Add a haste effect to maneuvers.

[sweetidealism]

I feel the automaton should be doing more damage overall than the master if using a damage dealing frame. If maneuvers were set to 5 minutes and their recast was lowered to 5 seconds, I would personally be completely ok with where master damage out is. There have been a lot of master improvements; From raising hand-to-hand skill, putting the master on the best light armor DD pieces, and the weapon selection is great. A well geared master can already outpace their automaton and hold enmity over them without trying to. I don't think the master needs JA haste to be competitive. It isn't a MNK and it's already a strong solo job by having high defensive capabilities. I'd rather see the damage partially alleviated with longer maneuvers and the rest of the discrepancy focused on the automaton itself.

If I recall, the DD automaton frames did more damage than the master during the 75 cap era, no? I enjoyed that, but especially with the buff heavy route XI's endgame has now gone, I just feel as though it isn't viable. I would be completely fine with going back to PUP/SCH and letting the pet do the dirty work while I helped remove status effects if I could count on the automaton being durable enough to survive the constant massive AoEs so prevalent today, and more importantly, if the pet could realistically be enhanced by other players. I shouldn't have to have a dedicated pet party or have to annoy a COR to mess up their roll rotation. No, if we're going that route, then I would have to insist that pets be included as possible direct targets of bard songs, corsair rolls, geomancy, and perhaps even healing, enhancing, and applicable blue magic, because if they make pets naturally as powerful as someone with a full suite of enhancements, then it's going to be severely overpowered outside of alliance settings in which we shouldn't have that level of power. Yet, as you mentioned, if you leave the pet's stats as they are, then they are rendered completely ineffective in alliance settings in which it is expected that we SHOULD have that level of power. However, unfortunately, I'm fairly certain that the developers do not want to let pets be directly buffed by other players, so I am not hopeful for such a solution.

Instead, my solution keeps in line with the direction the developers have been taking PUP by further enhancing the master.

Adding Haste to maneuvers wouldn't help that much, considering the two second-ish JA delay is the largest problem in situations where delay reduction is already capped at 80% and those two seconds can eat multiple attack rounds.

Just increasing Manuever duration would be much simpler and wouldn't run into that issue.

That is a troubling point. Assuming oatixur, base delay is 576, minus 160 for martial arts (approximately 28% reduction), 25% gear haste, 43.75% magical assuming potent enough double marches and the spell Haste itself, and we have 22.5% of our original delay remaining... Therefore, in a max buff setting, we'd be able to get about 4% haste from JAs before capping.

However, if you skip Advancing March and assume only ~32% magical haste, that allows for 15% JA haste, which is more around where I'd like it to be: 5% haste per maneuver. Essentially, if my suggestion were to be implemented, it would allow for PUPs to join a party of MNKs and/or NINs and just get Victory March and otherwise some combination of also important Minuets and Madrigals while still capping delay reduction. Perhaps that's not ideal, but I think that allowing a bard to use a different song is still worthy of consideration.

That said, I think increasing the duration of maneuvers is a worthy suggestion, too. Maybe we can see both?