CC End of Season 18 - List of pvp grievances and long running issues

[Valence]

Since the end of the season is near, I just wanted to list all of either what the community seems to perceive as seriously problematic points, or what I personally do see as toxic for the mode. Some decisions are especially puzzling. I do not expect much in terms of adjustments but here goes nothing, in no specific order.

• Since the hit registration changes the game has felt like playing underwater. We grew used to it, but that's like saying you grow used to playing at 2 FPS. Removing non intuitive snapshots makes sense, but why is WoW able to do it well and not XIV?
  
• Crowd control is obnoxious and has always been. While it's a good and necessary part of the game, it's also going absolute rampant and unchecked.
  
• The Purify changes into MP consumption can make sense in a vacuum until one understand that they are now intimately tied to MP resource and therefore mean inflicting damage. This has obviously not been taken into consideration when it comes to absolutely bloated jobs. Not a single job without cc performs well in the current ecosystem (with the exception of SCH that is a special kind of evil).
  
• Defensive buttons still feel like utter garbage to use because they have crazy delays or just don't want to activate when pressed - stuns are more reactive and seem to have priority over them as well. Purify is a special kind of evil that never wants to trigger, but Guard isn't much better.
  
• Field potions randomly decide who gets it without any logic behind. Same for chocobo feathers on C9, Orbs on Volcano, or Coins on Castletown. They also do not always trigger when dashing over them because the server is just too incompetent for detecting this half the time. This turns those field items into gamba "will I get it or not". Also I'm sorry but dying with your corpse clearly over the potion without the potion activating feels like a middlefinger from the game every time.
  
• The game feels absolutely shit to play over 50ms ping. You can't defend properly due to the increased delays, you think you're running ahead of someone but you aren't, you think someone is in range of your AoE but they aren't, and you get refunded abilities all the time because the server tells you "nope" after a couple of seconds. Even at low ping if you're literally sitting in Yoshida's office with negative ping, servers on a whim sometimes seem to take a malignant pleasure into sending you into crooked instances where everything microfreezes every 5s.
  
• Some jobs are completely broken: PCT is bloated and can do literally everything better than any other dps and at 25y without being easy to punish, SCH is completely batshit with almost 2 LBs worth of toolkit and also guard breaks at will, and healing debuff combo cancer with DRK. AST is still as obnoxious as ever as well (why the fuck can that job teleport???).
  
• Healers and supports are busted, going against those comps without one feels like pulling teeth and nothing dies while your team gets whittled down one by one.
  
• More additions have appeared into most jobs toolkits with 7.1 which allows them not to resort spamming the filler as much as before, but this also results in unending bursts of damage, meanwhile you choose to nerf Guard duration and add Guard breaks to the game. Stalling is a myth in 7.1+.
  
• There is a handful of jobs that you just wouldn't even want to pick because another does the job way better (why take MCH when you can take PCT, why take RDM when you can take PCT, why take VPR when you can take MNK, etc).
  
• Matchmaking just sucks overall. Some matchups from the bottomless pits of hell should be illegal (full red comp vs DRK/SCH + dps jobs) yet they happen regularly.
  
• SE balance changes are perceived more and more as a joke, especially when the justification provided is a two liner saying "X job's performance is surprisingly low, therefore we buffed their filler combo by 1k potency, with this we hope to improve their playability". Meanwhile you have jobs like DRK that yo yo back and forth between the exact same buffs and debuffs to the same abilities - what kind of message does it send beyond cluelessness?
  
• Lukewarm adjustments and changes at patches are literally part of the reason why play rates are collapsing to nothingness on NA and EU DC (even though other issues pile on top of it).
  
• Some LB designs still feel cheap to play against and are hated universally by new players, like OHKOs or Meteodrive "I guess I die".
  
• Win traders are temporary banned but come back the following seasons like nothing happened (why should they care about being stripped of all their achievements?). Even if you permaban them like at least one example in current season, they come back with another account and brag about crapping on games because they got mad for the ban.
  
• The intro movie + preparation for every game of CC literally takes over a minute and the time lost to this is unreal (imagine playing 500+ games in a season, that's right, you wasted 8 hours of your life watching this stupid intro and prepping for the game). And the end scoreboard is obnoxious and prevents you to leave the game because it comes over everything. Just leaving a game takes at least 3 buttons + confirmation prompts.
  
