[Feedback] Overall 4.0 PvP Experience

Since the beginning of PvP in this game, this have been an issue.

Facts:
• Heals have 2500/5000 potency. (2.3s cast time, single target)
• Tank combos have 2750/3250 potency. (3 attacks, in 7-8 seconds if you're fast enough)
• DPS combos will vary from 2000 to 5000 depending on bursts.

Can we please have a PvP-related Dev explain why all the matches are being carried by Healers only?
Tanks should also have carry potential, 2 second duration "Crowd Control" skills (its kinda hilarious if you think about it) means nothing most of the time.

DPS on the other hand seems OK right? Wrong.
Bursts often take too long to build up, and you'll hardly be able to sync bursts on the same target without communication (Quick Chat doesn't work for that).

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What do we have right now?
• Capable players unable to climb up the rankings, matching with random people that have no idea what to do since practice isn't required to join ranked.
• Overpowered healing due to fear of backlash, will never be nerfed because it looks like people don't like deaths in PvP;
• Underpowered tanks that should either be a pro on math to calculate the exact time to CC or a total disaster, there's no midterm;
• Headless chicken DPS that can't seem to focus attack a single target marked with a big yellow [1] and Quick Chat command "Charge".

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Etrius.

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Originally Posted by Etrius

Tanks should also have carry potential, 2 second duration "Crowd Control" skills (its kinda hilarious if you think about it) means nothing most of the time.

DPS on the other hand seems OK right? Wrong.
Bursts often take too long to build up, and you'll hardly be able to sync bursts on the same target without communication (Quick Chat doesn't work for that).

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DRK has an exceptional amount of CC along with Warrior. DRK has a stun, silence, and pull back. Warrior has a bind, and stun and heavy. But PLD... silence and one stun with no gap closer

DPS Burst is even harder without the appropriate CC. It's almost as if you need to need to milk your DPS until the healer is halfway and then do your burst.

But I agree the 4.0 system broke a lot.

because traditionally you cc the shit out of healers, but they gutted everyone and gave them shit like a useless 2 second silence

that's time for 1 gcd attack

that's fucking garbage

The problem when they had crowd control was that if you were a healer, you spent most of the match stunlocked. It wasn't fun at all to play feast when you are unable to do much, and had to play around constant periods of immobility, and it really made healing an immense pain in the ass. They tried to reduce it so you weren't waiting 30 min per feast que for the healer to show up, but they forgot to nerf healing power to compensate. You go back to tanks having more cc and dps better burst, it just winds up making healing harder and less people doing it.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

[...]but they forgot to nerf healing power to compensate.

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They didn't "forget" to nerf them, they buffed them and on purpose. They even gave them an entire right side worth of VIT accessories with absolutely no tradeoff in healing power.

What they are doing is to make healers increasingly overpowered on purpose to increase their popularity. That's all there is to it. And they always were OP, CC just served as a bandaid - CC prevents people from using their power, regardless of how much they have. You can "Focus, CC and Burst" even people who have the melee limit break as a regular GCD ability, that doesn't make having melee LB as a regular GCD is not broken as all hell.

Dedicated healers simply shouldn't exist in PvP period. By their very design, they are at odds with the game-mode, because they are playing a minigame of health bar Tug of War with them tugging in the direction of "Health bar full" and everyone else tugging in the direction of "Health bar empty". If the game is balanced, i.e. everyone tugging is equally strong, that can only result in one thing: One soul shattering defeat of the healer after another after another. Feel free to try that out sometime with colleagues after work, you only need 4 roughly equally strong players and a length of rope. This is something that just plain cannot be fixed, healer design simply isn't redeemable.

And until the designers realize as much, I advise abusing the heck out of the mess they made trying to salvage the idea. You can commonly win 1vs2 against most DPS without issues and run from the power generator all the way to the base with 4-5 people in tow as well. That in itself is hilarious enough, but the punchline is the fact that some still consider this "balanced".

It's balanced around diamond-level feast, so it should take 2 synced dps plus a ccing tank to burst down a healer. 1-2 gcd is all you need. The issue with healers in frontlines is that you just need a single above average healer to show all the dps that they don't know how to do damage since most players are not feast diamond level. If you do any buffing to dps or tank cc, you just end up with a few good tank/dps players steamrolling due to skill gap.

Also, dps need to know that sometimes it's ok to retreat. I mean is it really important that you and your buddy chase down that healer? Unless you're both buffed and sync the burst you'll just end up wasting a bunch of time or dying. I had dps just trickle in one by one to the caves under mid and I could healer dps them down. I mean if you're alone and see a healer just run away.

