Dear Devs: The Crystaline Conflict Ranked changes we want to see

[Bureda]

I hope you take these suggestions into consideration and they help make your work easier. I know you're all working hard.

Overtime Changes:
- If the losing team is not contesting the crystal during overtime, the timer to win should be much shorter. (for example instead of 3 seconds it should be 2 seconds)
- Breaking the 50% checkpoint completely should mean a victory if the enemy team hasn't done so at full time. Give purpose to breaking the checkpoint. If both teams are at the 50% checkpoint, the first team that breaks the lock at overtime wins the game but if both teams break the checkpoint before overtime then overtime comes into effect.
- Please add some sort of healing/shield dampening during overtime.
- Losing team unlocks checkpoint/pushes crystal too fast when it comes to comeback games. You can wipe the enemy team multiple times just for them to wipe your team once. This is not very rewarding and doesn't feel good. It doesn't promote playing to win before overtime.

Match Quality:
- Please remove Platinum Rank safety net, move it down to Gold if you must have it. Have a bigger gap to Crystal.
- Add a new rank above Diamond and before Crystal rank.
- It's very obvious that you get people that shouldn't be a certain rank because they got a lucky break because getting to Crystal is too easy.
- Bring back observable match history for ranked. Make people see their own accountability.
- Portraits at the start should show your Stars or Crystal Credit

Leaderboard Improvements:
- Instead of higher rating it should be current rating.
- Add Crystal Points decay after a certain inactive period.

Match Making:
- Make Match Making more reasonable, it feels and acts too much like a gamble simulator sometimes. You get very unfair match making just for it to be barely evened out by the star system.
- Take overall games played into account. Someone that has 10 games shouldn't be paired with someone that has over 1000 games.
- Use a better and more complex algorithm to match people.

New Player Onboarding:
- Use The Fold Arena to teach basic Crystal Conflict mechanic, general skills like Recoup and Guard.
- In the PvP Guide there should be videos on how to properly use a skill.
- Add a PvP tutorial and agreement that players must do before they start doing ranked.
- PvP tutorial should be instanced and fully acted out instead of just blocks of text from an NPC, so that way they can visually learn and adapt.


Please continue reading below

[Bureda]

Ranked Rewards:
- Bring back old PvP rewards.
- Use Commendation Crystals to purchase old and current PvP rewards.
- Gold should get 1 Commendation Crystal, Platinum 2, Diamond 3, Crystal 4, top 300 8, top 100 8 more.
- Top 30 players get a special title plus all the previous rewards.
- Top 10 players get a special title plus all the previous rewards.
- Top 1 player should get housing trophy reward, statue of their character in Wolvers' Den Pier Aetheryte on their Data Centre. Plus all the previous rewards.
- Rework Commendation Crystal NPC to make it fair for everyone and reward achieving players.

Currency Exchange:
- Allow us to sell Wolf Collars on the Marketboard or trade them
- Give us more items to spend Wolf Marks on.
- Give us more items to spend Crystal Trophies on.

Balance Changes:
- Healers do too much. They heal too much, damage too much, pressure too much and are one of few jobs that reduce healing. You have to mirror match to counter essentially, makes no sense. (2 healers vs 1 healer will mostly lose. A team without a healer will most always lose)
- Make tanks, tanks or more bruiser. Gun Breaker being unkillable 1vs1 (guaranteed objective holding) or doing excess levels of damage makes no sense for a 'tank'. Why does a tank have smite/execute.
- Remove Cover from the game, give paladins other ways to buff team. Intervention/Testudo.
- Balance the game based on top 300 player performance, not from casual games and other sources.
- Make counter damage windows smaller.
- More frequent and aggressive balance changes. Minor potency changes do not affect the meta like they should or how the patch note briefing claims it does.
- Make maintenance/more frequent balance changes just for the PVP Zone so you don't disturb the PVE player base.
- Introduce crowds control diminishing returns or add crowd control resistance.
- Reduce animation length for combat abilities.
- Improve snapshot of most skills.

Quick Chat:
- Give ups a ping system like League of Legends or Apex Legends.
- Add more Quick Chat options like: Stop Pushing Objective, Synchronise LB, Low HP Warning (only usable when under 50% HP),
- Two Special Chats for map terrain warning or reminder to get: for example, Oasis buff because Heatwave is happening or Sandpit is stirring, Volcano bombs are blowing up, Turbulence is happening or Pneumatic Parades.

Communication:
- Monthly Newsletter (Like FF11/Helldivers 2) from the Devs on what they been up to in regards to content in the game.
- Can we please get more communication in regards Competitive PVP and balances.
- Can we get an English Community Manager for PvP.
- Can we get a PVP Mega Thread or PVP Improvements in the English PVP forums.


