Reviewing up to 10 vods.

[BRVV]

Thank you 2 for the help! Greatly appreciate it. I will try to implement the tipps!
About the LB: Yeah i know it's a kill on enemies with the debuff... i always panic because it charges so slowly and i want to use it so i can hopefully use another one but no one attacks me or they CC me for ages :O Don't really know how to counterplay that basic counterplay ^^

[Ransu]

I tend to mark samurais with the do not attack marker when I see they have an LB. That said, sam is one of the few jobs where its perfectly ok to hold onto the LB for a bit because it charges so slow you're only ever going to see it once or twice anyways. A lot of sam players panic when a fight is going downward and they try to save it with an LB. It works sometimes, but its not something I would recommend unless you really know you can pull it off. Its best to use it offensively when you're winning the fight cuz you're gonna get more panic attacks from the enemy team who are forced to engage you.

[VivianInfinity]

https://youtu.be/DE9-pkdyU3w

Hope you can help

Heyo! Thanks for submitting a vod; I've been a bit busy until now, so I haven't had a chance to look at it as promptly.

So far, yeah, I definitely agree with Ransu; one of the biggest things you could be working on is just hitting recuperate more and being more willing to take extended downtime from a fight to drink an elixir. Dying with full mana (or, really, any mana) is dying with 60k healing in your back pocket that you didn't get to use; that's basically a full life bar.

On top of that, however long it takes for you to move to a safe position and potion, it will probably take longer to die, be dead for 10+ seconds, and have to walk back to your team. All the while that you're dead, you're also not building limit break gauge. If there's anything I can give as general advice to all players, it is that if you have used most of your cooldowns and what remains is your basic 1-2-3 filler, you should seriously, seriously consider potting instead.

First, matchups and composition (with no respect to game state).

This matchup is Samurai/Dark Knight/White Mage/ Ninja/Machinist on your team, with Monk/Samurai/Astro/Machinist/Summoner on the other team. As a brief aside, Samurai's Chiten gives 25% damage reduction and Monk has naturally high 60k health pool, Riddle of Earth, and Thunderclap shields. Both also lack substantial non-telegraphed burst beyond their limit breaks, so it's usually better to think of these jobs as "tanks" (or at least bruisers) than it is to think of them as DPS, since both of these classes have a much, much easier time soaking damage than, say, Machinist, who basically has no defensives. This means that you're most useful soaking damage for your team, when possible, and doing the initial damage needed to allow Ninja or Machinist to finish kills.

In a more coordinated team, these matchups will be much more focused on your team doing its best to not clump up too tight while hopefully getting a pick quickly to start the fight off; your team's White Mage, Machinist, and Ninja all excel at single target burst, while theirs is more split damage and focused on AoEs (due to Astro and Summoner), so the best way to deny their win condition is to have both you and the Dark Knight pile onto someone (probably the Monk, who needs to dive in to be effective, although it works to just have it be whoever is easiest), lock them down with your stuns and roots, and get them low enough that your Machinist and Ninja can finish the kill from a distance.

[VivianInfinity]

Given that this is casual, you can't really expect coordination (or even for your teammates to understand their role on a team); the utility of strictly playing for defensive team play gets a lot lower. But even so, enemy skills do less damage when they're used on you and are less likely to result in a kill, so you're still creating value by eating skills and keeping the enemy from getting their damage to cleave onto your team.

At this point, I want to mention that you can use a macro to indicate that you're going to be attacking someone; this alone can be enormously influential in getting your team to coordinate damage. Here's mine:

/micon "Attacking Target" quickchat
/merror off
/mk off <attack3>
/mk off <attack2>
/mk off <attack1>
/mk off <circle>
/quickchat "Attacking Target" <t>
/marking attack3 <t> <wait.1>
/marking attack2 <attack3> <wait.1>
/marking attack1 <attack2> <wait.1>
/marking circle <attack1> <wait.20>
<wait.20>
<wait.20>
/marking circle <circle>

[VivianInfinity]

Alright, onto the game.

0:09: Generally, as a "tank," you want to be positioning more aggressively than this; being in a position where the enemy can get to your Machinist and White Mage without first having to contend with you negates a lot of the zoning pressure you could be exerting. I have no idea why your Dark Knight takes so long to move forward, so positioning back makes sense, as you don't have both of you exerting pressure and make it a lot more likely for you to die alone if you don't get support, but something to consider for the future; even if you're positioning back, you still want to stand in front of your Machinist.

