I do expect a great majority of people disagreeing with what I'm about to say due to there being more classes benefiting from grab skills than those suffering from a lack of having even one grab skill. Ironically, that may be an inherent part of the problem as to why next to nothing has been done for so long to such an unreasonably powerful skill such as the grab. If anything, I hope that this thread will incentivate these grab-defenders to not only downvote this post but to also postulate their counter-arguments so that I can in turn counter them to demonstrate why there is no reason why such a powerful skill such as the grab skill should exist in Black Desert the way it currently functions. So let's begin.

I have a lot of experience in pvp, not just BDO but in other games. In my previous MMO I had the highest kill-count. For Black Desert, in NA I have the highest pvp kill-count from the sum of all pvp modes bdo has to offer, and I am pretty sure this is also true for every region of BDO worldwide. Needless to say I have a lot of experience in fighting enemies of all gear, classes, and tactics. My most important suggestion I can ever give to BDO with the goal of making PVP more balanced regardless of the class one plays, is getting rid once and for all of the Grab skill.

There are far too many reasons why the grab destroys any fairness in pvp, it's hard to find where to start; and even harder to understand how such an incredibly powerful skill has existed for so long in BDO.

Let's begin with some very crude facts about the essence of BDO PVP. The goal of PVP is plain and simple, kill before you get killed. Each class is given many tools to reach this goal. Using high damage tools/skills are a good way to reach that goal, but there are also a set of defensive skills. The enemy can dodge your attacks just like you can theirs. They will obviously not just stand openly still and just take your damage face on, they have frontal guard (FG) and iframes to counter attack skills. So you brought a rock and they answered with paper, you now need to bring the scissors and that's where crowd-control (CC) skills come along. CC skills can disable your enemy from further using any defensive or offensive skill for a limited amount of time so that you can deal the necessary damage to reach the ultimate goal in PVP. But your enemy can still answer to your scissors by bringing the rock, and thats the Super Armor (SA) skills. However, there is of course a big problem in all of this. A majority of classes see this harmonious interaction of rock-paper-scissors and they bring a steamroller, in other words, the grab skills.

The grab skills are in fact in an entire league of their own, above all other skills.

It doesn't matter if you use FG properly, Grab defeats FG.
It doesn't matter if you use SA, Grab defeats SA.
It doesn't matter if you use iframe, you have to time your iframe precisely and predict when the grab will be casted. Most grab skills are instantaneous (have no casting animation or have casting animations so short that it is humanly impossible to react to) so effectively dodging a grab skill ends up not being about skill but about luck. In addition to this, grab skills were silently given priority by the developer over iframe some months ago.

Thus we have a balanced game of rock-paper-scissors all overridden by a Joker Card, the grab skill.

Effectively, grab skills are by far stronger than any Ultimate/100% BSR skill. Since no other skill can grant the beholder what is essentially a roll of the dice to see if they get an instantaneous win or not AND in such a short cooldown time to add insult to injury. The only condition for grab to work is to be within range of the grab skill and once this is true there is nothing the person that is about to be grabbed can do, because grab goes through every defense system in this game. The fight thus becomes a gamble in favor of the grab caster, a dice-roll to decide whether the grab user gets a free win every few seconds or has to keep on obeying the laws of combat until his grab cooldown is replenished and they can ignore all of these rules again.

When we think of what this is equivalent to, it is no different than giving a player a skill that does 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 points of damage to an enemy's Health. in the end the result is the same, the receiver of this skill ends up dead and there was nothing they could have done to avoid it except perhaps a purely luckily timed iframe. Their destiny was sealed once that quintillion-point damage hit, or the grab landed; the result is no different in the end since in the current state of the game a CC that lands almost always results in assured death, and the path that lead to that conclusion while it is different it is also irrelevant to the outcome. In the end, the grab goes through SA and FG just as a quintillion damage skill was cast on a player using SA or FG. Why does something so unreasonable exist in BDO? Something that has the shortest of casting animations, some are even protected, some are even ranged, some don't even need to be accurately aimed! They even have very short cooldown timers when compared to any 100%-BSR/q/e/z/ultimate buff skills; and yet grab skills outperform and are far more influential in deciding the outcome of battle than any of those so-called strongest skills/buffs; and there's more: grabs can be used in conjunction with those other advanced skills/buffs! It's madness.

All of this also leads to the following realization: Grabs are extremely low risk and generously high reward skills. GRAB SKILLS HAVE NO COUNTER AND THEY COUNTER EVERYTHING.

