Is PVP just luck?

[Kelayda]

I took a break from PVP, and came back to playing a few days ago. Accepting that I was just gonna lose a lot, and focused on staying alive has helped. My win/lose ratio is still abysmal, but I am seeing that there is some skill to the madness of PVP.

I still wish the mode had some kind of replay feature, or a better battle log to parse what's happening. A lot of the frustration for me comes from not knowing what's going on. Even something simple, like showing what skill killed you, rather than just the class, would help. (I can't tell you how long it took me to realize that Machinists have a one shot LB with an ungodly range).

[Mawlzy]

I took a break from PVP, and came back to playing a few days ago. Accepting that I was just gonna lose a lot, and focused on staying alive has helped. My win/lose ratio is still abysmal, but I am seeing that there is some skill to the madness of PVP.

I still wish the mode had some kind of replay feature, or a better battle log to parse what's happening. A lot of the frustration for me comes from not knowing what's going on. Even something simple, like showing what skill killed you, rather than just the class, would help. (I can't tell you how long it took me to realize that Machinists have a one shot LB with an ungodly range).

A time-consuming approach is to experiment with all jobs so you get a stronger understanding of how to defend against them and exploit their weaknesses.

[Valence]

I took a break from PVP, and came back to playing a few days ago. Accepting that I was just gonna lose a lot, and focused on staying alive has helped. My win/lose ratio is still abysmal, but I am seeing that there is some skill to the madness of PVP.

I still wish the mode had some kind of replay feature, or a better battle log to parse what's happening. A lot of the frustration for me comes from not knowing what's going on. Even something simple, like showing what skill killed you, rather than just the class, would help. (I can't tell you how long it took me to realize that Machinists have a one shot LB with an ungodly range).

Recording your games locally can already help to look them over calmly after.

What you do also can look for in the scoreboard at the end is multiple factors:

- Damage dealt isn't the alpha and omega. If you get constantly targeted and bullied, especially if you're melee or the single melee and only playing on point and pushing, it means you're gonna defend a lot more than actually attacking and your damage will be lower, and you'll soak a lot of damage that won't go onto your team mates. The good metric for this is how many times you died comparatively to the damage you ate and dealt.
- Damage dealt will depend on the job. Top damage dealers are usually heavy AoE padders and pressurers like SMN, DRG or MCH. If you know an average of what can be expected of your job (comparatively to other jobs) it can help inform a little. Obviously the longer the game the higher the damage so it's more important to see where you end up compared to others. SCH is a big exception in relation to damage because the way the job works.
- Related to just above, a losing team tends to align less damage than the winning one, which indicates that the winner has been dominating in engagements and pushed the other one on the defensive, guarding, retreating, and staggering respawn so that their damage just peters out. Sometimes a losing team can show as much damage as the winner, and the amount of deaths can be extremely low on the winner side, which usually means that one team was unable to breach through the other's defenses in spite of similar damage output and pressure. This can be due to a lack of focus burst compared to the other, and/or one has stupid strong defensive jobs like AST etc.
- Time on crystal can be important especially when you were on the defensive side all the time and lost. If someone has no crystal presence, they probably griefed you if you were defending. For the winner, it doesn't mean much since ranged jobs maybe just didn't need to get on point to push much.
- HP restored is secondary but can give you an idea how well you performed as a support (heal/tank), especially heal if your damage output is also high as well, then you're goated.
- The most important part is your total amount of kills and assists. It doesn't matter whether you killed or assisted. What matters is the total of both combined, and then compared to the total kills done by your team. If everyone in your team has a total close enough to the team kills, and yours is lower, then you're probably griefing and not participating in bursts or main action when it matters. If everyone has a total twice lower than the team kills, that tends to be a clear indicator that everybody is running around the map like monkeys doing small fights that lead to nowhere.