Short Description: The Samurai excels in long fights, becoming more efficient as the fight progresses. Their main resources is Enmity, and hyper scale their skills based off how much enmity they generate. With a complex variety of branching out skill combos, the most efficient way of gaining enmity and mitigating damage changes depending on the situation. What choice you make is up to you and your way of the Samurai.
Note: At the end will be a list of scenarios of how the skills will work. There isn't a TL;DR section, but feel free to make one and post it if you want. Also any spelling errors, I take no responsibility. V_V
Samurai Skill Ideas (Lv.50)
Skills still subject to change and still not totally refined. Please leave your suggestions and criticism. Try not to take all the numbers too seriously they're just a base. The mechanics of how the class works is what I mainly focused on. Also, I was able to get up to lv 50, so ignore the lv 40 title if you're able.
Swordsmen + Lancer (Tank)
Slicing blade: Lv.1/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/70 TP/3y Range/0yRadius
Delivers an attack with a potency of 150
Mempo: Lv.2/0 cast/120 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/0y Radius *Changed*
Reduces Damage taken by 35%. Duration: 15s
Duration and potency decreases as Enmity decreases.
Cold Divider: LV.4/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/60 TP/3y Range/0y Radius
Delivers an attack with a Potency of 100
Additional Effect: Increases Enmity
Combo Actions: Slicing Blade
Combo Potency: 200
Sheathing Aura: Lv.6/0 cast/30 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/4y Radius *Changed*
Reduces surrounding enemies Physical and Magical damage up to 35%. Duration: 15s
Percentage decreases as Enmity decreases.
Additional Effects: Puts sword to "Sheathed Grip"
Removes "Two Handed Grip" Buff
Crescent Razor: Lv.8/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/80 TP/0y Range/0y Radius *Changed*
Delivers an attack with a potency of 120 to all enemies in a cone before you.
Additional Effects: Increases enmity.
Sheath Shot: Lv.10/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/80 TP/3y Range/0y Radius *Changed*
Delivers an attack with a potency of 110
Additional Effects: Stun.
Duration 5s (duration 3s below level 32)
Sword Dance: LV.12/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/80 TP/3y Range/0y Radius *Changed*
Delivers an attack with a Potency of 100
Combo Action: Slicing Blade
Combo Potency: 200
Combo Bonus: Restores TP
Sheath Throw: LV.15/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/120 TP/15y Range/0y Radius
Delivers an attack with a potency of 120. Additional effects: Increases Enmity.
Two Gripped Rage: Lv.18/0 cast/30 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/0y Radius
Increases Damage Dealt : Duration up to 15s
Potency decreases as Enmity decreases.
Additional Effects: Puts Sword to "Two handed Grip"
Removes "Sheathed Grip" Buff
Fair Warning: Lv.22/0 cast/40 recast/0 MP/0 TP/25y Range/0y Radius *Changed*
Steals 25% of a single allies enmity.
Iaido: Lv.26/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/75 TP/3y Range/0y Radius *Changed*
Delivers an attack with a potency of 120
Additional Effects: Increases enmity
Combo Actions: Cold Divider
Buff Actions: Sheathed Grip
Buff Bonus: Extends Sheathing Aura by 15s
Combo Potency: 240
Duration decreases as Enmity decreases.
Buff Actions: Two handed Grip
Buff Bonus: Greatly increases Enmity (Removes Two Handed Grip Buff)
Combo Potency: 260
Potency decreases as Enmity decreases.
Slicing Storm: Lv.30/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/70 TP/0y Range/5y Radius *Changed*
Delivers an attack with a potency of 120
Combo Actions: Sword Dance
Combo Potency: 220
Buff Actions: Sheathed Grip
Buff Effects: Increases Enmity. (Removes Sheathed Grip Buff)
Duration: 3s
Buff Actions: Two handed Grip
Buff Effects: Restores surrounding allies TP over time. (Removes Two Handed Grip Buff)
Duration: 15s
Duration and potency decreases as Enmity decreases.
Samurai skills and Lv 30+ skills
Ronin Stance: Lv.30 /0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/0y Radius (Samurai skill) *New*
Decreases Enmity by 30%.
Increases Critical hit rate by 20%
Increases physical damage by 5%
Effect ends upon reuse.
Karma's Weight: 34/0 cast/120 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/0y Radius *New*
Reduces damage taken from the highest enmity enemy by 50% : Duration 10s
Potency decreases as Enmity decreases.
The Enmity of my Enemy is my Friend: Lv. 35/0 cast/180 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/5y Radius *New*
Restores 120% of HP and 120% of TP slowly over the course of 10s.
Percentage decreases as Enmity decreases.
Greatly reduces Enmity gained for 10 seconds after.
Unforgiven Aura: Lv. 38/0 cast/120 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/6y Radius *New*
Increases the enmity of surrounding enemies for each enemy killed while focusing you : Duration 20s
Duration decreases as enmity decreases.
Honor Stance: Lv.40/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/0y Radius (Samurai skill) *New*
Lowers damage dealt by 20%
Increases Enmity by 30%
Increases Healing received by 35%
Being healed increases Enmity
Healing percentage decreases as enmity decreases.
Cannot be used with Ronin Stance.
Effect ends upon reuse.
Vow of Loyalty: Lv.42 /0 cast/120 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/3y Radius *New*
Prevents damage from being dealt to allies behind you as well as knock backs. : Duration 5s
Fatal Deliverance: Lv.45 /0 cast/45 recast/0 MP/0 TP/3y Range/0y Radius (Samurai skill) *New*
/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/75 TP/3y Range/0y Radius
Delivers an attack with a potency of 320
Potency decreases as Enmity decreases.
Grip Switch:Lv.46 /0 cast/180 recast/0 MP/30 TP/0y Range/0y Radius *New*
Changes "Two Handed Grip" To "Sheathed Grip" and "Sheathed Grip" to "Two Handed Grip".
Will Of The Shogun: Lv.50 /0 cast/300 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/0y Radius (Samurai skill) *New*
You can only be hit with 1 damage by most attacks for 10s
Blade Vortex: Lv.50 /0 cast/40 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/6y Radius *New*
Delivers an attack with a potency of 100
Pulls surrounding enemies 3y's in front of you and holds them there for 2.5's.
Samurai Skills and Concepts (Up to lv 40)
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12-17-2013, 04:21 AMVoxInaBoxSamurai Skills and Concepts (Up to lv 40)
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12-17-2013, 04:34 AMVoxInaBox
Concept fight. 3-5 Mobs:
Start by being in "Honor Stance".
Open up with "Sheath Throw" to pull the enemies towards you, no need to go to them.
Now pop your OGC move "Sheathing Aura". This puts an automatic 35% damage reduction on all enemies that are aggroed to you and the debuff doesn't decay in potency because, at this time, you're the only one on the mobs. This also puts the "Sheathed Grip" Buff on you which allows different effects depending on what moves you combo into.
Use "Crescent Razor", your enmity/damage move (basically your flash or over power). This secures that your "Sheathing Aura" debuff on the mobs stays around 20% to 25% damage reduction when the DDs and heals happen.
Slicing Blade is what starts your combo tree, but which branch should you take? There are many ways you can handle this situation, but I'm just going to focus on damage mitigation + keeping aoe aggro.
After Slicing blade, The "Sheathing Aura" debuff the mobs should have will be around 15-20% damage reeducation because of healing and maybe some AOE damage from the DDs, maybe even lower. I've now decided to use "Sword Dance". It Restores my TP, which isn't that important this early into the fight, however, what this combo branches out to, will help.
My next move is "Slicing Storm". This is an AOE damage move with a combo potency of 220. Because I opened up with "Sheathing Aura" my "Sheathed Grip" buff procs a Bonus effect on "Slicing Storm". It now increases the enmity that "Slicing Storm" does. This means that my "Sheathing Aura"'s damage redacting debuff should now be at around 20% to 25%.
Now that an enemy or two is about to die, you can even pop "Unforgiven Aura" which increases your enmity to the surrounding mobs every time an enemy is killed while focusing you, Further increasing "Sheathing Aura"'s debuff percentage until the duration runs out.
The Samurai excels in long fights, and only becomes stronger as the fight progresses. However this can easily be proven false if your cool downs are timed poorly. For example: If your teammates were to attack too soon, your "Sheathing Aura" will have a very poor damage reduction effect. You'd have a hard time getting the debuff up to a good % where it will become useful. By the time you would get it to it's maximum effectiveness, with moves like "Unforgiven Aura" and "Slicing Storm", your 15 seconds on "Sheathing Aura" will be up. So timing your cool downs at the right time is important. If you had known that your team would jump the gun, you could have saved "Sheathing Aura" for when you had more enmity later down the fight and use it then.
Concept fight. Boss fight, Titan HM:
Start by being in "Honor Stance".
Open up with "Sheath Throw" to pull titan and move behind him, getting in place.
Pop "Two Gripped Rage" to start building up as much enmity on him as you can. Giving you the full damage buff potency until your team starts attacking.
You'll be able to get your "Slicing Blade" off while you're moving in position.
Combo it into "Cold Divider" to Start building that single target enmity.
Follow up with the last part of this combo, "Iaido" to really pull in the enmity count. With "Two handed Grip" buff being activated the enmity you gained from this allows you to start the fight with near maximum efficiency.
Titan Jumps up into the air and your team stacks on top of you. The healers are casting their AOE heal. You pop "Sheathing Calm" to Mitigate the damage the parity receives including yourself. The AOE heal goes off and your healers now have a bunch of Enmity.
You can now pop "Fair Warning" Taking one of the healer's enmity and putting it on yourself. This should keep you at maximum efficiency unless you mistime it and they use "Shroud of Saints" before you use "Fair Warning". A safe way would be to use it on your Scholar if you're afraid of missing, but you won't get as high of a benefit from it.
You can now pop "Sheathing Aura" and use the "Sheathed Grip" buff with "Iaido" to prolog the effects of the damage mitigation it provides you and your team.
When it comes time for him to flip the table on you, you can pop "Karma's Weight" to prevent being insta killed or half'ed in hp. If you DO drop too low, and your healers are in a bind and can't heal you because of something like rezing a teammate or fully healing a party after a massive aoe spam, you can pop "Will of the Shogun" to keep yourself alive with low hp.
If you're really low when you use this and you'll still be able to die from the some of the damage, you can then pop "The Enmity of my Enemy is my Friend" and begin restoring your own tp and HP.
Now say your Melee DPS are having some problems with their TP. You want to help with your TP Utility on "Slicing Storm", but you can't because you're in "Sheathed Grip" and not "Two Handed Grip", and your "Two Gripped Rage" is still on cool down. No worries, because you're smart, so you pop "Grip Switch" and now you're go from "Sheathed Grip" to "Two Handed" and combo into "Slicing Storm" to restore your surrounding allies TP.
Oh no! What's this?! Your healer is about to get hit by a "Land Slide" because he was in the middle of healing someone! Think Fast! You move in front of titan's Land slide and pop "Vow of Loyalty", blocking the damage and preventing the knock back.
Put some "Fatal Deliverance" and "Blade Vortex" down when they're up and you should be fine. Got to love them OGC -
12-17-2013, 05:07 AMSirTaint
Needs More Tachi: !
