The Skillfloor

Hi!

My thesis is that the skillfloor of Crystalline Conflict is insanely high and that's where most grievances with the mode actually come from.

You need to understand and better yet play all jobs, understand each job's roles, kits and limit breaks, understand positioning, pots, be able to adapt to both different team comps and varying skill levels, be able to focus targets, focus the *correct* targets, pressure and play defensively in a myriad of variations, learn when and where to regen and understand all the different relations between and exceptions to certain skills and effects. You need to learn to target correctly and adapt to lag. You need to use and understand quickchat, you need to learn the individual map's quirks and the different job's skill interactions with those, you need to learn how overtime works.

It's just so goddamn much. If you go frustrated, focus on your own knowledge and experience. There's always something you can learn.

If you get angry at your fellow players, cut em some slack, even fundamentales are often not obvious for new players, and often mistakes go unadressed because nobody wants to help. Help em learn if you like.

If you get angry with the designers, realize that what you might hate about the mode and want to see gone may be someone else's favorite part about it. Except for analysis chainsaw proc, nobody likes that and there's no excuse for the devs to keep it in the game.

If you get angry at yourself, remember that's a very complex mode and you don't just learn it all in a day. Give yourself a chance.

Switch things up, play some other job, you need to learn them all anyway eventually. Do something else with your time, come back when you wanna play some, not because you wanna climb.

Never try and force climbing, concentrate on the current match.

There's a very high chance you haven't even reached the skillfloor yet. You will get miraclebursted again and you will have realized the enemy team has a White Mage too late *again*. But eventually you'll crack it.

I was thinking the same things Yesterday lol.

The skill floor is so much lower, especially if we are comparing it to pre-rework PvP. I personally think the toolkits are too small and should have more. You don't need to worry about specifics of how a class does it's bursts or what abilities are queued up currently, unless your doing comp. If your just doing a casual match the worse you need to worry about is just noticing when LBs are ready, if you have your defensives ready, and how to press your two button burst.

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Originally Posted by Astralrisk

The skill floor is so much lower, especially if we are comparing it to pre-rework PvP. I personally think the toolkits are too small and should have more. You don't need to worry about specifics of how a class does it's bursts or what abilities are queued up currently, unless your doing comp. If your just doing a casual match the worse you need to worry about is just noticing when LBs are ready, if you have your defensives ready, and how to press your two button burst.

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Agreed.. before you had to be aware of how to counter personal buffs and how to sustain yourself properly. Recuperate was a bad design compared to med kit. Even though some say it wasn't responsive, I understood how med kit worked and optimizing it for maximum efficiency, making yourself nearly unkillable. The ceiling was higher than CC and the floor was lower than what it is now. It could of been made it in a more advanced, and that was my hopes when most jobs got reworked for E.W.

I could go on for days how the identity of all these jobs were somewhat removed with a twist in Functionality. More Buttons would be great for various reasons. Unfortunately all I see is people want things to be closer to a hack & Slash Single button game as possible in both pve and pvp which is a sign of a slow and steady death of an mmorpg. I missed the days when we had 24 buttons or so during pvp. Makes me wonder about the new age of gamers wanting instant gratification and Less mental work.

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Originally Posted by Oni_Akuma

Agreed.. before you had to be aware of how to counter personal buffs and how to sustain yourself properly. Recuperate was a bad design compared to med kit. Even though some say it wasn't responsive, I understood how med kit worked and optimizing it for maximum efficiency, making yourself nearly unkillable. The ceiling was higher than CC and the floor was lower than what it is now. It could of been made it in a more advanced, and that was my hopes when most jobs got reworked for E.W.

I could go on for days how the identity of all these jobs were somewhat removed with a twist in Functionality. More Buttons would be great for various reasons. Unfortunately all I see is people want things to be closer to a hack & Slash Single button game as possible in both pve and pvp which is a sign of a slow and steady death of an mmorpg. I missed the days when we had 24 buttons or so during pvp. Makes me wonder about the new age of gamers wanting instant gratification and Less mental work.

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Personally always been a fan of small but versatile kits rather than oodles of buttons.
10 or so abilities with many different applications, yes please. If we had more abilities akin to MCHs Analyze that would be swell.
But I'm not keen on the idea of 12 of my buttons only existing because more buttons = more complex = good.
If 8 additional buttons are just "damage on a cooldown" I'd rather have what we have now.

