Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[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]

(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.

I'm not sure why you'd bring up Souleater into this conversation. The point I'm trying to make is that theme, mechanics and concept have to actually meet in order for this sort of thing to work. Again, using what was known about dark knights between sacrificing HP to deal damage (which wasn't going to fly because a tank making themselves more likely to die is a bad thing) and draining HP from their targets (courtesy of Drain/Drain II/Blood Weapon in FFXI and Night Sword in Final Fantasy Tactics), I'd lean toward working the drains into DRK and giving WAR some other means of mitigation that would make more sense for them.

(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.

The only things the WAR questline emphasize are that you're using your fury to protect your allies and that said fury needs to be kept under control. That's pretty much it.

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.

The health bar is more a mechanic to make it possible to tank without increasing defense values via Defiance. That's why Defiance and Shield Oath offer comparable increases in EHP despite the former not doing anything to your damage taken or armor value.

The point of my mentioning ignore pain is that it plays more into the inner fury/beast thing that WAR tries to advertise more than random drains attached to attacks. Think of it like a guy that is so focused on the fight that attacks don't hurt as much and do little to hinder them. If you want a visual reference, go watch one of the Undertaker's early wrestling matches. His opponents would hit him, his head would tilt a bit from the impact and he'd continue on his advance unhindered. That's how I imagine our WAR to be like. The inner beast theme plays into this easily (itself an extension of the berserker motif FFXIV has given to WAR), which would also draw on the theme of control (which is basically the moral of the whole WAR questline).

[Shurrikhan]

snip

(1) Because it and Abyssal Drain are the only native DRK drains, and so in a comparison between which two native drains better fit the surrounding aesthetic of the job, I listed why I felt Warrior's felt more essential to me than DRKs.
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That being said, I still don't see why HP sacrificing abilities would be a downside for a DRK so long as the output of those HP-spenders were increased defense or, effectively, equal or greater eHP that fades slower. That would simply give DRK increased control over its health pool, allowing it to better take advantage of skills like Essential Dignity even while smoothing out burst damage, and would provide no output increase in a easily healed OT setting. For the all the people who were shouting that HP spenders would make no sense for an MT, if you think about it, it's the ONLY place it could actually make sense while remaining balanced. HP is a tank resource; its investment should similarly be for another tank resource. For non-tanks, health no more or less than a safety check, rather than the economy your whole role revolves around. But hey, SE took the same side as those complaints so all's good.

(2) I'm not talking about the existence of an HP bar, or added maximum %HP. I'm aware that eHP can be modified both by the hp value and its coefficient (% damage taken). That's not being debated, nor are its benefits. I'm talking about the playstyle that forgoing standard passive mitigation provided, especially more towards the original 2.0 iteration of Warrior.

When I read your reference to Ignore Pain, I thought your reference was a bit more directly linked to WoW's version of the skill. I would guess that our only large differences in how we view Warrior is that, if it were in some part both a hulking beast of a combat and one that's just persistant, outlasting, I maybe lean towards the latter and you the prior? To me, a Warrior is at home in the middle of a battlefield, where he can last almost indefinitely under medium pressure, but is also able to rise to the situation, enthused by the heat of battle in either situation.

So long as it ties into the output, the momentum and energy so to speak, of this large and persistent beast of a combatant, then I'd be fine with a more analog take on the aspects of the Warrior's Inner Beast, and using that for damage mitigation and resistances. I'd also love to see a take on Berserk by which we're more visibly sacrificing sanity to some extent for that adrenaline- and rage-fueled state. That would be awesome, and would really drive home what lore we got. I just got a bit thrown off by the reference, and my thoughts quickly jumped to the idea of a tank who takes as little damage as possible but has no way to regenerate his health outside of his healer, which seemed, again, the opposite of a Warrior to me. Again, I lean more to the idea of the Warrior as a tenacious, persistent fighter in seemingly everlasting combat; neither just a strong but limited wall nor just a hulking brute to hit or tank like a truck and then die out quite covers that for me.

In short, the self-heal component, by which a Warrior could hold his own against a limited set of attackers without a healer is something I'd really like to still see on a Warrior, if not enhance.

(I'd also like to see more of the aspect or drawing enemies into insanity, feeding on their aether, pooling your power into certain enemies and then rending it back from them for a power or HP buff, and more frequently reaping the souls of enemies on death, etc., while still keeping near to the current, more normal thematic, for DRKs. To me, their drains should have capitalized more on that bastard tank and faintly off-role elements than they were. But hey, honestly I care a lot less about that perfecting the heading for Warrior into 4.0 and beyond; gameflow-wise DRK is still my favorite tank by a tiny margin even as is.)

Aside:
This shit makes me wish there were full-party job quests. Intense ones.

[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.