Feedback: The Feast Preseason - 150 Matches played.

[Renault]

Hi. So after spending just about all day playing The Feast, I've developed some opinions, thoughts and concerns that I feel might be worth it to share. To give a brief background of myself for credibility: I've been playing this game for 2 years, and have been PVPing frequently for like 4-5 months, mainly in "The Fold". I have tens of thousands of hours logged on League of Legends, having achieved Gold/Platinum in all seasons since the first. I have also been Duelist in 3 WoW PVP seasons (I suck too much to get Gladiator). Hopefully this gives you some invite on where I'm coming from, and why I'm voicing these opinions.


First, I'll say what I like about The Feast:

- The Overall map is "ok". The "base" area is a little too turtle-ish and is a huge trap for inexperienced PUG teams to rush in there, but overall I say it's a good map.
- The buffs and debuffs are not nearly as game breaking as they seemed on paper. They make for interesting strategies.
- The game is fast-paced enough to not get too bland, as was a problem in "The Fold." With the Culling, natural higher damage at 60, and the dps buffs, matches are often short and (almost) painless.

Now, I'll get into the topics I wish to discuss one by one:

1) Matchmaking obviously isn't implemented yet. Makes for an unfun climb
2) Teased end of season rewards are lackluster and not widely available
3) End of season rewards only going to Solo Queue
4) Class Balancing

Starting with 1) Matchmaking:

I'm nearing my Silver rank promotional series with a 61.6% win rate. However, for some reason I am often getting paired with people that are unranked (Not bronze), and even some that are getting their achievements for their first match, or first win. It is disheartening that there is more on the line for me, then them, as a loss could mean the loss of my promotional series, while they will not even lose points. I assume the matchmaking by tier just hasn't been implemented yet, but I feel it should be BEFORE the season to test out how it works. Because as we know, the game is spotting when it comes to their matchmaking technologies.

2) End of Season Rewards:

This is a big one. The end of season rewards are FAR too exclusive for anyone other than a very select group of people to become invested in it. For those that don't know, the "Diamond rewards" are rewards to the top 100 players on a data center, while the top 10 get special rewards and the top player gets an extra reward on top of that. So here's the problem. Right now, it seems that the only way to secure your spot at the top is to play...A TON. We are talking old school, Vanilla WoW, "Hey Jimmy can you log into my account and grind some PVP because I need to sleep", kind of playtime. My suggestion would be to make the first tier reward for all players of a certain rating number, and tier them upwards as such. Example:

Tier 3 rewards: Diamond rank and 5000 points
Tier 2 rewards: Diamond rank and 6000 points
Tier 1 rewards: Diamond rank and 7000 points

The feat is still there, but it is also available to any player willing to put in the effort it takes to climb that high.

To build off of this, I feel there is little incentive to grind for the less skilled or otherwise dedicated PVPers. The Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze tier rewards seem absolutely lackluster. Accessories? I suppose I need to see them first to make judgement, but accessories are generally the least looked at pieces in the game, and as it's the only reward, I personally cannot see myself grinding to those ranks just for a ring or bracelet.

My suggestion: Add seasonal titles. Titles you get that are wiped at the end of each succeeding season. So for example, at the end of Season 1, players are awarded with a title such as:

" The Bronze Wolf"
"The Silver Wolf"
-----
"The Diamond Wolf"

Something to that effect. These titles would then RESET at the end of Season 2, when new titles would be given out. Alternatively, if permanent titles are more desired, you could do something like:

"First Bronze Wolf" -- (Season 1 title example)
"Second Bronze Wolf" -- (Season 2 title example)

Obviously these names are not that great, but it's the general idea I want to get across. It gives players a sort of banner of achievement that they can show off and say to their friends, "Hey, look at how good I am at PVP!" As opposed to..."Hey, see my bracelet? Oh, you don't? My gloves are in the way? Well examine me and hover over my bracelet and see what I have it glamoured to. Pretty cool, right?"

