5.2+ Job Balance Feedback Thread

Hi everyone,

With the constant updates and changes for PVP provided by SE, we are making a centralized thread for feedback regarding the Feast. Currently there is a lack of feedback from the western community on the Official Forums and we'd like to have our voices heard, this is a community effort across multiple discords in NA/EU to provide PVP feedback on Official Forums.

We hope the following feedback can be brought to the attention of the dev team and encourages the player base to become more active on the forums.

A small request:
- Keep it civil please,
- Don't feed any trolls.
- Please like any suggestions you agree with.

Community Discords -
PvPaissa - Central hub for Feast and Frontlines
Revival Wings - PvP discord with emphasis on scheduling, teaching and grouping up for Rival Wings.
The Braveheart - PvP discord for the Primal PvP community.
Banette JcJ - French-focused PvP discord
Feast Friends - PvP discord with a focus on custom games on Chaos DC
Crystal Customs - PvP discord with a focus on custom games on Crystal DC

The first few posts will be the some of the most agreed on feedback from our Discord incentive.

All Jobs
Abilities that rely on dealing damage to absorb HP do not restore more than 1 HP if the target is shielded. If it is intended for these abilities to drain health even from shielded targets, please fix this interaction.
e.g. Drain's "Absorbs 200% of damage dealt as HP" effect.

Revamp common actions to allow for more variety.
Revamp additional actions to achieve the same goal.
The playerbase feels like there are too many underperforming additional actions that create an environment where there is only one or two correct choices with any given Role. Diversifying, revamping and/or bringing up underperforming additionals AND common abilities would help bring more decision-making and depth to the system and giving players more tools to deal with a variety of situations.
e.g. Rampart should be a common ability shared by all tanks, therefore moved from additionals into their base toolkit, and possibly adding more additionals, to allow more choice in how players can and want to handle different situations.

Healers
Giving Healers some means of recovering MP during combat. Such as granting 500-1500MP by casting Glare, Broil or Malefic.

While under CC effects, Healers are unable to Purify their party members if their character is turned away from said member. The playerbase at large considers this a design flaw, please fix the facing requirement from the ability.

Tanks
Consider reworking and/or re-diversifying Tank Jobs to have uniqueness with their own strengths and weaknesses. Currently, each Tank's toolkit is close to a carbon copy of one another (including buffs, CC and abilities & their potencies) minus one truly unique buff or debuff.

Each Tank Job plays in a very similar fashion. There isn't a lot differentiating them, and the playerbase feels it is frustrating to play each one when mirroring what we had during 4.x. The answer with all of them to various situations is practically the same, regardless of the Job you're playing; for example as helping a party member who's taking a lot of damage or assisting your party to kill the opposing party, the way you go about it is almost exactly the same.

The playerbase is concerned with losing albeit niche but also unique and useful abilities in the past, such as Sole Survivor, Clemency and Thrill of War. These abilities gave each Tank Job flavor and an identity, which made them more enjoyable and interesting to play. This sentiment is echoed in the usage of Tank stun abilities, with unique Stun abilities of the past (Such as the old Onslaught) being replaced by a global stun ability in Low Blow for all Tanks.

Giving Tank Jobs an additional defensive ability (e.g. Rampart as a common ability, rather than optional), or alternatively their tank stance (e.g. 20% mitigation, 25% less damage dealt) back, would improve the current situation of tanks where they're often easier to kill than their own Melee party member which should not be the case.

There is also an power imbalance between the Tank Jobs, where Dark Knight is above every other Job. In this feedback thread, we'll mention a list of possible Dark Knight specific changes, but alternatively the other Tank Jobs could also be brought up to match it. As an example, giving every Tank Job a CC ability in their baseline abilities, such as adding a Stun component back into Onslaught, Shield Bash for Paladin and possibly a ranged Stun for Gunbreaker. Other ability changes and/or revamping would be needed for the other Tank Jobs to match Dark Knight, but just the CC department fix would go a long way.

