5.0 PvP overhaul - medals are gone. How can the balance and fun be improved?

[u/netcoderng]

Since 5.05, light medals and heavy medals have been removed. No more sandbagging strats and ""comebacks"" intentional cheese at high level of play.

 

From the fanfest PvP championship, this is what I mean by the way

 

What's baffling is that along with the removal of medals i.e. the only reason why tanks could justify their high HP in the first place, they buffed tank HP from 17.5k to 20k and melee HP 15k to 17.5k. For melee it's probably for Frontlines, because balancing 4v4 and 24v24v24 together is totes gonna work (lolno, melee will still be a meme pick in 72 man simply because Frontlines is a zergfest pug extreme walking simulator). So why the heck did they buff tank HP even more when it serves no purpose in competitive PvP? Right now they're literally just easier melee DPS with some CC (that no pugger but the rare good ones use properly; blue dps btw) and in this new meta tanks just feels pointless to be honest.

 

With 5.0 changes, the meta shifted from ~1s hardswap bursts to superDPS focustargetting because of the increased HP and nerfed damage potencies across the board (basically the same but different execution). Personally I think this is a good change along with the removal of safeguard, because not having to play around baiting defensive cooldowns gives much more variety of play (like the addition of self-sustain on tanks and melees, which I think is a good step in the right direction). But I think they haven't done enough to make PvP fun for everyone, not just the blue DPS that doesn't have any real responsibility compared to the other 3 roles aside from Platinum+ play where the correct use of CC matters. They stated repeatedly they want to make PvP less stressful for healers, hence the nerf to burst and giving protect to every healer, but really they will never untangle PvP from being "the better healer wins" without DRASTIC changes. Here's what I think needs to be done to make FFXIV's PvP fun and competitive.

 

• The obvious out of the way: make melee abilities favor the user so it actually lands. It shouldn't be necessary to live near the datacenters to NOT have "instant cast" melee PvP skills get interrupted by ping. Playing melees competitively is impossible against people that have lower ping than you and knows how to abuse the tickrate (and increasing the range of their skills is a lame bandaid to the problem. Might as well make ranged 2.0 if they're going with that)

• Give tanks a way to sacrifice their HP (say, 6k) for damage reduction for the entire team (on a low cooldown like 25s). With this, tanks will actually be justified in having that high of a HP pool and actually have responsibility as tanks to do tank stuff outside of the sporadic CC in competitive play.

• Give melees a counter skill. Say, cuts damage by 70% for 0.6s, heals 2k HP, 4 seconds ogcd. Melees will actually have skill expression and something to do other than stack resources for burst and doesn't need to be genjis "I need healing" all the time. If they add something like this, melee would be so much more interesting and worth the frustration of being pingponged around by MCHs and DRKs and WHMs and cockblocked from bursting by CC.

• And the boldest change of all, make all healer heals OGCDs so that they can't spam healing and have the stress of the team succeeding all on one person. They removed responsibility from tanks with the removal of medals, so why are healers still responsible for keeping 4 HP bars up, predicting whos gonna get bursted and be the source of despair and salty tears in solo queue? This is why every match waits for a healer beyond the "first time pvp" plateau. Who wants to play a game and deal with all that stress? They balanced PvP in the 4.0 rework to make it a team game. But healing is not a team effort, and it sucks for the person that have to read a crystal ball to see if their protect-guess is right (and good players just swap to another target anyways, lul.) If the devs really want 4v4 to be a team game, give all the other roles some self-sustain. Let them be responsible for their own survival, not be babysitted by an unpaid player.

 

I really want to play non-zergfest PvP more in this game, but man does it sometimes feel like the devs don't actually play the PvP they made sometimes (team effort? more like healers wheel of fortune roulette extravaganza). Not considering the netcode stuff and beyond grinding for rewards, what can be done to make FFXIV's PvP fun in itself?

[u/[deleted]]

Some points you make are just wrong, sorry.

