Well Square, you really messed up this patch (PvP-wise)

[Sanghelios]

I was really looking forward to patch 2.5, because i like to pvp a bit in this game.
After 2.4 lands and did add the recycled animal gear i was thinking "Hey, 2.5 will be the one big pvp patch", so i didnt bother about it so much.


Time passed by and 2.5 came out today. After i came back from work i readed the patch notes and i couldnt really belive it.

+ New Mode...
- ...wich is a slap into the face of each healer out there.
- No new pvp gear
- No Rank 46-50
- PvP-Roulette gives only sol and poe tomes
- Even the new mode is still gc restricted

Square, I just cant get it how you can really say "Oh, we are all very addicted pvp players and we are working hard to give you really cool pvp stuff". In my eyes it just looks like you didnt give a single fuck about the whole pvp community at all.

I can tell you what you should have done in this patch to make it WAY better for every pvp player and i am not even a developer who should care about this in his working time.

1.)PvP-Roulette
Remove the soldiery and poethic tomes as reward and add 400-500 bonus pvp-exp (Or add a specific percentage of the next level-up (Just like challenge log), but at least xxx exp so rank 1 ppl dont get 1 exp out of it) and besides that, add 400-500 wolf marks aswell. The way the pvp roulette works now is complete bullshit (Sorry for saying that). With tomes as rewards, the amount of pve players who just go into frontlines to get thier non-pvp related rewards (Light,Tomes) will increase and again they dont have to care about who wins and who not. Just go in, annoy the addicted pvp players with wasted limited breaks and overall cluelessness. As of now, the only ppl who suffer from the "pvp roulette" are the pvp players themself.

2.)New Gear/Materia
Lets move on to the second point. A brand new mode but not a single new armor piece to spend your marks on? Eh, that sounds just silly. I mean you could at least add new kinds (-II) of pvp-materia for status effects or idk recycle the animal gear again but with more usefull/different stats on them (Seriously square, how many frontlines have you played to notice that spellspeed is just ridiculous wrong on every whitemage?).

3.)New Ranks
Hello, Rank 45 writing this post. Was really looking toward to new ranks so i can still get some pvp exp and upgrade my pvp skills. Why do you add a brand new mode but no new ranks aswell? Its not that new ranks would require a enormous amount of work. So basicly, i dont have any kind of reward (besides fun) from playing pvp as of now.

4.)Healers arent welcome in Slaugther
Yea, thats pretty much it. Dd are getting killing streaks, enormous damage buffs and achievements for killing ppl. The reward a healer is getting is just many deads, because some melees with 40% damage buff can kill you now faster then ever before. Please dont come with "Thats not true, every fl group needs a good healer and so they are welcome". Welcome maybe in the eyes of the other 7 dds in your group, but it should be enjoyable for the healer himself aswell.

5.)GC-Restricted
I dont understand why you still stick on this way. I heard ppl wanted it a while ago and they got it and nothing is wrong this this at all. But why on earth do you continueing on this. Queue times do suffer from this and of course ppl cant play with thier friends together. In case you really want to stick to this, then oh god please only use ONE pvp rank, no matter if you switch to another gc or not. So the players who are switching to a friends gc dont have to start with ranking up all over again. And besides that i can say that its not really enjoyable if someones forces you be on the loosing team all the time. Dont get me wrong. I am on chaos data centre and all three gc are almost on tie, but i did play on a few other data centeres and the situation on some of them really scares me (1 win out of 20 games for maelstrom on aether for example)

Day is almost over and i am sitting here in front of my pc and have to write something like that.

Edit: Found some new stuff:

6.)Range DDs are ridiculous overpowered in Slaughter while melees suffer
The gc wich brings the most blackmages or summoners to the match wins. Thats sad. I checked amount of BLM and SMN after the last games and oh snap, 95% the the dd players are using blackmage or summoner already. These two jobs always contributes 200-300k damage + 15-20 kills to a group. Dont get me wrong, surely there are plenty of melees who can contribute as much as a blm, but i think we all do clearly see that range dd is the way to go. Meanwhile melees get nuked while fighting the boss in the middle. As much as i hate melees as healer in frontlines, i feel sorry for them. Square, i cant believe that you test this game mode by playing it by yourself and saying its balanced enough to launch, wich is clearly not the case?!

7.)Map is oversized
That gamemode just doesnt fit on that size of a map. Really. You did add some teleporters to hide that fact, but ya, just way to big. You basicly could have done this gamemode in a wolfs den arena aswell. Add a boss in mid, add 72 ppl and let them fight each other.

8.)Zero Strategy required
Thats also a thing wich bothers me. The whole game mode needs zero strategy. Its just a zergfest of the gc wichever is dominating the data centre.

9.)Huge WHM mana problems while being in group B
Well, i am sure some of you fellow whitemages already noticed that healing in group B is extremely intensive and burns the mana pool fast. Problem is that you basicly dont have time to recover (Besides the two mana reg. spells you have), because the fight is going on all the time without a chance for rest. In all my games i already was sitting there with 100 mana, waiting 20-30 seconds for shroud of saints to get ready while my whole party is going to die. The other pvp spell that gives you mana is nice, but it does have a way to high cooldown for this situation so you can only use it once or twice at all. And i know bards can help, but thats not the solution. A possible solution would be to give healers a mechanic to recover more mana.

