Darlantan

Oh exciting; congratulations. ^^

Welcome welcome!

Yay grats!!

lol, Hey there! I was witness to Tilly's piece of that mumble conversation. I was going to come crash the party as well but it ended before I could get there.

Hello our newly person!

Between this thread and the chat room I think it's high time we got you an invite and recruit status.

I really only play my esper Darlantan; I'll try to contact you in game and get you an invite. Will you be around tonight? And is there a character that you prefer to main over the others?

I do remember you from chat room! Glad you decided to come on over. Our FFXIV chapter sure has attracted some great people; hope to see you around the forums and chat room in the future.

Unfortunately I always end up being "that guy", but... could you have your husband also post an intro if he's interested in us? Our recruitment process focuses on the individual all the way from start to finish; separating all couples' apps is the first step in ensuring we know each and every one of you, and nobody is just so-and-so's SO (see what I did there?!), brother, or whatever.

Cheers!~

Nice find.

I don't know what the gap is between the T1 and T2 gear sets is atm, but it might actually be playable once that specific change makes it through. If they change that and implement the AP/SP changes, that might help to bridge the damage gap between higher base AP classes (SS, Esper, Medic) and lower base AP classes (War, Engy)--especially in PvE.

Things have really changed since the last time I made a post like this. The gear gap has widened, class balance has shifted around a bit (improved significantly overall imo), healing got the nerf bat, and our play has improved. What does it all mean? Well...

Gear Gap

This is WS PvP's #1 problem right now. It has also become less of a problem in RBGs. What I mean by this is that although you will be beaten even harder by teams with better gear, the number of people who have the better gear is really starting to dwindle. Low-rated RBGs feel much the same as practice grounds do now: you never know what you're going to get in terms of your opponent. Will it be a full 1800 premade, or poor schmucks who don't know which way to run the mask, or somewhere in between? This game's PvP is great when you equalize gear, and more recently the opponents have not been as insurmountable as they have been in previous weeks.

Class Balance

DPeSpers are finally playing in the major leagues! My fears about the TkStrike damage nerf were unfounded. Warriors seem to have been brought to a more manageable level, especially once you learn how best to avoid their burst. Stalker damage has increased quite a bit without any offsetting class-specific nerfs, but if you have some PvP Defense it is still manageable. SS DPS is still incredibly well-suited to PvP, and they are still doing very well overall. Medics and engineers, well... I honestly don't know that much about their DPS. There is still some work for Carbine to do, but even if there are only four winners in the PvP DPS scene (and I'm not sure it's that limited), that's twice as good as a month ago.

Healing Nerfs

Carbine has acknowledged that they may have nerfed healing a little too hard... but from what I've seen, healers (especially medics) still have a place in PvP. It is definitely more about mitigating incoming damage via positioning and CC than it is about healing through big damage right now, though. Embrace the playstyle and you will flourish; watch for incoming buffs to PvP healing as well!

What the healing nerf has done very positively is tone down the immortal stalker tank metagame. Three medics and a stalker will still shrug off just about anything that an enemy team can throw at them, but things are a lot more reasonable now.

SoH Kickin' Ass

Whether it's the fact that the more seasoned PvPers in the game have vacated the RBG queues or that we're just that much better than we used to be, RBG night has felt a lot more successful lately. We CC early, drop telegraphs on soft spots in the enemy formation, and just beat people more often than we used to. Let's pat ourselves on the back, the (very) few of us who've stuck it out!

In Closing - The State of RBGs, the SoH Perspective

The RBG experience itself has improved for varied reasons, but the lack of participation and the lack of any interest outside of asking people directly are sending us the signal that SoH just isn't ready to commit much of its time to an RBG team. Further, the game's PvP itself is in a perpetual state of flux as Carbine tries (very slowly) to figure out how best to design it. When Wildstar launched, they started way behind in designing that half of the game, and although it shows promise, it really could have used a couple more months of testing. Tilly and I have spent a lot of breath and a lot of sweat, and even a few drops of blood and tears trying to make sense of it all. In the end, though, it needs to prove to us that it's worth your time... and we should have our answer on that in the very near future.

That info was from before the PvP stat changes. Now it's best to go full PvP gear (thank god).

I can't tell you whether you will see better results in full pve purples or in a blue pvp suit--it could be worth it to test it out--but my pve suit (including just 2 purples and 12/12 spellweaver) is outperformed by my blue pvp suit (full of simple +PvP Power and PvP Defense runes).

I don't know about the open world exactly (PvP stats are calculated differently there, especially healing), but in BGs, this:

outperforms this (no rune sets):

The 13.13% difference in the PvP Damage stat seems to beat out all 560 points of AP, ~2.6% strikethrough chance, and almost 4.5% crit chance. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me because that is an enormous AP difference, but that's how it is. The 77.7% increase in PvP Defense (15% -> 26.66%) certainly has a lot to do with overall effectiveness as well.

