Why does battle high exist?

[BloodRubyXII]

Actually, that's on them for fighting each other.

What would you have done if they took those battle highs to block every one of your cap attempts?

Accept we got absolutely smashed and requeue instead of taking to forums crying that another team was better than mine.

[Rhais]

Actually, that's on them for fighting each other.

What would you have done if they took those battle highs to block every one of your cap attempts?

That's right, nothing, because you couldn't fight them which you openly admitted.

If you're afraid to engage and are hoping the other sides fight each other so you can ninja cap, that shows a problem with the mechanic inherently. You should become fearful of engages because of skill/tactics disparities. Not because somebody farmed a bunch of sprouts/stragglers with a gank train to get a busted buff.

Bring it down to 3-5% there's no excuse for it being as high as it is and anyone claiming it's balanced because the teams with it make tactical errors, that's not sound reasoning and is surmount to excusing because of a want to abuse it, rather than seeing it balanced in such a way that it's still rewarding but not forcing a playstyle because it's so laughably over the top.

How can anyone consider 20-40% increase balanced is beyond me....

The person you qouted didn't admit to not being able to fight them, they said it was rough and they weren't worth engaging for the other 2 parties. Those statements are not the same as saying we could not fight them.

What I get from these complaints isn't that the mechanic is broken, but that a certain group of people want to deal with the content in only one way, completing objectives while all but ignoring PvP, and resent a mechanic that actually rewards parties for engaging in PvP. If it was actually broken it would be impossible to win when a party had multiple battle highs, this just isn't the case, but I guess it's easier to blame loss on 1 mechanic rather than recognize that it was a failure on your parties part and that you may need to adjust how you are playing.

[JanVanding]

The person you qouted didn't admit to not being able to fight them, they said it was rough and they weren't worth engaging for the other 2 parties. Those statements are not the same as saying we could not fight them.

What I get from these complaints isn't that the mechanic is broken, but that a certain group of people want to deal with the content in only one way, completing objectives while all but ignoring PvP, and resent a mechanic that actually rewards parties for engaging in PvP. If it was actually broken it would be impossible to win when a party had multiple battle highs, this just isn't the case, but I guess it's easier to blame loss on 1 mechanic rather than recognize that it was a failure on your parties part and that you may need to adjust how you are playing.

I resent the mechanic because it's overpowered, not because exists. When something is overpowered and becomes the playstyle (ie the META) then thats usually a surefire indicator there's something wrong with it (see every thread in PVE about Black mages right now, they're the meta because they are overpowered)

If it was balanced I wouldn't care and honestly, where does this notion come from of "you can win against it though"

Sure, but you don't have a fun time of it and it turns into the classic "we're outmatched, run around the caps and try not to get caught" keep away game, that's not PVP, that's anti-pvp.

Your post comes down to nothing more than "Git Gud", I've been around PVP in MMOs long enough to know when something is not right, a buff that lasts forever (except if you die, which chances are you're not going to because as soon as the healers see that buff they're focusing on keeping you alive) and grants you a massive increase in performance which multiple members of your team can have, is not balanced.

Short duration or greatly lowered bonuses, why are you so against that? Is it because maybe, just maybe, you're one of those actually abusing the Anti-PvP strat and you don't want the meta to change away from that?

PS: "They were rough and weren't worth engaging with the two other parties" means they couldn't fight them, rewording doesn't change that they decided themselves they were too difficult to fight and changed to an avoidance strategy

Edit: And again, farming stragglers and sprouts isn't pvp, it's a gank train, we used to run those daily in the Frontier in DaoC, it was one of the most efficient ways of farming RR exp because it was extremely low risk and high reward because you were going after small parties or stragglers that couldn't defend themselves against the weight of 8-20 people all set to assist on the same target. Guess what's happening here? That same tried and true strategy. Guess what DaoC did to counter that? They nerfed the amount of RR exp for kills not near an objective.

