Please revert the animation snapshot changes.

[sleepyhat]

Ever since the 7.1 update PvP has felt absolutely rotten to play. I don't really want to debate other changes, there are many other threads about them, I could probably tolerate them if the nail in the coffin wasn't the animation changes. They are far too slow. So many of my moves simply ghost or don't go off. My ping isn't ideal, but it was manageable before the rework. After 7.1 it's become frustratingly difficult to execute anything.

A lot of my friends have simply stopped playing. I think some of them would probably return if this was fixed. Yeah, this is what's on my mind at Christmas

I don't really have anything else to say, but I wholeheartedly wish for this change, and no matter what your grievances are with the current state of PvP, I hope you agree.

[Mawlzy]

Ever since the 7.1 update PvP has felt absolutely rotten to play. I don't really want to debate other changes, there are many other threads about them, I could probably tolerate them if the nail in the coffin wasn't the animation changes. They are far too slow. So many of my moves simply ghost or don't go off. My ping isn't ideal, but it was manageable before the rework. After 7.1 it's become frustratingly difficult to execute anything.

A lot of my friends have simply stopped playing. I think some of them would probably return if this was fixed. Yeah, this is what's on my mind at Christmas

I don't really have anything else to say, but I wholeheartedly wish for this change, and no matter what your grievances are with the current state of PvP, I hope you agree.

A related issue that I haven't seen discussed much is how much "wasted damage" one pumps out with the new system.

It is fairly natural to target enemies whose health bars are dropping. For long animations, however, this will invariably be a mistake, because the opponent will die before you apply any damage, and yet the skill still activates and goes on cooldown!

This has always been true to some extent due to latency, but planning attacks now is completely counter-intuitive, particularly for solo players. Literally the worst PvP combat philosophy I've ever experienced.

[Mawlzy]

It's also why KOs and assists can feel so inconsistent some matches. I can't count the number of times I hit someone that still had HP, they suddenly drop to 0 when I know I didn't do that much damage, but the game doesn't count it as me having contributed to their demise at all so I get no BH, but the cooldown on my skills still starts, or worse, I completely waste my LB.

It's part of WHY I don't really like the whole FMF and Wildfire thing they expect me to do on MCH either, because even assuming I manage to kill the HP sponges running around now, there's no guarantee it'll count as a kill even when I was the person who got the last hit after completely unloading into them, because what I see on my screen isn't what actually happened and that enemy was already dead by someone else, so I only get the assist credit.

They got me out here trying to bust caps into ghosts, and man, I can tell you the busting doesn't feel good.

Yeah K/A credit has always seemed a bit random, but is far worse now. Apparently we have to determine what the health bars of enemies will be in a couple of seconds and plan our attacks around that. [1]

[1] This is, of course, impossible.

[Post]

At the minimum, I dislike that we have a mode where animations dictate when the damage is dealt, and yet there are stage hazards which are dictated by the cast bars like in PvE. It's a bit disorienting.

At the worst, we now have tooltips that are less accurate because they don't explain when you need to activate the button to actually get the effect.

Most animations also weren't designed to be responsive or snappy with the timing of your presses, they were designed to be flashy for job action trailers. Not really sure there's an upside. At best, it's just different from the previous version (and the rest of the game).

[Mawlzy]

At the minimum, I dislike that we have a mode where animations dictate when the damage is dealt, and yet there are stage hazards which are dictated by the cast bars like in PvE. It's a bit disorienting.

At the worst, we now have tooltips that are less accurate because they don't explain when you need to activate the button to actually get the effect.

Most animations also weren't designed to be responsive or snappy with the timing of your presses, they were designed to be flashy for job action trailers. Not really sure there's an upside. At best, it's just different from the previous version (and the rest of the game).

I think that's correct, and is a terrible way to design PvP.

[Commander_Justitia]

The delay to certain skills make survivability harder, as you queue in recuperate/purify later as usual because you have to wait for the animation to finish. Reaction time is player skill. It should be rewarded and not mitigated.

[Valence]

The K/A system has always been a problem for Battle High since BH rewards you five times more for netting a kill than an assist. Otherwise, it doesn't matter at all, especially in CC (except for DNC but then it's on you to specifically partner jobs that kill better).

[Satyagrahi]

The animation trouble is especially apparent with DRK right now.

I primarily log in to play DRK in CC, and it seems virtually impossible now to come out of guard without dying.

It used to be that you could have your guard up, and use an action to restore your HP. This does cancel your guard of course, but restoring your HP was a very good way to end guard.

Now you just die because your enemies get their hits in before your HP is restored. It feels very unplayable.

[Sheidyn]

If you asked something like this in literally any other game, where you press a button and apply the effect to a player immediatly if the character's animation is nowhere near done or the VFX did not even spawn yet they would call you an absolute lunatic, but for some reason we are settling for less in this game, and i fail to understand why aside from not wanting to adapt to something more accurate to what is happening on the screen is because you relied on this early snapshot cheesing that the game provided, or not willing to adapt to a more methodical gameplay where you can't send your stuff and know it will magically work because the enemy did not read your mind instead of reacting.

Examples such as:

- A SMN running in, pressing LB, and not being able to guard it even though realistically, Bahamut takes like 1-2 seconds on the animation to hit you, but since the damage snapshotted, the SMN is rewarded by pressing a button without any thinking aside from seeing people are not guarding. Should i just pray that when a summoner comes in i'll just magically predict when they are going to press a button and i press Guard a second earlier?

- A MCH LBing you without warning, and no matter what you do you cannot react, and take the damage for free for no reason because you somehow were not reading the MCH mind at the time, getting an easy kill on you

- A SAM doing full damage LB on you EVEN AFTER the debuff expired because they pressed the button when there was one second left.

- A WAR literally stunning you when they press the button and THEN landing on you, when clearly the point of the ability is to look like it's stunning everyone around them when they slam the floor. In what other PvP multiplayer game would this make any sense? They would say it looks stupidly silly.

- A WHM having a insta-stun button where the stun happens first, and the Beam shows up after, this is somehow more wanted? It looks absolutely janky and it feels unnatural.

The PVP experience before these changes was guessing and hoping you are right, relying essentially on random chances and cheesing some people with no skill required and no counterplay what so ever. Now the game does actually require skill because things get executed in real time (as real time as this game can be of course, the netcode in this game is far from perfect).

There is skill in predicting your enemy, no doubt, but there is only so much you can display that way, whereas reactionary gameplay where a player needs to be more careful, being aware of the enemy's resources, able to improvise and react to the enemy, shows a greater display of ability and a higher skill gap than having 2 dudes deciding to LB you and immediatly dying, not being able to do anything about it.

if they revert these changes, i will be disappointed because it means they are settling for less instead of wanting to provide a proper PvP competitive experience.