Ranged/Caster
The playerbase feels Ranged Physical and Casters having close-range AoE (Enchanted Moulinet/Quick Nock/Spread Shot) is a poor design choice. The design mainly affects Frontline and Rival Wing modes, where moving in close-range to use AoE abilities often gets you killed very quickly, especially because it feels like these abilities were added with Frontline in mind.

Examples: Wide Volley for Bard, Grenade Shot for Machinist, a reworked Contre Sixte (on the GCD, gauge cost added) for Red Mage.

Astrologian
Currently, any spell that is cast under the effect of Neutral Sect will be interrupted if Neutral Sect ends before the cast is finished. This should not be the case for any important Healer cooldowns, as this can very easily lead to a party member dying simply because your own cooldown renders you actionless for a few seconds. Changing Aspected Benefic to an instant cast would prevent skill interrupts, and also increase Job identity.

Astrologians will also sometimes not get the use out of an Abridged proc while going from a Benefic I directly into Benefic II, because the proc doesn't register before you use Benefic II. Something should be changed so that this would not be an issue.

White Mage
Revert the change to White Mages' Regen spell. Bringing up other Healer Jobs was necessary, but bringing down White Mage at the same time was unnecessary.

Scholar
Often 10 second duration for Adloquium ends up being an MP deficit, because the shield effect runs out rather than gets broken. Increasing the duration or making the shield effect permanent would help out Scholar greatly.

Changing Biolysis "Reduces target's HP recovered by healing actions by 20%" effect to either not stack with, or alternatively overwrites, Dark Knight's Edge of Shadow debuff, and vice versa. Alternatively, replace the Biolysis effect with an entirely new effect altogether so that the stacking isn't an issue and allowing Scholar to contribute in some other way. Such as a pure DoT effect.

Dark Knight
Changing Dark Knight's The Blackest Night to either to not granting Dark Arts, reduce Edge of Darkness potency from 1000 to 800 or reduce the "Reduces target's HP recovered by healing actions by 20%" to reducing recovery by 10%. One of these changes would help bring Dark Knight in line with other tanks.

Changing Edge of Shadow "Reduces target's HP recovered by healing actions by 20%" effect to either not stack with, or alternatively overwrites, Scholar's Biolysis debuff, and vice versa. Or as mentioned in the Scholar feedback, create an entirely new effect altogether for Biolysis so the stacking isn't an issue.

Gunbreaker
Bring back the Draw and Junction ability to GNB: This core ability allowed for more variation, strategy, and utility that was unique to GNB that was both fun and interesting and an overall disappointment to lose.

Give GNB better utility, or more damage to compete with the other tanks: Currently GNB's damage does not make up for the utility the other tanks can bring(i.e. Vuln Up + Holmgang, Damage down + Ranged Burst + Hallowed, Healing Down at almost 100% uptime, etc.). This can be balanced by either a flat increase to GNB's damage equivalent to the utility lost, or additional utility to even out the playing field(Draw and Junction).

Don't have the Gnashing Fang combo interrupt your single target or AoE combo: It doesn't in PVE, no reason it should in PVP.

Increase the Fast Draw(Haste) max duration from 15sec to 20-25sec and implement GNB's Fast Draw buff timer onto it's job gauge: Comparing this to DRK's Darkside buff that only requires a single oGCD to maintain, with a max duration of 30sec; to GNB's Fast Draw that requires a gauge spent GCD to maintain(3 GCD's to max value at 3 stacks), but only has a max duration of 15sec, it is non-equivical in favor of DRK. Another possibility would be to make Lightning Shot an oGCD on a 20-30sec timer, keeping the same effect in order to make maintaining the buff far less of a burden.

Either make it so the shield removal from Bow Shock happens before the damage, make Bow Shock do 0 damage and decrease the cooldown, or change it to something else entirely: As it stands now, Bow Shock will do damage to the shield it is trying to remove, before the shield is actually removed, making the ability counter productive.

Dragoon
Consider removing Dragon Sight, and replacing it with Battle Litany.