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12-17-2013, 05:14 AMDarpaChief
Some interesting ideas. A little hard to read and understand though. While I like some of the ideas, the potency and also TP-cost of some of the moves doesn't seem quite right. The cost for similar moves on other tanks is actually higher than those that you've given SAM, but SAM can also recover it's TP. You'd want to be able to convert TP to mitigation if going this route. Also the ability to provide TP to other members probably shouldn't belong to a tank.
Honor Stance needs a complete rework. +35% Healing received is roughly twice what WAR get. I get that it's not coupled with a max HP+ like Defiance - but the low hp and lack of any passive mitigation is going to be too rough. SAM would just just be far too spikey and subject to that the same problems that WAR has just overcome. E.g. Imagine all 3 tanks with base HP of 6000 being hit for 5000. Pally would have 2000HP left after Shield Oath's mitigation, War would have 2500 HP after defiance buff to HP (6000 > 7500), SAM would have 1000 HP and likely die in the next hit. EDIT: forgot to account for Sheathed Grip in the calculation but seeing as it's impossible to give a figure to this, I can't say much. If the scale of DR goes between 0%-35% it's likely you'll be running with sub par mitigation most of the time.
There doesn't seem to be any real defensive CDs here? I presume keen flurry from LNC but that's pretty weak really. The CDs you've listed all seem to be long CD, situational 'last resort' abilities, as opposed to anything that currently works, like -% Damage Received. EDIT: Just noticed Karma's weight, which is ok, but only works in ST situations and even then I would say it's -% shouldn't be higher than sentinel. You wouldn't be able to rotate this on table flips anyway.
Vow of Loyalty is interesting, but considering i've pretty much never used cover on my paladin I don't think this will ever get used. If you have time to run around Titan to block landslide, then the healer has time to make the short move out of the way. I don't think you'd ever be able to use this skill in any realistic situation. In fact, the only use would be exploiting it by having the Main Tank stand behind you and you use this ability.
Overall I think the enmity affecting potency thing will just be too hard to balance. A group with good DDs, will end up generating more enmity while SAMs abilities will be worse. The job just seems unable to do anything consistently. Similarly, when being used as an OT, the low enmity will make the job weak and you'll end up doing worse damage. You end up in a downward spiral where you have no enmity, and therefore no damage. You then do no damage, and therefore gain no enmity. -
12-17-2013, 05:20 AMVoxInaBox
I'm going to be changing the "enmity" Scaling into a "Chi" Scaling where "Chi" Is determined off of how long you've held enmity and how much enmity you generate.
I'm also going to try and work on the numbers a little bit. -
12-17-2013, 05:30 AMKuwagami
Hmmm, what do you mean by "Potency decreases as Enmity decreases." ?
Judgement reserved until I solve that mystery -
12-17-2013, 05:50 AMKitruRandom note, the layout you chose to go with makes it really annoying to read, given that you use empty space to separate secondary effects as well as new abilities. Half of the time I wasn't sure whether you had screwed something up and misplaced a comment or were actually referencing a separate capability.Quote:
Originally Posted by VoxInaBox
A lot of the abilities you listed have "potency decreases as enmity decreases" which makes absolutely no sense to me, given that, as a tank, unless you're the offtank, you should *always* be at max enmity. On top of this, enmity isn't actually a percentage value, and it never diminishes (the only way to reduce your enmity is to use an ability that reduces your enmity or die). It's a flat numerical value that accumulates over time. From your second post, it seems to me like you intend it to mean "potency decreases as percent of enmity advantage decreases" but that's a terrible idea given that it monumentally penalizes the SAM for running with DPS/healers that actually deal good damage or even running in an 8 man group with an offtank. An outgeared SAM would get dramatically diminished effects, especially given that some of the high potency attacks actually have their potency linked to *already* having high potency. A SAM running with another tank would just have terrible values for this overall.
Even if you wanted it to be something more like "effects diminish over time", some of those effects are *really* overpowered unless the effects diminish *really* fast. Of course, since you're not saying *how much* they diminish or even stating a minimum value with which they can reach, you're refusing to provide a lot of information that would be really useful for determining balance/performance/use paradigms.
Enmity should *only* be used as a method of determining who is being attacked. If you use it to determine the effectiveness of damage/support/etc abilities in any way, everything gets screwed up because, while the devs can control the way that tank enmity and DPS/healer enmity scale, they can't make sure that absolutely everyone is always geared on equal footing, not to mention that it effectively prevents them from using all kinds of fight mechanics that are designed to force tanks to not just generate as much enmity as possible (think of the t2 tank swap, where the tanks have to routinely stop attacking so that they don't rip aggro off of the other after the provoke; it also outright prevents the devs from using any kind of threat drop designed to force the group to move the boss from one tank to the other or force the tank to use Provoke). It also makes them effectively worthless after they are rezzed because they can never generate the same size enmity cushion that they could before.
The whole "Sheathed Grip"/"Two-Handed Grip" doesn't make sense either, especially given that you used Iaido as a separate ability. Iaido *is* the act of attacking from a sheathed weapon so having attacks originate from a "Sheathed Grip" when you have an ability that already *means* "drawing a weapon from its sheath and attacking in the same motion" makes no sense whatsoever (on top of this, you actually allow Iaido to be used with the Two-Handed Grip which is just mindboggling). Furthermore, I'm guessing that you intend for every ability to have 2 separate animations (as well as 2 separate combat stances) because it's not like an Iaido attack is going to have anything close to the same animation as an attack from a weapon that's not only already drawn but also being utilized in a completely separate grip (you can't really draw a sword at your side with 2 hands) which is asking the devs to double their workload for a single class. If you actually intend for there to be something like a third single-handed grip used when you have neither buff, you're asking for the workload to be tripled.
I'm not even sure *why* you felt the need to create 2 separate buffs for the class to swap between. It's not like they're consumed in any way except to swap between the two. If you really wanted to do it as such, you could just get rid of the two buffs completely and replace them with a single buff called "Iaido" that allows you to use your Iaido attacks (that can't be used without the Iaido buff) and prevents you from using your non-Iaido attacks (it's a completely different stance so it doesn't make sense to be able to use the same attacks in it that you do out of it; have the Iaido attacks cost no TP so that you can never resource prevented from using them while Iaido is up) and turns off the auto-attack, since it smacking someone with a sheathed sword is idiotic in terms of actual combat. It would basically turn Iaido into a single stack that acts like 5 stacks of Wrath that you use immediately instead of holding on to it. A potential implementation would be for one of the tier 3 combos and maybe an additional ability from the job to provide you with Iaido (the animation has you sheathing your sword at the end of it) which allows you to create a further combo step on top of it that creates into 2-3 shared options (kind of like a fusion between the MNK form system and traditional combos).
This is broken as hell, given that it's a huge global debuff (35%? Seriously?) to all damage dealt, is off GCD, and, with one of the combo abilities provided, can be maintained with 100% uptime.Quote:
Sheathing Aura: Lv.6/0 cast/30 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/4y Radius *Changed*
Reduces surrounding enemies Physical and Magical damage up to 35%. Duration: 15s
Percentage decreases as Enmity decreases.
Additional Effects: Puts sword to "Sheathed Grip"
Removes "Two Handed Grip" Buff
This is a clone of Overpower with a TP cost of 80 instead of 130. Do you really have a justification for it being *that much* more efficient than Overpower?Quote:
Crescent Razor: Lv.8/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/80 TP/0y Range/0y Radius *Changed*
Delivers an attack with a potency of 120 to all enemies in a cone before you.
Additional Effects: Increases enmity.
A much more apt name would be Pommel Strike, since you can't really brain someone with your sheath when you're using your sword in two hands. You *can*, however, smack someone with the pommel of your sword whether it's sheathed or not.Quote:
Sheath Shot: Lv.10/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/80 TP/3y Range/0y Radius *Changed*
Delivers an attack with a potency of 110
Additional Effects: Stun.
Duration 5s (duration 3s below level 32)
First off, the name needs to be changed. Sword Dance is a signature ability of the Dancer. Secondly, a combo that restores TP is more than a bit broken, given that you're effectively saying that the class can *never* run out of TP. Riot Blade gets away with restoring MP because it costs TP to use.Quote:
Sword Dance: LV.12/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/80 TP/3y Range/0y Radius *Changed*
Delivers an attack with a Potency of 100
Combo Action: Slicing Blade
Combo Potency: 200
Combo Bonus: Restores TP
Throwing your sheath makes absolutely *no* sense. I would figure something else out, possibly using a glare/stare that acts like a single target Flash at greater range.Quote:
Sheath Throw: LV.15/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/120 TP/15y Range/0y Radius
Delivers an attack with a potency of 120. Additional effects: Increases Enmity.
You don't provide a baseline potency here, gave it an absurdly high uptime (50%, so that the only way it could possibly be balanced is if it averaged less than 5%), and, given that it provides the benefit regardless of what grip/stance you're using, doesn't even really prevent you from just throwing up Sheathed Grip immediately after and making the name really awkward.Quote:
Two Gripped Rage: Lv.18/0 cast/30 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/0y Radius
Increases Damage Dealt : Duration up to 15s
Potency decreases as Enmity decreases.
Additional Effects: Puts Sword to "Two handed Grip"
Removes "Sheathed Grip" Buff
This is a full on support ability, which means that it needs to come at the cost of your primary functionality. The primary function of a tank is to generate enmity and reduce damage taken so the only way it really makes sense would be for it to reduce your defense/mdef, reduce your damage, and/or reduce your current enmity levels. Support *always* comes at a cost in ARR: Selene increases skill/spell speed but provides substantially less healing than Eos (Eos brings Whispering Dawn *and* the healing potency buff) and the BRD support songs both reduce damage by 20%.Quote:
Slicing Storm: Lv.30/0 cast/2.5 recast/0 MP/70 TP/0y Range/5y Radius *Changed*
Delivers an attack with a potency of 120
Combo Actions: Sword Dance
Combo Potency: 220
Buff Actions: Sheathed Grip
Buff Effects: Increases Enmity. (Removes Sheathed Grip Buff)
Duration: 3s
Buff Actions: Two handed Grip
Buff Effects: Restores surrounding allies TP over time. (Removes Two Handed Grip Buff)
Duration: 15s
Duration and potency decreases as Enmity decreases.
That's insanely strong as a recovery tool, especially given that it fully restores your TP on a 3 minute CD (and the only way you anyone can burn through 1000 TP in less than 3 minutes is a WAR doing Overpower spam). In PvP, it would be borked as hell.Quote:
The Enmity of my Enemy is my Friend: Lv. 35/0 cast/180 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/5y Radius *New*
Restores 120% of HP and 120% of TP slowly over the course of 10s.
Percentage decreases as Enmity decreases.
Greatly reduces Enmity gained for 10 seconds after.
The only time this would be useful would be on the first big pull of a WP speed run. In every other case, by the time one enemy is dead, the tank should *already* have established a substantial enmity cushion on the other targets. It would be pretty much *entirely* worthless on boss fights.Quote:
Unforgiven Aura: Lv. 38/0 cast/120 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/6y Radius *New*
Increases the enmity of surrounding enemies for each enemy killed while focusing you : Duration 20s
Duration decreases as enmity decreases.
