Feast Suggestions

I was thinking that in the current state of things, The feast needs an overhaul or something. Not in design, but more in pvp related skills specifically for feast matches seperate from FL/RW.

Currently AST is by far the most infuriating class to fight in the feast, but not so bad in FL/RW. Since the feast has limitations on roles (4v4, 1 Tank, 1 melee, 1 range, 1 healer) It should have skills balanced for those kind of engagements and restrictions.

What do you guys think? Think the feast is in a good place? or could it use some updates. Thank you for your time!

AST has a definite edge over the other healers between its mobility and just how generally strong its cooldowns are compared to them. Being the only healer with an AoE heal/shield that's also a stun to boot is a such a fundamental no-no balancing wise that I'm not sure how it got past the team. I'm not sure why Abridged is a thing, either, because being able to just sit on an instant cast so you can pop your big heal the moment someone needs it is a needlessly huge perk when the other healers have only their OGCDs to rely on if they need to heal while moving.

The amount of effort to takes to burn people down if they have a skilled AST on their team vs. WHM/SCH is a bit ridiculous.

I feel like it's the only major outlier as far as class balance between roles goes, though.

I guess it's a matter of weighing development costs and usability VS more specificity in balance. It would be easy to say "Have the game be perfectly tuned so every job in every environment is specifically tuned for what makes sense in this scenario". Though realistically, their priority is probably to consider what areas of the game are most susceptible to balance discrepancy. That is, how sensitive is the environment to difference in the options available to the player, since a weak melee DPS in, say, alliance raids where there can be a dozen other people playing melee DPS of different skill levels, is going to have noticeably more impact than a vastly inferior melee job compared to another in 4v4. From there, the designer would want to decide on a percentile of player to make sure their data set is based on players making informed decisions.

I say this because like PvE should be balanced around current tier raid content, so should PvP be balanced be around The Feast, as it is the most sensitive to balance discrepancy, it is most likely to have players making informed decisions, and is the least volatile environment. From there, they can make concessions to see if they can align the performance of the jobs available to be as fun and complete experience as possible external of that (Alliance raids and dungeons for PvE, FR/RW for PvP) without harming their balance in their primary target.

Why not just give different toolkits in 24v24/72v72 versus what is in 4v4? Well, ask yourself if it's really worth it in terms of payout, and how much the experience in these larger scale battles would improve, which is already pretty good. RDM probably needs some tweaks for FL and AST is probably a bit too strong for The Feast, but for the most part it looks good. As it stands, they clearly have a lot on their hands trying to balance two toolkits for each job. If they were to add a third for large scale PvP, that would require time and attention to refine, which means attention is being taken away from the balance focus that is more sensitive to begin with. And let us not forget this is actually a barrier for the player as well, as any implementation is a barrier of entry on PvP in having to digest another toolkit or changes to existing toolkits. As it stands, a lot of people are not aware of the fact, for example, melee and tanks deal more and take less damage in FR, as very simple rule change.

They should refine the jobs around The Feast as much as possible, then see what they can do with the jobs while minimizing distortion as much as they can, but accept that their current one-size-fits-all kits for the character is the best balance between cost and effectiveness.

We're practically getting an overhaul in 5.1 apparently, pause the thought train for now

Pointless to even have this discussion when things will change in a week.

As others have said, once we get the new skills we can really get a better idea at who does what.

SCH is really bad currently but in 5.1 it could be the king of kings. Won't know till it comes out or at least until we get patch notes.