Contradance and Steps

[Byrth]

First, I'd like to say that I am excited that Dancer is getting new abilities and stronger maximum debuff potency and agree that these abilities will likely improve the job. The job will certainly be better after these changes than it is right now. I am glad that you guys are still paying attention to the job and attempting to fix it in some way that does not involve job points.


However, the changes will not make DNC desirable and fail to seriously address any of the problems with the job's healing/debuffing.


Dancer fails as a healer under the following conditions:
1) A lot of AoE damage spam with too many people in range - Critical flaw: Dancer always has to be in range and has to feed TP to continue healing. There are definitely monsters where Dancer fails as a healer when you consider damage created through their TP feed.
2) AoE status effects that hit the Dancer - Critical flaw: Dancer always has to be in range
3) Situations where monsters are able to do a lot of single target damage rapidly and wear out our timers - This used to be a much larger problem but has been substantially addressed by splitting the Waltz timers.
Example: If you are fighting AATT, Sleepga or being hit with Amon Drive would render you impotent as a healer. If fighting Ouryu, any of his Slowga forms would render you impotent as a healer. If fighting AAMR, being hit with Havoc Spiral would render you impotent as a healer. If fighting AAEV, all the AoE damage would overwhelm you. If fighting Shadow Lord, all the AoE damage would overwhelm you. If fighting Puppet in Peril, all the AoE damage would overwhelm you. etc.


Dancer fails as a debuffer under the following conditions:
6) Fights are quick, so daze potency is low on average - Critical flaw: Most fights are quick, even in events like Ra'Skirmish. Heck, Tojil takes 3 minutes to kill?
7) Dancer's debuffs aren't useful - Feather Step is always useful, but Quickstep/Box Step/Stutter Step are not useful against the level 75 content that most people use Dancers for.
8) Dancer's debuff delays outweigh their benefit - This is similar to #2, but factors in Haste. In situations with high Haste, you take on considerable DD-burden to maintain an aggressive Step rotation.
Example: It currently takes 75 seconds for dancer to provide an average of 11% Defense Down. This assumes that the monster lives for 75 seconds (most do not) and that Presto is up when you start. It realistically costs about 7~8 seconds of JA delay. So the Dancer sacrifices ~10% of their DPS for 11% Defense Down. It might net a gain in DPS for the group, or it might not depending what you're fighting and what your other buffs/debuffs are. After the patch, we will be able to continue spending ~10% of our DPS for slightly stronger average debuffs in longer fights, which is an improvement over the current situation but will only apply to monsters that live longer than a minute.


Superior solutions would have been to give us an AoE status removal Waltz with low recast (#2 addressed) and increase Level 1-5 Daze potency for Dancer main job (#6, #8 addressed).
* As proposed, the Step changes will not have any effect on the vast majority of fights, because the vast majority of fights do not even reach Level 5 Daze. If implemented as I proposed, this would have affected all fights.
* Contradance is fine as a JA and I look forward to using it, but its 5 minute timer means that it can't be relied on strategically in any fight. If I need Erasega every time a monster uses a bad TP move, the monster uses the bad TP move 1/5 of the time, and the monster uses 10 TP moves per minute, then I need Erasega twice per minute on average and sometimes as often as twice every 6 seconds. A 5 minute timer is not going to work for that. I will probably just save it for a Divine Waltz II in bad situations.