The playerbase at large feels like Dragoon's general at range damage and Piercing Talon in it's current iteration encourages "wall camping" because of it's considerably big potency when used at range and the ability having no cooldown. Either lowering potencies, adding a cooldown to Piercing Talon or removing the "Extends Blood of the Dragon or Life of the Dragon duration by 10s, to a maximum of 30s" effect from the ability would help to fix this issue.

Ninja
Changing Ill Wind into Jugulate (AoE into single target Silence) from the past would help balance Ninja. No decrease in potency needed.

Machinist
Machinist needs Between The Eyes or some other form of defnitive burst. Currently the burst window for Machinist is with Drill and Hypercharge (all of them on the GCD) which does not compare to, for example, Dancer's definitive burst window. Increasing the Hypercharge combo potencies would be ideal, if Hypercharge is to remain as the main burst window of the Job. In it's current iteration, the Job feels clunky to use and the reward to effort ratio is not in the right place.

Re: Tank
I am in favour of making Rampart baseline, yes. When they gave everyone a unified medkit with the same healing potencies the same time they boosted ranged and healer HP, they kind of flattened the overall HP pool of the jobs. The result is in, some ways, while tanks improve team defence, the tanks themselves can feel a bit flimsy for their name. Especially when we are giving melee 50% DR CDs. To make it more insulting, PLD and WAR have actions that are vastly improved when used with Rampart. It's hard to not feel a little ripped off if for some reason you don't have Rampart chosen, and it doesn't feel like a reasonable choice.

Speaking of WAR, if they are not going to let us self-target Nascent Flash, at least put self-healing on Decimate/Chaotic Cyclone. Would give WAR some much-needed sustain in FL and RW with minimal impact on Feast.

As a last note, tank adrenaline while okay for Feast and FL, kind of sucks for RW. Even if you stick with your party, the environment is frantic and you'll almost always have someone in a mech. This means the tank is suffering a self-stun for 25% mitigation on maybe 3 people in a world where we now have powerful oGCDs giving that kind of mitigation where it matters more, which is typically one target. I'd like if it could be made better here somehow.

Re: Dragoon
I appreciate what they were trying to do with dragoon in making them this sort of midranged specialist though IMO they are overperforming in FL and RW. The stickiness of a monk with half of the reach of a ranged DPS, while still getting melee damage bonus/mitigation. Not as sturdy as SAM but has a get out of jail free card on a short CD. I like having the extended reach on some of their options but yeah maybe require a little more commitment.

Re: Healing Reduction
With regards to healing reduction, I think the most elegant solution would be is to have only the highest available apply and leave it at that. On one hand it sucks because if you are a DRK being randomly matched and get a SCH, it feels like you are getting less value out of your lineup, but it's the lesser evil compared to nerfing in isolation. Not sure if they work additively or multiplicatively now (via subtraction), but the latter would be a soft nerf. Two 20% debuffs would be 64% healing received, rather than 60%

Some other thoughts
While the community didn't address monk, I do think it's fallen off in FL compared to the other melee. Pre 5.1, the burst justified their limitations, since with the +15% damage they would absolutely flatten ranged before healers could respond. Now that everyone has potions and everyone is kind of a ranged DPS in a way, monk isn't carrying their weight as much IMO. Maybe they should be given a ranged attack to maintain GL. While it's understandable DRG is better than them right now when it's broken, IMO they are a little behind NIN and SAM as well in this environment.

Dark Knight
We all know DRK, and to be more specific Edge of Shadow is pretty problematic right now, but I feel like most suggestions to the skill tend to go a bit far. I don't agree that the skill should deal less damage, or be nerfed to 10% instead of 20%. 10% is basically irrelevant, at that number it's almost not even noticeable whether it's reducing any healing or not. If we wanted to keep it just as spammable, then maybe it'd be an alright path to go? But I think the bigger issue is how often the debuff can be applied more than anything else.

I think the MP cost of EoS should simply be increased, enough so that passive MP regen is not enough to fund it so you have to make conscious effort tom keep your MP pool at a good amount. With TBN being 0 MP, all your MP goes exclusively to EoS which makes it far too easy to manage. I do think TBN should be free, because now that every tank has a party support button it would be unfair for one to arbitrarily have a cost while the others are free and on the same cooldown.

