FFXIV PVP Discussion Thread: HAHAH SLEEP!

[Rocl]

I think seeing like four or five people afk in the same matches over and over is what really broke my resolve to stick with the Flames.

[Rollercoaster]

I've been seeing so many people crying in ally chat that "you are all failures", "I'm switching gc" etc. lately... even if we end up winning. I reported a guy yesterday for refusing to reraise (and whined in chat the rest of the match) and actually got a conversation with a GM so it's worth reporting. There's no way to kick people right now and I think they are well aware of these idiots exist, but who knows if they actually will do anything about it.

[Kaisha]

I haven't seen much of it in the past week on Immortals. Probably because all the whiners are now stuck with bandwagon Maelstrom for another week, before they're allowed to bandwagon over Adders because Maelstrom is now sucking pretty hard when I do my runs.

[kisada]

maelstrom still the best on primals when i play. flames picked it up after being horrendous for 99% of my matches. adders really good in pst late afternoon and evenings for me, but that's about it.

[Jem]

See I've come to terms with the fact that I'm always going to have a shitty record as an Adder but as long as I keep doing well personally I don't feel too bad about it. Queue times recently are what have annoyed me more than losing.

[Pruviant]

I wouldn't mind the record so much as an Adder if the requirement for the mount wasn't WIN 100 matches. I am only 1/3 of the way there with 140ish matches played ; ;

[TheDirtyHobo]

Any DPS can do great burst damage with all of their PvP skills ready, shocker.

Okay, take out the PvP skills, then. SMN probably gains the least from them of any class, anyways. You've still got Fester+ED+Ruin2 at 300+150+80 for 530 potency burst on a 1 minute cooldown at worst, 10 seconds at best, all that you can do in about a 1 second period. Add in a dot tick for another 110, a Garuda basic for 100/140/180, and if she's feeling responsive, weave an instant Aerial Slash in for another 90/126/172. Let's say this situation is well into midfight, and all your cooldowns longer than a minute aren't up, we'll call the scenario psuedo-burst. Even then, you're looking at (530+110+140+126)*1.3 for 1178 potency burst in a less than 3 second timeframe, before considering the possibility of crits. And if you have Aetherflow primed, you can repeat it again, minus aerial slash, 10 seconds later for 1014.

Sure, arguably most jobs still beat that with similar constraints (only using cooldowns 60s recast or less, but I'll throw in Mercy Stroke even though it's not always usable on recast. For the sake of not going overboard, limiting to 3 offGCD uses, which is already pushing it) when looking at it purely from a potency perspective, but it's not quite as simple as that. DRG has the ridiculously impressive but insanely long to set up potential of Full Thrust, Jump, Leg Sweep, Mercy Stroke if applicable, dot ticks, all with Disembowel+Heavy Thrust up, life/power surge used appropriately, and an autoattack squeezed somewhere in there, racking up to [(495+300+130+200+~100+75)*1.15]/0.9 for 1661 (or if you remove the Disembowel/Chaos dot, you sit on a still impressive, still fairly long to set up, but much more reasonably attainable 1460). BLM, meanwhile, sits on a phantom dart into fire3 swiftflare with a tick of thunder, for {180+35+[(240+260)*1.75]*1.3}/0.9 for 1574.5, but absolutely fucks over their followup damage output for several seconds afterwards for it. MNK with GL3, DK, TS, Demo, ToD, and Fracture all up can push out a true strike, howling fist, somersault, mercy stroke, auto, doing [(190+170+160+200+85+~85)*1.37]/0.9 for 1355. An almost impossibly lucky BRD can come close, but the amount of things that have to come together for it makes it barely worth considering. Straighter shot into bloodletter, misery's end, river proc, bloodletter, and an auto, all while maintaining perfect distance to not get penalized, and the person standing in your circle of flame comes out to [210+150+150+190+80+35+~100+(17.5 or 22.5)]*1.2 for 1119 or 1125 depending on which DoT crit to get your proc.

However, as I said earlier, this is strictly looking at potency. When you consider that, at 80 cap, weapons will be scaled to 40 damage on BRD, 44 on Melee, 66 on Mages. So if you just use BRD as a base of 1, that means melees get a 10% boost, and mages get a 65% boost. Adding that in, you get a new psuedo-burst hierarchy of:
BLM - 2598
SMN - 1943
DRG (long setup) - 1827
SMN (2nd, no Aerial) - 1673
DRG (short setup) - 1606
MNK - 1490

There's also the marginal side benefit that SMN's psuedo-burst tends to be the most concise, since, even though it's 5 actions compared to most other job's 4+autoattack, the animations are split between 2 things, and are also all very short. It also has the second lowest setup time besides BLM, as well as the fewest ways to lose damage on/while setting up your psuedo-burst (having your DoTs/debuffs purified for all jobs, Fey Covenant/Focalization for BLM SMN, missing directionals for DRG MNK, luck on procs when burst is needed for BLM BRD, %hp gated skills not triggering for DRG MNK BRD, distance modifier for BRD). On top of that, it's gated by Aetherflow stacks more than cooldowns per se, which means you can drop it down up to 3 times in a ~25 second period if you really need to.

tl;dr SMN isn't necessarily the absolute best at bursting, but they're well above average at it. And their ability to spread damage (and therefore healer's attention) as well as their constant pressure threat for when big cooldowns are gone makes them really useful.

[Deadgye]

Any burst damage nakpin math that doesn't use buffs makes me sad. Barrage is so nice, especially when combined with other buffs.