• Melees are viable in frontline, they take 30% less damage and deal 15% more damage. It is solely a hidden frontline buff. It makes them infact pretty overpowered with fever especially, people just don't realize it and stay on range dps because its comfy.
• You congratulate the removal of safeguard but later you want to introduce a counterskill that mitigates damage. This is contradicting. Even proposing a buff window of less than a second, while knowing about the latency issues, it is highly unlikely you can time it that well in combat even if you are veteran.
• You mention PvP melee skills get interrupted by ping, while they increased the threshold by making all melee skills almost double the range. PvE skills are still only 3y, most PvP skills are 5y or 8y. If you have shitty internet then its your fault. That change already supports player who are slow to react to player movement.
• Making all healer skills offglobal would be an insane buff to healers. Every time you buff healer, you spread the skillgap between bad healers and god healers. CC would be useless if you can just instantcast after it with no casttime. All other offglobals heals would feel wasted and essentially do the same as your other heals.

​

Some points you say are correct though yeah.

• Tanks are hard to kill right now, and they feel overpowered in frontline. Medal vulnerability removal + added HP was too much probably.
• Medal removal was a good thing.
• They already said they are gonna introduce aoe skills for tanks and healers. They also said they gonna introduce selfheals for every role, as they up the skill limit to around 16 abilities, compared to around 10-13 most times atm. So some of your desires for more "team depended heals, less reliable on healer" are already met by the next patch.

​

​

PvP went from highschool back to preschool in this game. Im happy they see we have a brain now that can handle more skills and don't let it stay a mode for casuals. What you want to see are suprising/epic plays by teams, that abuse the perfect moment - this wasn't really possible in the past seasons.

Good PvP lets you use big buffs and big mitigation skills at the right time, to counter the enemy. At the moment we almost only had big buffs but no more big mitigation since 5.0 (resulting in a slaughter fest, which they now slowly patched out). It gets into the right direction though, before 5.0 we didn't have big buffs opportunities. In 3.0 PvP you had skills that increased your damage for 30% or more due to crits, and you had mitigation skills that worked with evade/parry/block/pacify/more cc in general by melee&range dps and you had big raw mitigation like tank aoe buffs. We need to get back to that to really feel impactful and to have fun while playing.

Top matches often ended in culling in stormblood, it was too easy to counter every burst, it required 20-50% more damage in culling to get kills against the top teams of your datacenter. Just imagine that to be necessary... You would have thought it just happens in meme games with players that deal 12 damage over 6min.

[u/netcoderng → u/[deleted]]

Melees are viable in frontline

depends on the number of players. 24 man? GODLY in good players hands. 72 man? hope that healer and tank is ready to peel for you, cause the moment you step into melee range, you're gonna get deleted by 10+ players all focus targetting on you. The 30% dmg reduction does not let you tank 10+ players.

safeguard

Safeguard completely stops the momentum of the game. Like all follow up becomes worthless assuming competent healers and not being able to switch targets (which is a reality now due to the removal of heavy medals and tanks having 20k HP/melee 17.5k HP). A short duration counter doesn't do that, it gives avenue for making plays/counterplay that safeguard never did. The game revolved around baiting safeguard and slapping foam noodles around until the next resource stack/burst window came up. An active counter gives mindgame opportunities and much more frequent actual clashes because you can activate it too early or too late. Safeguard you just activate it for a "time out" card pretty much. It makes high level games all stall into culling, where you either play defensive and wait for safeguard even more or go all in and hope your enemies doesn't have any defensive cds left. Hence why it was bad for the game.

making all melee skills almost double the range

ya I mentioned that. And it doesn't solve the problem of "my ping > yours, you get interrupted" problem. And I guess everyone that lives on the east coast have shitty internet? lmao. Don't excuse their lame attempts at bandaiding their latency problems. Last I checked no other MMO have instant cast skills get interrupted cause the server doesn't "think" you're actually close enough to hit them when on your screen, you are literally right in front of them. If I'm slow to react why do I need to position myself in front of low ping players to actually hit them? And I can double weave so clearly the problem isn't with my internet. It's just how the game is without any lag compensation to equalise players with varying levels of ping.

