Robbing gap closers of damage makes the game even less fun.

[Reimmi]

DRG's Spineshatter dive, PLD's Intervene etc are announced for having their damage taken off, leaving them as just a gap closer.

Just. Leave. Things. Alone.

Controller players especially are able to enjoy using the 2 Spineshatters and Dragonfire Dive to chain bounce 3 enemies (switching targets between each action), more fun after 180+ Elusive jumping towards them beforehand. Why remove fun? There is no valid reason to remove the damage the gap closers do. This so game is going to drop off so hard if this Nintendo Mentality continues to be applied to the game. Far more often than not, the fun you have in any game is the fun you make for yourself, not the fun that's been 'planned' for you. Even in it's current state, I cannot recommend this game to anyone and will probably start actively warning people away from this dying game. There is a certain worrying symbolism in targetting this random aspect of the game and taking it away, as any other random fun thing could get deleted from the game if they notice it. The future of this game is sadly just more and more restrictions and gameplay funnelling.

Nah i'm okay with this, but i would add new ogcds for the jobs that are losing them in their place
having to use your mobility for burst windows made absolutely 0 damn sense

Warrior is the one suffering the most from it, it needs a short cd OGCD to replace it or its gonna be even more boring lol

[Shurrikhan]

Before: You have 8 oGCDs useful in all situations. Among these, you also get 4 dashes per 2 minutes. Using fewer than 2 dashes within your 2-minute window costs you ~30 potency each, which is less that what a tenth a GCD's lost uptime would cost you. For best performance, you keep a charge in reserve for each time it'd thereby save you 10+% of a GCD of uptime.

After: You have 7 oGCDs useful in all situations, and an athematic dash useful in some. You do not need to think about upcoming mechanics that could otherwise reduce uptime because there is no further optimization available to them and they are less frequent than your CD.

I fail to see how this doesn't follow the very same broad trend of dumbing things down that tends to see poor reactions elsewhere.

One is certainly free to like that trend, but pretending that using movement skills for movement was somehow impossible just because they saw use either way and offered an optimization layer that gave little reward compared to its risk beyond just not overcapping their charges (also thereby favoring use for movement) requires some substantial mental gymnastics. And arguing this is a good change even while condemning loss of skill expression elsewhere is likewise contradictory.

[SalamanderIX]

Better yet, if we had gap closers that did damage and ones that didn't. Sometimes within the same role or job?

What if Paladin's gapcloser did damage but Gunbreakers did? Then you have a situation where the tank jobs have a difference in their mobility concern.. it might actually create variety??..
Instead it really does seem we're getting damageless gapclosers across the board. Remains to be seen about Samurai Gyoten though.

[Lyth]

Damage neutral movement tools like Gyoten/Yaten are perfectly fine and add variety. You want players to have ready access to movement tools to open up more possibilities for fight design.

The problem with gap closers that provide a net dps gain is that damage takes priority over movement. This in turn leads to uninteresting target dummy fights where the designers don't want to move the boss often for fear of making players lose gap closer uses. I think it's in everyone's benefit to have movement tools that are designed for movement first and foremost, so that we can have more interesting fight designs going forward.

Movement tools in general are a great way to create design variety, because there are so many different ways of achieving the same effect. It's a bit of a shame that all the new gap closers introduced in Dawntrail seem to be Thunderclap analogues.

It still amuses me that the WAR playerbase successfully campaigned to replace their on-demand Onslaught with a standard 30 second recast gap closer that has to be used for damage. I think that really highlights that sometimes people just want to stick to what is familiar and safe, rather than what actually makes sense from a melee uptime perspective.

[Shurrikhan]

The problem with gap closers that provide a net dps gain is that damage takes priority over movement.

Not when the movement provides uptime that in turn provides higher damage.

When your relative potency-per-GCD is over 400 and using your gap-closer under damage every possible (raid)buff available to you is 50 potency higher than using it outside those raidbuffs, it still takes at most a third of a second for holding one of your 2+ charges for that movement requirement to be a net DPS increase.

Movement WAS gap-closers' primary means to net dps gain unless there were no potential loss of uptime to be had anyways. Which is a problem then with a lack of melee mechanics, replacing bosses increasingly with DDR striking dummy play, not with having some way not to waste the given button when it'd otherwise lack any use.

