PvP in this game is an afterthought and it shows

[Esmoire]

I kind of treat PvP not as being comparable to PvE; they would have to massively change the game on a functional level for that. I think it's better to see it as a side activity, like Gold Saucer or housing. It's not perfect and it will always have sore spots, though I think there's a lot of simple fun to be had.

Honestly people will hate to hear this but tab target MMOs in general are always going to have very casual, low skill, slow-paced PvP. Especially in the latest decade where everyone is a big balloon of health, almost no precision is required, and it's kept slow enough that their wide audience can play it. It seems FFXIV's development is very segregated with the folks who manage PvP having limited resources allocated, so with that in mind I think they have been doing okay.

Like there's some huge sore spots, like it probably needs something to compensate for the removal of 8v8v8 so people playing on the graveyard hours can enjoy a more light experience besides Feast. I also think they have bungled a lot in trying to force some of the job components from PvE to work in a completely different environment. That said I think a more fair and measured criticism is merited, and in my eyes PvP in FFXIV is goofy but flawed fun, like the rest of the game.

[Rufalus]

I think this is a really good appraisal of the underlying problems with pvp in this game. They've made a few decent changes over the years and introduced some interesting modes/rules, but core issues with the engine deriving from it being a pve-first game hold it back from ever being great, the fairly long GCD and server tick rate chief among them. Re: healers, they've always been the mvp role but it was only with the 4.0 changes that they became godly relative to the other roles. The other roles got a reduced ability to melt them and it really focused the gameplay down to everyone else coordinating their attacks on the healer at certain intervals when their cooldowns are ready to burst. For most people it just wasn't fun and I noticed widespread complaints about healers on the official forums, reddit and gamefaqs at that time. The really hardcore pvpers pushed back and basically said get good, the game is fine.

Well the complaints mostly stopped because a lot of people just stopped doing pvp. It was only fun for the people at the highest skill level. I can't confirm because I don't use addons, but I suspect those are a factor? If a person had a tool to force their skills into the same data packet and align with server ticks, that's a huge advantage in this type of pvp to assist coordination and bursting healers at the exact right moment. Casual players who don't cheat cannot access that kind of assist. I hear that addons can also read the opponent's attack before the game displays the cast bar, which might make it possible for Silence to be reused reactively rather than predictively. Again a fix to the unfun design that's only available by cheating.

[iAxX23]

If a person had a tool to force their skills into the same data packet and align with server

That doesn't sound realistic due to the volatile nature of data packets, you send so many every second that it's very unlikely. What is possible tho is spamming a button 20 times a second so that it comes out on the earliest tick possible. Also plenty of the tools people use for PVE would work perfectly fine in PVP so I wouldn't be surprised if people were using them.

It was only fun for the people at the highest skill level.

There are people that have found the PVP system enjoyable. But I know even top 10 Feast ranked players that stopped playing because of Stormblood changes. There are very high skilled players right now that play it and hate it. The entire PVP sub-forum is proof of that :^)

[Commander_Justitia]

I know there's gonna be a ton of you replying to this with "I've been playing since Season 1 of FEAST, PVP has some small issues but you're overreacting, the PVP system is fine".

No, you have something called Stockholm Syndrome

I've been playing since Season 1 of The Feast. Already before season 4 ended, we got a sneak preview of how PvP will be in the new expansion/season 5. It was the great PvP overhaul, because in their opinion, the system was too complex, too uninvinting too new players, too many debuffs/buffs to track ~too hardcore.

We didn't have all the information at that point yet, so people stayed optimistic largely (despise the large degree of casualization visible in the videos): "hey just let's try it out, maybe it's fun, it looks like a solid basis to built more stuff on, pvp get's some changes finally - cool".
Up to that point that was the most fun I had in PvP and especially frontline. Spoiler: They didn't really built more customization/skills on it.


