Uncapped AoE is ruining PvP Frontline/Rival Wings

[Scintilla]

snip

Positioning matters, hence why anyone actively looking out for the marked DRK can often avoid the vokes by distancing themselves from the rest of their team when they see the DRK coming. But that will save the individual, not the team. A couple of surviving players is useless when there's a full BH5 alliance scrabbling to leech what kills they can and a significant proportion of your team are now lying dead on the floor.

Some of this is no doubt down to player inexperience - you can mark the DRK and shout warnings at the start, but ultimately, you're placing your hopes on your team showing some awareness. Sometimes it's a disaster. Other times they fight well. But, from my own experience, even very good teams have a hard time vs certain premades. The effort needed to win a match as premade is almost non-existant. The effort needed to counter them is far higher. Difficulty can't all be attributed to player inexperience and 'get good':
The centre podium of Onsal is probably one of the most obvious bottlenecks, but it's by no means the only one. Shatter is another map where getting sufficient distance from your team to avoid a DRK voke is harder (obviously not the centre section, but the narrower corridors and side pockets of the map - particularly for the disadvantaged team, without a sloped entrance). Seal Rock is generally quite open so a well thought-out approach can matter significantly, but for a standard team the central passageways of stone are particularly narrow, should the fight happen to centre around there.

Generally any team with some situational awareness will likely fall back and begin to split when they see a marked DRK coming. Not ideal as you are temporarily withdrawing competition over that node solely because a single player ran in your direction (and they might not have actually used any skills at all if the split happened so quickly and unanimously that there was now nothing to voke). It's a super easy, low effort deterrant to hold back attacks. In the event you are caught by a DRK voke, the best you can really do is Guard. But for the premades which use RPR etc. to remove Guard, if you're caught, it's going to be instant death with nothing at all you can do to stop it.
In such cases, there's only really 2 ways to counter it:
1. Play with a premade of your own to counter theirs. Mind-numbingly dull playstyle for many and not really a practical option for many solo, casual players. Personally, I don't think players should ever be forced into forming a premade of their own solely to make a fair and balanced game.
2. Form an unspoken alliance with the other random team, put objectives as secondary, and both teams focus heavily on maintaining constant attacks on the premade team, camping outside their base throughout the game. Obviously, this is a lot easier said than done

[Scintilla]

MNK snip

1 - This requires the DRK to use Eventide whilst stood on a raised platform. On flat ground? Tough luck. We're just delaying the inevitable by a second or two.
2 - Assuming Eventide is off CD and used by the DRK for that particular voke. For a decent premade, just a regular voke is more than enough to wipe out a team while still enabling you to get out perfectly safetly, without the drop to 1HP.

Useful to kill the DRK but it's very situational and only beneficial in a very particular set of circumstances. It would make yourself a nuisance for the DRK, but not change the game to the extent that it would stop the premade.

RPR/DNC snip

Given their forward dash, they can approach with minimal opportunity to launch a targeted attack against them. DNC's animation makes it the most easily countered so I tend to see it used far less - usually it's RPR for the super short CD, no warning, and easy teleport in and out. Generally, if you see the DRK coming to the front of the group, you can be pretty sure the RPR is on their way too.

"Hopefully your team has enough people left to mount a counter attack" ... in reality - no.
Never happens, even with a good team who do show positional awareness.
When the game begins, awareness of the presence of a premade is limited - only a very few who are currently spamming and are aware that a premade are currently queuing or that are so familiar with the regular premades that they can recognise them instantly from appearance alone will identify them fast enough to avoid the initial attack. Anyone else tends to find out after the first team wipe. They attack and wipe out an unawares random team 1. They attack and wipe out an unawares random team 2.
By this point, both random teams are aware of the premade and that their use of Guard won't save them, but by then it's often too late. Already the premade has built a significant BH advantage. With a proportion of your team dead following subsequent attacks and at a BH disadvantage, lauching a viable counter attack without the assistance of the other random team is extremely unlikely.

WAR snip

I was talking more of the use of WAR against the premade, rather than their use of it against us. Like MNK, it often only delays the inevitable.
In terms of 'don't clump up to begin with', a basic knowledge of map layout is enough to know that's not 100% possible in every situation.

SGE snip

Obviously to use it defensively means being super well-prepared and for that reason, yes, baiting is perfectly plausible and a huge annoyance given the immensely long CD time of the LB. Which only goes to show the level of desperation that such games have reached when this is one of the few options available to stand any chance of defending your team through such attacks.

[Mawlzy]

When the game begins, awareness of the presence of a premade is limited - only a very few who are currently spamming and are aware that a premade are currently queuing or that are so familiar with the regular premades that they can recognise them instantly from appearance alone will identify them fast enough to avoid the initial attack. Anyone else tends to find out after the first team wipe. They attack and wipe out an unawares random team 1. They attack and wipe out an unawares random team 2.

The recognition a premade is running a session can be a bit double-edged, since there's a subset of players who basically give up when they find they're not on the premade team.

But you're absolutely right. The way you identify the premade currently is to get splatted by it, and once this has happened to both non-premade teams, the premade and half their team have massive amounts of BH and often a significant points lead. Detuning AoEs would mitigate the problem since it would slow down the rate of BH gain; currently good premades can hit BH5 within 3 minutes.

Suggestion: I would like to see anyone who has a queued as a 4-person light party be tagged in some way so they are instantly identifiable.

[IDontPetLalas]

The recognition a premade is running a session can be a bit double-edged, since there's a subset of players who basically give up when they find they're not on the premade team.

But you're absolutely right. The way you identify the premade currently is to get splatted by it, and once this has happened to both non-premade teams, the premade and half their team have massive amounts of BH and often a significant points lead. Detuning AoEs would mitigate the problem since it would slow down the rate of BH gain; currently good premades can hit BH5 within 3 minutes.

