Fine, Bloodwhetting is too OP

[Alice_Rivers]

I wouldn't celebrate the tankbuster thing, tankbuster damage is a joke, if you want people to learn about tankbusters then tankbusters need to be a credible threat.

[Carighan]

I wouldn't celebrate the tankbuster thing, tankbuster damage is a joke, if you want people to learn about tankbusters then tankbusters need to be a credible threat.

Yeah nowadays they usually fall only into two categories:

1. Did you withhold at least 1 of your CDs for this instead of using it to decrease incoming damage? Ideally 2, but 1 works.
2. Have you put Provoke on your hotbar for a quick tankswap or are you a Warrior and can just invuln each instance because your invuln CD is too low?

They've become too formulaic. Every so often we see something semi-clever, like a 15s+ DoT that kills you if you also got the debuff from the second hit, so even if you invuln you die a few seconds later. But with autoattack damage being ignorable already (since bosses rarely have time to AA) and tankbusters being just a "did you withhold CDs"-check, it's just... boring.

If nothing else, I want tankbusters to be unreliable! Any AA has a small chance to be "upgraded" to a simple big hit with a short cast bar, meanwhile there is a PPM-limitation for how frequently this can happen so that if nothing else, the OT can always grab the boss and use their timers (cast selects target at the end, as it just applies a short buff making the next AA be a big hit).

[Supersnow845]

Yeah nowadays they usually fall only into two categories:

1. Did you withhold at least 1 of your CDs for this instead of using it to decrease incoming damage? Ideally 2, but 1 works.
2. Have you put Provoke on your hotbar for a quick tankswap or are you a Warrior and can just invuln each instance because your invuln CD is too low?

They've become too formulaic. Every so often we see something semi-clever, like a 15s+ DoT that kills you if you also got the debuff from the second hit, so even if you invuln you die a few seconds later. But with autoattack damage being ignorable already (since bosses rarely have time to AA) and tankbusters being just a "did you withhold CDs"-check, it's just... boring.

If nothing else, I want tankbusters to be unreliable! Any AA has a small chance to be "upgraded" to a simple big hit with a short cast bar, meanwhile there is a PPM-limitation for how frequently this can happen so that if nothing else, the OT can always grab the boss and use their timers (cast selects target at the end, as it just applies a short buff making the next AA be a big hit).

Alternatively they could just return crit autos and actually make autos dangerous

Anyone remember when a boss like kefka had a mit plan that went down to the GCD rather than down to per “event every 30 seconds”

[Carighan]

Oh true, or that. Which in turn would even open up more balancing knobs: Some tanks could be better at getting crit less or for less, but in return take more damage baseline.

[Somnolence]

I wouldn't celebrate the tankbuster thing, tankbuster damage is a joke, if you want people to learn about tankbusters then tankbusters need to be a credible threat.

They are in ultimates and these reflects this Square Enix philosophy of scripted incoming damage best.

Consider that all ultimates have phases where you do trios (downtime mechanics) and targetable boss comes back between them only to do tankbusters and get spanked.

TOP phase 5 is good example of this since it is double tankbuster - trio - double tankbuster - trio - double tankbuster - trio with a bit of targetable boss - double tankbuster into enrage.

Each of these tankbusters do up to 300k damage while tank HP is ~110k, so as you can see each tank is forced to kitchen sink these + have party and healers to mitigate if they are swapping them to have ~65% mitigation, or invuln these.

They are spread apart enough for rampart, feints, healer cds to come back. So incoming damage comes in intervals matching defensive/healer cooldowns. Even the short CDs like bloodwheting have to be used on specific things here.

While the rest of the game is easier, fundamental scripted nature of damage still remains.

And the proposals of more threatening autos, encounters forcing spreading of cooldowns etc. do not match this at all.

Big issue is that the healing is secondary to mitigation and encounters forcing overlapping mitigations from entire party results in huge issues if somebody misses theirs.

Shield healer tends to suffer as a consequence, but even they do not have enough tools to deal with all of this by themselves, so no wonder they are rarest role in PF.