Many other jobs are getting old skills back...

[Tegernako]

I'm honestly baffled how you don't see why a gap closer, 100 pot OGCD, TEN times enmity multiplier, 15 sec CD skill is better than a 50 pot 20 sec OGCD stun that only works on junk content. Just wow. It has some of the same 'nuance' as a filler in your rotation as fracture (gauge dump instead of a GCD dump, extra punch fitting it into your zerk/unchained/inner release windows etc for minor damage boosts). It actually does BOTH of those abilities jobs better as an OGCD damage buff and as a rotation adjuster to min max a little more, AND has practical fight use as enmity spike and gap closer. Just wow..

...I was talking about potency...lol

But okay.

I also never argued that every skill was worth keeping. I just listed skills and effects that were taken away. Explained how many of them left holes in a job's utility that were never filled. And talked about how I thought they could have implemented it better by combining skills for example or by letting them keep them. Also just because there's a new vision of something doesn't mean you have to like it or agree with it. I don't owe anyone anything.

I've already outlined my thoughts on drk. But what's wrong with war? It already has the highest dps of the tanks and you want SE to give you back old skills to increase it further? Bloodbath made war gods in dungeons, I mean in 3.0 did healers even need to pay attention to you during pulls? Dungeons are the only reason to want bloodbath back. You also want brutal swing for the dps otherwise low blow would be fine, and fracture tied to a combo to increase dps. That's all this is.

Uh. No. Those kinds of things are examples of things they could have done to change the class and simplify it without gutting everything useful about them.

I didn't say they were things they have to do to "save the job". Giving examples of what you are talking about doesn't mean you are demanding that everything you list should happen. It's just an example of the changes I'd have liked to have seen to at least some of the skills and utility instead of just deleting them from existence.

[Quor]

Fracture should have been given the Goring Blade treatment and tacked onto Skull Sunder as a fourth combo with 10 beast gauge generation and a buff to it's initial damage to put it on par with Goring Blade. Then we would have BB for aggro, SE for self buff, SP for generation and Fracture as a strong DoT to manage. That would certainly be more interesting than the SE/SP/SP combo chain that's used ad nauseam nowadays.

DRK also needs something for their combos, as spamming SE combo 100% of the time gets rather boring.

[Brannigan]

Fracture should have been given the Goring Blade treatment and tacked onto Skull Sunder as a fourth combo with 10 beast gauge generation and a buff to it's initial damage to put it on par with Goring Blade. Then we would have BB for aggro, SE for self buff, SP for generation and Fracture as a strong DoT to manage. That would certainly be more interesting than the SE/SP/SP combo chain that's used ad nauseam nowadays.

This would probably have been too much of a nerf to warrior. They're not just going to give you a free huge dummy DPS increase like that, so the damage gained by a DOT as strong as Goring Blade would have to come from somewhere else. So let's say warriors are doing the same DPS they are now, but with an additional combo thrown into the mix - a combo that is worth a lot of your damage (as goring blade is).

1) Bad warriors are punished more - the opposite of SE's goals with 4.0
2) Warriors are punished more harshly when a boss is incompatible with DoTs (read: he jumps a lot, has a lot of adds, etc)
3) The warrior rotation becomes more complex, and I see many warriors complaining now that they're not rewarded enough for their rotation.

This whole argument about "lost" skills is weird because it's sometimes hard to tell whether someone wants the skills back for the power they had or for the gameplay implications. People will cite that paladin didn't lose anything it can't slot back. I'll contend that, Rampart aside, Conva/Provoke/Awareness were all burdens in 2.x and 3.x that prevented paladins from getting other more interesting/useful skills. Paladin just got stuck with them because every tank needs them, and that's why they were all crossclass in the first place. They weren't benefits, because even if paladin didn't have those skills, SOMEONE was going to, and they were going to be crossclassable. People complain about 1-2-3 gameplay from early paladin and that's because its skill slots were filled with ALL of the basic tanking shit and none of it was pushed on warrior. Paladin didn't lose anything because it had nothing to lose - it was a lazily designed job that was used to give skills to other, stronger jobs. Hell, even Flash was cross classable - why wasn't Overpower?

