FFXIV Job Design Feedback

[Crater]

Would Living Shadow feel better and function well if Frey was designed to imitate the GCDs you use, perhaps up to 5 hits or so? I know a big complaint with Living Shadow as well as the Automaton Queen is that they feel like glorified DoTs, so I am curious if making Frey's action usage dependent on your own would resolve that.

It wouldn't really change much. There isn't really a meaningful difference between Living Shadow attacking on its own every x seconds and attacking when you use a GCD, which is something that also happens every x seconds.
The problem with Living Shadow is that the properties that make it feel bad to use are the exact same properties that make it such an effective and (within the context of the overall FFXIV 5.0+ combat system) well-designed.

The main reason that it feels bad is because of the summoning delay when the skill is used. The 7-8 seconds between pressing the Living Shadow button and Esteem making its first attack makes the effect of the skill feel completely disconnected from the player's actions. But, at the same time, the ability to precast the skill is a part of why DRK is so good at dealing damage during a burst. As it stands, you typically have between 10 and 12 oGCD "slots" under buffs: 4-5 of which are taken up by Edge of Shadow, 2 are taken by Shadowbringer, 2 are taken by Plunge, 1 is used by Carve and Spit, sometimes you need to fit Salt and Darkness (and even Salted Earth) in there, and frequently you also need to fit some mitigation. If Living Shadow were made into an immediate buff, in the service of making the skill feel more impactful, the actual quality and design of the class would suffer, because one of those oGCD slots would be permanently occupied.

The busyness of DRK's burst is good - being an oGCD-heavy class is a vital part of DRK's mechanical identity and has been an important part of the class in every iteration of it (save maybe Shadowbringers) - so trying to remove oGCDs to make room for other oGCDs would be a bad idea. The pre-casted nature of Living Shadow should therefore stay, even if it makes the skill feel bad to use.


The second-biggest reason that it feels bad to use is that despite Living Shadow's exceptionally high overall potency, its damage is split up into six mid-sized damage instances. The actual power of the skill is basically on par with a Gunbreaker being able to use Double Down twice, at the same time, as an oGCD that still allows them to spend their GCD on Gnashing Fang or Burst Strike - but because it's comprised of five 350 potency attacks and one 500 potency attack, there's no "Wow, look how big that number is!" effect that you get with Double Down, Inner Chaos, Primal Rend, etc.

But again, that's a key element of why the skill is as effective and well-designed as it is. When your 2250 potency attack is split up into six different hits, each of those hits rolls for Critical and Direct Hits independently, which tends to normalize the skill's damage to your actual CH/DH stats (and doesn't require any auto-Crit/DH effects, which also generally feel bad). The consistency that DRK achieves by landing many medium-potency hits instead of a small number of high-potency hits stands out in stark contrast to something like Gunbreaker's effectiveness varying wildly depending on whether Double Down lands DCH or not, which is very important when you start dealing with short DPS phases like the ones you see in Ultimates. (For the same reason, it is hugely important that Shadowbringer is 2 charges of a 600 potency oGCD, instead of a single charge of a 1200 potency oGCD or two 1000 potency GCDs or whatever.)

Things that are well-designed feel bad to use.
Things that feel good to use are poorly-designed.

This is just an unavoidable consequence of the current state of FFXIV's combat system. At least in this case, I don't think the problem can be tackled by making changes to a single skill, or even overhauling an entire job, in a vacuum. Fixing these sorts of things would require a pretty significant overhaul to the entire design of FFXIV combat, at least on the scale of how the game changed between Stormblood and Shadowbringers.