Thread: The Feast - 4.3 Updates!

Greetings,

As you no doubt have seen, the preliminary patch notes for Patch 4.3 went live today. In it, you'll find a list of the various PvP-related adjustments coming in Patch 4.3. As such, we wanted to explain the reasoning behind these changes.

Our overall policy and intentions regarding the Patch 4.3 PvP adjustments
In order to give each job an equal chance to win, we're making adjustments to job actions based on the win rate statistics we have collected. In addition to this, due to high defensive properties, it often became difficult to actually KO a player. This resulted matches dragging on without any majorly decisive outcome. For this reason, we will be making downward adjustments to the defensive properties to make it easier to KO an opponent when you work together with fellow team members.

Tanks
In regard to tanks in high-skilled match situations, such as those between top-rated players and team matches, the importance of having a paladin on your team was quite high. With that in mind, we'll be making a downward adjustment to them.

Paladin
Paladins have strong defensive properties as they have Shield Oath and Cover. This is especially apparent in team matches where it gave paladins a clear advantages over other tanks. For this reason, we have reduced their maximum HP, and also made it so that they're more vulnerable when using Cover or carrying medals.

Warrior
Similar to PvE, we made Inner Release more intuitive to use. Warriors’ weakness is self-defense, and to compensate this, we will increase the duration of Inner Beast. With the changes made to Inner Release, warriors will be able to spam this action, so while the duration is short, they will be much sturdier against attacks.

Melee DPS
Samurai and ninja were having a harder time winning matches when compared to monk and dragoon; therefore, we will be making positive adjustments to several of their actions. In addition to this, alongside the adjustments made to the defensive properties, we believe the overall effectiveness of the DPS role in a match will increase.

Ninja
When looking solely at the potency of the three Ninjutsu actions available, Raiton was being used the majority of the time; therefore, we have made adjustments to the potency of Katon and Hyoton. Moreover, Bhavacakra had a longer recast time compared to other melee DPS's high damage actions, and the frequency of burst damage was lower, so we will reduce Bhavacakra's recast time.

Samurai
Samurai's Sen tended to be used only to execute Midare Setsugekka; therefore, we have increased the potency of Higanbana and Tenka Goken so that these actions have a clearer purpose. Since we're making adjustments to lower the overall healing potency, this will increase the usefulness of dealing pure damage and the importance of DoTs and AoE actions.

Ranged DPS
In regard to ranged DPS, we will be making big adjustments towards caster jobs. Since the CC actions such as Sleep, Tri-bind, and Flunge are tied to the GCD, they had to be used as a trade off against other damage actions. For this reason, we had to make sure the properties of these actions were positive enough that players would use them over other actions. Furthermore, for beginners, determining when was the best timing to use these skills was difficult. We will be replacing these actions with Night Wing, Wither, and Monomachy, which are off the GCD with their own cool down timers, so players will now just need to determine when best to use them.

Black Mage
In our previous balancing adjustment, we decreased the potency of Foul to shorten the potency gap between it and Flare. This lead to a situation where players used Convert to use Foul. Within the ranged DPS jobs, black mages have a high winrate, so we made adjustments to increase the purpose of using Foul and Convert while making sure it isn't just a pure buff.

Red Mage
We have removed the GCD action Flunge, and brought back the highly requested Monomachy with a unique property.

Healers
We're reducing the potency of healer's strong healing actions. This adjustment was done to change the current defensive style gameplay into that which focuses more on offense.

The following reasons are why we reduced the potency of actions with high healing potency:

• With a high-tiered tank and healer, currently there are times where Culling Time reaches five stacks
• We would like to increase the overall rate of KO to increase the pace in which the outcome of a match changes
• By reducing the healing potency, it gives meaning to dealing damage outside of bursts

Miscellaneous

Changes made to the Bind effect
When a bind effect is applied by a PvP action, it will no longer be removed when receiving damage from an enemy. This was done to resolve an issue where bind is applied to an opponent for defensive or offensive purpose but quickly removed by your ally attacking them. For this reason, actions with the bind effect will now be more effective in both offensive and defensive situations for CC. As such, we have made adjustments to their duration.

Regarding adjustments made to Recuperate and the Decreased Damage Taken trait
When compared to the other additional actions and traits, Recuperate and Decreased Damage Taken were too strong, and were the most likely to be chosen among other available actions and traits. For this reason, we'll make adjustments to these two. These adjustments were done to better limit the amount of options that would increase defensive properties fitting with our overall policy, where it becomes easier to KO players.

We ask that our veterans and newcomers give these changes a try once Patch 4.3 lands. As always, be sure to leave feedback on how it feels before/after these changes were made as we're always listening.

Thanks!

Thank you Zhexos for giving us some insights into the forthcoming changes! Hopefully we can look forward to these detailed explanations whenever big, sweeping changes are made to pvp, since it sometimes feels like they are made without any clear direction in mind. But that's just from the user side, you guys have all the data!