Gunblade Class: Soldier

Classes: Soldier.

I won't get into lore for spoiler reasons but essentially let's assume we learn the fighting methods of the empire, and thus learn to fight using a Gunblade.

Abilities: Level 1: Swap--switch freely between using a sword or a 6 shot revolver. 10 second recharge time.
Abilities: Level 1: Reload--takes 2.5 seconds to add in another 6 bullets into a gun. Can be interrupted. 15 second recharge time.
Level 3: Burstslash--Deal 110 potency with 20% chance of critical, uses a bullet. 80 TP. On GCD , 2.5 second recharge time. Slash damage.
Level 5: Splashfire--When shooting, 20 potency damage is dealt to enemies within 0 yalms of target. Trait.
Level 6: Cross-Cut--Deal 140% damage from front. 80 TP. On GCD, 2.5 second. Slash Damage. Starts combo.
Level 8: Soldier's Cry--Increase strength for self and party members by 10% for 20 seconds. 3 minute recharge time.

Level 10: Active Parry--Gain 2 parry points. Passive.
Level 12: Sword Jettison--Use a bullet to propel the sword through an enemy, dealing 150% damage from afar. On GCD, 2.5 second recharge time. 110 TP
Level 15: Large Mag--Clip size doubles to twelve. Passive.
Level 16: Flank Shot--Deals 120 potency damage from flank, uses bullet. Enemy takes 5% extra damage for next ten seconds if attacked from flank. If attacked from elsewhere 100 potency. On GCD 2.5 second. 90 TP
Level 20: Improved Determination--Improves determination by 2. Passive.
Level 22: Augmented Shots--Makes damage from bullets deal 120% damage for 15 seconds. Recharge time: 3 minutes.

Level 25: Improved Parry--increases parry rate an extra 4 points. Passive
Level 28: Rush--AoE attack towards the front, attacks all enemies ahead for 80 potency with 20 chance of 3 second stun. Ends up in position 15 feet in the front. Recharge Time: 10 seconds. TP: 150. Combo Bonus from Cross-Cut: chance to stun is 30%, and 90 potency. Slash Damage. Continues Combo.
Level 30: Improved Jettison--Sword Jettison does 170 potency damage.
Level 33: Slice and Dice--Automatically and individually attacks the four closest enemies for 90% damage. Ends up behind last enemy attacked. Recharge time: 10 seconds. TP: 170. Starts Combo.
Level 35: Lethargic Strikes--All attacks have a 1% chance of inflicting slow for 10 sec.
Level 38: Battle Shout--Adds enemies enmity towards self or tank if tank is within range. Deals 20 potency damage. Recharge time: 1 minutes.

Level 40: Vigor--Recovers an extra 1% HP during battle.
Level 43: Launch--Attack an enemy with 130 potency, If behind launches them up into the air. Uses a bullet immediately after to deal 150 potency damage, and enemy lands with another 20 potency damage after 3 seconds. TP: 250 Recharge Time: 20 sec. Combo Bonus from Slice and Dice: Attack 1 deals 140 potency damage, and Attack 2 deals 170 potency damage, and enemy stays in the air 2 second longer. Continues Combo. Slash Damage.
Level 45: Major Determination--Increases determination by 4. Passive.
Level 48: Flip Blast--Deals damage at 100 potency and move character over enemy 3 yalms. Does not have to be facing enemy. Uses a bullet. Combo bonus from Rush: Deals 130 damage potency to all enemies that were previously rushed, with a 15% chance of causing confusion for 5 seconds. Only one bullet required. Lands in starting position of rush with enmity lost. Ends combo. Recharge time: 15 seconds (essentially a backflip over enemies.)

Level 50: Stagger Breaker--Jumps and attacks an enemy for 120 potency. Combo Bonus from Launch: Jumps into the air and attacks enemy three times for 80 potency each, as enemy is falling it is shot with another bullet for 130 potency and lands with damage of 20 potency. Enemy might be stunned after landing at 20% chance. Ends combo. Recharge time: 30 seconds.

Job: SeeD (lol don't know what else to call it)
Level 30 ability: Renzokuken--makes auto attacks shoot free bullets for double damage for 15 sec. 90 second cool down.

