The grab issue~

Why grabs became so strong:

1: CC cap changes (18th April 2018)

This is the change that made grabs into engage skills.

Before the CC cap was changed, all grabs put players in a downed state, making them immune to other CCs except downsmashes and grabs. 

With a single CC window to combo, it was fairly hard to kill someone after a single grab for most classes, especially before the patch that added AP brackets (january 2018).

However, grabs could also be used to extend combos (like a 100% downsmash) which made them very useful in a different way. Pearl Abyss wanted to give this ability to non-grab classes with the CC cap rework, but in the process made grabs a lot stronger and unhealthy.

The obvious fix should’ve been giving reliable downsmashes to non-grab classes, not switching grab’s combo potential to normal skills while greatly buffing its engage.

2: FG, SA & CC changes (2-16th may 2018)

Before this change, every single hit of CC skills applied the CC. Also, literally every single skill had one type of CC. It meant that even protected, core skills dished out multi-hit CCs.

So, why was this important to keep grab engages in check?

More than half of the grabs were unprotected, meaning it was difficult to simply dash up to someone and use an unprotected grab without thinking.

The result was often random and most of the time in favor of the player rotating CC skills.

Classes with unprotected grabs were not supposed to try grab-engaging, unless they knew they couldn’t beat their opponents fairly.

There were some obvious windows (sorc’s GRJ and crows for example) for safe unprotected grab engages, but they were rare and could be avoided by being careful.

Classes that had protected grabs and could brute force openings without risks were berserker, warrior/valkyrie and mystic/strikers, all of which were considered very strong and were the top duelists at the time.

This change wasn’t very impactful until recently because so many protections were removed that classes didn’t need to brute force openings to find CCs anymore, but the meta has once again evolved towards perma-superarmor rotations.

However, this time, very few protected skills have CCs, and even fewer have multi-hit CCs. This makes unprotected grabs a lot safer to use, and non-grab classes have a very hard time CCing anyone.

3: Iframe priority over grab removed (2020)

Iframe used to be almost completely immune to desync against grabs. If desync happened, the grab CC was either unusually short or glitched and only kept the grabbed player in place until the grab animation was over.

I’m not going to judge whether it was fair or not but by being immune to desync, iframe was almost a true counter to grab. It worked until the grab happened on the iframer’s screen, which was usually ~50-100ms after the grab was used.

A grab still could not be “reacted”, but the window of prediction was a lot bigger.

This change was ninja-patched and no grab nerf was made in compensation.

4: Individual grab buffs for 5 years straight (warrior, tamer, valk striker etc) and new classes with ranged grabs

By now, most preawakened grab skills have been buffed to be usable in awakening state from hotbar. Some had their cooldowns greatly reduced and others had their failed-grab window shortened or made protected.

Moreover since Lahn’s awakening release (2018), most of the new classes were given ranged grabs. Hashashin, nova, sage and corsair all have one (with some being a lot stronger than others).

I don’t think any player asked for this and it feels as unnecessary now as it was 5 years ago. Grab skills should never have been directly buffed, and ranged grabs should not exist whatsoever.

Why grab being so strong is unhealthy for the game:

1: It greatly limits the playstyle diversity

Basically, one opening ability being this strong completely warps the game around itself.

The whole defense system is made mostly obsolete and only mechanics that interact with grabs matter : protected mobility and speed to stay at a distance or grab-engage faster, and iframes to try avoiding the engage.

In 2018 before all the grab buffs, 1v1 fights were more or less evenly decided by:

   -damage trading (block and burst damage counters SA rotations)

   -block openings (getting behind someone’s block with a cc)

   -grab engages, only for specific classes or used when someone’s hp was already low

I am comparing current meta with early 2018’s because it also revolved around protected gameplay, but grab engages were a lot less important.

Damage trading was used to force people to use blocks when they couldn’t sustain their hp and deal enough damage with SA + lingers.

Either they used blocks and their backs became open to catches, which most classes had (more so than now), or their hp fell low enough to be able to be killed in a single grab-engage CC.

Dying to damage trading alone did not happen often but was always possible, when players stubbornly kept using SA rotations.

Without 100% BSR, only specific classes could one combo off of grab, most of them with long combos (multi-freeze or multi grabs) that had a high chance of failing.

Now however, more than 80% of 1v1s are decided by grab engages and nothing else.

Players have to try staying away from each other instead of actually fighting and trading blows when grab cooldowns are up.

