Problems I'd like to see addressed in PvP

[Rexxus]

To preface this post, I don't really come to the main forums often - or any FFXIV social for that matter. But I just wanted to put some things to writing. You all are welcome to disregard and have this topic buried into obscurity Especially if the things I discuss have been talked to death already.

Been spending the last several months farming Frontlines for win achievements, and I've narrowed down exactly what makes the PvP in this game... not fun? At least for me anyway.

1) The elephant in the room - the server validation is pretty awful. While I don't think this is new for FFXIV, the snappy, fast paced combat of this EW revamp really highlights how bad things can be. Hitting purify and then either a) having your crowd control be cleansed, but you're immediately hit with a new crowd control before your 5 second immunity goes into effect, or b) hitting cleanse on a crowd control that the server determined had already fallen off, so now you don't get immunity even though you were clearly still affected on your end.
2) To piggyback off the first issue - the validation for when effects/damage take place is all over the place. I will often see a DRG land on my character, hear the sound effect from the attack, and my first response will be to hit my self heal to deal with the damage. Only... for the heal to go off BEFORE the DRG's damage applies to my character. The DRK Eventide is equally awful, hitting me a full 3 seconds after Guard has been applied.
3) And the final, and most bothersome of them all: The Animation Lock. The entire reason the DRK meta exists right now is a result of this one issue. When you're being 'pulled' or 'pushed' with an effect, there's a short (0.5-1.5s) animation lock that occurs to relocate your character to where the game thinks you should be. The only problem is that you're not immune to damage or crowd control during this effect. And you can be pulled/pushed again during this lock. Which just makes it an un-counterable crowd control effect. Not all that problematic in crystal conflict, but a death sentence in Frontlines.

There's a lot of things I'd like to see them change: Diminishing returns on crowd control effects, bumping down the melee FL damage resist, a complete overhaul of battlehigh, limits to number of targets affected by aoe abilities, ect. ect. But I think the one thing that would help most of all - simply let us continue to move while being pushed/pulled.

Will any of this happen in 6.4? I doubt it. But a couple -1000 potency nerfs sure ain't going to fix the fundamental problems.

[Elfidan]

The animation locks on limit breaks are super frustrating. I wish SE valued gameplay over graphics.

[Novani]

General moves for Monk fall under the same category, have lost count of how many times a move has just not consented to being used because of reasons beyond comprehension. Overall, yeah, compared to many of its counterparts, FF14 suffers severely from trying to be fancy with animation without actually applying an appreciable difference in gameplay effect, in PvE environments it's something you can work around, but the more on point PvP is requiring players to be, the more noticeable the difference will be.

In all honesty, it's here more than anywhere where the frustration comes in. Not the damage potency, not the duration of cooldowns, not imbalanced classes (though the way some interact with the game's systems is definitely not evenly scaled), not even the map design. It's the general lack of consistent reactivity, even with good connections. A fancy animation ultimately achieves nothing versus actual gameplay impact, it might seem minor in the design board or even just from watching things, but in the heat of gameplay, it is a major oft overlooked component, especially since actions that are attempting to be weaved in often get lost in the process with some of them.

[Vatom]

Glad someone said it I was beginning to think I was the only one

[Elucesta]

I just need certain classes to be more balanced, imo monk, dragoon, whm, abs a few others are a bit overturned. Also, yes to limiting CC spam/lock.

[Rexxus]

In all honesty, it's here more than anywhere where the frustration comes in. Not the damage potency, not the duration of cooldowns, not imbalanced classes (though the way some interact with the game's systems is definitely not evenly scaled), not even the map design. It's the general lack of consistent reactivity, even with good connections. A fancy animation ultimately achieves nothing versus actual gameplay impact, it might seem minor in the design board or even just from watching things, but in the heat of gameplay, it is a major oft overlooked component, especially since actions that are attempting to be weaved in often get lost in the process with some of them.

You summed it up pretty well right here. Its not the balancing of the jobs that makes pvp frustrating right now.