The offensive difference isn't THAT huge, so full pve purples might be a viable option for anyone with that capability, but much short of that and you're better off runing PvP blues.

I forgot all about this post Vax! The first time I saw it I navigated away to come back to later because it looked like you weren't finished.

Healers are nerfed in PvP, but I think it is clear from my experiences this week that they are still necessary. The challenge involved in playing a healer without purple pvp gear has certainly increased; you would require more team support than before. But hey, at least you'd be the best healing class of the three! I don't really see many DPS medics making a huge impact in battlegrounds. If you're asking what the team needs most, a medic healer is it (right behind stalker tank ).

Swavorly has been leveling a stalker which he prefers to his esper, but I'm not sure whether he wants to be a tank defending and stealing masks or not. Most of the open field clashes are determined by 1) who CCs faster and 2) who stacks AoE telegraphs more efficiently. A stalker running in and hitting collapse to bring the entire enemy team into all the crazy damage would still be useful, but stalker tanks are so good. Disclaimer: I've seen a lot fewer stalker tanks since the patch. It is possible that the overall healing nerfs have brought them more in line with the others, but I haven't seen enough to make a determination.

I'm also leveling a stalker alongside Tilly's warrior, so our team comp options will expand soon (we went from 41 to 45 last night).

We also have Avenge who may fit into a PvP schedule (especially Thursdays), giving us an Engy tank.

I hope this helps your decision-making process. Carbine also said on their stream this week that they may have nerfed healing a little too hard and are considering increasing it back up a bit, fwiw. There will be times when you feel ineffective, but from what I have seen, medic healers are still perfectly workable in PvP. It's really just like in PvE; part of the idea is that the rest of us have to find ways not to take so much damage for you to succeed.

Update!

Well, we won 2 out of 5 RBGs last night! Net rating decrease was about 25 points. Honestly at this point the RBGs and the Practice Grounds aren't very different from each other at all. You might see slightly more difficult opponents in the RBGs, but it's not guaranteed. Full 1800 premades seem to roam around practice grounds just as often as the rateds now.

We've also improved! I've noticed us spreading out and taking better positions in the initial clash to reduce our vulnerability to being melted, and also being more aggressive with our own CCs on the initial push. We did very well in our practice grounds last night as well, coming back from 4-1 (or was it 4-0?) in one and 3-0 in another.

The Gear Gap, as we call it, is still brutal. In fact with this last patch, damage done by players with 1500 and 1800 rated gear has gone up relative to those using PvE gear or the blue PvP stuff. This will likely be a problem for the foreseeable future, and we will just have to deal with it if we want to play. The good news is that we're seeing a drop-off in the ratio of the 1800 teams to those who are geared more consistently with ourselves; when we come up against an evenly geared opponent, the matches suddenly become very fun. It's like magic.

I don't see any reason to continue queueing practice grounds except for using the first 15 minutes of BG night for pre-RBG warmup, and I don't see any major PvP changes coming any time soon; the time for rated is now!~

Thanks Avenge - those are good suggestions.

Yes, thank you for your post. This is the kind of feedback we're looking for, and more. Gold star for above and beyond. :3

It's not all encouraging, of course. Unfortunately I'm seeing a common lack of consistent availability among the responses so far, and I'm not terribly interested in a once-a-week schedule for RBGs. Luckily for us it doesn't take too many people to queue up and duke it out with exiles!

One thing I want to clarify is that raid nights are not off the table. I know we have a few non-raiders who would be interested in the RBGs, and if the only way we can make this work is to do, say, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays in the evenings, then we will proceed in that direction. I would like to include more people, but simply avoiding raid nights appears not to be good enough. So, non-raiders, don't let the raid schedule keep you from communicating your availability.

Instead of tossing up another poll, let's engage in a discussion. Consistency in RBG attendance is one of the most important things for the team to have, and it's not working very well at the moment. If you'd like to be a member of the RBG team but our scheduling habits just don't work out for you, let us know! Give us an idea of the dates and times that work best for you.

Also, if you've been doing RBGs with the team and you just can't seem to make the events consistently, tell us what's changed. We're seeing a gradual decline in participation, and we're just not sure why. Is it the schedule? Have you lost interest? Something else? It's perfectly ok! but we need to hear from you. We had 25 votes for RBG interest in this poll, but we only see a few people communicating with us in a meaningful way in an effort to participate.

