GNB feedback.

[Carighan]

Ah, but that's not a GNB-unique situation and other tanks did not get second charges on their 30s-ish CDs to compensate. I still don't quite know what the point of that change to GNB was, tbh. It's just one more component of feeling like a melee-range class removed, since as you say, now even not being in melee range (which should be 100% the death knell for everything you can do, being a melee range job) is less punishing than you'd expect it to be since your GF-CD can keep cycling happily on the second charge.

If GF at least stacked shields like the PvP version, I could kinda see the point I'll admit...

[Mikey_R]

Ah, but that's not a GNB-unique situation and other tanks did not get second charges on their 30s-ish CDs to compensate.

The difference is Gnashing Fang is 3 GCDs long whilst the other 30s cooldowns are oCGDs. If you push an oGCD back, it really doesn't affect anything else.

On the other side, Gnashing Fang getting pushed back DOES affect other things. For example, if it lines up with your Double Down coming off of cooldown, one of them has to be pushed back. With the consideration Lionheart tended to be the last 3 or 4 GCDs on the burst combo, if Gnashing Fang was pushed back enough to the point they started overlapping, you then have a conflict. You could bring Lionheart forward into the burst combo, but you then have to push Gnashing Fang back even further. In this hypothetical scenario, you have lost a good 15 seconds, which could cost a usage, even at the end of a fight, a single GCD Gnashing Fang is still stronger than Burst Strike.

For me, it caused too many conflicts to happen. Don't get me wrong, having things that fight each other can be good, but if it comes at the cost of making the job frustrating to play, that is when it becomes an issue for me. To be clear, I have never been vocal about my issues with Gunbreaker and I was more than happy to leave it to the players that do play Gunbreaker regularly and just not play it often. However, I am now interested in hearing what Gunbreaker mains are saying and whether they like the changes or not, especially in the context of the new savage raid, which also comes with a, how do you think the old Gunbreaker would have worked'.

[Kishin12345]

You mean before this change? Yes? That'd work fine? After all DRK works, and GNB essentially switched from a DRK-type tank (120s burst, can fumble your resources and misplan them) to a WAR-type tank (60s burst, essentially can at worst waste resource income to overcapping). DRKs do fine, and hence pre-change GNB would, too.

Omega disagree. Your rota would be drifting harder than you drift in any need for speed game xD
I was referring to the gnashing fang and cartridge changes, not the 60 second style gameplay. I don't know if you do savage but just look at m10s.
No gnb before the changes would not work! And i can almost certainly say that it was either m10s or the doomtrain ex that made them decide to change gnb in this way.

[Kishin12345]

Ah, but that's not a GNB-unique situation and other tanks did not get second charges on their 30s-ish CDs to compensate. I still don't quite know what the point of that change to GNB was, tbh. It's just one more component of feeling like a melee-range class removed, since as you say, now even not being in melee range (which should be 100% the death knell for everything you can do, being a melee range job) is less punishing than you'd expect it to be since your GF-CD can keep cycling happily on the second charge.

If GF at least stacked shields like the PvP version, I could kinda see the point I'll admit...

Other tanks don't have 30sec GCDs, only gnb has them and the problem was that it is based on a ressource, it requires cartridges.
If you take carve and spit from drk for example, it doesnt have stacks, because it is an OGCd and isnt tied to a ressource you generate.
Having carve and spit or danger zone with stacks would be good though. Less drift and more flexibility, so it's easier to keep it aligned.
If you look at the gnb changes, they all happened to counter drift and make it easier to keep stuff aligned.
Imagine a job that has its burst drifting out of buff windows. In this meta thats a death sentence. It's all about rotational alignment in tbis game right now.
At least if you do high end content. Gnb before the changes would just be drifting hell with how many gcds you lose in the current fights.
However i do agree that bloodfest could have stayed at 120sec. Having it on 60sec makes the job feel more busy and active though

[Kishin12345]

The difference is Gnashing Fang is 3 GCDs long whilst the other 30s cooldowns are oCGDs. If you push an oGCD back, it really doesn't affect anything else.

On the other side, Gnashing Fang getting pushed back DOES affect other things. For example, if it lines up with your Double Down coming off of cooldown, one of them has to be pushed back. With the consideration Lionheart tended to be the last 3 or 4 GCDs on the burst combo, if Gnashing Fang was pushed back enough to the point they started overlapping, you then have a conflict. You could bring Lionheart forward into the burst combo, but you then have to push Gnashing Fang back even further. In this hypothetical scenario, you have lost a good 15 seconds, which could cost a usage, even at the end of a fight, a single GCD Gnashing Fang is still stronger than Burst Strike.

For me, it caused too many conflicts to happen. Don't get me wrong, having things that fight each other can be good, but if it comes at the cost of making the job frustrating to play, that is when it becomes an issue for me. To be clear, I have never been vocal about my issues with Gunbreaker and I was more than happy to leave it to the players that do play Gunbreaker regularly and just not play it often. However, I am now interested in hearing what Gunbreaker mains are saying and whether they like the changes or not, especially in the context of the new savage raid, which also comes with a, how do you think the old Gunbreaker would have worked'.

