A fundamental flaw with FL (and PvP in general)

[Fyce]

Hello there.
I started Frontlines just recently and my little experience made me come to the forums to check about something I saw while punching people in the face.

What I found was posts like:
- "But you only need your team to focus on the enemy healer to kill him!", which also means: "I'm sure you'll win 8v1!". Okay, well, thanks Sherlock...
or
- "If you are really good you can defeat an average healer!", which also means: "At equal skills, a Healer will kick your ass, because you'll need to have a perfect execution while he can just play with his eyes closed"

After reading this thread, I can safely confirm what I was experiencing on my first games, even if I'm a PvP newbie, and say that Healers are definitly Jack of all trades, master of (almost) all.
When people who are arguing against that fact are just proving you right, it's quite safe to assume that you can make that statement.

Healers are balanced only in the event of fighting a similar team with only one or two healers per team. You can then take the advantage by playing well and having good priorities.
But when 3 or 4 healers are present in the enemy team while yours doesn't have that many, you won't be able to take that point unless you have a nasty trick in your pocket (Like a surprise LB2 while they're all sleeping or stunned, or whatever).
This shows that healers have too much weight to put in the balance and can easily turn the fate of an encounter around. It pretty much comes down to them being some nasty swisstool.

It just takes too much ressources to kill a healer while they can pull a lot of stuff from their bag with less efforts.
Maybe preventing the use of the Claeric stance can be something to try, but I'm not sure it would be enough since they would just go and equip some INT accessories.
So, in the end, I don't see much solution to this problem besides limiting the number of healers on the battlefield... but then, it would defeat the point of the free class change system in Frontlines.

So, yup. Healers are the biggest deal in Frontlines, but there's not much we can do about that.

[CeveArthu]

You dont need to be "really good to defeat an average healer", A good player will stomp a good healer 1v1, but you need to remember this is a casual PvE focused MMO, i don't want to sound like an ass but the vast majority the playerbase are TERRIBLE players

[Fyce]

You dont need to be "really good to defeat an average healer", A good player will stomp a good healer 1v1

I really don't see how you can pull that off.
If you can provide a good explanation or, better, a video, I would be happy to see that.

Until then, I just won't be able to believe you based only on your statement. I currently don't see any way to burst down a good healer faster than he can heal himself and/or root/stun/sleep/slow you and run away.
Oh and, of course, for your fight to be relevant, you would need to kill that healer fast enough, or it would just be a waste of time.

So, do you have any real example of someone going solo on a flag, fighting a good healer there, kill him and take the flag before his team comes back?
Oh and, please, if you can, provide examples with multiple classes/jobs, it would be great.

[Gor]

you need to remember this is a casual PvE focused MMO, i don't want to sound like an ass but the vast majority the playerbase are TERRIBLE players

naw you don't sound like an ass, i agree ten-fold. can't say that the vast majority of the playerbase are good players or you'd prolly get laughed at. fact is fact. most are terrible so the ones who are good just take advantage of them and appear as "gods" to them.

[Gor]

I currently don't see any way to burst down a good healer faster than he can heal himself and/or root/stun/sleep/slow you and run away.

just because you or someone you know can't do it, doesnt mean its not possible. i can name a few people from my data center of various classes who could 1v1 a healer because they almost killed me 1v1. just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

[CeveArthu]

snip

I'm not subbed at the moment, BUT you are from the same server i started from, which explains why you think healers are extremely powerful because the average skill on cerberus is really bad

Here's a great way to see first hand what i mean:

Get lvl 50 healer and solo-heal/roam/dps/midsnipe on cerberus server, I was averaging 4-10 kills a match and 1 death at max, with the most captures, etc

Move to Leviathan (or any primal dc server, just move from chaos to primal) and try and do the same thing, you will get beaten into the dust instantly

It was a huge culture shock to me, it showed me how bad the average player on cerberus is, but the pvp is so much better over here i would recommend switching if you are into pvp as much as i am

[Shake0615]

"At equal skills, a Healer will kick your ass, because you'll need to have a perfect execution while he can just play with his eyes closed"

This quote right here lets me know that you don't really understand the dynamic of PvP in this game. Any damage a healer receives will cancel (not push back) their casting. You can't "play with your eyes closed" when everything from Heavy Shot to a cockroach's fart cancels your spell-casting. It does not take "perfect execution" to kill a healer, just smart cooldown management, intimate knowledge of your class, and working as a team. A skilled player can defeat a healer no problem...but as many people have pointed out there really aren't a lot of skilled players here. Mostly just whiners.

I'm a mediocre player at best, but I'm also an experienced one. And my experience tells me that when I die it's not because my opponent has an overpowered class. It's because they're simply better than me. I may not be the best player but I know skill and cleverness when I see it.

[Atreus]

snip

I agree with part of what you said, but as I posted earlier: healer stacking works because of dominion-based gametype. Some FC and I encountered a situation of 6 healers and 2 DPS opposing us at our charge. We had 3 healers and the rest were varied DPS. We initially knew better than to fight them and to just blitzkrieg other camps, but we looked at the map, saw our other parties sucking, and we conducted an experiment and fought them.

They held the point, for obvious reasons (our bards know not to sacrifice distance for standing on point, and we knew better than to fall into the Holy spam), but we acquired LB2 faster than them and obliterated them. Even before then we were able to burst a few of them down, but the raises were too numerous.

tl;dr: Healers aren't OP, they're just easy to cheese it up with in dominion, which is a separate issue. Some think LB in Frontlines is cheesing it up too, but fire with fire, bitchez.

As for the 1v1 against a healer, I'll try to get footage in the future, but I've definitely accomplished this numerous times as PLD. It isn't about the burst. It's about setting up the burst so it finishes the target.

[Gor]

.... but the raises were too numerous.

i chuckled at this

[Atreus]

Zombies. 8( Zombies that wouldn't stay down.