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Originally Posted by Oni_Akuma

Agreed.. before you had to be aware of how to counter personal buffs and how to sustain yourself properly. Recuperate was a bad design compared to med kit. Even though some say it wasn't responsive, I understood how med kit worked and optimizing it for maximum efficiency, making yourself nearly unkillable. The ceiling was higher than CC and the floor was lower than what it is now. It could of been made it in a more advanced, and that was my hopes when most jobs got reworked for E.W.

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Recuperate requires much less skill to use than Medkits. I may not remember like all the specific details of it, I do know that now you not only have the ability to hold more charges effectively but being able to fall back and recover the medkits faster than pre-rework is much easier to go through than having to wait for the CDs. Not trying to say it's great design since it's the laziest way to implement a healing system instead of making unique forms of sustain for every job, but if we are talking about the basic floor for it, I'd say it's much easier than before.

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Originally Posted by Oni_Akuma

Agreed.. before you had to be aware of how to counter personal buffs and how to sustain yourself properly. Recuperate was a bad design compared to med kit. Even though some say it wasn't responsive, I understood how med kit worked and optimizing it for maximum efficiency, making yourself nearly unkillable. The ceiling was higher than CC and the floor was lower than what it is now. It could of been made it in a more advanced, and that was my hopes when most jobs got reworked for E.W.

I could go on for days how the identity of all these jobs were somewhat removed with a twist in Functionality. More Buttons would be great for various reasons. Unfortunately all I see is people want things to be closer to a hack & Slash Single button game as possible in both pve and pvp which is a sign of a slow and steady death of an mmorpg. I missed the days when we had 24 buttons or so during pvp. Makes me wonder about the new age of gamers wanting instant gratification and Less mental work.

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I don't think we're playing the same game. All the opposite of this for me.

The only noticable changes I've seen while climbing the ranks are the survival times and team burst executions. Other than that the skill floor doesn't seem high at all, especially if there are a few diamond players that go the entire match without using Recuperate at all.

In fact I would like to make the argument that the skill floor has been gradually going down with each coming expansion. Classes and roles being homogenous last expansion? I haven't played every class, but it's really more noticeable this expansion. Besides everyone having sprint, Recup, Guard, and Purify as a base shared actions all classes have a basic ability to rely on, an aoe ability that you can use every few seconds, some sort of 2 combinations of buffs, debuffs, shields, and heals, and a burst that's anywhere from 20k to 30k regardless of what role you're playing. Burst speed will differ from. However, the fact of the matter is that every class has access to a burst that you can use every 30 seconds.
Let's go ahead and remove SCH while I can, because they are the odd ball here since most of their relied damage is coming from Biolysis.

Who knows. Maybe next expansion we'll be able to play pvp with blue mage with the trade-off that you can never play any other class other than blue mage for all modes lol

https://gamerant.com/final-fantasy-1...ce-similarity/

Here is one article

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In Endwalker Patch 6.1, Final Fantasy 14 gave its PvP system a facelift. Alongside a new mode, this patch gave all the playable jobs new kits, including a unique Limit Break. While simplified from their PvE counterparts, these kits are dynamic, reactive, and unique.

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Can't say I disagree with that article.

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Originally Posted by Oni_Akuma

https://gamerant.com/final-fantasy-1...ce-similarity/

Here is one article

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I get what your saying here, but this feels like your moving the goalpost right now. I don't think job identity has anything to do with a skill floor. Sure, more complexity could contribute to a higher floor, but I'd say that even with it's own unique identity, it has a much smaller skill floor compared to PvE. Not just because it has much less buttons, but what it asks you to do at a minimum in PvP is not a whole lot vs PvE.

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Originally Posted by Astralrisk

I get what your saying here, but this feels like your moving the goalpost right now. I don't think job identity has anything to do with a skill floor. Sure, more complexity could contribute to a higher floor, but I'd say that even with it's own unique identity, it has a much smaller skill floor compared to PvE. Not just because it has much less buttons, but what it asks you to do at a minimum in PvP is not a whole lot vs PvE.

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In PvE you just need to know what your rotation is and what a boss is gonna throw at you, almost any mechanic a boss is gonna throw out you know what it'll do because you've seen it 1000 times before.

In PvP you gotta know what every single job is capable of so you know how to counter or exploit its weaknesses, making the learning curve much steeper if you want to do well compared to PvE.

Only difference is once you do know them, you barely have to learn anything new for probably the entire expansion PvP wise, in PvE you get new encounters every big patch so you have to learn new stuff every time.