• Having to travel to other DCs just to be able to play ranked feels miserable.
  
• Have we talked how SCH is absolute cancer already?

Feel free to add yours, or throw tomatoes.

Edit, added more grievance points:

• The addition of Guard breaks into the game is almost universally hated as far as I can tell. There is already piercing abilities that have been there since the start of 6.1, and this combined with lowering the duration of Guard is going overboard because it removes a lot of tempo when defending. The ability to cut down that tempo to nothingness from the two specific jobs that got an ability to Guard break is extremely strong, especially since this has always been gated behind Limit Break power level (RPR, MNK, DNC...).
• Chain Stratagem is breaking the game: 25y range OGCD ability that can be pressed with a single button anytime a valuable burst target Guards up. Really?
• Shield Bash is okay because it's on the GCD and melee range (but AoE), which means it's noticeably harder to react immediately to a Guard with it especially if the PLD isn't close by or if their GCD is already spinning. The real problem is that Guard breaks in conjunction with Guard reduction to 4s was specifically made to counter PLD stall strategies with cover, and the solution is to give a counter to this to... the same job? You can't be serious with this. PLD's cover can be problematic, so we gave tools to PLD to counter itself?
• All of this compounds into what people call slop compositions, which means that in conjunction with the aforementioned heals down from SCH (again, the same job that stacks everything and around which everything is built) and DRK, you'll end up with a burst target that can only spamm recuperate for half what it's supposed to heal after its Guard broke down by Chain Strat or Shield Bash. The target is dead as fuck, there is no recovering from this. No tempo, nothing. You're dead, period.
• This also feeds into a positive loop that helps the exact same jobs from recovering from this, because a PLD or an AST can help said target while other comps are doomed to lose engagements and be put in a defensive position because 4v5 after the kill while the other side is the only one to have the tools against this. Now you can imagine the absolute cancer the game turns into when two teams of tanks/healers centered around SCH (with perhaps a DPS nuker to keep a semblance of alpha strike dps) meet up. I don't personally involve into tournaments or LPs/scrims, but if this keeps going on in settings where people can choose their full comps in organized plays, your next CCRC is going to be resident sleepers to watch with the same teams full of tanks and healers on both sides.

Added even more!

• There is a non negligible part of the community that seems to think that the devs don't play their own game at a level sufficient enough. This is okay, it happens on every multiplayer game, where players will eventually completely beat the devs in terms of skill levels. I've worked in a game company that had that issue too, and the solution is usually to talk to players, survey what their feedback is, and actually involve top players into discussions where they can explain what's wrong on their end. Hell, even lower brackets, their complaints can also be legitimate too because balance is different and also matters at their level.
• Stop exclusively relying on winrates and data charts, this only makes your adjustment patches look like they were cooked by AI. There is more to it than number adjustments.
• Patches are way too lukewarm. What we're getting at major patches every 4 months should be what we should be getting every month at minimum. Major patches should try and shake up the formula more, and correct things that are completely unacceptable or make zero sense in the game right now, beyond number adjustments. Else this is how we keep jobs that are bottom of the barrel and struggling because adjustments are just adding potency instead of fixing what's broken and non functional.

[SpritePR]

For the end scoreboard thing you can leave the match as soon as defeat or victory shows up. Saves a few seconds. Mostly agree PVP needs help.

[jesseleewelch]

I think we can simplify this list of grievances and long running issues by simply saying that the biggest problem with pvp is that it exists. Sure, people play pvp for xp or series xp or mogtomes or achievements... But when was the last time you heard someone rave about how much fun frontlines is? The vast majority of players don't enjoy it, they just play it for the carrot at the end of the stick.

[Valence]

If everybody hated it you wouldn't have dedicated discord, and even less so of the infamous premades in FL. When it comes to CC it pops at most times for casual, although it's hard to ascertain how many in there play it just for series and how many for enjoyment, although there are names you see consistently in there.

And if we're speaking outside of NA/EU, even ranked instapops 24/24 on JP so you can imagine that a lot of them actually play the pvp modes.

