Pvp frontlines is a miserable experience

Or I'm terribly missing something here?

Being a healer is frustrating. While I'm hard to kill, non-tanks die in 3 hits, I can only save people if I sort of guess that they'll take heavy dmg and pre-cast so those heals land in time... Other than that by the time I click on the player frame and hit my button, they are already gone.

Being dps sucks because if you're in the front, is very likely that you'll be 2-shot by at least 3 ranged players.

It's really meant to be like this?

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Or I'm terribly missing something here?

Being a healer is frustrating. While I'm hard to kill, non-tanks die in 3 hits, I can only save people if I sort of guess that they'll take heavy dmg and pre-cast so those heals land in time... Other than that by the time I click on the player frame and hit my button,

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bard op in pvp

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Or I'm terribly missing something here?

Being a healer is frustrating. While I'm hard to kill, non-tanks die in 3 hits, I can only save people if I sort of guess that they'll take heavy dmg and pre-cast so those heals land in time... Other than that by the time I click on the player frame and hit my button, they are already gone.

Being dps sucks because if you're in the front, is very likely that you'll be 2-shot by at least 3 ranged players.

It's really meant to be like this?

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healers hard to kill lol?

your team simply is not using an optimal way to fight other teams

of course if you get focused and targeted by 5+ people you're goners, but I've managed to hold myself as a SCH against 3 people for quite some time

My experience healing frontlines has been more or less the same as yours. As long as I position correctly I haven't had much trouble with getting focused down, since most teams have been uncoordinated. I've found that usually when I see a dps spontaneously combust, it's because they were suicidal and ran straight into another team. I try not to be too frustrated about that. Still, I've started to spec for pure healing/mp regen over defense in frontlines to help manage the chaotic damage.

Ss someone mentioned, bard and mch is pretty op in FL right now. Couple that with bad players that just rush in and try to hit only what is in front of them, they will die in 3 hits. If they don't know how to retreat or when to go in, they will die. Lots of pressure on healers but I've learned that as a healer I just filter out the bads and put the good people on the top of the party list, or people with Battle High/Fever on top and focus them instead. The others are just cannon fodder anyway, can't heal them.

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Originally Posted by Rhinos

I've found that usually when I see a dps spontaneously combust, it's because they were suicidal and ran straight into another team. I try not to be too frustrated about that.

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This is precisely the reason why non-tanks die "too fast" TC; it's not that healers are ill-equipped to rescue people, they're ill-equipped to heal through multiple (we're talking 3-4+) DPS bursting-down the same person. An over-extended DPS (especially a ranged) will melt if even a handful of people from an opposing team jumps on them. It's almost always on them; and I can probably count on one hand how many DPS I remember that actually try to place the blame on the healers for their own lack of spatial awareness. My personal fav to this day is a BRD during the HW era who not only overextended but was too slow to pull out during a retreat and literally went from 100% to 0 in a fraction of a second due to the sheer amount of enemies who jumped on him and proceeded to try to call-out the 3 healers in the party for not making him utterly invulnerable in that one moment it took to floor him.

I love Deorbit on AST in Frontlines because I have the power to recognize incoming death-trains that my lovely tunnel-visioned melee might not see and drag them out of it, but alas, its wasted like 75% of the time because they immediately run back in to die within the next 5-10 seconds thereafter.

I'm always torn between going DRG or AST in Frontlines, lol. It can be annoying on both, obviously. I have to "predict" the damage on AST too, it's easier to when you heal someone who's getting focused, of course. I get a lot of those people who like to be punching bags for a whole alliance, too, like...really? Sometimes I'll baby leash them out, but sometimes...they run back in. Or people who just stand in front of an alli even if they're being burned down, even had other healers do it. If I get a known botter in my group, they can burn for all I care. I went AST to help a SCH in specific once, then I looked at the scoreboard...guy was full of 0's. Nope.

depending on when you que up your team may or may not be mostly bots.
It's insufferable on aether right now, especially after 10pm.
Getting freelanced to flames feels like a sick punishment of some sort.

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Originally Posted by bswpayton

bard op in pvp

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I dunno, DRGs are in a good spot too, the jumps snipe a lot of kills.

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Originally Posted by Toffa

depending on when you que up your team may or may not be mostly bots.
It's insufferable on aether right now, especially after 10pm.
Getting freelanced to flames feels like a sick punishment of some sort.

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Yeah, I freelance, but I still get Flames 90% of the time. 8% Adder, 2% Mael. Flames used to be alright, but they're definately the shit end of the stick, for now. And yeah, I'm gonna assume the healers with leveling robes on (the ones that look like potato sacks) are bots, lol. Somebody nearing 60 shouldn't be wearing lvl 26 gear.

