Drakesbane

Are there any plans to remove the 20% Attack Penalty that Drakesbane has? It's almost a pointless weapon skill to use except for DRGs with Ryunohige, and even they only use it for Aftermath because the 20% attack makes it inferior to Camlann's Torment and Stardiver in almost every situation. DRG does not have Critical Attack Bonus or very much gear to boost Critical Hit rate, that being said Drakesbane is only good when fighting targets that have low defense, and in situations where DRG is receiving a lot of Critical Hit Bonus like Rogue's Roll or in Abyssea. Otherwise it's far to inconsistent(has a very low critical hit rate at 1000 TP compared to Victory Smite or Chant du Cygne. It was one of the few weapon skills to not receive any adjustments a few months ago and I think it may deserve to be looked at again? Perhaps reducing the attack penalty to 5% like Resolution, would be better?

The single biggest disappointment of the WS update was watching Drakesbane get completely ignored. While near every other WS in the game got buffed. And Drakes needed fixing even before it got left behind by other WS getting buffed. ~-20% atk penalty on an atk starved job.. why!? Although DRG is less atk starved now, I still think that penalty should be removed.

Penta Thrust was ignored also. Maybe they think a critical hit based 4 hit, 1.0fTP WS would be too strong without an attack penalty? It would seemingly be stronger than Stardiver(Stardiver's only edge would be the 5% crit evasion and the 35% STR bonus). I bet if they removed the Att penalty, they'd drop Drakes to a 0.5 fTP or something. The exception to this would be Victory Smite which is also a 4 hit multihit crit WS without an attack penalty; the difference is Drakesbane is for a weapon class with 250+ base damage and h2h is far less. I could understand them keeping Drakes balanced with Star so that one isn't clearly better than the other. Removing Drakesbane's attack penalty would make it clearly stronger than Stardiver pretty much 100% of the time, not even counting mythics(Stardiver needs elemental gorget/belt and still falls below 1.0 ftp per hit, whereas Drakesbane is already a 1.0 per hit.

The slight hit to base damage dropping from 85% STR WS to 50% STR WS would be offset by Drakesbane's crit bonus. So I wonder how they can balance the two weapon skills. I don't think they want Drakesbane to be stronger than Stardiver all the time, otherwise what's the point of it existing(also merit WS tend to be stronger than mythic WS due to being higher level). But clearly, there wouldn't be much that Stardiver would have over Drakesbane if they removed the Attack Penalty, and that's not even mentioning Ryunohige's bonus.

My suggestion is, reduce the Attack Penalty to -5%, and increase the WSC from 50% to 60%. Doing this would make Drakesbane a lot stronger but still SLIGHTLY weaker than Stardiver, however with the proper buffs and equipment to boost critical hit rate, Drakesbane would be more potent, but still reliant on the luck of getting critical hits.

The tradeoff is that Stardiver is stronger at face value and has better Skillchain properties and increases everyone's DPS by loweing the mob's Crit evasion. Drakesbane would be DRG's premier weapon skill for damage when well geared and works in synergy with Stardiver's critical hit evasion down effect. Also the icing on the cake would be to change Stardiver's skillchain property from Gravitation to Fragmentation so we can use Stardiver first to prepare the mob for Drakesbane. Stardiver makes the target more suceptible to Critical hits so it would make sense to Stardiver>Drakesbane, except those two WS do not skillchain in that order, but should :(

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Originally Posted by Xsilver

Stardiver makes the target more suceptible to Critical hits so it would make sense to Stardiver>Drakesbane, except those two WS do not skillchain in that order, but should :(

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I do Stardiver > Drakesbane > Camlann's Torment. I guess that what I really should be doing though is Drakes > Camlann's >Camlann's for double SC instead of 5% crit rate

What bothers me is this:

They buffed Tachi: Fudo's damage but did not buff Drakesbane. If their rationale was to allow for jobs to use a variety of weapon skills to fit the situation, why buff Fudo which was already incredibly strong(as was Shoha). If they feared by buffing Drakesbane it would be too overpowering for DRG, then why didn't they apply that rationale when regarding Tachi: Fudo?

Fully buffed, on 128 content, my Drakesbane, at 300% with excellent gear, does ~1700-4000 damage. Stardiver? Easily does upwards of 11k+. Tachi Fudo however hits for 8-15k, like a truck. Yet buffing Drakesbane by removing it's attack penalty and giving it a bit more of a STR modifier would be too strong? I don't buy it...

Are there ANY plans to adjust Drakesbane? It was one of the only weapon skills not changed by that WS update a few patches ago, yet other weapon skills that were already FAR stronger than Drakesbane were buffed and Drakesbane was ignored completely.