LIVE Letter Regarding DRG & AST Postponed Reworks

[Zaniel]

Why this suspicion, out of curiosity? Until Shadowbringers, DRG's combo was increasing by 1 step per expansion.

Why do you think they'd suddenly go back on that now, when they seem to have no interest in rotational nuance by which to make use of shorter combos, anyways?

They can combine the button without combining the skill, that way you can keep the more complex rotation but just have less bindings which is the main goal.

[Shurrikhan]

They can combine the button without combining the skill, that way you can keep the more complex rotation but just have less bindings which is the main goal.

Okay, but... That is true for all combos and combo buttons. Combo buttons in general require the greater number among combo leads and combo finishers to maintain complete control over them.

There are only 3 remotely viable combo actions: start, continue, and swap. In practice, or without accounting for very unlikely mistakes, there are only two competitive options: start and continue.

DRG can therefore have virtually all of its combo-related depth with just three buttons:

1. True - Vorpal - Full - Fang - Wheel
2. True - Bowel - Chaos - Wheel - Fang
3. Doom - Sonic - Tempest

With that, the only affordance you lose is the ability to reset your AoE combo, for which there has never been a use case.

Moreover, if you were to consolidate WT and F&C, you'd generally do that to/with each other, as they're not available anyways until that point and only in sequential use.

[Aco505]

Having 7 individual buttons on your melee rotation is pretty stupid let's be honest, I don't mind that it's 7 skills and 7 presses but spreading it across 7 buttons is asinine low QOL and bad UI design. They just need to compress the skills a bit into like 7 skills on 3-4 buttons while still keeping that 2-path cycle style of flow. The rest is fine (although I wouldn't cry if Life Surge went walkabout, it's not Kaiten, its not identity defining, its just a random extra button).

SAM and MNK single target combo is composed of 6 actions. Why does an extra button bother you on a job that has a fixed rotation?

The complexity of DRG's rotation lies in oGCD management and keeping stuff on cooldown. If you make the GCDs more complex, they'll probably reduce oGCD complexity (whether that complexity is enough or not is another debate).

DRG is also the most positional-intensive job with 50% of the GCDs being positionals. This would change if the combo string was reduced, and the positional dance is fun to do, even if it could be a bit better (see below), as it keeps the flow and makes the job not be boring between bursts.

Moreover, if you were to consolidate WT and F&C, you'd generally do that to/with each other, as they're not available anyways until that point and only in sequential use.

I'd rather keep them separate but allow you to choose which one to use first after Chaotic Spring and Heavens' Thrust to help with positionals (and to hopefully do the same if the 5th hit became upgraded in 7.0...).

[Shurrikhan]

I'd rather keep them separate but allow you to choose which one to use first after Chaotic Spring and Heavens' Thrust to help with positionals (and to hopefully do the same if the 5th hit became upgraded in 7.0...).

As long as we're keeping them all separate buttons, this seems by far the best course of action. Still positional-heavy, but with more agency. Heck yeah.



Food for thought, on the subject of GCD-to-GCD or oGCD-to-GCD interaction:

One of the earlier HW suggestions I'd see floating around was to have Fang and Claw and Wheeling Thrust procs no longer be cancelled by combos. One of the affordances of that was each could take on more dynamic effects, such as buffing a following skill or having some further effect based on the last, or even just, say, spreading the effect of Chaos Thrust to nearby enemies (such that you didn't have to hit CT just before the adds spawned to immediately spread it).

:: Imagine for instance, Disembowel->Fang & Claw increasing potency you deal to that target by a further flat potency per attack, Chaos Thrust->Fang and Claw duplicating the attack at 50% initial potency and 50% duration to another target, and Wheeling Thrust the remaining duration of your status effects on target to have them instead tick instantly and spread to nearby enemies at reduced potency, etc., etc.

Similarly, an idea I played around with from back when NIN was introduced was to change Jump itself into a skill that just launches you up into the air, becoming untargetable and becoming immune to non-raidwide attacks for up to the end of the next GCD, with Jump then enhancing your following weaponskill (be that in various ways or via simply a %damage buff --in which case you'd basically just use it on FT or CT, depending on whether it can only aid initial damage).

[Zaniel]

SAM and MNK single target combo is composed of 6 actions. Why does an extra button bother you on a job that has a fixed rotation?

The complexity of DRG's rotation lies in oGCD management and keeping stuff on cooldown. If you make the GCDs more complex, they'll probably reduce oGCD complexity (whether that complexity is enough or not is another debate).

