I miss the old PvP.

[Wintersandman]

the standings only show the matches played by the top 100 players per server and overall. The top always played a lot of matches period, but eventually, like all the other times, participation declined one incentives left. if you look per server at the flames for example, the actual amount of matches played by the top 100 were a lot lower, and trended lower over time. There also was Garo and exp that drove shatter participation briefly.

Riyah, Obviously you haven't looked at the standings otherwise you would see there are only 15 names on Lamia before Freelancer. So if you did 10 matches you would show up.

fluid aura counted as an attack due to damage, and if melee attacked the tank, there's your block. Pacify works on healers because our OGCDs are abilties, and being without tetra or bene does hurt.

Fluid Aura is a magic attack which couldn't be blocked in 3.0 . Pacify never impacted me as Astro and I have OGCD's as well.

Here is what pacification does.

Pacification is a status effect that prevents weaponskills and auto-attacks from being used for the duration of its effect. It has no effect on other abilities such as spells.

I get five minute queues on RW at almost all primetime. You have to play at 3 in the morning before queues die down. I get faster queues on RW than trial rouletteas dps, for heaven's sake.

That's only because it is new and people want their mounts. Give it a month and then talk about queue times. Frontlines however is a ghost town.

because people preferred it to the actual 4v4 to get mounts. Trying to get ranked matches though died same as it does now, and light party never even took off. And now both 8v8 and 4v4 are dead.

Because A we have RW and two it is a ranked rewards are meh.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

• Wildfire could be Purified, not removed with Esuna as far as I can recall. If purified, now they didn't have Purify for my stun, my bind, my heavy, Lead Shot, or anything else my team could throw at them. And I know it was a gamble. It was a fun one. Are they going to Purify it, or will they let me just stack damage on them for the explosion? Baiting Purify use was part of strategy.
  
• Blood for Blood was both a telltale "I'm gonna burst" sign, and a "hey, get THAT guy" target on your back. Having a /status off for BfB was a means I used to bait stunlocks, THEN burst. Oh, and regens weren't going to save people from the MCH/BRD burst, and even if they did, we weren't without other options to still do damage with as well.
  
• No, turrets weren't going to do a ton of damage, but the turret attacked whatever I attacked, even if I was out of range to hit them. Don't think I just ever let turrets do the work for me. Placing it behind a wall or beside a pillar denied safety in those areas. Sacred Prism would easily outregen my turret damage yes, but it was a mindgame; most people aren't going to readily stand in an aoe, so Blanking them out of Prism and placing my turret there was something I saw work many times. Not all the time, but I saw it work.
  
• You talk as if I never had to deal with those same PLDs? Hell, PLDs were practically the Anti-MCH job (the defense specialist vs the burst machine - no pun intended). Taking down a PLD was tough. Stunlocks sucked. But I still have plenty of notches on my gun from all the PLDs I took down. Lead Shot still ticked away and turrets still fired while I was stunned. No, they didn't do much, but damage is damage, and in a race of momentum, every little bit I could take in my favor, I took.
  
• You mention healing potencies have gone down, not up. . . Have you seen the damage potencies of DPS lately? BLM is the only one I know of with a "regular" attack that matches Cure I's potency. All else is lower. I did the math. Cure II is still 500 potency higher than a full shot combo with ammo. Cure I is higher than each shot by far, and my Heated Clean Shot with ammo hits harder than most melee combo enders. I encourage you to take a look at the job guides. The numbers are all there clear as day to see.
  
• The Feast didn't die. It never "died". The active participants ranked up, and that made anyone left behind or late to start have problems with matchmaking. Attempts to try and fix that largely failed and created complications where it wasn't due. But still, with no rank decay, and let's be honest; a LOT of lesser skilled players, the majority of regular Feast participants understood that the best course of action was to rank up early and quickly to escape lowbie queues and lower skill tiers. Platinum, back then, was jokingly referred to as the "Promised Land", because you guaranteed wouldn't get someone lower than Gold, thus your risk of point loss wasn't as severe.
  
• You mention how healers are rare. Would you like me to refer you to some of the career healers that placed top 10 each season? Granted I can only account for Aether, not Primal, but I CAN name several great healers that always placed. Yes, healing was tough. Healing was always tough. But good healers could adapt, DID adapt, and were a nightmare to take down. Still, with knowing what they could/couldn't do, and making use of bait tactics, advantage and opportunity, proper setup and burst, and sometimes just pure attrition, I took down many a healer, even some of the toughest ones.