That describes it really well. Fully agree with this. Gnb before the changes had just so many things fighting each other within its rotation that it couldn't be seen as anything but design flaws.
So far i had a lot of gnbs in pf for the savage, the general opinion was that they like the changes. The drk in my static even switched to gnb, because he just prefers gnb now. Also it feels like in almost every random duty you enter there is a gnb. So either a lot of players are still testing or they just enjoy gnb more now.

[Carighan]

I was referring to the gnashing fang and cartridge changes, not the 60 second style gameplay. I don't know if you do savage but just look at m10s.

(I just cleared that yesterday, as GNB. Yes, it would have been perfectly fine without the change, I'm not saying that without personal experience)

And sure the changes are... alright? Like I said before, they feel utterly pointless but that kinda also makes them obviously not something negative. Just... pointless. Removes yet more potential identity and edge cases from jobs to make everything a sea of grey lukewarm slop. Granted, the loss is miniscule because there was so little to lose, before. Of course.

As a simple example, why is having to personally work against drift a bad thing? How is that not a good thing as it means the class not only has some level of player expression, but also something of an identity as different classes can be different levels of vulnerable to developing drift, and hence do better or worse in certain fights? That's how identity is gained after all with RPG classes: You're better at X, worse at Y, and someone else is worse at X and better at Y. Because removing those steadily means at some point, there is no longer even a reason to have separate abilities. There's no reason not just to have a single "damage skill" that like the single healer nuke gets spammed 25 times in a row instead of 7 buttons you use in a fixed, never-changing, ever-repeating, static 25-GCD rotation. We're not quite there yet, but since you can now no longer even run into a situation where you mentally need to re-sort your skills mid-fight, we're also awfully close. And at that point, just give players a break and reduce the RSI-inducing nature of combat and make the combat sequence run on its own and automatically whenever you're in melee reach, we just press oGCDs and mitigation skills and such?

[Kishin12345]

(I just cleared that yesterday, as GNB. Yes, it would have been perfectly fine without the change, I'm not saying that without personal experience)

And sure the changes are... alright? Like I said before, they feel utterly pointless but that kinda also makes them obviously not something negative. Just... pointless. Removes yet more potential identity and edge cases from jobs to make everything a sea of grey lukewarm slop. Granted, the loss is miniscule because there was so little to lose, before. Of course.

As a simple example, why is having to personally work against drift a bad thing? How is that not a good thing as it means the class not only has some level of player expression, but also something of an identity as different classes can be different levels of vulnerable to developing drift, and hence do better or worse in certain fights? That's how identity is gained after all with RPG classes: You're better at X, worse at Y, and someone else is worse at X and better at Y. Because removing those steadily means at some point, there is no longer even a reason to have separate abilities. There's no reason not just to have a single "damage skill" that like the single healer nuke gets spammed 25 times in a row instead of 7 buttons you use in a fixed, never-changing, ever-repeating, static 25-GCD rotation. We're not quite there yet, but since you can now no longer even run into a situation where you mentally need to re-sort your skills mid-fight, we're also awfully close. And at that point, just give players a break and reduce the RSI-inducing nature of combat and make the combat sequence run on its own and automatically whenever you're in melee reach, we just press oGCDs and mitigation skills and such?

The answer to that is incredibly simple.
There are situations where you cannot work against drift, just because the boss isn't targetable or you lost so and so many gcds already.
It is a design flaw when you get punished for something that is not your fault.
There is a reason every group has a viper and paladin (uncoiled fury, divine might, ranged combo)
People are already calling for that design to be put on all melees and tanks.
Believe it or not, but people do not enjoy losing gcds at all.
Also did you feel like you had an easy time on gnb? Have you been the guy with high carry potential or have you been the guy that got carried?
Was all that was missing for perfection just crit luck or did you go in with more of a yolo mindset? Did you optimize or greed or did you just take the downtime?
Did you have gaps between gcds? Did you triple weave by accident or even quadruple or quintuple weave? How long did you disvonnect from the boss?
Because what i'm talking about is high end optimization runs, and gnbs want to be able to do that, too.
Sure clear is clear but it also depends how you cleared.

[Carighan]

I mean GNB was the tank-class I always swapped to when the other tank was a PLD, so it's not like I didn't do all raidbosses and EXs this expansion on GNB before they changed it. You know what was kinda cool about it? That depending on the fight, it could not be played purely from memory.

It's like when a caster never has to abort casts for movement: There's no reason to have casts in the first place then, they no longer have any gameplay value and do not contribute to being, well, a caster.

