The Wanderer's Minuet and class-design frustrations

[CookieMonsta]

Because if you get rid of the cast times for Brd there is no reason to have WM any longer. But for the sake of not having to change reward for the level 52 Job quest, it will probably be reworked in to something else with the same name.

Edit incoming to respond to your edit, one sec.

How else would you propose matching the same skill ceiling of WM with your proposal?

[Khalithar]

How else would you propose matching the same skill ceiling of WM with your proposal?

I edited in my reply to my last post.

[Id_Slayer]

I absolutely hate WM, and feel they should have taken the job down some other path. Yoshi explicitly stated MCH and BRD would have a different feel, yet they're really two sides of the same coin because of WM adding cast times. If we keep WM, I'd want just two changes:
1.) A way to spread my dots bane-style. Call it Iron Reign or something to compliment Iron Jaws.
2.) Empyreal arrow to have no cast time. It should be instant like Sidewinder, gauss round and Ricochet(mch abilities that are the closest equivalent, and insta-cast like oGCD)

[CookieMonsta]

I edited in my reply to my last post.

I understand what people are saying with WM not interacting well with BRD mechanics but with the way iron jaws is implemented now. The brd rotation would be ridiculously simple without cast bars because it won't even be a 123. Its a maintain ss, hit iron jaws to refresh dots, pop ogcds ,empyreal on cd and spam heavyshot. It would be so simple the class would have a massive raid mechanics advantage (even with WM BRD has a huge advantage already) with no pentalties to deal with like Nin/DRG/BLM etc etc.

[Myon88]

(*Certainly they help MCH get better numbers relative to other jobs, but that's because those other jobs get hurt, not because MCH deals any extra damage)

Yeah that's pretty much it. I'd argue that MCH potencies are actually in a pretty good place - they still have the weakest 1-2-3 combo in the game by far for example (140 > 180 > 200 potency). Their performance relative to other jobs is more due to the fact that in actual fights, they're the ones coming closest to actually reaching their theoretical DPS potential, while other jobs due to DPS losses (dropping gl, having to burn off botd early, etc) only reach ~70-80% of what they could be parsing. To a good MCH that knows how to stance dance, pretty much every fight in this game is no different from an SSS dummy where you stand still the entire time.

In fact I'd even argue that the MCH rotation is inherently antifragile, in that it actually gets stronger when disrupted. The reason for this is their wildfire > mildfire > wildfire sequencing that alternates between strong and weak, and what happens when mechanics force you to delay something.

As a general rule of thumb, if you're about to pop cooldowns but you know a problematic mechanic is coming, you just hold them all for 30s and use them with the next set of hot/lead shots. Due to how powerful their cooldowns are when stacked, if you hold cooldowns this way you invariably end up syncing them with something else down the time - you might even 'upgrade' a mildfire back into a wildfire and thus get two wildfires in a row.

You can see this happen in a11s if you have enough dps in phase 1 to transition into 1-8 less than 1:45 after the pull - no time for a second wildfire as he will limit cut and disappear before it completes. Instead you can just do nothing and wait till he comes back from 1-8 to wildfire - and this time you'll have your 1 min cds and hypercharge back up too. And then you chill with everything down for lapis, no big deal, and then another big wildfire after eternal darkness. They're inherently good at shuffling cooldowns around like that to accommodate mechanics, and it's this kind of flexibility that many other jobs lack.

[Duelle]

I understand what people are saying with WM not interacting well with BRD mechanics but with the way iron jaws is implemented now. The brd rotation would be ridiculously simple without cast bars because it won't even be a 123.

Let's start with the obvious: Don't demonize simplicity as if it were a bad thing. Classes having different skill input requirements is a good thing, as it creates options. Designing everything around a specific level of input is limiting and doesn't help anyone in the long run.

It would be so simple the class would have a massive raid mechanics advantage (even with WM BRD has a huge advantage already) with no pentalties to deal with like Nin/DRG/BLM etc etc.

The only thing a BRD would be able to circumvent is ground-targeted AoEs; this game doesn't have a notable amount of ranged-only boss mechanics outside of ground telegraphs (no air phases, no shadow crash-style mechanics, to name two). Also consider that BRD's DPS potential is inherently lower than other jobs by design, which on its own acts as the trade-off for having mobility. Sure, one can make a case for it being "easier" to play, but as I've said above, simplicity should not be demonized.

[ChloeGrace]

Yoshi explicitly stated MCH and BRD would have a different feel...

