Thread: DEV REQUEST: Reduce the GCD to 1.5 in 4.0

Originally Posted by KitingGenbu

I would just say that the numbers they picked seem a bit low to even scale properly. The amount of skill speed that the average physical dps can have before it turns into a negative is really low tbh (like 600-700 on drg before it becomes negative? idk the exact numbers) and should be adjusted. It also does not help that our gear does not have any 'extra stats' to compensate for excessive stat builds or set bonuses. I'll utilize WoW as an example. There are trinkets (legendary items as well) or certain set bonuses that allow the player to generate extra resources like energy/focus or have a chance to get refunded a certain amount up on using skills. Such things kind of balance out the gearing system since honestly people dont care about BiS until their ilvl is at a certain point. If you're sitting at i200 and trying to gear up to 230, you're gonna take the piece that has acc/ss at 230 over the crit/det piece that is 215.

It's not so much that it becomes bad, so much that it just doesn't fit their rotation (Life Surge, primarily, in DRG's case) properly past that point. Until then, modifications can be made to keep it more or less in place. But, "fixing" that could use any number of things, from (1) reducing potency dynamic range so that popping LS on a non-FT carries less of a loss compared to the CD holding, (2) reducing LS cooldown, (3) scaling LS cooldown with attack speed, (4) scaling LS's (and likely other CD's) cooling rate with attack speed (e.g. 1.1 seconds of cooling for every 1 second of gametime at 110% haste), (5) causing certain regularly rotated skills -- as would apply to a speed rotation (e.g. as would have a potential extra FT per CT) -- to reduce the cooldown on LS, and so forth, (6) making LS a variable CD, which can be "rushed" or "overcharged", etc., etc.. But lets also keep in mind that DRG requires a certain amount of Skill Speed to even rotate conventionally in the first place. (I personally really enjoyed the 2.33 and 2.22 rotations way back when, and have even gotten to see DRG gameplay at as low as a 1.95 GCD. Just... that TP drain.)

Now, in a Monk's case for example, the main issue is simply TP drain. I prefer a 1.95 GCD rotation myself, because it allows me to have DK drop off just after a True Strike, maintaining Twin through the following Demo and Touch of Death and then Dragon Kick, losing only 7+3+(7 to 14) = 24 potency for up to a 75 potency gain via Bootshine, and just generally allowing me to use the full lengths of my DK and Twin buffs, down to the quarter-second, throughout my whole rotation. It feels great. Until you run out of TP in under 3 minutes. And seeing that Meditation's psuedo-GCD doesn't scale with attack speed, making combat Meds for TP recovery nonviable, doesn't help. (Purification's 3 minute CD then deals the mercy blow after that.)

To be honest, the more obvious flaws of the stat, or what would cause it to experience perhaps unintended variance between otherwise similar jobs, is the lack of an oGCD damage modifier. (Or for that matter, an auto-attack modifier, for which crit scales best... as with everything else outside the realm of BLMs.) The more of one's damage is vested in oGCDs (or AAs), the less attractive skill speed becomes, so even if two jobs were looking at equally useful plateaus for the amount of skill speed necesssary to be achieved, one will still like skill speed more or less than the other.

And then there's the issue that there's both skill speed and spell speed, meaning that skill speed can't affect a number of skills on an otherwise "physical" slot class. (Flash, Unmend, Unleash, Abyssal Drain, Mage's Ballad, Army's Paeon, Foe Requiem...) I don't know why the two aren't simply "Haste".

Now, to take imo stranger example of WoW, which has bounced between trinkets making up some 15% of your dps (I only somewhat exaggerate) and requiring adjusted rotations in Mists, massive stat scaling oversights (Armor Pen, sold as a choice, but actually scaling better AFTER reaching what would have made sense to be the cap, having reduced the target's armor to 0 -- yay negative armor!), and useful but unimaginative stats there just for complexity (Multistrike, for when you Haste and Crit can't do the proc-related trick you need), dependence on and then removal of Hit/Expertise/Defense... I can't honestly say I want to see the kind of balancing necessary to keep Legion's latest legendaries or a similar system in check.

I'd honestly be fine with just holding onto the 3 essential stats -- the plain one, the RNG plain one with some synergies, and the plain one with gameplay-affecting plateaus. Barring that... I'd like to see new stats or especially gear-applied traits that function in a more universal manner than WoW's legendaries. I mean, I can imagine there being some really, really cool legendary gear/weapon opportunities out there for XIV lore, but it's hard to decide what would best be relic material (i.e. user progressed) vs. storyline, boss-, or random drops, just what level of rarity they should have, but even more than that, or how interesting their mechanics can be without seeming 'out of left field' to the pre-legendary gameplay, etc.

At the moment I don't feel like there's much difference between XIV and WoW gearing otherwise. Item Level is usually the answer unless a stat is exceptionally bad or under-tuned for your spec (see SV mastery). The nerf to higher-end secondary stat scaling from WoD to Legion only brought them closer, imo.