Footwork - let's give this job ability a purpose
If SE wants to adjust Footwork, they should first go back to square one and decide what the purpose of Footwork should be.
To my personal opinion it would be useless to have a stance that allows us to do less, the same or even more damage than our normal stance, but with different animations (using feet instead of fists).
I'm curious to read more ideas about what Footwork could and should be but for me, in short, it should be a stance for us to deal damage more slowly, with a greater TP return and less TP given to the target.
Such a possibility would be nice for targets with spikes, or targets where we want to get a small control over their offensive TP moves etc.
More in detail, this is how I envision Footwork to be:
- Scaling base damage boost - Currently it only adds +18 damage no ma tter your level. In my idea this damage would instead scale with your level and increase every 5 levels, with the last increase at level 99. It could start at 10 and increase by 2 with each step. This would make Footwork keep up with the release of new weapons without forcing SE to release a new pair of feet gear (with more +damage on them) every time. We'd be able to keep using Tantra gaiters +2 for example.
- Kick Attack +X modification - "Kick attack +" can be currenty obtained in 3 ways: job traits (+10 atm), erits (+5), legs equipment (up to +7). Normally this stat increases the chance of a Kick Attack on each attack round. This works during footwork as well, altough appearently it doesn't stack with Double Attack (so each attack round either one or the other has to proc, not both).
This stat needs to work differently when footwork is active. Instead of increasing the proc rate of a secondary kick attack, it should be consider as "+ damage". So "Kick attacks +15" should be considered as "Kick base damage +15" while Footwork is active
- New Job Trait tier - at level 91 we should receive our third and last tier of Kick Attacks, another +5 similar to what happens with the previous 2 traits that we gain at level 51 and level 71.
- Update Weapon Skills - At least Tornado Kick. They don't need to make it too powerful, but one small thing they could do is raising the modifiers, for example STR and VIT to 50% instead of the current 37.5/30%.
- Increase TP gain - We said we want MNK to get TP fast. Currently Footwork returns the base TP that a 480 delay 2handed weapon would return. Indeed, 480 is the delay of our attacks during footwork. A bonus of +30 Store TP would probably suffice, bringing us very close to the threshold of 20tp per hit. In exchange for this we can probably give up the odd TP return behaviour we have during Footwork (where the first two hits of a WS, and not just the first, give full TP return)
- Make so OA-X weapons do not work - This is just to avoid abuse or exploiting this new reworked stance. With the current power ups we just envisioned adding the possibility to use an OA weapon would probably make Footwork too powerful, and we said at the beginning that we don't want Footwork to be the stance to keep 100% up because it deals more damage than our normal one.
With the above changes we should have a stance that should be able to keep up even with level 99 weapons, without the release of new feet equipment, and while still remaining inferior to the normal stance.
This difference though, while still there, would be smaller than the one we can see with the current live-servers Footwork.
It would also reduce the spam of too many hits during a single attack round (no OA weapons, no +kick attack, so just DA and TA would remain), making this ability effective for when we want to poke a target slowly with powerful blows that return a lot of TP.
Alternatively someone else in the past suggested to make so when footwork is active our feet get considered as a "two handed weapon", gaining the different STR>Att and DEX>Acc conversion ratio, and giving more bonuses from the use of /SAM subjob.
This is a very interesting possibility as well in my opinion, but it just "increases" Footwork's damage, it doesn't solve the initial problem, that is the fact that Footwork has currently no purpose at all.