Once again, another attack that is completely broken as hell because it's like Cover on crack. You're reducing the damage that multiple people take by 100%. Cover gets away with because it only works on physical damage, only applies to a single target, *and ensures that damage is still taken by someone*. Assuming you mean that knockbacks are ignored for both you and the target, it also provides some insane utility that allows you to ignore a number of KB mechanics that are supposed to be there for instant death purposes. If anything, I'd say that this is trying to give SAM Cover, which has never really been something that SAM is known for. Cover has always been a PLD thing. SAM's really kewl defensive ability was always Blade Grasp.Quote:
Vow of Loyalty: Lv.42 /0 cast/120 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/3y Radius *New*
Prevents damage from being dealt to allies behind you as well as knock backs. : Duration 5s
Once again, you pretty much copied a PLD ability, only you made it stronger. There isn't really a difference between taking 1 damage and taking 0 damage, especially since fully absorbing attacks no longer allows you to avoid secondary effects. You gave it the same duration and a shorter CD, so it's explicitly stronger than Hallowed Ground.Quote:
Will Of The Shogun: Lv.50 /0 cast/300 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/0y Radius (Samurai skill) *New*
You can only be hit with 1 damage by most attacks for 10s
You decided to steal Holmgang from WARs as well. Awesome job.Quote:
Blade Vortex: Lv.50 /0 cast/40 recast/0 MP/0 TP/0y Range/6y Radius *New*
Delivers an attack with a potency of 100
Pulls surrounding enemies 3y's in front of you and holds them there for 2.5's.
You really need to reexamine what you want SAM to be about. Mechanically, it's a horribly inelegant idea (there are much simpler ways to accomplish what you want) that doesn't work well, would frustrate players to no end, isn't even all that original (just look at most of your CDs; the only thing you did on most of them was increase the value and add the vague and mechanically unsound "effect decreases as enmity decreases"), and requires about as much work as creating 2 other entire classes. -
12-17-2013, 11:00 AMTyger
I picture SAM wielding two different swords that requires both the main hand and secondary slot.
The main sword (great katana) would be the source of most of the heavy hitting and tanking abilities, with the smaller sword (wakizashi) in the secondary slot would be used for bleeds and some cc type abilities. Both swords would normally be used as two-handers and only have one unsheathed at a time (think DoL land classes having two, two-handed instruments), except maybe for some cyclone-like or multi-slash abilities that could have both out one in each hand. That would be an amazing way to implement SAM.
Oh yeah, and a SAM throwing attack would be a tanto dagger (or even the wakizashi), not a sheath. -
12-17-2013, 12:02 PMKitruDaikatana (lit. "big katana) were two-handed swords, not one-handed, generally made by the melting down of the samurai's daisho (lit. "big-small", refers to the trademark combination of the katana and wakizashi worn at the side) in order to create a single larger blade. The sword of the traditional size which can be used with either a single or double grip should be referred to as just a "katana".Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyger
The wakizashi was the equivalent of a European a shortsword; using it in two hands would be like suggesting that a Gladius be used with two hands. If you're going to have both weapons, both of them should be wielded since that's how they were actually used. Only using one of them at a time and reserving each for specialized purposes makes no sense.Quote:
Both swords would normally be used as two-handers and only have one unsheathed at a time
The tanto wasn't anything approaching a throwing dagger because it was weighted for use as a melee weapon. Throwing a weapon that *isn't* weighted for throwing would be as effective as just throwing a lump of iron. If you're going to *insist* on a throwing weapon for the ranged attack, you would either want to go with shuriken (though that would probably be unpopular seeing as it's seen as more of a ninja throwing weapon) or, based upon the signature ability of the SAM throughout the FF series, Gil Toss (implemented in some way that it doesn't actually involve hurling real currency at the target). If you're willing to go in a kind of "dirty-fighting" way, you could also go with something like a dirt-flinging attack.Quote:
Oh yeah, and a SAM throwing attack would be a tanto dagger (or even the wakizashi), not a sheath.
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12-17-2013, 12:07 PMAkkirei
Kitru <3
Please continue on with your discussion. -
12-17-2013, 12:33 PMGalanth
I like how you are getting on him about throwing a sheath isn't viable.
GLD/PLD have an attack called Shield Lob. Since when does throwing a shield across the room and it magically returning to your hand make sense? -
12-17-2013, 12:58 PMKitruShield Lob at least exists as a cultural landmark, what with Captain America having spent over 50 years throwing a shield having it bounce around like a pinball before returning to his waiting hand. A Shield is also shaped/weighted well enough that it could actually be seen as a feasible throwing weapon. A sheath, on the other hand, has no real cultural status as a throwing weapon and is ludicrous on the face of it as a throwing weapon.Quote:
Originally Posted by Galanth
Shield Lob is weird, but Sheath Shot is just outright absurd. -
12-17-2013, 03:10 PMTyger
@kitru
If you would recall (assuming you're familiar with FF), "great katana" is the term in final fantasy for the 2-handed sword used by SAM, whereas "katana" was the 1-handed sword used by NIN. But it was a poor of me to say a wakizashi would be "used as a two-hander". The wakizashi would not graphically be wielded with 2-hands; but "used" like a 2-hander "mechanically" in that it wouldn't come with an off-hand. I didn't expect the focus to be on the animation, more so on the proposed game mechanics.
Samurai throwing blades are not really a thing, yet a ranged attack is needed for the game and a small blade makes the most sense; leaving a tanto or the smaller sword, and wakizashi makes more sense on review. This ultra-realism of yours is a bit silly though. The idea is to take the key class identifiers and build a series of fictional attacks surrounding those class identifiers. Thanks for the history lesson, but discussing the proposed mechanics would have been far more welcomed. -
12-18-2013, 02:16 AMKuwagami
To be fair, every weapon-throwing attack doesn't really make sense as you would lose you way to fight the monsters after that. ^^
Though, as every other weaponed job has a their weapon throw (can't say that monks have a weapon, technically it's their bare fists), wouldn't it will be called "Kozuka" ? (ref. to Yojimbo's attack in FFX, throwing 3 little knives) -
01-17-2014, 07:16 AMRamsey
Took a crack at a Samurai design out of boredom, you can view it as a spreadsheet on Google drive. For those who do not wish to view an external link, I've dumped everything below, I apologize for the rough formatting.
- This design is based on a unique TP management principle, Samurai does not regain TP naturally, but can use meditate along with focus to regain TP at will. This creates more deliberate play, where rotations are planned more carefully. Think of it as the melee equivalent of a Black Mage in some ways.
- Samurai is designed in this case as a tank. The base class would be Parivir / 刀術士 and is designed to split into Ronin (DPS) and Samurai (Tank). Ronin job abilities are not included.
- Some names are placeholder.
- Cooldowns have not been assigned to buffs, would take playtesting or a lot of unnecessary theorycrafting. Use your imagination based on equivalent buffs from other classes.
- TP values have not been assigned, there's a lot of math to do for balance considering the class's unique interaction with the resource.
- Damage values are probably not 100% balanced, however keep in mind the intent is for Samurai to be less spammy, and more deliberate, and the Samurai must lose a WS every few WS to meditate.
Quote:
Level Name Type Description
1 Enpi Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 150. Grants Focus.
2 Meditate Ability Instantly restores 100 TP and an additional 100 per focus.
4 Tsuki Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Increased Enmity. Combo Action: Enpi. Combo Potency: 200. Grants Focus.
6 Hamanoha Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Increases the damage the target takes from your next weaponskill by 100%. Duration: 3s.
8 Enhanced Strength Trait Increases Strength by 4.
8 Third Eye Ability Evade the next physical attack.
10 Seigan Ability Increases parry rate by 40% and lowers damage received by 10%. Cannot be used with Hasso. Ends upon reuse.
12 Strengthen Ability Increases damage dealt and reduces damage suffered by 15%. Duration: 10s. Grants three units of focus.
14 Enhanced Third Eye Trait Extends the effect of third eye to the next two phyiscal attacks.
15 Yoshin Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 140 to all enemies in a straight line before you.
16 Enhanced Vitality Trait Increases Vitality by 4.
18 Mineuchi Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Stun.
20 Enhanced Strengten Trait Extends Strengthen duration to 20s.
22 Hasso Ability Increases damage received by 30%, while increasing damage dealt by 30% and attack speed by 15%. Cannot be used with Seigan. Ends upon reuse.
24 Enhanced Yoshin Trait Adds +40% heavy to Yoshin.
26 Goten Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Increased Enmity. Combo Action: Tsuki. Combo Potency: 300. Combo Bonus: Reduces damage taken by 10%. Grants two units of focus.
28 Superior Focus Trait Allows the stacking of up to 6 focus.
30 Bushido Job Ability Increases focus gain by 100% every time you suffer physical damage. Duration: 10s.
30 Iainuki Ability Sheath your weapon to charge an attack. Activate again to deliver an attack with a potency of up to 500. Grants Mushin. Duration: 5s.
32 Enhanced Hamanoha Trait Extends Hamanoha duration to 6s.
34 Harae Ability Removes a single detrimental effect from yourself.
35 Challenging Strike Job Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 40 to all nearby enemies. Additional Effect: If the target engages another player they will be dealt large damage with increased enmity. Duration: 15s
36 Enhanced Harae Trait Reduces the recast of Harae to 30s.
38 Kagero Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 150. Additional Effect: Fire damage over time. Combo Action: Tsuki. Combo Bonus: Increases critical rate. Duration: 15s.
40 Enhanced Goten Trait Increases the damage reduction bonus granted by Goten to 20%.
40 Hold Fast Job Ability Reduces damage taken by 50%. Can only be executed under the effect of Mushin. Duration: 5s.
42 Shikikoyo Ability Grants nearby allies the effect of Regain, refreshing their TP over time.
44 Superior Focus II Trait Allows the stacking of up to 9 focus.
45 Power Break Job Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 200. Additional Effect: Lowers the target's damage dealt by 30%. Duration: 5s.
46 Konzen-ittai Ability Grants healing over time effect to yourself. Effect increases for every unit of focus. Cure Potency: 100. Duration: 15s.
48 Jinpu Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 180 to all nearby enemies. Additional Effect: Decreases target's slashing resistance by 10%. Combo Action: Yoshin. Combo Effect: Grants Focus.
50 Shirahadori Job Ability Any attack that would deal damage removes one unit of focus instead. Duration: 10s. Grants three units of focus.
50 Meikyo Shisui Ability Allows execution of weaponskills without expending TP. Duration: 15s.
Job Abilities
30 Bushido Job Ability Increases focus gain by 100% every time you suffer physical damage. Duration: 10s.
35 Challenging Strike Job Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 40 to all nearby enemies. Additional Effect: If the target engages another player they will be dealt large damage with increased enmity. Duration: 15s
40 Hold Fast Job Ability Reduces damage taken by 50%. Can only be executed under the effect of Mushin. Duration: 5s.
45 Power Break Job Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 200. Additional Effect: Lowers the target's damage dealt by 30%. Duration: 5s.
50 Shirahadori Job Ability Any attack that would deal damage removes one unit of focus instead. Duration: 10s. Grants three units of focus.
Weapon Skills
1 Enpi Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 150. Grants Focus.
4 Tsuki Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Increased Enmity. Combo Action: Enpi. Combo Potency: 200. Grants Focus.
6 Hamanoha Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Increases the damage the target takes from your next weaponskill by 100%. Duration: 3s.
15 Yoshin Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 140 to all enemies in a straight line before you.
18 Mineuchi Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Stun.
26 Goten Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Increased Enmity. Combo Action: Tsuki. Combo Potency: 300. Combo Bonus: Reduces damage taken by 10%. Grants two units of focus.
30 Iainuki Ability Sheath your weapon to charge an attack. Activate again to deliver an attack with a potency of up to 500. Grants Mushin. Duration: 5s.