The last point I want to make is that an officer doesn't have to be around for us to get together to do some rated PvP, and you don't need five people to queue up and try to win some matches. The scheduling we are organizing is, we feel, a good baseline for doing RBGs, but if a lack of official scheduling is holding anyone back from participating, let's work it out here. On the other side of that coin, if a few of you do get together to do some RBGs, post and let us know how it went! We'd really love to hear about your experiences.

Thanks all!

D&T

Oh if you're revisiting it for the first time since vanilla you're in for a treat. It's soooo good now.

Totes! Hope to see you back somewhere down the road. =)

Yus, last paragraph. Hopefully we will have ourselves in better RBG shape by then.

Cross-posted from our 7/18 RBG scheduling thread, because I think this explanation needs to be kept in sight. Please feel free to discuss any aspect here.

Over the past couple weeks, we have learned a few things about RBGs.

 

First, the landscape is saturated with those who pushed up to 1500/1800 rating and grabbed the gear. These players form an effective barrier to entry for newcomers to the RBG scene. In fact, the system is so screwed up that our team of five (with an average rating below 1200 thanks to some early experimentation) was berated mercilessly for queueing for an RBG without the 1500 rating gear. Queueing for RBGs simply to get punched in the face and yelled at by our teammates match after match is going to be fun for nobody. Whatever else we want the RBG team to be, it needs to be fun!

 

Second, let's be honest: We have not focused on PvP as a guild, and we have spent barely any time at all in rated PvP scenarios, or against players of a rated caliber. With the way the ratings and gear system currently is, we are not going to be facing teams similar to us. We are going to be facing teams who have been running these battlegrounds since the very beginning (and if you're wondering, yes, the vast majority of rated battleground opponents I have run across have at least the 1500 rated gear). We are currently not good! We need to refine our strategies and build good communication and awareness habits and teamwork.

 

Third, success in RBGs requires a commitment, in much the same way as raiding. Because we were not PvP focused from the beginning, we missed the boat on getting into this enterprise on the ground floor. We have a lot of ground to make up. We had a better turnout for last night's RBG practice, but we are still working on fundamental things such as "CC and focus the healer", "do we go for a steal or not?", and "stop them from picking the mask back up". This is partially why we made one of the requirements for joining the RBG team reading and responding to the BG strategy posts. Everyone who wants to be on an RBG team needs to contribute to the discussions, attend the practices that we run, and demonstrate that they can fit or grow into the standards set by the team.

 

For these reasons, we will not be starting scheduled rated battlegrounds this Friday. I can't state enough that we have a lot of work to do, and that that should be our main goal right now. This Friday will continue our RBG practice nights, as will each scheduled PvP event until we have made some significant improvements. I would like to get to a point where we see damage and cc coordination become a standard practice, and not something we pull off successfully once every other BG against pugs. I want to see us jump into the fight right from the get-go with strong damage and good results, and keep it up throughout the match. I want to see us carry the pug instead of getting frustrated with them. I want us to consistently follow not just overall-BG macro strategy, but show decisive micro strategy in the team-fights themselves.

 

This is an opportunity to get into SoH PvP on the ground floor, even if we missed that chance for the content at large! Carbine has stated that they will re-tool both PvP stats and the way PvP gear is distributed in rated play, in order to address the convoluted nature of PvP gearing and the barriers to entry for newcomers. We want to learn and grow now so that we are ready to jump into the fray when they implement these things (or before, if we feel that we are ready).

Welcome!

I think running as a group is probably a good idea if we get stuck with just a bunch of random pugs. We'll always want to communicate at the front of a match to see what our allies are bringing and what their intentions are. If no response or all pug, definitely roll as a ball imo. The other end of the spectrum is that we run into another organized group of 5, in which case we might even have to go so far as to offer up multiple offspecs from our group; I'd rather cross that bridge when we get there, though, and I'd rather change strategy than run bad specs.

I also think your general priority list is spot-on. Controlling mid is, in fact, more important than preventing a steal in most cases imo, in terms of resource allocation. This only becomes a real problem when the other team is simply beating yours in combat, in which case you're not being outmaneuvered; you're just losing the match on player skill and effort, lol. Obviously you CAN leave the middle, and any response to a steal attempt should always be weighed against the size of that attempt, but it's a good idea to keep the mask spawn timer in mind when doing so.

Because WalatikiTimer doesn't work consistenly, everyone should also get into the habit of looking at the clock when a mid-mask is captured or returned. The next mask always spawns 60 seconds afterward. We can even call out the time of the next spawn in mumble.

Friday evening isn't a weeknight!!!

Haha, that certainly wasn't the greatest post for me to find.  After doing some actual searching this morning, I found this post which references more of the actual discusison found... HERE!

