Feast feedback

It seems like PVP abilities in Feast were assigned rather haphazardly and there's no real "flow"to them at all. Like...

Why does machinist have a heal on top of the med kit? They're not targeted nearly as much as melee, but at the same time, Dragoon has bloodletter which doesn't give that instant heal that they often need.

Why does Paladin and (I think) Dark Knight have an "OHCRAP" button (Hallowed ground and I don't know what the DRK one is called) but Gunbreaker doesn't?

Is it just me or is machinist waaaay behind dancer (not sure about bard) in terms of damage dealt? Would love to hear from some MCH mains on this one since I don't have a ton of experience playing it in PVP.

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Originally Posted by Stormfur

It seems like PVP abilities...

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There is a flow, but it's just a fun feeling one because there is too much reliance on them being similar to PVE. Take, as you said, machinist, old gauge was fine, really rewarding if used correctly, punishing if not. Great design for a pvp game. Now all gauges are simply 'fill the bar, press the button that lights up', this is true for basically most jobs now. No resource management except for a few jobs. And the 'flow' is all vigorously keeping within 15 second and 30 second burst windows. As with machinist, keeping their 30 window is a problem because of having to perfectly execute your burst, or even a soft form of cc massively screwing you over (and with such an obvious 'tell' to mch's best, no wonder everyone hates it), or be screwed over for the next one because of how heat blast refunds time on ricochet. Compared to dancer and bard who don't have such a problem, other than maybe messing up a 2 burst per song window, if that's even a problem.

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Originally Posted by Stormfur

Why does machinist have a heal...

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Mch doesn't have a heal, I think you mean dancer? And Life surge is actually pretty great, people are either proccing it on the end of their aoe combo which is pretty great on 2+ people, because it's a 3k+ heal or even still, on wheeling it's 2.4k damage and a heal which hits harder than most range bursts actions. Dancer's weakness is it's damage, it's strength is it's survivability. So in a solo queue setting, you can see how being able to kite for 30 seconds and then another 15 more if you can get your stuff back, can be pretty beneficial as oppose to getting locked down install like a machinist would despite having more damage, but being way more prone to getting locked down.

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Originally Posted by Stormfur

Why does Paladin and...

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Balance.
Dark doesn't have living dead, paladin has hallowed and warrior has holm.
Gunbreaker has decent survivability for themselves and their team, not compared to paladin, but gunbreaker's main strength is it's damage and burst compared to paladin which is it's defense, which is more like stall. I call paladin a 'wall' because that's all it really can do, is lower damage, hold really well and have moderate damage.

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Originally Posted by Stormfur

Is it just me or is machinist....

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When it comes to 'raw damage'
Machinist is the best.
Bard is inbetween.
dancer has the lowest.

But damage doens't mean crap if you can't burst.

When it comes to burst
Bard has the best.
Dancer is ok..
Machinist is pitifully bad.

The reason for this is because machinist just has a super obvious tell to it's burst and blank +tactician are terrible when you compare them to dancer. Bard's survivability is overrated, but still, backstep is better than mch's defensive line up on it's own.
Also mch's 'burst' takes longer to execute than bard's and dancer's.

If I were to 'fix' machinist in as little dev time as possible. I would compile and ricochet and gauss,buffing the damage and making them actions that you can only use in heat blast, but also refunding them when you activate heat blast. Then I would turn AA into an ogcd. That's ofcourse if we're sticking with the 'glass cannon phys range' idea.

I feel the need to complain about how horrible smn feels to play in pvp compared to its current pve design. Yeah it has good pressure and painflare is a nice peel but the actual design is an abomination.

• Ruin 3 is a 1.5s instead of a 2.5s cast. I can buy small changes like this since they made fire 1 instant in pvp for playability reasons too, but dwt doesn't make it instant for some reason either.
• Ruin 2 is gone, instead you use energy drain as your instant (and yeah it's now a spell instead of being an ability). It no longer has a cooldown and you can spam it for aetherflow
• Tri-disaster gives aetherflow
• Bane costs aetherflow to use instead of being free with only a cooldown
• Trances cost aetherflow to use instead of being free with only a cooldown
• DWT does literally nothing after you deathflare because it's no longer tied to bahamut and doesn't have the 'make your spells instant' clause either, the timer just sits there looking silly

I'm gaining aetherflow stacks when I don't expect to, I'm losing aetherflow stacks when I don't expect to (e.g cc'ing someone with painflare right before burst and getting locked out of trances for an extra gcd), you basically have to erase your muscle memory of the job to play it in pvp. Now, if I wanted to I could, or I could just play blm instead which at least doesn't force you to unlearn half its pve best practices.

There's no point to them cutting pvp jobs down to 5-6 buttons if they're going to make them play completely differently anyway, especially summoner where aetherflow governs almost everything about the job. It's plain they ran out of time or revamped the job when it was still in it's Stormblood iteration hence the weird mismatched toolkit. I'd take HW smn with its 30 different buttons over this any day, at least it played the same way.

I actually do like the idea of them changing the flow of jobs for PvP since it's such a jarring different environment, though yeah it is a bit clumsy. There is a huge mismatch when they try to force components of a PvE kit into a PvP job when they are so drastically different, when a lot of those components either require a lot for adaption or just don't fit. For example, on DRG Life/Blood of the Dragon both feel like they have no reason to exist when you can refresh them with Piercing Talon at no cost to your combo, especially now that Stardiver is available in both states. Alternating states feels very forced in a PvP job, and the same is true for Summoner. We do a lot of damage, and I appreciate that, but... alternating between wyrm and bird doesn't really make sense here. It would make much more sense if they were distinct states we could choose at any time, maybe with a shared CD. And yeah... DWT doesn't feel like it has a substantial reason to exist when it doesn't have a real passive effect. It feels all very broken and sloppy.

Also some actions like Nascent Flash. This is one of those things that doesn't really suit PvP at all. They can double or quadruple the healing to make it balanced, but that doesn't mean it fits. It makes more sense in PvE where you can find times you can delay the burst of your rotation in PvE when a TB is coming or something, but here in PvP it's way too clumsy. Takes a completely different design or a different action entirely.

I mean.. it's like they took a random handful of PVE abilities, threw them on the wall, and then threw darts at them to see which ones to include. Nascent Flash is the weirdest action I've seen yet. The paladin casting AOE too (forgot the name of it.. not holy, but holy-something-or-other). Sweet Halone by the time I cast it, people are already on the other side of the map.

I do have another suggestion though. Show the # of medals beside the user/enemy's actual names (not their nameplates on screen) or an easily identifiable icon of the # of medals. Not all of us are playing on the computer and can read moving glowy red text on a blue background from several feet away.