It's a bit of a shame that all the new gap closers introduced in Dawntrail seem to be Thunderclap analogues.

Why wouldn't they be, though, now that you've stripped them of damage? To-target damage-less skills are just objectively and needlessly limited if they only go to enemies. That effectively leaves En Avant-likes, Thunderclap-likes, or Shukuchi-likes, or being getting flavor only by being needlessly more limited than others. The flavor already existed prior, in

It still amuses me that the WAR playerbase successfully campaigned to replace their on-demand Onslaught with a standard 30 second recast gap closer that has to be used for damage.

You mean Nyx, Xeno, and all of ~4 others? A vocal handful does not a "playerbase" make. The rest were quick to point out that Onslaught being its 10s CD and spending gauge was integral to offensive minutia atop being a far more compelling and flexible tool than any "free" (read: tuned around use within raidbuffs) 30s CD would be.

Note: Onslaught also had to be used for damage before. It just did that through correcting gauge value and interaction with Internal Release, both more thematic, atop exploiting raid buffs.

[GoatOfWar]

Better yet, if we had gap closers that did damage and ones that didn't. Sometimes within the same role or job?

What if Paladin's gapcloser did damage but Gunbreakers did? Then you have a situation where the tank jobs have a difference in their mobility concern.. it might actually create variety??..
Instead it really does seem we're getting damageless gapclosers across the board. Remains to be seen about Samurai Gyoten though.

Gap closers you actually have to use and track vs gapclosers that are completely thoughtless and always available when you need them? That's just boring, i'd rather have no gapclosers than one without potency.

[Lyth]

...

This partially comes back to designing fights such that 'perfect uptime' conditions are possible, which is why you see decisions like max-melee sized PBAoE. Actually forcing players off the boss makes players think about how many GCDs they can safely execute, and movement tools (especially extender/closer combinations like Gyoten/Yaten) let you stretch this to the limit. The counterpoint is that these should be designed to be brief disengagements, as nobody likes having to run a Flare marker over into the next arena.

I'm predicting that the shift to more damage neutral movement tools, alongside disengagement tools like the MNK fireballs and Viper's ranged gems, are designed to allow for more movement in fights along these lines, which is good for players in the long term. It just comes down to player buy in. Players always complain about feeling like they are 'losing out' on damage, which is why the old style of gap closers interfered with fight design. That's also why the WAR Onslaught change happened in the first place (and there most certainly were some heated debates over this on the tank forums, so it was far from a few people suggesting it).

As far as movement tools are concerned, I think that there are plenty of creative designs still out there, between speed boosts, hybrid speed + blink effects (Lost Impetus), interactable team teleporters, recall/rewind effects, substitution/swap effects (I'm surprised that NIN doesn't have a kawarimi wood block escape at this point). At this point you can just pick another game at random and start borrowing ideas for implementation. Having a fun movement toolkit is fundamental to players' enjoyment of many games. From a game design perspective, giving a player early access to a really exciting movement ability when zooming around a starter zone may make the difference of whether they keep playing or drop off their interest.

[Cabalabob]

I don’t mind that they removed the damage gap closers some of the rotations were far too busy for weak damage abilities that are supposed to be movement options.

What I don’t like is the lazy copy/paste dash replacements. DRG should have a jump, GNB should launch themselves with an explosion from the gunblade, DRK should have some kind of shadow teleport. Instead they all get MNK thunderclap knock offs…

[Taranok]

I don’t mind that they removed the damage gap closers some of the rotations were far too busy for weak damage abilities that are supposed to be movement options.

What I don’t like is the lazy copy/paste dash replacements. DRG should have a jump, GNB should launch themselves with an explosion from the gunblade, DRK should have some kind of shadow teleport. Instead they all get MNK thunderclap knock offs…

Also they shouldn't all be aetherial manipulations. DRG would do well with a ground targeted aoe to jump to a target, for example.

One of the more annoying pieces of homogenization was when the devs basically made every tank use a point blank aoe for aoe threat building and damage. I miss WAR's cone overpower and DRK's targeted aoe abyssal drain GCDs, for example. While not apples to apples, classes accomplishing functionally the same thing in different ways just feels good. We get this in rotations, but not always in direct gameplay.

[Sjol]

Honestly, for DRG if they were going to give us a zero-damage gap closer, a forward flip to mirror our back flip would have been personally preferable.