The ones that like this playstyle obviously like bdo’s current gameplay, but all the other players aren’t allowed to play the way they want. Most of them either stopped doing 1v1s, rerolled to adapt to the grab engage meta or quit the game altogether.

2: Some classes don’t have a grab. 

Since grabs are so important for 1v1s, non-grab classes are all weak and unbalanced for it.

These classes would need to be buffed a lot and become blatantly overpowered to compete with grab classes. And while it might work for 1v1s, they will be obviously overtuned in situations where grabs matter less.

However, in a game where a big part of the endgame is holding a grinding spot in 1v1s, all classes should be more or less balanced for it.

Currently, if both players play perfectly, a non-grab class should almost never beat a grab class. Players obviously always make mistakes, but with classes and protections getting buffed all the time, the windows of mistakes are getting smaller and smaller.

3: It makes 1vX almost impossible for most classes.

At present, classes need multiple iframes, fast movement and high, quick protected damage to be able to 1vX in bdo.

Before all the grab buffs, 1vX was accessible to every class. Fast movement + multiple iframes (grab counters) were not necessary, and the damage didn’t need to be as quick. It opened up group pvp to everyone and helped balance the game.

Obviously some classes were better at it than others, but it was still possible for all classes. The game’s skillcap felt almost infinite with plenty of winnable 1vX situations.

Now, every 1vX is met by a spam of grabs from multiple players, making it impossible for non iframe-heavy classes to successfully deal damage.

Protections don’t matter and safe multi-hit CCs don’t exist anymore to dissuade mindless grabs. 

(insane powercreep of slows and resistances are also to blame for this but I’ll rant about them in another post)

The only defense against grabs currently is fast movement and multiple iframes.

As a result, the game has become very zerg friendly. Individual skill level matters a lot less, which is very sad since a big part of bdo’s endgame is based around getting better at pvp.

How to address the grab issue:

A fix should tone down the strength of grab engages, but not so much that they become irrelevant.

They should stay extremely good tools, but should become more situational and less overwhelming.

In my opinion the simplest, best and cleanest solutions are

First suggestion:

grabs should only work on Superarmor status (including SA+FG skills).

This is a simple change but gives a lot more counterplay to grab engages, especially in 1vs1. 

Along with that, to make gameplay more interesting and help non-grab classes, all melee classes should have access to a few FG skills with high damage, which I believe most already have (awakened sorc doesn’t).

Second suggestion:

There should simply be a revert of most past grab buffs:

make grab count as "2" in the CC limit, heavily nerf the strongest grabs cooldowns and speed, their range and cone.

There is no reason for grabs to have a cooldown as low as a basic ability when they are brute-force engagement tools with next to no counter. They are currently too easy to land and their effect is far too strong. 

This change would somewhat reduce grab’s power to what it was meant to be when the game was released (and actually had decent balance and vision).

In this situation, shield classes’s SA block should be nerfed to avoid being unkillable in 1vs1.

(for example SA being removed and the block becoming 270° instead of 180°, or simply the block gauge being reduced by ~30%)

These changes could be applied together or separately, or a mix of both. I believe they’re the most simple and easy to implement, and don’t change the game’s balance too much.

Some classes would need to be buffed in compensation, but not as many as you’d think. A lot of the classes that abuse grab-engage the most are extremely strong without taking their grab in consideration. They’d also profit from the changes as they are mostly tanky classes (striker/mystic, shield classes, berserker). From the top of my head, the only ones that would require compensation are Tamer and maybe Lahn.

I really hope for something to be after the class reboots, while big balance changes are still being made to the game.

There’s really no better time than now to address the grab issue.

Yeah grab should not counter both FG and SA but only one of the two. Also pick a another cc to counter the other one.(a cc that grab classes don't have)

Also delete FG+SA already lol.

The whole grab engage thing shouldnt be a thing, that much is obvious. Now, one of the common sugestions i see is making grab count as a 2 on the CC mark to reduce their potential to onecombo people from grab engages, this would definitely be an absolutely disaster of a change just making the combat even more obnoixious, if you dont die in one grab you still take enough dmg and debuffs to force you to be on the back foot and play extremely defensive, some classes can just use the inmunity timer to fully heal, some grabs are KD and can be extended to downsmashes, it just doesnt fix anything.

So let me explain why feel he did a decent job on the suggestions.
Keeping the focus on the core of the issue which is grabs being an engage tool when they arent supposed to we:
Either we discourage the grab usage as an engage tool following the second suggestion mostly centered around slowing their speed, range, cone and CD.
Or we impose a similar ruleset to grabs as every other engage CC following first suggestion aka grabs not working on FGs, unprotected skills or iframes (seems dumb that i have to add this but just in case).

