Thread: Patch 7.5 Discussion Thread

It's really frustrating to end a match with your entire party at like BH2 because no one wants to enage at all. I keep trying to engage on Gunbreaker be a distraction and they just stare at me until I die or run away.

I like battle high as a carry system. I think the iteration where we lose all BH on death (pre DT) or half of our BH on death like pre 7.5 was better.

Losing half was fine. I also liked the increase of battle high gained for assists, it made sense.

But it feels like ever since that patch where they increased the assists, they've been going the wrong way with trying to speed frontlines up or increase the incentives for fighting.
Maybe making Kills worth more points, with lowering the score to win (decreasing the relative value of objectives) would had accomplished the goal more cleanly.

Originally Posted by Divinemights

You can’t wake someone who’s pretending to be asleep and you’re a pretty good example of that.
Look at how JP and TC players deal with premades or commanders.
They don’t just run headfirst into coordinated groups.
They disrupt them.
You’ll see tanks and healers, usually paired with a SAM, intentionally pushing into enemy spawn as bait to pull attention away from the main fight.

Why?
Because no premade functions well when a third or even half of an alliance gets dragged out of position chasing distractions.
A premade doesn’t guarantee a win.
It just makes coordinated play more impactful.

And now, with Battle High no longer dropping on death, what’s actually stopping die-hard players from leaning even harder into that kind of disruption strategy?
You keep saying you’ve tried everything, but from my perspective, all you’ve really done is complain about premades instead of adapting.

Yup, I agree. That's what I do as a solo player in NA. I do it so often, save my team, and mess up the DRK combo + other premade strategies that they take notice and always end up focusing me first. It would not matter if there's a whole group of BH5 members ready to get CC'd by them. I am literally a bigger threat to them than my entire team (and sometimes entire alliance) combined, haha.

Just the other game, I shut down the DRK + DNC combo 3 times in a row, interrupted their engage attempt, trapped themselves in their own engage (which led to eventually counter-wiping their team), and saved my team from a full wipe because they didn't bother marking me. Then they began targeting me nonstop. Even if there's a big group of BH 5 ready to be hit, they get ignored and I'm still the priority focus through it all. Battle High 5 is just a means to an end. With everyone having no BH loss, it levels the playing field for everyone, but there's still a world of difference from being able to fully leverage a BH5 job through tactics, positioning, awareness, and execution. For good players, if everyone's on the same playing field, it simply means everyone goes back to purely a difference of skill gap between players. Bad premades will simply get shredded against good players. Good premades do quickly realize who are the real threats even if there's a bunch of BH5 and then fights get spicier since they now have to play even better and more coordinated to pull ahead.

Similar to how solo players can interrupt a premade, a premade can realize the opposing solo player(s) is the lynchpin of the team and interrupting them will result in a smoother win if the team is overly dependent on them. Numerically... it is in the premade's favor since it's 4 vs 1. However, the reverse is also true... if the premade fails to do anything to that solo player... they wasted a lot of skills and time to get nothing happening. Instead, it opens up to half the enemy team splitting up and your team can wipe them up from bad positioning. Just foiling a premade's attempt puts the solo player in a huge advantage. ... But this scenario assumes all your allies are not NPCs without a brain and watch blankly. I'm not the only solo player who can counter premades, as evidence from this thread. Other players can also do it and can also stop them pre-emptively. Even if you're not able to stop the premade yourself, you can still cover each other's weaknesses. Sometimes, all it takes is for one or two people to stop a premade, and everyone else follows up to ensure they don't die. If everyone did that, then there would be no weakness that premades can take advantage to begin with. This is a multiplayer mode after all.

That's pretty much what happened in my runs against that DRK premade. After realizing I'm specifically waiting to counter them and my team grasps that opening to get rid of them thoroughly, that DRK premade combo stopped running headfirst into my team and adapted their strategy... which was to circle around the entire group to CC + get rid of me first or only engage when I'm not there. If I'm still there, they disengage & back up asap if they failed to kill me on their initial burst to avoid getting counter-bursted and team wiped after. Just having people cover my back made a world of difference from cutting each encounter close to widening the score gap greatly the further the match lasted.

Funnily enough, not losing BH 5 lets me put more riskier plays without worrying as much about dying so it's actually a pretty nice change for solo players to be more aggressive against premades. I can make more situational trades to sacrifice myself to prevent the team's death and won't lose BH + gain BH by letting my team get a more optimal position to burst the enemy alliance.

I've been doing this plenty of times as a solo player, but I would take more calculated trades before this since death results in cutting half my BH to reduce the opponent's BH. Now, I can be less strict about the trade. As long as I come out ahead in most of the trades, I don't take much of a loss as long as the objectives get secured. The only downside is if everyone on your alliance is mentally checked out and doesn't bother to actively try to win, in which case you already lost from a numbers perspective as it is no longer 24 vs 24. Premade or not wouldn't matter by then because the problem lies somewhere else.

2 changes that ruined frontlines are:

- Removal of death timer
- Removal of losing BH upon death

Whoever though this was a great change needs to rethink a bit. Removing death timer was a first mistake because this was a good thing to make sure you can punish some teams and get ahead and then take their nodes. With instant respawn, this was already turned into deathmatch. Then not losing BH is just crazy as now we see more and more Viper / Gunbreaker players who just yolo in with 95%+ reduction and destroy everyone. Plus probably have astro or paladin to cover them.

Also do people realize that premades aren't just 4 people? You know that discords exist? And that many many people know themselves there? So when they all queue together, there is a very very big chance that everyone will end up on the same team or at least in the same game which creates discord calls with 8+ people or "i'm on enemy team so i'll either play funny and won't kill people I know or just hunt them down". This thing is even bigger than you think. There is a reason why some strange things occur like your entire team being white mages or 10 gnb, all because on discords they say: "alright, lets do all whm challenge" and other crap that you see.

Originally Posted by MayuAmakura

Also do people realize that premades aren't just 4 people? You know that discords exist? And that many many people know themselves there? So when they all queue together, there is a very very big chance that everyone will end up on the same team or at least in the same game which creates discord calls with 8+ people or "i'm on enemy team so i'll either play funny and won't kill people I know or just hunt them down". This thing is even bigger than you think. There is a reason why some strange things occur like your entire team being white mages or 10 gnb, all because on discords they say: "alright, lets do all whm challenge" and other crap that you see.

Yes, I understand you dislike the new BH changes.
I’m not a fan either, but I think you’re crossing into conspiracy territory here.
What exactly would people even gain from win-trading Frontline?
At most, Q-syncing just groups PvP veterans into the same matches and reduces the chance of getting paired with random PvE roulettes.

I’m in a PvP Discord that regularly does Q-syncs, and I’ve never personally participated, but from what I’ve seen it’s mostly about playing with familiar players, not some secret win-trading operation.
And if what you’re claiming were actually true, how do you explain players like me maintaining around a 39% first-place rate while solo queueing?
One of my characters is even sitting at 45%.

People Q-sync Frontline mainly because they don’t want to deal with toxic PvE rouletters who ignore callouts, argue nonstop, AFK, or treat PvP like loweffort tome farming instead of actually trying to win.
Most veteran PvP players queue together because match quality is significantly better when you’re grouped with people who understand objectives, positioning, target priority, and basic coordination.
That’s not “win trading”
It’s just players trying to avoid frustrating matches with teammates who clearly don’t care about PvP.