Yay or Nay : Silence/stun abilties that have potency attached

[RiceisNice]

People do realize that one of the reasons things were played down I because stuff like this happened in first coil, people complained, and SE stopped designing fights around enfeebling mechanics, right? It was hard for the majority of people/groups.

At the time, only bard and paladin had access to reliable silences. If they want something like this for encounters, stuns need to be just as effective as far as interrupting abilities is concerned so you have a broader job selection that can do so.

[Duelle]

Example abilities like Blunt Arrow, Head Graze and Jugulate. Do you think these abilities should have a potency attached to it, or should only have the effect?

I personally feel that the added potency turns these skills into somthing that you'd use off cooldown withouta thought, which imo breeds a bad habit when it comes to figuring out what can and can't be silenced, as well as the use of stun DRs on normal mobs.

Agree. Interrupt skills shouldn't have potency attached to them. All of them are oGCD as is, to it'd be a matter of making them deal zero damage. And yes, it does breed bad habits.

Yes I hate the oGCD's dealing damage, it's such a pain when mnks drgs drks and wars destroy stun resistance to get their extra dps. And I'm guilty of spirits withining without a second thought when I'm supposed to be saving it for silence. The need to use them for dps just kills their tactical use, I'd prefer more moves like shield bash and feint that are on the GCD to get add effects and have oGCD's be more something to make up damage when you have to stop and prepare to use said skills.

The issue with Spirits is that it's something that PLD damage is likely balanced around (consider it has 300 potency that scales with HP, which is MUCH higher than Jugulate or Leg Sweep). Granted, if you made it deal 0 damage, you could justify bumping the other skills the rotation to make up for the loss. Or split it into a high-damaging attack (Spirits Within) and a silence skill (I'd change Shield Swipe to not require a block to us, have pacification and silence effects while having a 30 second cooldown, dealing 0 damage and having a stronger pacification effect if used within 6 seconds of a shield block).

Shield Swipe would look like this:

30 Shield Swipe: Prevents target from acting or casting spells for 2s. Additional Effect: If used after a successful shield block, triples the duration of Pacification. Cooldown: 30s. Does not require a shield block to use.

[Gamer3427]

I disagree, and I agree. STUN skills shouldn't have potency, because I've seen far too often where DPS will kill the stun counter on bosses and tough enemies early in the fight, preventing them from being stunned by the tank in order to interrupt a big attack. Silence skills on the other hand having potency are fine, because so few classes have access to them to begin with, and so few enemies have any attacks that can be interrupted with them......

I use Head Graze as a part of my normal rotation, because having that extra oGCD skill to deal damage in between GCD skills eventually adds up, along with Blank when I'm in close range, (though I never use Blank if enemies can be knocked back, because I know how annoying that is, and knockback effects are virtually useless in groups unless you have a bad tank or are a troll). However, because stuns are an important part of preventing status effects, as well as it sharing a cooldown with Head Graze which has better range, I never use Suppressive Fire. There's just too much room for that status effect on it to cause issues for the group as a whole, and the tank is far more capable of determining when stuns should be implemented than I.....

Also, while I primarily use Head Graze as an extra oGCD DPS skill, if I know there is an enemy that the silence effect would be useful against, I purposefully use it on that enemy. The thing to note here is that due to the lack of enemies that silence is actually effective against, if that skill didn't have damage on it, it wouldn't even be on my hotbar anymore. For that very reason, I don't have Foot Graze, (damage-less bind), or Leg Graze, (damage-less heavy), on my hotbars, as outside of solo content or particularly bad groups, these skills being pure status effects renders them virtually useless.....

[RiceisNice]

...

You don't necessarily want more skills that serve no other purpose than to be damage though (which is the case for abilities such as head graze since most content doesn't require the silence anyway). It's the primary cause of button bloat, especially down the road with increased level cap. It's either consolidating skills, redoing old skills, or adding traits, all of which can be incredibly tricky to implement for something like a level cap increase, you want the job to feel that it's evolving and becoming stronger, not get a straight damage buff to an existing skill). I don't want to get to the point that I have to redo my key bindings (which already uses the num pad,` through 9 with shift alt and ctrl binding) or decide between head graze and another oGCD damage skill...which is already somewhat the case when it comes to PvP.

If they want silencing mechanics to be a thing, then they'd need more jobs (particularly the casters imo, or at least dork knight since they're competing with paladin for main tank) to have a reliable silencing skill, or stun to be functionally the same as silence (which is somewhat the case in some encounters, such as A3s tornado phasse). Otherwise you'd get a repeat of having one job being extremely desirable for the content because they were the only one having a consistent, reliable silence.