I think increasing the cost to perhaps 3300 or higher would go a long way to putting the job back in line. At 3.3k the ability can only be used a maximum of 3 times in a row, and enough of a cost that you would struggle to keep uptime on the Darkside buff unless you made an effort in your MP management. The MP cost could even be a bit higher, to account for passive MP ticks (250 roughly every 3 secs). In two souleater combos you'd get back about 1.5k MP when taking into account passive MP regen, more if you had a bloodspiller held. But I feel 5k or more would be far too restrictive with the way the ability works now, so I'd say 3.3k~ is a good spot. If the MP cost were increased any further I'd say the duration of the debuff should be higher to compensate otherwise it would be too weak.

As for the debuff stacking being problematic...The devs would have to change how stacking currently works otherwise it wouldn't be consistent. Damage up and damage down effects stack, like caster LB + inner chaos + feint and whatnot, which are already strong effects than healing down. To have them not stack would be confusing and inconsistent. I think the bigger issue is how consistently available the debuffs are rather than the effect itself. When it comes to damage up effects they're locked behind cooldowns (as is the case with feint, phantom dart, caster LB etc), so if you hit the availability of EoS and Biolysis I think it'd be the proper route to go.

I really like the way EoS works and I feel like it'd be a shame to gut it or change the way it functions. More diversity is good, and if anything I feel like the other tanks should be brought up to DRK's level rather than the job be brought down.

Warrior
Honestly WAR is in a pretty good spot, it's just in comparison to DRK it's not as good. If any changes were to be made to the job, they should be small ones rather than anything major.

I like the idea of Onslaught being a stun again, that on its own would be really good (working under the assumption that all tank stuns get changed too, with low blow being removed from WAR).

I also think IC should generate some gauge again, WAR's personal damage feels lacking and I understand that it's balanced out by the fact that IC increases your party's damage, but the damage still feels lower than it should be.
Also i think most of the WAR playerbase can agree that NF should be self castable. Using it on yourself without a party member is a buff for rare situations where you're by yourself, but is actually detrimental in party play. You'd be losing out on half of the skill's effect if you use it just on yourself, so I feel like it's not really a buff but more of a tradeoff. (It should also be self castable in pve, reeee)

Just make the DRK Healing down debuff not stack with Scholars healing down debuff and nerf TBN abit, because TBN is stupidly powerful it migates so much damage and can save you alot compared to the other tanks version.

As a Ninja Main , Dragoon needs to be nerfed down in overall damage because holy shit Dragoons pulling 300k or even 400k with dancer just isn't right, as a Ninja im glad if i can pull 250k dmg in a match.
And the Piercing Talon needs to be nerfed down in potency or something, force Dragoon to having to be in melee range more.

Samurai, Monk and Ninja seems fairly balanced i would love having trick attack back to 20% because how hard it is to use correctly in the small Feast map you almost always end up getting it interrupted or getting hit by some aoe in there.

For ninja
I believe an aoe silence feels kinda OP considering you can go invisible and shukuchi. After the duration Nerf, the silence just feels lack luster now and doesn't really have an impact as the 1 sec is partially negligible. I'd suggest giving us jugulate back in play of Ill wind and increasing the duration to its original 2 seconds. This will return ninja to being more of a single target assassin as an aoe silence is more mage like and doesn't really fit with the assassin archetype. The loss of a stun, silence and root really hurt ninja combined with increasing damage made it lose its original identity of being a utility assassin.

In general
Some classes losing CC was a major turn off in general. I feel some classes lost forms of counterplay and play making abilities because of it, along with their archetype niche/identity. There was also a bit of skill and fun when coordinating CCs and Anti CC to make a play or defend yourself. That is now lost so we only have to coordinate bursts. Also as a whole I feel like tanks and healer identities are skewed because of the cc changes as well. All combined it, I feel it messes up unique comps in Team ranked.