35 ability: Blaze Wound--inflicts a DoT with initial potency of 120 and a potency of 20 for each tick. If tick is critical gun is automatically reloaded. Lasts 18 seconds, on GCD. 90 TP.
40 ability: Drill Blade--empties remaining bullets into enemy. Cannot move while using. Takes one extra second per bullet. Each consecutive bullet adds 15 potency, beginning with 60. Can be cancelled by toggling ability. 120 second cool down.
45. Intuition--allows allies to attack from 5 yalms further for 20 seconds. 60 second cool down.
50. Army of One--attacks all enemies for 180 potency. If a hit is critical the attack is automatically repeated for 160 potency. This continues to drop by twenty each time, and a critical must be utilized to continue, as well as one bullet. 240 second cooldown.

that sounds fun. I would do it

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Originally Posted by Seezur_Undies

that sounds fun. I would do it

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Think it's balanced and would fit gameplay here? :0 switching between ranged and melee?

Would be interesting to see if they could make it fit, but it would be nice to be able to do that and stay viable to the party

Why are you doing SE's job? Seriously 98% or more of what you thought up and wrote won't even be considered esp the levels, names, etc. It's good your trying to give a suggestion for a future class, but the community can't spoon feed SE. They have a lot of brains working for them, they have loads of jobs and classes to choose from and they already have a vision of the classes and jobs they are considering. I'm sure a gun blade class has been mentioned, and yeah it would be bad ass.

I am just doing it for fun, not to make a suggestion :)

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Originally Posted by Altijacek

I am just doing it for fun, not to make a suggestion :)

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you. i like you.

i also like this idea. if they could implement a class like this, i would have lots of fun with it.

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Originally Posted by saber_alter

you. i like you.

i also like this idea. if they could implement a class like this, i would have lots of fun with it.

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Thanks :D haha I have other ideas to share later XD

A gunblade wielding job that is a dps class that is all about bouncing between melee and ranged sounds like a neat idea. I could see it maybe coming off of Corsair, or as you suggested a new Garlean Soldier style class. However I would only really see something like this being considered after the story has progressed and more areas have been introduced where we can venture farther into Garlean controlled territory.

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Originally Posted by Pinworms

I'm sure a gun blade class has been mentioned, and yeah it would be bad ass.

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It has, and while I don't have a link to it at the moment, Yoshi-P did express some measure of interest in the idea of a class that used Gunblades. If/when an expansion gets released that has us taking it to the Garlean Empire, I'd expect a gunblade class then.

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Originally Posted by Pinworms

Why are you doing SE's job? Seriously 98% or more of what you thought up and wrote won't even be considered esp the levels, names, etc. It's good your trying to give a suggestion for a future class, but the community can't spoon feed SE. They have a lot of brains working for them, they have loads of jobs and classes to choose from and they already have a vision of the classes and jobs they are considering. I'm sure a gun blade class has been mentioned, and yeah it would be bad ass.

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Its fun to do this - stop being negative.

Also - killer idea!! I think some of the potencies might be low, and the SeeD class might be called "Specialist" (as that was what Squall was referred to by Cid in FFVIII: "Finally, a gunblade specialist!"). I haven't read all the way though everything yet, but regardless if all your ideas are totally off-base (which they aren't), it will still be so much fun to play, as it seems like this idea is centered around athleticism/mobility combined with power for interesting damage mechanics!

Love the idea of a gunblade class, switching between melee and range is an interesting idea one I have had my own ideas about.

Thanks guys for positive responses, I appreciate it :) it's just a hobby for my spare time :) and yeah I imagine if a Gunblade class did exist it would appear in expansion down the road after some things happen with the empire.

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Originally Posted by Altijacek

yeah I imagine if a Gunblade class did exist it would appear in expansion down the road after some things happen with the empire.

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To really do this, you'd have to have some large-scale unit of imperial gunblade users change sides as part of it so that they can train the Eorzeans in the art of gunbladery. To avoid conflict with the main story, it would likely need to be an advance class that requires progression through the main story to the point where the gunblade users swap sides (not terribly hard to implement, methinks since there are already requirements on getting classes beyond your first).

Another interesting variation would be having your character get captured by said organization of gunblade users (who are loyal this time around), stripped of all of your gear, and forced to fight your way to your actual gear with a gunblade stolen from their armory: you would receive the class and the weapon as part of the story and then get to level 5 or so as part of a duty that involves fighting your way to your actual gear, past low level enemies that you can actually defeat, wherein you get your actual gear back and resume fighting stuff at level 50+ to free yourself. When you get back to friendly terrain, you then have the option to continue to level up as a gunblade user, likely with a quest contact that isn't a gunblade user but rather an engineer that helps you discover the secrets of gunblade combat (similar to the SCH job contact who is actually a marauder; imagine if it were Biggs or Wedge or even Biggs *and* Wedge :3).

