Gunbreaker: thoughts and suggestions

[Kirisu]

That's far from a solution though... the issue many people are having with Superbolide is that it shifts the responsibility of the cooldown from the tank to the healer. This shouldn't be the case. A tank CD shouldn't burden a healer -- or anyone else.

I quite disagree, Invulns only come out in a party contents so it makes sense for the party to share the responsibility of its resolution. If DRK is forced to use LD then either they over-extended or they mismanaged their cooldowns, or the healer wasn't paying attention and overcommited on DPS spells. Either way its shared responsibility and so it falls on both to see it to a satisfactory resolution, the same applies to Superbolide, and to a lesser extent Holmgang and Hallowed Ground. (Though HG+Clemency is so broken PLD can simply resolve that all on their own.)

Invulnerability isn't just some cooldown, its the penultimate "Oh shit" button, and if you're pushing it, either someone fucked up or you're doing a cheese strat, either way it should not, and is not the tanks responsibility alone.

[MarvelousInRed]

I personally have no issue with Superbolide. The Benediction-Superbolide problem happened exactly once to me, because I make it a point to alert my healers at the start to save their cooldowns because I'll pop Superbolide before I want them to use their cooldowns. I find a lot of issues with this game is because people don't tend to communicate properly during dungeons/fights. I would welcome a change that cuts HP to half instead of 1, but that isn't too necessary IMO.

The bigger issue is that the Gunbreaker's mitigation is a little lackluster compared to the other tanks. It has no "big mitigation" button NOR a "big heal" button. WAR, DRK, and PLD get Equilibrium, Abyssal Drain, Clemency, but Gunbreaker gets Aurora? Superbolide would be much easier to deal with as a tank if I had an easy heal button to mitigate what is, essentially, a self tank buster. Also, WAr, DRK, PLD get Shake It Off, Blackest Night, and Passage of Arms. Gunbreaker has no equivalent. Again, why? Considering that even normal 4-man dungeons routinely have tankbuster mechanics, this just seems like it hamstringers my mitigation potential more than other tanks.

My other issues are smaller:

Bloodfest: I feel the CD on this should be 60 seconds. Having it be 90 seconds makes what is, essentially, a one minute rotation into a THREE minute rotation. It just doesn't seem to line up well with the rest of your kit.

Camouflage: It feels really underwhelming. Either boost the parry rate to 100% or boost the damage mitigation to 20%. Some people will compare this to Shelltron, but there's one important difference: block is far and away better than Parry in all instances, and Paladins have exclusive access to it.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Brutal Shell: This buff could use some tweaking. My suggestion would be to make the cure and shield effect based on damage dealt, rather than a low (and weak) static potency. Given its combo potency in the rotation, I can’t foresee this ability dealing overpowered levels of damage at higher gearing. As it is, the effect is less-than-lackluster.

Brutal Shell's problem is lack of Tenacity in builds. More Tenacity and you will see it producing stronger shields that take longer to break as Tenacity increases damage done, reduces damage taken and increases amount healed and shielded. Brutal Shell is the way it is currently in order to reduce the benefits of Crit, Det and DHit.

[Awful]

The only thing I want for GNB is Sonic Break to be an OGCD instead of a GCD other than that the class is pretty amazing.

[Kolsykol]

I hate Superbolide...
I can understand that people don't trust each other 110% in dungeons when it's random people, but I run into GNB's quite a bit who pop it the moment after I've healed them up to full from low hp >_<.............
They're at like 30%, and I heal them up to 100% and then they're immediately down to 1% again out of nowhere and it freaks me out and also makes me waste mana ( in worst case scenario you might not even have anymore mana.. ).

Some tanks are extremely twitchy and think that just because you're bellow 80% hp or something like that you're in danger and that the healer is afk:ing... Giving those people Superbolide was a bad idea imo.

[Bright-Flower]

I wish they had a cartridge spender for aoe sooner.


I'm also in the 'superbolide is bad' camp. Not only can the timing potentially waste healer cooldowns like bennediction, as it's optimal to use it when at low hp which is also when a healer might go 'oh crap' and start healing you intensely, but sacrificing hp like that is just bad tank design. It's why they didn't give drk 'trade hp to deal damage' in this incarnation of the job despite it being a staple of the job.

I get that they don't just want to give them Hallowed Ground and want to have the tanks have different takes on their invuln skills. But they really ought to come up with something better. This also means that not only can it potentially be wasted with poor timing like any cooldown in the game, but is at a net loss of hp saved if you wouldn't have died without using it or you don't take your full HP worth of damage in the time.