There has been a lot of feedback to PvP, especially after those big changes. Players probably hoped it would be a start of a new era.
The only thing we got was:

-A new map replacing the old ones, in the same blue style. (most dislike that style by now, because its been years playing on the same map, while there are other maps already from earlier seasons available; WoW started with 3 arena maps as example -and gets 1-3 new arena maps per expansion)

-The removal of heavy/light medals (asked for since forever, probably a good change, even though it was a noobfilter in s1-s4 because you could take way too many medals and you were 1shot then because of the dmg amplification)

-hud, macro and quickchat updates (some hud options are now worse and less easy to see than before, especially medal overview is tiny while being the most important stat)

-job adjustments and more recently 2-3 more additional skills for more aoe utility/dmg and potions (the aoe skills are not very useful in feast so this is a frontline update tbh, potions benefits players who use them very late when they are almost dead, it creates rng and unfairness just like heavy/light medals did and they scale with healing+ abilities, which makes them a bit overpowered at times, again this seems to be a frontline update// recuperate in Feast was good and smooth to use, we didnt need potions)
Maybe we need a seperation between frontline and feast skills -> customization...

Then there is the lack of general communication which haunts us since years as well. We don't know what their plan is until the day it happens. You don't know if it's time to create a light party team for a light party season for example. It takes time to find a team.
Then you get a season happening after 7 months, and they have to apologize that their seasonal rewards that are given out by a npc (happened every previous season since implementation), can't give them out because they were not finished with the changes. Apparently it would have been ready after 9 months, but the community demanded a season, so it is our fault for asking tbh.

Then they are promoting new frontline maps they released. They are promoting it by cutting off the access to the older maps... A daily roulette that exist out of 1 map is not a roulette.

I think ultimately nobody of the PvP players would have asked for such a big PvP overhaul after S4, you can give feedback and hope that some day something changes into the right direction again. But you know they won't put too many resources in PvP anyway, they are more busy with so many other things. So that is just reality, the PvP could be a lot better and a lot more fun as they already have old system that would make a lot of sense rn. But as long as the community doesn't care about it and just keeps putting it in the meme corner, where I think it does't need to belong (its not that far off other mmo PvP systems, they actually have all the basis/tools necessary) we won't see too many changes.
But yeah, try asking for 1 new The Feast map for years. Try asking for more meaningful customization (like a build, we had warriors able to use "Muse" a MP regeneration skill in the past, when warriors didn't need any MP, it was not a choice to use the remaining useful skills...)
Picture of old customization:


They even have some really REALLY cool skills in the game, which they don't allow atm for PvP or just slowly brought them back... after 2-4years.



But they made the mistake, making some of these skills weak, as a part of the AoE combo, which is pretty boring and not useful.
They were really high cooldown, instant use skills. They had an impact on the game, because they had an EFFECT/BUFF/DEBUFF and NOT because they did aoe dmg.


Take Tar Pit for DRk, a skill that creates a slowing puddle around the DRK, that selfheals him for the dmg others take within it, sounds like such a fun skill.

Take Sacred Prism for Whitemage, a skill that makes you scream at your teammates to stand in the prism to take 40% reduced physical dmg, big numbers, cause the damage buff of dps player had big numbers too. Now we have temperance, just use it and forget, no counterplay possible.

Take mch and brd ability to give their healer MP as support skill.
Ofc these values would have to be adjusted for the new PvP, but at the moment FUN should be more important than everything else for the developers of this mode. Let us have overpowered skills, let us have new maps.

A bit more job uniqueness wouldn't hurt PvP.

So yeah, after all this time you can stay skeptical, imo it's not worth to spend too much time on PvP as SE aren't doing it either(the developer probably has his hands full cause he has to do it all alone :P ). So just enjoy what you can or play other games.

[Pibz]

The pvp system is a mess, I've said it since 2013 and while it has improved, except them going back to 3-way frontlines for some god forsaken reason, there's still a lot of work to do, which they've been mostly shown to be incapable of delivering at this point

But..

