Thread: 3.2 PvP: Feast Game Mode Discussion Thread.

Originally Posted by Zhexos

Greetings

I'm a big fan of the changes to mages and casting, love that change, makes it fun to play as a mage, and against a mage now.

If morale dont make you stronger, and even materia are inactive during matches, whats the sense of PVP gear? somehow pvp gear should be better for PVP than the PVE gear or playing pvp and making pvp points wont have any incentive...

Just make separate games, one without morale and materia effects and one with Morale and materia effect for those who want to play that way or another... with different rewards for both to incentive playing one and maybe later the other option with morale and materia active.

unless pvp materia is also made relevant I really don't see the point of making morale relevant since pvp gear is unnecessary when it's all capped and doesn't add anything.

That out of the way, how about making morale effect your respawn time? E.G 10 morale = -1 second off your respawn.

Would be interesting to get you back in the action faster and makes sense cause having a high morale you'd rally quicker.

I like the idea of morale adding more TP/MP. It is still away to add value to the sets without making that a requirement for people that pvp casually. I also agree sleep is still too long.

I posted this in a different thread. I think there will be greater visibility here for devs to check it out. Edited some things as well.

My feedback for feast with all patches up till now included.

Casting changes:

I think it's pretty clear that this is a kneejerk reaction to new players having no real experience/knowhow of how to get casts of in some very fast paced matches. I think the general idea of helping out new players is right, but the application is way off. As mentioned, 15% of a player's HP is a gigantic number, especially when it scales along with vitality accessories. Let me put it this way: as a MNK at Ilvl 209, I wasn't able to hit a training dummy for over 2k (the approximate threshold for a caster in full VIT stat and VIT accessories) unless I hit a good forbidden chakra or tornado kick. When you sync down to 150 then that now becomes an impossibility.

I understand it gives a chance for those newer players to learn, but now any player who is any good who stacks VIT gear really changes the complexion of the game completely. It is not fun chasing a healer down who looks off any attacks you do as they CC you into oblivion, though that sometimes is part of the game. But it is really not fun having virtually every match time out because healers and casters are often times nigh-invincible tanks.

I like the bracket idea proposed by petite in the other thread. Lowering caster changes down to 10% HP might help but even then that might be too much. One idea that I think has merit is to allow only for crits to interrupt (though if that were to happen, mnk would need to be nerfed a little bit).


JOBS:

MCH/BRD. I think the GB/WM changes were excellent. I think balance-wise MCH seems stronger than BRD because it has more CC. I think brd got a nice buff with farshot but to make it really on par with mch/blm, wanderer's paean CD should be cut down to 30 seconds. Maybe even 25. The job pretty much loses all the utility of its songs and it doesn't have a whole lot of strengths once its initial burst is gone. At the very least mch a lot of CC to contribute when their burst is over. Changing paean to a lower CD would give the job some much needed balance with MCH will giving it more of a unique role.

SMN: Honestly I saw the SMN nerfs as just caving in to inexperienced players who really didn't understand how to combat SMN. Just look at a recent thread. It's yet ANOTHER player saying SMN's are overpowered yet pretty much most people agree it's been cut down to a very large degree.

Newer players just don't see all the nuances of the game yet. Take it from me as someone who's played the job extensively: one good healer can put your gameplan to rest and make you a jumping ruin 2 machine. When I saw the nerfs I thought "ok, maybe I can handle painflare nerfed. Maybe deathflare." But then when I saw the nerfs to dot duration, and then tri-bind being cut in half, that was just too much. The changes really neuter the job and make it so you are mostly hardcasting dots over and over and not much else once your aetherflow is used.

So I think if you HAVE to nerf it, there are some good ideas out there Start with tri-disaster. Make it so those dots are lower durations, but make hard cast dots the normal duration. There is a balance in that when 3 dots are up, they are certainly more threatening, but if you have to take 9 seconds to get them all down, it means you're pretty stationary/vulnerable to interrupt, and during those 9 seconds locked out of doing anything else that's remotely useful.

One other thing. The smn nerfs appeared to be predicated almost entirely on damage output. But if there's one thing that any experienced player knows, the damage numbers don't exactly tell the whole story of the match, and what actually won or lost the match for you. I'll get back to that at a later point though.

MNK: My issue is that mnk got a completely unnecessary buff in the somersault potency buff/cd reduction and it's already very strong in PVP. Now the dev team is just handing good mnks carte blanche to run everyone over. If they felt the need to buff it, the potency buff by itself would have been fine. Or maybe adding more potency to axe kick. Anything else really, but the CD reduction on SS is just too much.

The issue with this is it's indicative of a very strong theme that the devs keep running out: average or casual players don't quite get the ins and outs of the jobs, or they complain instead of spending some diligence in becoming better. As a result, enough of these voices speak up and a job is either gets a ridiculously strong buff (MNK) or a ridiculously strong nerf (SMN). And in the end the same players don't really learn anything about how they are supposed to get better.

