Hello BDO Staff,

I hope you have all had a wonderful Christmas/New years period.

I was absolutely delighted to read the current global lab patch notes. I would like to voice my opinion on the patch notes and offer up additional conversation about our opinions on the matter either through typing here, or via some kind of voice call on discord, etc.

BDO has the best combat of any game hands down. I aboslutely congratulate and applaud you for the combat in this game. The combat is the reason myself and I imagine many others play the game. Furthermore, you have correctly identified that too many classes have full super armor, and that super armor is currently only counterable by grabs. You also highlighted that grabs are the most overpowered crowd control in the game and that some classes struggle to live in large scale pvp. These are all spot on observations and opinions I have had for a while. The fact that you have taken on the same opinions as myself is fantastic news to me and I am super super super excited to see these issues are being acknowledged and I wholeheartedly look forward to their resolution.

In the global lab patches you put forward 3 ideas on how to approach dealing with these problems and I would like to provide my feedback on these approaches. However, before this, I would like to discuss grabs because as you pointed out, grabs are the strongest forms of crowd control that currently exist in the game. In my opinion, and the opinion of many of my friends in the game, the existence of grabs significantly reduces the complexity of PVP and only serve the purpose to counter the excessive super armor in the game. To many classes can simply exercise patience and press the grab button when anyone tries to do anything. They are frankly way to overpowered. They also significantly hinder the ability for people to 1vX which is not healthy for the game as skilled players who can beat multiple other players at once should be allowed to do so. Currently, a more skilled player is able to knock down 2 people in AoS (for example) and as they try damage the knocked down players, they are locked into a skill animation briefly. If this skill is a frontal skill and their is a non grab class on the opposing team, you have the ability to position yourself to face the standing player before using the skill and avoid their CC and successfully damage the players knocked down. Additionally, you can utilise and SA skill to damage the players on the ground as the standing opponent trades damage onto you (back attack damage if they are smart). However, if the standing opponent is a grab class, they just look at you and press one button, grab you, and you die. It doesn't matter if your frontal is facing them, it doesnt matter if you are in super armor. There is no countering a grab, there is no outplaying the grab, they happen immediately and you have to stand still to do damage to people you have knocked down so any grab player with any form of competence in the game just wins. I hope that you can agree that this is a significant problem. In my opinion and the opinion of my friends and the random people I talk to about the existence of grabs, the only argument for having grabs is to counter excessive super armor present in the game. In my opinion grabs should be entirely removed from the game and if that creates problems where there are to any super armor abilities then super armor should be reduced (but not entirely removed so that you can still damage knocked down players in large scale) in the game and swapped to frontal gaurd skills. The exact ballancing to achieve this would have to be conducted on a class by class basis but I firmly believe that this is an achievable reality.

I would like to now talk about some of my experiences playing BDO. I play sorceress and spend most of my time in the game pvping. I love pvping on bdo and thoroughly enjoy combat verses non-grab classes. I feel that in these these matches the most skilled player truely wins by finding gaps in the opponents playstyle, dashing behind their frontals or predicting the opponents use of unprotected skills. The game feels amazing to play and is truely beautiful. However, my experience when fighting grab classes is that I have to constantly move around and not do anything until they miss the grab which gives me a window to try pressure them until their grab is back up. This clearly favours the grab class as they can just be patient and use their grab when you are locked in a skill and if they somehow miss they can just play deffensively for 10 seconds and then do it again. I'd like to highlight that I do PVP a lot. My sorceress teacher is a renound good player, and I am lucky to have had his assistance. I am not an incapable PVP player and once I PVE enough to finally have gear I plan on applying to a top PVP guild and already have friends in some. Whislt I cringe at myself saying this, I point this out to try and convince you that this isn't just a "skill issue". Furthermore, during my experience I have determined that classes that don't have grabs cant do anything to a class sitting in frontal gaurd with SA behind them (e.g. warrior, gaurdian, etc.) just waiting for you to be locked in a skill animation so they can hit the grab button. 

In my opinion one of the beautiful things about BDO is the complexity of classes. Each class has so many carefully designed abilities and feels different and unique. Within the last week I decided to create an awaken Gaurdian to PVE on to swap things up. One of my friends was teaching me PVE combos on gaurdian in the battle arena and I was thouroughly enjoying learning all these new abilities and their cancels etc. However, whilst I was in the battle arena I had many people run up to me and try and PVP me as I was on gaurdian. Now, not playing gaurdian at all before this, I would say its reasonable to expect that I would do terribly in PVP as a gaurdian. This was not the case. I simply sat in Q block verses non-grab classes and when they came near me pressed e and grabbed them. Verses grab classes, I tried to avoid their grab and then grab them. This experience was extrodenarily disheartening. This highlighted to me that the entirety of BDO combat revolves around grabs being to over powered and this diminishes the beauty and effort put into creating the rest of the skills in the game. The only reason players ever put forward for grabs existing in the game is to counter the excessive super armor in the game. I truely, truely, truely believe that if grabs were removed from the game and super armor was tuned down and swapped to frontal gaurds players would be able to utilise their other skills and enjoy the complexity of the game. Now this might require some additional work ensuring classes that currently rely on their grabs have different CC options but this would be entirely worth it.

