On the issue of Limit Breaks (CC)

[Valence]

Prefacing this to say that this is only discussed within the realm of Crystalline Conflict. Frontlines is a whole different beast.

I do feel right now that besides a few other issues, LBs and the way they are balanced and designed are problematic. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the flavor of most of them and what they bring to each job. But some of their designs raise a lot of questions. I also want to bring up the not so obvious balance vs effort.

CC pvp right now is one of the deadliest, most lethal version of the arena pvp we have ever had, especially in crystal ranks. Without LBs into the equations, you can get punished extremely fast for bad positioning or defense, with the standard kits alone. Is this good or bad? I don't think it's bad actually. Maybe what could be adjusted is crowd control and rampant or too long hardstuns (especially miracle, you can go to hell), but that's another topic.

But on top of this you suddenly add LBs that are literally monster skills for some of them, and my biggest problem lies with the single target LBs:

1) They are not always the most game turning LBs, especially the ones that only focus on a single kill and don't snowball. For instance, party wide LBs like SMN (the easiest party wide nuke to use), BLM, DRG, WHM, but also PLD, AST, etc, tend to have a more directly game turning impact if used at the proper time, and that also requires some skill and strategy to use effectively.

2) Single target ones may bring some serotonin to the new player using them, but it just feels awful and discouraging when on the other end of them, be it for new players or veterans.

3) Most of them single target ones have counters, like barriers, mitigation, etc, but the effort required to deploy those counters is disproportionate and sometimes completely counter productive to your own damage and kit. Some just don't really have counters in certain cases.

-> In short, it's a problem of balance versus effort: single damage LBs aren't always the most game turning (unless you get a stupid streak of kills from Seiton or Zantetsuken, more on that later), but they're often the ones that feel the worst to play against. On top of it, they're tuned in a way that their deployment requires 10 times less effort than actually countering them or protecting against them. Some jobs don't even have the luxury to actually protect themselves against them.

I do believe that their design philosophy is flawed and could probably benefit from a rework for those reasons alone.