[WellFooled]

Square certainly never promised that this would be the PvP patch and nothing was ever said about new PvP armor, materia, ranks, or a changing of GC restrictions. I understand why you want these things, I want most of them too, but you can't hold SE to promises they never made.

As for the roulette rewards, I was bummed to see that there were no PvP bonuses either, but what it does have is enough to encourage new people to participate. 100 sol and 40 poetics for one match might be a big enough draw to bring in players new to PvP.

As for healers in PvP...I find slaughter much, much more enjoyable as a healer compared to Secure. Because of the amount of players at mid I think it's harder for healers to be identified and focused down, which means it's easier to go about healing without being constantly inturupted.

All and all, I think this patch has been amazing for PvP. I've had a lot of fun with the new mode, particularly on my healer.

[AstralKaos]

Bang on!

I agree with you on pretty much everything. Especially about the continuation of this GC rubbish, it should have been removed the first patch after WD released imo; the GC restriction for FL is just more garbage on the pile that is the link GC's have with PvP rank.

I wasn't expecting much from this patch for PvP, though, thankfully it saved me some disappointment...

[Sanghelios]

Square certainly never promised that this would be the PvP patch and nothing was ever said about new PvP armor, materia, ranks, or a changing of GC restrictions. I understand why you want these things, I want most of them too, but you can't hold SE to promises they never made.

I have never said that Square promised that.

[myahele]

I agree with many points and I'd also like to add that due to the focus on the middle my system can't quite render everyone, so I end up being killed and not see who's attacking; nor target anyone for that matter since they aren't rendered

[Evangela]

I agree. the Slaughter mode is a joke, Roulette rewards doesn't make sense, no new rank and gears are a disappointment.

[Logo]

You seem to have made a lot of assumptions and were disappointed when what you made up in your mind didn't come true.

Also, saying "Healers arent welcome in Slaughter" sounds like the same as people who enter who think the drones aren't important.

[Buff_Archer]

You have a lot of great points there, and I don't disagree. I have rethought my first position on slaughter mode as it pertains to healers a bit though, which was the same as yours. I've played Slaughter mode as SMN, SCH, and Bard, and so far I'd say that with it being more of a free for all battle with everyone attacking everyone, I felt less taken for granted than I thought I would, and than I have in Secure mode before when people often didn't worry about healing too much until all the focused healers on their team were dead and THEN they started taking major damage and dying. The game mode is new and so we have yet to see all the strategies that people will come up with and refine over time, but my impression is this won't play out quite the same way as WD/Secure in being a race by each team to kill the other teams's healer and then the DPS's... so far, it's turned the tables a bit and turned into 'focus the melee DPS!' as the system indicated which ones around had the biggest streak of kills. I had that up on me as Summoner once, it was fun getting the battle fever high status or whatever it was called but I was also shown on the map and a message went out and it essentially painted a big target on me I wouldn't want as a healer.

As far as kills go... the scenario where I went out as healer and got lb'd again and again just didn't materialize like I thought it would. I think I got at least as many kills as a healer vs. getting killed myself. Though sadly, I set what had to have been a hall of fame record at the number of enemy conbatents knocked off the ramp on top at once with Aura Blast... ahh the looks on their faces as they were flung back to their doom, why did I not think to save that video to my PS4 afterwards. Some posts had worried about people coming down on healers for kill stealing if it was their small damage skill that finished someone off but that didn't come to pass. The battle was just too much of a clusterf* to track individual targets and who finished them off, and I'd love for someone to complain about me finishing off someone with energy drain as a Scholar, especially out of self preservation- I'd tell them if they prefer complete separation between Healer and DPS roles I'd be happy to swap to a DPS class, and leave the healing up to whatever potions they have in stock.

If there were things I could change as far as how this mode works from a healer's perspective, I'm sure I would do so... most likely introducing a form of Cleric Stance that's a bit more balanced between risk/reward than before. I'd give this another try from a Healer's perspective though, and think of it not in terms of the kill counts and the transient bonuses that come with battle fever or whatever... I'd think of it in terms of the ultimate win at the end of the game. That's what mattered in Secure mode when it was all we had. As a healer, your team is screwed without you and they won't have the same life expectancy. Before in Secure mode a healer who wanted to win had to show up at the flags and hope the rest of their team was on point too, or they paid the price for it... but maybe now it's your turn to call the shots more, and if you think you know the best objectives to go to (which I'm guessing you're probably clued into really well based on your commitment to this), players can either choose to go with you if they wish to have a fighting, or they can go it alone and die over and over.

[Trixxy]

Im seriously pissed off over that lazy duty roulette.

Really, SE? A PVP duty roulette that doesn't reward PVP points or currency. Wow.

[BunnyChain]

I agree with many points and I'd also like to add that due to the focus on the middle my system can't quite render everyone, so I end up being killed and not see who's attacking; nor target anyone for that matter since they aren't rendered

I think this is also causing some "extra" 90k d/cs. And I'm not really sure but I think when you are disconnected right at the beginning, you are automatically removed from the Frontlines... that or I was kicked in 5 sec after disconnecting. .-.