Proposed changes to some abilties

1. Mug: Cut potency and cooldown in half. Therefore damage output I pretty much the same, and you can get more items when farming in open world. Would be nice if one poison drains health (as it does now), the other increases drop rate, and having NO poison guarantees HQ (but doesn't increase drop rate). Makes sense because if you don't poison the mob, it retains its quality.

2. Forbidden Chakra/Purification: I love this mechanic, despite how little we see of it. But I feel like it could've all been saved into one button for hotbar space. Forbidden chakra available while in fists of fire, purification while in fists of wind, and a raid wide -5% damage for 10 seconds while in fists of earth (that could be a future ability).

3. Provoke (PVP only) makes it so that if target is within a certain distance, their next attack hits you no matter what.

4. Shuffle for Astrologian needs to not allow the same card to come back.

5. Living Dead: allow dark knight to go to 0 HP, not one, making it obvious that the heal counts as 100% (not sure if that was fixed, but if not this would be a nice thematic way to solve the issue).

6. Wildfire: I feel like as a support class, that is lacking in DPS (doing fine really, but generally frowned upon I guess), they should have one very very powerful ability that makes good use of their allies. Allows all DoTs ticking on enemy when timer is up to burst for their remaining damage, and continue ticking afterwards (as to not ruin rotations of allies). Sounds insane, I know, but it fits and I'm sure percentage of damage dealt can be adjusted but it would make their DPS be something admirable. I think if the ability is to powerful, it can do a percentage of remaining damage, but the concept is that this works like a raid wide fester.

7. Ley Lines: would be beautiful if this was a support ability that other Mages could use, but might be too strong.

8. Wheeling Thrust: since it's fairly identical to fang and claw, it'd be nice if this has one unique aspect to it, like resetting cooldown on Elusive Jump while the other resets cooldown on Dragonfire Dive, both with like a 15% chance of activating. Just for the sake of making the abilities a bit different, without ruining the rotation of normal jumps.

9. Wanderer's Minuet: remove cast time but retain the concept of staying stationary. Yes, bards love to run around, etc. handling mechanics and whatnot and that's fine. But it makes sense that the archer should have a moment to focus and concentrate. When wanderer's minuet is active, each attack grows in potency by 5% stacking up to 30%, so far as the bard is not moving. If YoshiP really wants cast times, that's fine too, one of the new weaponskills can have a charge up time because that also makes sense--an archer might want to pull back and charge a bit longer.

10. Wanderer's Paean: maybe this is too powerful, but I think it should just last until it's used. My bard casts it on my war before a pull, and I have to use berserk within the first ten seconds which is fine of course, but would be nice in other instances if I don't want to berserk right away or some such thing.

Repost here in appropriate subforum please :)

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...est-Megathread

I cried a little bit. . . all of these changes were so. . . logical and well thought out. Are you a magic man?

that DRG change would make them ridiculous lol
dragonfire dive does A LOT of damage. imagine if youre lucky and proc it 3 x in a row

Lol at the ley lines. When as a SMN early on I thought that the spell speed buff would also work of me when a BLM used ley lines

Smn in Dwt standing in a blm leylines...

It'll be demanded that blm use it for smns , cause twice as many aoes to target the leylines user and everyone else just benefits while the blm gets screeeeewed.

Please no.

You do realize that's actually nerfing Wanderer's Minuet, right?

I will agree WP does need a change. whether it is instant cast or lasts longer. there is no use for it outside the very beginning of a fight because of that cast time of 3secs.

Everything except the WM is a good idea. WM really doesn't need a nerf.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Altijacek

2. Forbidden Chakra/Purification: I love this mechanic, despite how little we see of it. But I feel like it could've all been saved into one button for hotbar space. Forbidden chakra available while in fists of fire, purification while in fists of wind, and a raid wide -5% damage for 10 seconds while in fists of earth (that could be a future ability).