Making healers so incredibly strong is mind boggling to me, look at any succesful MMO right now that has a functioning PVP system, the healers are generally the weakest, they take more damage, they are more suscetible to CC but they have A LOT of utility and heals. In this game a single DPS will not kill a healer without an LB. They're built like tanks.

There is no fixing this system. I can understand balancing PVE and PVP spells together is a huge challenge, I can accept removing some spells that are available in PVE from PVP or changing them for PVP but absolutely gimping a job and boiling it down to 10 spells is a joke.

I've yet to find a game where healers being present or not doesn't completely change the balance between fighting groups. It's just what the nature of healing does. In WoW if you have a healer and the opposing team doesn't, outside of big gear deficits between the teams, the team with the healers will win almost assuredly.

The problem isn't that the healers are "too strong" (they've been severely gimped in recent years and it didn't fix anything, made it worse in fact), the problem is that a completely and ridiculously disproportional amount of responsibility is placed on them. Your healer is new and doesn't know what he's doing? Well you lose where as you can get away with having any other role being worse than the rest of the team. THIS is the big design flaw, one that i doubt they will ever address

However the idea that the system isn't fixable is just completely ridiculous

[Commander_Justitia]

Your healer is new and doesn't know what he's doing? Well you lose

That is not a design flaw, it is the flaw of the player queueing into a Ranked PvP mode, when he has no single clue how to use his heals. You read savage guides, you read trial guides, you look up your rotation, you buy bufffood for raid, you get the best in slot gear, all that for PvE - but in PvP everybody doesn't care what his skills do and gets away with it?!

If I see a healer going into ranked PvP, then spamming his damage spells instead of healing his team, no, it is not the system I blame - I am gonna blame the healer for not healing anything than himself (maybe, half of the new healer don't even manage that).

Why is a 3 way frontlines mode bad? Guild Wars 2 does it for Open WorldvsWorldvsWorld PvP too and it was pretty fun. Do you only not like it because the achievements tied to it are only rewarded to the first place? That doesn't make the PvP mode bad dude.
2 way PvP would mean, one side gives up because they are 300 points behind and the other group farmed battle highs, but with 2 groups you can overcome them. PvP already rewards you for doing nothing, don't make it even easier. Already the idea to be able to queue at whatever jobs for frontline is bad, we need players of every role just like in feast.

Just think about the impact of your desired changes first, people demanded so often changes that turned out to be even shittier, only to complain even more then as if they knew it all along. Prominent example would be rank decay for top100, there is no good way to implement decay in ff14 at this point, we are not league of legends or whatever.

[Stormfur]

That is not a design flaw, it is the flaw of the player queueing into a Ranked PvP mode, when he has no single clue how to use his heals.

To be fair though, the game doesn't exactly do a good job of guiding you in that. You need to hope that some high-rank PVP player has made a video or that you can join a Discord and ask. Even PVE has the Novice Hall. PVP actively tells you to just "get in there and do it." When you're accustomed to pretty much having your hand held starting out in the PVE world, you naturally think PVP is going to be similar, and it's jarring when it isn't.

Right now, PVP in FFXIV is very carrot-and-stick, but the stick is coated in barbed wire and set on fire. It's the equivalent of tying your arms and legs together and telling you to swim. Why do it, then? Everyone has their reasons but for myself, I like trying to improve and working toward a goal. I might never get there, but I'll certainly give it my best. I like the competition and having the results to show for my efforts. But by the same token, the way Feast is set up is abysmally punishing - more than a game should be.

[Myon88]

That is not a design flaw

It's definitely a flaw of the mode if one role holds a disproportionate amount of the responsibility for success, because it devalues the effort of the 3 other people on the team. If you like playing ranged jobs, you pretty much have to accept that no matter how good you are, your skill will not influence your winrate as much as if you were a healer player. Don't make the mistake of focusing only on the person playing healer, it's all about their effect on the rest of the team.

