Could we get a change to Hyoton (PvE)?

[KasaiTaiyome]

Hey everyone, I was going to do this much more thoroughly, but the character limit said no, so...

Edit: Editing seems to be fair game, so you do get the tldr version after all.

Although it is in the title I'll ask again for dramatic effect:

Could we please get a change to the PvE version of the Ninjutsu Action "Hyoton"?


For everyone who does not know what I'm talking about, newbie or otherwise, here's an explanation:

Hyoton is a Ninjutsu action with a potency of 140 that places a 15 seconds bind on the target. There are two major problems with that:

1. Potency. This Ninjutsu action is weaker than any other and significantly so. Even Fuma Shuriken, the very first Ninjutsu which Ninja can use has a potency of 240. Even Katon, our AoE Ninjutsu action is at 250.

2. The bind debuff. This one ends prematurely as soon as the target receives damage. Ninja is a melee DPS job so we usually don't want to keep monsters at range. Also the occasions when they try to escape are so incredibly rare, that it is of little use. Even if such a situation presents itself, remember that the bind breaks on damage. After one attack the monster is free to move.


I'm not just posting in order to whine, I did think about what could be done to improve Hyoton and I think an increase in potency is not what we want. We have Fuma Shuriken and Raiton already.


Instead, how about the bind is replaced by some other debuff?

As an example:

A debuff to piercing damage. That debuff won't do anything to increase our own damage, as we do mostly slashing with a bit of magic mixed in, so no balancing problems there. However there are 3 other Jobs who do mostly piercing damage, namely Dragoon, Bard and Machinist. The former have a piercing debuff of their own, but the latter two might be happy about one additional job being able to boost their damage. This might add some incentive to use Hyoton at least once in a while, especially when we are forced to get out of melee range while having a Bard and/or Machinist in the party.


I thought about other more radical changes to the action but they are really just ideas and potentially problematic if not outright game breaking.

For example a debuff to magic resistance comes to mind, but this would in fact increase our own damage output, since most Ninjutsu actions and Bhavacakra deal magic based damage. It would also cause a very high demand for Ninja in parties with magic DPS jobs and therefore most likely affect class balance and party composition negatively.


An even more extreme approach would be to completely rework the action into a party utility along the lines of Smoke Screen and Shadewalker, that is:

Instead of targeting an enemy for low damage and a mostly useless debuff it could target a party member instead and apply some kind of buff.

Think about a one time damage reduction (5% maybe?) to help a tank through a tank buster. Think of it as a one-time-use ice armour.

Or how about a short term magic damage buff - still strong as hell but not as broken as a magic resistance debuff to the monster, which any magic DPS could make use of. This again might interfere with what buffs the healing jobs have available.

I have many other ideas but most of them are even more ridiculous than these.

TLDR: I don't want Hyoton to go. We have it, we keep it. What I want is a good reason to use it in PvE. In PvP it is usefull and since we already have the advantage of actions being balanced separately for PvP and PvE, why not change the PvE version so that it can be used in a reasonable way?

I think that the one thing we can agree on is that currently Hyoton has no meaning in PvE.

What are your thoughts on the matter?

[Kabooa]

Looking at the Ninjutsu toolkit we have

Fast Single Target Hit
Med Single Target Hit
Sneak Enabler
Med AoE Hit
AoE DoT
Attack Speed Boost
Single Target Bind <- The one in question.

When we take the Ninja's other ability and their tools into consideration, it's hard to justify giving them something else, but Hyoton is effectively worthless. Fuma/Raiton could use some competition for its spot.

Hyoton: Deals X Ice Potency damage. For the next 30 seconds, the Ninja's Ninki generation is increased by 15%
or
The Ninja's next magic damage source benefits from Poison.

[RenOkamiya]

First of all, I agree that it's useless sadly and should be reworked, plus the animation is actually quite good (I like ice spikes lol).

BUT, you can't possibly put a damage buffer or resistance down for any type of damage on it because it would be mandatory to use it every 20sec when not in need of Suiton, making fuma and raiton useless. Aggro management is already great, so also no need there.
You also have to think of it's rework with Ten Chi Jin, since you can fuma-hyoton-doton with the rigth inputs, so it needs to have some effect other than potency. What it could do however is having no potency but applying a DoT with a very long duration like 60 sec so other single target ninjutsu are not useless, with reasonnable tics, maybe not quite as strong a the Samurai one, but still something along that line. Maybe 20/tics for 60 sec, making it 600 potency total. It would benefit from TCJ, and be worth cliping GCD once for a DoT damage. You can say it's a frostburn if you want to have a reason for justifying it ^^.

I'd like to see some DoT again since we don't have mutilate anymore. It was great to have some other source of non combo damage.

[KasaiTaiyome]

Both of you made very valid points and I too could imagine it to simply apply a DoT instead of immediate damage. Again the suggestions I made are nothing more than ideas, which I hope could make the action useful without breaking the class.

And although I really don't like it, I have to agree with this specific part:

[...]When we take the Ninja's other ability and their tools into consideration, it's hard to justify giving them something else[...]

I will try to explain why this bothers me so much. This will be a wall of text again.

First of all Ninja is kind of unique. The job got added to the game after it was released, but does have it's own base class - Rogue - which still cannot be chosen at character creation. So other than not being able to choose Rogue as a starting class the class and job is like every other starting class. Join the correct guild, get to level 30 as Rogue (and originally level 15 as Pugilist), do the job quest, ???, profit.

It was in the game before Stormblood or even Heavensward. It was in the game when the level cap was still at 50. And most importantly it was designed with Hyoton as part of their original tool kit. This means that is Hyoton is not a new Ninjutsu action that we got with Heavenswward or Stormblood. It has been there from the very beginning.

