Wanderer’s Minuet, Gauss Barrel and Positive Gameplay Additions

[Alahra]

I took Machinist to 60 not too long after launch, and over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started working on Bard as well, which has prompted me to re-examine the core gameplay additions for both jobs post-50 in Wanderer’s Minuet and Gauss Barrel. While I got used to Gauss Barrel, coming back around and dreading level 52 on Bard led me to realize that there’s still something that’s just poorly designed about the two abilities.

The way I’m looking at things now, the problem with them doesn’t, on its face, come down to the fact that cast times don’t interact well with the rest of the two classes’ mechanics or solely because they become “bow” or “gun mages,” respectively. While a lot of dissatisfaction with the two abilities is often expressed in terms of these two things, the fundamental issue comes down to the fact that the abilities don’t feel like a benefit.

New abilities should, and usually do, make your character feel more powerful, more capable in your assigned role, or make you more versatile on the field of battle (often through additional group utility). They should allow you to do something you couldn’t do before, increase your overall damage output, healing output, or survivability, or shore up some weakness inherent in your class’s kit in some way.

Most of the new abilities in the game hit at least one of these things. Deliverance directly increases a WAR’s damage output by 5%. Armor Crush lets a NIN spend Ninjutsu on other things instead of Huton, both increasing damage output and versatility. Form Shift gives MNKs a way to adapt to rapid phase shifts and downtime. Indomitability gives SCH a strong AoE healing option that they formerly lacked. And so on. Some abilities may not be perfect or all that useful, such as Clemency for PLD or Smokescreen for NIN, but they still expand their respective class’s versatility in a way that’s easy to understand.

Wanderer’s Minuet and Gauss Barrel are different, though. They don’t, by themselves, improve your character in any significant way, and in fact, they come with notable drawbacks. From the get-go, at level 52, both abilities make your character do less overall damage on single-target than you do before you turn them on because the math isn’t properly tuned: auto-attacks are already close to 30% of a BRD’s or MCH’s damage and because of issues with GCD-clipping, the loss of ability to use two Abilities per GCD, and the loss of damage while responding to fight mechanics, both of these skills feel like punishments rather than enhancements.

Now, the addition of special weaponskills and abilities that can only be used while using the respective class’s new stance does ultimately make up for the lack of auto-attacks (starting at level 54 with Gauss Round and Empyreal Arrow), but it’s worth contrasting these with the other major stance added in the expansion: Deliverance.

Deliverance is a damage increase in and of itself meant for situations in which a WAR would already not be using Defiance of 5% (a little higher if you include the Critical chance from Abandon). That’s not particularly gigantic by itself, but it’s noticeable and exciting and most importantly for the comparison, it doesn’t have a cost associated with it.

Like the stances for BRD and MCH, Deliverance has a few abilities that are associated with it, but none of them are necessary to make Deliverance worth using. Fell Cleave offers delicious burst, Equilibrium offers minor TP recovery (which while not that useful rotationally, is nice for AoE and after unfortunate deaths), and Decimate offers high, TP-less AoE damage.

The same can’t be said for the abilities tied to Wanderer’s Minuet and Gauss Barrel. Empyreal Arrow/Gauss Round and Sidewinder/Ricochet are essentially abilities that require you to do more to make up for the loss of auto-attacks, which require no additional work from you. As a result, they’re not exciting abilities in their own right but only exciting because they make up for the terrible ability you picked up at level 52.

From the moment a BRD or MCH turns on Wanderer’s Minuet or Gauss Barrel at level 52, they are weaker than they were before they had access to them. Quite simply, that’s not good design because new abilities—especially the introductory ability for a new expansion’s level range—should feel significant from the getgo.

Even at level 60, relative to their level 50 selves, BRDs and MCHs don’t particularly feel more powerful. In ARR, a BRD’s DPS ceiling was around 20% lower than that of melee DPS, and in Heavensward, BRD and MCH are sitting at about the same place compared to their fellow physical DPS. So what they’ve accepted on the road to 60 is the addition of cast times, which limit mobility, interact very poorly with off-global Abilities (this is of special note for BRD, but also relevant to MCH), and cause bizarre animation clipping (hey, aesthetics do matter), to arrive at exactly the place they were before.

BLM and SMN are of particular note here, because while they both saw some significant gameplay changes, these changes, which make both classes more difficult to play, increased the standing of each in situations in which they were formerly weaker (single-target DPS for BLM and area-DPS for SMN). Additionally, the changes to the casters don’t fundamentally alter the way the two classes function in the overall gameplay sense (though BLM does come close, admittedly—but at least they got a pretty significant single-target DPS boost to make up for it).

That’s ultimately why Wanderer’s Minuet and Gauss Barrel are so disappointing and frustrating: they have significant drawbacks, and the benefits they offer don’t actually make up for those drawbacks. They’re far more like nerfs to BRD and MCH mobility at level 50 than they are enhancements to their playstyles. New abilities shouldn’t feel like nerfs, and any abilities that do are badly designed.

I’m no game designer and ultimately, I don’t have a huge personal stake in making BRD and MCH’s central abilities play better, as they’re both just occasional diversions for me from my main jobs, so my thoughts on the best way to improve the two classes don’t come from a position of authority. And beyond that, I've been thinking about the two abilities more in a broader sense, regarding what gaining new abilities should feel like in general.

Edit: Through the course of discussion, I looked over the numbers compiled on FFLogs for BRDs and MCHs relative to DRG and MNK in Savage, and BRD has in fact gained somewhat relative to the other DPS, so some of the thrust of this post isn't spot on. Info on the exact numbers are available later in the thread--I don't want to clutter the original post with all of that, as it's already fairly long.