Suggestion: I would like to see anyone who has a queued as a 4-person light party be tagged in some way so they are instantly identifiable.

First of all, I agree that a subset of players does give up as you say- personally, I find too quickly- however, it is what is.

Secondly- your suggestion of marking premades is so simple it's brilliant. If I was on a premade , I would find it better to have a special mark for premades than using the existing marks- I would much rather have the existing ones used to focus targets, and if I was in an alliance and I was a new player I would expect that it would help them to assist the premades, Perhaps that's wishful thinking on my part.

[Colt47]

Premade groups vs non-premade groups is a completely different issue. The reality is that DF frontlines should be a completely separate pool from pre-made and not even allow someone to queue with a party, since it is intended to be a chaotic mess where people are joining mostly for the roulette bonuses and likely not even there for engaging in the pvp content proper.

The AOE problem is circumstantial to the volume of players involved in Frontlines and no real damage fall off for increasing number of targets.

The DRK discussion feels sort of situational. Guy comes in and says people need to git gud with using guard and apparently doesn't realize the other strategy of dealing with a DRK doing a chain is to just run through someone else who has a bigger model then yourself while they try to target. Either way both involve predicting you are the one to be targeted, and most of the time they target people who are playing jobs that signal "this guy is a newbie and an easy kill" because they are playing Machinist or some other job that doesn't have AOE skills or good mitigation skills.

[Mecia]

Here's hoping they do some proper FL balance in the upcoming patch.

(They wont)

[brancinaed]

Capped AOE would be worse due to targeting problems and deathballs would become invincible. Deathballing is already so powerful, however the vulnerability to be wiped by coordinated burst is one weakness. Just theorycrafting, it would be become impossible to kill stacked groups of people because it quickly gets very complicated who is damaged by what area of effect.

Trying to target an individual in a group is already hard enough. Not being able to just damage everybody in a group with AOE would make picking out individual low health targets a necessity. Ick.

[IDontPetLalas]

Capped AOE would be worse due to targeting problems and deathballs would become invincible. Deathballing is already so powerful, however the vulnerability to be wiped by coordinated burst is one weakness. Just theorycrafting, it would be become impossible to kill stacked groups of people because it quickly gets very complicated who is damaged by what area of effect.

Trying to target an individual in a group is already hard enough. Not being able to just damage everybody in a group with AOE would make picking out individual low health targets a necessity. Ick.

On the contrary, capping AOE makes a great deal of sense and if it introduces some skill to be be able to target specific players instead of just hitting a single button- then so much the better. Focussing down specific targets should be the way to go, it should take some basic intelligence and determination and coordinated burst to finish your target off.

[brancinaed]

On the contrary, capping AOE makes a great deal of sense and if it introduces some skill to be be able to target specific players instead of just hitting a single button- then so much the better. Focussing down specific targets should be the way to go, it should take some basic intelligence and determination and coordinated burst to finish your target off.

Frontlines is 24v24v24, so imagine Player 1 - Player 19. Imagine you have 19 targets stacked, then 4 enemies show up and cast conal Area of Effect (AOE).

What AOE damages who in the stack? If the targeting logic is good, ideally lowest health enemies are targeted first or squishier targets before tankier targets, people may die but the only way to guarantee any one person is hit would be targeting them.

Since there are 19 targets stacked, clicking may be ineffective, we have to tab quite a long list of people... ugh.

Are low health targets receiving AOE damage before higher health targets? Are ranged taking AOE damage before melee because they take more damage? Is it based off distance? This requires all sorts of new balancing and weird interactions that are not as intuitive as area of effect is area of effect.

Capping AOE will require all new targeting logic, it may be less intuitive than uncapped AOE, and it would make grouping up tightly have no meaningful weaknesses. A more realistic solution to problematic AOE is reducing range or damage rather than reworking how AOE works.

[IDontPetLalas]

Frontlines is 24v24v24, so imagine Player 1 - Player 19. Imagine you have 19 targets stacked, then 4 enemies show up and cast conal Area of Effect (AOE).

What AOE damages who in the stack? If the targeting logic is good, ideally lowest health enemies are targeted first or squishier targets before tankier targets, people may die but the only way to guarantee any one person is hit would be targeting them.

Since there are 19 targets stacked, clicking may be ineffective, we have to tab quite a long list of people... ugh.

Are low health targets receiving AOE damage before higher health targets? Are ranged taking AOE damage before melee because they take more damage? Is it based off distance? This requires all sorts of new balancing and weird interactions that are not as intuitive as area of effect is area of effect.

Capping AOE will require all new targeting logic, it may be less intuitive than uncapped AOE, and it would make grouping up tightly have no meaningful weaknesses. A more realistic solution to problematic AOE is reducing range or damage rather than reworking how AOE works.

Consider, somehow this was solved in games that were designed for PvP, and we had literally hundreds of people onscreen at one time, so forgive if I find your diagram rather underwhelming, and while I find brainstorming useful, I honestly believe your introduced way too much complexity.

In the specific game that I'm thinking of when we had fort sieges it wasn't unusual to have cluster of 50, 100 or even more people in one area. The game did not introduce anything so complex in its logic as "who is squishier, who is lower health, etc". Instead it was based solely upon the distance to target. It was up to the player skill - and if you are dealing with a battle on that scale, you should not be tab targeting anyway but keybinding and hitting marked targets (anyway I abhor tab-targeting in PvP in general).

In that specific game, it wasn't "weird" interactions, to summarize some classes and attacks: melee would take more damage at close range, but they had more defense to those melee attacks, whereas magical ranged would take more damage to melee attacks but they'd be at range and they would take less damage to magical ranged attacks