Other games like GW2 also have different variations of this problem, like when ranged attacks are never tested as everyone is always piled into melee range 100% of the time. No point to even have range then if it's never worth anything as nobody else is ever penalized for not having range. That latter part is osmething FFXIV also does: Yes we have ranged that actually attack from range in many fights, but in particular in EW, melee DPS got guaranteed basically perfect uptime. At which point "I need melee range to attack" no longer has any meaning and you might as well be given range. You even mention this yourself, with apparently (luckily not seen that myself yet) people calling for ranged segments on melee classes as a general thing so that again instead of class differentiation we erode the point of these abilities even existing in the first place.

And don't get me wrong, GNB is fine to play now. It's just... entirely soup now? It's one defining element (the slow shift in ability-alignment you basically could not prevent in most fights) is gone, and hence there's little to set it apart from just swapping to another tank. It's all pointless different vfx skins on the same underlying tank class now.

Functional, sure. Just sad.

(edit)
But anyways, kinda went offtopic from what the thread was supposed to be about. xD

Back on point, I feel the changes are aggressively... "okay".

[Kishin12345]

I mean GNB was the tank-class I always swapped to when the other tank was a PLD, so it's not like I didn't do all raidbosses and EXs this expansion on GNB before they changed it. You know what was kinda cool about it? That depending on the fight, it could not be played purely from memory.

It's like when a caster never has to abort casts for movement: There's no reason to have casts in the first place then, they no longer have any gameplay value and do not contribute to being, well, a caster.

Other games like GW2 also have different variations of this problem, like when ranged attacks are never tested as everyone is always piled into melee range 100% of the time. No point to even have range then if it's never worth anything as nobody else is ever penalized for not having range. That latter part is osmething FFXIV also does: Yes we have ranged that actually attack from range in many fights, but in particular in EW, melee DPS got guaranteed basically perfect uptime. At which point "I need melee range to attack" no longer has any meaning and you might as well be given range. You even mention this yourself, with apparently (luckily not seen that myself yet) people calling for ranged segments on melee classes as a general thing so that again instead of class differentiation we erode the point of these abilities even existing in the first place.

And don't get me wrong, GNB is fine to play now. It's just... entirely soup now? It's one defining element (the slow shift in ability-alignment you basically could not prevent in most fights) is gone, and hence there's little to set it apart from just swapping to another tank. It's all pointless different vfx skins on the same underlying tank class now.

Functional, sure. Just sad.

(edit)
But anyways, kinda went offtopic from what the thread was supposed to be about. xD

Back on point, I feel the changes are aggressively... "okay".

I totally get what you mean.
It's just that the game gets balanced from top to bottom. Jobs gets balanced around ultimate and savage so that every job can generally do its rotation without too much interference.
At least what i imagine is the encounter design team making fights and then handing them to the job design team and they just filter out which jobs might struggle more than others. Then they change accordingly.
I remember when only a few jobs had gap closers and then everyone wanted one because of functionality reasons. Now every job has some form of gap closer.
If they actually put pld and viper ranged style on more jobs it would be more homogenization, i get that. It's just that this game is going for hyper balance rather than niche skills or high differentiation in identity.
Functionality comes first. The past years of changes prove that.
It's not for me to decide if that's good or bad, i just want the jobs i play to not have disadvantages over other jobs.

[millktea]

I do not like the gunbreaker changes, at least specifically DT gunbreaker. However, hear me out:

On paper, I love the changes (except for the overabundance of carts spam), I like that gun mode is now 60s and the 2 gnashing charges is fantastic, but as a controller player, this added combo was not a good move.

On controller, I want my main gcd hits to be on the shapes (my right hand, as clearly the left is for movement), and bloodfest was on my upper left dpad as itd a single hit (similar to my other tanks, particularly warrior, same place as infuriate). Now, they added lion combo to it, and i have to move with my hand and hit the buttons, needing to use my other thumb just to do it? That's ridiculous. They make changes, but completely ignore mobility. This was an issue when it first dropped in ShB as well.

It was mostly perfect in EW, other than its issues, but as far as mobility goes, it was good. All the changes that happened are what id say are welcome if it didn't not have lions on BF. I still feel Double Down simply needed to only be an ability cd, or one that's unlocked using No Mercy (similar to primal rend) and no need carts at all. Sure, hyper spam wasn't the most exciting, but the mobility though.

Changes in older Ultimates? Fantastic with this change. Its again nicer because its just 2 gnashing (no lions) and... you guessed it, on my right hand (shapes). There is simply too much bloat to have a second combo like this.

Now, I know no one wants to read this but...I would've preferred lion just had been a gnashing upgrade into 100 (similar to atonement) or they just added it into gnashing fang combo in general, making it into a single button. Its not ideal, but it would fix the mobility issue. I think just making gnashing into lions wouldve been better or just after it, continuation becomes lions.

Im just brainstorming, because I just want mobility on a controller.... and want it to be smooth, not burst strike spam going into burst.

Pld has the same issue for me with new magic combo. Why not upgrade from holy spirit as that was, you guessed it, my right hand