38 Kagero Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 150. Additional Effect: Fire damage over time. Combo Action: Tsuki. Combo Bonus: Increases critical rate. Duration: 15s.
48 Jinpu Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 180 to all nearby enemies. Additional Effect: Decreases target's slashing resistance by 10%. Combo Action: Yoshin. Combo Effect: Grants Focus.
Class Abilities
2 Meditate Ability Instantly restores 100 TP and an additional 100 per focus.
8 Third Eye Ability Evade the next physical attack.
10 Seigan Ability Increases parry rate by 40% and lowers damage received by 10%. Cannot be used with Hasso. Ends upon reuse.
12 Strengthen Ability Increases damage dealt and reduces damage suffered by 15%. Duration: 10s. Grants three units of focus.
22 Hasso Ability Increases damage received by 30%, while increasing damage dealt by 30% and attack speed by 15%. Cannot be used with Seigan. Ends upon reuse.
34 Harae Ability Removes a single detrimental effect from yourself.
42 Shikikoyo Ability Grants nearby allies the effect of Regain, refreshing their TP over time.
46 Konzen-ittai Ability Grants healing over time effect to yourself. Effect increases for every unit of focus. Cure Potency: 100. Duration: 15s.
50 Meikyo Shisui Ability Allows execution of weaponskills without expending TP. Duration: 15s.
Traits
8 Enhanced Strength Trait Increases Strength by 4.
14 Enhanced Third Eye Trait Extends the effect of third eye to the next two phyiscal attacks.
16 Enhanced Vitality Trait Increases Vitality by 4.
20 Enhanced Strengten Trait Extends Strengthen duration to 20s.
24 Enhanced Yoshin Trait Adds +40% heavy to Yoshin.
28 Superior Focus Trait Allows the stacking of up to 6 focus.
32 Enhanced Hamanoha Trait Extends Hamanoha duration to 6s.
36 Enhanced Harae Trait Reduces the recast of Harae to 30s.
40 Enhanced Goten Trait Increases the damage reduction bonus granted by Goten to 20%.
44 Superior Focus II Trait Allows the stacking of up to 9 focus.
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01-17-2014, 08:49 AMKitruIt wouldn't work since it would screw over anyone at low levels (THM gets Blizzard at level 1 so, from the start, their resource model is fine) and is entirely arbitrary: it doesn't serve a purpose other than justifying its own existence. If you want to have a mechanic like focus act like a secondary resource, you should have it behave as such. If you want its main purpose to be TP regeneration, just make the t3 combos cost a crapton so that the "enforced" cost only occurs once you've actually gotten high enough level to actually put it to some use.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramsey
Furthermore, forcing someone to use an attack that prevents them from doing anything on a regular basis is bad design. The Pacification on Berserk is bad enough and that's 2 GCDs out of every 18 (at most, if you use it on CD, which I don't actually know anyone that does). You're basically enforcing *more* loss than that and *requiring* that it occur on a regular basis. If you're going to have something like that, it shouldn't be on the GCD.
You really need to assign CDs just to provide a given frame of reference for your intent on the ability, especially given how hugely powerful some of your choices are. For the attacks, it's impossible to know whether you intend them to be long CD, short CD, or no CD, all of which can drastically affect their purpose/effect. Even if you don't want to assign explicit numbers, you should, at the very least, assign a descriptor, like "short CD" (Brutal Swing), "medium CD" (Infuriate, Internal Release), "long CD" (Vengeance, Rampart), or "very long CD" (Hallowed Ground, Sentinel).Quote:
[*]Cooldowns have not been assigned to buffs, would take playtesting or a lot of unnecessary theorycrafting. Use your imagination based on equivalent buffs from other classes.
Assuming you meant this to not break combos (since otherwise it would be worthless), it an arbitrary pseudo-combo. Since it's on GCD, you're basically just including it as an arbitrary combo attack you use right before any t3 attack so you have to wonder what the point even is since you might as well just make all of them t4 combos. Also, the 3s duration is redundant because it's consumed so there's no reason to attempt to limit it to a single attack through duration, which is what you're doing here. If anything, the baseline duration should be long enough so that it's not wasted if you don't immediately follow it up (like if you're stunned, you/the enemy is knocked away, or it disappears).Quote:
Hamanoha Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Increases the damage the target takes from your next weaponskill by 100%. Duration: 3s.
Broken as hell since you're providing explicit immunity to an attack on a regular basis. Hallowed Ground's immunity to all damage is only balanced because it's on a 7 min CD. This would either be basically worthless, if it were given a long CD, or hugely overpowered, if it were given a short CD. If you want it to be a baseline CD, just make it a high parry chance increase with an explicit duration.Quote:
Third Eye Ability Evade the next physical attack.
You shouldn't provide the tank and DPS stances to the base class. They belong as part of the job. Seigan should be in Samurai and Hasso should be in Ronin. Also, they're both disgustingly strong: Hasso is a ~53% increase to damage dealt, and Seigan provides the rough benefits of Shield Oath without any commensurate reduction in damage dealt.Quote:
Seigan Ability Increases parry rate by 40% and lowers damage received by 10%. Cannot be used with Hasso. Ends upon reuse.
Hasso Ability Increases damage received by 30%, while increasing damage dealt by 30% and attack speed by 15%. Cannot be used with Seigan. Ends upon reuse.
Horribly overpowered. Inner Beast provides 20% DR but can only be used every 20 seconds and comes at an explicit cost. This would basically be all that a tank uses because 20% DR is absurdly strong, especially since it's also your strongest Focus generator.Quote:
Goten Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Increased Enmity. Combo Action: Tsuki. Combo Potency: 300. Combo Bonus: Reduces damage taken by 10%. Grants two units of focus.
Bad design here, once again. Even if it's thematically appropriately, Iainuki is just a strong attack that requires 2 clicks instead of one. On top of this, a single ability that generates a single buff with a short duration that activates a single CD is bad design because you're creating a single forced usage path. Aetherflow works for ACN because the stacks last a long time and there are multiple consumers for both SCH *and* SMN; Wrath works because lots of abilities generate/maintain it and there are multiple options for consuming them. My guess is that you intended for Ronin to have its own Mushin consumer, but, even so, it wouldn't work.Quote:
Iainuki Ability Sheath your weapon to charge an attack. Activate again to deliver an attack with a potency of up to 500. Grants Mushin. Duration: 5s.
Hold Fast Job Ability Reduces damage taken by 50%. Can only be executed under the effect of Mushin. Duration: 5s.
The two abilities should be separate, and Iainuki should require a single click to activate it. Just replace Mushin with full Focus or something similar.
I'm reasonably sure that the devs avoided self-cleanses for a reason. Cleansing isn't needed often enough that it's something that you have to worry about a lot. A self-cleanse with a 30s CD basically renders the need for a healer cleanse redundant.Quote:
Harae Ability Removes a single detrimental effect from yourself.
Ridonculously strong. Even if you give it a long CD, you're basically providing them with a craptastically strong Virus/EfE. Burst damage would be a joke with a couple SAM tanks.Quote:
Power Break Job Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 200. Additional Effect: Lowers the target's damage dealt by 30%. Duration: 5s.
Broken as hell again. Immunity to attacks/damage is ridiculously strong especially since it's not like you even have to worry about getting hit more than 4-5 times over the course of 10 seconds unless you're in an AoE scenario (and the situations you'd want to use this are pretty much all ST burst situations). Since you can still generate Focus while it's active, it's not even costing you appreciably, especially given Bushido which is basically a free 9 Focus.Quote:
Shirahadori Job Ability Any attack that would deal damage removes one unit of focus instead. Duration: 10s. Grants three units of focus.
It doesn't help that you're providing it on *top* of Third Eye such that you're providing an insane amount of outright damage immunity to a single class.
AoE damage debuffs are pretty friggin' strong. It should be noted that only BRD gets access to one and, even then, it's of limited uptime and doesn't apply to their own damage. Yours is part of the optimal AoE damage rotation for your class.Quote:
Jinpu Ability Delivers an attack with a potency of 180 to all nearby enemies. Additional Effect: Decreases target's slashing resistance by 10%. Combo Action: Yoshin. Combo Effect: Grants Focus.
I realize you want the base class to flow into either a DPS or tank job, but the class itself has to have a defined role. ACN gets INT traits even though its built to stem into either a DPS or a healer because ACN is a DPS class, not a healer. Furthermore, it's standard for all classes to provide 3 attribute traits (that stack, I believe, so you actually get 12 points), and you've only got 2. Either way, it doesn't work.Quote:
Enhanced Strength Trait Increases Strength by 4.
Enhanced Vitality Trait Increases Vitality by 4.
Yoshin itself is fine, but a 40% heavy on an AoE, even for a melee, is more than a bit much. Flash works with Blind because it deals no damage and Blind is a relatively weak mitigation mechanism. Blizz 2 works with Bind because it's low damage, has a non-trivial cast time, and can only be used by squishies in melee.Quote:
Enhanced Yoshin Trait Adds +40% heavy to Yoshin.
Loads of problems with your design. You instituted a lot of arbitrary design choices that serve no practical purpose and actually detract from the build as a whole, provided a lot of abilities that shouldn't be provided (either at that point or at all), and tried too hard to design a class that could turn into either a DPS or tank job without actually considering what the class should actually be. -
01-17-2014, 09:04 AMinkuzenWhat if there were a Windslash? It would have some for of cultural relevance in a way, having the Samurai slice fast enough to create a wind projectile. I did kind of enjoy the gil throw you had proposed earlier. Though a wind slash would be the same animation wise as the Tomahawk ( which kinda looks like you're just throwing the axe head IMO :P)Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
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01-17-2014, 09:51 AMKitruI could see a Windslash-type attack being the SAM ranged attack, but I always felt that those types of attacks should be super attacks, like a 60 sec CD 20y cone, which is the model that Howling Fist follows. It's possible that it could have 2 separate levels, one of which is gotten at low level and acts as the tank ranged attack and a second at a higher level that acts like the uber-cone.Quote:
Originally Posted by inkuzen
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01-17-2014, 09:56 AMNalou
I like the idea of using enmity as a ressource, but then I thought about something: enmity NEVER decreases (unless you die, in which case it resets to 0). It always adds, no matter what you do (except shroud of saints).
The percentage view in party window represent the percent enmity of the player with most enmity. So a MT can only be at 100%.
Plus, the enmity raw value can change from 0 (start) to millions (depending on how much damage is dealt and how much modifiers are applied).
It means you can have 1 enmity and be 100%, or you can have 500k enmity and be 1% of MT.
How can you scale abilities based on something that varies so much ?
What about mobs that resets enmity ? What do you do ? What about the times you die as well ?
It sounds like a tank trying to get back into the fight with only a RoH combo (and even a gimped RoH combo if I understand well because "potency lowers as enmity lowers")
Another thing, you probably noticed that the longer the fight is, the more Pld and War make a gap with the rest of the party, to the point they could even stop using enmity generation abilities (ex: #2 player on enmity list is barely 20%).
The players able to reach spots 2 and 3 are usually offtanks, or healers (that forget to pop shroud).
Also, this sheathing aura is NOT a tank ability, because it's the best and most cheated offtank ability ever.