Bardic (Carbine guy) posted this in that thread, post#17:

Further information, to chew on (and if this is not working as described, please let me know so we can look into it):

 

The relationship between PvP Offense and PvP Defense is multiplicative, such that:

 

PvPNetMitigation = PvPDefensePercent * (1 - PvPOffensePercent)

(value clamped between 0 and 1)

 

This PvP Mitigation works cooperatively with armor value to decrease total incoming damage. This interaction is also multiplicative. Such that:

 

NetDamage = IncomingDamage * (1-MitigationPercent) * (1-PvPNetMitigation)

 

Where MitigationPercent would be the percent of damage mitigated by target armor/resists.

I have not yet read too much of that thread, but this is the way PvP stats are calculated, and there are a lot of graphs and analysis in there.

I'm kind of excited for this one.. there are a couple ways to do it. I'm a little hesitant, though, to try to expose pugs to any strategy that they're not completely used to. Not because they can't execute it, but because they'll be unwilling to. Alterac Valley all over again.

Anyway... When attacking, I prefer going for secondary nodes and holding ground in mid to simply stacking mid, especially if we have a pvp tank. Mid needs a lot of dps since you need to actually hold territory for the objective; the secondary nodes simply need to be capped and the held off them.

On defense in the first room, we could send one solid person to each side as a scout and the rest up the mid. Once we get any report from the sides, we can allocate at that time using the orange pads. It'll have to be quick, but this maximizes our potential in mid pretty well. Just like Walatiki, getting a count of the enemy rushing mid would be great if we can manage it.

In defending the second room, it seems better to stack people up top and then respond to whatever shows up below by jumping down. The secondary nodes can be a hell of a thing for the attacker to try to take in that room; I'm not sure whether it's a good idea to try it or if attackers should just slam mid, though with some nice pushbacks and CC it could work.

Third room... not much to say here. It's basically divide and conquer; allocation between the three objectives is important to get right. It would be nice to have a stalker who can set up on the third room when attacking and use whatever abilities they use to basically insta-cap the west side (I think it's west).

I also found this reddit post, including:

With the Walatiki Mask it will spawn in a predictable place. It can only spawn in a place it hasn't spawned in.

 

So if it spawns on top then next it will be somewhere on the bottom. If next it spawns bottom middle it will be bottom left or right. Repeat until it has spawned in all 4 places at least once then it'll go back to the top.

This isn't too much of a surprise to me, but if this person is right, that means there isn't a pattern, but that the spawn becomes increasingly predictable as you reach the later spawns. The quote also claims that the sequence repeats itself once all four spots have spawned a mask, so we'll want to keep an eye on that.

On the other hand...

Spawns - The first 4 spawns will never repeat so you have top, bot mid, left and right. So if the 1st 2 come top and bot right you know the next spawn will be bot mid or bot left.

--- Have a guy camp them by hiding behind rocks and pull the fight to the other side of the map (maybe by a steal) to guarantee an easy pickup.

--- after it spawns at all 4 it goes back to being random again. The last 2 of any cycle should be easy grabs if you time them right

Let's kick off this discussion.

First, get WalatikiTimer. It doesn't always work, but when it does................................ it's great.

With the BGs in Wildstar we thankfully have a couple different strategy options, although Walatiki does narrow it down a bit more than Halls, I think.

It seems to me that the best way to go is to bring a stalker tank or two into the team, since they have so many advantages in sneaking to the masks and also in deflecting just about everything under the sun in the face of any efforts to kill them. An engy tank might also serve for this purpose--minus the sneaking of course--but I'm not sure about warrior tanks. Do we have any experiences with warrior tanks being effective mask carriers?

The optimal number of healers is, I believe, two; and I think both should go straight to mid for the initial clash.

I'm leaning away from going for a steal up front. Picking up a mid mask is a much shorter run and you usually don't have the enemy spawn right in your face. As long as you can defend your mask room, I don't see too much reason to go for a steal straightaway; perhaps if the mid fight draws out.

Two on defense should be able to manage any steal attempt. This group should be loaded up with CC breaks and cleanses, and needs to be on the ball with communication in case the enemy bum rushes our base and we need to peel.

At the beginning of a match we should always attempt to scout the enemy's steal attempt. Can we count how many come to mid?

How do you guys think different comps might alter our strategy? If we get into a group with too many tanks or healers do we definitely go for the steal? Three healers in mid with three dps can probably hold an entire team off the mask for quite a while; alternatively, if somehow we end up with three tanks, having more than one in mid is kind of wasted. Does this make sense or am I wrong? Also, the role poll currently includes four clothies, with three dps slingers in there. How would we fare in mid, with that group? Do we need to alter strategy and have three of us (esper heals, slinger dps, engy tank) go for steals all game instead?