you have of them. That is, more DR means you start towards the 80% cap, instead of being at 30% or so, which is a factor of 3.5 difference in incoming damage. Critical strike resist and arpen resist only increase that gap.

Therefore, I propose an increase to the base values of PvP resistances, and a significant decrease in initial tenacity scaling. This will significantly lower the gear gap between those without and with PvP gear, and with proper calibration, will leave PvP gear the more attractive option for those who earn it.

Specifically, the new baseline should be around 35% DR, 60% arpen resistance, 35% critical strike resistance, and 35% control resistance. Then the next 2000 points scale up to around 42% DR, 66% arpen resistance, 42% critical strike resistance, and 42% control resistance. Finally, the last 1500 points scale to 45% DR, 70% arpen resistance, 45% critical strike resistance, and 45% control resistance. That last bit of scaling seems slightly worse than defense, since you only gain 3% DR for 1500 points, but the other resistances make up for it. Plus, diminishing returns mean more variety in viable equipment.

I believe this leaves Tenacity a viable stat to stack, and significantly narrows the gear disparity between those without, those with, and those stacking PvP gear. I think this change should be relatively uncontroversial, since the only people it helps significantly are those without PvP gear, who are too easy to kill for those with gear anyways.



Second, the DR cap in PvP should probably be lowered, and health increased. The difference between 80% resistance and 60% resistance is a factor of 2 in damage. This makes arpen stacking crucial in PvP, since if you can get your opponent down below 80%, your damage to them increases immensely. However, the 80% DR cap also has the effect of multiplying the value of heals immensely, which is another problem I'm getting to, and furthermore increases the gear disparity significantly, between those with capped DR and those without. Therefore, I suggest that the DR cap be lowered to 70% or so, which should narrow the difference between geared and ungeared players. To compensate, about 50k-70k health could be added to players in PvP. Not only would this narrow the gear gap, reduce whining about shocking execution, and put total EHP around the same level as before for those with gear, it would reduce the effectiveness of instantaneous burst with massive arpen, which is usually a problem in PvP with large gear disparities.



Next, the effectiveness of self-healing. Self-healing in PvP, apart from the dedicated healing classes, is extremely dangerous for balance, as it multiplies the value of burst, the value of DR, and makes battles extremely one-sided, and in some cases, never-ending, in many 1v1s.

There are 6 main sources of self-healing in PvP at the moment. Drowned Weapons, drowcraft clothes, artifact powers (waters/wheel), lifesteal, boons, and insignias. These are all problems at the moment, but insignias most of all.

The first step is to slap an ICD on insignia healing, and make them affected by healing reduction. Specifically, Survivor's Blessing, Oppressor's reprieve, Vampire's Craving, and their 2-insignia equivalents, need at least a 8s, maybe 10 or 12s, cooldown. This cuts their effective healing at least in half, and then again with healing reduction. Barbarian's Revelry could probably use a 1-2s ICD just to reduce the crazy cases (Duelist's Flurry, crit Warlock's Bargain, Dreadtheft)

Drowcraft clothes set bonus should probably be affected by healing reduction, since it presently is not.

Additionally, it might be wise to increase the amount of healing reduction to say, 65-75%. This would mean 3 nerfs to insignia healing, which I think everyone will agree is toxic, but also reduces the effectiveness of Drowned set/Wheel, which should be fine, since several PvPers have suggested the effects of these be cut in half. This would also reduce the effectiveness of lifesteal and boons, both of which are complained about fairly often. Also, I believe healing reduction is currently calculated additive with incoming healing, it should probably be multiplicative to make incoming healing not 3-4x stronger in PvP than intended. (i.e. if you have 75% healing reduction, and 15% incoming healing bonus, right now you'd have 40% effective incoming healing. Multiplicatively, you'd have 28.75%)

This would, however, result in a triple nerf to DC and OP healing, as they would not only have more health to heal, but also less DR to mitigate incoming damage, and less healing to dish out. Now, many people feel DC's presently make their teams effectively immortal as-is, so whether that's a problem is up to you. However, it's undoubtedly a problem for their survivability, since I'm later proposing yet another nerf to DC survivability. So, I would also suggest removing the Righteousness feature that DC's have, and increasing their heal potency by 70% to compensate, so that their ally healing is relatively nerfed after the healing reduction, and their self-healing remains about the same. I doubt anyone will complain about this in PvE, since it will effectively just buff DC's self-heals.