Keep the samurai enmity just a little bit under Paladin or Warrior, and you just gave warrior and paladin 34% extra mitigation on top of their own. Why would anyone want you to get on top of enmity list and have "only" 35% damage reduction ? -
01-17-2014, 10:24 AMRamseyTo be clear, they would still regain TP out of combat. Additionally, as Meditate states, it restores TP regardless of focus. So you'd simply need to activate it more often at lower levels. That said, most fights are shorter at lower levels, and damage scaling on most classes raises with level naturally or due to passive traits. You are right that it would need to be carefully balanced in order to not be too strenuous at low levels, or throwaway at high levels.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
The mechanic creates the following effects:Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
- Less frequent weaponskills (hence why they are balanced to be more powerful, no damage down scaling in tank stance, damage up in dps stance, with the same base numbers as other classes.)
- More deliberate planning with TP usage. You will have to take into account how much TP you have before you begin a series of attacks, as Meditate will break combos.
- A sharper drop if you screw up your rotation. The class is designed with a little more finesse in mind, because of the way that TP works, and because meditate would have a small cooldown and interrupt combos, you have more time to think about your next move, but if you do screw up your DPS will suffer more sharply.
I'm not sure what you're referring to? Perhaps you're assuming meditate needs to be channeled? I probably should have thrown some baseline CD values on these abilities, and also marked whether or not they are on/off the GCD.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
Yup! Can't agree more.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
Correct, you throw this in a la Life Surge before a powerful attack, however the short duration is actually intended, it's meant to synergize with Iainuki directly, though the duration should really be more like 5s, not sure why it was set as 3.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
The intended synergy is such that Iainuki's strength increases up to a maximum of 500 the longer you charge it, and the most powerful way to utilize it is to expose the enemy with Hamanoha and follow up with Iainuki, waiting for the last possible second Hamanoha is up to deal the most efficient damage.
Totally valid, the CD probably needs to be adjusted or the effect, as you said. Or this could simply be adjusted to dodge only auto attacks. Do keep in mind though, that the job design lacks the native damage reduction or large health pool of warrior. This job is meant to excel when the player anticipates correctly, perhaps slightly edging out its competition in those situations, but perform significantly less well if the player fails to anticipate attacks. (A la XI's Ninja.)Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
Really they belong? There's no precedent for this. In fact, the only job with two equivalent stances is Paladin, which has both available on the job.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
The idea is that Samurai can slightly edge out Paladin and Warrior in terms of providing DPS as an off tank, making up for their weakness in other areas. But because their enmity generation is native to their weaponskills, they have to worry about their threat in those situations.
Unlike Paladin and Warrior which have their threat generation tacked on, the equivalent DPS job would have a threat dropping mechanic.
Moreover it's important to realize that the classes' weaponskills are inherently weaker by default because they are using them less frequently. Essentially they naturally have the same damage reduction overall that Warrior and Paladin experience in their respective tanking stances. Without the reduction benefits. Basically, without Hasso or Seigan up, Samurai is quite weak. But they unlock fairly quickly, and it's certainly not unplayable at low levels given how stats scale.
You are absolutely correct about Hasso being overpowered though, it was meant to be -15% attack speed, but likely became a typo when I converted from rough tooltips to using the game's tooltips as a style guide. Either way I adjusted it to -50% attack speed. The idea is that attacks are more powerful, but slower and more deliberate. And that weaponskills make up a larger portion of the class's DPS when in DPS mode or compared to other DPS classes.
Duration is important here, the duration would be short, it would essentially encourage the Samurai to time his combo so that Goten activates immediately prior to periods of high damage. You're right though that this is going to be the go to combo finisher, and that was intentional. You'd want to roll Jinpu combo and Kagero to keep the buffs up, but this is definitely the default combo.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
Refer to my previous response to Hamanoha, and the intended synergy. That's really the important thing with this attack, the way you'll use it together results in you essentially playing a quick draw timing mini game whenever it's up (not literally.) The damage and TP consumption would be balanced so that essentially you wouldn't want to use Iainuki without Hamanoha in most cases.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
Mushin literally just acts as a combo without being subject to other combo rules. Because its follow up move Shirahadori is not meant to be able to be used without activating Iainuki first. You are correct that Ronin would have its own Mushin consumer.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
It's much more like the "enraged" state or a monk's "forms" than aetherflow. It's not meant to split into multiple moves, although that would be a possible expansion given a cap raise.
Having a Paladin in the party renders Ruin II redundant. You're right, you wouldn't need to cleanse a Samurai in many situations. But that's intentional. It's just makes managing a Samurai tank slightly less strenuous in one area as a healer. They'd still need cleanses during some fights, and so would the rest of the party.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
You're correct that the intent for this is a long cooldown. The duration is extremely short, you need to use good timing (yes it's a theme) in order to make good use of this. Keep in mind that Samurai does not have access to things like Sentinel, nor does it have the natural high HP or healing received as a Warrior. They can't tank on the same level without hitting the right timing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
You are correct though that this ability does help even as an OT, this was an intentional boon to bringing a Samurai as an OT. (And there are similar boons for PLD and WAR already.) However it would definitely need testing against encounters.
First I want to address Bushido, which you may or may not be interpreting incorrectly. This basically provides you with double focus from weaponskills as long as you've gotten hit recently. It's a passive that you leave up, it does not provide instantaneous focus, and in reality it may be too strong as is. It might need to be adjusted to granting focus when hit with an internal CD of X seconds.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
Basically the intent is that Samurai cannot become an amazing damage dealer when in DPS stance for long periods of time, because it will not be able to maintain the necessary TP as well. Ronin would have an equivalent DPS focused passive focus generation source.
On Shirahadori itself: This would have a long cooldown, equivalent to Invincible, and considering it has a duration of 10s, I don't think it's quite as powerful as you're interpreting it to be. It's basically an invincible that you must plan to use by either generating focus ahead of time, or popping alongside meikyo shisui and then blowing all your focus generators (assuming they are up.)
There was no uptime listed on this, but the duration would have to be carefully balanced against Samurai's normal tanking rotation, as they'd want to keep this up even on single targets if possible. You're right that this could potentially be a problem, but playtesting or blocking out an AoE encounter would be required to know how harshly it needed to be nerfed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
Not all classes get 3, Arcanist gets only 2, because they also have Aetherdam, not to mention Arcanist simply has more traits than a normal class. Also, considering they've already announced they plan to have hybrid spots in the future, I'm not entirely sure if that's true.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
That being said, if you consider the overall damage dealt, and the fact that many of the base classes' attacks have enmity generation, you'll see that the base class is actually a tank. You could easily tank 1-30 with the skill set provided. You could probably DPS adequately too, but only as adequately as ACN 1-30. Definitely it would queue as tank.
One thing to keep in mind is that the heavy would DR itself very quickly if you spammed the attack. So you have to choose between using this as a CC tool, or using this as an AoE damage source.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
I'm not convinced that this would be a problem.
I appreciate the critique, and you definitely had a lot of valid concerns as to what skills might be pain points with the design. I also left a lot of room for assumptions by not including cooldowns and TP costs (and in one case a duration), which was problematic to understanding the intent.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
That being said, feel free to look over my responses. I think some of the clarifications might make the intent of the design more clear. And how in some cases, abilities that appear at first glance to be dramatically overpowered, are not actually broken, or at least as broken as they might appear out of context. -
01-21-2014, 12:34 AMDuelle
The OP's design is a little too stance-heavy. That and basing your model on enmity is not solid, IMO. Anyway, as per my time-honored tradition:
Mercenary/刀術士
Sellswords. Cutthroats. Mercenaries. These are the words used to describe trained warriors that hold loyalty only to the weight of their purses. Despite bearing a negative stigma, the effectiveness of trained mercenaries cannot be questioned, as they have proven to be as capable as members of all adventurers' guilds in tasks that require witts and combat skill.
Remaining distant from their adventurer brethren, mercenaries train using foreign weapons forged in the far east. From great katana to the smaller combination of one-handed katana and wakizashi, they hone their art for the safety of their benefactors and the ensurance of payment.
Concept: Tank class that focuses on parrying while having flexible combos.
Mechanics: Unlike other melee fighters, Mercenaries do not have combo restrictions, but attacks are separated in the categories of Opener, Bridge, and Closer. Bridges and Closers cannot be used out of order.
Weapons: Mercenaries can equip great katana and daisho (katana+wakizashi)
Abilities
01 Cut (切) - Opener. Delivers an attack with a potency of 100.
02 Third Eye - Parry all incoming attacks for 15 seconds. 3 minute cooldown
04 Demon Cut (鬼切) - Bridge. Delivers an attack with a potency of 120. Increased Enmity
06 Resolve - Reduces the effect and duration of status ailments and damage over time effects on you. 4 minute cooldown.
08 Dragon Fang (牙竜) - Opener. Delivers an attack with a potency of 100 to all enemies directly in front of you. Increased enmity.
10 Boost - Increases the attack power of the next two weapon skills by 50/25%. 2 minute cooldown.
12 Break (ブレイク) - Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Reduces the physical damage target deals to you by 10% for 15 seconds. 90 second cooldown.
15 Iron Flash (斬鉄閃) - Delivers an attack with a potency of 130. Increased enmity. 15-yalm range.
18 Shooting Star (流星) - Delivers an attack with a potency of 50. Knocks target back. 45 second cooldown.
22 Challenge - Forces the target to attack you for the next 6 seconds. 25 second cooldown.
26 Counterstance - Instantly counter melee attacks. 10 second duration. 5 minute cooldown.
30 Turning Swallow (燕返し) - Closer. Delivers an attack with a potency of 270. Increased enmity.
34 Hold the Line - Reduces damage taken by 15%. 10 second duration. 2 minute cooldown.
38 Tornado (陣風) - Bridge. Delivers an attack with a potency of 120 to all enemies within 5 yalms. Increased enmity.
42 Heart of the Sword - Allows the use of one Bridge or a Closer, regardless of whether an Opener has be used. 2 minute cooldown.
46 Brace - Reduces damage from incoming attacks by an amount determined by your defense and magic defense values. 5 Charges. 1 minute duration. 2 minute cooldown.
50 Nine Dragons (九頭竜閃) - Closer. Delivers an attack with a potency of 30. Places a damage over time effect that grows stronger over 24 seconds.
Traits
08 Enhanced Vitality
14 Enhanced Third Eye - Doubles mitigation from parries while Third Eye is active.
16 Enhanced Strength
20 True Dragon Fang - Dragon Fang causes the next Bridge-type weapon skill to deal additional fire damage with a potency of 50.
24 Enhanced Vitality II
28 Full Break - Break now also reduces magic damage dealt to you by target.
32 True Demon Cut - Demon Cut now increases your parry chance by 20% for 9 seconds.
36 Enhanced Shooting Star - Shooting Star now also places a 50% Weight effect on the target for 10 seconds.
40 Enhanced Boost - Boost now increases the attack power of three weapons skills by 75/50/25%.
44 Enhanced Counterstance - Reduces the cooldown of Counterstance to 3 minutes.
48 Immovable - Extends Hold the Line's duration to 20 seconds.
(suggested) Achievements
Blade and Soul I-V
Notes
- Just to get it out there, potency numbers and cooldowns are negotiable.
- As a reminder, unless otherwise noted parries equate to damage reduction rather than negating damage as in older MMORPGs.
- MRC must use skills in the strict order of Opener => Bridge => Closer. This rule also applies to SAM.
- MRC's tank model is more centered around parry mitigation with a couple of cooldowns it can use in a tight spot.
