PvP gameplay balancing

[Conadrium]

Have you ever actually stepped foot into PvP? Positioning is meaningless when control if your character can be taken away in 5 different ways in 3 seconds. And due to hamster wheel servers purity’s immunity basically doesn’t exist.

[AnotherPerson]

Have you ever actually stepped foot into PvP? Positioning is meaningless when control if your character can be taken away in 5 different ways in 3 seconds. And due to hamster wheel servers purity’s immunity basically doesn’t exist.

Yes, and I play it well enough to understand the intricacies behind how to win consistently in Frontlines and can apply it to the games I play if I'm motivated enough to win.

I won't lie, I thought positioning was meaningless at first too until I learned how incredibly impactful it can be when I position correctly. Positioning well is also a tactical maneuver as well. Positioning itself is not a standalone ability, it's intrinsically tied to how well you can understand your opponents. You have to stop thinking about the opposing enemies as AIs and think of them as actual players. Players who are limited by what they can see and what they can do, unlike AIs who can instantly respond regardless of range. Positioning in their line of focus is a key factor to controlling the amount of damage you take (aggro) and for how long you will face it. Once you figure out blind spots and what players usually have their camera angles at based on the way they move and target, you can find places to position yourself and attack or run away. There are many ways to find an opening and create an opening, but if you charge headlong into the enemy's field of vision, you're going to get focused fired first. -- This is the biggest mistake people make in frontlines, and it shows after watching players just naturally hit the tank just because they charged in first, and never switch their target either when they become unkillable. The tank has no real aggro control against people who can use their brain. You are not locked into engaging the tank because he hit you like in PvE. People can directly ignore the tank altogether once the other enemies start charging in. However, it's this mentality that shows how positioning can matter - enemies who plan on focusing someone focuses people based on their line of sight. And I don't mean just character's line of sight, but how the player itself will narrow their line of sight when placed under pressure to focus a specific task. You can call this tunnel vision, but it happens to nearly everyone in Frontlines because not many people can consistently and continually be able to keep up with the changes in the battlefield when healing an ally or damaging an enemy. Players who play PvP more often will get better at it, but they still need to actively realize this issue to improve on it (which was why after the tomestone event, you can see a lot of players doing better at following callouts and moving faster - their awareness has improved, but it's still quite limited because they aren't specifically spending some energy to improve map awareness, they just have more mental headspace to keep track of other stuff).

From there, you extrapolate how you can use that to your advantage. Other than coordinating with your group, positioning is the biggest key factor to winning in frontlines by enabling you to continue to build up Battle High and minimizing risks. Being able to position yourself to a good spot within your allies field of vision while not being able to be targeted is what separates bad players and good players -- and directly becomes noticeable over time through the difference of who can maintain and gain Battle High.

People who play Crystalline Conflict in high level matches already do this very well at a smaller scale - through environmental barriers to cancel far range casting, breaking line of sight against ranged enemies, moving past their range, and redirecting their focus to someone else. They are so used to keeping track of multiple things at once that it is much harder for higher rank players to tunnel vision as easily in making a mistake. This is a technical skill acquired from training their awareness. However, Frontlines is much more things to keep track of and much less visible indicators. Not to mention just high rank Crystalline Conflict players, even your regular average player will struggle to keep track of everything happening at once. The skill level required is much higher than what most people are willing to spend effort on (assuming they even realize this is a thing), and this is what makes it much easier to catch people off guard because very VERY VERY few people have developed the required awareness for these matches to be able to process every single useful tidbit of information at once to use at their advantage.

Don't get me wrong, the average player can be decent enough at their job and can focus / CC an opposing enemy down. However, that's still within the realm of being tied down to a lack of vision. This is actually what allows ninjas and monks to quickly get kills in chaotic environments using their LB and then escape without much issues, whereas bad ninjas and monks would think it's a free kill and then die because they get focused by running into the enemies' line of sight. Even then, the good players doesn't need to be able to understand every single tidbit of information, they just need to gauge a rough estimate of how the surrounding players are reacting to see if they can sneak a kill.

However, in the very peak of Frontlines gameplay, this level of skill is barely scratching the tip of the iceberg, which is why Frontlines has such huge potential in its gameplay if you're willing to look for aspects you can improve on. You have incredible power to balance the scales to your advantage. The payoff is just winning [1 match] though, so it's more like.. Are you willing to put in THAT much effort to guarantee a victory? If not, you just need to do well enough that your team will be able to win as long as they are decent players, but you can always put more and more effort if you really care about winning this one match.

Or you can be like those crazy masterminds at PvP and can actually influence the game enough using their own methodology to tilt the sides in your favor and get a win. They do exist, and I had the pleasure to get matched with two in Frontlines before, but they're just very few and far in between.

In case someone else goes "Oh but you wrote too much, so I won't read" again... this is already the trimmed down version of my insights to PvP. If you don't want to read, more power to you, but please try not to give that impression of being a frog at the bottom of the well. Otherwise, you look like people who complain about Normal content being too hard because you got hit by an AoE every single time until the duty finished and your justification was that the AoE didn't show the orange indicator until you got hit each time until you died. I mean ... failing to dodge the AoE 4-5 times might be rough, but if you cover your ears and still give the same excuse the other 10 times after someone explains it to you, that's not a problem with the game mode being difficult but a problem with not willing to improve your lack of understanding when someone else points it out for you.

Honestly, we just need Purify to also block Draw-In effects, grant you the buff even if you don't dispel something (failsafe against server ticks), basically like how it used to be. We also need some CC immunities. 4sec for Stun after it fades (They can rebalance abilities to help off set this such as Ninja's low potency chain 2sec stun), 3sec Heavy/Bind and 6sec Silence.

I'm just irritated that with Purify up I'll still get dragged into DRK Salted Earth even if it has 1-2sec left on it from just dispelling a Stun.

I think that's mainly because purify works the same way as Esuna or Warden's Paean in this regard. Purify acts as a cleanse, not a knockback immunity. It works against hard CC with debuffs, but against soft CCs that push/pull, it can't really nullify it because there's no 'debuff' to nullify since it acts as a displacement. That's why we also have Arms length in PvE. Would be nice if we have it for PvP, but that's quite specialized of a focus I think.