As to the class itself, you didn't include a "basic" attack at level one. Swap and Reload are both support capabilities so leveling from 1-3 would involve only being able to autoattack. You probably want to pull Crosscut from level 6 to level 1 so that players actually have an attack that they can use from the start. Swap itself seems kind of arbitrary and unnecessary; since you're limiting the ranged attacks based upon a secondary resource, you don't really *need* to have an enforced swap function, especially since the existing gunblades are designed to fire whilst slashing rather than having to swap from one function to the other (the trigger mechanism is part of the grip), so that your only unrestricted attack capability is in melee range.

Also, keep in mind, you're calling it a revolver, so you don't have a magazine because revolvers use a series of chambers, and you can't really have a "large magazine" because revolvers are limited by the number of chambers which are a physical limitation of the weapon itself. If you want to have the number of ammunition stacks increase as you level, you may want to consider just having the gunblade be a magazine fed weapon rather than a revolver or just have it be some kind of magitek energy weapon that doesn't so much fire bullets as it does blasts of magitek energy, which is what the mechs do.

While it's not impossible for the traits to add to parry rating and determination rather than a main stat, I find it highly unlikely that they would do that for a couple reasons. The main stats are stronger point for point and scale in a much more linear manner whereas the secondary stats diminish in comparative value as you increase in level; you're adding 6 points of parry and 6 points of determination which is next to nothing at 50 (it takes something like 5 Determination to equal the contributions of 1 point of mainstat). It's also a bit strange because you're splitting the focus of the class. If you want soldier to be a tank class/job, you would probably need to follow the same mold as the existing tanks wherein you get Enhanced Vitality traits however you'd need to get rid of the positional requirements on the attacks because tanks don't really get to hit people from behind. If you want it to be a DPS class/job (which seems the most likely given how you didn't include anything else tanky other than the parry rating stuff), you could keep the positional requirements but you'd want to swap in Enhanced Strength (or Dexterity, whichever one you use).

You gave the class combos in which one of the attacks is an AoE that's *also* on a CD. On top of all of this, the levels you provided them mean that you're going to have a single attack as part of your "combo" for more than half of your levels. You probably want to change them so that at least *one* of them is a basic single target progression without any CD so that the player isn't screwed out of using said combo whenever there are CCd enemies or enemies that they're not supposed to attack about (not to mention that the potency, because it's an AoE, is low enough to drag down the rest of the combo). Also, because you effectively preselected where the player should be standing and landing so that you are bouncing around like crazy as part of the attack, you're preventing the player from actually getting to choose where they want to be, which is highly problematic in a game like ARR where dodging ground effects is a major part of the game. The acrobatic movements sound cool and would probably look cool but it would play horribly. Just look at how DRG deals with the jumps right now and then consider what would happen when you're doing that for *everything*.

It honestly feels like you designed this class more around aesthetics than how it would actually play. Reading it, I get the feeling that it would play *very* clumsily, given the schizophrenic and largely uncontrolled positioning. The attacks sound more like mechanics you drew from various games' limit breaks than actual attacks that you would realistically use as part of combat in an MMO.

P.S. Random point. You can edit a post to overcome the 1000 character limitation.

Thanks so much for all that in depth analysis and the tip at the bottom. I didn't think a lot of it through, just had some fun with it, and as a gun owner myself I can't believe I didn't catch that silly revolver/magazine mishap lol. But yeah, thanks a lot :P I plan to add more ideas soon so I would appreciate awesome feedback like this!

Interesting idea and agreed, not sure what I would call the job myself. Maybe Commander? It was Squall's title in the game. Maybe change the class name to Mercenary as well since that is what they were. Soldier bears too close of a resemblance to SOLDIER (FFVII) I think for basing it on FFVIII.

By the by, you can edit your original post after posting to include as much as you want and bypass the character limit. I'd also organize the abilities and traits a little better to the standard format (posted below in spoiler (to save space) so you can copy and paste). Every single class (except ACN for some reason) follows this formula for traits and abilities. Also note that traits are largely means of enhancing existing abilities (to prevent the enhancements from being used as cross class skills) and 3 of them are generally set aside for Stats (like "Enhanced Vitality" for tanks) in tiers I, II and III giving 2, 4 and 6 increase.