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When I first saw mnks using meditation, I thought it'd be on it's own cooldown so you could use a skill, use meditation while waiting on the cooldown for the next skill. I was horribly wrong when I lvled mnk :/ They really could have done something better with it too, rather than "spam 5 times, use once, wait until everything is dead, spam again". They could have done something special for each stack and had it on its own cooldown so it wouldn't be a "spam, use once, done", like giving us a 2nd skill that goes with it, so we use meditation for stacks, but each stack changes the other skill etc. Could have been something like...

1 stack - 100-200 tp restore
2 stacks - 200? 250? potency hit, like a weaker forbidden chakra or perhaps an AoE, we all know mnk could use some, especially when tanks pull huge groups.
3 stacks - recover 1 stack of GL (for those times your tank decides to be "clever" and drags half the mobs with him in the middle of fighting, causing GL3 to wear before he stops again >_> )
4 stacks - hp recover, maybe on par with second wind
5 stacks - forbidden chakra

Of course, it'd have to be on a cooldown of say, maybe 1 min? So you couldn't abuse the hp recover / damage, but it'd still be short enough so it'd be useful a few times per fight. It'd also help bring mnk's damage up some. From leveling with a fc member's drg 50-60, dungeons all the way, both geared about the same, his damage was blowing mine away. Yes, I was doing positionals correct too, I'm not a lazy mnk like 75% of them lol There were even times we'd both be on a different mob (the tank couldn't make up his mind so no matter what we hit, he'd lose hate anyways) and his would be dead before mine even hit 50%

I was thinking that Wildfire should be a bit different, but have a similar effect to now.

Wildifre: The next 10-12 Weaponskills or Abilities used by the MCH count towards the 25% accumulation at the end and double the duration of the ability from 15-30 or until those 10-12 hits occur, rather than a strict 15 second self-imposed DPS-check. 10-12 being a variance based upon my very rough estimate of how many actions I actually get in the current 15 second window. This would allow MCHs a bit more leeway in making their wildfire effective, compared to the VERY strict and fairly difficult rotation and opener that it currently demands. As of right now, I see as much as a 2k damage variance when I don't crit, or if I happen to forget to weave a single OGCD or do them in the wrong order.

I completely disagree with you on Wildfire. Namely because that would make it either extremely over powered or extremely useless unless you have a DoT heavy party. Also, since MCH only has one DoT ourselves, if it wasn't in the OP version, then we would be losing considerable damage potential without having to rely on other players to boost it. As is, my Wildfire after a full rotation is hitting for a little more than my most powerful attack, (Ricochet on a single target), and that's on top of all the damage I am doing to the target while it's up. The only way that I could reach that same damage level without relying on other party members to have their DoTs up, is if you did the full potential damage from my Lead Shot's DoT in a single burst. If you did that though, then in a party with even just a SMN and a SCH that threw up all their DoTs as well, you'd have a skill that once every 90s could put out close to 30k damage, (at iLevel 170, I'd hate to see the damage potential at 210 with a full party that keeps DoTs up, or even worse, a 24 man raid that does so). That's just game breaking. And as I said, if you had it as a percentage, even anything lower than 75% would lower the solo damage able to be done by a MCH using it. Meaning we would HAVE to rely on having party members who used their DoTs to their fullest if we even wanted to meet as much damage as we're doing now. That's a fine concept for when you run endgame content with a static that knows what they're doing, but for all of us who use the DF and small parties with friends, you'd be crippling us if you didn't make us damage dealing gods with that kind of change.......

For some damage numbers from my testing I was doing earlier, let me give you some examples.....

For point of reference, I was at iLevel 173, with no food, potion, or party buffs, purely using skill buffs. I'm rounding numbers here to make the math quicker and cleaner.....

Fully Buffed Ricochet - Average DPS was about 900 on the initial impact, with about 1800 on the distributed damage, giving me around 2700 if used on a single target, which is ideally the only time you use Ricochet.

Full Rotation on Wildfire - When Wildfire ended, I was getting at around 3000 damage, (give or take), after a full rotation. I have bad lag with my internet, so I effectively miss out on getting a basic attack or two in while Wildfire is up, so we could probably expect most players to get that closer to 3200 damage with my gear set up.

