Real Solutions to PvP problems

[Wintersandman]

Mammets don't do any real damage mid game. yes you can get a tower down to start, but when the bots come out, oppressors beat mammets every time, and people can no longer support mammet pushes. If you don't have decent enough ce then, you'll lose.

That is if you can get an oppressor there. I have won matches where we lost two towers and held off the teams oppressors reaching the core. We ended up getting down their towers and had enough kamikaze dps to do more damage on their core than they did to ours. This isn't done by healer stacking. CE can also be gathered all across the middle and you can easily keep your team a float with CE plus some without holding the generator.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

This is completely false. You'd be surprised how many people end up completely ignoring mammets running through the fight/robots. I have, on multiple occasions, kept healing mammets to push them back to the opposing tower on the top lane while a 20-30 person brawl was happening on the middle island. While the oppressors are getting focused while running through and doing zero damage due to not reaching the destination, I end up putting substantial damage into the enemy tower until people realize it.

^ This is true. I've been right there with you once or twice.

[RiyahArp]

The common thread is "people ignoring mammets." when they don't, they are useless. All it takes is a healer and a dps to contest you on the other side, and suddenly your damage slows to a trickle. A lot of this "mammets do damage" is just based on people playing bad and completely ignoring a push, or on one side giving up on mid and overwhelming a tower early game. I've seen plenty of people try to use mammets instead of mid, and soon the tables turned because two oppressors + escort is far harder to counter.

[Wintersandman]

The common thread is "people ignoring mammets." when they don't, they are useless. All it takes is a healer and a dps to contest you on the other side, and suddenly your damage slows to a trickle. A lot of this "mammets do damage" is just based on people playing bad and completely ignoring a push, or on one side giving up on mid and overwhelming a tower early game. I've seen plenty of people try to use mammets instead of mid, and soon the tables turned because two oppressors + escort is far harder to counter.

Two oppressors generally only happens once per game (generally towards the end) and I was able to take out an opp single handily with a CC escort before it could get off a 3000 Tonze Missile. The other opp was unescorted because they split up and the rest of the team demolished them. 1 DPS and a healer can't stop 5 dps and a healer escorting mammets. Or 3 dps and a healer for that matter.

[Vivi_Bushido]

What if we just turned Healers into DPS for PVP, strip them of all shields and heals aside from weak heals such as Cure 1, Physic, Benefic, and make them identical to Vercure? That way healers are equal to all the jobs and the other jobs have a fighting chance to take a healer down, and stacking healers wouldn't be such an annoyance to take out? Any thoughts?

[Wintersandman]

What if we just turned Healers into DPS for PVP, strip them of all shields and heals aside from weak heals such as Cure 1, Physic, Benefic, and make them identical to Vercure? That way healers are equal to all the jobs and the other jobs have a fighting chance to take a healer down, and stacking healers wouldn't be such an annoyance to take out? Any thoughts?

If we do that then we need to add a cure spell to tanks and one to all DPS. The only DPS that has a cure is Redmage, in which we should strip away dual casting vercure on Redmage. We should also make all potencies the same for all classes so that way there is a fighting chance.

[Zojha]

If we do that then we need to add a cure spell to tanks and one to all DPS.

We don't actually.
We only need to balance the cure spells against the damage spells tanks and DPS have or vice versa. Which we could also do right now with the given kit, but healers don't like that idea either.

You do not need to give everyone the same abilities to create balance, nor does every ability need to have the same potency: What matters is the bottom line, how effective is the kit as a whole?

It's not really different than balancing in PvE - All DPS need to have the same raid contribution for balance to happen. How they achieve that raid contribution is entirely open, what matters is the bottom line. On principle, it is no different in PvP. Every job needs to contribute equally, whether it be via healing, CC, damage, AoEs, buffs... whatever. You can do that for a 4-man group, for an 8-man group, solo etc, that doesn't change the weight of raw throughput much, but it will drastically change the weight of supportive abilities and AoE. A stun is worth a lot more in a group than when balancing for solo, so the job with the stun would have to be nerfed harder to compensate for it if you're balancing for a group. Same with vuln up etc.

The issue with healers is that the devs are simply not balancing the roles at all. They only balance within the roles and even that they do badly. As a consequence, roles have vastly different group contribution.

You don't really 'need' to address that on the design level, that's something that can be fixed with numbers if you really want to. Other games have done that successfully multiple times. But when a healer in a trinity game only contributes as much as a DPS and therefore is only as valuable as one, they cry foul. I can understand why they do, what I fail to understand is why it often isn't an issue in non-trinity games. I'd just go without healers entirely to be on the safe side as dev, but that's done and over with.

Since we're stuck with the role hard-coded in, I'd give their PvP version DPS spells on the GCD and fill the rest with a couple of balanced healing and utility spells on longer cooldowns and/or tied to their job mechanics, much like tanks have a couple mitigation/disruption abilities next to their DPS toolkit.

Alternately, we could go full course on the "screw DPS players, trinity roles rule!" design and give tanks aggro abilities, then force people to only attack the target with the most aggro like any random mob. I'm not a fan of trinity design in PvP in general, but hey, might as well - It can't get much worse (And fun fact: Other games did not just manage to pull balanced healers off, they also managed to pull balanced taunts off).

[Wintersandman]

You do not need to give everyone the same abilities to create balance, nor does every ability need to have the same potency: What matters is the bottom line, how effective is the kit as a whole? .

3.0...

/10char

[RiyahArp]

We don't actually.
We only need to balance the cure spells against the damage spells tanks and DPS have or vice versa. Which we could also do right now with the given kit, but healers don't like that idea either.

I don't think healers would mind that. It's actually not fun trying to tank people in this game as a healer. What I'm against with all the 3.0 nostalgia is going back to something that was even more unfun, trying to tank people while CC'd half the time.

And tbh, there really aren't that many healers that do pvp overall. RW only has them due to it being OP; for most of the game, you barely could muster 2 healers per 8 man party. I don't think much would be lost if they radically revised them.

[Wintersandman]

I don't think healers would mind that. I don't think much would be lost if they radically revised them.

As someone who plays healer in everything but RW I would be against this.