Could we get a change to Hyoton (PvE)?

[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.

[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)