Heavensward brought us some very appreciated quality of life improvements. Armor crush gave us a very easy way to refresh Huton. Smoke Screen and Shadewalker gave us party utility and in Stormblood the Ninki gauge actions gave us some AoE and more burst damage. And through all these changes and additions Hyoton remained completely untouched. Now we are here discussing if and how it could be made useful but are already agreeing on and accounting for the problem of not making the job too strong in the process. Simply put the developers have given us ever new cool abilities but seemingly always under the premise that Hyoton has to stay useless.

And that is simply wrong.

If you want to get really good at playing a certain job you need to know what every single ability does. You need to know which ability to use and when to use it. In the case of DPS jobs what you want to achieve by that is, of course, the maximum possible damage output.

In case of the Ninja job however you also need to know what ability never to use: Hyoton. If you want to do the best damage you can, no matter if single target or AoE, you must never use Hyoton. What kind of design ist that supposed to be? And why did the developers leave it like that for such a long time and through two expansions?

Instead of avoiding Hyoton like the plague in order to achieve top performance as a Ninja, it should be an integral part of it. Instead of being rewarded with top performance for not using an ability of your class at all, you should be rewarded for using it at the right moment.

And that is basically my problem with the current PvE version of Hyoton and the reason I started a rant like this in the first place.

[Alistaire]

I will try to explain why this bothers me so much. This will be a wall of text again.

Heh, and on the other hand, it bothers me so much when people fight against this logic. You absolutely have to balance jobs based on their whole package. To do othewise is stupid. Like when monks were uncontested top dps and complained one-ilm punch should be buffed, are you kidding me?

Always, always, always consider job changes based on the entire job, not their least-used action.

And ninja's in a similar spot right now, not top dps but their contribution to raid dps and utility puts them as pretty much the job with the highest % of usage in top tier content.

So no, as a NIN main, hyoton does not need to be changed, and if it did get changed, it would have to be changed to be on par, not better than other ninjutsu...and then what's the point of even changing it? Keep it as is.

[Zojha]

Always, always, always consider job changes based on the entire job, not their least-used action.

The two concepts aren't mutually exclusive, though. You can change Hyoton to be something a ninja actually uses and then nerf something else to compensate so that the strength of the kit as a whole stays the same.

The main issue is: Where does Hyoton actually fit in?
My first guess would be something exclusively useful with Kassatsu, because if you don't make it situational, you're just gonna replace a different jutsu - maybe a Combo bonus with Suiton ala Mateus shenanigans. That limits the usefulness to once every 2 minutes - You can make it a potency gain of slightly over 100 by nerfing Spinning Edge or Gust Slash by a nigh unnoticeable 5 potency without affecting the overall performance (SE/GS are used roughly once every 6 seconds, so 5 pot per 6 seconds means 50 pot per 60 seconds/min. A bit more due to Dripping Blades/Slashing Down).

No big deal, is it? The only critique one could use here would be complexity for complexity sake.

[Cabalabob]

If you want to get really good at playing a certain job you need to know what every single ability does. You need to know which ability to use and when to use it. In the case of DPS jobs what you want to achieve by that is, of course, the maximum possible damage output.

In case of the Ninja job however you also need to know what ability never to use: Hyoton.

You are rewarded for knowing when to use hyoton, the times to use it are simply few and far between. It used to be mainly used in pvp but now that has its own skill set hyoton, along with all other binds and sleeps, see little use.

But that doesn’t mean they see none. Palace of the dead springs to mind. If you’re dying, a hyoton will allow you to step away from the fight for a few seconds, this can buy you time to recover CDs, auto heal, use second wind and while this is happening you could have shadowfang eating away the mobs hp without breaking the bind. You could also get aggro from a second mob, bind it and pull the first away so you aren’t taking twice as much damage. A dead dps is doing no dps, hyoton is a dps increase over raiton if it saves your life.

So it is exactly as you describe, you need to know when to use it. And that is not never. To say never use hyoton is to not know what it does and when to use it.

[RenOkamiya]

You are rewarded for knowing when to use hyoton, the times to use it are simply few and far between.

I think what the OP meant was it's useless in raid content were everything is immune to crowd control anyway. I get that in solo content or surviving situation you can use Hyoton as it is, but the main complain here is not the single player mode but more the fact that it's a useless ability. Every class have those thing you never ever use yes, but why let them in the set of thing you can do if nobody uses them?

At the very least if it had the same pitency as Fuma and the bind for 2 mudras, it would not be that bad, but as it is it's useless. Again, every class got some skills like that (the good old feint on DRG back in the days for example, who got removed btw)

[Ash_]

It used to be amazing in PVP before the 4.0 changes. For PVE I used it occasionally for solo content, particularly back in the job quests for breathing room.

And I suppose that's where it is still somewhat useful in group content; when things go south and the heals (if they're alive) or the rest of the group need a mob bound to a spot to give everyone a chance recover.

Otherwise meh; it can stay as is. We have enough in our rotation already, and I prefer for them to stop bloody touching NIN every patch.

[Alistaire]

It used to be amazing in PVP before the 4.0 changes.

Yeah, the pvp changes have certainly opened this up; if this was posted before the separation of skills it'd just be "no, absolutely do not change this because pvp".

As for pve changes there's still the chance someone trying to push the limits of potd soloing would want hyoton kept as is.

And as far as "boosting it while nerfing something else", that would be fixing something that ain't broke. Making hyoton useful at the expense of something else would make it an extra part of the rotation for no benefit.