3) End of Season Rewards Being Solo Queue Only

There's a whole other thread about this so I won't spend too much time, but I really cannot begin to understand the reasoning for this. The only -possible- excuse I can come up with is that it's meant to block win traders from grinding to the top. It's a poor excuse, to put it bluntly. This game mode is based around coordinating strategy and tactics with your group members to defeat the opposing team, so why, I ask, is the reward structure centered around a mode where you are put up against and with a bunch of strangers? That's not how team-based PVP should work. It should be ranked..Oh, you know, with a premade team setting in mind. Imagine if the League of Legends world championship was just a game made up of random Challenger players? That's not really competition.

My suggestion is obvious and short: Make the same rewards for team play as they are for solo queue. Same rewards, same criteria to be met (In the example I gave above, or something else, as the current rewards structure is bad.)

4) Class Balancing

I don't want to talk about what classes are strong or weak, but rather I want to warn about what I assume will come before preseason ends.

Please do not nerf Classes/Jobs to accomodate the lowest common denominator.

Classes are not too bad right now. While some are easily argued to be stronger and therefore better, after playing today I feel like all jobs have their niche, and many jobs counter others.

EDIT: I've since changed my opinion after playing some more games. Please see point 6 of the post for class balancing opinions.

Thanks for making it this far to read my feedback. I hope some of these things can at least be looked at or acknowledged by the Dev team (Particularly concerning the rewards).

TLR: Feast is great, rewards from season are too exclusive and the lower tier rewards suck, don't nerf classes because bads, fix matchmaking.


EDIT 1: 300 Games played. Silver Ranking Solo Queue

5) Promotional Series:

So I want to add on some more feedback specifically regarding the Promotional Series between each tier. For those that don't know, when you hit max rank in your tier, you then enter a promotional series which consists of 5 games, 3 of which you must win in order to advance. If you lose your promotional series you are set down to an amount of points where you'd need to win 3 in a row to advance to the series once again. EX: If I am bronze going for silver and lose, I will be set back down to 945/1000 points.

I'm not a big fan of this feature at all for many reasons. Having played ranked League of Legends for quite some time, I know the toxicity it breeds and the stress it causes. You are put into a match that is, for the other three players on your team, just any old regular match. For you, however, it is the decisive match between passing or failing your series. In Solo Queue, where team makeups and strategies and skill levels are volatile, it's just not a great system. You often get stuck in matches where you are left feeling hopeless, because no matter how hard you try to carry the team and move up to the next ranking, someone breaks your CC, or a particularly hotheaded player doesn't follow the predetermined strategy.

My suggested changes are one of two. The more unlikely one would be to remove the promotional series entirely from Solo queue, while keeping it in team play, where the environment is naturally more consistent and controlled. The second would be to have a "Failsafe" to your series. To describe my idea:

You enter your series for Silver tier with 1000/1000 points. You need to win 3/5 games. Instead of being booted out of the series and have to climb once again in the case of a loss, the counter would just reset to 0/5 games played and you'd have to try again. HOWEVER, your point would continue to go down with each loss. So let's say for example we lose our first series and the counter resets. Well, now we are still in the series but only have 925 points. So let's say in this example we then go into that second try at the series with 3 wins and 1 loss, at 25 points per win and 25 per loss, we'd enter Silver tier with 975 points. So, you'd then be 975/1500 towards Gold tier. There may be complications with this idea that I'm not forseeing, so I'd like to hear everyone else's thoughts on a system like this.

6) Class Balancing Changes:

Here are some classes I'd like to see changed:

- Summoner: Summoners are far too powerful right now. I think the only adjustment that needs to be made is to their high burst potential. They either need potency reductions in pvp, or some of their abilities need to have cast times. There are some "counters" to summoner but really all they do is delay the inevitable burst, and abilities like Retrogradation, One Ilm Punch, Glory Slash, and Wither do not reliably take off the aetherflow in time. A skilled, or even average SMN will blow their stacks before a monk has the chance to take them off. You can argue that the other ranged jobs bring more utility, but honest the damage to utility difference is far in favor of the summoner.

- Black Mage: Black mage has an extremely strange niche in PVP, and in solo queue, having a BLM on your team is an almost guaranteed loss. Their damage potential is absolute garbage, probably around 60-80k average over a 10 minute match while BRD/MCH can do in the 200k range with SMN often 300k+. They either need more/better tools to fulfill their "control mage" niche in PVP or they need more abilities to allow them to do damage. I've not put TOO much thought into suggested changes, as I don't play one personally, but I'd toy with the idea of giving them something like Fetter Ward, where they'd have a certain window of time where they are immune to CC and interrupts to their casting. This would allow them to turret somewhere and put out great burst for a set period of time.