This is the only MMO I've ever played where I have to back down from engaging healers because they can actually kill me in a 1v1 situation.

I feel like they really need something to balance them out, whether it be nerfing their DPS or at least making it more MP intensive so they can't afford to keep themselves alive while simultaneously killing off players.

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Originally Posted by PotatoTree

It's balanced around diamond-level feast, so it should take 2 synced dps plus a ccing tank to burst down a healer. 1-2 gcd is all you need. The issue with healers in frontlines is that you just need a single above average healer to show all the dps that they don't know how to do damage since most players are not feast diamond level. If you do any buffing to dps or tank cc, you just end up with a few good tank/dps players steamrolling due to skill gap.

Also, dps need to know that sometimes it's ok to retreat. I mean is it really important that you and your buddy chase down that healer? Unless you're both buffed and sync the burst you'll just end up wasting a bunch of time or dying. I had dps just trickle in one by one to the caves under mid and I could healer dps them down. I mean if you're alone and see a healer just run away.

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amen

/10chars

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

The problem when they had crowd control was that if you were a healer, you spent most of the match stunlocked. It wasn't fun at all to play feast when you are unable to do much, and had to play around constant periods of immobility, and it really made healing an immense pain in the ass. They tried to reduce it so you weren't waiting 30 min per feast que for the healer to show up, but they forgot to nerf healing power to compensate. You go back to tanks having more cc and dps better burst, it just winds up making healing harder and less people doing it.

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the solution is counterplay and class depth

you take purify to break cc (and diminishing returns eventually nullifies cc)
you have your own cc to peel with
and they give you a more diverse toolset that makes healing more manageable while players are trying to wreck your shit

crowd control is a core part of this style of pvp combat, locking people down or peeling them off teammates is where the good players are separated from the bad ones and gutting everyone's cc just lowers the skill ceiling.
in it's current state it feels like smacking your head against a wall in unison until it falls over.

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Originally Posted by Etrius

Bursts often take too long to build up, and you'll hardly be able to sync bursts on the same target without communication (Quick Chat doesn't work for that).

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Just use a burst macro like every single player on JP datacenter.

As for the other stuff, overall I think 4.0 PvP is fine. Diamond tanks I know have no trouble CCing, Diamond dps I know have no trouble killing. Etc.

Purify didn't stop CC. Back then remember PLD had their full PvE kit, which meant they could stun you three times, silence you, and white mages could bind and knockback you. You had the one purify, to deal with ten seconds of CC or more. While you could deal with it, it really made matches unfun, and if you weren't good as a healer (not just average, very good) you were a liability and got reamed out. This actually over time led to the chat ban.

And honestly, they should think about balancing for feast and frontlines separately. two or more healers in a frontlines mode can soak up damage to a ridiculous degree. It's killing rival wings imo.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

Purify didn't stop CC. Back then remember PLD had their full PvE kit, which meant they could stun you three times, silence you, and white mages could bind and knockback you. You had the one purify, to deal with ten seconds of CC or more. While you could deal with it, it really made matches unfun, and if you weren't good as a healer (not just average, very good) you were a liability and got reamed out. This actually over time led to the chat ban.

And honestly, they should think about balancing for feast and frontlines separately. two or more healers in a frontlines mode can soak up damage to a ridiculous degree. It's killing rival wings imo.

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Well, they've set up the foundations for something like that, all we have to do is tell them we'd like to kill a healer or their adjacent allies within the next month

I really wish I knew what I was doing wrong in Feast as a SCH. I find it hard to keep everyone alive when they're (or I'm) being focused, but everything I read on these forums suggest I should be able to just heal & dance away.

I'm fine in Frontlines but I just can't deal with Feast after the 4.0 changes, I don't feel like I have enough raw healing power to keep four people going. The fairy being difficult to use doesn't seem to help.

That is honestly a bit of weakness with healers in general for PvP.

Their AoE healing tools are really limited compared to PvE now, so splitting the damage between several targets can actually put more pressure on them trying to focus one player down.

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Originally Posted by PotatoTree

It's balanced around diamond-level feast, so it should take 2 synced dps plus a ccing tank to burst down a healer. 1-2 gcd is all you need.

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Pretty much this right here, when stuff gets balanced around arenas then ofc large scale pvp balance will be all over the place. This is one of the reasons why i always dislike when games has or gets arenas added as it will ruin balance for other modes permanently.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

That is honestly a bit of weakness with healers in general for PvP.

Their AoE healing tools are really limited compared to PvE now, so splitting the damage between several targets can actually put more pressure on them trying to focus one player down.