Maybe a bot check is in order, before the match starts? Idk, I'd rather weed them out than waste time dealing with them.

I'm just remembering the whole "We're aiming to make PvP in FFXIV big" or however it was worded, yet, bots are ruining Frontlines, and Feast still has terrible communication. Hilarious.

I dont have much problems healing or dps as a mch.
The only thing i may say is a problem are bots or people playing like they have an IQ of 20.

"why that dumb nin run into a full enemy alliance alone" And i do mean IN to the alliance.
Or people thinking theyre a Paladin staying within healing range, getting whaled on badly by 8+ people, but staying alive, and NOT retreating at all. Get the damn target off your head plz, jeezus.
I let you die, we start losing, i heal you, then im just encouraging your dumbness.

Anyway, my main complaint is the bots. They charge through an alliance and die, or just cause chaos.

The worst of the worst of them is at like 4/5am est time. I swear Im the only human player and so many commands from the bots are taking place the entire match lags til i get 90002d off the server. Five days in a row now. (no its not the ISP lol)

This weeks frontline score is 24 played, 5 wins, 8 at 2nd place and 11 at 3rd place. I was a flame or freelanced to adders for 21 of the games, of which 2 were a win. I swapped to mael and won 3 in a row. the worst is when you see you have 6 healers and find out later they are all bots. They run into the enemy group and spam heal themselves only, if I'm on my astro and I use the pull thing to move them to me out of the large group they instantly run back to where they were standing its awful, I really don't have time nor can be bothered to report this.

Needed only 5 wins for the blue orb mount it was painful playing 21 games with 2 wins

Honestly there is no point playing anything but ranged or healer, maybe tank if you want to stretch a bit. You get wrecked by ranged before you can hope to engage so generally you end up sitting back picking off people the tanks lock down or poking ice till someone decides to kill you.

I came here to find answers to why Frontlines has become so frustrating. I'm on the flames, and I can't remember the last time we won. Seeing as bots seems to be a common theme and that they're congregated on the flames, it all seems to make much more sense.

It's time to make Frontlines all-freelancer. This is pretty much as absurd as it gets.

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Originally Posted by Sindele

This is pretty much as absurd as it gets.

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Haha. 4.1 Please look forward to it!

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Originally Posted by Cynric

Haha. 4.1 Please look forward to it!

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Basically. Until then I guess everyone goes Mael/Adders, whee?

I needed these achievements anyway, I guess, I just hate to desert my boy Raubahn like that. :(

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Originally Posted by Sindele

Basically. Until then I guess everyone goes Mael/Adders, whee?

I needed these achievements anyway, I guess, I just hate to desert my boy Raubahn like that. :(

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Nah man it'll probably be like 10 times worse when they launch a new pvp mode. so yeah look forward to that. at least then every team might have bots.. haha.

on the upside you might be able to get some wins on shatter at that point

IMO, part of it is the 1v1v1 setup. Most matches I see one GC goes all out on the 2nd GC and the 3rd GC wins easily by getting uncontested ice. Then there's lack of healers and spawn camping. One match had zero healers in the alliance, adders sends their entire alliance and sits on our base. Couldn't push them off with no heals. Then they move towards the spawn point. Despite all the easy kills they had, they still lost to mael who ran around getting all the ice.

I'm just tired of shatter, wish they would delete it. Seal rock was much more fun.

Still on this...

I get less frustrated now on a healer because I really realized after the posts here that some people dropping like flies are their own fault running to the enemy pack alone or not retreating when getting overwhelmed.

I'm currently leveling NIN and it's horrid to play melee. You only score some dps if the enemy ranged units are targeting something else... I wonder if it's the same with the other melee jobs. Just sucks spending most of the time waiting for the rez timer.

And why on heck NIN doesn't have hide in pvp? I mean, the staple of being a stealthy ninja is to... stealth? lol

Been playing it quite a bit lately to try to get a late start on all the Garo stuff (RIP me), and I gotta say, Frontlines and PvP in general is kind of... resoundingly "eh". It feels like SE hasn't looked at big PvP games in the west like LoL, CounterStrike, DOOM, or even WoW's offerings. Some of their mistakes were made by other devs and changed years and years ago but SE is making them all over again.

- Healing is OP as all heck. You can hold your own against 3-4 people whacking on someone for a few seconds, usually more than long enough for them to escape and the attackers to either over-commit and die or simply switch targets. Rinse and repeat as much as you want if you don't over-extend yourself. But hey even if you do that you can still spam heals on yourself and it'll take an army to bring you down. It's too much, way too much. I've actually ignored a PLD and a DPS doing their best to hassle me but they had to give up because it just wasn't worth the effort. I've had the same experience as a DPS too- all or most of us pile on the healer, they stand around or run right at us and don't die (mostly SCH of course, but WHMs and ASTs have done it too).

