(Un)Responsiveness of Defensive Spells and Abilities

Hello, I am a fan of many of the things PvP in FFXIV offers, but even I must admit that being a healer feels really bad in this game. I still play it a lot because PvP healing fills that niche I love, but there's some serious issues with it that prevent me from recommending it to anyone else.

The biggest issue is that the game allows you to use defensive abilities and heals on recently K.O.'d players. This means if you are fervently trying to keep someone alive, there is a good chance your last few heals will be wasted because they were already dead, but the game allowed you to keep spending your resources on them. The same goes for if you use Hallowed Ground or another tank invulnerability. The game allows you to use it even after you have been K.O.'d and the spell will go on cooldown with no effect. I believe this is caused by the lag compensation in the game, because on your end, you are still alive and can input the ability, but from the server's perspective, you are dead and it takes time for the server to inform the client that the player is dead. I've heard people attribute it to the "casting animation" of the ability, and this could also be contributing to it. In either case, I feel that skills in PvP should go on cooldown only after their effect has been confirmed to have activated successfully, and the same goes for resources spent using them. The only exception to this would be limit breaks, whose long animations and potential failure an important part of how they function. Fixing this alone would make healing and tanking much more satisfying to do.

The other issue with healers is that they are very unbalanced compared to other jobs, most especially in the Feast. There is a large amount of responsibility on the healers to be competent in the Feast, as having a bad healer makes winning effectively impossible. You can win with a mediocre tank or dps, but a mediocre healer will almost definitely lead to a loss. In other words, your skill as a tank or dps only feels like it matters when the healers are evenly matched. In a subjective sense, I feel that the team's overall power is 60% in the healers hands, and the other 40% is divided among the remaining 3 players. Even though I love playing healer, I would prefer if if healer players were balanced so that less of the team's overall power is in the healers hands, ideally with each player being 25% of the team's overall effectiveness. I know that Feast will be going away in 6.1, but this unbalance extends to other PvP modes and will carry over to the Feast's replacement, Crystal Conflict. For example, in Wolves' Den duels, healers cannot kill each other unless they willingly stop healing themselves. In frontlines, players cannot 1v1 a healer, and even a 2v1 can be challenging because healers are good at escaping unfavorable conflicts with repose and purify. Healing allows for easier escapes, too, since it extends chases, baiting enemy players into overextending, leading to them getting mobbed by the rest of your team. Healers that get attacked also have the extra resource of medical kits to heal themselves, so attacking a healer will not drain their mana or cooldowns. Because of this, it feels like it's not even worth it to attack healers unless you are sure you can K.O. them.

Because of these strengths, the most common and effective way to deal with healers is to target a single DPS and deal so much damage to them in such a short period of time that their healer cannot heal them in time. This is unsatisfying for everyone involved. The attackers are unsatisfied because they do not get to use their full combos, and it feels like your contribution is just one of 20 other people attacking a single target. The healers are unsatisfied because they cannot heal the target in time, and if they try, then the server will make their ability go on cooldown even if it did not heal the target. The target dps is also unsatisfied because they were killed before their medical kit could go off and it feels like there was nothing they could do in that situation. The design of PvP should move away from nuking single players by making AoE damage more effective than single target burst. Since players are much more hard to predict than dungeon mobs, and they tend to spread out more, spells like Flare and Gravity should have much larger AoE ranges to compensate, and all AoE spells should be buffed for use on "2 or more" players rather than "3 or more". There are many effects that increase damage dealt to a single target (such as Inner Chaos, ranged and caster LB's, and Phantom Dart) and they contribute to this problem of having one player at a time being killed all at once. These could be replaced with DoT damage, which can lead to greater overall benefit, just not provided all at once.