Please continue reading below

[Bureda]

Job Specific Balance:

Tanks:
Dark Knight:
- Reduce LB timer to 90 seconds.
- Disesteem should go through guard, or fix the description for it.
- Add cure potency on LB.
- Add cure potency on Impalement instead of lifesteal.
- Snapshot for Salted Earth should be more instant.

Gunbreaker:
- Blasting Zone should do a 8k damage, not have a smite effect.
- Rough Divide should have 1 charge.
- Reduce Nebula reflect down to 2k.

Paladin:
- Remove Cover.
- Add Intervention (reduces damage on target, and if Paladin has Holy Sheltron on, reduce damage taken further and add regen)
- Holy Sheltron should be a defensive skill only, not both at the same time. Make shield 12k, remove the Heavy from the shield, damage and remove Sword Oath.
- Add Heavy to Imperator.
- Imperator should give Sword Oath

Warrior:
- Bloodwhetting should have 10% damage reduction, give it cure potency instead of lifesteal.
- Thrill of Battle should give you damage reduction.



Healers:
Astro:
- Remove Dash/Mobility
- Nerf the healing on Macrocosmos (Add a limit to the damage it can absorb and convert to healing)
- Remove the 30% healing increase and healing reduction added to LB (make limit break longer to get)
- Oracle should only stun one person or remove it

Sage
- Most balanced green job
- Buff LB to 90 seconds
- Increase healing slightly
- Give the skill Philosophia to them

Scholar:
- Reduce Damage, when they go into LB Form they deal too much damage
- Make Seraph 90 seconds
- Make Seraphim 105 seconds
- Nerf healing reduction to 10%, it's too spammable.

White Mage
- Nerf LB Damage
- Increase LB timer
- Reduce LB range, why is it 40 yalms?

Please continue reading below

[Bureda]

Melee DPS:
Dragoon:
- Dragoon is in a good spot there's just too much healing/shielding in the game due to imbalanced green jobs.

Monk:
- Monk's in a good spot, just like DRG it feels slightly weak due to too much healing/shielding done by green jobs.
- Riddle of Earth should auto trigger when expiring, like macrocosmos.

Ninja:
- Shukuchi should keep you Hidden even when hit.
- Hidden should let you use Sprint or Shukuchi should give movement speed.
- Meisui cure potency buff to 12k.
- Mudra cooldowns should be 10 seconds
- Choosing between defensive and offensive is annoying and most times using defensive mudras is more punishing than rewarding.
- Bunshin should give 12k Shield
- Huton, shield breaks too easy, then shield buff should be separate from the actual Huton buff which is: reduce weaponskill recast time by 20%, and increases movement speed by 25% should stay the full duration. (2 different buffs, Shield and Buff)
- Cap LB Limit to 2 resets. So 3 executes total.

Reaper:
- Arcane Crest should be 25 seconds and Regen from 6k to 4k when broken.

Samurai:
- Please change the limit break, raw damage 38k that ignores shield and goes through guard. Make it 90 seconds.
- Ogi combo should do less damage, reduce shield potency of combo.
- Tendo combo should do less damage.
- Oka should go through guard.

Viper:
- LB animation needs to be reduced drastically. Noxious Gnash Heavy should not be purify-able. LB should also give 20% damage reduction.
- Uncoiled Fury should get a potency increase. It's currently too weak.
- Slither should give 50% movement speed.
- Scales should be able to move but at slightly slower movement speed.
- Basic combo should do more damage.
- Bloodcoil should be 2 stacks.

Physical Ranged DPS:
Bard:
- Very well designed, no need to change. Well done!

Dancer:
- Honing Dance damage reduction should be nerfed to 20%
- Curing Waltz healing should be 12k potency

Machinist:
- LB should do half the damage when enemy is guarding if they have chainsaw debuff on them.
- Bioblaster needs to have Heavy back. Buffing Bioblaster with Analysis isn't rewarding.

Magical Ranged DPS:
Black Mage:
- Revert it back to 7.0
- Put fire changes on the new version in the old version.

Pictomancer:
- LB animation takes too long, reduce it please. You die before the animation is done.
- Increase normal combo potency.
- Motif should do more damage
- Increase the cooldown of Motif and Smudge to 20 seconds.

Red Mage:
- Increase Silence cooldown.
- Remove stun on Vice of Thorns and change it to bind.
- Reduce Prefulgence healing potency to 8k.

Summoner:
- Radiant Aegis duration reduced to 6 seconds but lasts the full duration even when the barrier is lost.
- Mountain Buster should be OGC.
- Necrotize should make Slipstream instant cast and Ruin 4.