[RiyahArp]

What does this matter? Frontline standings are low because RW launched and shatter is obsolete. What I meant was that even with freelancer, over time participation declined like usual. up till 4.0 hit and people really went for it since dps queues were ridiculous.

You mention how healers are rare. Would you like me to refer you to some of the career healers that placed top 10 each season? Granted I can only account for Aether, not Primal, but I CAN name several great healers that always placed. Yes, healing was tough. Healing was always tough. But good healers could adapt, DID adapt, and were a nightmare to take down. Still, with knowing what they could/couldn't do, and making use of bait tactics, advantage and opportunity, proper setup and burst, and sometimes just pure attrition, I took down many a healer, even some of the toughest ones.

...cool, you can introduce me to less than ten healers per data center, yes. And yes, people can adapt to about anything; the problem was that it weeded out so many healers in the lower ranks that it prevented the mode from really growing or thriving. And once people got toxic, that sealed the fate, because people started wondering why should I put up with this when at best you'd get a piece of jewelry for being anything but the top 100.

You mention healing potencies have gone down, not up. . . Have you seen the damage potencies of DPS lately? BLM is the only one I know of with a "regular" attack that matches Cure I's potency. All else is lower. I did the math. Cure II is still 500 potency higher than a full shot combo with ammo. Cure I is higher than each shot by far, and my Heated Clean Shot with ammo hits harder than most melee combo enders. I encourage you to take a look at the job guides. The numbers are all there clear as day to see.

That's nice. You have fun trying to heal a mammet push when i've just casted a buffed regen and asylum, and have both benediction and tetra to cure them, plus lowered recast on assize, and added potency to my medica via plenary indulgence on my team. Oh, an I have that pvp aoe ability, I forget its name now, the one that reduces damage as well as heals. So imagine there are two or three of me to cover blind spots as we push. Oh, and we can raise each other to full health with no weakness via our pvp raise.

And while we're at it, why don't I repose you so my team's cc can murder you, then immediately swift + holy to stun you so he can spin and finish you before you run. The 3.0 toolkit was if anything more powerful than what we have now in many ways. If we had it at pve potency you wouldn't be able to do crap. The only issue they need to address imo is getting potency down, otherwise its pretty darn balanced.

The Feast didn't die. It never "died". The active participants ranked up, and that made anyone left behind or late to start have problems with matchmaking. Attempts to try and fix that largely failed and created complications where it wasn't due. But still, with no rank decay, and let's be honest; a LOT of lesser skilled players, the majority of regular Feast participants understood that the best course of action was to rank up early and quickly to escape lowbie queues and lower skill tiers. Platinum, back then, was jokingly referred to as the "Promised Land", because you guaranteed wouldn't get someone lower than Gold, thus your risk of point loss wasn't as severe.

That wouldn't matter in a healthy scene, because even then, you'd still have people doing lowbie tiers for the fun of it. The top ranks are always a small percentage of players, and the bulk would be at gold or less in ranking, but they'd still play out of enjoyment. A lot of people do competitive not because they want top 100, but because competitive matches are fun in a different way than casual matches are. People would sort to their rank naturally.

That they don't happen, well, I'll leave that to you.

You talk as if I never had to deal with those same PLDs? Hell, PLDs were practically the Anti-MCH job (the defense specialist vs the burst machine - no pun intended). Taking down a PLD was tough. Stunlocks sucked. But I still have plenty of notches on my gun from all the PLDs I took down. Lead Shot still ticked away and turrets still fired while I was stunned. No, they didn't do much, but damage is damage, and in a race of momentum, every little bit I could take in my favor, I took.

In Feast, the PLD never bothered you, because mostly you weren't the primary danger. The tanks focused healers because dps classes would go down easy without them, and tanks were more effective to kill via melee LB by the time you needed them dead. If they tried to stunlock you, that gave the healer time to heal you. An the reaction times were pretty harsh to stun you. From what I remember some of the higher skilled players used act callouts to tell when the enemy did blood for blood, and that's how you could bait them. Most people couldn't even hit that level of play to counter it save for caster classes, who often needed long times to cast.

Frontlines was more fluid, and generally diluted the power of tanks.

[Wintersandman]

What does this matter? Frontline standings are low because RW launched and shatter is obsolete. What I meant was that even with freelancer, over time participation declined like usual. up till 4.0 hit and people really went for it since dps queues were ridiculous.