- Resolve is designed exactly as written. If a paralyze effect has a 30-second duration, MRC using Resolve will reduce the chances of paralyze proccing by half and reduce its duration to 15 seconds. The same goes for any future death sentence-type effects as well as things like Allagan Rot, making the effects end faster. This may be seen as something of a double edged sword unless you know exactly when to use it.
- Brace is based on the WoW DK cooldown Bone Shield, and much like it does not affect DoT effects, AoEs or damage auras. Where Brace deviates mechanically from Bone Shield is that Brace charges are not spent whenever a parry or dodge proc. Think of it more as an insurance policy for reduced damage whenever you fail a parry/dodge check.
- Brace damage mitigation caps at 35% and is calculated based on player level as well as their defense and magic defense values. It's defensive bonus also stacks with that of Hold the Line.
- Nine Dragons is designed to simulate each additional "dragon" (in this case, subsequent DoT ticks after the attack is used) joining in after the effect is applied. Starting potency would be 30 and the tick potency when the 9th dragon joins (the tick that takes place on the 24th second of the effect) should be something like 210 potency.
- Counterstance is a way to get some extra damage out, and is most effective when surrounded by mobs. Unlike FFXI where Counterstance prevented damage, you are still taking damage while Counterstance is up (this is why I did not suggest the "reduce defense to 0" part)
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Samurai/侍
Upholding personal and family honor, the far eastern warriors known as samurai once composed the armies of many a feudal lord. Their peerless courage and skill in combat earned them the awe and respect of both commoner and noble alike. It was this dedication to protecting and serving that led to their rise to greatness.
When a prominent clan betrayed their leige and made into the night with the treasures of the shogunate, a stigma befell these warriors that would not fade with time. As more lords stopped supporting them in favor of other means of defense, many samurai clans were forced to go underground and adopt new ways of life. Some say that to this day the clans are quietly training heirs to a legacy of protecting the weak, even when they have no one to protect. Others claim that the way of the samurai died long ago and will never return.
Mechanics: Building on MRC's focus on parries, SAM focuses on parries while gaining Counter whenever a parry procs. Counter increases the damage of the next Opener/Bridge/Closer by 10% and allows the use of three attacks. Using any Opener/Bridge/Closer, Ageha, Kouki or Midare Setsugekka consumes Counter.
Support Classes: GLA (Convalescence, Savage Blade, Awareness) PGL (Featherfoot, Haymaker, Second Wind)
30 Seigan (正眼) - Decreases damage dealt and damage taken by 10% while increasing enmity. Parrying attacks while Seigan is active grants Counter.
35 Ageha (鳳蝶) - Requires Counter. Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Decreases target's resistance to slashing attacks by 10% for 20 seconds.
40 Kouki (光輝) - Requires Counter. Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Pacification for 4 seconds.
45 Midare Setsugekka (乱れ雪月花) - Requires Counter. Delivers an attack with a potency of 250. 30 second cooldown.
50 Meikyou Shisui (明鏡止水) - Perfectly parry all incoming attacks. 10 second duration. 7 minute cooldown.
(suggested) Quests
30 Legacy of Honor
35 To Protect and Serve
40 Dual Fates
45 In Memory Of...
50 Muramasa
50 A Relic Reborn: Masamune
(suggested) Achievements
Strength of a thousand men - Complete the samurai job quest Muramasa
Like, mind over matter - Acquire Masamune in the quest A Relic Reborn
Notes
- Not mentioned in the design, but SAM would favor great katana.
- Seigan introduces the Counter mechanic while also providing some passive mitigation for SAM.
- Counter allows the use of Ageha, Kouki and Midare Setsugekka. Ageha brings in a debuff that SAM would be encouraged to keep on the mob as much as possible. Kouki is utility in the form of Pacification. Midare Setsugekka is on-demand damage and would be inserted into the rotation whenever possible (much like PLDs do with Spirits Within in situations where an interrupt isn't required). Ageha, Koki and Midare are off the GCD and do not break combo chains.
- Attacks parried while Meikyou Shisui is active deal no damage (hence "perfect parry").
- Opinion: I don't have a full story drafted, but what I would want the SAM story to focus on is the player character's encounters with a fallen Samurai wielding the blood-thirsty blade Muramasa, building it up and culminating in a fight to the death against them. Since we have vanity slots on the way, I'd also want Muramasa to have a unique model and be an equipable reward for clearing the SAM questline. Maybe a "sealed Muramasa" or something.
- You get a cookie if you can guess where I got the SAM achievements from.
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Yojinbo/用心棒
Concept: Not finalized, but going for DPS job focused on chaining abilities.
Mechanics:
Abilities
(suggested) Quests
50 A Relic Reborn: Ama no murakumo & Ito
(suggested) Achievements
Notes
-
01-21-2014, 04:36 AMKitruAnd as per mine...Quote:
Originally Posted by Duelle
It's basically identical to the MNK/PGL system. The only difference would be if abilities that aren't labelled as such break the combo, which would need to be clarified. Even with your Yojinbo changes, it wouldn't be all that different because all it would be doing is adding the equivalent of "third form and second form bonus" to the second form attacks.Quote:
Mechanics: Unlike other melee fighters, Mercenaries do not have combo restrictions, but attacks are separated in the categories of Opener, Bridge, and Closer. As long as the attack is used in the proper order, additional effects will proc.
Few problems with this. First off, Focus shouldn't reduce GCD by a flat amount. All effects like that should be a percent reduction in attack speed. As such, it would be more appropriate to say that Focus increases attack speed by 20% (keep in mind, that's a 25% increase to DPS). Second, it's pretty arbitrary given that you're having Iron Flash provide 2 stacks and Strike provide 5 stacks (I'm assuming that Enhanced Strike was meant to refer to Strike instead of Cut) so that you're basically going to have it up at all times (5 stacks means that you have the full combo plus 2 non-combo attacks). There's not really a reason to keep it as stacks. Of course, because it's triggered by everything that *starts* combos, it's basically a 20% increase in attack speed that you get automatically since there's no reason to ever *not* start with it.Quote:
Openers grant stacks of Focus, which reduces the GCD between abilities by .5 second, and each ability used consumes one stack of focus. Using an opener while having stacks of Focus does not grant additional Focus. If used outside of order, baseline potency for all attacks is 75 and no additional effects will proc.
It doesn't really add anything because it would basically be up at all times and be generated no matter what you do. You would maintain it without ever thinking about it and it doesn't even impact tactical decision making because it's based off of the attack that everything else is built off of (unlike Maim, which preempts the use of the high enmity skills).
A couple random points in general: you're not using the levels that every other class gets their given abilities and you're 1 ability short from the 17 minimum that every other class gets (ACN gets 18 and is the only deviation because it's providing their pet). It's not a balance concern, nor is it impossible to implement, but it's a deviation from what has been adhered to religiously.
I'm not entirely sure what was intended here because your wording is vague and roundabout.Quote:
02 Third Eye - Attempt to parry all incoming attacks for 12 seconds. 3 minute cooldown
14 Enhanced Third Eye - Doubles Third Eye's duration and mitigation from parries while Third Eye is active.
Parries are already attempted on all physical attacks so saying "attempt to parry all incoming attacks" is really just a fancy and roundabout way of saying "allows you to parry magical attacks", which is less useful than one might think, given that there are already magic attacks that can be parried (magical auto-attacks such as those used by sprites). In addition, because it's an RNG mechanism, it doesn't actually afford much in the way of predictable performance, which is what you would want out of something intended to be used on the big bursts that you cannot currently parry.
If it was intended for this to be a bonus to parry chance, it needs to be listed. Furthermore, it shouldn't be a percent increase to the existing chance but rather a flat increase, such as provided by Bulwark, else it becomes worthless at low levels and hugely overpowered at high levels.
Also, the other level 2 CDs that the tanks gets are 2 minute-trait-down-to-90 secs tank CDs. You should probably be providing Brace at this level instead.
Tank CDs wouldn't work out well like this because 2 attacks happen almost instantly. You'd have to activate it less than a second before a lot of big attacks or else waste it, for all intents and purposes. It works for BLM because they're not *supposed* to be getting attacked all the time. If you want something that only mitigates a small number of attacks, just make it an absorb shield. If you want it to be damage reduction, just make it apply to all attacks over the given duration.Quote:
08 Brace - Reduces damage taken by the next 2 attacks by 30%. 20 second duration. 2 minute cooldown.
40 Unbreakable - Brace now reduces damage taken by the next 4 attacks.
Also, even if it *were* supposed to be stack based, 2 attacks every 2 minutes is a complete and utter joke. Assuming 1 attack per GCD, you're talking about 1.25% mitigation over time from what is supposed to be the equivalent of Foresight (~1.67%) and Rampart (3.33%). When it's weak compared to *Foresight*, you know you screwed something up bad. When you finally get Enhanced Brace after 32 levels, it starts actually being able to compete with Foresight against single target (but only really competes against Foresight because it's still really weak), but it's still weak compared to pretty much everything else out there (and functionally worthless in any situation in which you're tanking multiple enemies).
You're providing a second tank CD at level 8, when, honestly, tank CDs are needed the least. Should probably provide the damage CD that you forgot to implement at this level because it would be much more useful.
These are the only AoEs that Mercenary gets, and they're both combo based. It's bad explicitly bad design since you're forcing the player to use the combo as opposed to allowing them to choose between AoE spamming and using a more efficient methodology (which is what happens in every other case of AoEs being tied to combos). It's even worse because, unlike DRG, tanks actually *need* to use AoE as part of their fundamental role.Quote:
12 Dragon Fang (牙竜) - Bridge. Delivers an attack with a potency of 100 to all enemies directly in front of you. Increased enmity.
20 True Dragon Fang - Dragon Fang now affects all targets within 10 yalms.
38 Tornado (陣風) - Closer. Delivers an area attack with a potency of 200. Increased enmity. 45 second cooldown.
48 True Tornado - Tornado's cooldown is reduced to 30 seconds.
For Dragon Flash, the effect of Focus has it doing the equivalent of 125 potency damage and you're having it apply in 360*. You started it off as Overpower and then buffed the living hell out of it, especially since you're giving it nearly 3 times the area of effect compared to Flash and roughly 9 times that of Overpower.
As to Tornado, you're putting a t3 combo attack on a 45 second CD. That's terrible. Have it be one or the other. If it's a t3, you seriously need to reign in that damage because, with the 25% increase in effect DPS from Focus, you're providing an AoE that hits nearly as hard as Steel Cyclone and can be used more often. Even as a CD, it hits harder than it should given that Steel Cyclone precludes the use of other attacks to justify its potency.
You just copied Maim. It's something of a recurring theme that you didn't really do anything new, but just copied what another class did with a minor deviation.Quote:
22 Cut (切) - Bridge. Delivers an attack with a potency of 160. Increases damage dealt by 10% for 20 seconds.
I would be very surprised if the devs implemented this given that they didn't have Provoke do this when they could quite easily have done so.Quote:
26 Challenge - Forces the target to attack you for the next 6 seconds. 15 second cooldown.
As with Brace, mitigation for a limited number of attacks is a horrible idea for a tank. Even worse, a single attack at 50% every 3 minutes is even worse than Brace. Even at 75%, it means next to nothing because it's a single attack.Quote:
34 Deflect - Deflect one enemy attack, decreasing damage taken by 50%. 10-second duration. 3-minute cooldown.
44 Enhanced Deflect - Increases damage reduction to 75%.
"Counter attack" means absolutely nothing. If you meant dealing damage from getting attacked, you just copied Vengeance and you still forgot to include the potency. A *chance* to do so is also relatively worthless, even with a longer duration, because it's a CD. CDs should have predictable effects; it's why Featherfoot and Internal Release aren't considered absolutely amazing but Life Surge is afforded a decent level of respect.Quote:
40 Counterstance - Grants a 25% chance to counter attack when taking direct melee damage. 30 second duration. 2 minute cooldown.