From here I would like to begin talking about your posed solutions to the problems:

1) The first solution you posed is adding abilities that break through deffences. This in my opinion would create far to many problems. Grabs are overpowered because they negate protection. Why would we want to add other abilities that negate protection? How would this solve the issue of people dying in large scale PVP? This would just mean there are more skill-less abilities that negate protection and get you killed. This would significantly detract from the beauty and complexity of PVP and would frankly make myself and many others quit the game on the spot. It makes no sense at all to give someone the ability to press one button and win against a player doing the right thing and being protected.

2) Reducing super armors and increasing the amount of frontals instead. Beautiful. Please do this. I have wanted this for the longest of times. You outlined some fantastic reasons why this would be beneficial in the global labs post and I have outlined some reasons why this would be beneficial too. You could even go a step further and remove grabs from the game. If you did this I literally beleive this could be an E-sports game if you removed resistances (unecessary RNG survival chance that literally every PVP player wants removed). Please when removing super armors and adding frontals try and keep this consistent across all classes. Right now some classes have way more super armors than others. In the previously proposed protection classes, classes that already had heaps of super armors were getting even more than classes that were struggling. Talk to the PVP players. We all want to see the game succeed.

3) Adding grabs all classes. DO NOT DO THIS. Everyone is talking about this, nobody wants this. You will kill the game if this happens. To me this "solution" even being suggested is an admittence that grabs are required by non-grab classes to compete with grab classes because grab classes are to overpowered. If you instead go ahead with option 2 you should actually remove grabs from all classes. Failing to remove grabs from all classes will keep the game in a state where grab classes are always better than every other class due to the simplicity and over-powered nature of grabs that you yourselves have admitted too. If you are unwilling to remove grabs I would propose that you change them so that they are blocked by frontal gaurd so they are atleast counterable. They will still be overpowered, they will still deal with super armor and they will still be bad for the game, but they will atleast be more bearable.

Finally, I would like to talk about anoth solution will fix the issues you've highlighted and other points I'd like to take this opportunity to discuss:

A) Some classes like sage are able to kill other classes in 3 skills where as some classes have to drop full thoughtout combos to kill a sage. The damage disparity means that some classes succeed more in large scale PVP as they just dump high damage out and kill people that can't just dump high damage out back. A solid exmaple of this is seen in AoS. Some classes are completely unable to 1 combo other classes without reset combos (such as sorceress) where as other classes can easily 1 combo all classes (including sorceress). This is a well regarded fact among the community and is reflected by the ratings of players in each class on average (there are 1 or 2 exceptional players that do well on bad classes but that will always be the case). If you can fix the problem in AoS and also in Capped and un-capped node-wars all classes will be more viable. If any class, full combos another any class in a capped node-war or in AoS they should die. Currently if I had to guess, only about 2/3's of the classes are able to one combo all other classes. This is clearly an issue for the viability of the other classes. Tune down excessive damage and buff up lacking damage.

B) When considering the issues with damage disparity it is important to also consider that some classes are tankier than others. Whilst this is a perfectly acceptable and encouragable thing there must be downsides. A beserker is allowed to be harder to kill than a squishy mage, however a beserker should not also be able to kill people just as effeciently or more so than a squishy mage. You cannot just make some classes tankier than others and still give them just as much damage and skills that are just as capable of doing that damage.

C) I hinted at this before but resistance is bad for the game. Nobody enjoys landing a crowd control on an opponent and them resisting it. The player resisting doesn't even enjoy resisting they just think "wow I am lucky, that sucks for the other player". It makes no sense that in a beautifuly crafted complicated game where a player needs skill to land a crowd control (except for grabs) that RNG should be able to negate that. Please talk to PVP players, AoS top ranked players, 95% of the player base wants resistances gone. I can not think of a single situation in which resistance is a good addition to the game. If you can I would definetly like to hear it. If you wont remove them from the game entirely maybe remove them from AoS and 1v1 and open world and only leave them in node-wars if you think they help in node-wars somehow? I don't know why they are in the game.

I hope all the effort I put into writing this does not go un-noticed. I am a reasonable human being and a I love BDO and want to see it succeed. I would be over the moon if I had the opportunity to discuss this further with you. Please reach out if you would like to. If you beleive I am wrong, please explain to me how, I welcome a long discussion about this. I promise I will not be stubborn and will take onboard your opinions. I want nothing more than to reach a game state in which you and players like myself are happy. Best of luck with the future of the game!

