Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Jim_Berry]

I think tank jobs should lose tank and dps stances, and rely on actually needing to keep enmity rather than being a dps (like PLD, NIN, and WAR in FFXI).

[magnanimousCynic]

I think tank jobs should lose tank and dps stances, and rely on actually needing to keep enmity rather than being a dps...

Why should TANKS lose their TANK stance if you don't want them to DPS? I get that you want tanks to spend more time tanking, but removing BOTH stances for that to happen? You have some incredibly flawed logic there. I'm not even going to touch on the fact that WAR and DRK have skills that can only be used with that stance on or are changed by that stance.

Besides,

(like PLD, NIN, and WAR in FFXI).

This isn't FFXI. This is FFXIV. They shouldn't be compared and FFXI definitely isn't the official guide on how FFXIV should and shouldn't work.

Moving back to the OP's post, if there's any skills I want to see removed/changed for 4.0, It'd be Bloodbath and Foresight being merged into one skill. Fracture should also be buffed to be worth keeping up outside of specific scenarios.

[Cabalabob]

Why should TANKS lose their TANK stance if you don't want them to DPS? I get that you want tanks to spend more time tanking, but removing BOTH stances for that to happen? You have some incredibly flawed logic there. I'm not even going to touch on the fact that WAR and DRK have skills that can only be used with that stance on or are changed by that stance.

Besides,



This isn't FFXI. This is FFXIV. They shouldn't be compared and FFXI definitely isn't the official guide on how FFXIV should and shouldn't work.

Moving back to the OP's post, if there's any skills I want to see removed/changed for 4.0, It'd be Bloodbath and Foresight being merged into one skill. Fracture should also be buffed to be worth keeping up outside of specific scenarios.

In ffxi tanks didn't have tank stance or dps stance. Their enmity tools were enough to hold hate so it was just a choice to use them or not. It could technically work this way in ffxiv too since tanks don't actually need their tank stance to hold hate, most end game tanks full time dps stance anyway.

Since we're talking about simplifying rotations, what this would do is remove the need to stance dance, you'd just focus on generating enmity or focus on dpsing removing that middle man of changing your stance to whichever you're planning on doing.

It would require some fine tuning and tweaking and in some cases (as you said WAR relies on its stances for half its skills) complete overhauls.

[Duelle]

Why should TANKS lose their TANK stance if you don't want them to DPS? I get that you want tanks to spend more time tanking, but removing BOTH stances for that to happen? You have some incredibly flawed logic there. I'm not even going to touch on the fact that WAR and DRK have skills that can only be used with that stance on or are changed by that stance.

This entirely depends on how abilities are tuned.

Hypothetically, if you removed tank and DPS stances you'd have to make the enmity combos for all tanks the centerpiece of holding aggro. Which means a PLD would have to focus on using Halone, and only when they have a threat lead would they be able to sneak in Goring Blade or Royal Authority. The design would lead to increasing the enmity bonuses on Savage Blade and Rage of Halone, with Riot Blade, Goring Blade and Royal Authority getting a damage buff to compensate for the loss of Sword Oath.

That is, of course, unless we're also aiming to reduce tank damage with this change rather than reducing the opportunities to use Goring Blade/Royal Authority during a boss fight.

Moving back to the OP's post, if there's any skills I want to see removed/changed for 4.0, It'd be Bloodbath and Foresight being merged into one skill. Fracture should also be buffed to be worth keeping up outside of specific scenarios.

This sort of depends on what we want to do with WAR. I still argue WAR should lose the drains (really, DRK should have those for the sake of theme) and focus on using skills to sort of ignore part of the damage aimed at them.

Fracture could be changed into a skill that reduces damage the mob deals to the WAR for its duration in addition to the DoT effect.

[ADVSS]

This sort of depends on what we want to do with WAR. I still argue WAR should lose the drains (really, DRK should have those for the sake of theme) and focus on using skills to sort of ignore part of the damage aimed at them.

Fracture could be changed into a skill that reduces damage the m.

100% agree Duelle!

[Shurrikhan]

This sort of depends on what we want to do with WAR. I still argue WAR should lose the drains (really, DRK should have those for the sake of theme) and focus on using skills to sort of ignore part of the damage aimed at them.

Fracture could be changed into a skill that reduces damage the mob deals to the WAR for its duration in addition to the DoT effect.

The one thing I like about Warrior drains and self-heals is that they better give a feeling of a combatant in the midst of a long battle. The drains particularly also give a sense of overwhelming the enemy with sheer force, or that a good offense can be great defense. If you put just "drains" on a Warrior job page, it probably wouldn't immediately strike me as thematic as someone newish to the concept, but once you've played around with it, the playstyle might well seem hollowed without it.

Personally I just kind of to see Fracture as a skill that (1) deals potentially heavy damage, (2) creates personal bonus damage, and/or (3) mitigates (in the sense of Fracturing an enemy's ribs, their armor, or their arms), based largely off recent outputs and/or inputs. Go ham on an enemy in Deliverance and then Fracture to deal a finishing burst, or Fracture into an improved Zerk-triple-Cleave, or from Defiance and sap enemy attack power based on amounts you've been mitigating thus far.

