Revert the damage reduction

[Whalaqee]

Lower the damage reduction, back to original pvp update levels when Crystaline Conflict first came out.

Melees across the board got a damage reduction buff is nonsenical. If it was just tanks that would make sense, they are meant to take hits. Monk, Reaper, Samurai, Ninja, and Dragoon should have 40% DR at most, not 60% like the tanks.

As its honestly more preferrable at the moment to take potshots at a healer or a caster or a ranged-physical because of how much meatier the attacks are against them than a samurai for example.

Like if a samurai has 58,500 HP for example. Balance wise giving them 60% DR is giving them that much more effective HP. As if I were to deal like 36,000 damage with a hit to one from a Marksman's Spite, a limit break, I am not damaging them for 36,000. I am damaging them for 14,400. If they were at 40% DR, I would be damaging them for 21,600. What this process has done is effectively nerfed Marksman's Spite when used against melee by a whopping 7,200 damage.

And to keep using Marskman's Spite as an effective measuring tool lets compare it to the non-melees. Originally they had 20% DR. This meant they took 28,800 damage from it. But since they now have 30% that means they only take, 25,200. Which is a nerf to Marksman's Spite versus them by 3,600.

But were not done with showing how borked that DR change is. For it to get close to the old damage values respectively in frontlines the battle high requirements is different.

Marksman's Spite vs Nonmelee requires Battle High 2. Which in that case means you overshoot the goal by 1440 damage as your attack has a damage value of 43,200. If you only settle for Battle High you are 1,390 damage shy of 28,800.

Marksman's Spite vs Melee requires a massive Battle High 5. As that means it is a 54,000 damage attack that only deals 21,600 to melees. Which is the same as it was before they got buffed from 40% DR to 60%.

And if that is not silly enough, that same 54,000 damage attack from a battle high 5 machinist basically is a 37,800 damage nuke to jobs that are not melee.

And if that is not ludicrous enough, don't forget, machinist has its autorook turret. Which aside from a 6000 damage aoe, it also applies a debuff to those damaged by making them take 10% increased damage.

What would be even dumber is buffing Marksman's Spite damage and other damage sources like it, even ones that are not a limit break, to compensate. The reason it is a bad idea is the 60% from melees requires a far greater value in how much a potency is buffed by to make it impactful enough. And yet that risks making casters, healers, and aiming that much more fragile.

TL;DR:

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Agreed, the damage reduction across the board is ridiculous. Certain melees already were naturally better at survival due to useful ranged tools (NIN Fuma Shuriken, Hyosho Ranryu, Goka Mekyaku) or mitigation (DRG Roar, SAM Chiten, Meikyo Shisui CC resist), so a whopping -60% reduction (i.e. over double of effective HP) was massive overkill.

If their worry was the LB nuking of Afflatus: Purgation, Summon Bahamut or Sky Shatter, then they could've implemented LB damage coefficients to reduce LB damage further and keep damage reduction at a more reasonable level of like 20-30%, so the normal tools don't feel like wet noodles.

[Kansene]

NIN is definitely the biggest offender there.
They have the tools to be comfortably spending a lot of time at range, a big shield, a vanish effect that forces people to de-target them, and a stun. Then you also slap them with -60% damage taken from absolutely everything.
In FL they're simply too good at too many things because of it.
They have the tools of a squishy hit'n run character but the raw punishment soaking capabilities of an S-tier tank. The only things missing now is for them to get good AoE and external heals, then they can be the best at literally everything.

Conversely, DNC is a job that actually should have more DR. Constantly forced into melee range. It looks so sad when a DNC dashes in to plant a strategic LB, gets animation locked, then dies before it even goes off. They literally need to be in the thick of the enemy lines to get a good result, and ideally they even need to stick around to deal damage and extend the duration.

I appreciate that the devs wanted to overhaul PvP, but even CC feels like it was a complete "set and forget" kinda deal. It took forever to fix the PLD Onsal exploit, and the blanket DR is the laziest "fix" I've seen in ages. The jobs of the same roles still play very differently, and need individual tuning, simple as.

[Towa-Musa]

this, make pvp fun again! please!

[Whalaqee]

-snip for character limit reasons-

Yea Ninja and Monk are honestly the most obnoxious ones to pin down. With the current stuff like 60% DR, they are the reason why we can't have diminishing returns on crowd control effects. Like if I had a nickel for every time I have seen 4 or 5 people having to gang up on a single Monk or Ninja just to knock out them, I would have enough money to pay for a yearly sub.

Your also right they should be just directly tweaking the potency numbers instead of this 60% nightmare. As at least then they could start to find some sweet spot. Like for Marksman's Spite as its the highest potency I can think of at the moment, maybe 36000 is too high, maybe 35000 or 34000 or 33000.

-snip for character limit reasons-

Mostly my own experiences with frontlines, but ninja also just has the tools to be extremely annoying, like if you can get the aggro of a few people from an enemy team, you can lead them on a wild goose chase. Sure the ninja isn't contributing to whatever objective, but neither are the people getting baited. The smart ones realize what the ninja is doing and bail, while the rest just tunnel vision.

