GNB Feedback: Lionheart combo doesn't fit the vibe.

Gunbreaker has been my favorite tank since Shadowbringers. Not only does it look very cool but I've always enjoyed that you're consistently pressing a number of different buttons so it always feels very active.

However, in Dawntrail this all comes to a screeching halt every two minutes when it's time for the Lionheart combo. You suddenly go from pressing all sorts of stuff to just hammering the same button for several seconds. This really sucks the feeling of momentum out of the rotation. The job at level 100 feels like you're playing Devil May Cry but every two minutes you have to stop and watch The Weather Channel. Hitting that brick wall is not fun.

Even just regarding the visuals, I can appreciate the artistry that went into creating this sequence but I think it looks pretty goofy for gravity to suddenly and mysteriously have no effect on you at all as you unnaturally move through the air in every direction like you're on a malfunctioning wire harness. I get that it's a recreation of Squall's limit break where he does the same thing but I just don't think that translates to this format very well.

So all that said I would love for the Lionheart combo to be removed in 8.0. I don't think the one button spam concept fits with the flow of the job at all. GNB was unique from the other tanks in not having a phase like that and we should be making the jobs more unique, not less. Thanks for reading and for your consideration of the feedback! :)

Fascinating how people differ in how we see the game.

Personally I always rejoice when things get added as auto-combos onto the same button as I don't feel like pressing A->B->C is in any way more interesting or engaging than A->A->A, and just aggravates me due to wasting so much space on my screen in hotbar icons for absolutely 0 brain activity needed for it. It quite genuinely makes me mad how much FFXIV pretends to have complex combat when it all could be done optimally or near-optimally by a macro bound to a single mouse button on a gaming mouse, easily running a full 120s rotation on autopilot.

As much as the combo is in my criticisms of "yet another combo every 1 or 2 minutes yippee *eye roll*" you can pry my Lionheart combo from my cold dead hands.

That said, imo it and maybe even the other combos of the same vein would feel better if they were actually earned with the respective job's mechanics for playing it well rather than them just being given because you have the tiniest amount of brain power to be able to press the button that just hands it to you for free.

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Originally Posted by Zairava

That said, imo it and maybe even the other combos of the same vein would feel better if they were actually earned with the respective job's mechanics for playing it well rather than them just being given because you have the tiniest amount of brain power to be able to press the button that just hands it to you for free.

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I've been thinking about this before, I kinda feel the Double Down -> Down change was the wrong direction, anyways. I want too many options for my cartridges, so that there's some actual decisionmaking involved maybe. So the Lionheart combo could be using 1 cartridge on each step maybe, and Double Down could simply be a passive effect for the AoE spender that every 60s, if you have 2+ cartridges, it'll automatically eat a second cartridge and perform Double Down instead or so.

With Lionheart it'd be easy anyways, since it follows straight from getting 3 cartridges for free, but it also means that if you got another spender lining up while executing it, you need to consider that if you use a cartridge elsewhere, you're considering whether you can get another back in time.

Bonus points if this cartridge game extends into our defensive CDs, maybe via stronger effects on Heart if it can eat a cartridge (and it tries to), while other CDs have longer base cooldowns than on other tanks but reduce in remaining cooldown each time we spend a cartridge or so.

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Originally Posted by Zairava

That said, imo it and maybe even the other combos of the same vein would feel better if they were actually earned with the respective job's mechanics for playing it well rather than them just being given because you have the tiniest amount of brain power to be able to press the button that just hands it to you for free.

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I agree that things feeling earned is definitely a good thing and we should see more of that across the jobs. That's one of the main things I lamented being taken from DRG this expansion when they removed the eye system.

However, that doesn't solve the root issue. I don't find it fun to spam the same button. I enjoy moving around the keyboard to hit different things and I disagree with the notion that pressing eight different buttons is the same difference as pressing one button several times in a row. Going from the former to the latter in the rotation feels like driving 90MPH into a wall and puts a damper on the fun of the job IMO. To each their own though of course.

I genuinely hated Lionhearth combo so much that GNB went from being my most played, loved and optimized job for the fun I had with it

To the tank I dislike the most

I also think Double down costing 1 cartridge was a huge mistake. It made the very intuitive "get to burst with 3 cartridges every minute, 2 for DD, 1 for GF combo" into a weird mess where you sometimes want 2 or 3 cartridges depending on bloodfest usage for no good reason

Points where its due however, continuation to the AoE spender feels good, Lionhearth sound effects are great (not the goofy ahh flying animation though), and the change to magic mits with HoL now doing physical on a lesser extent were great adjustments to the job

Do I want LH combo removed?, not really. I just wish they reverted the DD costing 2 cartridges change, that change was entirely made because Lionhearth made you lose a cartridge as you had 3 more GCD in the rotation. Other than that, if Lionhearth had Continuation it could also feel more like GNB's burst before, with Continuation-Hypervelocity dumps. As it is right now, Lionhearth is just goofy ahh fell cleave

I guess the simplest fix would be give or rework Lionheart GCDs so they have a Continuation proc.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

I agree that things feeling earned is definitely a good thing and we should see more of that across the jobs. That's one of the main things I lamented being taken from DRG this expansion when they removed the eye system.

However, that doesn't solve the root issue. I don't find it fun to spam the same button. I enjoy moving around the keyboard to hit different things and I disagree with the notion that pressing eight different buttons is the same difference as pressing one button several times in a row. Going from the former to the latter in the rotation feels like driving 90MPH into a wall and puts a damper on the fun of the job IMO. To each their own though of course.