NO COUNTER: If a grab isn't protected by SA it has a casting animation so short that at 60 FPS their unprotected casting of the grab is something from 5-10 frames, hitting it would be pure luck and it's unreasonable to even call this unprotected. Then of course there's the SA grabs from Strikers which can grab while being in SA and then subsequently cast an AOE CC around them (usually to CC players coming to aid the grabbed player) while the striker is still holding their grab and is still protected by SA. In effect, grab skills may only have a downside in that others might come help attack the player that is doing the grabbing, but this isn't an argument since we are talking about balance here and that implies to consider scenarios where the number of friends and foes are evenly matched including gear; that's why we can't consider those uneven situations here because we are focusing on situations that should be balanced and yet they aren't due to grab skills, unlike uneven situations which aren't balanced to begin with.

COUNTERS EVERYTHING: We already covered this, all mechanisms of defense (such FG, SA, and sometimes iframe) that exist in BDO to defend against CC skills are all rendered useless and break down against grab skills. This is not balance.

unfortunately I'm tired of typing but I have not yet covered every reason why grab skills shouldn't exist in BDO.

(To be continued in Part II in this same thread)

(Continued from PART I): Yet another reason why grabs break the delicate PVP balance. You don't need to know your enemy nor their class' unprotected skills in order to CC them if you have a grab skill available. Your objective as a grab-class is cookie-cutter, your objective is the same regardless of who or what class is in front of you, whether they are veteran or new, meta class or dead class, more geared than you or not; your objective is only one: get near to them, preferably approach them using high speed and protected movement or let them approach you, and cast your grab. In the rare case it gets predicted or resisted and you are out of grabs, you will need to play by the rules now until your grab skill is off cooldown and you get another gamble. Some shield classes abuse this by simply sitting in their simultaneous FG+SA stance and classes without a grab usually have a hard time with these, especially melee classes who need to get near them, and thus get into grabbing range of a class they have no means to CC.

I have heard the pseudo-argument saying that this modality of a class with grab skill against a class without a grab skill is somehow fair because the class without a grab has to patiently wait for the right time to strike while all the time trying to trade damage and getting in range of the grab just to try to fish for that CC... Well how convenient it is to make such a remark from such a high horse! Why should the Grab class have that constant Joker card under their sleeve while the other class has to play under the unfair condition that she may get grabbed at any time while trying to do her work without a grab? This is no argument, either both classes have a grab skill, or preferably none have it. Why should one class always be the hunter, the aggressor, and the other has to always be the unfavored underdog, the prey? This is not balance. No one can tell me grab is fair until they have played as their main character a class with no grab skills from the past two years to present day, because then they would understand the underlying lack of balance that the grab skill brings to BDO.

PROPOSED SOLUTION:
Therefore my proposed solution is the following:
Eradicate grab skills from the face of BDO. Make every single grab skill in BDO follow the rules of combat of BDO
1) You cannot grab a player whose Forward Guard skill is facing you.
2) You can grab a player whose Forward Guard is NOT facing you.
3) You cannot grab any player during their SA no matter what.
4) Grab skills cannot CC an iframed player and should not have priority over it.

This is in my view, with all my PVP experience, the best solution by far to deal with this unreasonable thing known as grab skills. However, I also see an alternative approach to restoring the power dynamic around the grab skills, and that is to give every single class in BDO a grab skill. While I despise this path, I think it would help put into perspective how idiotic it is to have such a powerful skill such as the grab skill, when everyone has it. It's not really the best solution in my view as much as it would be just setting the entire house on fire, but I also realize that the developer might be very nervous and hesitant to do the right thing and take away their child's favorite toy, a skill that so many players rely upon so much that they couldn't imagine having to fight by proper and fair rules of rock-paper-scissors, removing once and for all a skill so powerful that it should have never existed.

Some have made the argument to me that it would be unreasonable to give a highly slippery class like mine (sorceress) a grab. To those people I always point them to ninja, kunoichi, and most of all, lahn (Oh god the lahns! >.> ). I basically refer to these classes as "sorceresses with a grab skill(s)." While it is true that the sorceress differs in capabilities from ninjas and kunoichis, it's not by that much, and the fight is usually quite even between sorceress, kunoichi, and ninja if we ignore the grab skill; and I'd also argue that Lahn's can even outperform sorceresses at sorceressing! and they get a grab skill too! In fact, I would go as far as to argue that the developer arbitrarily decides who gets a grab skill(s) and which classes don't for no reason at all other than whim. The aforementioned classes along with the sorceress are all very fast-paced classes, I'd argue they have better mobility at traveling long distances than sorceress, they are all heavy-iframe user classes, lahn probably outperforms all of them at the latter. But for some reason sorceress is the only one among these that wasn't granted a grab and try as I may I can't see why that would be the case, it seems entirely arbitrary and at the expense of sorceress players. I have thought many times that, had sorc been released today instead of back in 2013 (was it?), then the sorceress would have been released with a grab skill too for no other reason than the developer seemingly being more charitable in giving out grabs to all new classes since the release of shai/archer I forgot which came out last but thats quite a few years ago. The number of classes with a grab skills outnumber the few that don't have a grab skill. And there doesn't seem to be any reason at all as to why the few that don't have it don't. A similar argument can be constructed for musa/maehwa: Why dont these two have a grab skill? Some would say it's because they are very fast classes (analogous to saying that sorceress is iframe-heavy so shouldn't have a grab skill) and thus they would argue that musa/maehwa too shouldn't be granted grab skills due to these reasons... But then we can point out that there are classes as fast or far faster than musa/maehwa that do have grab skills: Berserkers, Warriors, etc... The only reasonable conclusion we can draw here is that there is no valid reason why any class should not have a grab skill, especially when it is so decisive in battle.