The last major issue is that healers can only cast AoE heals on players in their parties. This is not as big of an issue in Feast or in the future Crystal Conflict, but in Frontlines and especially Rival Wings (where there are 6 parties of 4 players per team) this is a major issue. Even if multiple party members are near you, it can be hard to position yourself to be in range to heal all of them with an AoE heal when players are frantically running about. This is one of the few buffs I think healers desperately need, to have AoE heals effect all players, not just party members. It would be a huge quality of life improvement to simply see a mob of friendly players, stand in the mob, use an AoE heal, and actually have everyone be healed. This would go hand in hand with my earlier suggestion to improve sustained AoE damage and nerf single target burst, as healers will need better AoE heals to compensate.

The last suggestion I would make is to improve the UI to highlight players that are within healing range, and add an indicator that points towards who you have targeted even if they are offscreen. This is because the UI currently lights up players that are nearby, which is a handy feature for knowing who you should focus on healing. The problem is, the UI lights up even if they are out of range, and offscreen. This means you can see a highlighted HP bar at 30%, click it to try to heal them, only to learn they are too far away, and you need to spin your camera around to try to find them, then run towards them. This minigame where you try to play Where's Waldo as fast as possible should be streamlined by having better UI indications of where your selected target is, and either increase the range of single target healing spells to reach anyone lit up in the UI, or reduce the range at which the UI will light up to indicate the player is nearby.

In the new PvP game mode Crystal Conflict, I hope that healers do not play as major a role in the teams success, allowing other jobs to contribute just as much. Since Crystal Conflict will not have role restrictions, I hope a team of 5 healers vs 5 healers wont lead to both teams being absolutely unkillable. And I hope that peoples best defense against healers will no longer be killing players quickly enough to exploit the game's unresponsive servers.



This part is just a rampant tangent
Also let medical kits activate their heal immediately like all other instant heals please for the love of God. Healing is unresponsive enough without adding a potion-drinking animation added to it. (Though personally I think it would be best to dramatically increase everyone's base HP and make medical kits a 12 second regen that you can also use on other players, to help mitigate the effectiveness of one-shot bursts and distribute the responsibility of healing onto other jobs.)

I do hope that all the Jobs get seriously reworked for PvP in 6.1. The way they are designed always makes me think that whoever did the Job, loathes PvP with all his being and only did it, because he owed yoshi p. some big favour and couldnt refuse.

If we just get some comedy gold potency adjustments, then i will most likely consider FFXIV PvP as a lost cause.

I recommend you watch the PvP-focused section from the last Live Letter. It was already announced that in 6.1 all jobs will be significantly reworked to essentially remove reliance on healers and roles in general from PvP.

I've seen good healers withstand 3v1 in Frontline. They're like tanks.

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Originally Posted by Azuri

I recommend you watch the PvP-focused section from the last Live Letter. It was already announced that in 6.1 all jobs will be significantly reworked to essentially remove reliance on healers and roles in general from PvP.

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The thing is, the wording "rework" from Squeenix side, often just means removing 1-2 abilities at best and stick to the same old formula of potency adjustments. SCH in PvP, to provide a example, has been tossed arround with those rework ideas before, by removing the Fairy it once had, re-adding it, then replacing it with Seraph, only to be removed again, readded and now gone for good.

And that, is part of the reason why i have very low expectations of why it wont be any better than it is already is. I dont think Squeenix understands the concept of PvP and they need to hire People who do, if they want to have said mode in FFXIV.

What I hope is that the rework doesn't just make all jobs completely bland and generic to the point that they are nearly indistinguishable from each other.

Meaning instead of making all jobs some similar dps class with different animations for their abilities keep strengths and weaknesses for each role even if they are changed. For example, healers would become less necessary for keeping the party alive (which was a big design problem in the Feast) but instead their focus would be on supporting the party with buffs and CCs and also slightly stronger healing, but not like it was before; tanks become more of bruisers with also decent utility and more survivability at expense of damage, etc

Unfortunately while I hope it will be like this, I'm completely expecting them to do the opposite and just make all jobs amorphous blobs for PvP, and it is what the fact that they are making it role unrestricted seems to suggest.

