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.
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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.

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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.

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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.

Previous reply is well past over-stuffed, but wanted to address this part here as well. Because, I really like this part, and I want to see more AoE / ST crossover.

Originally Posted by Hustensaft

4) How often do you get long lived AoE phases? How often do you have to burn down adds as fast as possible? At what number of targets is the AoE flat out superior damage/tp wise?
Asking it simpler: How much of a gain over conventional AoE is "multi-dotting", both damage wise and in TP.

For a dragoon you have: Phlebo vs. Doomspike vs. Heavy Thrust/Ring of Thorns. One combination of these only exists for the sake of keeping heavy thrust up...
You also have additional AoE possibilities with Dragonfire Dive and Geirskogul.

If we're talking about reassessment of abilities - and in this case AoE capabilities - you have to decide the necessity of DoTs on the remaining toolkit.
If you remove Phlebo and, Ring of Thorns and some other abilities, how likely can the remaining toolkit be changed to create similar/better AoE options?

For example: Geirgskogul doesn't train Blood if it hits x targets, and has no cooldown. Doomspike reduces CD of Dragonfire Dive by x sec per target hit.
There are quite a few possilibites to enhance AoE gameplay via passives or altering existing buttons. You don't need 50 buttons for every situation.

That's... pretty damn cool. Yeah.

At present a 2.33 Dragoon can spend 4 GCDs in rotation across multiple enemies to mass-CT and fire 5 or 6 Gierskoguls per minute, total of ~9340 to ~9940 potency per minute total, iirc. That would be about 387 potency per GCD, more than a Ring of Thorns x3, less than a RoTx4, less than a DSx3. So it's already a dps loss, but you'd have near infinite TP (the rotation doesn't support you most costly spender, Phlebotomize) instead under a half minute's worth. (And it needs 30 seconds per CT to get that full duration, even though they die so conveniently timed... Ouch.)

(1000 - 69 TP/s + 20 TP/s) --> about 20 seconds' worth of TP at 2.33 GCD DS spam. So, if you really needed that TP for later, it wouldn't be a bad idea. But until then... Very, very niche.

But that's just... bleh. And this is probably the ONLY job in which single target can even make a cross-over, because of Gierskogul's AoE being generated by ST attacks (F&C/WT). Everywhere else, there's virtually nothing. Monk mixes the two, via DoT-cleave and Rockbreaker, but you can't really call that a crossover apart from the Demo vs. RB decision (full Demo deals more than a RBx3, but less than a RBx4, and is as efficient as an RBx6). DRK's is just the obvious multi-Scourge and then whatever MP allows (SE is worth more healing and damage than an DA-ADx3 and costs less, so the decision's obvious for self-heals, unless you're at the edge on AoE enmity, which probably just harkens back to AD vs. Unleash, where both give the same enmity but AD deals more damage and costs more mana...). In short, it's kinda shitty.

And honestly I don't know what would be the best path to try to fix it. I personally want to see anything that looks like a cleave be a cleave (looking at you Spinning Slash), but I've no idea if that will work either.

Originally Posted by Elleia

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I'd also like to see skills that, when activated, immediately switch into another skill. You can do this with macros and hotbar switching, but it's much clunkier than it could be. An example for this is the SMN's dreadwrym trance. Instead of having two separate hotkeys for dreadwyrm trance and deathflare, I'd like to see the skill toggle automatically into deathflare when DT is activated, since deathflare cannot be used outside of DT and ends it upon use. Something similar could be done with tank stances.

I also assume a lot of the button bloat comes from this actually. Skills you can't use any other way besides having used a previous skill (Blood of the Dragon comes to mind too, they could replace the button for it with whichever of teh two skills proc'd. Hmm, maybe I'll make a macro for it, haha.)

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Previous reply is well past over-stuffed, but wanted to address this part here as well. Because, I really like this part, and I want to see more AoE / ST crossover.



That's... pretty damn cool. Yeah.

At present a 2.33 Dragoon can spend 4 GCDs in rotation across multiple enemies to mass-CT and fire 5 or 6 Gierskoguls per minute, total of ~9340 to ~9940 potency per minute total, iirc...

Hmm, either I'm oblivious and need to re-learn, or 5-6 Geirskoguls is impossible. I think at max I get 4 out. Maybe a discussion for another thread though, but can you teach me how to do so many geirskoguls in 1 minute? o_O

Edit: Ah wait, now that I think about it, if I don't Heavy thrust it may be possible to indeed get to 5. Depending on the amount of mobs present, the loss of 15% dmg may off-set the extra Geirskogul. Heh, I will try this out on AoE situations - thanks for the train of thought!

Originally Posted by ckc22

IMO As a healer I want cleric stance gone + scale healer damage off of mind. It's not difficult to play around - I haven't gotten stuck in cleric stance at an inopportune moment in years, which means it's only a threat to new players and for everyone else playing DDR with their fingers.

Having recently leveled WHM, AST and SCH to 60, I know what you're talking about and definitely see the potential benefits of having their attacks scale off MND rather than INT.

That being said, the tradeoff would have to be reduced damage potential during boss encounters, either by direct nerfs to Stone, Malefic et al (which would suck for soloing) or having outgoing damage be high enough that the healers have to prioritize healing over dealing damage. As much as I hate to admit it, Cleric Stance currently presents a sort of risk in gameplay that sort of balances out the damage gains with loss of healing power, and you'd no longer have that if you were to remove it and leave everything else alone.

Originally Posted by ckc22

There's definitely some skill bloat and just unnecessary stuff. There's also some elitists hanging around here.

IMO As a healer I want cleric stance gone + scale healer damage off of mind. It's not difficult to play around - I haven't gotten stuck in cleric stance at an inopportune moment in years, which means it's only a threat to new players and for everyone else playing DDR with their fingers.

Anyways since they basically put a target on Sch's head I'm concerned they're going to destroy it.

I'm just the opposite. I like that it's a risk to enter Cleric Stance. My only wish is that its CD scaled with attack speed, so it's always 2 GCDs in length, or an oGCD-weave short of that, rather than a fixed and not necessarily aligned 5 seconds.

It's not difficult, but I do at least like that it's something. If anything, I just wish I had more support options to fill the space before a big hit that's not worth shielding yet I want to be out of Cleric Stance for in order to Lustrate, Essential Dignity, or Tetragrammaton as soon as the damage has been dealt. But I realize I may well be in the minority in that regard.

In all honesty though, I don't really see the point in splitting Mind and Intelligence in the first place, apart from Cleric Stance itself... which just as easily could have had its percentile shift strengthened to some +33% dps for -50% healing dealt, when starting 25% weaker caster base per-potency output (.75*1.33 = 1). There are no viable options by which a DPS caster might take Mind items for improved off-healing, nor would off-healing break balance by being a bit stronger. Healer traits, perhaps even through a new role-shared means of acquisition, could do the trick just fine in differentiating Healer curative casts from off-role ones. My vague wish that Paladin get above-average off-healing generally, rather than just through Clemency, is the only obstacle that comes to mind for me.
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EDIT:

Originally Posted by ckc22

The issue is that it isn't a risk to enter clerics unless you're terrible...

Originally Posted by Duelle

As someone who has seen things go south because of someone dipping below a safe HP threshold right after clicking Cleric Stance, thus praying for nothing to go wrong until the cooldown expires so you can drop it and heal, I beg to differ.

The offensive versus defensive use of Assize also comes to mind, and possibly any other ability to follow in its footsteps.