Agreed on Dancer. It really just feels awkward to play with their damage reduction. As even its basic circular aoe ability they channel requires them to get into melee.

this, make pvp fun again! please!

Very much this. Currently the main things I have found fun in frontlines are

Monk: Shatter/Secure where I just lurk in areas to purposefully knock people off ledges.
Ninja: Uncapping points or capping enemy. Sometimes leading people on a chase, sometimes baiting them into my team. Also just using the limit break to mess with stuff like enemys with a big battle high like dark knights or ninjas/dragoons/samurai.
Machinist: Similar to monk. Also being that person that just puts an autoturret on capture spots on Onsal to prevent captures and get cheeky assists.
Bard: Acting as a trapper/catcher when helping out someone like a dragoon for example to make them fed; focus target on hunting partner to keep track of them in the chaos.

And thats because i just generally feel the player experience has become less fun since they damage reduction buffs.

[True-to-Caesar]

60% is indeed a lot, I just play GNB and WAR in Frontlines (MCH when I was playing CC).

No wonder the monks and ninjas seem to be more tanky and do deal more damage.

As Whalaqee said, there is not a time I have seen a ninja getting killed unless there’s at minimum 3-4 players to chain stun/bind and keep up with gap closers+sprint.
Same for monks but to a much less degree.

4+ players to kill one, not a tank too. How is that fair ?


Sprint should also have a cooldown and short duration (like 10s), it’s way too braindead to use.

[Cidel]

I'm also of this opinion. It's time; the flat Frontlines damage reductions need to be dialed back. It stunk of a lazy kneejerk reaction to melees and tanks getting overwhelmed from the sheer amount of LBs flying around when they implemented it. Not so differently from when their solution to WHMs and SMNs stacking and spamming their LBs is to just outright nerf their entire damage output in Frontlines rather than singling out what the actual problem is with those jobs.

As I said back then, I'll say now: melees and tanks are playing some Dynasty Warriors-lite with the insane amount of survivability they have in Frontlines because of the 60% damage reduction. Because of it, direct skirmishes are easily decided by whoever has the largest presence of melee and tanks by dint of every single one of them being some sort of stonewall. Nevermind tanks, attempting to kill any melee DPS with any less than 4 decent players (meaning on average you'll probably need more) is an exercise in futility without the assistance of moderate to high Battle High teammates or a NIN's LB to kill them quicker.

I get that they were probably paranoid about the "meta" being all ranged DPS sniping everything before it can even get in range to function (again), but they swung so hard in the opposite direction to the point where the correct answer to every confrontation in Frontlines is to single-out healers and ranged DPS that are even marginally overextended to even the fringes of a fight instead of punishing the Leeroy Jenkins melees and tanks that will run in and soak up an insane amount of punishment and live to run back to their team and Elixir to repeat. Part of the reason DRK+DRG stacked LBs are so effective is because it is incredibly difficult to punish them due to how much focused fire they can live through.

And as OP stated, MCH's LB is a joke (and almost always a waste) to any melee unless the MCH has a large Battle High discrepancy against their target, otherwise the melee only needs to hit Recuperate maybe once during the crosshairs animation to almost completely negate whatever is coming their way. The thing I appreciate about NIN's LB in Frontlines is that they can largely circumvent this insane damage reduction nonsense and cause people to be mindful of their HP levels and even make people with BH5 have to respect the risk of falling under 50% HP.

The problem will always be that the PvP person team will almost never fine-tune anything PvP-related for Frontlines. They will be and have been general sweeping blanket buffs and nerfs without actually interacting with or addressing specific abilities because I imagine it's too much of a mess for them to give abilities different effects and potencies between Crystalline and Frontlines.

What I think is the real big problem is that people are throwing out LBs way too frequently, which is where most of the imbalance and craziness is coming from. Some jobs are way too frequent as well, WHMs shouldn't have their LBs filled just from running to the middle platform from the spawn at the start of Secure. If you ask me, all jobs shouldn't be getting off more than 2 LBs, exceptions being the less game-changing ones, maybe they can have 3. That is, the LB gauge needs to either fill much slower or it shouldn't be filling at all unless you are in combat. LBs could stand to be more tactical and nuanced rather than "let's see how many I can fire off in this one game."

[Llynethil]

Tank dr is fine, melee dps ones are not.

Sam, drg and rpr can keep like 30% or so, nin and mnk need to be lowered to 20%

[Knot_D]

DNC, SGE, and RDM need that DR rather than NIN and MNK imo.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

-due to multiple "snip for character limit reasons-

If you post within character limit and then edit, you can circumvent the 3000 character limit.

1.) Write what you want.
2.) Mark and Ctrl + X to cut out what is too much.
3.) Post, then edit, then Ctrl + V to paste back in what you were missing.