[Bureda]

Thank you for your time, and for checking my thread. What are your suggestions?

[Valence]

- Overtime: I completely agree that the checkpoint break once the game goes below 2min remaining is way too fast and feels like the team that had been struggling now somehow can cheat their way into the final push. This is a huge advantage to have and it feels totally arbitrary every time it happens.

- Rating: I'd argue that they could just bring back the Feast rating system and remove their rng based streak system, which is a literal negation of skill to the favor of pure luck. Going back to a standard elo system found in most online games where the lower the league the more the system nudges the player up is good and that's what Feast did (losing in Bronze lost 5 rating, winning gained 25-30).
- Remove the safety net altogether.

- Leaderboard: I am staunchly against having the board set on the current rating, this is what we had in S1 and the result is that people just stop playing once they reach high enough out of fear of dropping back. If the fear is that people eventually stop playing because they're parked where they wanted to get, just think that it was even worse with the previous system.
- Decay is a common proposal and I feel it can alleviate it a little.

- The matchmaking certainly has issues, and I'll add mine to the pile: it tends to consider hybrid jobs as melee jobs when it's convenient and you end up with full ranged teams vs 2-3 melees, this needs to stop happening.

- I agree that ranked should give ranked specific rewards lower than Diamond to encourage every player and skills to participate in ranked, even if the lower tiers earn less commendation crystals. This really needs to happen instead of trying to ratchet every player into plat+ so they have a chance to get to Diamond for the rewards...

- Regen healers need to be put back in line definitely. They were already a problem in EW and they're even more of a problem now that sustain has become as viable as bursting in the meta (which is a good thing but healers gained a tremendous amount of power out of this).
- GNB is totally busted, especially for pug ladder, and I'm not sure why not more people got up in arms against it especially considering how low effort it is to pull.
- I like cover actually. Big identity and flavour, feels good to use, and it introduces a LOT of weaknesses to exploit when a PLD uses it. It's very punishable. I feel that it would become more trivial and in check like it used to be once the sustain healing becomes less stupid. But perhaps alternatively it needs to bleed a little through cover idk. I'm not against nerfs but removing it would really suck.
- Already made my piece on Sukuchi, no, getting hit should unhide the ninja. If used to run away, sukuchi should be used as an evade, not an autohide (it already breaks targeting...). If used to sneak and burst, then it hides and does its job already. I don't like the idea of effortless stealth, but I could be inclined to agree that making it more interesting, especially offensively, could be a good thing.
- NIN LB should return to at least 105s. It's stronger than Zantetsuken already with very little counters...
- DNC: Honing actually does its job for a hybrid role and a very risky move, and could benefit from more, not less. LB should either have delays reduced, or the game needs purify to increase back to 5s.

- Quick chat: Make "good game!" only usable at the end of games. Remove "Nice Job!" (it brings nothing of value beyond griefing, spamm or dubious feedback).
- Introduce a spamm auto silencing, meaning if the system detects spamm, it will lock the player out of quickchat for 30s or a minute, like it is the case in many online games.

[Bureda]

- Quick chat: Make "good game!" only usable at the end of games. Remove "Nice Job!" (it brings nothing of value beyond griefing, spamm or dubious feedback).
- Introduce a spamm auto silencing, meaning if the system detects spamm, it will lock the player out of quickchat for 30s or a minute, like it is the case in many online games.

My posts were getting too long but I agree. You should be able to press TAB or equivalent controller button, bring up the scoreboard card and then on that card (like league of legends) have a mute function for different things like ping or sounds.

[KiraShalen]

In my opinion the jobs to nerf in priority are SCH and AST and then GNB, if we want to change this boring meta (PLD is annoying too, but it'd get indirectly nerfed by SCH/AST nerfs).

I actually agree about DRG, I think the job itself is really good and if we weren't in a stalling meta, we'd see DRG shining much more. It's still one of the best jobs to secure kills outside of lbs in general (especially on opener).
I think PCT is also pretty good and balanced and same as BRD, I wouldn't change it.


