Change to Wanderer's Minuet

[SaitoHikari]

Actually, if there's one thing I'm starting to notice going through the live letter, it's that it looks like the developers want to kill the concept of double weaving entirely, by massively reducing the amount of oGCDs that have potency attached to them and getting rid of personal damage buffs that have nothing to do with resource building. This would make it so that people with low ping no longer have such a major advantage over higher ping players of equal skill level. This also has the added effect of people no longer blowing their crowd control abilities to push out extra damage, if said crowd control abilities no longer have potency attached to them.

Consider this picture from the live letter when Yoshi briefly swapped to Bard to show everyone the ranged role skills.



Note how many off-GCDs are missing. One of the reasons why Bard is so hard to optimize is due to the sheer number of personal oGCDs we have to juggle, and from the looks of that picture above, a good 3/4ths of them are gone. The only ones that remain either assist with party utility or are key attacks.

(The damage buffs such as Hawk's Eye and Internal Release aren't the only ones that are missing though, there's stuff like Flaming Arrow too, which I'd be legitimately sad to see gone, so I'm hoping that Yoshi either just forgot to put it on there or Bard has a number of other replacement skills that weren't ready to be shown in any capacity. Indeed, if they're pruning THAT many skills from Bard, that would leave the early leveling phase pretty barren, because everything that's missing are entirely from the first 50 levels.)

Indeed, think back to the new job UI with all the resource/meter building, compared to the combat environment of today. Today's raiding scene places massive emphasis on the concept of openers, where everyone has all of their best tools ready to use at the very beginning of a fight. Said openers were also fairly reliant on player ping and the limited class synergy currently available, which is a part of why the BRD/MCH/NIN/DRG setup became so popular this late into Heavensward. With what appears to be the overall removal of straight personal damage buffs AND most of our strongest abilities now appear to be locked behind resource building now, the focus on 'openers' will essentially shift to building towards our strongest attacks as quickly and as often as possible, so combat is now less about perfecting burst damage windows and more about consistent gameplay throughout.