I think the skill floor has to do with the gimmicks that surround each job. There's also the fact that SAM LB, MCH Chainsaw, and NIN LB exist in the vein that they are extremely powerful for their own reasons(Instant Kill, Chance of Instant Kill, and Chain LB). As far as things go, they won't ever balance PvP since it's broken in some respects for certain jobs(staring at you RDM).

This skill floor on top of Crowd Control being a complete mess is what attributes to how high it is. If we didn't have as much Crowd Control, maybe we might've had a better PvP experience somewhat?

Highskill floor with small skill sets given to all jobs. Yea… ok dude.

I’m sorry to say, it’s just bad. It’s mainly a matter of having the right jobs combination both in CC and frontlines.

When I play actual games with good PvP, there’s a steep learning curve and a huge pay-off at the end when you compare the before/after in K/D ratio, etc. There’s none of that here.

There’s a reason why MMOs are not reference nor popular for good and competitive PvP. It’s because they can’t and will never do it right.

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Originally Posted by True-to-Caesar

Highskill floor with small skill sets given to all jobs. Yea… ok dude.

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In Smite (does that game still exist?) you only had 4 abilities, and it had a way higher floor and ceiling then any mmo and even most moba's, but that's also because you had to aim your actual abilities to try and land them, so it can be done.

But it will never be done in ff14, because that doesn't seem to be what yoshi wants.

He seems to want FL and CC to just be another mode to have fun in like deep dungeons or gold saucer, hence why even being crystal in cc is about 1700 rating in wow arena, nothing to brag about really.

It's not designed as a sweaty gamemode to begin with, the latest cc map shows this even better.

You can be sweaty in pvp just like you can be sweaty in chocoboraces or mahjongg, but that's not the core designphilosophy behind it if you look at it, whereas WoW arena is 100% designed to be so and is much harder and more competitive in nature because of it.

High skill floor in anything ffxiv related.

Nice joke :3

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Originally Posted by IckeDerTyp

High skill floor in anything ffxiv related.

Nice joke :3

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Agreed. Especially when I can beat 99% of you players [now & Feast] on a 1 v 1. Yeah the job I play is broke [currently/still my main], but it requires true combo to do it right. That aside, there is no high skill floor, since I (1 v 3) to (1 v 5) duel people in CC just to satiate my thirst for blood and the rush of staying on the edge like Feast did.

The skill floor is raised, so many of you toddlers can reach the ceiling. Sorry not sorry, cause like I am gonna say before my sub ends. 99% of you players are weaklings.

Whatever the #s are but about 13 million of you players

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Originally Posted by Oni_Akuma

Agreed. Especially when I can beat 99% of you players [now & Feast] on a 1 v 1. Yeah the job I play is broke [currently/still my main], but it requires true combo to do it right. That aside, there is no high skill floor, since I (1 v 3) to (1 v 5) duel people in CC just to satiate my thirst for blood and the rush of staying on the edge like Feast did.

The skill floor is raised, so many of you toddlers can reach the ceiling. Sorry not sorry, cause like I am gonna say before my sub ends. 99% of you players are weaklings.

Whatever the #s are but about 13 million of you players

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Once your sub ends you should try touching some grass, chief.

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Originally Posted by Oni_Akuma

Agreed. Especially when I can beat 99% of you players [now & Feast] on a 1 v 1. Yeah the job I play is broke [currently/still my main], but it requires true combo to do it right. That aside, there is no high skill floor, since I (1 v 3) to (1 v 5) duel people in CC just to satiate my thirst for blood and the rush of staying on the edge like Feast did.

The skill floor is raised, so many of you toddlers can reach the ceiling. Sorry not sorry, cause like I am gonna say before my sub ends. 99% of you players are weaklings.

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Putting aside that you sound incredibly cringe with your talking down to others to be toddlers like as if you are someone special, I believe you are mistaking "skill floor got raised" with "skill floor got relocated".

As a whole, killing got made fundamentally easier and less reliant on full party bursts (not counting FL/RW) and almost every job has a fair bit of individual impact right now. People no longer need to rely on Healers to stay alive with most jobs.

On the flipside, with individualism comes the responsibility, which is where the floor is raised again and not having a healer up your a** 24/7 to bail you out of your bad decision making means you now more than ever abuse physical cover and running away to make up for it.

It got lowered in one place, raised in another. I don't think it actually raised as a whole, but the personal skill requirement is different to before.

None of this is skill ceiling though, that is a completely different thing and depends per job.

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

Putting aside that you sound incredibly cringe with your talking down to others to be toddlers like as if you are someone special, I believe you are mistaking "skill floor got raised" with "skill floor got relocated".