Riyah, I am talking pre-4.0 and pointing out the fact you don't know what you're talking about especially when you made the comment pacification which affected your OGCD's which is an outright lie. Scroll up and you can see what Pacification does.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Adding a vit accessory eliminated getting one shot by melee LB which a good healer would spot and top off the person. Sleep and caster LB was only threatening if it was an organized premade but there were also ways to counter that (Spread out). Stun locked by paladin was only a threat if other people were paying attention, otherwise it was annoying and it was only 7 seconds and then the person went immune.

I'm sorry, I just wanna brag a little

Then. . .

. . .And now.

(In the first one, please note the full health MNK who probably had Fists of Earth up who uh. . . didn't fare so well despite that)

I'll stop misbehaving now.

[RiyahArp]

They are both the same video, one is 45 seconds though

[Wintersandman]

They are both the same video, one is 45 seconds though

You didn't notice the difference between 3 cometeor vs 7? Also it clearly illustrates the lack of effectiveness of any Ranged LB.

[Kisama]

both seal rock and shatter declined to 8v8s in the off season too.

That isn't entirely true. At least on Aether, Shatter popped consistently clear up until 4.0. You would get 72 man matches during the days and 24s at night, which did pop slower. Seal Rock died for an entirely different reason, and that was thanks to part of the pvp community, unfortunately.

I see no problem with pvp being seen as 'niche'. They tried to make it accessible to the masses and it turned into hot garbage. The masses aren't the crowd that they should be trying to appeal to.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

What does this matter? Frontline standings are low because RW launched and shatter is obsolete. What I meant was that even with freelancer, over time participation declined like usual. up till 4.0 hit and people really went for it since dps queues were ridiculous.

Participation declined back to what it was. Technically more than before thanks to easier matchmaking and new blood that perhaps was attracted by GARO, and realized PvP was actually pretty fun. Let's not act like people weren't queueing and PvPing - for FUN, without XP - all that time before Freelancer. I've got the videos to prove otherwise.

...cool, you can introduce me to less than ten healers per data center, yes. And yes, people can adapt to about anything; the problem was that it weeded out so many healers in the lower ranks that it prevented the mode from really growing or thriving. And once people got toxic, that sealed the fate, because people started wondering why should I put up with this when at best you'd get a piece of jewelry for being anything but the top 100.

I can introduce you to many more than that, most of whom are still career healers and across the community, not just top 10/top 100. It's worth noting that while the Feast rankings aren't exactly a solid measure of player skill (I mean, I've never ranked at all, but largely due to not having the time/losing interest or just not participating like season 4 and most of this season), you say that healers were so rare when in fact, there are many healers that work their way up the ranks. Some weren't so great at first, but rather than give up, they reflected on their performances and learned and improved. Just like I did as a DPS.

As for the toxic thing, I honestly don't even want to touch that. No matter how much I say from firsthand experience that issues of toxicity weren't nearly as bad as people exaggerate them to be, it's my word vs the misconception SE's basically sponsored with their chat ban. Believe what you like, but many of us knew how to behave ourselves like mature adults.

That's nice. You have fun trying to heal a mammet push when i've just casted a buffed regen and asylum, and have both benediction and tetra to cure them, plus lowered recast on assize, and added potency to my medica via plenary indulgence on my team. Oh, an I have that pvp aoe ability, I forget its name now, the one that reduces damage as well as heals. So imagine there are two or three of me to cover blind spots as we push. Oh, and we can raise each other to full health with no weakness via our pvp raise.

And while we're at it, why don't I repose you so my team's cc can murder you, then immediately swift + holy to stun you so he can spin and finish you before you run. The 3.0 toolkit was if anything more powerful than what we have now in many ways. If we had it at pve potency you wouldn't be able to do crap. The only issue they need to address imo is getting potency down, otherwise its pretty darn balanced.

My answer to that? Drop a Bishop on the mammets, maybe even hit em with Flamethrower, and the healer? Blank out of Asylum, stun, then "1-2-3-4, you-don't-exist-anymore." And while that burst might still be potent enough to take down my intended target, the damage wouldn't be at current endgame potency. It never was. An ilvl sync would be in place still. Keep in mind, I took down many a healer with that burst back when healers were so powerful then. Only reason I can't do that so easily now is that burst literally doesn't exist, and healing potencies sit well above the most potent attacks I have.