It just feels like backwards design for a tank cooldown. Maybe if there was something else to it like, 'you heal back all the damage you take during the invuln period' when it expires so that you get healed back if used to tank massive damage, or put up a shield when the timer was up based on damage taken. But right now it feels like they couldn't think of a good creative way to make it stand out from hg/hom/living dead and just slapped this on there.

[DRKoftheAzure]

Brutal Shell could be a lot better, yes.


Superbolide could have duration increased to 10 seconds.


Danger/Blasting Zone is fine although it could be a line AoE.


Camouflage should be 25% damage reduction with no parry chance increase, but that's just me...


Sonic Break is fine as well since you use Bow Shock after and Blasting zone after Bow Shock.


Tenacity stat is one of those stats that REALLY NEEDS TO BE BUFFED...


I do see Bloodfest getting buffed to where it resets Gnashing Fang recast but that's like next expansion expectation.

[Taranok]

Camouflage: I’ve tried and tried to give this ability a fair shake… I’ve used it on as many trash pulls as possible hoping to see some sort of return. Thus far, I haven’t even noticed it’s active. I would like to see the parry increased to 100% with an increase of at least 5% on the damage reduction (100% parry, 15% damage reduction). This would make it useful on so many levels.

Tenacity: This isn’t a Gunbreaker issue specifically, however I felt it necessary to discuss. This is pretty much a dead stat. While I understand it has merit, it serves no purpose in decision making where melds and gearing are concerned. I would suggest buffing the damage output and intake coefficients to at least allow it to compete with Determination… or just remove the stat altogether. As it stands, it is bait for new tanks (for which I have – in the past – fallen victim) to stack for little-to-no return. In SB, I fully stacked Tenacity… as much as I could muster. It resulted in roughly 12% damage reduction. While this may sound like a lot over the course of a fight, given the amount of external and internal CDs we have, it’s inconsequential.

Camouflage is already a 10% damage reduction, and you can assume half of the parry as extra damage reduction in trash pulls, putting it at about 7.5% damage reduction, which stacks I believe multiplicatively with the 10% damage reduction, giving it an effective, expected damage reduction of about 17% (slightly less). The change you want would make Camouflage literally about 28% damage reduction against anything that can be parried, putting it on par with nebulae. Camouflage is fine, the nature of parrying is inconsistent though and I can understand feeling like the ability is bad because of this.

And tenacity is and always will be a dead stat in FFXIV as long as the devs insist on a buster-based meta. Reducing incoming damage by fractions of a percent in all-or-nothing style incoming damage will always be useless. Buffing it to be as strong as determination will make people take it, but it won't really fix the underlying problem of the stat itself. The issue is the devs also can't just delete the stat. It has to be replaced with something, otherwise it will break any item that uses what used to be Parry. At least cloning it with determination will make people not eschew it just on principle though, so there's merit to that at least.

The issue is that there's so much healing going out, and healing is somewhat unlimited in the game, that you either have enough to handle the incoming damage and an extra 12% on top will just result in overhealing, or you don't and the target is going to die. Same issue tenacity has, just from the opposite end of the spectrum. You don't need tenacity in both directions, both to take incoming damage and to reduce pressure on healing. It's a problem of how the game's very encounters and classes are designed, and until you fix the underlying issue, tenacity will always be in an awkward place.

[CrazyAce]

I took off Superbolide and Living Dead my hotbar entirely. Both are useless skills. The times you use them are times when the healer is probably going to be unable to heal you sufficiently regardless, because if you really needed to use them, you're probably about to die regardless and you're just delaying the inevitable for a couple seconds.

Unless you're teamed with a WHM. Then they MIGHT be okay, sometimes. But if you're not, it's just putting additional burden on the healer which is NOT something I want to do as a tank. Your role as a tank is to make the other classes' jobs EASIER, not harder. It's why tanks exist in the first place.

[Rox_Unlimited]

I took off Superbolide and Living Dead my hotbar entirely. Both are useless skills. The times you use them are times when the healer is probably going to be unable to heal you sufficiently regardless, because if you really needed to use them, you're probably about to die regardless and you're just delaying the inevitable for a couple seconds.

Unless you're teamed with a WHM. Then they MIGHT be okay, sometimes. But if you're not, it's just putting additional burden on the healer which is NOT something I want to do as a tank. Your role as a tank is to make the other classes' jobs EASIER, not harder. It's why tanks exist in the first place.

Lol. Superbolide is literally just off brand hallowed. So you should take that off your Paladin bar too. That logic makes all the invulns terrible and “useless” because holmgang gang doesn’t make you immune to damage and has the shortest effect duration of all the invulns. Anyways you should have all your skills on your hotbar. Even some “useless” skills have moments where they shine. Except fluid aura...