
Originally Posted by
Dyvid
Well since you main BRD and we are talking about making things simpler, was extending the DoTs in 4.0 good or bad in you opinion? While I'm still leveling BRD, I notice the extension is helpful because it lets me focus more on keeping straight shot buff up, songs up, and focus on my shot weaving. Now you say Repertoire is confirmed as a flat rate, okay but a good BRD is still going to need to make sure your DoTs are up, you just won't be penalized as heavy if you miss it during on rotation. Now if they remove DoTs all together that would simplifying the job. Trust me, I don't agree with everything SE has said like removing Crit+ party buff from songs and will be the first one at launch asking for them to add another buff to replace it. The point I'm trying to stress is patience and wait until the 29 for first hand experience and then launch so we can actually see how it pans out.
DoTs were more than just extended—they also have higher potencies in their current form compared to the previous ones. The DoT extension allows for more presses of other GCDs aside from IJ—that said, it also comes with potency losses if one snapshotted DoTs too early. DoTs snapshotted at ~9 seconds or below did not result in PPS lost (it’s basically a “free IJ”), but anything above that did. I cannot definitively speak on how this compares to HW BRD as I only started raiding back at the end of Creator and do not have on hand any sort of HW BRD theorycrafting to speak on what amount of potency was lost if one got too IJ happy and snapshotted too early.
If you just want to know which one I prefer, I liked them both to be honest: 18s and 30s. I’m more used to the 30-second DoTs now, so I prefer them more for that reason, I guess. I didn’t really find it as “making the job easier”, nor as an inherently good or inherently bad decision. I just liked the idea of getting stronger DoTs, because it gave me more power without really adding buttons, and it built off of the previous iterations.
IJ optimization is getting into min-max territory though—this is not something that players who are not looking to raid or optimize their job should worry about, which is why I added that I don’t think it’s being done to narrow the skill gap so much as it’s the developers’ answer to the power creep BRD saw throughout Stormblood (BRD got stronger and stronger each tier because of the increase in the amount of crit we could stack). If they changed Repertoire BECAUSE of this desire to close the gap, then it is a silly decision, as this is not something needed for most content but something that BRDs find fun to do when they min-max.
I don’t know why you’re bring up letting one’s DoTs fall off—you will still lose just as much if you let them fall off because you lose access to Repertoire entirely, plus you’ll have to waste 2 Heavy Shot GCDs reapplying them so there’s potency lost there, in addition to every tick you missed. That doesn’t have to do with IJ
optimization though—IJ optimization is about snapshotting raid buffs onto your DoTs to buff them and the damage they deal (as well as maximizing your proc chances in current BRD); not just snapshotting them every ~28 seconds. That’s just Iron Jaws/BRD 101.
I also do not think that IJ min-maxing is a source of some HUGE damage gap that demands a narrowing of the skill gap—the largest damage gaps are probably from BRDs that improperly utilize their songs and personal buffs. I see a lot of BRDs that do not use their songs at all. I see a lot that do not think about when Raging Strikes would be the best used, or who use Barrage outside of RS, or who wait for a Refulgent Arrow to Barrage instead of taking Empyreal under RS instead. I also see BRDs that Barrage just...anything. These are all things that can be rectified with a little guidance and teaching from those willing to learn. Those unwilling to learn will still do poorly—but the game shouldn’t change to help them, in my opinion. Which was the crux of my entire argument in this thread.
All-in-all, I’m not sure why you’re wanting to get into IJ optimization because I only said this
may simplify BRD. I never said that it was what they were definitively doing to simplify the job as they claimed. So this aside is quite a bit off-topic. My initial reply to you was really only to say that the removal of the crit reliance from Repertoire was a confirmed change, not a maybe. We don’t know how this will affect BRD—if Repertoire will just be a trait thing or if it will still be tied to having DoTs on the boss in some fashion.