- Dark Knight: Dark Knights are clearly the weakest of the tanks, with no real purpose. They don't do much damage, don't have a healing reduction or on-command damage reduction like warrior, and they don't have the control or defensive utility of the paladin. Their PVP abilities are very lackluster and other than Delirium their kit doesn't do much to help their team. My proposed change would be to adjust their two unique PVP abilities, Tar Pit and Carnal Chill. Right now, Tar Pit is not even noticeable. Not once have I said "Oh god, I just got hit by tar pit!" I'd like to see it be more of a force. Add a 20% slow effect to the 40% heavy, and make the damage absorbed turn into a shield rather than a heal, and extend it to nearby allies. This would give the spell utility in both disabling the enemy team and defending your own. It also stays true to the class fantasy. Carnal chill I believe should be reworked and buffed slightly. Instead of just effecting damage, it should also reduce healing received. That way, it is essentially a long-CD pair of both Storm's Eye and Storm's Path, used in an AOE.

- Scholar: I've not much to say about Scholar because I'm not feeding into the hype of it being in a place of uselessness like much of the PVP community says. I think the job is just much more difficult to play effectively than WHM or AST. I believe with proper fairy management and smartly protecting their aetherflow stacks (keeping protect/SS/Galvanize on themselves to give more fodder to one ilm punch) they can be quite a force. One thing I can say however is that their PVP ability is absolute trash compared to AST and WHM. Retrogradation is an amazing offensive and defensive tool that has won me many games (Removing GL3, Berserk, Aetherflow and even Attunement.) and Sacred Prism, in my opinion, is probably the most powerful healing ability in the entire game. Scholars get...Aura Blast. An AOE knockback on a massive 2 min cooldown. My suggestion would be to rework Aura Blast to also bind all those knocked back, like an AOE Fluid Aura, and also give the Scholar 3 Aetherflow stacks. I'm really interested to hear a Scholar's opinion on this, or rather their opinions on what they'd like to see changed.

- Monk: In my opinion, and this may be unpopular, I think One-Ilm Punch is too strong. My (perhaps dangerous) suggested change is to make it a 30 second OGCD. This way it would not be a direct nerf, but rather a slight modification. However, I'd like to still see it be spammable during periods of perfect balance, where I think it is fine. My problem with the ability stems from the fact that it is a potentially super-powerful effect at the expense of very little potency. It can remove huge CDs that ruin other jobs at more or less no cost. I like that they have this tool in their kit, but I do think it should be made more strategic than just a spammable thing.

Edit 2: 3/15 - 450 matches played

7) Matchmaking

I wanted to touch on matchmaking again, as we got the confirmation on how it works...

You are matched with a team with a median of points. Meaning the higher your rating is, the lower the rating will be of your teammates.

This system is A-W-F-U-L. How can you possibly expect this to work? If I am a good player, playing a COMPETITIVE game format, why would I want to be matched with people that are less experienced? Please match me with people of similar ranking. Again, I'll repeat myself. I do not care if I have to wait a short while if it's with people that are good. For reference, I was hovering around 80-90% win rate from my unranked rating all the way through bronze. However, as soon as I hit Silver, I hit a brick wall. My team started getting harder and harder to carry. Now, I am having to look into a job that can carry harder since healer cannot end games, only prolong them.

[PotatoTree]

1 per datacenter? Jeebus these seasons better be like a week long or something if that's the case. I know we want to be competitive and have meaningful rewards, but 1/10/100 seems very low, and it may get worse as queue times rise due to matchmaking/people losing interest, so it'll be more frustrating to climb in diamond.

10/25/50 per server sounds better imo. The current prizes would work if they were cash prizes/physical rewards or something, not glamours/housing items. Also a prize system like this would work better as a solo type game with little rng, like starcraft, not one where you are paired with 3 randoms.

[NessaWyvern]

I totally agree with everything posted by the OP.

