Battle High needs to change/be removed

[Parthmakeo]

I think at this point in the game's life we need to have the talk about Battle Highs and how one team if early enough gets a bunch of them is nigh unstoppable, leaving a third team to be so drastically down in the dirt they have absolutely no way of recovering. Especially if they are the focus of being farmed for said highs.
I've lost and won matches where team three is usually 90% less points than the first two places by a large margin and some stay like that after the first conflict, leading to the situation above of both teams harassing that third party not because they are a threat but because they are free and easy 'Battle High' generators with how distraught and disjointed they become.
I do enjoy PVP. I put in a few too many matches of CC as well. It's a nice diversion and throw myself into fast paced action on occasion.

Option one: Get rid of battle high entirely.

Just remove the concept of a battle high to make things a bit fair. It only benefits the people who can consistently get their group to coordinate deaths and ramps up to where there is no hope in even dealing damage back.
Yes, it is 'rewarding' the people winning with more survivability and damage but the snowball effect it has only diminishes any attempt for struggling teams to climb back up. I've been in many matches as both a winning and losing team. Even with max Battle High i find the system downright unenjoyable. The losing team no longer has a means of recovery.
Removing the system entirely would make it chaos and deadly but offer up potential real big comebacks over "Kill more ppl = nigh invincible"

Option two: Change the Battle High system

Right now the Battle High works in 5 tiers. Starting from 10% increased damage and healing to a max of 50%. Battle High on it's own concept sounds nice and rewarding but eversince the overhaul in 6.1, damage is fixed rates and survivability becomes higher due to the potency heal increase of your self heal. I think it should change the values to be more like this...

Battle High 1: 10% Damage/healing increase
Battle High 2: 20% Damage/healing Increase
Battle High 3: 30% Damage/healing increase, 20% Damage Received
Battle High 4: 40% Damage/healing Increase, 30% Damage Received
Battle High 5: 50% Damage/healing increase, 40% Damage Received

The idea is that after BH3, you are now a more wanted target and surviving with such powerful damage increases should be a detriment in order to prevent snowballing and risky plays that see one person able to decimate 3 players singlehandedly with no drawback all because they killed players early enough to run.
If a tank is worried about these bonuses, reminder that all tank jobs already start with a -50% damage taken modifier in a Frontline to compensate for the amount of players in a given battle. All this would do is reduce their damage taken up to -10% at a BH5. Same with most other melee like Samurai and Monk.

With the damage increasing, so too should the player with higher highs be easier to take out as a true risk/reward progression.

These are only two ideas i had and i want to hear other ideas or why you think Battle High should remain as a team denier snowball mechanic to guarantee your wins for stacking them up...but knowing how PVP forums are 9/10 people will be unnessicarily hostile.

[Divinemights]

Option 1 is a big no thanks.
Battle High is an incentive for players to get better and removing it also encourages more leeches

Option 2 is also not going to work because that is what old Battle High works already. Level 5 BH players will showing as BIG icon on the map. It is changed for a reason

[Valence]

The reason for battle high to exist is to force teams to actually engage into pvp and attack each other. If you remove it, you end up validating the cringe, wide spread "just let them fight" take, which it is fundamentally meant to combat. You know, that one:



Perhaps the problem is that people don't understand this in general, that it's not intuitive. Because in reality even if your team has a fighting spirit or you're leading them to take the correct course of action, sometimes they just get crushed in succession at every fair engagement. But perhaps your team also deserve it when this happens tbh, and there is ways to play around it, like flanking the winning team, deleting their battle high players (which is frankly relatively easy to do).

Note, the losing teams have an increased LB rate generation, especially the third one. It's not nothing if people know how to make use of it.

Now I'm not gonna say that BH doesn't have issues, notably that it benefits some jobs immensely and scales like crazy on them (AoE jobs especially), while it doesn't really do anything for some others.

I have legit honestly no idea how it would work without the BH system, whether it would be better, just the same old, or worse tbh.

On option 2, I don't think this is going to work with such numbers. Remember that even the squishy ranged jobs have something like 15% innate DR and they get literally deleted as soon as they get in. Imagine a BH5 melee player with even less than that? Perhaps if you lower their DR by 15 or 20 at BH5, maybe? That would bring them on par with dancers somewhat?

Either way they do need to remove the BH healing effect on recuperate, this is just ridiculous. It has however to stay on other healing actions since they are part of the kit of their respective jobs.

[Teno]

"Let them fight" is the biggest plague in frontlines, most notably seen on the infamous garbage snow map, where one side racks up BH and deletes the ice lickers.

Besides, in the current state of damage reduction, BH is pretty much the only way to carry more weight as a solo player. So if it is to be removed, there better be some adjustments.

[Aravell]

I don't think BH should be removed as it does encourage people to play actively rather than passively waiting for node spawns. I think it's fair enough for people to be rewarded for doing well.

That being said, I do think that since everyone is responsible for their own survival now, the healing received increase should be removed from BH, the boost to Recuperate makes an already tanky melee even more annoying to kill, base Recuperate is enough already if you play smart and don't overstay your welcome.

[Elfidan]

I feel like something they could do that would make pvping more enticing would be to make objectives have hp bars so you can "sabotage" them for other teams or heal them for instance on ice. How about making BH decay over time so you have to work at it constantly.

[Blueyes]

If Battle High remains, I would make two changes to it.

1. Remove the healing potency increase from all ranks of Battle High.

2. Reduce the damage dealt increase from 10% per rank to 5% for a total increase of 25% at BH5.

Players would continue to feel rewarded for playing well, but the gap between BH0 and BH5 becomes less extreme.

Modifiers for damage dealt and damage taken may also require adjustment in accordance with these suggestions.

[OliviaLugria]

Option 3: Get kills, don't die

[Mawlzy]

If Battle High remains, I would make two changes to it.

1. Remove the healing potency increase from all ranks of Battle High.

2. Reduce the damage dealt increase from 10% per rank to 5% for a total increase of 25% at BH5.

Players would continue to feel rewarded for playing well, but the gap between BH0 and BH5 becomes less extreme.

Modifiers for damage dealt and damage taken may also require adjustment in accordance with these suggestions.

That might work. Though I doubt it'd be an issue as is were it not for the way it acts as a force multiplier for meta stacks.

[Genz]

lol no

We could argue, at best, that Battle high is superfluous, because the players who regularly get BH5 are already 10+ times more powerful that the "average" player.
So even if it was removed, it wouldn't change much.

("average player" in the case of frontline doesn't mean much, since the level is abyssal because of many other reasons - reward too easy to get, lack of tutorial, etc.)

Battle high is for everyone who actually try, and a small hint for new players that they're getting better. The actual problem is there are currently far too many people who shouldn't queue for PvP.
It's also a useful information for the opponent, showing who is dangerous and who is the easy target.

and about this weird suggestion about increasing damage taken ... punishing players for playing well? what's this? FFXIV 1.0 ?