Thoughts on Composure

As of the February update, Composure has been buffed to increase enspell damage and increase magic accuracy in addition to increasing buff duration, physical accuracy and spell recast.

The changes are appreciated, but I feel this may cause an issue: Composure arguably has a lot of things attached to it. From a design perspective this in effect may make RDM a bit too dependent on Composure stat-wise. We could write this off as a melee problem, except that the extra Magic Accuracy and longer buff duration helps both melee and ranged RDM.

This issue is exacerbated by the fact that Composure can be dispelled. One unlucky RNG Dispel or AoE dispel (like the iron giant from December 2018's normal Ambuscade) and RDM could be screwed until the 5-minute recast of Composure ends.

As I see it, there's a couple of ways to handle this:

A) Make composure unDispelable: Set Composure so that it can never be affected by Dispel (or put it at the bottom of the priority list; the only way Dispel would remove Composure is if it's the last buff on you). This is the easy route.

B) Adjust/redesign Composure: Change Composure so that it serves a very specific purpose by turning it into a "melee button" (Increase recast, increase accuracy, 5% JA haste, increase enspell damage), and the other aspects of Composure can be rolled into RDM baseline. Turn the Magic Accuracy aspect into a job trait that is gained while leveling.

The longer buff duration would be trickier. What I'd suggest here is introduce a Job Trait at level 50 called "Perpetuity" that increases duration of buffs on self by a percentage and duration of buffs cast on others by a lesser amount. Spread it over 3 tiers (lv50, 75, 99), with the split being 66% self/6% other at tier 1, 132% self/12% other at tier 2, 200% self/20% other at tier 3. Incidentally, the Empyrean set bonus would further increase buff duration on others by an additional 6% per piece (totaling to 50% as it is in the current game). Alternatively, cap the extended buff duration on others from Perpetuity to 50% and change the Empyrean set bonus to something else.

C) Reduce composure's cooldown to 1-2 minutes to lessen the blow to RDM when composure is dispelled.


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Seeing that the change to Composure was for the sake of "fun", I'd prefer option A over the others.

I'd just say cut it to 1m recast and call it a day. I'd largely call Composure the RDM equivalent of SAM's Hasso/Seigan at this point, and you can pretty much bet if they were locked to 5m cooldowns, people wouldn't be happy.


Then again, I still want a "Dummy" spell whose sole effect is to block Dispel attempts.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Seriha

Then again, I still want a "Dummy" spell whose sole effect is to block Dispel attempts.

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That's a good idea. "Magic Decoy" or something.

Add that effect to Blink maybe?