So, yeah, good suggestions and finally imma expand on what i feel would be the optimal solution, i rather get something akin to the second suggestion as i like the idea of grabs being a counter to over passive gameplay or long protected skills, rage skills  and such, this forces grabs to be protected saddly but also they need to be SLOW and telegraphed (by slow i mean 0,5-1 sec activation or so, something that gives all classes with any ping time to react {not predict, react, forcing defensive plays by forcing predictions is just winning an advantage by doing nothing and its pretty unfair for nongrab classes} if they are in position to react), they are the thing you should use when the enemy is not paying attention or using something that cannot be stopped otherwise but again, they also should be punisheable not just avoidable, this means that if they are protected they need to have a fail animation lock of unprotected time that lets you punish it (something like dark trade animation when low hp in awak).

I can imagine under my changes grabs could be regarded as a "bad skill thats situational and not good in 1v1" and only the skilled players would know when and how to use but thats exactly what i would like them to be.
This wouldnt fix perma SA problems but would be a good foundation to work over perma SA rotations without the constant pain of grabs defining the meta in 1v1 and small scale.

A missed grab should be highly punishable.  Example is fighting games - a wiffed grab locks the player into animation to get punished.  This, IMO, should apply to BDO grab as well.  If a player misses what would be a literal "I win" button ("press E to win broooo"), that great reward when successful, should be met with a great punishment if missed.

I agree. There are two variations of grabs normal and command grab. Normal throws usually have quick recovery and fast start up frames. But you get nothing from them. Maybe BDO could use something similar. A lesser grab that gives some sort of CC but you can't really get much from it and a riskier grab that can give you a big advantage. 

A sorc asking for grab changes, are you high?

Point 3 is bullcrap, it's an internet issue this entire post is a joke

Some classes are heavily reliant on grab as main source of cc, there is a reaosn why you only get grappled by some classes because there aren't other reliable cc as some skills are too slow

If this crap change go through, a lot of people going to be rerolling to something else and a indirect buff to certain classes for some situation such as valk 100% in large scale or guardians will be absolutely busted (there is a reason why guardians hate grab classes and stomps over any nongrab classes especially musa and maehwas), with how much more protection everyone is getting with rework, it will be a no skill damage trade

Grab was never the issue, it's a class design issue, ever tried to grab a sorc, tamer, nova? they will straight up punish you hard if you try, and those 3 are just prime examples, any classes with more than 1 reliable iframes will stomps anybody who try to grab.

I agree, unless the grab was resisted, then it wasn't a player fault, also there are some resisted animations for some classes' grab skill(s), which is even longer than if the grab was wiffed.

All that needs to be done about grabs. Is for the Devs to extend the cooldown of all grabs skills by 3 or 4 times. What makes grab brokenly overpowered, is the fact that you can spam them every 8 to 15 seconds. With some classes having 2 grabs, or protected grabs. On top of the fact that some classes can just blow you up 3 or 4 seconds after connecting the grab.

Nah rescource managment would be too much for the avarage bdo player. This is not that game.

Well, I think the mistake here is not necessarily about the grab system in itself, or the grab engage : the main problem is that grab is the only one in its own category.

What I mean is, there should be something else with the power to go through SA/FG, usable on a regular basis, and each class should have one of these tools depending on their playstyle.

So, I'd say :

- give the power to bypass SA/FG to another type of CC, and make sure that all classes have at least one of them

- or make grab work like another CC (not working on SA/FG) but give to each class 2 skills with CC (one for succession only, one for awakening only) with the "Guard Breaker" ability. 

- or, same idea, make grab work like another CC but let players choose one skill in a set list (like we're currently doing with our core skills) to give it the "Guard Breaker" ability. 

- or again, grab like another CC but give us an easy way to activate black spirit power, so that the next skill will have the Guard Breaker ability (not fond of this idea, doing it with some skills would be clearly OP and BSP is not really convenient). 

- or (I'm not convinced about the efficiency of such a solution, but I'll tell it anyway) give the non grab class a way to shatter FG and even SA, more easily than grab class. 

Reduce the damage after a successful grab by 80%

nothing new, it would work just the same of freeze

this would stop the no brain mystic, warrior, striker etc going at you fully protectect / grab / and 2 skill win

and the grabs go from no brain 1 skill win to more strategic skill used carefully