These changes reduce the effectiveness of Wheel and Drowned weapons somewhat, but they may need additional tuning, as both are quite strong, but such changes could be determined afterwards. Another possibly problematic effect is Endless Consumption, which is massively stronger than most boons, doubling effective lifesteal. Reducing Endless Consumption to a flat 5% lifesteal chance or similar would go a long way to bringing it in line, but again, could be done after we see how a healing reduction increase pans out.



Finally, flat damage reduction effects. These are effectively the same as cooldown-free healing, are pretty useless in PvE, and way too strong in PvP, especially against enemies with many small attacks. The two culprits are Empowered Astral Shield, and Cold Shoulder. These should simply be changed to %reduction effects, multiplicative with DR, like Guardian Fighter shield. Cold Shoulder could be a 20-30% reduction in damage from an enemy, while Astral Shield should probably reduce damage (with 3 empowered stacks) somewhere between 45-60%. This would nerf DC survivability a fair bit, since they currently rely heavily on Astral Shield in PvP, but I think we can mostly agree that the mechanic is toxic, and should be reworked into something less binary, and more possible to tune.


TL;DR

* increase base tenacity-granted stats, reduce tenacity scaling to around other stats
* lower DR cap, provide HP bonus
* Insignia ICDs and healing reduction
* Increase healing reduction
* Improve DC's self-healing to compensate for healing reduction increase
* Change Astral Shield/Cold Shoulder into %damage reduced

Does anyone have any other suggestions for existing problems in PvP? I think these changes would bring us back into a good state in PvP, where you could actually wear people down, and not just either be burst or be immortal. It would also lower the gear gap between dedicated PvP players and newbies enormously, which I think would be good for PvP participation as a whole. I think it might also reveal more disparities between classes in PvP that are currently masked by the massive amount of self-healing going on.

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arbitrarity

My changes to healing reduction weaken all the things you listed, by halving their effect (assuming 75% heal reduction), as well as weakening your suggested removals (and when since mod 6 is wilds medicine a problem?). They also reduce the EHP granted by healing boons.

Why do you think insignias are balanced? They add up to much more healing than the healing boons or lifesteal in sustained fights. I could see nerfing them a bit at a time, waiting for feedback, then hitting them again if needed, but right now they're across the board too strong. Furthermore, they punish classes using control powers with Oppressor's Reprieve, and it's not like CWs and HRs are doing a lot of burst damage as-is against geared opponents.

No opinion about tenacity/hp/DR changes? Those don't make a big difference to geared players, since I left the top-end about the same, but make it so that the 2k player that comes in might not get killed in one rotation by literally any class, and has a chance at dealing a bit of damage. Combined with the healing reduction change, they almost have a chance at sticking some lasting damage onto an opponent.

Also, any opinion on Astral Shield/Cold shoulder? As a GWF, I guess you don't care as much about cold shoulder, since you hit for tens of thousands, so the reduction is less, but HR/SW/CW/TR (assuming they're not just using Shocking execution) and low-damage classes are affected by it brutally. In my opinion, Astral Shield is like mod 4's Forest Meditation, except better in some ways (longer duration, shorter cooldown, affects allies) and worse in others (follow-up healing not certain, no control immunity)

