Healers are way too strong in large scale PvP.

[BubblyBoar]

Guess I'll come back in here to say that the problem isn't that healers are strong and you can 1v1 them, it's that a group of healers are better for Rival Wings specifically than anything else. Because Mechs do all the work, players don't NEED to kill other players. The sooner alliances go full healer comps, the easier this is to realize. Healers should be able to out heal the dmg of one DPS. That's fine. But a group of healers compounds the issue much more than just one. It isn't 4v1 with healers, it's 4v4. because the comp of 4 healers doesn't NEED to kill the balanced comp, those 4 healers will succeed at whatever they are doing.

[RiyahArp]

if the healer was decent, yes it did require it. Because it was really the easiest way of doing it. I mean, come on, we didn't wear vit accessories as healers in seal rock because LB's were easy to deal with. But even in 3.0, it wasn't expected to solo a healer; you could drive them off because they could run to the next objective and didn't turtle anywhere near as much.

As for the germans, no offense but if you think its hard to burst a healer down now, you try it when you need to use 3x the abilities just to do a decent burst, or dealing with BLMS that mass sleep you or mass cometeor spam. I played it from the start of HW, and no it was not better. People complained just as much then.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

They agree the new 4.0 system is worse than what we had in 3.x

Mmm. . . talk dirty to me!


Okay, seriously though, 3.x wasn't perfect, but it was a LOT more balanced. Come on, going from all jobs having at least 2 different CCs to 3 out of 4 melees having none? MCH hitting like a melee (stronger in some cases) at range, but a slave to the GCD? LBs hitting like nothing? (Come on, I survived 4 or 5 caster LBs stacked on me in a video!) And now healers being more of a tank than tanks are? That same caution I used to have when running into a WAR, I now have running into a WHM. Doesn't mean I can't still take them down, but whereas the WAR would have to effectively use his skillset and outplay me, the WHM can just outheal what I do, emergency heal themselves back up in a pinch, shield themselves to gain momentum, and basically fight a war of attrition. Can't retreat because now their damage is based on their main stat, so they actually CAN do decent damage.

CC chains were, in my opinion, a product of coordinated team play. Why do I say that? Because if you got a stun happy PLD and they stunned that healer into immunity, you were out of luck to work your stun to burst for the next minute. I think the older 3 sec stuns/6 sec Sleep with the 6 sec resistance would be a nice balance, but with everything being a blink and you miss it CC now, it's still useful, but feels terrible compared to what it was.

I think a bigger issue is many only look at what was wrong with 3.x PvP and not what was actually right all along.


Wew, Sophia's gotta be loving this balance right now.

[RiyahArp]

Third, it wasn't balanced. If you were a MCH you should know how useless wildfire was, or turrets were, and how much you relied on one move, between the eyes, and loading the target up with debuffs. You couldn't even land wildfire back then due to its long duration and ability to be purified or shut down via one of those many stuns people had. Most of the kit in 3.0 was designed for relatively immobile pve. BLMs had trouble even landing Fire IV due to how tight enochian was and how easy it was to zone it. You're not remembering it accurately.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Ive killed healers through Attunement with Wildfire, or baited stunlock because they thought I was gonna burst, or duped gullible healers into focusing one DPS with Wildfire on them while I proceeded to burst another. Turrets were great, and I miss them. Plenty of times I placed a Bishop and fought inside its radius against an overzealous melee. Gonna run for the wall at low HP? Nope. Not with that turret there. Hide behind a pillar? Hi Turret-chan. Sacred Prism? Kneejerk dodge out of the Bishop aoe reaction. . . You'd be amazed how much it worked. Also as much as I loved BTE kills, it did have a long cooldown back then. And I scored plenty without it. The proof is all in the vids.


Thing is, consideration had gone into a lot of skills for PvP already back then, and we weren't dealing with gimped, watered down kits. BLMs might've had it rough, yes, but if they landed that Fire IV, you felt it, and if you weren't smart enough to either los them or crush them, that Fire Iv was a harsh lesson. CC was balanced in that it was shared. Make someone resistant and you possibly messed up your team's ability to coordinate a strong burst. Or peel for your healer. Or simply give yourself breathing room when needed.

What I personally feel is one of the bigger issues of this new system is, with this limited kit, you've got to work with what you've got, and if you don't have it, or if somehow it doesn't work, you literally have nothing after that. Flunge is great, right RDMs? Deorbit, ASTs? Sure, you didn't use everything in the PvE kit, but sometimes when your back is to the wall, you use what you got, and hey, maybe it worked? Saying that, consider that one job can literally cut its recasts for big important skills in half, 3 jobs have no CC whatsoever, 1 just about has it all, 1 can literally fuel its own resource on demand, and one is technically a pet job with no pet. And tanks aren't tanky. They just. . . aren't. How is that balanced?

