7.0 Gap Closer Feedback

When the changes to gap closers were announced I was very apprehensive, but as with most things in the game I try to reserve judgement until I actually play it to be fair. Well now I've actually played it and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that these new gap closers feel very unsatisfying to use compared to what they replaced.

To be clear, I have no problem at all with the damage being removed from gap closers. Now they can be used for their intended purpose and I'm fine with that. The issue is that each job's gap closer had a unique animation that suited their job, and now they all do the same generic dash with slightly different particle effects.

Old GNB: A stylish sideways spinning front flip.
New GNB: Generic dash.

Old DRK: Using the weight of your massive sword to propel yourself forward.
New DRK: Generic dash.

Old DRG: Leaping a mile into the air to sail across the battlefield and land on your enemy.
New DRG: Generic dash.

If the intended goal after the battle content rework is to make the jobs unique again, this change is the opposite of that goal.

I request that the devs bring back the old gap closers and just remove the damage. If that is not possible because the old gap closers look like attacks then fair enough, but please make their replacements look as unique as the old ones. For example, instead of a basic dash perhaps the GNB one could have your character fire a gunblade round into the ground to propel themselves forward or something. That's just off the top of my head but the sky is the limit as long as the dashes suit the vibe of the job.

This is doubly so for the DRG gap closer which should 100% be a jump and not a dash. I would rather take my chances using Elusive Jump to get where I need to go because it feels awesome to use. So did flying into combat with Spineshatter Dive. Just remove the damage from Spineshatter Dive. I don't think any reasonable person will take serious issue with the fact that you're technically hitting the enemy with your internet lance but not doing damage.


Thanks for reading!


tl;dr: The new gap closers lack the flavor of their respective jobs and feel unsatisfying to use. Please bring back the old ones without the damage or make new animations that are more unique for each job.

The new gap closers for GNB/DRK look bad aesthetically and feel horrible to use in dungeons, which is the main place people will be using them 95% of the time. They do no damage and give no enmity so I'm finding myself scrambling to draw aggro on packs before they run away from me and shred my party after I've jumped to them. It's so awkward and completely defeats the purpose of having the ability.

And look, I almost exclusively play GNB in savage so I know how busy its burst was. Removing two oGCD weaves does give it more flexibility in that regard, but the more I play with the change, the more I feel like this was the worst possible "solution." It feels like a lot of the balance tweaks in DT were made for people who don't main these jobs to make them less intimidating, which ended up being overall detrimental to class design and made certain jobs feel worse to play for everyone.

What's also surprising is that Winged Glide has the same animation lock as Spineshatter and it replaced the ability completely instead of being a new one. This is obvious if we have a look at, for instance, DRK because Plunge got removed directly, meaning that you had to take it from your bar as an unavailable action.

It feels like they just modified Spineshatter's animation and icon and left the rest as is. Its cooldown should also be lowered to 30s or so but yeah, it should definitely be a jump, at least a horizontal one like in one past trailer.

Though it's not DPS and instead talking about healers.
Why the hell are both sage and whm gap closer/movement tools both on a 60 second CD. Like look at dnc and pic gap closers being what 30 seconds and the exact same as whm and sage basically has monks and vipers which both have 3 uses.
I seriously don't get why healers arent getting the same treatment and the excuse of them being casters don't hold up because all of the casters have movement tools on way shorter CDs (bar summoner but that job has no cast times.)

There's like zero good reasons for WHM and SGE CDs on their movement tools to not be the same as the DPS.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Luca_

It feels like a lot of the balance tweaks in EW were made for people who don't main these jobs to make them less intimidating, which ended up being overall detrimental to class design and made certain jobs feel worse to play for everyone.

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That is exactly right and as a DRG main I'm feeling that very acutely this expansion. :(

Agreed, the new gap closers have such boring animations and remove a lot of the flavor that each job had with the previous ones, I hope this is something they are open to tweaking in the future because seeing the visual identity of a job get removed in favor of pure utilitarian animations just sucks.