My issues with PvP

[KusoWat]

PvP shouldn't be balanced around the inability for inexperienced players to burst and CC correctly. If you were to get the nerf to healing you so desire, realize that it effects your team as well and that it just becomes a slug fest of mediocre damage killing without effort.

At higher levels, even in PUGs aka solo queue, many kills are made despite this supposed overpowered healing that can get interrupted in so many varying ways. Not to mention scenarios of damage that is not heal able. Balancing should be based on higher levels of play, from the top, not the bottom.

PS: 6+ people failing to out damage a single healer is just bad tbh. Has nothing to do with them being a PUG unless being one equates to lacking common knowledge. And 4dps can easily instant gib someone from 100 -> 0.

[Khalithar]

PvP shouldn't be balanced around the inability for inexperienced players to burst and CC correctly. If you were to get the nerf to healing you so desire, realize that it effects your team as well and that it just becomes a slug fest of mediocre damage killing without effort.

There would still be effort involved if people are using their defensive cooldowns and mitigation appropriately. But slugfests where we just around killing each other sounds a lot more fun to me than what we have now.

[Llus]

I've been pushing for the Garo mounts this past week. I'm currently on an 18 game losing streak at 7/10 for the silver one. Feels bad man.

Anyway, I've been PvPing in MMOs for 15+ years, and these are my observations of what I think PvP in this game is doing wrong. Keep in mind that this is considering PUG vs PUG, which is the vast majority of PvP that occurs.

1. Healing is too strong/Time To Kill is too high. From what I can tell, SE didn't even try to balance healing for PvP. The numbers seem to be pulled straight from PvE, where healers need to heal through raid boss damage.

A semi-competent healer can heal through 6+ PUGgers attacking them or another player. It should be well known and should have been easy to foresee that expecting the level of coordination from a PUG that it takes to properly counter a healer is unreasonable.

It's an imbalance of responsibility: one healer vs 6+ strangers needing to coordinate burst, CC, and cooldowns. In the case of the Feast, they need to do all of this without the ability to even talk in some cases!

This is the #1 issue that sucks the fun out of PvP for me. Most encounters turn into two walls banging against each other for 10 minutes.

2. Frontlines have too much RNG. Ice and Tomelith spawns contribute too much to the outcome of the game. When the winning team gets 3 Tomeliths close to their base, it's a real punch in the gut.

3. Three-faction PvP doesn't work if people don't understand what tactics they should be using. When #3 keeps attacking #2, then the entire system breaks down and #1 just stays #1 uncontested.

4. Losing points on death creates a "dead zone" where it's not even worth trying to win anymore, because you'll just lose faster. This is most noticeable in Sieze when someone is close enough to winning. You can't even assault their Tome because you'll for sure suffer some sort of causalities in the process, and the points from your deaths will put the enemy over the top anyway.

5. If it isn't already, premades should be matched with other premades whenever possible. A premade on any side is too strong of an advantage given the other points I've made. It's a snowball effect.

6. The available game types and sizes rarely allows for individual players to make a mark on the game. Whereas other MMOs have game types where a player can feel good stealing a node or capturing the flag, Frontlines (especially Shatter) are almost entirely about moving as a group.

#1A - Healing is fine, DPS in FL usually uses PvE rotation resulting in a stun resist healer.

#1B - 6+ DPS on 1 healer should be almost an instant kill, again bad DPS - if you don't know your PvP burst you're not going to kill much of anything

#1C Very good healers in feast will almost never die (once or twice) during a match, that's just the facts of life. However, even the best healers run out of cooldowns and MP and you should be coordinating your bursts on squishy DPS, tanks that over stack and mele that pop blood for blood and extend too far into enemy lines

#2 - RNG based matches do tend to favor the "let them fight" crowd, so unless your team pays attention to the score, the turtles tend to win. Even if your team is really good; RNG can win the game. - This is part of #3

#3 see #2

#4 You also gain points for killing and if many players on your team gets fever/high early you tend to become unstoppable. This requires good DPS and good healers keeping those fevers/highs alive

#5 premades have been in existence since PvP became a thing, if you can't beat 'em; join 'em. premade groups are just as susceptible to RNG as the rest of us so it's possible to beat a premade through avoidance, gaining your own fevers/highs against stragglers and other members of the GC the premade is on and playing objectives

#6 - Nex Cross - u just got to git gud

[KusoWat]

There would still be effort involved if people are using their defensive cooldowns and mitigation appropriately. But slugfests where we just around killing each other sounds a lot more fun to me than what we have now.

General players using defensive cds??? They can barely put their abilities together to burst...

The defensive cds of dps isn't going to keep them alive.

Also, what do we have now? People are dying plenty enough as is.

[loreleidiangelo]

Why in god's name would you want healers to be nerfed because PUGs are bad??? In my opinion, you should NOT be able to 1v1 a healer because a healer CANNOT 1v1 you ever since the removal of Cleric Stance. Healers NEED to be able to have influence over the outcome of a match because tbqf if they don't then nobody will play as them, ever, because the game is already doing a terrible time at rewarding them for their hard work as is.

I have no idea what is up with this recent influx of people who seem to think that people should just explode as soon as you sneeze on them, rather than DPS be forced to coordinate and stop doing their PVE rotations on squishies or blowing their burst on a 2-stack tank. You can nerf my healing as soon as I get Cleric Stance back and Adrealine Rush is removed from the game, ggwp.