ADDENDUM:
I have also heard the argument that wrongly says that shield classes would be too strong if there weren't grab skills to go through their simultaneous SA+FG skill. Myself, having played Sorceress as my main class ever since my first day in BDO in late 2016 when Sorceress was considered the worst class in PVP, I can assert that shield classes like Warrior, Nova, Guardian and Valkyrie, would not become invisible if grab skills were entirely removed, because lets not forget that these shield classes for some reason not only have some of the best defense (simultaneous FG and SA) but also the best offensive skill by far in BDO: The grab skill. By eradicating the grab skill from BDO they are losing half of what makes them so dangerous to approach in their shields, and thats a good thing for balance. I don't mean to attack nor target any class in particular with this but I also want to bring up solid examples of why getting rid of grab skills makes sense; and that's the only reason why I mentioned those classes here.

As a final note regarding yet more alternative ways to rebalance the grab skills, I will leave here a link to a youtube video by the player known as ShakyBay. The video is from mid 2021 so some of the issues he mentions have been addressed already by the developer but others (including his views on grab skill mechanics in BDO) still remain true to this day. He includes a very good explanation of why grab skills are too strong but most importantly he provides a contrast of how grab skills work in other games. For example he mentions some fighting game where the most powerful kind of grab skill has a very long casting animation skill which gives time for an opponent to react to it and so it's an example of how BDO could rework grab skills to have a full 1 or 1.5 seconds of casting animation before the grab is deployed and thus giving an opponent the option to react to it if not counter it with a new combo-counter mechanic to actually punish the grab (which doesn't exist in BDO yet). Just avoiding it would be fine too, and so continue the dance that is BDO PVP rather than ending it abruptly because the grab user won the dice roll. That's so much better than what grab skills are now in BDO: Having no counter and countering everything, and casting almost instantaneously without any chance to avoid them other than sheer luck.

Here is the video: https://youtu.be/zw7-hqwXKN4?t=1027

I tried including every possible counter-argument along with the ones I've been presented with and this has been my response to all of them as to why there is no excuse why a technique so powerful such as the grab skill should continue to exist in BDO.

If you read all that then I'm very impressed! Treat yourself with a cookie or something nice!

P.S.
I also just remembered. Some classes can instantaneously grab you after they were CC'd and survived you while from the ground, skipping the getting-up animation and giving no chance for a player to react other than counting the seconds.

you're a sorc u have unlimited iframes to dodge grab, just git gud 

And what is this essay for?

Short: grab and other cc kill pvp. 

Also even FG and SA kill pvp because classes like wiz using fact that client, not the server calculates everything has 24/7 protection.

Conclusion: if the pvp core works badly then pvp will never work well.

While it is true that grabs are too strong and have no place in a competitive PvP game, bdo is not a PvP game, and especially not a competitive one. PvP in bdo is a meme, and such broken mechanism prety much fits into it, clearly showcasing the incompetence of the developers.

Also sorc is the last class (literately) in the game to complain about it with her nocd, nogap iframe which should not exits either.

Double standarts in the essay.

First it was stated: "Grabs can be avoided." Then "Grabs should be removed, because too strong." What is the reason of whining here?

Second: By removing grab, enjoy the free domination of FG/SA non-stop comboes and also an even greater difficulty to catch other more nimble classes.

Long post with the usual rambling. 

Short answer : git gud.

Long answer : check my class, I'm playing one of those filthy grab classes. Still, I don't remember the last time I landed a direct grab on a good player (on bad players, for sure, it's easy grab then death).

Good players will try to kite my grab, keep me at a good distance, Iframe when I manage to come near, and so on. 

But above all, if I land a grab on them, it also means I landed another CC before that. Only fools can think that we simply wait to dash and grab.

Answer to your PS : thanks for proving your lack of knowledge, staying near a CCed grab class is precisely what you should not do. Good players get grabbed less often precisely because they anticipate moments like that, you can't think about "reacting" against every move, you also have to "predict".

Sorc is precisely a perfect class for grab kiting, but I have the impression that you rely too much on the reactivity of your class, and forgot the "prediction" part of the fights. 

Time to demonstrate. But good luck. 

you can not grab people in iframe.