Again, I encourage you to look at the job guides. It's all there. MCH has no oGCDs besides the nerfed BTE, Blank, and Leg Graze. . . Guess what Benison, Regen, and Benediction are?

That wouldn't matter in a healthy scene, because even then, you'd still have people doing lowbie tiers for the fun of it. The top ranks are always a small percentage of players, and the bulk would be at gold or less in ranking, but they'd still play out of enjoyment. A lot of people do competitive not because they want top 100, but because competitive matches are fun in a different way than casual matches are. People would sort to their rank naturally.

That they don't happen, well, I'll leave that to you.

In a "healthy" scene, more players would not only have understood the system better to the point that 4.0 changes would be unnecessary (that is, unless SE really thinks this is actually better), competition would've been taken far more seriously, instead of a dismissive, spiteful XP grab and go. In a healthy scene, SE would actually be listening to the players that regularly participate in the content, and not just making things up (like what led to 4.06a for example). In a healthy scene, they wouldn't just drop sweeping changes on the community like they did and alienate a dedicated playerbase in an attempt to make a mass appeal. In a healthy scene, 6 seasons of the same people cheating wouldn't have gone unanswered STILL.

Man, I could write a page on this alone. But let it be said that SE's missteps, and worse, their inaction at all the wrong times does far more harm to the community than any players could ever do.

In Feast, the PLD never bothered you, because mostly you weren't the primary danger. The tanks focused healers because dps classes would go down easy without them, and tanks were more effective to kill via melee LB by the time you needed them dead. If they tried to stunlock you, that gave the healer time to heal you. An the reaction times were pretty harsh to stun you. From what I remember some of the higher skilled players used act callouts to tell when the enemy did blood for blood, and that's how you could bait them. Most people couldn't even hit that level of play to counter it save for caster classes, who often needed long times to cast.

Frontlines was more fluid, and generally diluted the power of tanks.

Oh Riyah. . . remember I mentioned that thing about Blood for Blood being a telltale sign you were going to burst? Guess who responded to that more often than not? Guess who I WANTED to respond to that? Same with Wildfire. If they saw it get applied, I expected any PLD worth their sword and shield to be in my ass like a thong til they couldn't stun me anymore without making me resistant.

Tanks sat on healers so as not to allow them to freecast, not because I as a DPS was less of a danger. I'm the damn damage dealer; it's my job to be a high threat, lol. It's not like we were counting on tank damage to help get the job done (WAR being a minor exception because. . . WAR). You are at least right about focusing healers because the DPS were easy to pick off without them. I operated on that simple principle more often than not myself.

We frowned upon ACT use in PvP. We still do. You didn't need it, not when you could simply focus target who you wanted to watch out for. OR JUST USE YOUR EYES. It really wasn't that difficult, nor did it break any TOS.

And if anything diluted the power of tanks, 4.0 did. I used to actually be wary of WARs, and had to engage PLDs with caution. Now? Pfft, just another melee DPS with a little more HP. . .

Lastly, piggybacking off what you said, most people couldn't hit that level of play purely for lack of trying or WANTING to try. A small body of the community left to its own devices to learn and compile that information couldn't force it on the rest of the community that chose to shun and ignore it like it was a joke and a "waste of development resources". We can't make anyone learn, we can't make anyone improve. And now look at what we have?

I'll be the mean person to say it: For all the ones that thought PvP was a joke back then, but are PvPing now? The joke's on you. More than you even know.

[RiyahArp]

I can introduce you to many more than that, most of whom are still career healers and across the community, not just top 10/top 100. It's worth noting that while the Feast rankings aren't exactly a solid measure of player skill (I mean, I've never ranked at all, but largely due to not having the time/losing interest or just not participating like season 4 and most of this season), you say that healers were so rare when in fact, there are many healers that work their way up the ranks. Some weren't so great at first, but rather than give up, they reflected on their performances and learned and improved. Just like I did as a DPS.

Go queue as healer, then go queue as dps. Tell me how much difference the wait time is. When you queue as DPS, tell me how many different healers or tanks you see. You can wait till the start of the next season.

You're trying to argue against something which isn't really arguable against. Half the issue with feast queues is the lack of healers. There are in general a lot of dps that do pvp; I've actually been on shatter matches where there was 23 dps and me as healer.