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engineerofevil

The solution has always been simple, the way to keep PVE and PVP separate. Cryptic already showed themselves how to do it before, they just have not spent any time balancing the two. The skills can simply be 100% at PVE (A) and a % at PVP (B), i.e. say 125% (B) for more control. They did it before with a HR Wilds Medicine Feat in the past, it literally called out for a different quantity while in PVP. It calls it out as 50% effective in PVP. They can put a multiplier on everything after testing with a PVP testing crew. The bigger problem being they have never played their own game to understand how these things work.

mamalion1234

arbitrarity said:

I have some (what I think to be) simple ideas for changing PvP mechanics, narrowing gear gap, and fixing the sustain problem that currently plagues PvP. These are mostly class-independent, though there is a DC buff to compensate for their being effectively nerfed 3-4 times with these changes.


Increase tenacity's base effects, and reduce tenacity scaling. This has the danger of making the PvP stat tradeoff for tenacity seem unappealing, but properly calibrated, it should remain fairly good. Right now, at 0 tenacity, you get 20% DR, arpen resist, critical strike resist, and control resist. At 2000 tenacity, you get 40% DR, 60% arpen resist, 40% critical strike resist, and 40% control resist. Finally, at around the highest you can viably get (that is, still using artifact belt/neck), around 3500, you get 45% DR, 70% arpen resist, 45% critical strike resist, and 45% control resist.

The issues here are twofold. First off, that first 2000 points of stats are upwards of 5 to 10 times as effective as any stat besides armor penetration. You gain not just 20% DR, at a rate 5x that of Defense, but 40% arpen resistance, which accounts for at least another 24% DR against most opponents. And critical strike resistance, and control resist. On top of this, all of these stats become much more efficient the more you have of them. That is, more DR means you start towards the 80% cap, instead of being at 30% or so, which is a factor of 3.5 difference in incoming damage. Critical strike resist and arpen resist only increase that gap.

Therefore, I propose an increase to the base values of PvP resistances, and a significant decrease in initial tenacity scaling. This will significantly lower the gear gap between those without and with PvP gear, and with proper calibration, will leave PvP gear the more attractive option for those who earn it.

Specifically, the new baseline should be around 35% DR, 60% arpen resistance, 35% critical strike resistance, and 35% control resistance. Then the next 2000 points scale up to around 42% DR, 66% arpen resistance, 42% critical strike resistance, and 42% control resistance. Finally, the last 1500 points scale to 45% DR, 70% arpen resistance, 45% critical strike resistance, and 45% control resistance. That last bit of scaling seems slightly worse than defense, since you only gain 3% DR for 1500 points, but the other resistances make up for it. Plus, diminishing returns mean more variety in viable equipment.

I believe this leaves Tenacity a viable stat to stack, and significantly narrows the gear disparity between those without, those with, and those stacking PvP gear. I think this change should be relatively uncontroversial, since the only people it helps significantly are those without PvP gear, who are too easy to kill for those with gear anyways.



Second, the DR cap in PvP should probably be lowered, and health increased. The difference between 80% resistance and 60% resistance is a factor of 2 in damage. This makes arpen stacking crucial in PvP, since if you can get your opponent down below 80%, your damage to them increases immensely. However, the 80% DR cap also has the effect of multiplying the value of heals immensely, which is another problem I'm getting to, and furthermore increases the gear disparity significantly, between those with capped DR and those without. Therefore, I suggest that the DR cap be lowered to 70% or so, which should narrow the difference between geared and ungeared players. To compensate, about 50k-70k health could be added to players in PvP. Not only would this narrow the gear gap, reduce whining about shocking execution, and put total EHP around the same level as before for those with gear, it would reduce the effectiveness of instantaneous burst with massive arpen, which is usually a problem in PvP with large gear disparities.



Next, the effectiveness of self-healing. Self-healing in PvP, apart from the dedicated healing classes, is extremely dangerous for balance, as it multiplies the value of burst, the value of DR, and makes battles extremely one-sided, and in some cases, never-ending, in many 1v1s.