As for war/drk's lost stuff, I do agree with some things - Dark Knight's gameplay is crazy boring. I can't play that class because it triggers PTSD from 2.0 paladin. It could probably use a bit more defensive utility, so something like Delirium or Reprisal would be cool, but it'd have to be on a cooldown similar to other defensive utility. 3.0 Reprisal was an OP skill because it stacked with Storm's Path (another OP skill but whatever) and had crazy uptime. I'd like to see Low Blows come back (with a trait that gives them damage on Low Blow or something)

I don't think warrior needs any of its old stuff back. I've explained fracture above, but warrior is so inundated in defensive cooldowns that giving it foresight or bloodbath would be ridiculous.

Also, finally, this is from the OP:

Their removal makes no sense unless you just wanted ways to nerf those two classes without putting much effort into remaking the jobs.

This was EXACTLY their intention in Stormblood. They intended to bring WAR/DRK down and PLD up to try to level them all out. They actually got pretty close. Removing free DPS like Brutal Swing was part of that.

[MauvaisOeil]

Button bloat is not an excuse to remove things and screw a toolkit only to make it barely functionnal at 70, like the DRK is now.

Yes, every job getting a "non combo one button dot" was not a good design. That didn't mean every one button dot should have been removed from every job minus casters. Because not beeing combo made them different to use (had to wait for the end of the current combo, or in the mnk case, could use it to delay by a gcd the next stance skill). It was clearly less boring than a 2 combo SoulEater DRK spammer we have now, or any tank now with combo aggro having relevance one or twice in the opener with absolutely no flavor.

Making things relevant is what reveals a cunning edge of game design, taking away things to compensate them at later levels is only lightening the current kit to make it back viable at higher level, and less viable at lower. I'm not saying we should have had 40 skills useable at the same time, but I strongly believe that after an expansion giving 5 "new" skills to everyone (or replacement of spells for some), SB could have focused on traits making old and new skills match better together.

Having spells changing functionnality would have been as interesting as getting now ones, but that's not the road that have been taken. They simply choose to remove skills from everyone, and barely make compensation appear somehow and sometimes later.

The DRK lost a combo, and since he doesn't use power slash combo more than he did in HW, is completely struck to spamming one combo forever.

The WAR who had a balanced use of his 3 combos back then, two beeing utilities and one beeing damage and threat, is now alternating between gauge and a single and mandatory utility (since maim and eye have been swapped out, there isn't even a choice to "focus on gauge" if the slashing debuff is irrelevant, notice the downgrade of choices...)

The PLD, well, hasn't changed much, it's mainly the tank with additions in his gameplay with pretty much no change. No removal of offensive abilities (except cross), addition of two of them with a specific casting cycle.


If you see this button bloat as "the best thing ever", well you might not be playing on of the job that really lost gameplay into it, instead of having choices or multiple actions to cycle, just fell down to one combo action overall.

[Azerhan]

In fact, the principal thing that came from the mouth of DRKs players is the one combo gameplay.
Where is the fun to spam an only combo? And more of that, we haven't a good dps as PLD and WAR, and we haven't the same protection as them too.
Nobody that understand the game will say the tanks are equal now.
And I know, in a online game, we can't reach a perfect equality between all classes, but hey, their only three tanks in this game. And tanks it's the jobs that is the less played in this game.
And one of these three tanks will become a garbage...
We need that SE understand their mistakes from Heavensward with the PLD, and find a solution for the three tanks, with the idea in mind that the main topic of the three tanks is: PLD best protection, WAR best dps and DRK between the two.
They are close to reach that, but if they don't want to see the DRK "banned" from PF, they have to redesign it.

[whiskeybravo]

Where are you getting this "many other jobs getting old skills back"? The only thing I saw was sustain. 1 class getting 1 old skill back...

[Gravton]

I've already outlined my thoughts on drk. But what's wrong with war? It already has the highest dps of the tanks and you want SE to give you back old skills to increase it further? Bloodbath made war gods in dungeons, I mean in 3.0 did healers even need to pay attention to you during pulls? Dungeons are the only reason to want bloodbath back. You also want brutal swing for the dps otherwise low blow would be fine, and fracture tied to a combo to increase dps. That's all this is.

[Kabooa]

I miss the animations more than the skills. Scourge, Fracture, Brutal Swing and Retaliate all had very satisfying animations. Knowing that the animations sit idle is what bothers me. Like when you could cross class the old second-step hate combos on every class and see all the animations assigned to them, even if they were just modified auto attack animations. The pace, the altered timing, of the basic attack animations gave something to the skill, whether or not it was useless. (Gladiator, Rogue, and Monk 'Skull Sunder' were basic animations, but with a slowed down wind up, and a faster release. Very simple, but very visceral. They looked -great-)