As a whole, killing got made fundamentally easier and less reliant on full party bursts (not counting FL/RW) and almost every job has a fair bit of individual impact right now. People no longer need to rely on Healers to stay alive with most jobs.

On the flipside, with individualism comes the responsibility, which is where the floor is raised again and not having a healer up your a** 24/7 to bail you out of your bad decision making means you now more than ever abuse physical cover and running away to make up for it.

It got lowered in one place, raised in another. I don't think it actually raised as a whole, but the personal skill requirement is different to before.

None of this is skill ceiling though, that is a completely different thing and depends per job.

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I don't gotta be saved in previous mode. My burst was enough to keep me alive in a 1 v 5 or more during feast skill set. Healers never needed to save me cause I had a 17-20k Bloodbath heal combo and perfect pot timing. I'm allowed to be cringe-ish. That comes with mastering PvP and the games hard coded mechanics.

To the smallest detail in micromanagement and optimization.

Idk how you can relocate a floor under a roof though? How does that make sense? If you mean it as housing, then yeah its a new House with a new floor and ceiling, then yes it makes sense. Now it is slightly more team based / and less individual skill based in some regions, but overall it is still childs play compared to all the micromanagement that had to be done before. Like yeah with LB now being the tool for execution for individuality, it still relies on a team coordination.

Before I killed every class in 6-8s flat combo when burst was ready without an LB. All tanks and healers died when a weaved combo was performed with LB. Even the infamous GNB/DRK and Healers. This every 1m+ [exception to RPR] LB gimmick is just funny entirely.

Personal skill is different before, but overall the calculations are the same in lining up your moves for optimal damage just like PvE.

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Originally Posted by Oni_Akuma

Agreed. Especially when I can beat 99% of you players [now & Feast] on a 1 v 1. Yeah the job I play is broke [currently/still my main], but it requires true combo to do it right. That aside, there is no high skill floor, since I (1 v 3) to (1 v 5) duel people in CC just to satiate my thirst for blood and the rush of staying on the edge like Feast did.

The skill floor is raised, so many of you toddlers can reach the ceiling. Sorry not sorry, cause like I am gonna say before my sub ends. 99% of you players are weaklings.

Whatever the #s are but about 13 million of you players

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I'm so sorry, but I can only imagine you as whoever created Coldsteel the Hedgehog :,,D

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Originally Posted by Kansene

I'm so sorry, but I can only imagine you as whoever created Coldsteel the Hedgehog :,,D

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I agree! About 90% of it lol. Didn't know about him till now :D but I'm probably like a mix of him and sonic.exe. >:D

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Originally Posted by Llynethil

In Smite (does that game still exist?) you only had 4 abilities, and it had a way higher floor and ceiling then any mmo and even most moba's, but that's also because you had to aim your actual abilities to try and land them, so it can be done.

But it will never be done in ff14, because that doesn't seem to be what yoshi wants.

He seems to want FL and CC to just be another mode to have fun in like deep dungeons or gold saucer, hence why even being crystal in cc is about 1700 rating in wow arena, nothing to brag about really.

It's not designed as a sweaty gamemode to begin with, the latest cc map shows this even better.

You can be sweaty in pvp just like you can be sweaty in chocoboraces or mahjongg, but that's not the core designphilosophy behind it if you look at it, whereas WoW arena is 100% designed to be so and is much harder and more competitive in nature because of it.

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I have hardly played that game. Any pvp game with classes is often unbalanced as hell (Team Fortress 2 is an exception though). I used to prefer shooters (now I prefer slashers for PvP).
However I do hear that Dota 2 takes a lot of practice and skill, but I’ve never been much of a fan of that type of moba. Same as League.

In shooters/slashers, even with the most weak weapon, if you’re good you’re going to come out on top, because your actual irl abilities/reaction to deal with situations will do 80% of the work. That’s what I like about them even though the slasher games I play are hard to get into, but after going through the learning curve it does pay well and I really like that kind of reward. Seeing how well you’re doing compared to before.

Hell even Fortnite with its stupid bloom mechanic (worst thing ever for a shooter) takes some knowledge and practice to do well in it.

You will never indeed get that in FFXIV or any MMORPG for that matter because they’re always subject to awful class balancing, gameplay and for most over reliance on gear.