There are 6 main sources of self-healing in PvP at the moment. Drowned Weapons, drowcraft clothes, artifact powers (waters/wheel), lifesteal, boons, and insignias. These are all problems at the moment, but insignias most of all.

The first step is to slap an ICD on insignia healing, and make them affected by healing reduction. Specifically, Survivor's Blessing, Oppressor's reprieve, Vampire's Craving, and their 2-insignia equivalents, need at least a 8s, maybe 10 or 12s, cooldown. This cuts their effective healing at least in half, and then again with healing reduction. Barbarian's Revelry could probably use a 1-2s ICD just to reduce the crazy cases (Duelist's Flurry, crit Warlock's Bargain, Dreadtheft)

Drowcraft clothes set bonus should probably be affected by healing reduction, since it presently is not.

Additionally, it might be wise to increase the amount of healing reduction to say, 65-75%. This would mean 3 nerfs to insignia healing, which I think everyone will agree is toxic, but also reduces the effectiveness of Drowned set/Wheel, which should be fine, since several PvPers have suggested the effects of these be cut in half. This would also reduce the effectiveness of lifesteal and boons, both of which are complained about fairly often. Also, I believe healing reduction is currently calculated additive with incoming healing, it should probably be multiplicative to make incoming healing not 3-4x stronger in PvP than intended. (i.e. if you have 75% healing reduction, and 15% incoming healing bonus, right now you'd have 40% effective incoming healing. Multiplicatively, you'd have 28.75%)

This would, however, result in a triple nerf to DC and OP healing, as they would not only have more health to heal, but also less DR to mitigate incoming damage, and less healing to dish out. Now, many people feel DC's presently make their teams effectively immortal as-is, so whether that's a problem is up to you. However, it's undoubtedly a problem for their survivability, since I'm later proposing yet another nerf to DC survivability. So, I would also suggest removing the Righteousness feature that DC's have, and increasing their heal potency by 70% to compensate, so that their ally healing is relatively nerfed after the healing reduction, and their self-healing remains about the same. I doubt anyone will complain about this in PvE, since it will effectively just buff DC's self-heals.

These changes reduce the effectiveness of Wheel and Drowned weapons somewhat, but they may need additional tuning, as both are quite strong, but such changes could be determined afterwards. Another possibly problematic effect is Endless Consumption, which is massively stronger than most boons, doubling effective lifesteal. Reducing Endless Consumption to a flat 5% lifesteal chance or similar would go a long way to bringing it in line, but again, could be done after we see how a healing reduction increase pans out.



Finally, flat damage reduction effects. These are effectively the same as cooldown-free healing, are pretty useless in PvE, and way too strong in PvP, especially against enemies with many small attacks. The two culprits are Empowered Astral Shield, and Cold Shoulder. These should simply be changed to %reduction effects, multiplicative with DR, like Guardian Fighter shield. Cold Shoulder could be a 20-30% reduction in damage from an enemy, while Astral Shield should probably reduce damage (with 3 empowered stacks) somewhere between 45-60%. This would nerf DC survivability a fair bit, since they currently rely heavily on Astral Shield in PvP, but I think we can mostly agree that the mechanic is toxic, and should be reworked into something less binary, and more possible to tune.


TL;DR

* increase base tenacity-granted stats, reduce tenacity scaling to around other stats
* lower DR cap, provide HP bonus
* Insignia ICDs and healing reduction
* Increase healing reduction
* Improve DC's self-healing to compensate for healing reduction increase
* Change Astral Shield/Cold Shoulder into %damage reduced

Does anyone have any other suggestions for existing problems in PvP? I think these changes would bring us back into a good state in PvP, where you could actually wear people down, and not just either be burst or be immortal. It would also lower the gear gap between dedicated PvP players and newbies enormously, which I think would be good for PvP participation as a whole. I think it might also reveal more disparities between classes in PvP that are currently masked by the massive amount of self-healing going on.

you forgot the champions return insignia

arbitrarity

mamalion1234 said:

you forgot the champions return insignia

Why you quote entire post q_q

I was talking about ICDs in that sentence, not healing insignias in general (which should probably all be affected by healing reduction). Champion's Return already has a 1 minute ICD, which is just fine.

josiahiyon

metalldjt said:

i have other way to fix it

1. remove endless consumtion from dread ring
2. increase the CD of drowned weapons from 1min up to 2minutes.
3. decrease the water buff from the wheel of elements from 100% down to 50%

leave the insignias as they are.