0:35: Around this time (a bit before it, actually), your Dark Knight positions to move forward, posturing aggressively. He's almost certainly going to dive in on a target, and you should be there with him to exert bonus pressure. In fact, he manages to get somewhat substantial damage (like 20k or so) onto the enemy Machinist, which might have been more impactful had he not been able to walk to the potion and heal it off immediately. If you're there and you stun him, there's a good chance that's the kill, and not doing this slowly loses you the fight.

0:39: I think you have an opportunity to purify the root the summoner puts on you here. I have no idea if it would be worth it, because I cannot, for the life of me, find your buff and debuff bar. This is critical; you need to be able to tell how long you have left on certain crowd controls, core abilities, if allies have buffed you, so on. Not having that front and center is putting yourself at an enormous disadvantage; I've seen people with PvP specific huds that keep their buffs and debuffs at 200% size near the center (and they're kinda lunatics, but that's just preference).

0:42: Here, you spend about 5 seconds recuperating without hitting a GCD. While the value of optimal weaving is substantially less important in PvP than PvE, you still want to have your GCD timer rolling if you can help it. You basically miss out on, at the very least, a stun -> Midare on the Monk (or something else, I don't know what buttons are ideal for Samurai here). This kind of becomes a recurring pattern; you recuperate without moving towards your target at 0:50 or without an idea of what GCD should be rolling quite a bit.

[VivianInfinity]

1:35: There is no world where you get this feather; you should 100% just guard the turbulence.

1:42: At this point, your white mage has gotten an enormous laser on 4 members of the enemy team; your goal at this point should be to turn that damage into a kill, and in this case, you can probably get the Machinist, who has limit break up and you want to take out of the fight. I think if you commit onto the Machinist, he dies, and this fight turns conclusively in your favor; at the very least, you should maybe be going for the big AOE damage on the clump of 4 rather than trying to solokill the Astro. It's a slow bleed from here, since their team is able to use most of their limit breaks.

2:50: Your target is guarding while the enemy Astro is in dash range and not; hitting the guard here is wasted damage and time that could be put elsewhere.

3:30: Your White Mage gets a really good Miracle of Nature on your primary target and if you stun right after, you can secure the Samurai kill before he guards with Double Oga (or Midare? I don't know which is better, I don't play Samurai). Either way, you waste a stun on a guard and a faster kill could help you secure the Astro in enough time to start pushing sooner.

3:50: At this point, the enemy team just starts going in 1 at a time onto the 4 of you with no real options to secure any kills; this is an enormous misplay on their part, and they should just be falling back to regroup. This isn't something you did, but I want to point it out because this pattern of always wanting to be on the crystal is often wrong; while ignoring the checkpoint is wrong, so is grouping up tightly (or worse, one after another) to stay on a point, not achieving anything other than making it easy for the enemy team to get value out of their AoE abilities.

From there on, the game's going pretty much in your favor, but you need to keep a person on the point at all times. As one of the frontliners, that's probably your job. Honestly, the overtime mechanics in this game (and how overtime doesn't trigger if nobody is on the crystal in the last overtime tick) is kind of dumb, but you have to play around it.

Overall, biggest points to improve upon are 1, not hitting people in guard with core abilities, 2, keeping your GCD rolling and continuing to move while you're recuperating, and 3, initial target selection to make sure your damage is going on the same target as the rest of your team.

Hopefully this gives you something to work on, and hopefully this was helpful!

[nighttimebunny]

alright, finally got around to taking one, sorry for poor quality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whK-UrNG_no

I know I did pretty bad and those deaths were avoidable but hey that's what this is for right? xD

[VivianInfinity]

alright, finally got around to taking one, sorry for poor quality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whK-UrNG_no

I know I did pretty bad and those deaths were avoidable but hey that's what this is for right? xD

Hey, Seraph! Thanks for submitting this; I'll try to get to it tomorrow or the day after (been a bit nauseous today).

[VivianInfinity]

Heyo! Sorry this took so long; I've been pretty out of it for a couple days now.

Alright, let's jump right into it, same structure with less setup.

