Damage gap closer should vanish

[Collin_Sky]

Friendly reminder that abilities like Spirits Within used to have a silence attached to it, as did BRD also have a silence ability. Many other jobs had stuns with damage attached as well.
These were sensibly replaced with non-damaging abilities because it's ridiculous to combine utility with damage. Most jobs now have gap closers as non-damaging abilities, literally every job except WAR, PLD and SAM at this point. There's no reason these 3 jobs should have to deal with this when every other job in the game can have their utility be available whenever it's needed.
There is no "tactical decision-making" involved at high level, it is a binary "will I need to use this for it's intended utility? no? spam that shit in the burst window".
Just remove the potency from the final 3 gap closers and give us something else to weave/manage instead.

[Carighan]

These were sensibly replaced with non-damaging abilities because it's ridiculous to combine utility with damage.

Not at all, other MMOs are just smart enough to not make ~everything an oGCD instant you can press between other abilities, so they never have this problem in the first place.

Now of course, this is probably not something FFXIV can viably change, even if we can easily assert that when we compare other games, its current design is a hindrance to smart class design because it shoves everything into this "static rotation with tons of woven extra skills"-pseudo-design, which also in turn establishes the inane button bloat we see on ~all classes.

But FFXIV is centered around a very slow GCD timer (comparing other modern games) to work around the terminally bad netcode it inherited from 1.0. And this slow timer probably can't be changed in a usable manner as it'd essentially require ripping the entire combat system including all skills out and re-implementing it. And without that, a reduction in oGCD weaving would make things... boring.

But there's a reason I had my little list before were one job had no gapcloser, two had a rotational one, and one was too slow to be woven: Removing the damage is not the only way of fixing this "gapcloser gets woven"-issue, and it's also an incredibly boring one that needlessly increases class homogenization. Which can sometimes be useful, but the tanks are mostly carbon-copies of each other already, there's little need to further up it, no?

[Azurarok]

SAM's Gyoten is a gauge spender that's usually used in tandem with Yaten for disengagement scenarios. You use Shinten, Sanei, and Zanshin instead in the 2min burst. Ikishouten gives you 50 gauge, the cost of Gyoten/Yaten are minimal, and you gain gauge quickly enough that it's just not a problem there.

It's not so much the gap closer that's the problem and more the fact that charge actions don't mesh well at all with the 2 minute meta.

EDIT: What I'm trying to say, is that both SAM and ShB WAR's gap closers work while still having damage because they're not used for the burst, and they do it by being gauge spenders that shares the resource with a burst tool.

[Oizen]

Is there any real reason we couldn't have both Plunge and Shadow stride as two separate buttons?

[Carighan]

Is there any real reason we couldn't have both Plunge and Shadow stride as two separate buttons?

Other than most jobs including DRK already having too many instead of too few buttons, no. Like, if you made them intelligently swap out (say Plunge out of combat, Shadow Strike once in combat), sure!

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Other than most jobs including DRK already having too many instead of too few buttons, no. Like, if you made them intelligently swap out (say Plunge out of combat, Shadow Strike once in combat), sure!

They could actually do something fancy with that snorefest of a LV84 Unmend trait and do the following rather than the CD reduction on Shadowstride...

Enhanced Unmend (Lv.84 Trait)
Upon execution of Unmend, you gain the effect of "Plunge ready", changing the action Shadowstride to Plunge.
Effect Duration: 30 seconds

Plunge (Lv.84 Ability)
Recast: 1 second
Potency: 200
Additional effect: Enhanced Enmity
Can only be executed while under the effect of "Plunge ready".

Would make using Unmend less painful without it being a gain, keeps your Shadowstride dashes as is, retains Plunge as an action. The only thing I'd possibly consider is moving this interaction to lower than Lv84, at least in the 61-70 bracket if not straight up being baseline obtained at Lv54 with Shadowstride. Or we could stop pretending that "button bloat" and "busy rotation" is this much of a problem and just give us back Plunge along with our new dash as a usable action with like an additional effect - like Sole Survivor, similar to PvP. WAR also gets to have two dashes (yes I count Primal Rend), so what gives?

[RyuuZero]

SAM's Gyoten is a gauge spender that's usually used in tandem with Yaten for disengagement scenarios. You use Shinten, Sanei, and Zanshin instead in the 2min burst. Ikishouten gives you 50 gauge, the cost of Gyoten/Yaten are minimal, and you gain gauge quickly enough that it's just not a problem there.

It's not so much the gap closer that's the problem and more the fact that charge actions don't mesh well at all with the 2 minute meta.

EDIT: What I'm trying to say, is that both SAM and ShB WAR's gap closers work while still having damage because they're not used for the burst, and they do it by being gauge spenders that shares the resource with a burst tool.

tiny correction.. you can't use Zanshin outside of Ikishoten, so Zanshin is just a Kenki Sponge that soaks up Ikishoten's Kenki and Senei is just a bigger Shinten.. so the Gyoten/Yaten Kenki Cost is kinda unnoticable

[Oizen]

Other than most jobs including DRK already having too many instead of too few buttons, no. Like, if you made them intelligently swap out (say Plunge out of combat, Shadow Strike once in combat), sure!

DRK doesnt have too many buttons.
I don't even think you'd need a swap out. Just two seperate buttons. 4 gap closers.

WAR has 4 gap closers and the server is still running.

[Carighan]

DRK doesnt have too many buttons.

#respectfullydisagree

I should add that I think all jobs have too many buttons for how insanely shallow their gameplay loop is. GW2 achieves far more interesting core gameplay with just 12-15 buttons. Hell I'd go as far as saying that most MOBAs achieve deeper gameplay with four buttons.

I could understand 20-25 buttons for jobs if that were actually relevant, but it's really not. Just on Dark Knight, consider that all the following abilities could be removed cleanly if the skills did full damage to the main target then reduced damage to extra ones:

* Unleash
* Stalwart Soul
* Quietus
* Flood of Darkness
* Abyssal Drain

That's 5 hotbar buttons freed up at not a single spit of depth lost. And in turn shows how absolutely irrelevant the existence of these skills even is, beyond some funky visuals (which I very much enjoy, don't get me wrong!).

[Arohk]

I could understand 20-25 buttons for jobs if that were actually relevant, but it's really not. Just on Dark Knight, consider that all the following abilities could be removed cleanly if the skills did full damage to the main target then reduced damage to extra ones:

20 is the sweet spot for buttons, FFXIV is very very bloated on hotkeys.