Remove healings from classes such as Cahotic regrowth , fighter's recovery , wilds medicine.

increase the burst damage of the classes : SW , GWF, CW , HR and thats it, sure alot more adjustments.

This is great. Simple, and addresses the primary issue of too many self-heals for dps classes.
There is 1 (only 1) DC nerf that I support: removing the Faithful capstone buff from allies when ally goes out of sight from the DC. It's really silly that an ally can be on other side of map for 5 minutes and get instantly full healed as soon as the ally sees the dc.

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loboguild

metalldjt said:

i have other way to fix it

1. remove endless consumtion from dread ring
2. increase the CD of drowned weapons from 1min up to 2minutes.
3. decrease the water buff from the wheel of elements from 100% down to 50%

leave the insignias as they are.

Remove healings from classes such as Cahotic regrowth , fighter's recovery , wilds medicine.

increase the burst damage of the classes : SW , GWF, CW , HR and thats it, sure alot more adjustments.

Targeting specific powers / items is the easiest way to deal with stuff, but it's never the smartest. You are proposing massive balancing changes that impact more areas than self-healing in PVP. The result can only be guessed. Nope.

mamalion1234

josiahiyon said:

metalldjt said:

i have other way to fix it

1. remove endless consumtion from dread ring
2. increase the CD of drowned weapons from 1min up to 2minutes.
3. decrease the water buff from the wheel of elements from 100% down to 50%

leave the insignias as they are.

Remove healings from classes such as Cahotic regrowth , fighter's recovery , wilds medicine.

increase the burst damage of the classes : SW , GWF, CW , HR and thats it, sure alot more adjustments.

This is great. Simple, and addresses the primary issue of too many self-heals for dps classes.
There is 1 (only 1) DC nerf that I support: removing the Faithful capstone buff from allies when ally goes out of sight from the DC. It's really silly that an ally can be on other side of map for 5 minutes and get instantly full healed as soon as the ally sees the dc.

i hate the way the gift of faith works. it doesnt even need skill to change node and throw glow and bastion on alllies the heal overtime willl stored in gift and job done now dc can change node again since the stored hot will take care as instant heal if the allies lose life.;p

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kalina311

drains had a counter wards

invisible ring had a counter ..ring of vison


there was no counter when pets were working in regular dom and you ran into a fully geared pve player with crazy pets except to get your own pets

there is no counter running into a fully geared pve player in pvp not abiding by these rules of not using boons/mounts etc

you cant expect the community to police itself not to use things they feel they have "earned" and things the devs have released that being said there is way too much healing in the game now

if there were a pvp lobby with ways to set match rules that would be a different story

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ayroux

metalldjt said:

the problem right now that we encounter in PvP it's the lack of damage and thats because of tenacity, HP ,DR and deflect + other classes mechanics such as Block/Shield/Astral shield/ DR and deflect severity .

I disagree Lancer... I dont think tenacity is the cause of lack of damage. The issue with lack of damage is really because of self healing.

If a player has 170k HP and you hit them for 50k or even 30k, there is nothing wrong with those values... The ISSUE comes when that same player can heal 30k or more back with EASE.

If you nerf self healing (and I think Insignia needs to be nerfed as well) then smaller damage is more than fine as long as DPS is > HPS. THATS the issue.

This has always been the case, that HPS > DPS which is what forced people to value BURST damage > DPS.

I truly believe how to get a balanced PVP game is you allow DPS to > HPS. Thus you dont need crazy burst, I would even say burst (compared to EHP) is too high.

