Volcanic Heart is a bad map

[Zachia]

I'll just say that Machinist feels abysmal in volcanic heart due to the 'cast time' of its basic, gcd combo and the fact that you need follow up attacks to make wildfire effective. The other ranged job I play consistently is Scholar, and for scholar it's kind of a mixed bag. The walls constantly get in the way of your only real damaging ability, which is the dot spread. You cast the dot and then you can't follow up with deployment tactics because you lost LOS. And that's not a conscious effort by your target, it happens due to their natural map movement alone. On the other hand, it does make it somewhat easier to escape danger while self-healing, including from melee enemies. You can play around the pillars and cause melee pursuers to miss attacks. However, it's only logical that the map design harms more than anything else those ranged jobs with cast times and/or that need to chain follow up skills in order to deal real damage.

I would never, ever willingly play machinist in volcanic heart.

TBH multiple matches of getting the crap beaten out of me in random CC (non ranked) on this map as a mechanist is one of the biggest reasons i made this thread in the first place... how ever the map is really easy and fun when i'm playing as dragoon. I can escape and heal up easily after I dive and i can just abuse the pillars everywhere. Some people chase so far and get lost within the pillars that my team has pushed the crystal pretty far. The map is a blessing for dive melee players.

[Sigma860]

I only played wow vanilla and that was back in 2004/2005. I have no idea what it's like nowadays, but even though MMOs have evolved A LOT since the early days of wow, their pvp back then was still better than what we have today in FFXIV. At least in my opinion. And that is despite the fact that FFXIV does not have to deal with balancing abilities for pvp and pve simultaneously, which makes things so much easier for Sqenix. Oh, and they don't have to deal with any type of variation in skills/talents/gear either. All those are complicating factors which most MMOs have to deal with when balancing out their pvp that are completely absent in FFXIV.

WoW PVP is inherently unbalanced thanks to the PVP gear. Someone with high-level PVP gear could teabag their keyboard and still destroy you no matter how good you are. ESO is even worse with the way their gear sets work and how broken certain combinations are. Any MMO PVP that doesn't put everyone on the same playing field in terms of gear and stats like FF14 or GW2 is automatically bottom tier.

[Corbeau]

I didn't think highly of WoW pvp even when they did standard templates to avoid gear advantages. It was the same completely healer-centric clusterfuck that pre-6.1 XIV pvp was, just with better technical underpinnings. At least XIV has the design edge now with Crystalline Conflict and the new kits that reduce role dominance.

God, if only XIV had WoW's responsiveness and reliability.

[Ransu]

WoW PVP is inherently unbalanced thanks to the PVP gear. Someone with high-level PVP gear could teabag their keyboard and still destroy you no matter how good you are. ESO is even worse with the way their gear sets work and how broken certain combinations are. Any MMO PVP that doesn't put everyone on the same playing field in terms of gear and stats like FF14 or GW2 is automatically bottom tier.

WoW doesn't have pvp gear anymore...Resilience/PvP Power stat has been gone since the release of WoD

[gioroggia]

WoW PVP is inherently unbalanced thanks to the PVP gear. Someone with high-level PVP gear could teabag their keyboard and still destroy you no matter how good you are. ESO is even worse with the way their gear sets work and how broken certain combinations are. Any MMO PVP that doesn't put everyone on the same playing field in terms of gear and stats like FF14 or GW2 is automatically bottom tier.

I both agree and disagree with you on this one. I think having one "pvp set" which is simply better than everything else is indeed an inferior system to getting rid of gear in PvP altogether like FFXIV does. However, when you have multiple viable choices of gear which can give you the possibility of tweaking how you use your character, it becomes a much more fun and engaging system than the one we have here.

Granted, that wouldn't make sense in FFXIV since gear boils down to one metric: ilvl. There are no meaningful differences in item stats, no bonuses, no procs. Each helmet is just a slightly better version of the previous one. In this system I agree with you that the only point of introducing gear in PvP would be to make some players stronger than others.

Anyways, my previous comment was more of a rant. The pvp system is super streamlined in FFXIV, which makes it so much easier to balance and to build content for. So I kinda expected things would be in better shape.

[Gserpent]

Well if we were to believe Gseperent and people believing range is either unaffected by being forced into melee combat or that los is not an issue while pillar dancing, i guess all the pvp hardcore players of world of warcraft as well as the many pvp dev designers of world of warcraft who dedicate their time to balancing arena who always put pillars and LOS to prevent range dominance are just outright wrong and wow pvp has been designing mmorpg games the wrong way the entire time even though WoW still has a bigger pvp playerbase than any other mmorpg.

Have you considered just learning how to deal with pillar humping instead of complaining about it? It's actually not that hard to use it against people that try to do it to you.

You're on Crystal. Hit me up and we'll go to wolves den and I'll play MNK and we can practice kiting MNK around corners and punishing aggression.

[Zachia]

Monks, Samurai, and Ninja's are the top 3 melee that beat me down as a mechanist

[Gserpent]

With exception of NIN, their entire gimmick is running at people. There's only a limited number of things MCH can do if their team isn't helping them, but that's by design. You're supposed to require your teammates to do their jobs. You *can* do a few things, like analyze Air Anchor or shotgun them backwards and quickly run around a corner, to prevent them from immediately dashing back to you. You could also stun them after they round a corner, isolating them from their teammates, or shotgun them back towards your team after they round a corner (latency willing.) Dropping your mortar as you round a corner so that they're standing in it while you're getting buffed by it will also help.

But ultimately, MCH is not *supposed* to win if a MNK or SAM or whatever is allowed to just sit on them and maintain near-permanent uptime on them. The game isn't designed like that. Your teammates are supposed to peel them off of you, or buff and protect you, or take advantage of you stunning them when they overextend and punish that, etc. It's frustrating when they don't. But your teammates not doing their jobs isn't the game being broken, or the map being unfair. You can absolutely use LOS against melee classes - but doing so generally requires your team to pick up on the openings you're creating by doing so. Cloud Nine and Palaistra with needing to protect melee as they initiate is basically the same concept but in reverse.