Tempered Will on a lower CD.Quote:
44 Resolve - Breaks any snare or root effects on you and makes you impervious to root and snare effects for 10 seconds. 90 second cooldown.
Combo attacks with CDs are bad ideas. At 2 minutes, the damage is a joke and the effect is mediocre at best, especially given that all you did was copy Virus.Quote:
48 Nine Dragons (九頭竜閃) - Closer. Delivers a nine-fold attack with a potency of 210. Reduces the target's STR, DEX, INT and MND by 10% for 10 seconds. 2 minute cooldown.
It's just Perfect Balance.Quote:
50 Heart of the Sword - Instantly gain 3 stacks of Focus. Allows you to use any attack with their additional effects regardless of being Opener, Bridge, or Closer. 10 second duration. 5 minute cooldown.
You don't have Iron Flash labelled as an Opener so it simply provides Focus stacks. You would still have to follow it up with Strike, generating 5 stacks of Focus and rendering the second stack provided by Iron Flash redundant, in order to use any of your combo attacks (of which only one other attack, Shooting Star, *isn't*).Quote:
- Focus is only obtained by the two Openers available, Strike and Iron Flash while the Merc has no Focus stacks.
The problem is that it's not a lose structure. Your only Opener is Strike and 2 of the 3 Closers are on CDs. Even if you removed the CDs, all you'd be doing is mimicking WAR: Strike>Cut>Nine Dragons is SP and Strike>Demon Cut>Turning Swallow is BB. Since Cut lasts 20 seconds (which is just over 3 combo cycles), it even copies the WAR rotation pretty much explicitly.Quote:
- The idea behind the loose combo restrictions is that the player has to think on their feet depending on what they need to get done. If you open with Strike and want bridge into high enmity, you're going to follow it with Demon Cut. If you're looking to buff yourself, you're going to use Cut instead. You could do something like Strike => Cut => Turning Swallow and still get favorable results since you're closing with an increased enmity skill.
They're not trump cards because they're CDs so weak that they're almost laughable.Quote:
- Merc's tank model is more centered around parry mitigation with a couple of trump cards it can use in a tight spot.
Broken as hell. You copied Shield Oath (since, as a tank stance, it's supposed to have an enmity increase on it that you forgot) and then, on top of that, provided a parry buff that's nigh upon ludicrous. I can understand the desire to have it scale with Strength, but doing so just makes Strength provide more parry chance than parry rating, which is just saying "ignore everything but Strength", which is a bad idea for a tank class. Furthermore, it's another one of those cases of "worthless at low levels and absurdly overpowered at high levels". In full i90 gear, a tank is going to have roughly 360 STR. In i50 gear, 200 or so (I think, haven't checked). If you want it to increase parry chance, just have it increase it by a flat amount. Buffs and stances should not scale based upon gear because it just creates an exponential growth issue (gear *already* improves performance; you'd be having it improve performance *even more*). Also, you'd need to fix the living hell out of the damage dealt/taken reductions: you're providing a 10% increase in damage dealt, which WAR gets, and, as such, you need to reduce damage via the stance by more to compensate.Quote:
30 Seigan - Decreases damage dealt and damage taken by 20%. Increases parry chance by 10% of STR.
No CD, but I'm guessing it's supposed to be something like 3 minutes. You also don't give a range, which would be needed (6y v. 10y could change a lot). Since it's RNG based, it's not very useful, especially since Parry is a mechanic that only contributes appreciably over longer periods of time and you're only affording it 10 seconds. Also, AoEs tend to either be unable to be parried (e.g. magic) or single instance. Either way, it wouldn't actually do much. Would probably be better to just have it provide damage reduction to all allies within a given range for the duration. Make it 20% to "match" parry rating.Quote:
35 Mimamoru - Parry attacks aimed at nearby allies. 10 second duration.
Now you can choose between a 10% personal damage increase and an 11% increase to all tank damage. Not really all that impressive and, once again, basically copying WAR.Quote:
40 Enpi - Bridge. Delivers an attack with a potency of 150. Decreases target's resistance to slashing attacks for 20 seconds.
Reducing damage from area attacks means next to nothing and you, once again, didn't define "counter attack", which means next to nothing. Stack limitations on mitigation are still apt.Quote:
50 Meikyou Shisui - Counter attack the next 5 attacks and reduce damage taken from area attacks by 60%. 15 second duration. 7 minute cooldown.
It wouldn't been more interesting than what you afforded it with your given stance. I'm not sure why you thought it would be overpowered since all you'd have to do would be have the stance provide a more stringest damage reduction modifier to compensate.Quote:
- Seigan is a basic tank stance. I wanted to give it a built-in counter attack mechanic but I felt that would be overpowered when comparing damage output between SAM, WAR and PLD.
"Counter attack" has never meant "take no damage" in the annals of the FF series so I'm not sure where you're getting that from. It also makes next to no sense since a counter attack is an attack in response to an attack.Quote:
- The 5 attacks that can be guaranteed counters while under the effect of Meikyou Shisui fully negate the damage. The 60% damage reduction is there to compensate for SAM not having an real invincibility.
Another point, all melee DoW have access to a stun and some other form of CC or utility as well. You have provided neither. The closest you get is Heavy and KB on the same attack, neither of which are especially useful to melee.
I have *always* seen the term translated as "Yojimbo" and that's also how the FF series has translated the term historically.Quote:
Yojinbo/用心棒
You need to define that DoT because just saying it's there and how long it lasts means next to nothing without potency.Quote:
Mechanics: Equipping the Yojinbo crystal causes Dragon Fang to place a dot on all enemies affected that lasts 12 seconds
Assuming it's supposed to be off-GCD like all of the other stuns, Brutal Swing is 5 seconds, Steel Peak is 4 seconds, an Leg Sweep is 3 seconds. Tanks are supposed to have better stunning capabilities, based upon what we've seen currently, and you're providing the strongest stun in the game to a DPS class.Quote:
35 Hobaku - Stuns target for 6 seconds. 20 second cooldown.
So they get a second Mercy Stroke?Quote:
40 Satsujin - Delivers an attack with a potency of 200. Can only be used on targets with 20% or less HP. 45 second cooldown.
I find it rather strange that you provided the weapon set that favors parry and counter-attacking to the DPS and the one that emphasizes strong direct attacks to the tank. It makes *way* more sense for it to be the other way around. You don't really provide a reason for the two weapon types to be there either. They would be mechanically identical but require twice as many animations to be made, which is a really bad idea, given that the problem with adding classes is the additional workload. It's entirely arbitrary, from a design standpoint, and adds nothing to the actual play. It's not as if the same type of weapon can't have different stat allocations: just look at the ACN/SMN/SCH books.Quote:
- The design doesn't say this, but Yojinbo favors daisho (katana+wakizashi). I'd expect the katana and wakizashi to come as a set (thus not requiring anything in the offhand slot)
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01-21-2014, 08:04 AMDuelleThis was intended. The devs used the concept of martial arts kata that can flow into different attacks with PGL/MNK, and I think a similar idea would fit Merc/SAM/Yojinbo.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
I looked at this more in context of Merc compared to GLA and MRD rather than Merc vs PGL. The former is a tank, the latter is DPS through and through. That said, I'm not prone to attacks of unique snowflake-ism, and instead look for things that work and try to give them a slightly different spin.Quote:
The only difference would be if abilities that aren't labelled as such break the combo, which would need to be clarified. Even with your Yojinbo changes, it wouldn't be all that different because all it would be doing is adding the equivalent of "third form and second form bonus" to the second form attacks.
If you make it a percentage all that makes it is subject to getting messed with via Skill Speed. I just feel a flat amount with reduced potency per attack would keep it close enough to WAR and PLD that it doesn't take over the tanking game. The again, the fact that tank gear doesn't have a ton of skill speed gear and light DPS gear like PGL's does may be able to come into play and keep things balanced, with SAM using the former and Yojinbo using the latter.Quote:
Few problems with this. First off, Focus shouldn't reduce GCD by a flat amount. All effects like that should be a percent reduction in attack speed.
This is intended as well.Quote:
Second, it's pretty arbitrary given that you're having Iron Flash provide 2 stacks and Strike provide 5 stacks (I'm assuming that Enhanced Strike was meant to refer to Strike instead of Cut) so that you're basically going to have it up at all times (5 stacks means that you have the full combo plus 2 non-combo attacks).
Fancy way of increasing parry chance. I couldn't decide on a number, and looking ahead I was thinking LNC should be one of SAM's subclases. I could make it 100% parry chance for the duration (would work similarly to Rampart).Quote:
I'm not entirely sure what was intended here because your wording is vague and roundabout.
Brace is more for things like Mountain Buster, admitedly. I can recognize that it wouldn't be useful if you're getting beat on by multiple enemies, though.Quote:
Tank CDs wouldn't work out well like this because 2 attacks happen almost instantly. You'd have to activate it less than a second before a lot of big attacks or else waste it, for all intents and purposes.
I disagree here. The idea was opening with Strike or Iron Flash, and with the reduced GCD quickly go into Dragon Fang => Tornado if you need AoE. Merc would have access to Flash from GLA, so at low levels you could suplement with that.Quote:
These are the only AoEs that Mercenary gets, and they're both combo based. It's bad explicitly bad design since you're forcing the player to use the combo as opposed to allowing them to choose between AoE spamming and using a more efficient methodology (which is what happens in every other case of AoEs being tied to combos).
I guess I wasn't paying attention to Flash's tooltip. I'll have to look at that and adjust it.Quote:
For Dragon Fang, the effect of Focus has it doing the equivalent of 125 potency damage and you're having it apply in 360*. You started it off as Overpower and then buffed the living hell out of it, especially since you're giving it nearly 3 times the area of effect compared to Flash and roughly 9 times that of Overpower.
This is intended. Granted, Cut resolves my pet peeve with Maim because Maim doesn't flow into aggro generation at all (which sucks horribly when DPS don't realize that to maximize threat you HAVE to get Maim up), whereas Merc's combo system's version of it would flow because if I wanted to I could bridge with Cut and close with Turning Swallow and still get some added enmity out of the deal.Quote:
You just copied Maim. It's something of a recurring theme that you didn't really do anything new, but just copied what another class did with a minor deviation.
The undertone of this part of my suggestion is "change Provoke to match this ability". The way it is currently designed makes tank swaps needlessly difficult.Quote:
I would be very surprised if the devs implemented this given that they didn't have Provoke do this when they could quite easily have done so.
Again, I'm thinking of it being used for stuff like Mountain Buster or very high damage attacks. I guess it could be turned into a regular mitigation CD (45% damage reduction for 8 seconds or something).Quote:
As with Brace, mitigation for a limited number of attacks is a horrible idea for a tank. Even worse, a single attack at 50% every 3 minutes is even worse than Brace. Even at 75%, it means next to nothing because it's a single attack.
Tempered Will prevents knockbacks, whereas this doesn't.Quote:
Tempered Will on a lower CD.