Now, some thoughts about DNC:
• 12k Curing Waltz would be way too much, coz that'd mean potentially 24k aoe heals, which is huge when people stack on point (happens often in OT) especially that the range got increased from 3y to 5y this expansion.
• I wouldn't reduce damage reduction on Honing Dance either since you're essentially stunning yourself for 4 secs in melee range, I think the dr is actually fair there.
• The only thing I'd slighty buff about DNC is the damage potency somewhere, because I believe it's a bit stupid that Saber Dance damage got nerfed while the overall HP pools is higher than in Endwalker.
• The changes made DNC even more dependent on team mates and comps. Something that I never see mentioned is how the new hit detection thingy reduced DNC own damage output during its lb. In Endwalker, during a 4 seconds charm, DNC was able to do a full burst with Honing Dance/Ovation -> Fan Dance+Starfall Dance which was about 42k aoes (46.2k under Saber Dance buff). Now, charmed players can heal/guard/try to dash out from the end of your burst, which is the most condensed part of it and 14k less damage than before.
• This means you heavily rely on syncing with others team mates more than ever. I don't mind this design, altho it makes DNC very random in Solo Q, but in this current meta it's sometimes almost impossible to get good lb opportunities because against specific comps you pretty much have to dodge every enemy lb if you want to get a good value from yours, or just avoid dying during your lb animation (e.g. the lbs from GNB, PLD, SCH, MNK, DRG, RPR, etc are all easy counters of some sort to DNC lb by just pressing one button).
• DNC lb being very strong on paper, it's fair that there's a lot of counters to it but also Purify being 3s instead of 5s made the timing really tight now if you want to safely avoid ccs/knockbacks/pulls (a good thing is that the lb animation got reduced from ~2.9 sec to ~2.6 sec tho, and that Fan Dance is now stronger if you want to use it preemptively for the dr during your animation). And now people can just walk out of the lb range to avoid charm because of the new snapshot. I think Purify buff should be 5s again regardless of DNC anyways.
• I wouldn't touch the support part of the job which IMO is very good, also the fact you need to swap dance partner around more than before made the job really interesting to play, especially for Dance of the Dawn, with a lot of meaningful decisions to make.

[Bureda]

Now, some thoughts about DNC:
• 12k Curing Waltz would be way too much, coz that'd mean potentially 24k aoe heals, which is huge when people stack on point (happens often in OT) especially that the range got increased from 3y to 5y this expansion.
• I wouldn't reduce damage reduction on Honing Dance either since you're essentially stunning yourself for 4 secs in melee range, I think the dr is actually fair there.
• The only thing I'd slighty buff about DNC is the damage potency somewhere, because I believe it's a bit stupid that Saber Dance damage got nerfed while the overall HP pools is higher than in Endwalker.
• The changes made DNC even more dependent on team mates and comps. Something that I never see mentioned is how the new hit detection thingy reduced DNC own damage output during its lb. In Endwalker, during a 4 seconds charm, DNC was able to do a full burst with Honing Dance/Ovation -> Fan Dance+Starfall Dance which was about 42k aoes (46.2k under Saber Dance buff). Now, charmed players can heal/guard/try to dash out from the end of your burst, which is the most condensed part of it and 14k less damage than before.
• This means you heavily rely on syncing with others team mates more than ever. I don't mind this design, altho it makes DNC very random in Solo Q, but in this current meta it's sometimes almost impossible to get good lb opportunities because against specific comps you pretty much have to dodge every enemy lb if you want to get a good value from yours, or just avoid dying during your lb animation (e.g. the lbs from GNB, PLD, SCH, MNK, DRG, RPR, etc are all easy counters of some sort to DNC lb by just pressing one button).
• DNC lb being very strong on paper, it's fair that there's a lot of counters to it but also Purify being 3s instead of 5s made the timing really tight now if you want to safely avoid ccs/knockbacks/pulls (one good thing is that the lb animation got reduced from ~2.9 sec to ~2.6 sec tho). And now people can just walk out of the lb range to avoid charm because of the new snapshot. I think Purify buff should be 5s again regardless of DNC anyways.
• I wouldn't touch the support part of the job which IMO is very good, also the fact you need to swap dance partner around more than before made the job really interesting to play, especially for Dance of the Dawn, with a lot of meaningful decisions to make.

The debate we had was basically DNC can sometimes feel overly tanky for doing constant chip damage to everyone, and what would make it more of an active job, outside of changing dance partners is to play about with support, like make healing more rewarding since sometimes, even when you stack on top you can barely feel its effect.

[ThaCa]

I like the sound of most of these, but I prefer the highest rating achieved approach as it encourages people to keep playing instead of sitting on their points. Decay might be an option, but I'd rather see them give us a carrot instead of stick and make grinding more worthwhile.

This could be achieved by any of the suggestions we have made over time for the currencies and stuff to buy with them. If I could for example grind good PvE gear by playing Crystal tier matches or limited Dyes that are only sourced from PvP to sell, I would be way more active.

Having something big like Legend titles and full Augmented set from multiple top 300 finishes etc. would also encourage to keep pushing highest ranks.

Also having something for more casual players that they can slowly grind over time from lower Ranks would be good for the general activity and to hook some of them to eventually push the higher ones.