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Originally Posted by Oni_Akuma

Agreed. Especially when I can beat 99% of you players [now & Feast] on a 1 v 1. Yeah the job I play is broke [currently/still my main], but it requires true combo to do it right. That aside, there is no high skill floor, since I (1 v 3) to (1 v 5) duel people in CC just to satiate my thirst for blood and the rush of staying on the edge like Feast did.

The skill floor is raised, so many of you toddlers can reach the ceiling. Sorry not sorry, cause like I am gonna say before my sub ends. 99% of you players are weaklings.

Whatever the #s are but about 13 million of you players

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you beat people who are not even there to win, they just wanna grind the series pass lol

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Originally Posted by Towa-Musa

you beat people who are not even there to win, they just wanna grind the series pass lol

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That is the even more sadder part of the truth lol and I agree 100% lol. There are plenty of homies from pvp community that I respect their skill. But overall that is still the 1% club.

Like idk how is it possible that many can't exceed passing plat or under gold hell? Many don't even recuperate correctly to maximize its use case :p . I mean S.E did try to make it more friendly I get it, but the participants are relatively the same people you come across. People care more about getting useless things except its only useful as being endgame glamour than actually being useful xD . Plus many of them are cowards too lol doesn't matter which mode they play in. Whether it is Frontlines or CC.

About 90 to 95% of the complainers on these forums are most likely newbies [zoomers as they say] that hadn't got propper pvp training with a skilled mentor.

Someone mentioned another game like Smite earlier. That game is a Moba with a variety of options and counterplay gear and champions. Even if it is 4 skills, item and champion choice added to the skill ceiling.

Current skill ceiling is like this:

https://media.tenor.com/jdfPBdUDOZYA...toy-houses.mp4
https://media.tenor.com/jdfPBdUDOZYA...toy-houses.mp4

The skillfloor would be lower if gold rank players wern't allowed to slaughter any bronze they want at any time.

You guys from gilgamesh on those pvp forums are a sight to behold.

or just do like everyone else and download hacks from mmominion, square dont care.

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Originally Posted by Oni_Akuma

That is the even more sadder part of the truth lol and I agree 100% lol. There are plenty of homies from pvp community that I respect their skill. But overall that is still the 1% club.

Like idk how is it possible that many can't exceed passing plat or under gold hell? Many don't even recuperate correctly to maximize its use case :p . I mean S.E did try to make it more friendly I get it, but the participants are relatively the same people you come across. People care more about getting useless things except its only useful as being endgame glamour than actually being useful xD . Plus many of them are cowards too lol doesn't matter which mode they play in. Whether it is Frontlines or CC.

About 90 to 95% of the complainers on these forums are most likely newbies [zoomers as they say] that hadn't got propper pvp training with a skilled mentor.

Someone mentioned another game like Smite earlier. That game is a Moba with a variety of options and counterplay gear and champions. Even if it is 4 skills, item and champion choice added to the skill ceiling.

Current skill ceiling is like this:

https://media.tenor.com/jdfPBdUDOZYA...toy-houses.mp4
https://media.tenor.com/jdfPBdUDOZYA...toy-houses.mp4

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you don't even need a mentor, people just need to /want/ to learn unfortunately they don't because to them pvp just is not fun anymore.

Yeah for real there is absolutely no skill involved now man. I rather go back in time and duel all the top rank players than this mode. Didn't matter what rank you were, Diamond or Crystal. It was a great time when job identity was a thing. Someone quoted on all the complainers list of suggestions and we got this mode.

I am glad I am done with this game and so are the og legends until we find a suitable change in patches.

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Originally Posted by Oni_Akuma

Yeah for real there is absolutely no skill involved now man. I rather go back in time and duel all the top rank players than this mode. Didn't matter what rank you were, Diamond or Crystal. It was a great time when job identity was a thing. Someone quoted on all the complainers list of suggestions and we got this mode.

I am glad I am done with this game and so are the og legends until we find a suitable change in patches.

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lmao never heard of these og legends but i suppose thats what happens when you don't really care, im decent enough to carry my own water but i hate being dragged down by bad teammates, its why i don't particularly care about ranked since its just a roulette and tbf id love it if they went 6.1, killing 36 people in one fl match with the boys was so much fun.

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Originally Posted by Towa-Musa

lmao never heard of these og legends but i suppose thats what happens when you don't really care, im decent enough to carry my own water but i hate being dragged down by bad teammates, its why i don't particularly care about ranked since its just a roulette and tbf id love it if they went pre 6.1, killing 36 people in one fl match with the boys was so much fun.

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The golden age. I miss those days too and they were headed the right direction until we got this as a joke