Healers should heal less and support more or be far, far easier to interrupt and kill. Even if FL is a clown fiesta there should be limits on how godly healing and saving ass can be.

- 1v1v1 means your W/L ratio will be about 33/66- you will lose more than you win, by a lot. I'm neutral about this set up but it feels bad knowing that, no matter what you do, you're probably going to lose more often than not. Trying to direct 24 people to do objectives and not be stupid (or bots) is a challenge that some like to impose on themselves, but many just go in with the objective of "kill dudes and get some roulette EXP". There's no stakes in it unless you're still farming for mounts, and even then, you may as well tilt or quit FL after a loss or two since you're statistically going to lose more than win anyway. Feast is where people who want to win go, or at least trade wins.

- This is more of a complaint towards Feast, but it applies to FL too. Specialised UI and SFX look shiny but the gameplay behind them is shallow. You bumrush people, do objectives if you care enough, and if you want to win you will have some teams doing different things simultaneously. Breaking ice and ignoring the swarms of enemy factions around to shatter it before making a speedy escape to safe ground isn't thrilling. Neither is poking at each other and waiting for someone to over-extend so you can gimp and kill him. So many matches are simply pockets of players waging sustain wars- better/more healers = you win- and the only thing that breaks them up is a third party staging an ambush (FL only, been in plenty of Feast matches where 2 or more "culling time" stacks were gained because of endless poke/skirmish/heal) or if there's a break in ranks due to objectives spawning and players rushing to them at inopportune times. It was a good idea to limit the complexity of jobs in PvP so players could focus on strategy, but now the ideal strategy is "have better healers and don't be a Leeroy Jenkins". It's BORING. So safe, so easy, unless you get caught on your own away from friends and get obliterated. Would not spectate that stuff unless you paid me to do it.

- If you're losing, you're going to take a long time to do it. There are no mercy ends to matches where one team steamrolls the other two. We've all been on the teams that have only the points generated by their base and few kills to their names while the other groups have to wait for ice to spawn before earning enough to win for sure. Meanwhile those loser teams are getting decimated over and over again, or are perpetually locked in a 1v1 fight against each other while the third team goes off and steals bases, breaks ice, and has to wait a while before the end of the match. Close games are a rare thing, usually it's one team taking the winnings and leaving the other two to squabble over rotten seconds. I'm not sure what they can do about this but FL feels like a chore because even if I'm winning for once, there's little joy in breaking ice that's getting ignored by the other two combatants. Wow I broke the ice instead of getting trapped in the personal conflict quagmire below me, I'm so good... I guess... And if I'm losing, well... Great I'm trying to break ice but there's no back-up/we're getting steamrolled so hard we don't even have a base any more/everyone is ignoring the objectives to kill the guys who aren't winning despite pleas to not do that... I have to wait a while for this to finish but I guess I'll keep trying since I'm at least going to be better than those bots rushing to their deaths over and over again. Hope that big ice spawns faster, I might get to poke it before I die or have to run away.

- Bots are a thing and are apparently fine to use, as long as you don't tell anyone you're doing it. While that questionable approach is mostly harmless in PvE stuff, it is NOT okay in PvP. SE please please please look into doing something about it, getting rid of botters would help give the mode some legitimacy and make matches more fair and interesting.

I want to like PvP. But it's so aimless, so under-developed that I can't take it seriously at all. I hope SE makes it worth caring about since it has great rewards and they want to make it into the next big thing, if all the shiny stuff for Feast is anything to go by. It needs a ton of work before it's ready to be promoted as a selling-point though. Thank you for reading my opinion essay about PvP in a PvE MMO.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

And why on heck NIN doesn't have hide in pvp? I mean, the staple of being a stealthy ninja is to... stealth? lol

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Because normal Hide was incredibly unfair if used right. And NINs do still have a way of hiding. Three Mudras -> Kakuremi -> wait out the duration outside of combat

Honestly in some ways new Hide is better because we can move normally while hiding now, it just has a timer to prevent what we did with normal Hide.

Hide was countered before by all 3 Dexterity jobs (BRD, MCH, and NIN) having the "Detect" ability. Many times I saw a NIN player try to use it while I could see them. . . I'd simply sprint out to their last known location and use Detect, revealing them instantly.

We actually DON'T have a way to reveal a hiding NIN anymore.