You sit in a queue for 20 minutes, get in a game and lose on the spot because you got unlucky with the healer on your team. You've lost 30 minutes of time with not a lot of agency to influence the outcome on your part. Or maybe you get lucky and you win, but so what? You won more because you got lucky with matchmaking, and less because of your own skill. Either way, it makes for a very unsatisfying experience for 3/4s of the players in the match.

I've never seen a pvp game built around a tank/dps/heal trinity see mainstream success. If you look at the competitive gaming landscape today, the vast majority of them are all about dps focused gameplay loops - fighting games, shooters. Even in genres like mobas or class based hero shooters, any 'healing' classes there are more like glorified supports than pure healers.

Sadly it's not really something you can fix since this is a problem that trinity-style mmos bring upon themselves. Their class system is baked in and they have to shoehorn pvp gameplay into that. If you ask me though, the presence of strong healing in pvp fundamentally does not make for exciting or fun gameplay, its lack of representation in mainstream gaming is proof of that.

[iAxX23]

It's definitely a flaw of the mode if one role holds a disproportionate amount of the responsibility for success, because it devalues the effort of the 3 other people on the team.

What a well thought out and logically consistent point of view.(the entire post not just the quoted part)
The only thing that I could add to this is that in most succesful PVP games right now healers are virtually non existant because of the simple fact that the healer job is nowhere near as satisfying to play.

Most PVP games right now have multiple ways of rewarding players for playing but usually it comes down to DURING the game and AFTER it.
After it is mostly just currency, ranking up and getting a new badge, items that sort of stuff which gives you a feeling of progression.
During the game it rewards you with things like long cooldown spells that feel very satisfying to use, being able drop an enemy down from full health to about 15%, comboing someone with a friend and that sort of stuff. Generally as long as you see BIG NUMBERS of deeps your brain reacts to it and it makes you feel good. Now most of these things happens with DPS classes.

If we take a look at XIV PVP healing it's incredibly inconsistent with what the PVE team is doing in the sense that in PVE healers play a huge role to how much damage you can output as a party by doing nearly as much or as much as a tank. Not only is it inconsistent and completely against everything that PVE has taught you so far but they double down on a playstyle that is VERY boring. Topping people off every 5-10 seconds and every so often casting 1 ability to fill someone back up to full is not fun. I know healer players that could easily carry any rag-tag group of bronze playerse to Gold without even trying that hard in half a day but they don't play healer because of how unsatisfying it is. There is virtually no reward during the game and after the game you get a nice rank up and some wolf marks. It feels like grind for the sake of grind.

[Commander_Justitia]

It's definitely a flaw of the mode if one role holds a disproportionate amount of the responsibility for success

I mean just play healer if there are some newbies in the queue, if its ranking points you are after, and you think they play way worse than others. And just btw, last season dancer got rank 1 on multiple datancenter, a range job.
Range role is just very popular in the community and yeah they don't have much responsibility, but doesn't mean they are not important to get a win, they might have carried more than all other jobs last season maybe even still.

And go on, ask healer top100 players how they like their healer atm, many good healers already quit lol, it is so much trouble to heal people who are not using their potions, they can't carry as they used to in the past. Maybe this discussion would have been more appropriate in the past, but now it feels like beating a dead horse, as if some players cant 1vs1 a healer in a duel and come complaining :/

Anyway, I have said way too much already, I am sure SE knows that PvP isn't as spicy as it used to be - I think they lack to see the potential it could have or could have had the last years. Even if it was brandmarked as bad, it isn't unplayable and some people I meet or see ingame, actually stick to PvP and keep playing it despise the grim outlook they had in the first place (generated by a salty pve reddit community I guess).

I just can recommend focusing on whats really important when you make suggestions, what is a top priority issue you want to see fixed and what is only a minor annoyance that you happen to experience once or twice. I feel like the mode needs "fun" back first of all, to me it feels balancing actually killed the enjoyment even more over the last seasons. See you around