Reflections after Grinding to Crystal: Counter Play and Frustration

Hi everyone!
This is my first post on the forums, but I wanted to give my feedback on the new PvP after finishing my grind to Crystal rank a few days ago. I didn’t want to read too many other forum posts about PvP balance yet as I wished to keep my opinions as uncolored as possible, so if there is information in this post that is repeated elsewhere, I want to apologize now as I didn’t meant to copy.

So starting off, I predominantly played SAM during the entire grind. I started playing the new PvP mode relatively soon after patch 6.1 went live and actually started queueing for ranked immediately. After only a few games of job hopping I landed on SAM as it felt not only easy to pickup and fun, but also quite strong. And with that I was off to the races, as I for the most part was winning quite a lot of games (probably due to the power level of SAM). During this time I rarely if ever swapped off SAM until I made it to Platinum.

Once I made it to Platinum, I wanted to expand my repertoire of jobs and become better at the game as a whole, not just the one job. Therefore I quit SAM and swapped to DRK as I found the move set incredibly interesting and I (at the time) believed with some practice, DRK could be incredibly strong to play. I believe I queued for about 9 hours with DRK in ranked and found less than decent success. By the end of my time with DRK, if the enemy team had a WAR and I didn’t have a Co-Tank WAR, I knew about 8/10 times I was not going to win the match. It was honestly a little crushing to learn that “The Dark Knight Dream, couldn’t win against the Warrior Reality”. To be fair, I could have been playing DRK completely incorrectly and others might have much better success than I did, but it definitely did feel as though most groups would’ve rather had a WAR than a DRK.

After coming to this conclusion, I swapped back to SAM and continued my grind into Diamond, where the games were very difficult. I spent the large majority of my time fluctuations between Diamond 3 and 5. However, and this will sound a whole lot like bragging, so I apologize now, but after I had fallen down to Diamond 5 0 Stars, I proceeded to win 7(8?) games in a row to make it into Crystal. It was pretty epic.

(Continues below in first reply.)

Ok, so away from my background and my shamelessness, the main reason I made this post was to talk about Counter Play and Frustration. I don’t want to label any jobs as overpowered mainly as I can’t really define what that means in the context of CC. (Note #1: What I mean by this is that it’s difficult for me to isolate what makes a job overpowered in comparison to another, as WAR/WHM are strong in different ways from SAM/DRG). Instead I would like to look at how frustrating a job is to play against.

My main example is SAM. I think one thing most players can agree on is that Zantetsuken (SAM Limit Break) can be incredibly frustrating to play against. During times of intense action, especially in overtime when holding a point, the fact that a stray AoE can hit a SAM using Chiten, give someone a debuff and the SAM can instantly KO that player or players, thereby losing them the match, is very annoying.. To be fair, there a lot of cool clips of quad kills, but that feels much to the detriment of the opposing players’ experience. I think the biggest reason for this frustration is that the players felt like they didn’t have a lot of control in the outcome. As far as I know, Kuzushi (the SAM debuff) cannot be purified, so players sometimes just have to wait to be KOed. This is recurring theme in other jobs as well.

When I was playing DRK, I felt useless against a WHM, as Miracle of Nature could effectively just KO me at the end of my Limit Break as it can’t be purified and I can’t use any abilities to save myself. (Note #2: I could of course run away and abandon the fight, but that is sort of antithetical to my role as a Tank in the fight).

These two examples, I posit are examples where there is little to no Counter Play and I believe that is a lot of where the Frustration lies. In these examples, the player feels as though they had no control over the immediate future of the match. Which doesn’t feel very fun to play through. Therefore, if I were to change anything, it would to build more Counter Play into these frustrating abilities.

(Continues in second reply below.)

Let’s imagine the scenario that the SAM debuff can purified. The scenario where a stray AoE leads to a immediate KO can still happen. However, it would happen in the circumstance that the to-be-KOed player had already used their Purify within the past 30 seconds. If instead the player saw that the SAM LB was soon approaching the player might not elect to use Purify in order to protect themselves against being hit by the instant KO. Which immediately puts the control of the outcome not in the hands of only one player. Which would then reduce the Frustration that comes with playing against the SAM LB. Another layer can be added to this as well as, for example, a WHM on the SAM’s team could see that the SAM’s LB is fast approaching and they elect to use their own LB and force out the Purifies if the opposing team, which immediately gives more synergy between the 2 jobs. And in this scenario the opposing team, must make the choice between Purifying the WHM LB and the SAM LB. This is still a difficult decision, however in my opinion is better than no choice in the matter at all. (Note #3: I personally would not want this to be the change, instead I think SAM LB should be Guard-able instead as I think that is a more obvious change, but Purify is still a good enough example.)

Between Guard and Purify, the Dev team has put a lot of tools in the hands of the players to have Counter Play and I think that’s great. I think it would be even better if they buff those 2 abilities to deal with a lot of the situations that people are frustrated about as opposed to, for example, removing the instant KO from SAM LB as I personally love the flavor of that. (Note #4: I didn’t talk about jobs besides SAM and that’s just because it’s the most obvious frustrating thing right now, but for example I think Miracle of Nature, should either be purifiable or perhaps even better, let someone use Recuperate during it.)

All in all, I’m a huge fan of the PvP and think they’ve done an incredible job with it. I believe there are a few Frustrations that could be mitigated, but once that happens I believe the game mode will be probably my favorite PvP mode I’ve ever played. (To be fair it basically is already, but I could be even better!)

Thank you very much for your attention and your time in reading this post. I hope to see you out there in CC and that you have a great rest of your day.

-Fran Gralvarek (Cerberus/Louisoix?)