SO this is why I think BASE HP needs to be increased by A LOT. I think its what? 43k or something? It should be more like 60-70k as the BASE.

Then next I think tenacity on GEAR needs to be removed as well. This truly serves zero purpose and only creates a "player divide" between PVE and PVP where you need TWO sets of gear for content when.

Self healing needs to be nerfed.

I would even suggest AN avenue to pursue this would be to create more boons like Shadowtouch:
"When dealing damage you have a chance to deal 20000 Necrotic damage over a few (4) seconds. After this effect ends the target receives 25% less healing from spells for 10 seconds."

I dont know if this actually works... But imagine if this was increased to 50%... or if OTHER boons added effects like this and stacked... Then you would have windows of time where not only heal depression was in force in PVP but then ONTOP of this these boons nerfed healing by another 25%-50%+ for X seconds, giving a nice window to kill a target.

That said, it could come in the form of overload slots... It could come from artifacts. It could come from SH boons... Etc. This type of thing would actually moot out some of the benefits of self healing.

I like most of what the OP wrote though and think its on the right track. We need a SMALLER gear divide in PVP. Things like Tenacity create a gear gap, so do all these self healing sources....

rayrdan

lets start by putting some healing depression on insignias maybe

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ayroux

rayrdan said:

lets start by putting some healing depression on insignias maybe

Frankly this will do nothing at all... Its not enough.

if you want to fix PVP, the SIMPLE fix to all of this would be to release new overload slots that:
"Your damaging abilities have a 10% chance to proc *Name Effect* on the target. *Name Effect* reduces all incoming healing by 50% for 10 seconds. This cannot proc more than once per minute."

Lesser can be 25%, greater (rank 2) can be 50%.....

Now this solves TWO issues:
1) Drains/Overloads - that constantly are an issue in PVP.
2) Self Healing - again constantly a problem in PVP.

rayrdan

ayroux said:

rayrdan said:

lets start by putting some healing depression on insignias maybe

Frankly this will do nothing at all... Its not enough.

if you want to fix PVP, the SIMPLE fix to all of this would be to release new overload slots that:
"Your damaging abilities have a 10% chance to proc *Name Effect* on the target. *Name Effect* reduces all incoming healing by 50% for 10 seconds. This cannot proc more than once per minute."

Lesser can be 25%, greater (rank 2) can be 50%.....

Now this solves TWO issues:
1) Drains/Overloads - that constantly are an issue in PVP.
2) Self Healing - again constantly a problem in PVP.

well first of all that joke of champion's return and gladiator struggle would be less of a problem
then i would start to make striker classes act like strikers, tank classes act like tanks, healing classes act like healers.
Is nice to have different paths but squares should never become circles.
there is not too much healing, there are too many jacks of all trades and as many jakes of no trades.
ofc boons to diminuish healing are well welcomed but i m still dreaming a world where everyone can do their jobs and nothing else. Healing is dc job and is right for them to heal.

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ayroux

xsayajinx1 said:

I like Lancers suggestion more to reduce the amount of heals from several sources such as wheel, drowned set etc.



The problem I have with your suggestion @ayroux is: it makes using those overloads mandatory - and no matter what it will fix, I am no fan at all of being forced to slot certain overloads.



Pugstomper will still use drains since pugs don't have that much self-healing and drains are no problem in pm vs pms anymore because no serious PvP guild use them anyways.

I never said it was perfect, but its simple. Yes they would be required but do we need to start the LONG list of "required" things to be competative in PVP? This would be kinda the ONE thing that an average player could get, that levels the playing field a bit. Also rank 2 overloads are really not that hard to get... Our guild got that unlocked very quickly and I knwo big guilds sell access to their market to purchase this stuff.