[RiyahArp]

the turrets didn't even tickle a player. They were just pet spam, you put them there to do single tick damage to prevent people from capping a point, and annoy them because it was yet another thing to waste your targeting with. You couldn't kill them because they could just be dismissed and resummoned instantly (yeah, balance again) just like smn egi. And its not like the egis even worked, you had to baby sit them or they would chase someone all the way and desummon. There was plenty of cheese..one ilm punch had to be nerfed for example, it made being SCH impossible to even play. And I already said how Feast was...it was no fun to get stunlocked nonstop as a healer. It was not better for a lot of people.

if you want to go back to that, I don't care too much. It's just you are going to get that, then come back here and complain Feast is empty because all the healers aren't queuing or the DPS can't even manage a decent burst.

[Wintersandman]

People complained just as much then.

People complain and will always complain. The goal is to satisfy 75% of the people. MNK was SCH's weak point. But SCH was tough for a lot of others.

the turrets didn't even tickle a player.

Having been killed by a Turret I would say that the tickle did enough.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

if you want to go back to that, I don't care too much. It's just you are going to get that, then come back here and complain Feast is empty because all the healers aren't queuing or the DPS can't even manage a decent burst.

You've said that several times now, but plenty of career healers played then and enjoyed it just fine. Yes, stunlocks and cc chains were annoying as hell to deal with but you had more to work with all the same. See the tank moving in to stun you? Fluid Aura/Aura Blast, hell even Swiftcast Holy and stun him first, crazy as that sounds. And DPS? Plenty of DPS STILL can't burst right now. MCH barely even has one, though they can at least apply better pressure than before. Watering down PvP isn't the answer to helping people get better. Actually explaining things and providing better means to practice - which, side note, they FINALLY added 5 seasons in - is what will make them better. The community has done plenty to build learning resources and help others learn, even despite blanket chat restrictions preventing on-the-fly coaching, but many players just don't look for the info, and SE doesn't provide it besides.

I said it before but you don't change the sport so that people can play it better. You push the players to learn so they play it better. 4.x PvP does have some good QoL ideas, but the rest is 3.x BRD for PvP as a whole.

[RiyahArp]

It didn't really work that way. Long reply incoming (darn this editing)

I mean, healers weren't the rarest teammate, driving up the queue times incredibly, because many of them rose to the challenge and successfully dealt with the stunlocking meta. What happened was over time, it just winnowed them out to a small number who can deal with it, and a small number of newbies or people that didn't care. The style of play put too much burden on healers to adapt, and too much responsibility in a match. This led to a lot of frustration for everyone because you didn't really see the importance of roles equalize unless everyone was very highly skilled; you couldn't simply compensate for a bad or outmatched healer at most ranks.

And more important, it wasn't fun, dude. It didn't motivate you to keep playing when you spent much of the match constantly being disabled in one form or another. Losing because you literally can't cast any abilities in a mode that requires split second heals sometimes is one of the worst feelings you can have. PvP is as much motivating the losers to keep playing as it is to reward the winners, and that style of gameplay didn't motivate people at all. It didn't even matter if you looked up strategies or things, you had to either deal with that crappy CC meta or keep losing in some of the most unfun ways imaginable.

Oh, it was fine for the people with high skill, in the same way people defend Gordias and Midas to this day. But if we went back to it, you'd see the same initial interest, and then the same hollowing out. You'd just end up thinning out the ranks as most of the healers couldn't cut it and would get tons of abuse because not cutting it meant a guaranteed loss. This doesn't mean the current meta is ok either-i hoenstly think the answer is just weakening healers altogether and enabling them to have less responsibility. More about buffs and heals over time, less direct and active healing. But ugh, if you think people are going to somehow enjoy having to deal with BLM sleeping the entire group and timing it for max duration, and that is better, well...

[Wintersandman]

But ugh, if you think people are going to somehow enjoy having to deal with BLM sleeping the entire group and timing it for max duration, and that is better, well...

Well once upon a time we had materia for that. But as I have been told progression only makes sense in PvE not PvP. I disagree with that but since people will always complain thank the complainers for what we have today. Nerfing healing isn't the answer either because we will be resorted to a healer just sitting there. Then you will get people complaining "Why do we have to have a healer for 4v4? Why can't we have 4 dps? Then we will have devolved from a trinity system.