The matchup is Dragoon/Machinist/Sage/Ninja/White Mage versus Red Mage/Ninja/White Mage/Gunbreaker/Machinist. On composition alone, this seems like it's going to be a rough matchup, since while your team does have two melee jobs, neither of them are especially tanky, as Dragoon's most important damage modifier also makes it take substantially increased damage. This is prime material for the enemy Red Mage to make work of your team, who has high burst damage and a (marginally) tankier front line on account of having a Gunbreaker.

In organized games, I'd probably consider this lost at draft, but this isn't a tournament; it's low platinum, where the single most important determining factor isn't composition but instead synchronization of damage and avoiding getting caught out of position. Based on the compositions, you're probably looking to wait for their team to make a mistake rather than for your team to engage; first Miracle of Nature on a priority target probably wins. To me, this means playing a little bit back on the opener and playing spread enough that the most notable cleave, Red Mage's Resolution, doesn't hit multiple members to force cleanses.

On to the game.

1:15: I'm gonna be honest, I feel like this engage is pretty bad on the Ninja's part. However, it is extremely telegraphed for both you and the enemy team; as soon as your Ninja dashes forward in stealth, the only way out is by getting a kill, and you need to be there to help him stay alive. In this case, the enemy team takes substantially longer to kill him for going invisible and charging into the enemy team than they should have and the enemy Machinist takes pretty notable damage before they're is able to respond. At this point, you have to commit; you take too long to follow up on this engage, and had you committed as much burst as possible, it's likely your team would have won this fight and your Ninja would not have died. This is a slow reaction on your part (nearly 7 seconds).

The typical dragoon burst is Elusive Jump, Geirskogul -> Wyrmwind Thrust -> High Jump -> Heavens' Thrust -> Nastrond, although due to how Nastrong removes both your damage taken and dealt, it's very situational when you should use it. I'm by no means a Dragoon main and can't give specific heuristics for it, but generally, you want to prioritize staying alive on Dragoon, even if it means losing some theoretical damage optimality.

[VivianInfinity]

From here on, this first engage is noted by you simply pressing buttons whenever available; you Horrid Roar two targets that are not attacking you and are pulling back, then Nastrond a relatively healthy White Mage before using Heavens' Thrust while unpressured, then swap targets to an also full-health Ninja. You then slowly walk towards the (still full health) White Mage, backflip out once you're in danger (but not far enough to get back to behind your team), and then use a Wyrmwind Thrust, the highest damage ability on your kit, into a target at melee range that is guarding with no one behind them. None of this damage is being directed in a way that can secure a kill, and even if it was, simple button order means you lost quite a bit of damage.

As a Dragoon, since nearly all of your damage is on your cooldown-oriented abilities, you need to make sure that when you hit an ability, it's getting as much value as possible; your 1-2-3 combo does basically nothing. That means securing a kill if it's available, that means hitting as many people with your multi-target Wyrmwind Thrust and Geirskogul (if reasonable), that means making sure the damage adds up onto the same target to execute when appropriate, and that (usually) means not trading your life to do it; since Dragoon's damage is so high, a 1 for 1 trade is usually not in your favor. Again, a better Dragoon player could give you more specific advice on what buttons to hit where, but the heuristic is universal; use cooldowns for specific reasons; do not just hit buttons because they're available. This is true across the board for every job but this is especially true for Dragoon; "always be casting" is basically the law for PvE but terrible advice for PvP.

All the while this is happening, from 1:33 onward, you are at half health, easily within burst range for even incidental damage. You're also taking focus fire from the enemy team; the play is to guard, and you do it too late, having eaten nearly 30k damage before you guard. The reaction time on this isn't something I can really give advice for, but it's just too slow, and it's difficult for me to feel like positioning advice is going to make a big impact when this part seems so much more egregious.

I brought this up earlier, but I want to come back to you walking forward at the White Mage. By this point, you have used every cooldown you have; there are no abilities you can hit the White Mage with that will secure this kill or even leave notable damage, and you have walked so deep into the enemy zone of control that I do not think a competent team lets you live regardless of how fast you hit guard or how well you play this escape. You are out of resources by this point, and you need to leave; as a rule for squishy dive classes, you should always have an escape plan for if an engage goes wrong, and if you do not, you should almost always wait until you do.