Endwalker "Melee Mastery" trait

What is with this trait? It seems stupid to me. Why does it increase base non-combo damage of skills? Why is that interesting? Why bother spending any amount of developer time to produce this trait? Who presses Storm's Path outside of a combo?

Am I missing something?

There are traits like this for other jobs like Lance Mastery II for DRG and these traits buff both the base potency as well as the combo potency. It's worded poorly for sure but these aren't just base damage buffs.

It's likely there to make combos slightly stronger at higher levels, without making them just as strong at lower levels. Also, there's a 99% chance it's affecting the combo potency by the same value as the uncombo'd value.

Using WAR's for example, it's very likely the combo potency for Storm's eye/Path is 380 before 84, and then the uncomb'd potency becomes 120, while the combo potency rises to 400 once you get the trait. it's basically potency management across level thresholds.

They gotta put something else besides Enhanced Unmend in the Traits folder.

Might be partially for keeping you rather OP when you go back to unsync old content. New content is balanced around having it, old content is not and therefore you're slightly more powerful than you "should" be.

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Originally Posted by gilmorej

What is with this trait? It seems stupid to me. Why does it increase base non-combo damage of skills? Why is that interesting? Why bother spending any amount of developer time to produce this trait? Who presses Storm's Path outside of a combo?

Am I missing something?

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Most likely as a result from keeping old content fresh too. These traits boost both combo and non-combo potency.
For old content, getting your base combo skills with a ridiculously high potency just makes old content a lot easier to clear than it should be, which can take part of the 'synced' content experience.
Having these be traited keeps content for that expansion level synced without taking away too many skills at lower levels, or allows them to introduce lower level variant skills.

Yeah, if it does raise both base and combo potency then I can see the obvious point in having it.

Just the way the tooltip is worded it seems like it's base damage only. Which is why I was confused. Wouldn't be the first time a tooltip was worded poorly, though.