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So put Bloodfest on another 3 keys.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

So put Bloodfest on another 3 keys.

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I tried this early on and the visual clutter in your hotbar is terrible, even if it feels better

People were saying to do the same thing when the Gnashing fang combo was consolidated to 1 key and it still feels wrong

*Mind you, I did get used to Gnashing fang on 1 button, but it took a long long time of disliking it

Yeah but think about that: You can solve this issue yourself by pressing 3 buttons instead of 1, and that did nothing. So your problem was not with you having to press 1 vs 3 buttons, but specifically with everyone else no longer having to press 3 different buttons, then?

Agreed about the animations being lackluster and on the burst feeling inappropriate to the overall vibe of the job, although I can't quite put to words the reason for the latter. I've no problem with having combos follow each other on the same button - it should be optional to hotkey them separately for those who would prefer that alternative approach.

I'm not 100% on this but maybe the job would feel better if its burst tied in better with the theme of the job as being about "breaking through" and explicitly being a vanguard. If the lionheart combo instead moved you through the enemy like samurai in pvp, and/or was re-animated to become a gap closer with capped additional damage inverse to proximity, it would communicate the sense of advancing across the battlefield better than the current "float and spin" animations.

It's current animation is ripe for including a movement component where you fly around the enemy (so movement depends on the hitbox size).

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Originally Posted by Exmo

Agreed about the animations being lackluster and on the burst feeling inappropriate to the overall vibe of the job, although I can't quite put to words the reason for the latter. I've no problem with having combos follow each other on the same button - it should be optional to hotkey them separately for those who would prefer that alternative approach.

I'm not 100% on this but maybe the job would feel better if its burst tied in better with the theme of the job as being about "breaking through" and explicitly being a vanguard. If the lionheart combo instead moved you through the enemy like samurai in pvp, and/or was re-animated to become a gap closer with capped additional damage inverse to proximity, it would communicate the sense of advancing across the battlefield better than the current "float and spin" animations.

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Yeah it's quite a bizarre animation. Every other GNB attack feels very vicious and impactful, but then suddenly you're floating three feet off the ground somehow while making incredibly strange unnatural movements, like floating straight up then straight down then to the right and back. It clashes with the aesthetic that the rest of the animations achieve so well IMO. I think the devs were just so stoked to add one of the most iconic parts of FFVIII that they didn't stop to think if it actually fits that well within FFXIV, which is to say nothing of the boring gameplay design they went with for it.

I don't like how gcd heavy GNB's burst feels now, and I dont like that Lionheart is at the absolute tail end of it, I play the job a lot less.
But thats fine I'll play other jobs

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

Yeah it's quite a bizarre animation. Every other GNB attack feels very vicious and impactful, but then suddenly you're floating three feet off the ground somehow while making incredibly strange unnatural movements, like floating straight up then straight down then to the right and back. It clashes with the aesthetic that the rest of the animations achieve so well IMO. I think the devs were just so stoked to add one of the most iconic parts of FFVIII that they didn't stop to think if it actually fits that well within FFXIV, which is to say nothing of the boring gameplay design they went with for it.

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It already looked bad at first glance when I unlocked it, but disabling VFX and looking at just the animation made it infinitely worse. When you remove the VFX vomit it is one of the most nonsensical and janky animations in the game.

I can not take this job seriously as long as that skill exists. Double Down's jumping X was already questionable but Lionheart does not fit thematically with the entire rest of the job and only exists because "Hey, remember FF8? That was great, right? Look, we got this thing from this game you remember!"

I never actually played GNB after hitting 100 since I've disliked it's design since Endwalker. But oh my god, Lionheart combo looks so bad. How did this get approved?

I think what makes GNB feel extra GCD-y nowadays is the insistences by theory crafters to play GNB with no added skill speed. While playing GNB with a 2.5 GCD might be the mathematically strongest option, I think it is the 'wrong' way to play GNB. Gunbreaker is a hotrod of a tank, and wants to be fast. Crit needs to be nerfed, and I think skill/spell speed needs buffs/changes to make faster builds more attractive.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

I think what makes GNB feel extra GCD-y nowadays is the insistences by theory crafters to play GNB with no added skill speed. While playing GNB with a 2.5 GCD might be the mathematically strongest option, I think it is the 'wrong' way to play GNB. Gunbreaker is a hotrod of a tank, and wants to be fast. Crit needs to be nerfed, and I think skill/spell speed needs buffs/changes to make faster builds more attractive.

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The reason why you don't want speed isn't even solely due to how good crit is, it's because of raid buffs being consolidated into a single big window and every job having it's main burst of damage inside said window.

Almost all cooldowns, and certainly the heavy hitters, are divisors of 120s. They're intentionally designed to be up for every raid buff window.
Additionally you have just enough of them to fill most of the time window, meaning that higher speed doesn't actually gain you anything besides maybe being able to fit an extra filler ability into buffs.
And putting an extra Keen Edge into No Mercy is obviously going to pale in comparison to just making your 800-1200 potency attacks do more damage under buffs, even if all you melded was Determination.

Not to mention that speed can be an active detriment when it pushes parts of your burst rotation out of buff windows due to the difference in resource gain from spamming your filler more.
Before 6.2 you actually wanted 2.4/2.41 on GnB because that made it align better with raid buffs.



In general I agree with you, I hated the 0 speed GnB that emerged with the 6.2 changes and stopped maining the job back then because it just felt awful to play.
But until they fundamentally change raid buffs and the damage profile of almost every job you will not make skill/spell speed attractive.