[Squigley]

I'll hop on the "Heals are too powerful" train too. This is the first game I've seen where the healers offensive power is being completely gimped because of their healing power. So far I've only played frontlines and at least there the healers make things fairly meh.

I'd say give the healers back their cleric stance and hit the healy spells with a fairly heavy nerfbat to up the bodycount.

Edit: Oh yeah, the silliest DPS bursts might also need some nerfing if the heals would get nerfed. Which would be fine IMHO

[Zojha]

I'd say give the healers back their cleric stance and hit the healy spells with a fairly heavy nerfbat to up the bodycount.

I'd rather just remove dedicated healing as a whole from PvP and instead leave that mostly to health packs, spawn recovery zones and the like.

The issue with healers is partially a power issue - primarily, it's a design issue. Healers aren't working towards the Win condition of battle in this game, which is to reduce an enemy health bar to 0. They are only trying to prevent the enemy from doing just that and as such, serve no purpose other than to create stalemates. That's simply their design. A "healer" in chess would be a player that doesn't move their own pieces but instead puts the enemy piece back to where it was before when its their turn. As seen from the example (and potential all healer matches you had in feast) it's a potentially gamebreaking design and needs to be kept in check.

So I'd just replace the rotational heal spells in PvP entirely and only leave those with a considerable cooldown. Those then get a slight reduction in potency to be in line with burst abilities of DPS and finally we take off the heal penalty from cleric stance in PvP (Which implies enabling it again). Lastly, we make a global durability buff to prevent the pace from becoming "too" fast, number being adjusted in an iterative process.

But that's just me and I'm quite known for having unpopular opinions. /huh

[Khalithar]

Snip

I think your ideas are fantastic and I want to subscribe to your newsletter.

[Culfinrandir]

Try actually playing healer in PVP and come back to say that. While healers ARE strong, they're nowhere near that strong. Tanks can shut them down, and DPS that actually know how to burst can take people out in spite of healers. On top of this, healers can't do much of anything on their own due to a complete lack of offensive ability, and can be squishy when they run out of cooldowns and instant heals making them rather reliant on having a team that actually sticks near them (You would not BELIEVE how many DPS just straight up Leeroy Jenkins when they see a pack of foes)

Unfortunately I can only give you one up vote Urthdigger, your post was worth ten times that. People seem to think healing in PVP is easy & too strong - I completely refute that. If anything, there's times when a buff yo certain healing actions would be a huge boon!

[Ama_Hamada]

#1A - Healing is fine, DPS in FL usually uses PvE rotation resulting in a stun resist healer.

#1B - 6+ DPS on 1 healer should be almost an instant kill, again bad DPS - if you don't know your PvP burst you're not going to kill much of anything

#1C Very good healers in feast will almost never die(once or twice) during a match, that's just the facts of life. However, even the best healers run out of cooldowns and MP and you should be coordinating your bursts on squishy DPS, tanks that over stack and mele that pop blood for blood and extend too far into enemy lines

#2 - RNG based matches do tend to favor the "let them fight" crowd, so unless your team pays attention to the score, the turtles tend to win. Even if your team is really good; RNG can win the game. - This is part of #3

#3 see #2

#4 You also gain points for killing and if many players on your team gets fever/high early you tend to become unstoppable. This requires good DPS and good healers keeping those fevers/highs alive

#5 premades have been in existence since PvP became a thing, if you can't beat 'em; join 'em. premade groups are just as susceptible to RNG as the rest of us so it's possible to beat a premade through avoidance, gaining your own fevers/highs against stragglers and other members of the GC the premade is on and playing objectives

#6 - Nex Cross - u just got to git gud

This and sch healing is too weak in pvp, not too strong. Stop trying to kill healers that know what they are doing and focus more on DPS that have no defenses, like SMN, BLM, BRD, MCH..... , more so when one of those 4 overextend. Ever see how quick a BLM can go down that is not paying attention? My friends got yelled by one once. That person ended up being hated by the whole party since one of my friends explained to the BLM people where running back when that BLM stood there, being a target. Everyone was running back and the person furthest out was that BLM. I saw the video as well, you are not going to find a healer to react heal that, esp with people scattered while my friends try to figure out the most likely burst target. They went from full to half hp in one hit basically, then split seconds later, dead, any cast time heal would of not hit them off reaction.

If you can't kill someone in PvP because of healers it has to do with the following:
Lack of CC on the healer
Lack of knowledge of the burst rotation in PvP
Lack of coordination of 2+ people while ^ that is an issue
The healer is skilled and knows how to precure and predict bursts in PvP

today a mch and war (maybe a 3rd I was not sure) made a decent attempt on trying to burst me down. When I was binded and I heard that all too familiar sound of it being from a MCH, I knew what was coming next. I was ready for it, I was ready to use dissipation if needed. They gave up after I Attunement on them and backed up far enough for them to stop chasing me since I lived though the burst. Should a second MCH bursted on me on top of that I would not of lived due to being useless after healing like that as a SCH.

PvP has balance issues but healing as a whole is not one of them, also my healing potency is about 1/2 what is is in the real world, nice try on that claim.