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Limited = completely missing as far as Scholar is concerned. The only AoE heal is the limit break, which isn't easy to build in Feast. ='(

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Originally Posted by StomMeisie

the solution is counterplay and class depth

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There is no counterplay to CC. If you were a healer, you had one purify, and one healer had a knockback/bind and sleep, WHM. None of these worked to counter players. The WHM was only potent if they could get their CC off first, otherwise you couldn't really play to react. Fluid aura often just traded hits, leaving you stunned still with them away, and enemy players had stun, bind, silence, pacification, and sleep to mess you up with. Part of the reason BLM was gutted a bit in HW pvp was that sleep was so massively effective that whole teams couldn't counter it. It was imbalanced in favor of the offense.

Idk, this game has problems where there isn't any real happy medium. You're either a god or suffering.

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Originally Posted by Culfinrandir

I really wish I knew what I was doing wrong in Feast as a SCH. I find it hard to keep everyone alive when they're (or I'm) being focused, but everything I read on these forums suggest I should be able to just heal & dance away.

I'm fine in Frontlines but I just can't deal with Feast after the 4.0 changes, I don't feel like I have enough raw healing power to keep four people going. The fairy being difficult to use doesn't seem to help.

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For feast. SCH has to feel the flow of burst. When a burst is coming. Adloquium -> Lustrate (Summon Eos) -> Physick -> Lustrate.

If their dps is particularly persistent, throw in eye for an eye.

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Originally Posted by RedHerb

For feast. SCH has to feel the flow of burst. When a burst is coming. Adloquium -> Lustrate (Summon Eos) -> Physick -> Lustrate.

If their dps is particularly persistent, throw in eye for an eye.

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I've tried that but find the summon time of Eos is a great time for them to use stun &/or their deadliest combo. =(

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

There is no counterplay to CC. If you were a healer, you had one purify, and one healer had a knockback/bind and sleep, WHM. None of these worked to counter players.

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The answer to that was to peel for your healer. Is the tank sitting on your healer? Bind him, stun him, knock him back. Give your healer the support they need from you as teamwork dictates. There was also the shared diminishing returns on CCs. Though it was more favored to use Stun Gun as part of my burst, I often used my bind, so my melee or tank could still stun as they needed.

No one peeled for you as a healer because they were busy using CC on the other healer. DPS were not peeling because it was more important to burst a non-healer target down as fast as possible while the healer was incapacitated. As a healer in it, you were expected to take care of yourself really. It was mostly because if you tried to peel for your healer, you were giving the other healer free reign to keep healing the target the dps were trying to kill. As DPS, what you should have been doing was using purifies on your healer to break the stunlock or bind. But few people even did that, mostly because it's not fair to expect DPS to monitor a healer so closely as to use it effectively. That's why so few dps use their role actions effectively in pve, too.

Healers didn't quit that mode in droves because their teammates were watching out for them. If you played post Season 2 or at high ranks, you were dealing with the healers that weren't winnowed out by the whole stunlock/1v3 things.

I think pvp is lot more balanced then before, but it is boring because skill set is very limited.

Of the few good things that came out of 4.0 PvP, it's good that you immediately go into a resistance for CCs after they wear off, which prevents things like stunlocks, but CCs have been so ridiculously reduced when they're quite vital to burst opportunities.

It's not good and hardly balanced when 3 our of 4 melees have no CC, but one has it all. It's not balanced when healers are more tanky than tanks are, and while I know many love the 9 button thing, I can't stress enough that jobs play differently enough that they can't all be force fit into 9 buttons. Not without severely hampering their capabilities.

Healers are actually still the only one who can carry a bad team. No matter how good or bad I am, my life still depends on the skill of my healer. Great.

And btw: chat restrictions and server delays are more toxic for Ranked Feast than ever player can be.

The toggle could use more work. It's pretty frustrating when you're in front of a healer but the toggle is like "Did you mean that machinist in the back doing nothing?" Something like, the ability for Healers to have 1 "target" DPS can have 3 "targets" and tanks can have 5, where they will have an enemy list for the last X people you hit. Healers would only have 1, DPS 3 and tanks 5.

This would at least help with the ability to focus someone you want to target without getting screwed because you accidentally clicked off them.

My biggest wish would change ninjas mundra system in pvp. In the classic version you had to press 5 buttons just to set up trick. In this new form you have to press 2 to do 1500 pot, when you can do 2000 pressing 2 other buttons. Its absolutely retarded ninjas have to go through hoops when other classes can treat it as an ogcd. Its also why I think ninja is/was under represented despite such a great toolset. Raise the ninki cost to compensate and just have a separate button light up when you can use it like sam, that would be so much better.