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Originally Posted by Pibz

What I hope is that the rework doesn't just make all jobs completely bland and generic to the point that they are nearly indistinguishable from each other.

Meaning instead of making all jobs some similar dps class with different animations for their abilities keep strengths and weaknesses for each role even if they are changed. For example, healers would become less necessary for keeping the party alive (which was a big design problem in the Feast) but instead their focus would be on supporting the party with buffs and CCs and also slightly stronger healing, but not like it was before; tanks become more of bruisers with also decent utility and more survivability at expense of damage, etc

Unfortunately while I hope it will be like this, I'm completely expecting them to do the opposite and just make all jobs amorphous blobs for PvP, and it is what the fact that they are making it role unrestricted seems to suggest.

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It seems, based on the details in the Live Letter sildes, that the only thing that will be unique for jobs will be the Limit Break or Adrenaline Rushes as they call them in PvP. As for party composition in Crystal Conflict, anything will go as long as there aren't any duplicates.

If all jobs will be statistically the same, the meta will boil down to which jobs have the shortest attack animations.

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Originally Posted by Justuas

I've seen good healers withstand 3v1 in Frontline. They're like tanks.

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This is how I enjoy playing frontlines most of the time, tanking packs of 5+, even more if there's a pillar to los around. It can turn fights around pretty quickly. But the biggest issue is the delay in activating some spells, which means that against 2+ players who have racked battle high 5 you literally need to start healing yourself when you are full life, as a single delay of a gcd can lead to death.

Burst damage becomes sky high and this kind of situation shows the limits of how pvp works in the game.

I completely agree. Burst damage is mainly effective because of the limitations of the game, and burst damage isn't fun to experience as it currently is. A fun way to do burst damage is if they take a page from PvE BLM's new AoE rotation. Using Fire 2 in astral fire gives you an "enhanced Flare" buff making your Flares more powerful as long as you stay in astral fire. This could be translated to PvP BLM by making enemies currently suffering from thunder take increased damage from your fire spells, instead of applying a DoT. Removing Phantom Dart and other "damage up" buffs as well would free up BLM to absolutely CHUNK people with Fire 4, but with setup required. This means healers could see the thunder debuff and preventively throw out shell/protect knowing the Fire 4's are coming, or the target could move away from or break line of sight with the BLM as soon as they get debuffed. Point is, you can create situations where burst damage is a reward for good setup / positioning, but right now burst damage is just everywhere all the time in frontlines because of the meta of singling people out to nuke them. Single target burst is so overwhelming that Holmgang is basically a death sentence for whoever you single out, deadlier than any LB.

If I could redesign the DPS jobs, I'd make it so instead of making every ranged magical having phantom dart and every ranged physical having head graze / leg graze / foot graze (meaning magic ranged is good for the damage up and physical ranged is good for the CC), I'd make it so RDM and DNC have "increase the damage of allies around me" skills in exchange for low personal dps, MCH and BLM are the selfish dps that specialize in sustained high damage, and SMN and BRD have AoE healing/shield abilities that can help out a team in a pinch.

I do not play enough melee dps to say what would be good roles for them, but they definitely need more HP, defense, and things to differentiate their playstyles. Perhaps DRG could be a half-tank like ARR again except with Jump abilities giving you momentary 100% dodge chance, MNK have an AoE heal and passive defense/attack buff to any allies nearby (like classic WoW paladin auras), Ninja have access to placing down invisible traps like landmines that if enemies walk into them, they get CC'd and a glass cannon playstyle that forces them to use hit an run tactics (they die to CC as easily as they kill with it), SAM being high sustained damage like MCH and BLM, and Reaper being another half-tank but this time because it absorbs health repeatedly when hitting enemies.

Those are just some ideas for how they could change the jobs, not really any point to it but its fun to imagine how they could redesign them.

(Also I'm not too experienced using forums, I meant to reply with quotes in these but I think I messed it up.)