So as far as a simple, easy to implement suggesting, this actually goes a LONG way with VERY LITTLE work required in creating a more balanced game. It would still favor burst DPS > DPS but atleast now you would get people to have to play more "roll-ish" as in guardian fighters might be forced to run KV just for those 10 seconds where healing is cut in half to diminish the damage taken.

You might also have to have healers pay more attention to "solo node" holders who might get rolled up on by another enemy and gets hit with this overload making their self healing ability turn to mush.....

Its just ONE simple suggestion that makes a major leap towards the right direction IMO. Not saying its perfect or ideal. IDEALLY they would remove ALL self healing items and powers from non healing classes with a few exceptions.... But that will NEVER EVER happen.

So whats our best bet of having anything done? A simple solution that utilizes what they already have in place.

A player that doesnt have access to rank 2 drains, isnt really "competitive" anyways in today's PVP, so it wont change that. In fact it puts more emphasis on strongholds - which is clearly what they want. SH to matter more.

not part of a guild? Easy. Our guild will sell access to you, you can buy as many rank 2 "heal drains" - or whatever these are called - as you want! Done!

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ayroux

magenubbie said:

Then increase the amount of HDP until it is balanced with the DPS. I'm not a fan of forcing people to use overload slots to decrease self-heals. It would pose the same "problem" as drains do. Not to mention you'll put a serious dent on the DCs/healadin ability to PvP with all those slots. You're better off balancing the bigger picture instead of just hitting 1 class in particular.

increase the amount of heal depression? This creates further issues and frankly doesnt make sense. We need o think back to WHY they created HDP in the first place. It was because everyone stacked Regen up the yingyang and self healed too much. They even said when they pushed out heal depression it was because they didnt wanna nerf regen in PVE but self healing in PVP due to regen was a BIG problem.

This then created another problem. Everyone died too quickly. Regen self healing was keeping players alive, giving some a fighting chance. So they initiated tenacity to increase everyones "effective HP" while cutting in half via heal depression, self healing. What this created was longer but finite battles where DPS > HPS meaning that with enough TIME someone was guaranteed to die.

So what has happened since? a TON more sources of self healing have been introduced into the game. Abilities, items, etc. So whats the solution? making healing nerfed even more? add even more tenacity. Frankly THE solution would be to UNDO the healing items. But this will take too much time/effort/balance and the other aspect here is that people have farmed for these items... They are very hesitant to nerf an item thats been around for a long time - look at the controversy with the LOL set bonus....

Since overload slots are already loathed by everyone (drains in particular). Creating NEW overload slots that are basically mandatory for PVP would thus take the place of drains - also alleviating that issue.

magenubbie said:

I'm also not a fan of putting cooldowns on insignias as it would interfere with PvE. The same goes for changing healing feats. PvP has 2 wonderful stats intentionally designed to balance PvP: Tenacity and Healing Depression. Those are the tools that should be used. Too much damage? Too little? add/remove the effect tenacity has on that skill. Too much/little healing? That's where HDP comes into play. It's really time to add those 2 stats to every skill and effect in the game. Failing to do so will affect both game-modes at the same time and that can never be the objective when you're only working on 1 mode.

I guess I would like to ask why you think PVE is balanced as is? I can self heal SOOO well via lifesteal on my GWF I dont even need a healer.... I would say thats probably NOT balanced and needs a fix... Just because something would also impact PVE doesnt mean its a bad change, maybe PVE needs some tweakin as well.

I dont think the solution is to make a bigger heal depression and even more tenacity. There are already issues (maybe you arent familiar with them?) with tenacity. Like for instance, if you have zero bonuses to crit severity, crits actually now deal LESS damage than non crits in PVP due to tenacity. Thats just one example on why you cant just keep scaling things up. Not to mention if that is the solution, what stops them from releasing MORE self heal items in PVP in the future, thus needing to further increase tenacity/heal depression etc etc. Pretty soon youll have heals only doing 10% of what they do in PVE and everyone only deals 10% of the damage of the damage they do in PVE.... WHen does enough become enough there?

magenubbie said:

With all that, I do have a question to ask: How much of all this is a real problem and not the result of mismatching people? Do we have any objective data to support the problem? It would be much easier to get the dev's attention if we do.