And Hestzhyen, not to devalue your opinion, but a LOT of what you said is pretty off the mark. However, you may have actually enjoyed what PvP used to be like if you'd tried it then. There was far more depth, far more competition, FAR fewer bots, fewer afks/exploiters, and Shatter wasn't always the be-all, end-all of Frontlines PvP.

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Originally Posted by Zandeth

Honestly in some ways new Hide is better because we can move normally while hiding now

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Not only because of that but because you can use new Hide while in combat, old was annoying as sometimes you had to run across the map to lose hidden "in-combat" status.

Frontline is a miserable experience beacuse of bots. Since the expac (and the consequent increase in exp, etc.) i'm only playing pvp because of the roulette. Today, I almost ragequitted cause of bots. There were like 10 of them, moving like a pack of wolves, ahead or behind at the exact same moment, mostly ignoring ices, etc. It was terrible. Dunno the reason, but on my server this problem is hitting the IF harder than the other 2 GCs. I'd gladly change GC, if I hadn't the First Marshal rank.

Please, do something. Even rule out the exp from the equation, but do something.

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Originally Posted by AndrewAlexander

I came here to find answers to why Frontlines has become so frustrating. I'm on the flames, and I can't remember the last time we won. Seeing as bots seems to be a common theme and that they're congregated on the flames, it all seems to make much more sense.

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It became frustrating because it is the only usefull way to level right now if you play dps without a taxi (tank or healer) in your party.

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Originally Posted by QT_Melon

I dunno, DRGs are in a good spot too, the jumps snipe a lot of kills.

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Are you insane? If you "snipe" with jump your characters physical position is moved into range of all those casters and ranged. You WILL die. And if they do a pull on you while you're in range, that's it, you're toast.

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Originally Posted by Coldbrand

Are you insane? If you "snipe" with jump your characters physical position is moved into range of all those casters and ranged. You WILL die. And if they do a pull on you while you're in range, that's it, you're toast.

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Jump is a temporary position change, you go back to where you were when you used Jump after the damage is dealt. Spineshatter dive physically moves you. So that would be what you're thinking of.

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Originally Posted by Coldbrand

Are you insane? If you "snipe" with jump your characters physical position is moved into range of all those casters and ranged. You WILL die. And if they do a pull on you while you're in range, that's it, you're toast.

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No you won't die...at least not on my data center since people there are ignoring everything in frontlines. ;)

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Originally Posted by Cynric

Jump is a temporary position change, you go back to where you were when you used Jump after the damage is dealt. Spineshatter dive physically moves you. So that would be what you're thinking of.

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No it's not what I'm thinking of, you shouldn't correct me if you don't know what I'm talking about. The time spent close to the enemy when using jump as a poking tool DOES physically move your character and DOES put you in range of tank's vacuums if they're fast enough to grab you. You are also physically in range of casters and ranged DPS when you do this, because your physical position changes, and while it's true you return, it's often an INCREDIBLY bad idea because you have no control over your character, the longer the jump, the more time spent powerless.

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Originally Posted by Coldbrand

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Jump doesn't even last that long with the position change, and if you're using it close to a pack of people in FL that's all on you anyway.

Though piercing talon is probably the better snipe either way since Jump was nerfed + costs 400 TP. and Talon actually gains a benefit on lower HP %.

I don't think Jump can take longer? It seems to be the same timing no matter what. Yeah you can get hit if you Jump into a mob, but if you die there that was just poorly planned, or the ranged were already getting ready to target you. People aren't that coordinated in FL. I've run into a pack of people as a Monk and just nuked them, got fever, and ran out. But hey your mileage may vary in Botline.

Jump invisibly walks your character along a given distance in the same way Shukuchi does. This becomes extremely obvious when you see how you take damage from ground based AoE zones. Longer jumps take longer. I don't see the point in mentioning how it's a "bad idea" and "on you" when my original point was that it was an extremely bad idea since Frontlines basically relegates melee to staggler hunters at best.

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Originally Posted by Coldbrand

snip.

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Nah there's totally times where you can go in and when you can't go in. You just have to be able to recognize them, and a healer has to have your back. You can't jump into an entire alliance , but why would you try to jump into an entire alliance? Is more so what I mean.

Botline is a huge mess anyway you slice it though.

Also didn't realize that about jump. That's a shame. And I didn't mean on you specifically. I mean more so that if the DRG decides to jump into 24 players of course they stand a good chance at dying, but if they jump on the right person in a bit of a smaller group or a distracted one, they also could stand a chance at getting a kill.

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Originally Posted by Elfidan

...you end up sitting back picking off people the tanks lock down...

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So much true, as tank I found the most effective help I can do is stunning the fools that adventured out of their pack to let team eat them.