You raise very good points and do a great job at dissecting them. I really enjoyed reading and appreciated the analysis of your experience going from pvping on a class without grab to one with a grab; perfectly reflecting how grab is so central a problem in the current pvp, and it being not essentially but undisputedly a win button. It would be amazing if grab classes were forced to pvp on a grabless class for a month before they were able to unlock classes with a grab in pvp, then I think more would understand how ridiculous it is for a skill such as BDO's version of grab to exist in any competitive game.

You also provide great analysis of the 3 proposed solutions from the developer and add your views, which I mostly align with, but with which I feel is too contingent on the developer removing grabs, which is not likely to happen even though I 100% agree with you that it would take BDO to e-sport level if done together with the removal of resistances. Due to the fact that I don't see the developer removing grabs from the game, or even making them not go through FG like you said (which is also another great alternative to rebalance the grabs), I therefore have to disagree going with with your selection of option #2 and I instead claim that option #3 is the best out of the offered ones. This because the first two options do nothing to change the influence of the grab on classes that have it:

Option 1 makes gaps shorter and adds means to counter them in pvp. Grabs still go through everything and thus this option doesn't address the problems that grabs will reign even more so over everything.

Option 2 increases FG at the expense of SA but this is irrelevant to any class with a grab. Thus classes with grabs will still have an easy time.

Option 3 is the only option presented by the developer that actually proposes spreading equality by means of everyone getting a grab, and for some cases compensating their other abilities.

This is why in my opinion the only one of the 3 options that brings us closer to fairness is #3, even though the existence of the grab skill is idiotic and should have never existed. But I am also aware that it is unlikely that they will remove grabs so the only possible alternative is to at least make it fair by everyone having one. Yes, grab dumbs down pvp, that is uncontroversial; but unfortunately it's either some classes have it or all do, the selection to me is a no-brainer.

If the developer does add removing grabs entirely, or making them respect the protection of Forward Guard, then I agree that option #2 is the best. But as things are right now, the best option for class fairness is #3.

I support option #3.

It makes sense to me that all classes have a set of basic tools. Class focus and specialization is always a plus, but having the bread and butter elements are essential. 

Grab classes are best classes? Then why is succ maewha, succ musa,  succ sage deleting people in AOS faster than anyone else?  Outside of AOS archer and succ ranger dominating without grabs.

You picked highest damage classes and that's what you have.  Play your role...

You don't hear grab classes crying for succ mae damage, but I would take it! 

Maybe it's okay if everyone has grabs but there's no way your classes just get a free grab cc and don't lose some significant things. Cut that damage by alot. Lose some protected CC. Mobility nerf. Something(s) gotta go. 

Grab classes are best classes? Then why is succ maewha, succ musa,  succ sage deleting people in AOS faster than anyone else?  Outside of AOS archer and succ ranger dominating without grabs.

You picked highest damage classes and that's what you have.  Play your role...

You don't hear grab classes crying for succ mae damage, but I would take it! 

Maybe it's okay if everyone has grabs but there's no way your classes just get a free grab cc and don't lose some significant things. Cut that damage by alot. Lose some protected CC. Mobility nerf. Something(s) gotta go. 

Funny you say that when zerk can run faster than anyone in sa for longer than any musa/mae can & just hold you in the air and make you die to his teammates whilst your v is not even gonna work. Ah yes, did I mention he's one of the tanky classes with ranged capabilities?

Also you are complaining about the damage but think the things others should lose is cc or mobility?

And the fact that you dont hear grab classes crying for succ mae damage just proves the point.

Where? Only in battles where he stands in the second line and is not attacked by anyone.

In all 1 vs 1 or 3 vs 3 fights he dies in one second because he has almost no protection and most of his skills are melee skills (for the range class!!!). The only archer advantage is very strong healing, but it is only effective in PVE, in such AoS everyone gets auto healing by default, so he even lose this advantage.

Same time 100% melee class berserker has a range grab with a range greater than most archer range skills. ROTFL.

Your point seems to be based around the Devs not doing what they should. Just because the devs are unlikely to remove Grabs and do option 2 doesn't mean its not the best option. I humbly request that when discussing this matter you lead with "this is what they should do" so eventually (hopefully) enough players are talking about the best course of action making it more likely to happen. Plus, giving us all grabs will make the game incredibly stale and I would honestly quit after a small period of trying and I imagine many others would also quit because the game would be boring.

Just remove grabs from all classes, compensate with a cool ability, Grabs are useless in pve and are just an I win button in PvP (most of the time).

It always surprises me that the front guard does not protect against capture in this game.