I think tank jobs should lose tank and dps stances, and rely on actually needing to keep enmity rather than being a dps (like PLD, NIN, and WAR in FFXI).

I'm guessing you REALLY like those Butcher Block, Rage of Halone, and Power Slash animations? Because, that's all your going to see on any short fight then. At present enmity gives the ability to actually invest in holding threat from the offset without trimming your choices down to one combo every pull. Additionally, if you remove the stance variant on AoEs, how would the better geared (temporarily/mechanically-set) OT ever not pull from the MT? They can't differentiate enmity outputs. Are we going to add a second AoE to every tank, identical to the first except in that it has little to no enmity boost?
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The hints at fanfest were super vague, but I think tank attack rotations will remain mostly intact. Fracture or Scourge might be cut or combined with a WS combo (path, power slash). I hope for Sword Oath to either be removed or put on the same button as Shield Oath and for something similar to happen with Defiance/Deliverance and their mirror actions. I also expect stuff like Awareness, Bulwark, Tempered Will, Foresight, Bloodbath, and even Convalescence to be either removed or combined with other skills. A lot of that stuff is useful, just not useful or class-defining enough to occupy a single button.

Then that's one more window you lose that would otherwise make rotations more interesting. I like timing my Scourges into the stance-dance; I just want the opportunity cost of Grit reduced so that I can use that full range of the DRK's toolkit and complexity more viably.

Toggles and auto-swapped keys would indeed be a godsend. Personally, I'd like to the Oaths revised as well, but as you've said, you don't need to remove an mutually exclusive ability for it not to take up space; you just need to stack it with its mutual exclusives.

What's more interesting is I seem to remember them saying something about cross class getting some pretty significant overhauls with abilities being grouped by role instead of class. If all tanks are drawing from the same crossclass pool then that opens up some possibilities. If Flash were made into a targeted AOE (rather than point blank) so that you could pull with it, they could remove Shield Lob/Tomahawk/Unmend. If Overpower was cross-classable, they could get rid of Unleash. Perhaps we'll get some new skills there that don't even belong to any one class but provide a tool that every tank has to have (like Provoke).

But none of that frees up SPACE. It only homogenizes jobs far more obviously. The very word for ranged/AoE tank enmity would just be "Flash". Why do that?

[Brannigan]

But none of that frees up SPACE. It only homogenizes jobs far more obviously. The very word for ranged/AoE tank enmity would just be "Flash". Why do that?

Allows you to delete Shield Lob from paladin, freeing up a space. Shield Lob/Tomahawk/Unmend are all basically the same and worthless outside of pulls and add pickups. A targeted/ranged AOE flash could serve the dual purpose of AOE enmity and a pulling/add pickup tool. Doesn't necessarily have to be used by all tanks, but it's an example of what could be done. Really, there's not enough info on what the changes are going to be, so it's all just kinda blind speculation atm.

Also I wouldn't have even mentioned scourge/fracture if they hadn't brought up fracture in the powerpoint. I guess Scourge probably isn't going anywhere considering how bland the drk rotation already is.

[Shurrikhan]

Allows you to delete Shield Lob from paladin, freeing up a space. Shield Lob/Tomahawk/Unmend are all basically the same and worthless outside of pulls and add pickups. A targeted/ranged AOE flash could serve the dual purpose of AOE enmity and a pulling/add pickup tool. Doesn't necessarily have to be used by all tanks, but it's an example of what could be done. Really, there's not enough info on what the changes are going to be, so it's all just kinda blind speculation atm.

Also I wouldn't have even mentioned scourge/fracture if they hadn't brought up fracture in the powerpoint. I guess Scourge probably isn't going anywhere considering how bland the drk rotation already is.

And in doing so it would remove choice in the same way that collapsing Unmend and Abyssal Drain into a single option would. Why not just actually make the skill itself more interesting and relevant? Why make the fewest buttons used the goal, instead of the highest ratio of choices to button strokes? The goal is interesting, intuitive gameplay, right? But if you set SE off on that direction, do not be surprised if you end up with 12 skills total, each viable only in one particular circumstance. It's partly because this is still largely in the air that community opinion (less so NA's) could have an effect. While reducing button bloat can be important, I'd just recommend that you consider whether you want it to be the top priority, at cost even of opportunities for more interesting abilities and gameplay.

The main reason Fracture came up is that it's awkward in two ways: (1) on Warrior itself, rather than being something you can use strategically to maximize the skill's own potential, you actually have to hold off on Fracture frequently to keep from losing dps—which really isn't how any skill should work—and (2) although TP-inefficient, it's a much larger dps gain overall on a Monk than on its native class, and then an absolute waste on all other jobs. Scourge is solely a native skill, is the strongest per-execute skill in the DRK toolkit, and determines a large portion of their typical-play cleave damage and all of their by-choice cleave damage.