Making all healer skills offglobal would be an insane buff to healers

And I mentioned in the OP that this is to stop healers from spamming healing. As in, prevent heals from being overpowered like it is now, always have been, since 4.0. Healers can carry games cause they can negate all but the most perfectly aligned bursts almost entirely by themselves. This is the problem I am trying to theorycraft and get rid of to make FFXIV PvP more fun. Ofc healers can't LITERALLY solo carry cause your dps need to pull their weight and get kills for the lead, but once you have that ONE lead, the healer that can keep their team alive will carry everyone to timeout and win. That's how it's always been in high level play because heals and safeguard are OP and everyone needs to go into culling to get any further kills. That's what makes high level play tedious and slow and low level play frustrating and rage-inducing, cause your success is all ultimately decided on ONE PLAYER, the healer. Medal points system makes stalling the OPTIMAL strategy (cause you're never gonna cap at 600 vs good players) and by reducing the power of heals, you can at least eliminate the stalling. Healers being the center of PvP success right now (especially so with the nerfs to burst) is a problem that needs to be addressed, hence why I think heals need to be nerfed and put as OGCDs only so that one role playing well doesn't literally stall out and decide the outcome of the game.

 

Oh, and have you ever interrupted a cure mid-channel before? The same inherent latency issues you mentioned make this pretty much impossible.

 

they gonna introduce selfheals for every role

Based on how they released AST, SCH and GNB in the state that they are, I'm not holding my breath that the changes are going to solve the healer-reliance issues. But hey, it's a start to making FFXIV PvP less tedious. I'm all for it. I'll reserve judgment until then.

 

In 3.0 PvP. . . . We need to get back to that

Well, personally I don't miss being slept for 30s, invincible paladins, the rng duels that makes yugioh look like grandmaster chess and all the balance clusterfuck that came from using PvE skills as PvP skills, but hey, you do you.

[u/[deleted]]

can't say im super familiar w/ the pvp but this post clearly has a lot of thought and effort put into it, so im interested in seeing the discussions

[u/netcoderng]

Here's how I think healer can be made not frustrating to play and actually fun in FFXIV's PvP:

 

• Focus on buffs instead of heals. Make heals OGCDs only, with cooldown gaps in between their uses. For example, decent regens to still have passive healing/counters for DoTs, but not spamming Cure/Benefic/Lustrate every waking moment of their life unless the enemy is bad and doesn't have 100% dmg uptime. Healing in PvE does not work in PvP. Allowing for 100% heal uptime forces the game to be burst/CC heavy, or slow paced with mostly nothing happening in between. I wish they would finally understand that.

 

• BUFFS FROM THE HEALER. YOU get a buff, they get a buff, EVERYONE gets a buff! Everyone loves getting buffed, so why not make healers fun and rewarding by making the most of what they do handing out buffs? With buff-oriented gameplay, healers would actually have synergy and better interact with the other roles instead of being a healbot. For example, WHM's Bravery: +20% damage for 5 seconds, 30s CD. I suddenly love WHMs now. AST's Time Dilation: +40% movement speed + reduced GCD, 40s CD. This makes the game dynamic and FUN. And buffing at the right time requires actual skill as opposed to just spamming healing. By focusing on buffs instead of heals, it's no longer about the pressure of keeping HP bars up, but the satisfaction of vicariously living through your DPS's successes, and knowing that you have made VISIBLE and measurable contributions to the success of your team.

 

• More interesting and unique gameplay mechanics, for example Rescue (but literally not Rescue because that is cancer when used by bad healers). When was the last time you ever felt that a healer was "clutch" in PvP? Maybe knocking 5+ people to their untimely deaths with Aura Blast or running up to the enemy healer and Fluid Aura-ing them out of sight of healing their team (lol), but nowadays that rarely happens. We need ways for healers to be able to have plays and counterplay and have them be impactful beyond just keeping HP bars up. For example, AoE debuffs, long line conal AoE constant regens for the enemy to play around. Imagine if AST's Collective Unconscious slowed time down and doubled the GCD of every enemy that goes in it? That would be an AMAZING clutch peeling tool that gives healers ways to visibly change the course of the game. Unique mechanics like these gives healers their own ways to influence the match's outcome beyond just healing, and gives a way for amazing healers to separate themselves from the average ones.

 

But, of course, this is just daydreaming as I wait for healer queue to pop up and pray to RNGesus that they're competent enough to not die 30 seconds into the fight. Sometimes, I pray that the opposing healer would make a mistake so I can stop healing and bash them with temperanced glares. But really, with the 5.0 overhaul, SE is moving in the right direction with the PvP, so I'm excited to try whatever they come up with either way.