[Gamer3427]

Words

I'll agree with you, but not entirely. I do think that if a skill has damage, it should either be high damage, or damage/effect. Your argument about it serving no other purpose than damage causing button bloat, is the opposite effect for skills that don't do damage at all. Skills that don't do damage and aren't flat out buffs/debuffs, quickly become near pointless to have on your hotbars if they aren't actively used in most fights. Such is the case I pointed out with Foot Graze and Leg Graze. If they were damaging skills, then yes, there would be a risk of having too many useable skills on your hot bar and no where to put them, but with them not being damaging skills and only applying status effects to enemies that are essentially useless except in very specific circumstances, they become useless skills that you don't WANT on your hotbars at all. When it comes to skills, it should never be a goal to have skills in the lineup that players just discard entirely after a certain point.....

With skills that have a semi-useless status effect, but also deal damage such as Head Graze, you have them available to boost your DPS during normal content, while also being there to apply said status effect when it becomes useful without having to have two separate spots on your hotbar taken up by them. It's up to the player to decide whether they should be using it in those situations for pure DPS, or whether they should use it for support purposes to make the fight easier on themselves and their party. In my personal opinion, the player who understands the differences between the two is far better than the player who puts out more DPS but completely wastes the skill when the situation arrives. It's more a byproduct of the community that players tend to push DPS above all else, and ignore mechanics whenever possible. Removing damage from skills with status effects won't alleviate that, but will instead result in more situations where players will ignore the skills entirely because they need "max DPS".....

Again, I do think stun skills shouldn't have that DPS incentive, as stunning an enemy too often usually results in enemies becoming more of a threat to the party, while the players who feel compelled to do max DPS will only care that the skill does damage regardless of the consequences. This is only furthered by the fact that so many classes have some sort of stun skill at their disposal, and it takes so few stuns before enemies become immune.....

[Morzy]

Keep the potency, let peole choose what to do themselves. I personally have elixir field, steel peak, howling fist and mercy stroke macroed together to make things easier. I am considering instead macroing steel peak with shoulder tackle for utility. I still spam shoulder during raid, but normal mobs or where stun is useful, i save it, only really worried about dps in raid.

Besides i believe people need to learn control and stop turning to se for things like this for a solution when in reality all it does is take things away leaving us with one option and i am always an advocate for choice.

If you dont like it alright you can either limit who you play with or teach randoms in duty finder some respect when you play.

[AniCelestine]

I don't see the point in having silences with potency. Because stuns are quite often useless agaist skills that should be interupted (read: all bosses that matter are immune) silences on the otherhand works 99% of the time all the time (all those wipes caused in diadem when people don't silence the red V rank monster that looks like a bull.)

And there is no diminishing returns on it, unlike stun.

Though ideally I'd rather see all the oGCD skills with additional effects lose their potency and them being added to other places. It always was do painful to not being able to use shoulder tackle/spine shatter dive in Levi ex to get to the add cause of reasons.

[Duelle]

Besides i believe people need to learn control and stop turning to se for things like this for a solution when in reality all it does is take things away leaving us with one option and i am always an advocate for choice.

Design is what breeds player behavior. If mechanics allow it, people will do it without a second thought (see: the current tank meta that devalues the inherent purpose of tanks for the sake of dealing more damage simply because players can get away with it).

This is the sort of thing that would need to be addressed at the core, which in this case does mean altering the abilities in some way.

[Archaell]

I believe that removing potency is the better solution, but we could improve the situation by adding more potency or bonus effects to skills.

For stuns:

When the target is stuned during using an ability the potency could be trippled.

For silence:

Debuff that explodes for additonal doubled potency if the target's spell is interrupted.

[AniCelestine]

I believe that removing potency is the better solution, but we could improve the situation by adding more potency or bonus effects to skills.

For stuns:

When the target is stuned during using an ability the potency could be trippled.

For silence:

Debuff that explodes for additonal doubled potency if the target's spell is interrupted.

War + drk have quite fast stuns(20 second and 30 second with possible reset every parry), drg(30sec 1min) has relatively fast stuns, same as mnk(30sec 40sec). And nin (30sec)has either or relatively fast.

You can't get everyone the bonus from interupting(stun) a skill, so that'd mean none of them cares if one of them could possibly get the bonus and everyone would spam their stuns to get themselves the extra dps out of the skill along making the boss immune, which renders this idea quite useless.

And for silence, all the stuff in dungeons just chain casting that are part of speedrun. Monks would get a 50 potency boost to their aoe, which is already quite insane for a melee dps. All the drg and nin complaining. (Arm of the destroyer, aoe silence)

Just get rid of the potencies on the oGCD's and shove those potencies to the main rotation of the job.

People who are gonna raid and need the interupts for encounters will remember they have these skills and use them. And interupts that are in other than high end raids won't ever be so bad that you can't just blast through the mechanic without second thoughts.

If there is a game that has dps checks that most people can't beat right away when content is released, why should those people be forced to render their dps even more cause they have to save some of the damaging abilities just so they can del with another mechanic of the fight?

Idk, have fun beating your head at the 1 boss of the patch of which dps check you can't meet and the next upgrade for your gear you can get (that makes any difference in dps) is due in 3 weeks. /shrug


Edit: and people who don't remember they have these certain skills(interupts) and want to raid will sooner or later watch a guide that mentioned the use of skill to interupts this mechanic for sure.