Tanks
To go with thee above, I believe that in pvp we have to reconsider tank archetypes again. Should only tanks be capable of CC? If so why do they all have to have the same CC across all classes. When I look at other pvp games or mobas like league, you have various tank archetypes. Bruisers, vanguards, juggernauts, etc. And now that's gone because all tanks pretty much have the same kit with just slightly varying Mitigation and damage skills. With DPS losing some of their CC it feels like tanks are literally only there to be meat shields and peel without any type of uniqueness between the 4 tanks. That's just how I feel currently. Although I do enjoy how tanks don't feel unkillable this patch, so that's a plus I'd like to keep.

Healers
After Tanks got toned down/changed. Why is this still the only class that seems unkillable, especially with the loss of CC on most classes? I would be all for making healers less of a heal bot, in exchange for slightly more damage or utility to solidify them into the support role. And, as with tanks, the homogenization of healer role abilities and loss of some cc made it feel like healers loss a bit of their individual identity.

Machinist
Machinist is kind of clunky and weird as a whole. the hypercharge combo just feels clunky, with both Gauss round and ricochet, as the animation cast cause CD clipping. My solution to this would be to remove the ricochet CD reduction from heat blast and add it to auto crossbow. This would give it an aoe combo and single target combo. Also both bio blaster and blank having low range (For a ranged class) and being necessary for burst feels clunky as you would not normally go into melee range to attack. If this is for balance reasons, I would make bio blaster be an OGCD to make up for it. And with Air anchor, drill and heatblast sharing a GCD it just feels hard to grasp what would be an ideal burst phase for this class. With all of those combined MCH just doesn't flow like the other ranged dps classes. They all have some type of combo that flows with silence and a quick 3-4k combo for an execute if they have to finish off. Idk what could be done with this class.

All jobs:

Medical Kit:

-Reduce the animation's duration, so it activates almost instantly, like the dancer action 'Curing Waltz'.

Most of the time, players have to use this action while under high pressure, when they are bursted by the enemy team. In these moments, each second and action is crutial if you want to stay alive, and in its current state, I think the medical kit is way too slow to activate.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Astryoneus

Ranged/Caster
The playerbase feels Ranged Physical and Casters having close-range AoE (Enchanted Moulinet/Quick Nock/Spread Shot) is a poor design choice. The design mainly affects Frontline and Rival Wing modes, where moving in close-range to use AoE abilities often gets you killed very quickly, especially because it feels like these abilities were added with Frontline in mind.

Examples: Wide Volley for Bard, Grenade Shot for Machinist, a reworked Contre Sixte (on the GCD, gauge cost added) for Red Mage.

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After I realized it wasn't just me, I find it funny now how often Black Mage casts their adrenaline rush and then dies. Range is based on the center of the circle and it's a big circle so you have to get pretty close to cast it on a group. Then everyone sees the aoe marker and the Black Mage gets focused while doing their long cast time and can't use medical kit etc until after. I think it's only slightly better for ranged classes with the line attack but the damage is weak and if I get hit with it, I usually have medical kit to use or I wouldn't be in range. And the real best thing about the Black Mage aoe is hitting a bunch of people with the cometeor +25% dmg for iirc 10 seconds debuff anyway, rather than the damage itself.

I certainly wouldn't mind another 10 or 15 yalms on Thunder 2 and Freeze and Foul/Flare. In Frontline Onsal Hakir, we are irrelevant fighting on a node until we move forward and spend our medical kits quickly. Even with our full burst up, we don't usually have enough to burst down non-tank melee players diving into the backlines and our aoe is mostly useless in that backline role. Keeping people from capping nodes with AOE is fun but a niche thing and again you have to run forward for that.

Scholar:

Maybe tie their indomitability/Lustrate charges to the job gauge via aetherflow stacks that refill over time. There are three charges and using the fairy gauge refills a charge. It follows that the charges should be a part of the gauge since they work in tandem.

With so many targets on the map at a time, sometimes trying to target where you want your AOE's to go (that are not ground targeting) can be a little tricky. I think it would help quite a bit if abilities that shouldn't need targeting, did not or at least had the option to fire without targeting.