[KageTokage]

Battle high is generally not the only reason a team loses but it sure as heck doesn't make winning any easier for the teams that are already behind. Matches where people manage to overcome a significant number of highs are the exception as opposed to the norm and almost always require the other team to gang up on the dominant team which is never a guarantee as the "playing for second" mentality seems to often convince them that picking on the team in third place is the best course of action.

I've also noticed that it's way more prone to becoming a problem in Seize then any of the other modes for whatever reason. It was rare to see more then a single person with Fever in any of the shatter matches I played today.

Honestly though, one of my biggest beefs with the mechanic overall is that it often fails to even fulfill its supposed purpose of "rewarding good gameplay" because only the person who gets the killing blow on a player gets credit for it (In the case of self-induced deaths from fall damage it seems to go to whoever damaged the player most recently). I can regularly be dealing 80%+ of a player's HP, be topping the damage chart, and get over a dozen assists in a single match, yet never get battle high simply because I was never able to get a killing blow. This also inherently makes it more prone to ending up on people playing burst heavy classes like DNC (These guys are by far the ones I see with it the most regularly), NIN, and BLM. It would work better as an equalizer if it's consistently going to the players who are actually putting in the most work on each team.

[KageTokage]

I feel like the way the buff is handled in Rival Wings is more balanced overall because it's a much more gradual build-up that's distributed across your entire party as opposed to only the people who are getting kills.

The momentum also shifts more easily with how you steal stacks whenever you kill someone who has it.

[KageTokage]

I wouldn't interpret any kind of negativity about battle high as "crying".

The mechanic really feels like it could use some tweaking in how it functions for the sake of both the teams using it and the teams playing against it. While I did initially create this topic as something of a knee-jerk response to finding the premise of rewarding the winning team totally foreign (I play a lot of multiplayer games and virtually all of them favor giving the losers a comeback mechanic and the ones that do offer the winners an advantage make it an extremely double-edged sword), I've started taking a more objective look at it and it still seems flawed in multiple respects.

The lack of consistency when it comes to earning it is frustrating for both sides as you end up with situations where people who are just lucking out with killing blows get it then lose it almost immediately because they're too reckless and not actually the ones who know what they're doing. You also end up in situations where you can be dominating but hardly anyone gets the buff because the kills are spread out across the team.

I think it can be an interesting mechanic that doesn't necessarily benefit only the dominant team, but the way it works now tends to make it that way.

[JanVanding]

Accept we got absolutely smashed and requeue instead of taking to forums crying that another team was better than mine.

Farming sprouts/stragglers and refusing to play the objective until 3-4 members have battle high isn't being better.

It's playing around an abusable mechanic.

Played a game earlier where we did just that. It wasn't fun, it wasn't some incredible tactical stroke of genius, it was simply anti-pvp until we were ready to do it on our terms with a huge advantage.

Oh and we were getting beat soundly til we switched to straggler farming.

So no, its nothing to do with being better, everything to do with the buff being overpowered and too easy to abuse.

[Samsta]

I think battle high and battle fever shoulnd't last forever, have them on a timer and have that timer refresh every time you get a kill. It isn't really fun when 2 teams are fighting and the team that came out on top can now crush both teams easily because the buffs are honestly pretty insane.

[KageTokage]

I agree with the notion that it should require continued kills to maintain because half the reason it becomes a problem in the first place is because the DPS getting it are usually are playing extremely conservatively, hanging back and only moving in when they're confident they aren't going to get picked off for one reason or another. IE, ranged DPS often won't approach at all if they see that there's a WAR or DRK in an opposing group who could yank them out of the group and get them killed. I also see NINs who basically do an opening Trick Attack, burn Bunshin, then run away with Shukuchi the moment their defensive cushion is gone.

Having a timer ticking would force people to take risks if they want to maintain the buff, which would create a more interesting dynamic on both ends.

[Divinemights]

You assume too much. Don’t assume your definition of PvP is a universal fact because it is not. Anything that move and it is not same colour as you, it is legit killable target. Sprout will grow up one day and straggler will learn from the mistake. You don’t punish veterans just because sprouts can not take heat.