Its the way pvp "Feels" when compared to games I've played in the past. This game mode has to be smooth and responsive, and right now... it uh.. isn't.

[Archeron]

Definetely got most of the changes I've been pushing for, for awhile now. Theres a lot of potential in FFXIV pvp but I just can't see the developers putting any time or resources into it. They've made it clear over the years that they don't care about pvp with some of the nonsensical changes they make, or more specifically they Don't make.

To add on to this, They need to balance Front lines, and Crystaline conflict SEPERATELY. They're two completely different game modes, played in entirely different ways, but share the EXACT SAME balancing, excluding melee DR in front lines. Is it really that hard for them to change potencies of skills between modes?

[Rexxus]

Definetely got most of the changes I've been pushing for, for awhile now. Theres a lot of potential in FFXIV pvp but I just can't see the developers putting any time or resources into it. They've made it clear over the years that they don't care about pvp with some of the nonsensical changes they make, or more specifically they Don't make.

To add on to this, They need to balance Front lines, and Crystaline conflict SEPERATELY. They're two completely different game modes, played in entirely different ways, but share the EXACT SAME balancing, excluding melee DR in front lines. Is it really that hard for them to change potencies of skills between modes?

They actually do this. SMN gets a... I think its 20%? Damage reduction in Frontlines. There are others as well.

That being said, I don't think the fundamental problem with PVP in FFXIV is individual balancing of abilities. I think that there's a bigger issue with just responsiveness and timing of when things occur. You can tweak individual potencies for days and not make the game feel any better to play.

Here's a simple example: Why is it you can't just hit an ability button and automatically dismount? Why does being silenced keep you from dismounting? Mount/Dismount is considered a spell? What?

[Archeron]

That being said, I don't think the fundamental problem with PVP in FFXIV is individual balancing of abilities. I think that there's a bigger issue with just responsiveness and timing of when things occur. You can tweak individual potencies for days and not make the game feel any better to play.

The fundamental problem with PvP is this; Square Enix Doesn't care about the PvP community, its opinions, or the competitive scenes integrity. They're never going to give us the fast responsive servers people have been begging them for years to have. You can just scroll through these forums for proof of that, Or even the JP forums since thats all their team seems to take feedback from.

Job balancing is left as the second biggest issue with PvP. Salted/Shatter combo in frontlines is completely, and utterly broken. Games with a lot of DRK/DRG feel almost unplayable, completely boring, and not fun to play. But if you nerf or change the abilities it will render them broken, or unplayable in CC. This is why they NEED to balance these game modes seperately.

The last biggest issue FFXIV PvP has, at least as far as frontlines is concerned is the maps in general. Seal rock is completely unbalanced, especially for the North spawn. Borderland Ruins played too much like a PvE map, and didn't incentivize people to play defensive. Seal Rock, and Onsal are too RNG heavy. Don't get me wrong I absolutely love Onsal out of all of our maps, but the spawning of the end game nodes is absolutely ridiculous. The winning team should be the team that played the best by holding objectives and killing the other teams, not by whoever got the random 3 lucky S nodes in their spawn area in the last 3 minutes of the game.

And yes I'm aware they're rebalancing shatter, (The changes sound like it'll make it worse than it currently is. We'll see about that in 6.4) and Borderland ruins is probably being shot in the back of the head never to be seen again, just like Astralagos. All we can do is throw temper tantrums on their forums, Unsub, and whine at the devs on twitter until they decide its time to implement more nonsensical changes made with our feedback not in mind.

[JamieRose]

The fundamental problem with PvP is this; Square Enix Doesn't care about the PvP community, its opinions, or the competitive scenes integrity. They're never going to give us the fast responsive servers people have been begging them for years to have. You can just scroll through these forums for proof of that, Or even the JP forums since thats all their team seems to take feedback from.

You pretty much hit the nail on the head. The FFXIV team doesn't care about cleaning up PvP and for all of Yoshi P's bluster about "You can go play other games!" they still want you to go in and play PvP by using a battle pass to enforce it.