[Shurrikhan]

The issue is that the confluence of (WM + River of Blood + lots of other oGCDs) just doesn't function properly. It's anti-synergistic and leads to a myriad of decision points that - while yes, in a vacuum more decisions means more skill - some of these judgment calls are frankly bulls**t in nature and have no place within the design philosophy of this game.

Trying to figure out on the fly whether a DoT tick that started a refresh animation that finished some variable tenths of a second later, came before/during/after a half-second window on your cast bar, and then responding appropriately within the next half second - that kind of thing belongs in competitive fighting games where people count frames, not an MMO that ostensibly uses a 2.5s GCD to allow room for forethought and attending to mechanics.

By far the most plausible route SE could take to address this, would be to overhaul River of Blood in some way. There's a semi-common expectation of some manner of charge/stack or storage system, especially with Yoshi talking about class-specific UIs. But it's kind of an open question as to how they might ultimately go about it.

That first part, especially, stuck out to me. I am an avid believe that more decisions = more complexity. But that assumes that each choice is not only balanced, but balanced against the effort required to make the judgement call, rather than merely following a static priority list. Bloodletter, for instance, is simply too damn strong for any of the alleged judgement calls to actually be judgement calls. The possibility, however faint when tracking DoT ticks and having a stable internet, of losing an entire 150 potency from an overriding refresh is simply too costly to warrant preceding with any other skill outside of an emergency silence. In effect, there are no decisions there. If anything, they are delegated to issues of Feint potency loss, late refreshes of Straight Shot in hopes of proccing Straighter Shot, etc. Now the mere fact that one mechanic that did not meet its potential may fall back on others suggests a kind of synergy (just as much as the mixed messages of <"wait, gotta spend Bloodletter if it refreshes in a half-second" > using an arsenal of oGCDs in a buff-window-intensive class> suggest an anti-synergy). But even in gestalt, there's just not that much there. And while I'd rather see its potential fleshed out than forgo Wanderer's Minuet completely (I find this sum of mechanics more entertaining than ARR Bard's sum), I can see why the gameplay frustrations outweigh the gameplay value for many.

I certainly cannot disagree with that second mechanic. I for one can barely single-weave without a VPN, and that only on low skill speed classes. As such, the double-weave is a rare treasure for me, which I enjoy when I have the funds to toss at WTFast, but could never suggest predicating game mechanics upon. And make no mistake, that level of mismatch between the global tick and personal GCD requires a very low and reliable ping in order to make these kinds of time-based judgement calls. What's more, those judgement calls are only even available (or, "necessary", in terms of intrusiveness) over certain modular common multiples, with large windows between. In its present state, it's just not reliable enough of a mechanic to really even think as... made intentionally, let alone skillfully.

Now, given how much the game does require double-weaving for optimal play, I don't honestly think that the longer GCD really suggests room for forethought or any sort of tactical aim. At best, it simply allows for the use of positionals in certain fights, whereas the way the game handles latency does more for stutter-stepping than the GCD itself. But there is no way this game should attempt that level of precision timing when the netcode is only average at best and server placements are so few.

My suggestions as they'd apply to Bard, then, are about the same as yours. Either you remove the global tick, and everyone's DoTs now tick at their current, non-snapshotted, GCD speed, which would be a hell of a revision, or you smooth out Bloodletter generation itself. However, I do not want to lose what few points of decision we have; I still want there to be risk, and a sense of relief when a Straighter Shot is readied for a double-weave (assuming I could ever experience one again), or warrant the use of a Feint just to keep my CDs in sync without any River of Blood overflow. I want it to feel technical. I just don't want it to feel like ground gears.

And there's always a chance Yoshi was alluding to a re-focus on songs. If you recall, when 3.0 launched every Bard song save for Swiftsong came with a 3s cast, and it took a lot of pressure for them to back off of that inch by inch. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there a rework aimed at making Bard songs powerful enough to justify giving them long casts again.

I really hope that ends up being the case. There are so many cast systems that could do a lot for this game, or MMOs in general, that have yet to be explored. Manual (over)charging, analog resources, incremental CD acceleration/refresh—any of those could add a huge amount of control and decision to Bard Songs, Paladin Oaths, to reduce button-bloat among otherwise identical Thaumaturge spells, etc.

Personally I just want more point-support/sabotage via our Songs, and for no song choice to be wholly irrelevant. The former would probably require another ability, and the latter that Swiftsong is reworked to be combat-usable and may even require a whole rework such that all classes use both MP and TP, or that song effects are, effectively, embonused split AoEs (stronger against fewer recipients, or based on need or range, such that Ballad stays nearly as powerful in low-caster compositions and Army in low-physical). That's a lot. Though I think it'd be worth it.