GNB QoL Change:

[Satarn]

As it stands now, after you are out of your No Mercy window, you spend the next 40sec building gauge plus one Gnashing Fang Combo. We may get more in the No Mercy window, but the rotation is way more stagnant outside of it.

I fully agree it would be awful if that was the case, however... it's not. We still get a varying number of extra Burst Strikes between our No Mercy windows, as we still generate enough cardridges to overcap otherwise, since Bloodfest gives us more than it used to. The difference is that now you have to be a tad more mindful about blowing those up in case of downtimes.

In a way every mechanic is "an annoyance" to someone. Working around the jobs' annoyances is their gameplay and getting rid of them to "smooth things out" has led to many jobs losing their identity and engagement in my opinion. I wouldn't say that current GNB is in any way a big-brain job with these changes, but it's about the most we can hope for with a modern ffxiv tank.

[Ixon]

I fully agree it would be awful if that was the case, however... it's not. We still get a varying number of extra Burst Strikes between our No Mercy windows, as we still generate enough cardridges to overcap otherwise, since Bloodfest gives us more than it used to. The difference is that now you have to be a tad more mindful about blowing those up in case of downtimes.

In a way every mechanic is "an annoyance" to someone. Working around the jobs' annoyances is their gameplay and getting rid of them to "smooth things out" has led to many jobs losing their identity and engagement in my opinion. I wouldn't say that current GNB is in any way a big-brain job with these changes, but it's about the most we can hope for with a modern ffxiv tank.

This had me curious so I did some investigating. I started by comparing the Normal mode fights of EW with some of the normal mode fights from ShB that I felt were equivalent in the amount of uptime while also keeping all the kill times around the 8min mark in an effort to make the comparisons as fair as possible. With this, I saw that EW GNB produced approximately 2/3rds the amount of total Burst Strikes that it did in ShB. This should be no surprise with the addition of Double Down reserving two cartridges every minute. However, even with Bloodfest giving us an additional cartridge every 90sec, GNB on average produced approximately 2-4 less Burst Strikes outside of No Mercy per given 8min encounter. Now while I agree this isn't much, the data I have seen at least confirms my suspicion that we spend more time building gauge outside of No Mercy than spending it in EW compared to ShB, even if by a small amount.

With that out of the way, there is still the underlying issues this current iteration of GNB brings that are outside of just a mere "skill issue":
- GNB is probably the most punished tank if a death occurs right before a burst due to the other tanks bursts being mostly cooldown based and not as gauge based for their abilities like I had mentioned earlier. You do not need gauge to Inner Release, Fight or Flight, Req(MP sure, but you can still get it out and still Confiteor), Delirium(Living Shadow does, but unless you died after hitting Blood Weapon, it will give you the needed gauge in three GCD's).
- GNB is the only tank to need to save a gauge from 40sec ago in a previous burst, to be able to hit their Double Down and Gnashing Fang on cooldown if a fight has considerable downtime(argument as a skill issue, just seems like a unique annoyance).
- GNB is more punished for using their gauge(like using Gnashing Fang on the last bit of mobs before a boss) even if it was optimal at the time, if it means they will not have full, or close to full, gauge come time to hit Double Down + Gnashing Fang.
- Double Down plus the ability to hold a third cartridge replaced our smooth, loopable rotation(like most other jobs have) with one that feels unnatural to optimally use(like having to No Mercy AFTER Gnashing Fang in your No Mercy + Bloodfest window because it's less potency than Burst Strike + Hypervelocity).
- Seeming optimal rotations feel suboptimal as the current No Mercy duration does not leave enough room for Hypervelocity if you end on a Burst Strike.

Why do these all matter? It's because these issues did not exist in ShB. In a nutshell, SE took a job that was fine in ShB and riddled it with more problems than solutions in EW. Even with all this, I still enjoy playing GNB, but I would enjoy it so much more if SE could simple add the new stuff without also adding a bunch of clunky baggage. Look at WAR or PLD(excluding their damage complaints) and you can see how they can make changes that almost only improve on the quality of the job.