DNC Analysis for 6.0/6.05

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Originally Posted by Averax

So i've determined that Tillana, Starfall Dance, and Fan Dance IV only exist to re-add the complexity to the burst window that was lost from old Flourish. That's what it feels like anyway.

If I would change things, i'd detach Fan Dance 4 from Flourish and simply make it an upgraded Fan Dance 3 that has a chance (or maybe guarantee) to proc on Saber Dance and Starfall Dance. I would also detach Starfall Dance from Devilment and just....i'm not sure. I just wanna use it more often because it looks neat. Maybe stick it to Flourish instead.

Tillana's fine where it is maybe, just needs a little extra. I'd love it to have another, different, buff it provides. More party support is good for dancer.

I'm not 100% about it, but these new abilities look really good and it's a shame we don't use them more often.

I love dancer, conceptually, i love having all these supportive abilities, to be able to buff the dps, help the healers, help the tanks (and also be able to hit like a mack truck once every now and then). They seem to want it to be all about the burst window as far as personal damage goes, and i'm not totally certain how i feel about that. I like a little more even spread.

Edit: Also give Improvisation a bigger radius.

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What I think Tilana needs is an alternative to Standard Step that you'd choose instead, opting out of reapplying the buff in exchange for something different. Since Standard Step lasts 60 seconds, we can afford to choose something different on a shared cooldown already, and Tilana allows for the flexibility for that potential other dance to always be available during technical windows.

I'm not a huge fan of the DNC changes, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement.

The good:
Esprit generation. There's not much to say, this was a great change and using Saber Dance more feels good.

The meh:
Improvisation. Old Improvisation was terrible so it wasn't hard to do better, but the skill still feels annoying. The AoE regen is pretty good, but channeling the skill (which isn't always possible) for a weak 10% AoE shield is really bad.

The Bad:
Tillana, Fan Dance IV and Starfall Dance. Not a fan of all the new skills being locked behind other cooldowns (two of them behind 120s CDs). DNC suffers from a boring downtime during burst and the only thing that helps slightly with this is FD4 because of Flourish.

Flourish change. This was the "make or break" skill for me because DNC was very boring before obtaining this skill, but now it's just not as exciting anymore. I also liked the AoE procs which gave sense to DNC's hypermobility.

My suggestions:

- Give Fan Dance I and II a 50% chance to proc both Fan Dance III and IV. They are already coupled together by Flourish anyway and it feels weird to have Fan Dance IV so disconnected from the feather system. Additionally, make them combo together, so Fan Dance III -> Fan Dance IV
- Make the procs you get from Flourish guarantee Fan Dance I/II upon use
- Get rid of Improvised Finish and just make Improvisation a skill you can weave to get an AoE regen and a 10% damage mitigation
- Make Starfall Dance a skill that uses Esprit. Make it cost 50 esprit and give it a 60s cooldown.

Tillana feels weird as it looks like a skill that is supposed to do something but ultimately doesn't. Don't have a suggestion for it yet.

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Originally Posted by Toutatis

I also don’t like having needlessly two of each steps when I begin dancing

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They do this so you can have a single target bar and an AoE bar and not have to switch back to your single target bar during AoE so that you can Step. This is a major improvement from ShB; it's not "needless".

From what I gather, what I would like to see seems like an unpopular opinion among the dancer mains but here it goes anyways. I would want closed position to work like sage's kardia (in that casting it changes your partner to the selected target instead of needing to deselect the target first), maybe reduce its cooldown to something like 5 seconds and make the standard finish buff linger for a while afterwards (I think full duration might be too much and kind of go against the theme of single target buffer just due to its duration and the whole 2 minute burst focus of EW but somewhere around 5-10 seconds might be a good spot for it). I don't know whether the esprit generation buff should linger as well as you tend to gather a lot of it in the opener and would most likely annoy people due to overcap.

Dancer is refreshing standard step 3 times in the opener. In the meantime, I had so much fun with sage just changing partners with cardia to heal up other's mistakes (or even just raidwides in normal content), treating it just as the infinite HoT that it is.

But back to dancer, other than that,
1) I would like the improvised finish to be double weavable like any other ogcd or at least like double bloodletter on bard and
2) all those new skills are locked behind so many other abilities and they don't see much of a use. Maybe sabre dance could have a chance to proc FD4 for instance as it is fun imo to worry about being close to the boss at times in fights and you will have a gauge to cooldown ratio management to do. You had 3 dashes before to help with doing your aoe gcds in your burst, it's a bit of a shame to use fd4 this rarely now.

honestly the only thing it needs is potency buffs imo. The core design is really fun.

If I had to name a few things, I wish dance partner worked like sage's Kardia, where you just hit the button and it re-applies to a new target.
Perhaps a small tweak to some particle effects, so that the core moves are a bit more color coded to make it easier for newer players to remember where the dance buttons are, and make the aoe effect of dance a bit more clear on exactly how far it reaches.
uhh, more an evant I guess?

I personally don't want FD4 to be a proc off FD3 because being able to double weave all your procs in a single GCD is good to prevent help with overcapping. Starfall feels impactful enough that I don't feel like it needs to be used more at the cost of how strong it feels. Tilana is a fun tool for multi-DP openers for when the jobs are better balanced.
I also don't want the dance buffs to neither go nor get a lot stronger like some people ask. Forgoing the support is lame because machinist is right there for you to enjoy, and making them an even larger portion of your damage means it's now even harder to contribute when you join a party with really bad DPS.

Yeah, personally I just want potency buffs, please.

wat do? wat say?

Dancer doesn't need to do much damage at all, it contributes to the raids damage, so it doesn't need its own damage. I can imagine a dancer in an anime in the background just doing the two step while everyone else beats down the big bad, but at least the dancer is bringing the good vibes.

I think they really captured feel of the job.

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Originally Posted by Navnav

Dancer doesn't need to do much damage at all, it contributes to the raids damage, so it doesn't need its own damage. I can imagine a dancer in an anime in the background just doing the two step while everyone else beats down the big bad, but at least the dancer is bringing the good vibes.

I think they really captured feel of the job.

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DNC has historically had the lowest personal DPS out of any job in exchange for the highest contribution via buffs, but it still needs to be buffing the party to an extent that warrants bringing it over another ranged, and prior to this patch BRD was cleanly outdoing it even factoring all of its support.

It seems like MCH is going to be the one to suffer until 6.1 now, though.