Thread: Classes and Rotations to be "Easier" in 4.0. Predictions, Concerns, and Discussion.

Originally Posted by Hustensaft

Then the problem lies in the remaining rotation. If a 24 sec upkeep damage buff and DoT are the only things that add only complexity to your rotation, while the vast majority of buttons you press do not, then there is a major issue with those buttons.

And there you have my point, and why I prefer to look at the job gameplay as a whole, rather than taking a reductive approach button-per-button, when trying to maximize the... "button-to-choice-output ratio" or whatnot.

I can show you how exactly the DoT's and buffs create new rotations at various GCDs, and do so because of current internal balance, but it'll have to wait until after work.
________________________________________________________

Edit: Back! Okay, continuing on with a few points first before the main idea.

A combo system, static durations of DoTs and rotational buffs, and faster rotations created by skillspeed just don't work together.

This part I felt I needed to point out in more detail. Skill Speed has an effect on gameplay BECAUSE the durations of DoTs and rotational buffs are STATIC. If not, it would have zero difference from Determination; the same exact abilities would be used in the same order and ratios and under the same priorities. But that is not the case when durations are static, and does not universally improve damage, nor by the same amount (AAs and abilities unaffected, and DoTs less affected). Rather, it becomes a matter of creating new rotations to best fit those durations even while adding additional GCDs between them. You see this with Fracture usage on Monk, Dragon/Twin-drop rotational strings, etc, and, if Meditation were changed to scale with attack speed, in-combat Meditation to fill spare half-GCDs for later TP regen or burst. There are plateaus, and therefore have no benefit between those particular levels, but each level does come with new rotational possibilities. It is the only stat outside of Bard Critical Strike that has an effect on gameplay, and it does so because you're trying to fit additional parts into an unchanged, original window.

The same of course applies here:

1) They don't fill anything. If they didn't exist, your whole other rotation would just be moved one step ahead without any consequences.

But, your "combos" also include DoTs, and therefore have windows of their own. Unless the base GCD has the perfect means to accomodate those DoTs upon removing all non-combo skills, you're going to need filler in the form of non-combo skills (which are pretty much all DoTs, ever since Monk stopped cross-classing Impulse Drive). If you don't want to waste a tick of Demolish by reapplying early or two ticks by reapplying late, you need to fill that GCD (with a non-stance Touch of Death or Fracture).

Internal balancing, such as by slightly de-emphasizing DoT damage on Dragoon, allowing for the double-Full per Chaos 2.33 ST rotation to become viable (bases the window on Chaos Thrust, rather than Phlebotomize), rather than merely a 3-target gimmick (albeit a powerful one) in the form of Chaos Spread and an extra 2 3-hit Geirskoguls (lot of extra potency there), can make those additional rotations a much bigger deal. Back in ARR, though TP issues again made it irrelevant to cutting edge play, you'd find new rotations at approximately 2.44 (perfect HT), 2.33 (rushed Full), 2.22 (perfect-HT triple Full, late Phb), and 2.11 (true perfect triple Full) GCD rotations. Were TP regen to scale with attack speed, most of those probably would have been viable options. If Skill Speed affected ability damage at least as much as it does DoT damage, then they absolutely would have.

Still - Touch of Death is useless to Monks. You multi-dot Demolish for more damage, while keeping Greased/Twin Snakes at the same time.

Here's a trickier example of that intersection of rotational speed and internal balance. I'll agree, fully, that Touch of Death in itself is dull. However, because of the surrounding abilities, it actually has a fair bit of complexity. Though it gains 25 potency from Twin Snakes, it only gains 3 from Dragon Kick. Demolish similarly gains 41 from Twin, but only 7 from Dragon. This allows you after a given skill speed, upon desyncing from the original Dragon-Twin-Demo string to True-Demo-(Death)-Dragon, to let Dragon Kick drop off just after True Strike, and Twin Snakes to drop off just after Touch of Death, losing 7+3+15+3.33*duration potency over the lost buff times, but gain an extra Bootshine and True Strike within the Demo string, giving you an extra 50 + 115 (*1-.5CSR) potency (net: some 70 potency at 36% crit chance). You can probably see why this was more popular back in ARR, when Critical Strike had diminished scaling over time, and did not affect Bootshine's auto-crit. Because of these factors coming into play, the Monk at plateaued skill speed must decide how he wants things to sync up and when, and can maximize or trim (typically to maximize another later) durations as he sees fit. That's where your complexity comes in. But it takes a certain number of abilities playing on the same side of the balance given by the rest of the toolkit (e.g. Dragon Kick vs. Twin Snakes) in order for that to have a real rotational presence, and to be something to look forward to managing syncs for. (And of course, the right amount of skill speed.)

So my question would be something like "how would you provide all that Touch of Death extrinsically provides while replacing or removing it due to inherent plainness, or how would you replace those extrinsic factors with something at least as interesting?"

In the end, we're trying to make our abilities more interesting, right? That takes place at two levels, both the individual/inherent/intrinsic and the combined/collective/extrinsic.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

To be clear, I would be totally fine with getting rid of all those things I've mentioned above, as long as we're given at least much to explore and to challenge us as those things did. (Given enough time and thought, that shouldn't be that hard, I would think.)

At present, XIV combat is no more or less than modular math. It's about timing things for maximization, present or upcoming, of their effects, looking x situational loops into the future to figure out how we should manipulate whatever rotational strings we can control. LCMs, multiplicatives, immediacy/potential uptime loss, (eventual) desyncs. That's all it's got going for it. But that is enough to at least find something for the more theorycraft-y among us. Should it be appreciable by a larger audience than just those who obsess over their striking dummy parses, testing gambit after gambit under multiple gear sets? Definitely. But at least it's something.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

To take the SMN Ruin I / II example in particular — I can't disagree with that. It's solid reasoning. Each (I through III) serves their purpose at present, but yes, the benefits can be redistributed into just the first two of the three and there'd be very little harm to overall control.

But why stop at just the redactive angle? What do you actually envision as being potentially awesome for Summoner, and how would Ruin I, II, III, X, whatever, fit into that? How much MORE control, still, could you fit into two buttons?
We want our jobs to be more exciting, more integral, more engaging, right? Why stop at just trimming the fat if that would just make it more obvious how dull the actual remaining burger was and is?
That's all I'm saying — take it from multiple directions; be ambitious. And then cut down from there, because being condensed is still always a good thing, so long as you don't lose anything worthwhile in the process.