[SpritePR]

I think we can simplify this list of grievances and long running issues by simply saying that the biggest problem with pvp is that it exists. Sure, people play pvp for xp or series xp or mogtomes or achievements... But when was the last time you heard someone rave about how much fun frontlines is? The vast majority of players don't enjoy it, they just play it for the carrot at the end of the stick.

The game modes are fun. Having to walk through mud with all the small grievances is not. They can fix things instead of just saying OH WELL IT IS WHAT IT IS.

[Loggos]

Feel free to mock me but I'm paying my sub primarily to play CC. I didn't even do the patches' story or PvE content for almost a year because I'd rather play PvP. CC has a lot of potential which is why the devs' treatment of it is so egregious. You know what could be if they just cared properly but instead you are slapped in the face repeatedly by the reality of their less than half-hearted approach.

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Regarding the original post:

Very hard yes esp. to the points addressing ping and input delay. The joy of losing critical engagements or even games because your LB/guard/purify/heal didn't go off after pressing it 5 times is the best "how to instantly invalidate the success of your anger management therapy" example there is. It completely degrades what otherwise could be a genuinely fun game mode with near endless intrinsic replayability value.

I know the community is divided on this but I'd like them to reverse the purify changes (not just the MP costs, please also be more generous with its duration so classes can pre-purify again).

---

This is not directed at OP but rather my plea to the devs or something:

If you address pictomancer's current state in the meta please do so without messing up its kit. I understand pct is very oppressive right now but as somebody who's mained it since release and loved its playstyle even when it was considered bad I'd be incredibly disappointed if you "optimise" the fun out of it (fun: motif (de)buff cycling, pairing comets with different motif (de)buffs, stance dance, smudge, non-on-demand CC you have to "work" for etc.).
Since pct's sudden transformation into a disproportionaly dominating force might be an unintended result of introducing mp costs for purify (because pct's kits happens to synergise very well with those changes) I'd prefer if the general purify changes were addressed first.* Then you can see how much these changes affect pct's power level and whether it needs further adjustments.
I do like how CC is incorporated into pct's kit. I just don't like how it interacts/disproportionally benefits from purify's mp costs.

*Let me cope, ok? It's christmas time. I know the chances of them reverting the changes are probably non-existent but reality can come back to me after the 25th.

[Aravell]

Agreed with ping being a problem, hit registration still being annoying on certain skills and team balancing during matchmaking being awful.

But I have to ask, are PCT and SCH really big problems on EU? From all my matches on JP, I rarely see PCT and still mostly see RDM, and if I do see a PCT, they're not usually very effective (maybe I've only seen bad ones, because I rarely see them). SCH is an amplifier, so you'd need a halfway decent team (which isn't even a guarantee at crystal tier) as amplifying zero is still zero, I mostly see SGE being used more for the zoning potential of their LB.

That said, I don't think facing off against 1 tank+1 healer+3 DPS teams as a 5 DPS team is really that hopeless, in my experience it mostly comes down to whether or not your 5 DPS jobs have any CC to use and whether your team knows how to focus a target, although it does remain an annoying match-up still.

[Valence]

I see PCT very regularly on EU as well as JP (and I've played a lot of JP recently). Perhaps close in popularity to BRD, which also has absolutely obnoxious tools btw (Bind on 10s recast, really?).

SCH is literally everywhere, the most picked job alongside with DRK, at all ranks past platinum. JP, EU, everywhere. As soon as you reach Omega+ you end up with meta jobs all the time, which always involves a SCH on both sides, potentially a DRK as well. AST is a good contender as well. SCH being an amplifier isn't a problem because teams past diamond are perfectly able to be amplified and often play other meta picks anyway. I feel like griefing every time I show up with my DNC there.

[SpritePR]

I don't know if PCT is broken or not but its definitely very good. I climbed to crystal on two characters on that job specifically and its extremely strong and versatile (please don't nerf it too much).

On another note here's a great post on reddit about feedback for PvP if people want to chime in and also to make it more visible here for the devs: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...f_balance_and/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D67lXxC8cm4 (associated video)

[Loggos]

Thank you for the links! I just finished watching. It's a really good video. I hope it'll reach the right ears.

And yeah, I do hope whatever changes they make to pct keep its identity and viability in place without "overshooting" in the other direction.