DRG is also the most positional-intensive job with 50% of the GCDs being positionals. This would change if the combo string was reduced, and the positional dance is fun to do, even if it could be a bit better (see below), as it keeps the flow and makes the job not be boring between bursts.



I'd rather keep them separate but allow you to choose which one to use first after Chaotic Spring and Heavens' Thrust to help with positionals (and to hopefully do the same if the 5th hit became upgraded in 7.0...).

Well done completely misreading my post I guess? I never said change the combo, just how many buttons are required to use the combo. It matters because it makes for less RSI with idiotic key bindings, you can keep all the skills and all the combos but with just less buttons. They want to keep button bloat down because it makes controller and keyboard usage difficult.

[Aco505]

Well done completely misreading my post I guess? I never said change the combo, just how many buttons are required to use the combo. It matters because it makes for less RSI with idiotic key bindings, you can keep all the skills and all the combos but with just less buttons. They want to keep button bloat down because it makes controller and keyboard usage difficult.

DRG does not suffer from button bloat because it's actually one the jobs with the least amount of actions needing to be bound in the hotbars. There's several controller users in this thread saying that they've never had an issue with it. As a keyboard player, I don't find myself out of buttons with DRG at all. Tanks and healers present more problems because of their targeted utility in addition to their damage actions and cooldowns.

[Shurrikhan]

DRG does not suffer from button bloat because it's actually one the jobs with the least amount of actions needing to be bound in the hotbars. There's several controller users in this thread saying that they've never had an issue with it. As a keyboard player, I don't find myself out of buttons with DRG at all. Tanks and healers present more problems because of their targeted utility in addition to their damage actions and cooldowns.

Every combo save for DRG's, even when including Continuation atop the old 3-button Gnashing Fang, could be done in a single palette (i.e., just the face keys or just the DPad keys of a given side of a single hotbar), so I don't think it's unreasonable for Zaniel to expect that, given that there is zero affordance given at present to having two separate buttons for Wheeling Thrust and Fang and Claw (which cannot even be used except during their procs and, on M&KB, can be performed without tracking the current step just by key-swiping over both each time), the combos might be consolidated to at most 4 buttons each, without any effect on the actual combo actions.

They went so far as to consolidate keys that could thereby cause issue (first by accidentally queuing Mirage Dive before Jump has even actuated, then by adding too long a lockout period before Mirage Dive could be used thereafter). While that likewise made it so could intuitively put all Jump/Dive keys on the same palette (HJ, SSD, DFD, SD), which already adds some warrant to that expectation, allowing for a consolidated WT and F&C arguably has greater benefits and does not have the same vulnerabilities, making it a decently strong contender.

Whether that consolidation would be a pure good or not is questionable, but I Zan's right to point out that there is no advantage in those separate keys, nor, in WT/F&C's case, any change whatsoever to difficulty, depth, or the like.

(MNK, thankfully, was spared the fixed XIV-style "combos", and thus actually needs its 6 ST buttons. DRG, on the other hand, needs only two buttons to retain exactly the same ST rotational depth it has now.)

[Aco505]

there is zero affordance given at present to having two separate buttons for Wheeling Thrust and Fang and Claw

But consolidating them would close the possibility to choose which one to use and to make the 5th hit more relevant in the rotation, both mechanically and aesthetically. It would be a lost opportunity. I'd see the point if we were talking about Vorpal Thrust, as it's right now the only GCD that has zero purpose besides being the twin of Disembowel.

(MNK, thankfully, was spared the fixed XIV-style "combos", and thus actually needs its 6 ST buttons. DRG, on the other hand, needs only two buttons to retain exactly the same ST rotational depth it has now.)

The change to Gnashing Fang was warranted because it was a combo that is used once every 30s and required three buttons on a job that already has plenty of them and happens to also be a tank, which means needing a lot of space for utility buttons (e.g. it's not so uncommon to have more than one HoC in the hotbars, one for the GNB and one to target an ally).

If we go through this route, NIN (and RPR) also needs two buttons, SAM three, the tanks and MCH one... MNK is only spared due to their buff/debuff having a different duration, their GCD speed and the way PB balance works. You tweak that and theirs becomes a 3-button combo as well.

By keeping the WT and FnC buttons separate, we open a window for interesting future expansion and adjustments to the job's GCDs. By consolidating them, we just free up a button, which in the grand order of things doesn't really fix anything.

And to link it with one of the things Zaniel mentioned, I'm saying this as someone who suffers from RSI problems IRL as well as having bilateral CTS. The jobs that can actually make me tired are ironically healers and those where you just press the exact same key over and over.