The bread and butter of Merc and SAM is supposed to be Strike => Bridge => Turning Swallow. Read my notes on Nine Dragons, by the way.Quote:
Combo attacks with CDs are bad ideas. At 2 minutes, the damage is a joke and the effect is mediocre at best, especially given that all you did was copy Virus.
I didn't realize this until after I finished typing up Merc. Much like with PGL, a system with restrictions like Merc's could use a CD that temporarily lifts the restrictions.Quote:
It's just Perfect Balance.
Read the traits, please.Quote:
You don't have Iron Flash labelled as an Opener
I guess I could have called it free-flow instead.Quote:
The problem is that it's not a lose structure. Your only Opener is Strike and 2 of the 3 Closers are on CDs. Even if you removed the CDs, all you'd be doing is mimicking WAR: Strike>Cut>Nine Dragons is SP and Strike>Demon Cut>Turning Swallow is BB. Since Cut lasts 20 seconds (which is just over 3 combo cycles), it even copies the WAR rotation pretty much explicitly.
I was admitedly conservative with the numbers.Quote:
They're not trump cards because they're CDs so weak that they're almost laughable.
Lack of +enmity was a typo, which I'll fix. The parry buff is taking into account the fact that you don't have shield blocks at all to help mitigate incoming damage. Parry rating in its current incarnation is pretty terrible because of the fact that it tiers rather than gradually increasing parry chance defined by the different between player level and mob level. The alternatives would be fixing parry in a discernable way (which given the comment by the devs about not wanting to have ratings translate to percentages, is not likely to happen) or having Seigan increase the amount of benefit SAM gets from parry rating. PLD has a parry+shield, WAR has active mitigation and self heals, SAM should have better/stronger parries.Quote:
Broken as hell. You copied Shield Oath (since, as a tank stance, it's supposed to have an enmity increase on it that you forgot) and then, on top of that, provided a parry buff that's nigh upon ludicrous. I can understand the desire to have it scale with Strength, but doing so just makes Strength provide more parry chance than parry rating, which is just saying "ignore everything but Strength", which is a bad idea for a tank class.
You've never been in a situation where stray AoE can get you killed. You can chalk it up to bad healers, but again, it's there to make up for SAM having no invincibility.Quote:
Reducing damage from area attacks means next to nothing
Final Fantasy XI.Quote:
"Counter attack" has never meant "take no damage" in the annals of the FF series so I'm not sure where you're getting that from.
This is more due to me not wanting utility shared by both SAM and Yojinbo. Nine Dragons kind of falls into that category, but as I said that's in an iffy spot.Quote:
Another point, all melee DoW have access to a stun and some other form of CC or utility as well. You have provided neither. The closest you get is Heavy and KB on the same attack, neither of which are especially useful to melee.
I write it exactly as it is written. Kind of like how senpai/先輩 is sometimes romanized as sempai. I stick to the former.Quote:
I have *always* seen the term translated as "Yojimbo" and that's also how the FF series has translated the term historically.
You wanted stuns and utility. There you go. >.>Quote:
Assuming it's supposed to be off-GCD like all of the other stuns, Brutal Swing is 5 seconds, Steel Peak is 4 seconds, an Leg Sweep is 3 seconds. Tanks are supposed to have better stunning capabilities, based upon what we've seen currently, and you're providing the strongest stun in the game to a DPS class.
MRD shouldn't have a monopoly on Execute-type attacks. I also never said anything about Yojinbo getting access to MRD abilities.Quote:
So they get a second Mercy Stroke?
This isn't so much about stats as it is about aesthetics. I was also thinking of this when I decided Yojinbo should use daisho.Quote:
I find it rather strange that you provided the weapon set that favors parry and counter-attacking to the DPS and the one that emphasizes strong direct attacks to the tank. It makes *way* more sense for it to be the other way around. You don't really provide a reason for the two weapon types to be there either. They would be mechanically identical but require twice as many animations to be made, which is a really bad idea, given that the problem with adding classes is the additional workload. It's entirely arbitrary, from a design standpoint, and adds nothing to the actual play. It's not as if the same type of weapon can't have different stat allocations: just look at the ACN/SMN/SCH books.
I'll admit that I have to use the gear equipped by SMN and SCH to differentiate them because if you were to look at the book you still wouldn't know which is which. I also kept in mind the crooks vs wands and cudgels vs staves thing CNJ and THM have going, and wish that was a little more widespread. It's also why I've pushed for GLA loosing daggers and getting great swords as a secondary weapon. -
01-21-2014, 09:07 AMzmoney03
so they gonna release the samurai for FFXIV
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01-30-2014, 08:22 PMDuelleI don't see why they wouldn't, really.Quote:
Originally Posted by zmoney03
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01-31-2014, 02:54 PMKitruIf given infinite time and monies, I'm sure that the Yoshi and company would implement every job ever come up with for FF and then some. It's horribly unrealistic to assume as much though. As such, there's a certain amount of triage that new class/jobs have to go through, and, given the lack of cross-class acting as a major mechanic (as occurred in FFXI), there isn't as much of an impetus to design new classes and jobs. The only reason would be to add a specific desired construct to the existing classes and jobs (which is basically what Yoshi has says that they'll be basing their decisions around).Quote:
Originally Posted by Duelle
There's also lore and story considerations to take into account. Samurai isn't an Eorzean class/job construct, which presents some problems if it were going to be implemented as a class (jobs can pull the "exotic combat style" thing because that's kind of what they're supposed to be; WAR is from the far north, SCH/SMN are from the ancient past). While not a concern from a balance/design standpoint, it's still something that has to be considered, especially when there are classes that could be brought in without any problems of the kind.
While I think that SAM is one of those "eventually" and/or "if we get to it" classes, I fully expect that we'll get a bunch of other classes first, if only because they're the lower hanging fruit: DRK, NIN (if NIN were done as a job off of a "local" class like THF), RDM, DNC, etc. SAM, without a construct that views SAM as a job applied to a thematically separate class instead of a class and job together, is problematic enough that SAM is "harder" than other options (not that it's impossible to create such a construct; the class could be simply the 2h sword class that turns into SAM at 30; as long as the base class didn't *scream* SAM while not being completely antagonistic towards it, it could work). -
01-31-2014, 03:49 PMViridianaExcept in Tactics, where it was "Katana" and "Ninja Sword," respectively.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyger
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01-31-2014, 06:34 PMDuelleAs I've mentioned, SAM's aesthetic happens to suffer the same problem NIN does. It's too unique and there is a little leeway in terms of where they can insert the job. I can picture people being VERY pissed if SAM were to be derived from lancer (for example), and even more furious if Masamune was turned into a naginata for the sake of that idea.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitru
How is this an issue? You write lore and wait for the proper moment to introduce the class/job and the lore that supports it. The original classes that launched with 1.0 had the benefit of setting to back them up (since each guild was clearly presented as having their place in the world), and I don't see MRC (per my suggestion) or SAM having any trouble if they were introduced in an expansion that focuses on the far east.Quote:
There's also lore and story considerations to take into account. Samurai isn't an Eorzean class/job, which presents some problems if it were going to be implemented as a class (jobs can pull the "exotic combat style" thing because that's kind of what they're supposed to be; WAR is from the far north, SCH/SMN are from the ancient past).
This is fine and to be expected. I wouldn't want them to randomly shoehorn jobs in for no reason. That's how we ended up with SAM and NIN coming from a bunch of pirates in FFXI rather than a more "pure" source.Quote:
While I think that SAM is one of those "eventually" and/or "if we get to it" classes, I fully expect that we'll get a bunch of other classes first, if only because they're the lower hanging fruit
On the first point, SE has shown with XIV that they care a lot about stuff like attack animations and stances (MRD and LNC have VERY different stances instead of the blanket 2-hander animation schedules other MMOs tend to use). A claymore and a great katana are and should be held differently, so a 2-handed sword class wouldn't sprout SAM without going against the way classes are built and animated.Quote:
the class could be simply the 2h sword class that turns into SAM at 30; as long as the base class didn't *scream* SAM while not being completely antagonistic towards it, it could work).
On the second point, a class heavily leaning towards a job is not strange and could even be called expected. GLA plays pretty much like a PLD with less cooldowns, for example. -
01-31-2014, 11:55 PMSirTaint
SAM,DRK,RDM,NIN have huge fan bases. I know SE said they would introduce new jobs with updates but I wouldn't be surprised to see the big name jobs with the first expansion.
If I had to make SAM it would be a tank job. Parry based with a stack system almost like BLM.
Tachi: Enpi opener then have 2 paths. Parry/Emn up path (stacks) and a debuff path.
Enpi > Yuki (parry stack) > Gekko (stack+Emn bonus) > Kaiten (Stack+Emn)
Enpi > Yuki (parry stack) > Kasha (stack+Damage down bonus) > Kaiten (Stack+Emn)
Enpi > Rana (damage up stack) > Fudo (damage up stack)/Koki (Magic damage down debuff)/Jinpu (physical damage debuff)
Pretty rough idea, but I would love SAM to constantly be spamming WSs and constantly needing to decide which path to choose. 4 step combos as finishers with the main functions at the 3rd step. So you can spam 3 steps for the buff/debuff or finish the combo for more damage/hate but taking up another GCD. -
02-01-2014, 04:21 AMKitruI can understand the sentiment you're expressing here, though I don't think that SAM and NIN have *quite* the same problem. NIN has a pretty easy evolution out of THF, which is easily placed pretty much anywhere for virtually any reason. SAM doesn't really have a class that does the same.Quote:
Originally Posted by Duelle
Because, if it's a class, it players should be able to start their character as that class. A *class* built to obviously transfer into a SAM would *have* to be strongly influenced by the Far East of Hydaelyn, if not originating there. The story, as it is written, is focused upon the player being an Eorzean. A Far Eastern character, which is what you'd be if you started as the pre-SAM, would require rewriting the starting story.Quote:
How is this an issue?
*That* is the issue: it requires rewriting stuff. The only ways to circumvent the issue would be to either design a class that *doesn't* obviously turn into a SAM and have SAM be a job acting as a new and unique combat style you're not using *or* deviate from the class norms and prevent it from being a class that you can start as (which, while it doesn't effect longstanding players, has a definite impact upon new players coming over to check out the SAM).
Yes, they should be wielded in dramatically different ways. The problem, however, is what I mentioned before: a class that is obviously built to grow out of SAM is going to present implementation problems. A class designed to circumvent the implementation problems would need to be an Eorzean 2h sword fighter; it *doesn't*, however, mean that the aforementioned non-SAM pre-SAM class would *have* to have animations that make absolutely no sense for a SAM to use. A claymore isn't the same thing as a katana; a bastard sword *is*, and it just so happens that Occidental fencing *does* actually have a combat style relatively reminiscent of kendo (high guard, falling strikes that flow into others) that could be used.Quote:
A claymore and a great katana are and should be held differently, so a 2-handed sword class wouldn't sprout SAM without going against the way classes are built and animated.
And I'm not arguing the point. In fact, I agree with you. The issue is that a class that leans into SAM wouldn't work since classes are, by virtue of the story, as written, supposed to be Eorzean. Far Eastern classes wouldn't work without revision to said story (and the actual story, not the backstory). Without that revision, a pre-SAM class would have to *play* like a SAM without feeling like one or even looking like one, which is what I was referring to.Quote:
On the second point, a class heavily leaning towards a job is not strange and could even be called expected. GLA plays pretty much like a PLD with less cooldowns, for example.