Abilities:
1:
2:
4:
6:
8:
10:
12:
15: (Quested from class guild)
18:
22:
26:
30: (Quested from class guild)
34:
38:
42:
46:
50:

Traits:
8:
14:
16:
20:
24:
28:
32:
36:
40:
44:
48:

Edit: Since I had nothing better to do I put your abilities into their approximate slots so you could get an idea of where to go from. I made some commentary on them and for some I changed their ordering due to combo's. For your traits, if you're looking to increase both damage and parrying rate consider making DEX the modifier for your attacks. DEX increases parry rate, blocking rate and ranged damage naturally in the game. STR increases parrying strength, blocking strength and melee damage. Though with the nature of only one stat being the absolute primary, I'd suggest giving Enhanced Dexterity I, II and III (2, 4 and 6 increase).

Abilities:
1: Cross-Cut (I swapped with Burstslash because generally your level 1 ability does damage and starts a combo)
2: Swap
2: Reload
4: Burstslash
6:
8: Soldier's Cry
10: Rush (I lowered its level so you're actively comboing while leveling)
12: Sword Jettison
15: (Quested from class guild) (you could swap in any ability here, usually utility attacks like knockbacks, jumpbacks, ranged attacks etc.)
18: Flank Shot
22: Augmented Shots
26: Slice and Dice
30: (Quested from class guild) (you could swap in any ability here, usually a defining ability. Examples: MRD's Butcher's Block, CNJ's Cure II, ACN's Summon II etc)
34: Lethargic Strikes
38: Battle Shout
42: Launch
46: Flip Blast (Think about lowering the level and including a 2nd combo string)
50: Stagger Breaker

Traits:
8: Spashfire (I suggest increasing the range to at least 1)
14: Active Parry (I'd suggest a base stat)
16: Large Mag
20: Improved Determination (I'd suggest a base stat)
24: Improved Parry (I'd suggest a base stat)
28: Improved Jettison
32:
36:
40: Vigor
44: Major Determination (I'd suggest a base stat)
48:

Edit2: Also, maybe consider giving it a tanking role. You give it increased HP regeneration and parrying rate already, some other buffs and combos could lead to an interesting tank. Make this one Squall themed. You could then give them a 2nd job for DPS that would be Seifer themed, using his Aura ability to increase damage dealt and the ability to cast fire magic as well. Just an idea :) . My reasoning for it is because of the 2, Squall had higher defensive stats and Seifer had higher offensive stats.

For naming it could go Mercenary(class, Tank) -> Commander(Tank, Squall themed) & Disciplinarian(DPS, Seifer themed)

Awesome thanks for all that feedback and I feel stupid about the magazine revolver thing lol, as a gun owner :P forgot I had written it that way.

Thanks for cleaning that part up for me by the way :) then I'll upload another idea tomorrow. I love the existing ones by the way.

http://static2.wikia.nocookie.net/__...IVGunBlade.png

just going to drop this here. this is a garlean gunblade (gaius' maybe? i think officers use a shorter one). as you can see, it has a revolver setup, so maybe it could be a typical revolver setup, or you swap wheels (more expensive, but easier to reload).

maybe the wheel doesn't actually store bullets, rather a magitek core...just something to think about.

http://www.pistoleer.com/hks/pics/speedloaders.jpg

Just thought I'd post this here as a bit of flavor. Speed loaders are a quick and easy way to reload a revolver. You slide out the firing chambers, dump out the empty shells, and slide the speed loader into place. The bullets slide into the chambers, you snap shut and you're on your way.

Since Reload has a 2.5 second cast time, it seems reasonable that in that 2.5 seconds, the player's "casting" animation could be pulling a speed loader out of a back pocket or something, slide it and the fresh bullets into their gunblade, and be ready for combat a moment later.

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Originally Posted by saber_alter

http://static2.wikia.nocookie.net/__...IVGunBlade.png

just going to drop this here. this is a garlean gunblade (gaius' maybe? i think officers use a shorter one). as you can see, it has a revolver setup, so maybe it could be a typical revolver setup, or you swap wheels (more expensive, but easier to reload).

maybe the wheel doesn't actually store bullets, rather a magitek core...just something to think about.

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Any class that would let me use that weapon would be one I'd HAVE to play.

Heck, I can actually see the fighting style of using one. As a sword you'd use it much like a Rapier. Then brace yourself backward, and place the curved portion just ahead of the revolver chamber on top of your forearm to stabilize it and pull the trigger.

Oh man, now my brains going into "design mode" creating a hybrid range/melee dps class using one.