[Garanfsh]

the lol and wow comparison was great ,
i still follow the na and eu lcs and some lck and i found that riot doesnt make champion changes based on the majority of their player-base who are in bronze/silver/gold ...
they almost always make changes for those pro teams and they consider the way it impacts them ...


the "omg smn and ast are so op" argument is like them bronze lol players always banning katarina and nasus coz they dont know how to counter them or how to deal with them and they consider them super op,
while in high dia/master/challenger you dont seem to see these champions at all ...
if you wanna make class changes wait a bit and then take a look at high-tier matches to decide ...


and regarding the prizes ,
i totally agree that light parties should have their own prizes ...
but i think solo-q should be always the main focus ...

[Stormrider]

The one thing about class balance and countering. Since it is solo que and 4 man for rank the classes will probably need to be nerfed. You have to expect the worst possible combinations from randoms at least in the first few tiers. As the quality of players increase the gap will shorten but how will you deal with the bottom of the ranking pyramid. The game is not balanced around the top of the pyramid but closer to the bottom generally (ilvl150 really).

I actually wonder if this is why no rank/reward for premades. Can you not see it now most of the top 100 teams TANK, MNK, SMN, and AST. They might not want to get into that ugly look. I vaguely remember during Burning Crusade where every arena team had a druid and they nerfed the living lights out of them which also included PvE nerfs.

We may just see nerfs based on too many players playing one class. What if every top healer is AST? Not that i expect that. We aren't really attached to a class we can just change allowing a certain class to be more prevalent. So they can have more then one reason/cause to nerf a class.

[Kyani]

One balance thing i'd really like to see:

SCH (and SMN?) need some mechanism to get their pet back into action upon respawn. Scholar is barely functional without the pet; it's a huge strike against the class that it takes 8+ seconds longer to get back into action.

[Bloodb]

I like everything said in the first post. I can't believe the reward strucker is data center, and not even all diamond players. top 100 - 10- 1

[Bloodb]

BTW Renault, you said you got paired with bronze and no ranked players.

How do you tell if someone is bronze/silver/no rank?

[Marxam]

2) End of Season Rewards:

This is a big one. The end of season rewards are FAR too exclusive for anyone other than a very select group of people to become invested in it. For those that don't know, the "Diamond rewards" are rewards to the top 100 players on a data center, while the top 10 get special rewards and the top player gets an extra reward on top of that. So here's the problem. Right now, it seems that the only way to secure your spot at the top is to play...A TON. We are talking old school, Vanilla WoW, "Hey Jimmy can you log into my account and grind some PVP because I need to sleep", kind of playtime. My suggestion would be to make the first tier reward for all players of a certain rating number, and tier them upwards as such.

Example:
Tier 3 rewards: Diamond rank and 5000 points
Tier 2 rewards: Diamond rank and 6000 points
Tier 1 rewards: Diamond rank and 7000 points

The feat is still there, but it is also available to any player willing to put in the effort it takes to climb that high.

I agree with this entirely. As someone who can only play when I have time seeing the insane exclusivity of the rewards has basically killed any involvement, outside of 200 wins for the mount, for the feast. I can't keep playing just to hold my spot and I personally think they need to stop with this "grind" and punishing players who have a life outside the game. Not to mention the rng involved with solo queue.

[RocheKat]

The Base area is the biggest issue imo. There needs to be a better way to force people out of their base area. It isn't a problem yet however I think it will be once people get more time with this map.


Class balance seems decent. I don't think people would be so "OMG smn" if Blm and Brd was a little better. Issue with Ast is that the average derpydo can play like a great Whm or Sch. Some Whm and Sch are super hard to bring down while others are not. I have run into one AST who was not a giant pain to kill and I think he wasn't wearing gear... dude had like no HP.

I don't really care about rewards that much BUT if playing more = getting rare rewards at the end then yes that is a vanilla style WoW nightmare in the making.

Until now I have not liked PvP in FFXIV. In fact its ranged from "Meh." to "This is the worst pvp I have ever played" depending on the mode and patch. I have had an absolute blast in the feast. The fact you can go from near defeat and go on to win in this mode is what really makes it fun imo. Just because you lose a dps or healer first doesn't mean you lose the match. One match my team was literally one death away from losing and we managed to turn it around and win.