Favorite DPS job Mechanics.

The goal of this post is for everyone to discuss their favorite mechanics of any jobs. For me my favorite thing about reaper is shadow of death in aoe trash pulls. you generate so much soul gauge as a pack dies and dumping it to not over cap is really exciting to me. Dragoon used to have the ability to fill up a blood of the dragon gauge and if you did a good job keeping it topped off you'd be rewarded with more uses of nastrond. I miss that gauge and wish it never got sanded off. I know this isnt a dps ability but I absolutely love the rework living dead got to feel more like a proper last stand ability with death granting you massive lifesteal on gcd attacks.

I do wish we had more little perks like shadow of death. I remember making a thread somewhere about that..

I miss Stormblood MCH AoE, where you could slowly build manually to overheat, and once overheating, spamming big AoE damage taking advantage of the +20% damage buff from overheat, then snapshotting it over Flamethrower at the end of the window to have FT cover the whole barrel lockout phase (10s) and nullifying that drawback. Combined with Tactician (party wide TP refresh) it made the job one of the most durable/sustainable in AoE situations (usually when you ran dry of resources, you were the last one doing so). Still something you can do on BLU with Apokalypsis at the end of Moon Flute.

Funnily, I hate 'of death.' All the downside of a DoT to maintain with all the button bloat on top of it and no real satisfaction outside the mentioned death of adds bar spam. Basically the worst of both worlds. It works on WAR because it's had it since ARR, kind of, and WAR has nothing else really distracting it, but even old school DRK (HW) had more interesting interplay despite having a literal 30s DoT and garbage darkside+dark arts design. This was back when tanks were allowed to have a procedural rotation like BRD. While I didn't exactly love HW DRK coming back in entirety, I'd love procedural-based rotations instead of combo-based rotations for tanks and melee to show up. As a note, I don't want it for myself, I just think procedural rotations add a lot to the game for certain people, even if it's not what I want, and that category is criminally underserved.

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Originally Posted by Reginald_Cain

Dragoon used to have the ability to fill up a blood of the dragon gauge and if you did a good job keeping it topped off you'd be rewarded with more uses of nastrond. I miss that gauge and wish it never got sanded off. I know this isnt a dps ability but I absolutely love the rework living dead got to feel more like a proper last stand ability with death granting you massive lifesteal on gcd attacks.

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Unfortunately this is a consequence of both bad presentation of the mechanic and skill floor problems. It's hard to convey that a person should top the gauge before hitting LotD and also balance around something very easy to mess up. Doubly so when you lose relatively high amounts of damage off it.

Regardless of feelings for liking it, I will always err on the side of murdering skill floors at the cost of all else provided the skill ceiling allows room for variable skill expression. People should be able to do a basic rotation of button and cooldown mashing without falling into traps.

A noteworthy exception of this is if the skill floor being high facilitates compelling gameplay. For example, HW/SB AST cards. I feel those cards are better than what we have, and the floor is worth it provided traps are mitigated, E.G. allowing cards to have charges so they don't clip cooldowns in slow play. This is in contrast to dragoon's BotD/LotD, which is bad because it exists purely as a trap and offers no compelling gameplay that isn't already offered beyond the trap itself. SAM's Kaiten/Guren/Senei is much the same, it exists as a trap and little else.


On the topic of STB MCH, it's an example of both good and bad gameplay. They slightly proccy 323121 gameplay was fun, but the heat gauge, an infinitely better mechanic than what it has now, was so poorly implemented that it accelerated MCH into 95th+ percentile enjoyers only. It's one of the few examples of the devs throwing the better gameplay out to facilitate worse design, without fixing what made the better gameplay bad. Such as the overheat window stacking with hypercharge, not really being explained, flamethrower's absolutely awful implementation, and so forth. If the class were redesigned around just the heat gauge and procs, it would be a great class. It just needs better netcode to handle the burst rotation.

A mechanic I personally would like to see both back and explored, HW Bard's empyrean arrow. It was an oGCD with a cast bar, and represents rather unique gameplay missing from FFXIV that could enrich it if brought back. I feel the game would be better bringing that back and exploring the idea on a caster dedicated to it.

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A noteworthy exception of this is if the skill floor being high facilitates compelling gameplay. For example, HW/SB AST cards. I feel those cards are better than what we have, and the floor is worth it provided traps are mitigated, E.G. allowing cards to have charges so they don't clip cooldowns in slow play.
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I miss the old cards too. Arrow would be so much better without tp existing and dark knight would now be able to take advantage of ewer with darkside's mp regen negation being gone now.

My favorite was Aetherflow for Stormblood summoner. It was fun to push your stacks before or after downtime or save stacks for aoe phase. It bring the job a lot flexibility and made every encounter unique in its own way.

I like it when a job gives us a way to adjust things to deal with downtime or mistakes, so we have to think about something to make the rotation work as best as possible.

