Thread: Culling and restructuring skills to make room for 5.0 abilities

Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Dragoon is the outlier here. Every melee (except NIN, because theirs is a permanent +20% from Dripping Blades trait) that gets a damage bonus from a weapon skill gets it from WITHIN their combo as opposed to a stand-alone GCD like Hot Shot/Heavy Thrust. Dark Knight and Paladin don't get a damage bonus from any of their weapon skills (DRK has a stance, and PLD has an oGCD), hence why I left WAR in there since they get the bonus from a WS.

Fundamentally different. DRG has only one viable combo sequence. Unless the target will die before you can get 4 ticks, CT-combo will always be used first. SAM has to pick BETWEEN two different damage bonuses, one of which is generally more important and the other is more important to oGCDs and Higanbana. Monk must choose from among 3 different abilities available within its stance (in 99% of cases, between its damage bonus and its highest direct potency weaponskill). They CHOOSE among differing forms of damage gains. Dragoon does not. It has zero choice. But while you'd likely maintain that factor, your suggestion would DRG to delay both its DoT and on-target damage bonus in order to gain its larger damage bonus from VT first. At best, you'd create the (incredibly awkward) option of TT-VT before normal comboing (ID-Db-CT-WT-F&C-TT-VT-FT-F&C-WT).

As for double weaving, that's a technique discovered and perpetuated by PLAYERS. It's likely SE only ever intended for players to single weave because they "assume" the average player just plays with mediocre skill and doesn't parse, so they simply use oGCDs willy-nilly as oppose to more hardcore players that have optimal rotations and weaving techniques. So that said, don't base anything on "double weaving", which is something we as a community discovered but isn't technically intended, though is possible.

Do you see any mention of double weaving?

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

@OP

It's like you've taken a coin with either side viable, and instead landed it right on its edge for an untenable position.

I agree that we both should and likely will lose our awkward click-and-quite-nearly-forget long maintenance buffs, but why would you, in lieu of that, suggest baking the buffs into another skill, let alone one that would, say, put DRG rotational priorities in direct conflict with themselves?

We're facing button bloat, but button bloat only has at most half to do with actual button count. The majority of it has to do with efficiency: how much gameplay--how many distinct rotational strings and tactics and strategies--can we form from the given buttons?

DRG's weaponskills allow for essentially 3 rotational strings in Single-target combat, with only a single decision path. I'd much rather see as many keys as we have now, or even a few more, with considerably more depth to each than to remove what little complexity we have as outlier to the doldrums of the majority of our keys on combo classes.

Likewise, MCH is hard-pressed to find variance, flow, or any real excitement from its weaponskills, even with the augmentation of Ammunition and Gun Heat -- the latter of which manages to feel far more esoteric and punishing than it feels exciting, intuitive, or wholly integral -- and in need of a more integral tool to let its systems compliment each other. Rather turning Hot Shot into a trait, taking with it its impact on and within Ammunition, why revise to aid the solution to Gun Heat's underwhelmingness?

Nonetheless, I'll go ahead and address this.

If SE does not treat what is possible as if it were intended, they are being intentionally foolish. Exploits will be taken where given. Strategies will be taken where effective. It's not on the players to handicap themselves just because development "assumed" the low-hanging fruit somehow wouldn't be taken.