Gunbreaker gameplay hope and expectations

[ksuyen]

[NanoSquid]

Seeing his shield animation in the teaser got my gears turning. I'd really enjoy a tank based around barriers like TBN/Veil/Shake it off/Sch/Nocturnal Sect AST. It would be cool to see most of his cooldowns be big barriers rather than percentage reductions, and maybe some that can be applied to party members. It would be a different style of play from the other tanks without being totally alien, and it would fit the weapon animations, with him loading special shield rounds to launch onto team-mates, perhaps.

Whatever happens I'm excited to see what they come up with; it's nice to see one of FF's most iconic weapons in the hands of the Tank role.

[shao32]

I hope we get Gaius sword as glamour, it's more long but still I hope for it, and looking at the trailers I expect gunbreaker being more complex that WAR and PLD, more like to DRK levels of complexity and speed with DRK being more faster but more faster that the other 2.

It's gonna be my favourite second tank.

[Izsha]

What in the trailers leads you to think it will be more or less complex? It just looked like a couple combo gcd type actions and a defensive ogcd. Did I miss something?

[shao32]

I look at the shadowbringers cinematic too, so the ammo mechanics, I except the job have some kind of micromanagement around that, so it's not I think it will be more complex but more I expect it to be like DRK in his own way.

[OcieKo]

Honestly, I think it's near pointless to speculate on Tank and Healer changes at this point. Both roles suffered quite hard from being trinities in a duo focused game. You hear a lot about how are they going to manage making 4 Tanks/Healers feel balanced when they're having trouble with 3? Well if you think about it, you have 2 slots to cover all the necessary abilities, and you had to be able to do it with 3 different tanks, well you have to overlap a lot to prevent missing too many core requirements that it would affect performance. With 4 tanks/healers bits and pieces of the utilities can be shared by 2, so as long as you have 1 of them about you'll have a lot of it covered.

Take Shielding/Barriers on tanks for example. Currently only DRK has a single target one, WAR/PLD have a group one, well if GNB gets something that competes with TBN then to get both effects in places for that, you need a WAR or PLD and a DRK or GNB. Do this over and over in different combinations and eventually you'll get to the point where you're picking which pair you'd prefer for which fight.

At this point im expecting AST to take the brunt of the core kit changes in healer. DRK is almost positively going to be worked on the most out of the tanks.
Also AST's issues over the years exaggerate my point. Since you had to be able to take ANY 2, well if the 3rd failed to provide what could be needed, it became unnecessary or bland. So personally I'm looking more at what effects need/should to be passed around and where they can be removed to end up at roughly having 50-70% of an entire role kit on any given character.

ATM you could say (at least from the impressions here) WARs Role Kit is too full in comparison even if PLD/DRK might have more than they really need just less than WAR. Add GNB to the mix and maybe they can all balance out to having a mixed bag of the "full kit".