Already, you can see that 3200 is better than my most powerful single attack, which does 2700 without a crit. We could also expect the differences in these numbers to rise as I got things like food and my party DEX bonus, since Wildfire is based on what burst DPS you throw in, (all my skills, including Ricochet), while Ricochet is just a flat increase.....

Fully Buffed Lead Shot: I can't be 100% certain, but if I remember correctly from my testing, Lead Shot was hitting at around 400 damage every tick, (or every 3 secs), and it has a duration of 30 seconds. This means that with a fully buffed Lead Shot, I can effectively get in 4000 damage if it gets in a full 10 ticks while it's up.

If your proposed version of Wildfire does 100% of the damage of the DoTs on it, and I use it as soon as Lead Shot hits, then I could do 4000 damage with Wildfire, (probably actually closer to 3600, because one tick would likely be missed no matter what). This would put me higher than my current solo DPS with Wildfire. However, they can't just account for solo DPS, as they have to include party members. If they count for a full 8 player party with the potential for 4 SMNs, 2 SCHs, 1 MCH, and 1 Tank, (in single tank content), then suddenly that DPS coming from one player using one DoT changes into the potential for a lot of players using a lot of DoTs all at once. If they didn't put it at a low pecentage, then players could just throw up DoTs, have the MCH use Wildfire, and suddenly the boss would take a MASSIVE chunk of damage, on top of taking the same damage as the DoTs continued to tick down on their own, since as you pointed out, they would have to stay up to keep from ruining rotations. So let's say they did the percentage down on the damage Wildfire uses to what it currently is, at 25%. Well suddenly without having other party members' DoTs up, a MCH can only do 1000 potential points of damage with Wildfire. Considering that right now with no buffs up, (including no GB), and no crits, my basic Split Shot is hitting at about 600, then the fact that I could pass the potential solo DPS of a 90s cooldown skill with just two basic attacks is pretty sad. Particularly when you consider that doing those two basic attacks would take only a fraction of a second longer than doing the combo of Lead Shot > Wildfire.....

With the potency at any reasonable level, you'll barely be breaking even with the current damage Wildfire can do in a party that isn't designed around utilizing it. Meanwhile you'll also have to make sure that everyone refreshes their DoTs at the same time if you want the damage from it to be consistent from one use to the next. Also, as I keep saying, you'll be greatly hindering what we MCH can do solo if you make it so that one of our most powerful abilities requires us to have a solid party backing us up. In DF content in particular, you're lucky if everyone puts up DoTs to begin with, much less maintains them so that you can use a skill on them. The reason that we don't have skills that currently rely on other party members is because doing so means you can't use said skill without the rest of the party cooperating consistently, which means lower over all DPS....

As is, Wildfire is a big part of the MCH opening DPS burst rotation, and both from what I've experienced first hand, and from what I've heard, we have one of the highest, (if not the highest), opening damage rotations in the game. We are also quite capable with our average DPS if the player in question knows what they're doing, though we have to work a bit harder for it, and won't reach the same levels of over all damage as full DPS classes if the other player is equally capable. But, we also have support abilities that lets the group hit harder, or keep hitting for longer, if we choose to employ them. The players who look down on MCH tend to be the ones who judge how well a person is doing based purely on DPS, rather than what they're actually contributing to the run. Those types of players are more often than not the same ones who blame a wipe on "low DPS" even when it was due to a mechanic of the run that they themselves should have taken care of. I just ignore the people like that, because they're probably too busy watching their parsers to pay any attention to the logic you throw their way anyhow......

I'm sorry if I've come off as harsh OP, and I do understand that you mean well. Without playing the class though and seeing the way that the damage is implemented though, you can't judge a skill like Wildfire as needing to be completely reworked. It does what it's intended to do, and if used right, it does it quite well. I also appologize for repeating myself so often in my little rant here. It's a bit late, and I'm tired, but I felt the need to let you know why exactly you were wrong with your assessment, rather than just say "you're wrong" and go about my merry way......

EDIT: I'd also like to point out that this is just my assessment on the matter. I could be shouted down as wrong by all the other MCH out there for all I know. Still, as someone who fell in love with the class upon first trying it, I felt my opinion should be known, even if it's only that, "my opinion".....