Leaderboards tells the truth about frontline...

http://markbinnt.smugmug.com/FFxiv-f...ards/i-9KLfVj5

...at least when it comes to what jobs deals the most damage. All these are from Slaughter and arranged by damage dealt. Most from 72 but also quite a few 24. Nr 15 is interesting as there were no casters. Still range dps ftw when it comes to total damage dealt.

I'm sure this is old news by now. It is debatetable if damage output = effeciency in slaughter, but these are the guys that will grab the most commondations. Aren't there more data to go by to determine performance (except healing and kills of course)?

Who would have thought that high damage AoE based ranged spells do more damage overall than single target attacks in 8v8v8 or 24v24v24 :P

Welp, a ranged AOE damage dealer being first at damage done in a 72 cluttered man environment? Such a surprise.

Doing big AOEs isn't that useful anyway, especially since healers can equally dish out aoe heals.

Better being able to burst down a healers imo.

Heck, I can be in the top damage done on my warrior if I got a pocket healer and I go in spamming Overpower, but I don't think that's what will win us the game.

Heavy focus fire / CC on one target is much more useful.

So there haven't been any suggestions on how to "improve" the feedback on perfomance? I would like a more advanced report than what we currently have. At least be able to save the results.

Being able to see past matches would be good i guess, but you get a good amount of data already post match to measure performance

You should also sort by kills. A lot of people think it's just AoEs that's propping up the damage (which is true for SMNs and bane) but if you look at the kills you'll find that in the vast majority of the time, casters are still very common at the top especially in 72 man.

There definitely is some imbalance favouring casters in slaughter. However, this does not mean we should nerf casters, as they are well balanced outside 72 man slaughter. What's really happening is the 72-man Slaughter and adrenaline combo that's causing the advantage through meat shields and LBs. A possible fix is a change in how the 72-man Slaughter matchup occurs, with more focus being on the 3 side nodes instead of forcing the majority of the match to be in the middle. This will make it harder for casters to hide behind a mountain of people and freecast. Another is to make Cometeor unstackable, like make a 3s buff that you get when hit by a cometeor, which nullifies any other cometeor damage you take during those 3s.

And just another side note, I feel like people rarely give commendations in frontlines. Achievement points however, are another story. You'll reach the 5k kills achievement way faster if you played caster.

@CeveArthu
Yes, you get a fair picture. That does not mean it is not room for improvement. Well, that will always be true anyway, so, shrug. At the same time, if you suggest that the current leaderboards reflects performance good, then, on an average, the players playing as casters are basically better players than melees (according to damag/kills). Unless you do some sort of artificial scaling. i.e add 30% to melee damage and then compare.

@PotatoTree
Some good ideas there. Caster LB and mid focused slaughter makes it easy(er) for casters to stack up damage and kills. I think what SE aims for with slaughter is an easy way for noobs to get into the game, thus sacrificing map utilization for brainless zerging.

I don't care for commendations that much, however when people are serious about commendations they will study the leaderboard.

If you take the end of match stats at face value, sure the casters look good, its not hard to look at the bigger picture though (or even better, realise frontlines isnt really worth bragging about)

But even useless casters are strong on frontlines, its not exactly a competitive format, its not balanced for all the classes, its for PvE players to mess around in and pretend they know what they are doing :P

If a melee actually bothers to DPS the Allagan Weapon systems, they should reach 80k~ total damage per match pretty regularly, and if they stay alive and have a good group 100k isn't difficult either..

Total damage and Total HP healed is affected by the length of the match too though, some run the full 15 min, some not.

The most impressive stat though imo is Time's KO'd. Gotta get that goose egg.

Too bad the scoreboard doesn't have "Battle High" and "Battle Fever" columns, with the value being the number of occurrences per player.

Edit: Actually why not just a total points generated column. Combine points per kill with Battle High/Fever bonus and slaying enemy Highs/Fevers bonus. There could also be a column for each node/drone, with a % value representing the total % of damage the player inflicted on each node/drone.

Of course it's long been known that Frontlines (specifically Slaughter) is like this. I'm on a different data center, but I could supply you with loads of screenshots on Aether that look exactly the same as that.
Also this is a little nitpicky, but I think by leaderboards, you really mean end-of-round statistics. The real leaderboards are here:
http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/ranking/

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Guesswhat

It is debatetable if damage output = effeciency in slaughter, but these are the guys that will grab the most commondations

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wat

This is just my personal opinion, but I believe Frontlines commendations (like commendations for any other duty, really) should go to people who play exceptionally and participate more than just "doing their job" (role). People get Battle High all the time, there's nothing special about that, although I would like to commend people who can get Battle Fever and keep it for the whole match. I don't commend simply because someone got the highest kills or the highest damage. I think someone who has low kills and low damage but was able to take out multiple drones did a better job than someone attacking other players with high damage and getting kills. Just my opinion.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by aerialrave

wat

I believe Frontlines commendations should go to people who play exceptionally and participate more than just "doing their job". People get Battle High all the time, there's nothing special about that, although I would like to commend people who can get Battle Fever and keep it for the whole match. I don't commend simply because someone got the highest kills or the highest damage. I think someone who has low kills and low damage but was able to take out multiple drones did a better job than someone attacking other players with high damage and getting kills.

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Hence the statement "It is debatable if damage output = efficiency in slaughter". I can imagine someone study the end-match statistics to determine commendation. The point here isn't how I determine it, or how it should be, but what most likely will be the case.

Yeah, I know about the official leaderboards. I mean the end-match "leaderboard". It sounded good in the thread title. :P

In Slaughter mode I almost always commend a healer if they did their job well because that person who got 15 kills and battle fever during the match, got 15 kills towards the related achievements and titles whereas the healer got jacksh*t in that department. And someone who managed to keep battle high/fever through a whole match might have acquired it based on their own talents, but with that big bullseye over their head it's probably one of the healers who kept them from losing it. Ever gotten battle high/fever, just to get focused down and no one healing you while your survival skills go on cool-down one by one and your hp dwindles to nothing and you get to start all over at the GC landing stripped of that and any remaining buffs you earned from taking down drones at manors/markets/temple? I have, and it sucks, so any healer who's able to keep that from happening amidst the clusterf* at mid is doing an exceptional job in my book already. Of course some healers neglect their job, and relying on someone to be a capable healer and then discovering once you're at mid that they aren't sets you up for failure in a major way. But just because I've healed a few hundred PVP marches as SCH that doesn't make me biased- I've gone as DPS for just as many and if I'm standing there bound or slept the first thing I'm looking at is the healer's castbars and in too many cases what I've seen is them casting something like Stone II or Miasma (weak DPS skills with a healer's INT stat at i80 and no Cleric Stance), or spamming Medica on a party with full HP while two or three of their party members stand there slept as their Raging Strikes ability they just used counts down to 0 and three casters from another alliance are lining up their Cometors.

Of course, someone who racked up a ton of kills in a match is doing something right, and without that the team can't win. But it can't necessarily be said that person got all those kills by themselves and deserve all commendations above the other DPS's based on that number alone. Picture this scenario- 2 casters in an alliance target the same group of 6 people at full HP with Cometors, killing them all. Score 0 kills for whoever's cometor went off first, and 6 kills for whomever's went off second. That's what it's come down to for me in a number of matches... whether I got credit or someone else on the team did came down to which one's LB landed after the other. A win will benefit the whole team, and a high kill count will further benefit whoever got it... but the healer who enabled those people to do that, in comparison, often gets shafted.

TLDR; People with The Hand of Mercy title under their name & who say it's too much work to ever give out commendations at the end of a match can suck it.