Why does battle high exist?

[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.

[Rhais]

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?

I'm against it because it's unnecessary, because the mechanic is not this overpowered unstoppable thing you make it out to be and things should not be changed based off of erroneous, false claims.

The group of people I PvP with do not ever just go farming for battle highs, we balance objectives with fighting, and often have less highs then opponents, yet we still win the majority of our matches. Dealing with parties or alliances with highs/fevers is not some impossible task, it's not some busted mechanic so why would I want to see it changed?

This really is just an issue of being outplayed, and rather then admitting it and improving your parties game blaming your loss on one mechanic. I can not support something being changed when it is clearly being used as a means to avoid facing the fact that the opponents you were facing were just better than your party. And as far as nerfs go just because something is given one doesn't mean it really was an issue, sometimes devs listen to the chronic whining of the incompetent and make changes to the detriment of the game to appease them.

[KageTokage]

I feel like battle high kind of creates an unstable equilibrium where a team can sometimes gain a huge amount of momentum from winning one engagement because a few specific players on their team were hogging enough kills to get it. In the average match, though, the kills tend to be spread too thin for highs to build up quickly and start going out of control.

Some might argue that it's rewarding "skill" if you're getting killing blows, but it encouraging you to fight over kills with other players on your team by resorting to extremely overkill use of LBs/cooldown abilities to ensure you're getting the last hit seems...counterintuitive (It might explain why melee DPS are blowing their LBs on me when I'm alone and getting mobbed with less then half of my HP left...). I feel like all that should matter is that the player is dead and I like the Rival Wings system of rewarding the whole team a weaker buff for racking up kills for that reason.

People can feel free to keep misinterpreting any kind of negative talk about the mechanic as salt or crying, though. At this point, I thoroughly understand why people like/dislike it, but that just makes me wish it could be tweaked in some ways even more. I suppose 5.1 might bring some changes. I'd mostly like it to be rewarded based on damage dealt as opposed to killing blows because I'd be getting it a heck of a lot more often if that were the case. It would also make it harder to deliberately feed kills to one member of a premade group to ensure they're triggering it ASAP.