DRK: DRK's recent changes really just shows a gigantic disparity in what the devs think goes in in arena play vs what actually happens and what is actually useful. I'll skip the breakdown of what strengths and roles PLD/WAR get to have, but the short of it is this:

- DRK doesn't have as good a burst as WAR, and burst is the absolute KING win condition in this mode.
- DRK has almost no way to protect their teammates from burst the way PLD does.
- DRK has very little CC.
- DRK has underwhelming defensive abilities that make it more susceptible if they are designated as the medal carrier.
- DRK as a result is just a weak melee DPS that contributes almost nothing to a fight, and it really has no defining role in PVP.

So in 3.25, the dev team basically just gave DRK some higher potencies on their abilities. But that did absolutely nothing to address the issues above. And really the buffs to DRK are symptomatic of a greater issue: Not everything in feast is about pure damage, but the devs seem to think so. You can't just look at aggregate data damage because there are so many different variables and dynamics in each fight that blanket solutions won't actually create balance the way you might want it to.

You know what WOULD help DRK? Things that have nothing to do with pure potency adjustments. Let certain DRK attacks have CC's attached to them. Maybe add a 5 second heavy effect added to plunge. Let syphon strike steal MP from the player you hit. Or let souleater steal a player's attributes (obviously with a cap on them). Let blood weapon steal TP. Something like that.

Or make DRK the tank that fights off CC a lot easier than PLD or WAR can. Change plunge to break out of bind or sleeps. Make it so dark mind can do the same thing, or prevent bind/sleep/heavy/stun the way fetter ward can.

These ideas might not necessarily be good or bad but really it's just the idea that there needs to be something out of the box that gives DRK a defined role, which it currently does not have, and something to make it unique from WAR and PLD. If the dev team wants to look at actual MEANINGFUL data I would highly suggest first looking at the winrates of each job as opposed to blanket data like damage, which again, reveals not nearly enough about a job's intricacies that'd you want to understand for balance.

Other things:

1. MM should not exist in solo queue, or if it does it needs to be dampened.

2. Making new players wet their feet in something like ten 8v8 matches first before doing 4v4 would be an absolute godsend. It is borderline impossible to win a match when the first thing your healer says is "hi this is my first time." One minute behind the gate is not even close to enough time to help a new player out. They need to be learning and it is much easier for them to figure things out in an 8v8 match before they actually try the 4v4 match which is far more unforgiving and a much faster game.

3. A short, mandatory tutorial would be pretty nice to show players what all their pvp skills do.

4. This lore match throwing is absurd. I enjoy playing pvp, especially on teams. But today I played about 10 matches and EVERY single one was just a tome throw match. I literally didn't see one team that actually tried, and now I see it as pointless. I'm sure I'm not the only one with a team that feels this way, and I am pretty sure more and more of the legitimate teams will do what I'm doing: withdrawing entirely from a mode that is a waste of time.



Final thoughts:

I want PVP to succeed in this game. I really do. But I don't get the feeling that we are on the right track just yet. I hope the dev team can start taking a deeper look into the feedback from players who have extensive PVP experience in ffxiv, and appreciate that feedback more. I myself have played thousands of matches of PVP in FFXIV. And while I don't necessarily think my opinions are always right or wrong, I feel COMPLETELY ignored by the devs. And I feel like many other players who have substantially more experience than I do, with tons of great feedback and suggestions, are also equally ignored. Please don't do this. We aren't suggesting changes so we can have the most overpowered jobs or be the most overpowered players. We want the game to be healthy and to have a healthy competitive balance. We want the game to survive.

Conversely, I think it's pretty clear that the team listens only to the least experienced players who don't have nearly the same game experience to really see what is happening, and most adjustments are made based on incorrect info, judgments, and faulty premises. If the dev team continues to make changes based on what the newer end of the player spectrum wants vs what the most experienced end wants, the game's balance will be completely out of line for as long as people play it. If we want balance and feedback to work this needs to change.

Just remove it entirely. Players shouldn't be stronger just because they farmed for a bunch of moral PvP gear.

I'm also heavily in favor of either making PVP materia applicable in all types of pvp content (preferred) or removing it entirely. Likewise with morale, though I feel the latter could have interesting ramifications in future patches as the game becomes more expansive, and it'd be something you'd choose to re-add later if it was removed now.

PvP gear needs to be more than glamour. While I understand that new players shouldn't be at a disadvantage, players who dedicate themselves to pvp - much like pve - would like to see the reeards they get provide incremental improvements to their character.

In order to make minimalist changes to morale while still implementing it, I also suggest having it increase tp/mp, or increase the speed at which the Adrenaline bar fills.