Spell/Skill Speed rework suggestion and effect

[Sylvain]

Hi, I would like to discuss the eventual impact of a new effect on SS.

SS would now reduce the CD of damaging (or unabling damage) abilities:
To name a few: JumpS, Etherflow (more bahamut/transe), mudra, gauss round, wildifre etc


For those who don't know about crit/dh VS ss, (skip if you do)
The "main" reason most jobs prefer crit/dh over ss is that SS doesn't interact with these abilities. Increasing your crit/dh chance by 20% will, overall, increase the damage of the skills listed above. Reducing your GCD from 2.4 to 2.1 will not. If these skills represent a significant portion of your dps, then SS doesn't affect a significant portion of your dps.
This is why for instance BLM scales well with SS, because only one skill doesn't really benefit from it (Foul on a 30s timer)

Now, what if SS would reduce the CD of those skills by the same amount they are reducing your GCD (relatively). Would that make SS better all around?
Would we see some special threshold making rotation easier or harder at some point?

On a dummy, my guess is that it would scale like for BLM.
If you cast 10% faster, you do 10% more damage (bit less due to foul)

But I'm not sure about CD based job.
Taking the dragoon for example, if you jump 10% more often, your jumps do overall 10% more damage (and it's more stable than random crit), but you also enter 10% more often in Super Sayan mode so more Nastrond resulting in more dps. Technically.

The same thing should apply to SMN with 10% SS -> 10% more bahamoot


Now, the thing I wonder.
Assuming this would be implemented, would that make SS better than anything else or equal to crit/dh?

I realise that when it comes to dps, there isn't much choice usually. You often always have a best mathematical out come. Unless you can reach very high value where gameplay do become an important criteria (not everyone can play with 30% smaller GCD), but I find the current situation a bit... "boring" for dps. You have no choice on your secondary stats.

For instance, healers have more choice when it comes to stats. While most healer don't enjoy SS, on the healer forum when people ask for stats, it's usually "go for what you enjoy the most" with a few suggestion regarding what you might want.



So what do you think? Would you like something like this to be implemented (like haste now affect DoTs dmg)?

[Silver_Blade]

Yep. It is the only way to balance the stat.
If they do not do this it will always be crit / DH with det to fill in caps.
They are making the game far too homogenized. As it is everyone uses the same materia.
If they did this it would help some classes more than others making the gearing more diverse.
Classes like DRG with lots of abilities would get large benefit out of it while classes like MNK who have much fewer cooldowns would get less.
It needs to be only DPS or heal abilities like jump, contre sixte and fleche and benediction / tetragrammaton though.
If it is cooldowns like litany, shake it off or largesse it would make every class gravitate to it equally.

They should also make determination scale with potency so classes with big hard hits would get more effect opposed to classes with quick smaller hits. This would add more diversity as well.

[Shurrikhan]

I've suggested this in the past only to met with "I don't want this to be like WoW" (because apparently Haste concepts belong to WoW and WoW alone?), but as Silver said, it is technically the only fair way to balance the stat besides having all stats, when not uniquely applicable, revert to Determination in their effects. (E.g. auto-crits simply affect the damage as det would; SkS affects DoTs as Det would; SkS affects CD damage as Det would....)

Or rather, it's a necessary part of that balancing process. I'll get to the two or three other requirements shortly.

I mean, if you wanted to be more "FF" about it and avoid the awkward 39.22-second CDs, you could always just write out everything as "turns" where your "turn" speed is given on the character screen (and likely still as your GCD recast time on weaponskills and spammable casts).

The two or three other requirements are as follows:
- Resource scaling (either MP and TP costs would have to be reduced, which would again face strange decimals and the like, or their tick rates accelerated)
- Animation(-lock) scaling (the faster your GCD, the faster your animations complete)
- *Percentile GCD decrease, rather than a basically flat number of points required per GCD decrease, such that the value per point gradually increases in terms of actual percentile gains.

