[Sawrock]

Perhaps have a setting in the Settings Options that lets you choose the front, middle, or back of your side (which would either be the top or bottom of the map). This way, people as warriors can choose to spawn up front, but squishy mages can choose to spawn farther back. In addition, if you're, say, fighting a Void Assassin, they could choose front (to try to go for backstabs), but if you predict that, you can choose back (so they are no longer within reach).

EDIT: Also, a "random" option that is chosen by default, that chooses between the three.

[K Peculier]

100% Support. The current match-up for butt stabbing is too favorable.

[Grandpa]

Currently as-is you can get overcharge sonic-shelled on round zero, buttstabbed to death on round zero and a plethora of other horrible things that'll immediately turn the battle in one person or one team's favor. Something needs to change, be it reducing movement again (which is ill-advised) or making us spawn further away and broken up so we aren't bunched together for an instant full team KD and wipe.

[Snake]

Positioning clearly got annoying in PvP, when the only problem of it was PvE related. Oh boy.

Why not make the spawns related to your main hand weapon? People with melee weapons will spawn closer to the center, people with ranged weapons will spawn closer to the edge.

[Autumn]

If people spawned 13 range from eachother instead of 10, and also didn't spawn as clumped up (Allies should spawn 3 range from eachother at least) then we wouldn't have Round 0 rush strategies involving AoE Ryesers

[Trexmaster]

The new positioning as it stands is catastrophic for PvP, yes. 1v1 battles always start each participant in 10 range of each other, while this isn't inherently awful, it heavily favors builds that require little to no setup time and can take advantage of being that close every time (VAs, damage stacking gunners, some duelists)

In team fights, it becomes a massacre if one side gets more initiative/AoE potential. As already stated, due to being in a roughly 3x3 area, nearly every AoE in the game can and will hit every single party member on Round 0. This makes having an AoE KD and having *immunity* to an AoE KD vital to not being trivialized before your turn even pops up, not to mention the possibility of sheer AoE burst damage wiping you as a casualty for not being tanky enough. Before, AoEs only became party-wiping if your group carelessly huddled up or got grouped up to eat them, now you don't have a choice unless you can move first.

Either further distance or a more spread out formation would balance it out for team battles, one on one will simply need more distance perhaps.

[Neus]

I'd like to hear more detailed arguments about distance. I understand having people spawn not so far from each other is an issue as far as AoE is concerned, but I'd also like to know which AoEs are the biggest offenders there.

[Autumn]

The smallest AoEs possible can still hit everyone, the strongest AoEs in question seem to be Explosion, Nerhaven Sear, Crystal Rose, Lead Storm, anything with circle targetting essentially.


But even AoEs like Holy Spark can hit everyone round 0, its not just the AoEs either.

[Snake]

Reducing the size/range/damage of AoEs won't solve the problem here, just saying. If anything, will bring future nuisances to newer classes, or make certain setups with absurd range more broken than ever.

People spawning close to each other should be a Tactician thing by itself and spawn between player enemies should be more distant or else why bother playing anything but Kensei/VA that insta-gibs someone for 300 damage per hit on Round 0, before the enemy is ready?
Overall, the utility of Round 0 is to prepare your buffs, since you have no other chances to re-cast or re-use them in the rest of the fight without sacrificing Momentum;

And, the way it was before, we had most of the classes with ways to maneuver across the field (Shukuchi, Charge, Western Wind, Gain Air + Winged Serpent, Blink, Haunting, technically all movement skills do cover quite the area), and the new party starting positions wrecked the 'logic' behind a single class that depends a lot on the enemy staying as away as possible (Archer/Arbalest). Hit and Run is a myth for Archers.

I'm quite locked to the idea of making player spawns for PvP fights start by the northern or southern edges of the map, this alone will fix everything.

If anything, Monsters should be the ones spawning in the middle, and players by the borders.

[Rendar]

So, since I don't actually know how bad it looks. Could someone show me a picture of what a normal 4v4 (and possibly 3v3) looks like in PVP right now?

I remember in the past that, as tact/curate, I loved loved LOVED being able to just mass + rescue our entire party for a party-wide celerity, etc.

Admittedly, I don't think that players should have had a choice on their starting positions in relation to one another (aside from avoiding but stabbing because lol buttstabbing insta-dead on turn 1) without a Tactician. Tactician is this class that is, now, overly bloated with skills that are half god-awful and outright bad, and the class is so starved for SP that you're gonna have to Destiny to get any worth out of it (compared to destinying ghost/kensei and just shitting on everyone because they're one of the best class combinations in the game that work off of eachother due to crit + crit + crit + damage + damage + dodge + survivability but who the hell cares about class balance.)

I'd like to see, certain innate things be added to the Tactician skill that determines your tactician rank. Being able to, prior to battlestart in earnest to either A ) Give a buff to all of your allies, B ) Let's you choose placement along the bottom/top (depending on which side you spawn on) sides of the map. Or C ) Just flat out lower the amount of SP needed for half of the skills (and still keep the benefits.

That's the problem with Tactician (and a few other classes). Their kits are too bloated with abilities. Sure, we have a SHITTON of skill slots now (arguably way to fucking many for some builds), but some classes (Ghost/Kensei come to mind again) get by with just basic attacking and a lot of passive buffs.

Oh whoops, this sort of turned into a tactician rant.