Quote Originally Posted by Citizen_Thom View Post
I leveled MRD from 16 to 26 over the last three nights, only to find out that, yeah, that cooldown is a little long for Mercy Stroke. If it guaranteed a 20% heal, I could see that long a cool down, but being that it's conditional on the enemy's health, and that there's only a slim chance of a heal, it should probably be a 30s cooldown instead of a 90s one.
It would be too large of a DPS increase at that point; if it were a guaranteed heal, it would also be too large of a heal. It's a 200 potency attack that WARs get every 40 seconds (16 GCDs), which is a 12.5 potency/GCD increase for the final burn. It might not seem like much, but it's a ~4.2% increase to your DPS for that period (WARs manage ~300 pot/GCD without factoring in damage multipliers like Maim and SE). Reducing it to 30 seconds as an additional would bring it up to 16.67 pot/GCD ~5.5% increase as an additional ability while also necessitating some significant buff for it to WARs, which means that it would provide a similar offensive benefit as the pure genertic DPS additionals (IR provides a ~1.2% increase in damage for everyone but PLD; it's slightly more for PLD) while simultaneously providing greater burst when you need it (since it's loaded on the final kill portion when you most often need the big deeps to deal with final phase mechanics) on top of healing utility.

The problem with Mercy Stroke isn't that it isn't up often enough, doesn't heal for enough, or doesn't do enough damage. The problem is that it requires such precision timing on its use to get the heal from it that the heal might as well not exist. The "fix" for this would be having it throw a debuff on the target that lasts for a tiny period (~2-3 seconds) that heals you if the target dies while it's affected. That way you'd still have to be precise in its use to get the heal but you'd actually stand a real chance of getting the heal. If the devs wanted to reward precision especially, they could reduce the debuff heal to 10% such that you get more with the kill but at least get *something* if you use it right before it dies.