As for the toxic thing, I honestly don't even want to touch that. No matter how much I say from firsthand experience that issues of toxicity weren't nearly as bad as people exaggerate them to be, it's my word vs the misconception SE's basically sponsored with their chat ban. Believe what you like, but many of us knew how to behave ourselves like mature adults.

it wasn't entirely the players fault.

The matchmaking was way too wide early on in Feast, and really, you couldn't do all that much to compensate for an outmatched healer. So that healer often lost you the match, and in the worst cases, there were only a few unique healers queuing. So people got mad because it felt like they could do nothing but lose. And mature or not, an evening of watching your rank go down because they had a top 100 healer and you didn't frustrated people. SE tightened the matchmaking band a little better, but the damage was done. It happens in other pvp games too...Overwatch has such a ridiculous hate on Mercy mains because Mercy is such a key role on the team.

My answer to that? Drop a Bishop on the mammets, maybe even hit em with Flamethrower, and the healer? Blank out of Asylum, stun, then "1-2-3-4, you-don't-exist-anymore." And while that burst might still be potent enough to take down my intended target, the damage wouldn't be at current endgame potency. It never was. An ilvl sync would be in place still. Keep in mind, I took down many a healer with that burst back when healers were so powerful then. Only reason I can't do that so easily now is that burst literally doesn't exist, and healing potencies sit well above the most potent attacks I have.

Again, I encourage you to look at the job guides. It's all there. MCH has no oGCDs besides the nerfed BTE, Blank, and Leg Graze. . . Guess what Benison, Regen, and Benediction are?

You are losing my point. My point is that the HW kit wouldn't make RW better, it would make it worse in a different way. Mass CC would alter it in ways that would be even more frustrating.

In a "healthy" scene, more players would not only have understood the system better to the point that 4.0 changes would be unnecessary (that is, unless SE really thinks this is actually better), competition would've been taken far more seriously, instead of a dismissive, spiteful XP grab and go. In a healthy scene, SE would actually be listening to the players that regularly participate in the content, and not just making things up (like what led to 4.06a for example). In a healthy scene, they wouldn't just drop sweeping changes on the community like they did and alienate a dedicated playerbase in an attempt to make a mass appeal. In a healthy scene, 6 seasons of the same people cheating wouldn't have gone unanswered STILL.

Man, I could write a page on this alone. But let it be said that SE's missteps, and worse, their inaction at all the wrong times does far more harm to the community than any players could ever do.

Look, the story of HW was that SE overestimated the skill of the playerbase as a whole. That led to large gaps in performance between players, since players almost always vary in skill according to a bell curve. At first, they said "git gud." Then, they started to do very modest tweaks, assuming people just needed a little help to get over the hump. Then at Creator and SB, they more or less said to hell with it, started a lot lower, equalized the skill curve, and probably hope instead to raise it slowly.

You're kind of asking to go back to that first step. But people aren't going to all approach the same level of skill, and by bringing back the HW skill gap, you kind of make the lower end of the curve far more ineffectual than they are now. You're either gambling that they will rise to it, or not really caring if they quit. I think the former has shown it doesn't happen. Especially if you are going to get rid of incentives for trying and failing, namely exp/tomes.

We frowned upon ACT use in PvP. We still do. You didn't need it, not when you could simply focus target who you wanted to watch out for. OR JUST USE YOUR EYES. It really wasn't that difficult, nor did it break any TOS.

And if anything diluted the power of tanks, 4.0 did. I used to actually be wary of WARs, and had to engage PLDs with caution. Now? Pfft, just another melee DPS with a little more HP. . .

It diluted it because you had other healers/dps to watch your back. Part of the problem with feast was no one would peel for you as healer. At least in other modes, healers watched out for each other. I remember people complaining about 8v8 mostly because two healers could do that so well.

And come on man, it was far easier for them to automate it because it was so hard to "use your eyes" in the middle of battle.

As for "more than you know," nah. If it was, you'd be able to get seal rock to spawn consistently.

***

I guess the only way to cure you is to give you what you want. I'm arguing to try and make people think about what exactly they want, more than simple nostalgia. This isn't a particularly unique thing. In every MMO there's always a group of people who thinks if they can roll back the server to a specific time it would somehow fix things. I'm starting to think that the only solution is to actually recreate it and force people to look at it without nostalgia. I try to do this with words, but I think you need to get chain CC'd and suffer through that whole thing again to understand why SE did what they did. I don't think 4.0 is blameless, but its a better base than 3.0 ever was.