Some examples being Bioblaster, Spreadshot, Auto-Crossbow, melee cleave AoEs, etc.


Tbh, I would like to see this for PvE also. They already did it for Flamethrower and it's so much simpler to direct.

Quick take on 5.3 patch notes.


Shared actions
Agreeable, across the board. As a WAR main I feel a sense of panic over Rescue working against Holmgang, but honestly it's fair. It feels like that thing wasn't working for healers when they needed it most. Anyways, 40% DR on Addle is huge, but like... it feels like it has to be amazing to compete with the other options. This will absolutely neuter somebody's burst sequence, but you are losing out on DPS or one of the other survivability options to get it which is fair. Especially since it can save your healer if the focus shifts onto them.

Healing Reduction
There was a lot of ways to approach the problem. They could have done something like cap it at the highest value applied (which is anti-synergy and kind of sucks) for example. Instead, they went for just raw number nerfs... which is fine. I think healing someone with a 25% healing penalty is going to be a lot easier than 40%. We'll at least give it a try.

Gunbreaker Changes
I appreciate them giving some flavour back to GNB. Having CC will give it some much needed utility to compete with the other tanks. Losing sks on the surface is a DPS loss, but having a +10% damage buff up for your CD-based damage is going to be big. Looking at the updated PvP guide, it looks like Draw and Junction has a 30 sec CD. Means 100% uptime and you can enjoy the power of the debuff often. Given you will almost always want the damage buff for Feast, you'll almost always be getting the -10% damage/healing on a ranged DPS/healer rather than the +10% damage taken on melee/tanks. As an aside, Lightning Shot's +50% damage buff is nice for the non-combo cartridge spenders.

Ranged DPS stuff
Hello MCH buffs. Don't mind me, I'll just scooch right in there. As an aside, looks like they want to keep BLM DPS, but tone down the burst sequence a little, which is fair. Would have been dangerous to increase the damage bonus of Astral fire without monitoring that. Also, RDM getting DR for Frontline is going to help a lot. Using the melee sequence was really difficult.

Clearly they didnt buff Ninja in Feast because there was one Ninja in top 10 on all datacenters.
How is trick attack still 15% with all the trouble it takes to use it inside Feast. :mad::confused:

Also Zero nerfs to Dragoon that was clearly super OP this season. :confused:

This next season gonna suck hard for Ninja in Feast.

Rescue now 100% mandatory and make holmgang worthless.
Monk now impossible to kill.
SCH nerfs when it's the worst healer, AST buffs when it's the best healer.
SMN buffs when it's the best dps.
Ranged players deleting you if they look at you like in SB again.
Good patch.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by snipski

Also Zero nerfs to Dragoon that was clearly super OP this season. :confused:

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You ready for another season of drg kills ranged in their base till timeout. I AM :rolleyes:

This is gonna' be a hit it and quit it season for a lot of people I can already see it.

If you compare suggestion with changes: They adressed healing reduction in a way and gave gnb a higher burst. But many bydesign gameplay elements stayed the same.

The overall mitigation boost makes even PLD look good, while its still a slow job and stuck in animation delay when the burst already ended. Underplayed classes got potency boosts, but Im sure BRD and MCH want a different kit instead. And who in their right mind would play a physical job anyway right now, when mages got a 40% addle that absolutely destroys any bursts. Melees should have Feint in their common actions now on a 30s cooldown to counter it.

And just repost the big rest of this thread for 5.4.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Esmoire

Speaking of WAR, if they are not going to let us self-target Nascent Flash, at least put self-healing on Decimate/Chaotic Cyclone. Would give WAR some much-needed sustain in FL and RW with minimal impact on Feast.

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https://i.imgur.com/0qst05x.png

Well okay then.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Esmoire

https://i.imgur.com/0qst05x.png

Well okay then.

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This was a great change. Although, I still wish Nascent Flash is self targetable in PvP. Either that, or be consistent and not allow Gunbreakers to self-target with Aurora.

Summoner

-Remove wither.
-Add the regen/barrier removal onto bane.
-Add energy siphon. ( adds 1 aetherflow and deals AoE damage)