Well this is complicated. Ill break it down this way. Lets just go back to Tenebrous enchants as an example. I dont know if you played back then (mod 0) but these enchants would deal 3% of your max HP as necrotic damage - but back then would bypass 100% of your opponents DR and hit their life directly. So I would run up to a guy on my GWF, like a TR for example with 25-28k HP(standard for mod 0 btw) and I would have ~36k on my GWF and hit him with just 1 at will for ~7,500 un mitigated damage + a few hundred for the at will. Which BTW was HARDER or ATLEAST as hard as my IBS would crit back then. So I do a "combo" of "takedown" + flourish + IBS (stunned the entire time) + Tenebrous procs. And its a 1 shot combo. Insta dead. Here is an example of a video I filmed FF to 1:24 (https://youtu.be/GEX1HJOt5Bc?t=85)

Now, is this OP? Yes. I think everyone would say it is....
Was it OP is premades? Not really, since generally speaking both teams had them.

So do we balance things based on being OP, or based on them being OP only versus other premades? If you do the later, in fact almost nothing consistutes as "OP" as the assumption is everyteam/each side has them, so NOTHING could be deemed OP which we would both agree isnt true.

What makes these things OP is you can have a BIS player literally take on and kill and entire TEAM of enemies, if they are not as geared. Where as back in mod 0, it was almost impossible to take on and kill 2v1 or 3v1. Why? Sheer survivability due to self healing and the "outgoing damage" gap between a 2k player and 4k player.

TLDR:
So no, I dont think messing with heal depression OR tenacity is the solution. The REAL solution is to remove self healing items/abilities from non healing classes. Lifesteal needs a major nerf (mainly endless consumption) but all of this has MAJOR PVE impacts and frankly will be hard to get the entire community to understand how toxic these things are.

So instead why not go a route that alleviates these issues while ONLY impacting PVP players - with Overloads.

its a VERY simple solution that removes a ton of the benefit of self healing items for a short window - allowing for that player to die.

Sure it creates a gear gap of players who have the overloads and players that dont. But I would argue this already exists with drains... If players dont have wards, then they have no stamina or AP...

This simple solution of a FUTHER heal depression debuff lasting for ~10 seconds on an overload proc fixes many issues in the game very easily. While not the PERFECT solution, it is an easy one that will do the job.

fastrean3

If non healing class can no self heal, then DEV need to redesign the queue system first to ensure both team have no /have healer class

ayroux

fastrean3 said:

If non healing class can no self heal, then DEV need to redesign the queue system first to ensure both team have no /have healer class

Agreed. And PVE already has something like this in place, so I cant see why it would be hard to do... I dont necessarily think you need to remove 100% of self healing. A SMALL amount of self healing is nice to have - and I think you can keep this on certain items (like Drow shirt/pants) stuff that provides a NON scaling, small amount of healing... Or lifsteal will always be a self healing stat just based on how it works...

What makes items too powerful is when you have multiple sources of them (water wheel + water weapons + insignias + drow shirt/pants) and then ALSO combine it with lifesteal that is effectively DOUBLED when paird with endless consumption.

That is why SOME of the items needs to be nerfed/removed. Also why (IMO) boons should be disabled in domination PVP. Maybe allow JUST stronghold boons in Stronghold PVP as they kind of go hand in hand...

demonmonger

No...
I don't think so..

Your last comment about boons and pvp...
No...

Unknown

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scylent

arbitrarity said:

I have some (what I think to be) simple ideas for changing PvP mechanics...

Really like where you have taken it Arby I would love to see at least the tenacity deal changed to where the new guys coming in at least have a chance to fight and get their gear before they never come back to PvP. But at this point I would be absolutely happy if ANY changes good or bad actually come to PvP as opposed to PvE byproducts.