[TheDirtyHobo]

I did specifically say this is a midfight, i.e. after all your initial bigger cooldowns are gone, scenario and it's 60s or shorter abilities, with the exception of Mercy Stroke, because of the %HP gate preventing it from being used aside from burst scenarios. His complaint was that every DPS does good burst with their buffs and cooldowns up, so saying "SMN does good burst" meant nothing.

[Niiro]

There are so many liberties taken with those numbers it's more than I care to address tbh.

But you certainly put much more thought into it than just "omg top damage totals".

[Deadgye]

As a bard, popping all my buffs at the beginning of a fight instead of midfight sounds silly. I finish people off with burst damage, not burst them down to half hp and watch them get cured up?

[TheDirtyHobo]

If you could point out a few, I would gladly work on correcting them. There are some I know of myself, like that it feels like Garuda's potency numbers aren't completely accurate to what you would be putting out if it was the master casting something at that potency, but I honestly have no idea precisely how pet potency works. Because the point was to show that SMN was comparatively strong, I tried to compensate for this by giving everyone else as much positive wiggle room as I could reasonably allow, hence the pre-debuffed, fully buffed, 1 GCD, 3 off-GCDs, and autoattack structure for the physicals, and 2 GCDs 1 off-GCD for BLM, even though those are both a significantly longer timeframe than what I gave SMN and I could add more damage in from SMN in this time.

The only other potentially significant one to my argument that I am aware of is that generally the target of this burst tends to be the healer, or occasionally attempts at quick pick-offs on squishy DPS mages while the healers are distracted. Mages' m.def tends to be floating somewhere just shy of double their p.def. But, I honestly have no idea how armor defense functions in PvP at all, if it affects anything, and if so how drastically. So, unfortunately, I had to just completely ignore it altogether until I can actually get some figures.

[Seravi Edalborez]

There are some I know of myself, like that it feels like Garuda's potency numbers aren't completely accurate to what you would be putting out if it was the master casting something at that potency, but I honestly have no idea precisely how pet potency works.

Pet potency is actually exactly what it would be for players. The reason it doesn't match up for SMN to pet is that ACN gets Maim and Mend II (30% damage boost), so all pet potencies look weaker by comparison (76.9% of listed potency if I'm mathing correctly; 100/1.3) but it's more the other way around.

BLM and WHM also get 30% trait, BRD is 20%, MNKs have Greased Lightning, and DRG/WAR have Heavy Thrust/Maim (not always for the former in PvP of course).

[Seravi Edalborez]

A lot of Scathe killshots but I am nonetheless quite happy.

[Izzy]

I love when people always go with "WHO CARES THAT YOU GOT 16 KILLS AND I ONLY GOT 4 WE DID ABOUT THE SAME DAMAGE".

Dude, if you don't finish the person off, who gives a shit?

[Lucavi]

I think seeing like four or five people afk in the same matches over and over is what really broke my resolve to stick with the Flames.

What's interesting is that Yoshi has played plenty of MMOs with PVP that all have taken steps and put measures into place to stop this kind of stuff. Spawn-sitting checks (sitting in your spawn for too long, regardless of AFK or not), auto-running AFK checks (running in place for 45+ secs without changing direction) - all of these things exist, and more, and have existed for years.

I'm not going to holler at them too loudly right now because it just came out and hell, they probably pushed like crazy just to get the bare-bones PVP system out the door, but to not have features that have existed for years in old MMOs... it sucks. It sucks to know exactly what kinds of issues are going to crop up game after game, and not have the newest of games accounting for decades-old knowledge.

Modern MOBAs and shooters are coming right out of the gates with default non-cross chat settings because they know how toxic cross-chat can be. SE did the same thing with this, but you can't put in a base-sitting check? Clearly they were thinking of -some- abuse because they put in a 2-minute AFK timer that triggers anywhere, even if you're sitting in place defending a node (which I've been tagged by more than once).

Humans don't change. Players are humans. The way players attempt to milk and exploit and sabotage games does not change. For crying out loud, if YOU aren't going to put the fixes in the game, give parties the ability to majority rule kick. While yes, that can be exploited by pre-mades coming in 5-men strong to block majority rule kicks, but shit, premades are coming in to kick ass, not to manderville spam outside their own base.

[Seravi Edalborez]

MORE (got like 3-4 on a LB2)

Spoiler: show

[solracht]

to not have features that have existed for years in old MMOs...

this is a pretty good quote for the game as a whole

[Lucavi]

this is a pretty good quote for the game as a whole

For ANY game, this is just the game I am currently playing, so it makes me angry. Frontlines has a good thing going, but its going to be a barren wasteland if SE doesn't chomp down on this bullshit greifing nonsense quickly.

[TheDirtyHobo]

Pet potency is actually exactly what it would be for players. The reason it doesn't match up for SMN to pet is that ACN gets Maim and Mend II (30% damage boost), so all pet potencies look weaker by comparison (76.9% of listed potency if I'm mathing correctly; 100/1.3) but it's more the other way around.

BLM and WHM also get 30% trait, BRD is 20%, MNKs have Greased Lightning, and DRG/WAR have Heavy Thrust/Maim (not always for the former in PvP of course).

Hmm, are you positive? That was actually the first (and only because I'm lazy) thing I tested. I gave it up pretty quickly once I realized Garuda's wind blade (100 potency) was having a slightly, but not 25% higher, range than my ruin2 (effectively 104 with M&M2). In fact, just re-ran a very short recheck of 20 non-crits of each, and Ruin2 did 243-274, Wind Blade 261-286.

And I did add in all of those traits/buffs, which is what the 1.3 multiplier on BLM and SMN, 1.27 on MNK, 1.2 on BRD, 1.15 on DRG are.