GNB being able to pick when to press Sonic Break and Bloodfest in the burst window is something I really like, so that I can keep the burst window working as well as possible if there’s downtime affecting either my cart situation or when Gnashing Fang is up. And there’s also the worse but simpler alternatives of either just wasting a cart or delaying my burst window by a gcd, if I need to focus hard on the mechanics. There’s a decision to be made that I appreciate.

I had a similar feeling when a played a bit of Endwalker Dragoon, where we could change the order of pressing Geirskogul and Mirage Dive in case downtime or mistakes affected when we could go into Life of the Dragon (at the cost of drifting something to make that happen). But that’s a job I only have surface level knowledge of.

The alternative is when an update removes the “problem” entirely, which is how I felt about Dawntrail changing how DRG’s Life of the Dragon works (but I say that as someone who hasn’t raided as DRG during Dawntrail).

Greased lightning. The more you hit stuff the faster and stronger you get is a pretty neat job fantasy. The storm aura was cool, GL is still baked into the pugilist job quests with that old man whose name escapes me regaining his strength. The anataman opener was funny too.

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Originally Posted by fulminating

Greased lightning. The more you hit stuff the faster and stronger you get is a pretty neat job fantasy. The storm aura was cool, GL is still baked into the pugilist job quests with that old man whose name escapes me regaining his strength. The anataman opener was funny too.

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And the double Tornado Kick forbidden japanese tech

DNC
I like both Standard and Technical Steps mini-game-esque gameplay.

PIC
I enjoyed the previous iterations focus on painting and setting your muses up.

AST
I enjoyed the cards. I wish they'd figure out what the hell they want to do with them.
I also enjoy some of their more interesting healing tools like Macrocosmos and Earthly Star.

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I miss the Dragon Eye system. Between that and everything else that was removed in 7.X, DRG is a hollow shell of its former self.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

I miss the Dragon Eye system. Between that and everything else that was removed in 7.X, DRG is a hollow shell of its former self.

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I know buddy. I began as a dragoon in stormblood and played it for msq in every expansion except shadowbringers as dark knight and dawntrail as viper. I'm still missed viper stole our blue aura. Bring back botd and greased lightning auras!

This is a tough one since it's so subjective and depends on the encounter. I main VPR so I have a bias towards it but I do appreciate how smooth it is on a ps5 (provided your action bars are in comfortable binds) and I do appreciate the frequency I can use reawaken for big damage. The reawaken/legacy combo is easy to do while moving around, sounds and looks great and the final hit never gets old.

Viper feels great and I don't want to insinuate i hate it but I am salty they get a cool blue aura alone

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Originally Posted by fulminating

Greased lightning. The more you hit stuff the faster and stronger you get is a pretty neat job fantasy. The storm aura was cool, GL is still baked into the pugilist job quests with that old man whose name escapes me regaining his strength. The anataman opener was funny too.

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Greased Lightning was so good as a mechanic that they basically copied the principle behind it and ported it over to Black Mage and Dragoon as Enochian and Blood of the Dragon. It probably wouldn't have been taken behind the shed if any of the skills they'd ever added to it were rewards for upkeeping it and if the upkeep skills they ever added just worked without having to jump through flaming hoops.

Like Form Shift could have just worked how it did in Shadowbringers 5.05/5.3 (refreshes gl when going from Coeurl>Opo Opo form/just refreshes GL while granting you formless fist) and if Tornado Kick was a skill you were rewarded with after refreshing Greased Lightning X number of times it would have been a totally functional and fun to play job instead of a rolling trainwreck because the devs were more willing to break the job over their knee rather than risk people being able to use Tornado Kick.

I'd just list off everything that's been removed at this point.

I suppose next in line is I like RDM Melee combo and Rez, looking forward for that to be removed because "balance"

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

I miss the Dragon Eye system. Between that and everything else that was removed in 7.X, DRG is a hollow shell of its former self.

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Stopped playing DRG since DT, was my favorite job previous to 7.0.
They removed everything that made dragoon a dragoon.
And now gotta wait 2 years to see if they are goiing to fix it or not.

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Originally Posted by fulminating

Greased lightning. The more you hit stuff the faster and stronger you get is a pretty neat job fantasy. The storm aura was cool, GL is still baked into the pugilist job quests with that old man whose name escapes me regaining his strength. The anataman opener was funny too.

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Also adding my appreciation for Greased Lightning here. I shelved the job after it was removed, and yes the Anatman opener was indeed an amusing quirk. I'd even rather that be back than play MNK like it is now. Job felt nice with its budget fighting game combo feels ending with Tornado Kick. Missed it in PvP as well, felt like a bit of a flex to manage it good. Right now the only melee with any kind of flair in PvE seems to be NIN.

ED: not that it was particularly unique, but I miss the elemental stances on it as well. I actually got some mileage out of Fists of Earth in standard/casual content lmao.

The way Empyreal Arrow interacts with Mages Ballad/Wanderers Minuet ticks and their procs.