*The last point is optional as Critical Strike already falls outside of that rule, thus making it weaker than DHit and Det at low amounts in compensation for being stronger than either at high amounts -- unbalanceable by design, except roughly and only at very specific gear options. Both have quadratic gains at the moment. And while it may simplify gearing in the name of broader stat choice, I'd prefer to see all stats balanced towards equally linear or ramping gains.

That said, there'd still be one huge issue, even if one were to fix all instances of personal desync by allowing Speed to double-dip on such buffs as Internal Release, Blood for Blood, Raging Strikes, Perfect Balance, Meikyou Shisui, etc. You'd still desync from the party, such that you are forced to hold onto your CDs or use them outside of TA/BL/BH/EB/FR/HC/CS windows. That's a huge hit. And to fix it you really do have to resort to that most dull of effects: when unable to otherwise uniquely improve upon one's skills at full power, a stat will always function as Determination.

With that, you maintain syncs of all kinds except rotational modulars, and can fully make the most of your Speed.

Thus the overall changes and effects would be:
:: SkS and SpS combined into "Speed".
:: All damaging or throughput-affecting abilities now scale with Speed.

(This does not affect external utility or buffs that you could squeeze more uses into the window or already afford more casts through resource generation as affected by Speed.)

:: TP and MP received are reduced by 20% per tick, but now tick per player GCD.
:: Effects which cause their targets to generate additional TP or MP now simply increase the amount gained per player tick, and their effects therefore likewise scale with the receiving player's Speed.
> Speed increases global cooldown and auto-attack rate while increasing the damage of periodic effects and skills with recast times longer than the global cooldown.

[Sylvain]

It needs to be only DPS or heal abilities like jump, contre sixte and fleche and benediction / tetragrammaton though.
If it is cooldowns like litany, shake it off or largesse it would make every class gravitate to it equally.

They should also make determination scale with potency so classes with big hard hits would get more effect opposed to classes with quick smaller hits. This would add more diversity as well.

Perhaps I wasn't clear but I do only talk about damaging skill or those tied to damaging skills part of your "core rotation" (like wild fire and etherflow).
What I proposed would not reduce the CD of skills such as
Battle litany
Trick attack
Leyline
2% smn dps buff
Cards
Etc etc.

[Gr1mwolf]

As much as I would like to be able to do everything faster, I don't think that would work. Either it affects everything, and becomes the best stat because it also boosts non-attack cooldowns like Wildfire, Hagakure, Aetherflow etc. Or it only affects attack cooldowns, and throws off rotations. In some cases forcing you to hold on to the cooldown anyway and negating the benefit.
An easier solution would be to just make it so that Crit/DH no longer affect cooldown attacks either.

[Kabooa]

You can just bump up the gains of Skill/Spell Speed by about 10-15% and that alone would make it one of the most overpowered stat gains you could go for in high amounts. The non-interaction with OGCDs would be the balancing factor.

Except Black Mage.

[Shurrikhan]

You can just bump up the gains of Skill/Spell Speed by about 10-15% and that alone would make it one of the most overpowered stat gains you could go for in high amounts. The non-interaction with OGCDs would be the balancing factor.

Except Black Mage.

But that would be more uneven than the way Crit benefits Bard/Monk more so than all other classes. Classes can vary at anywhere from zero to 20% of their damage coming from oGCD sources. (Further) overpowering a stat for some just to make it marginally viable for others is not balance. It's just two different directions of imbalance.

[wereotter]

There are a few other things that could be done to make it a DPS increase, at least for certain jobs.

If added skill speed decreased the auto attack delay rather than increasing its potency, then it would be a pretty vital stat for ninjas, and maybe for monks. Also they could compensate for this by making your TP/MP regenerate based on your speed.

Adjusting the frequency of your non global cooldown moves, though, would probably be worse in the big picture. Certain party buffs and off global cooldown moves naturally line up so that burst phases are even larger when done as a party. However if one job needs more speed than another, then these phases no longer line up, and the whole thing falls apart, which will mean less party damage overall.