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I admit that my comment is based on what I already know about DRK and what is associated with it, which is why drains feel more natural to DRK than WAR. I'm not alone on that one, because a lot of people were speculating DRK would be a job branching off MRD because it had Bloodbath.

If you want a tough combatant feel, I'd still go the ignore pain route. Refine the idea behind it, or turn it into active mitigation that costs wrath stacks (you'd need to redesign inner beast for this) and it would still feel relatively the same. Your WAR instead of magically recovering HP from attacks is now gritting his teeth and is so tough parts of certain attacks don't hurt him at all.

Considering fracture is rarely used as is, increasing the damage won't really help. The reason I suggest turning it into a skill that reduces the damage the mob deals to you is to give WAR an additional mitigation tool that still has some opportunity cost due to Fracture's relatively low damage. If you truly want to take WAR in the direction of using more skills to build up their mitigation, such a version of Fracture would easily fit as part of that.

(1) And I don't see why Souleater's drain is considered as identity overlap with Bloodbath's. They feel very, very distinct to me. That said, if I had to remove either the drain on either Bloodbath and Inner Beast or Souleater, I'd remove Souleater's for sure (albeit with great confusion and regret for having a groundless ultimatum thrown upon me). In my experience, it doesn't fit the surrounding play as well as the other two do for Warrior.

(2) I have no interest in simply copying WoW's Protection Warrior's Ignore Pain over to our Warrior. The two are thematically different beasts. The 'Bulwark of a tank' theme that a Prot Warrior has better fits a Paladin if anything, and poorly even then. Balancing aside, the original 2.0 Warrior's means of survival seemed about the closest to all the lore says the Warrior is. (Yes, we're thoroughly into the subjective by now.) The changes done later were helpful but plain, and moved partly away from that. For me a Warrior is more likely to revel in the dynamics of his health bar, and when left alone may drop low before springing back until out of time or strength enough to do so, but never is his demise an inevitable slow descent like that of death by Ignore Pain's 10% remaining damage taken. That is... pretty near the opposite of what I imagine. I have all the tanks at 110, save for two I've tested over a friend's PTR copies extensively, and none of them quite feel like what a Warrior is alleged to be.

(3) It is rarely used because it has a long duration and it deals little damage. I did not attach a duration in that example, and specifically said "high damage" for that first possible take on Fracture. I don't see anything wrong in and of itself with adding another possible mitigation tool (which will come at some cost to the rest of its mitigation toolkit, minus only what portion SE imagines that Fracture won't typically be used due to said damage cost), but it certainly wouldn't be unique in being an exchange between mitigation and damage. Warrior is pretty well the icon of that concept, the poster-child for its meta. Tuning is the only thing that decides whether we more commonly see damage "actively" sacrificed for mitigation (really just that we think about it in those terms, rather than the tank stance as the default and the rest as sacrificing mitigation), instead of the usual, opposite perspective.

[Duelle]

The one thing I like about Warrior drains and self-heals is that they better give a feeling of a combatant in the midst of a long battle. The drains particularly also give a sense of overwhelming the enemy with sheer force, or that a good offense can be great defense. If you put just "drains" on a Warrior job page, it probably wouldn't immediately strike me as thematic as someone newish to the concept, but once you've played around with it, the playstyle might well seem hollowed without it.

I admit that my comment is based on what I already know about DRK and what is associated with it, which is why drains feel more natural to DRK than WAR. I'm not alone on that one, because a lot of people were speculating DRK would be a job branching off MRD because it had Bloodbath.

If you want a tough combatant feel, I'd still go the ignore pain route. Refine the idea behind it, or turn it into active mitigation that costs wrath stacks (you'd need to redesign inner beast for this) and it would still feel relatively the same. Your WAR instead of magically recovering HP from attacks is now gritting his teeth and is so tough parts of certain attacks don't hurt him at all.

Personally I just kind of to see Fracture as a skill that (1) deals potentially heavy damage, (2) creates personal bonus damage, and/or (3) mitigates (in the sense of Fracturing an enemy's ribs, their armor, or their arms), based largely off recent outputs and/or inputs. Go ham on an enemy in Deliverance and then Fracture to deal a finishing burst, or Fracture into an improved Zerk-triple-Cleave, or from Defiance and sap enemy attack power based on amounts you've been mitigating thus far.

Considering fracture is rarely used as is, increasing the damage won't really help. The reason I suggest turning it into a skill that reduces the damage the mob deals to you is to give WAR an additional mitigation tool that still has some opportunity cost due to Fracture's relatively low damage. If you truly want to take WAR in the direction of using more skills to build up their mitigation, such a version of Fracture would easily fit as part of that.

[Reynhart]

I think tank jobs should lose tank and dps stances, and rely on actually needing to keep enmity rather than being a dps (like PLD, NIN, and WAR in FFXI).

If you want that, you don't have to remove their stances. You just have to remove the enmity bonuses on their single target rotation. (And give Shield Oath at lvl 30...)