New Job Concept: Riskbreaker

[Grimoire-M]

This isn't WoW. Main stats help to divide gear into cohesive groups the same way they do in WoW and act as flavor on top of that. It's aesthetic mechanical design. They do serve a purpose in being able to differentiate between stat reduction and damage type reduction as well, though we have yet to see SE exploit that in a raid (specifically referring to players getting debuffed here, not Addle/Feint/Virus) as far as I'm aware. Leave it at that.

As for the concept, I like the idea of trying to maintain Risk stacks in this manner, but I don't think Crit Rate is entirely appropriate. You're still going to stack Crit alongside this because of the damage modifier. Even if you force a cap on the rate. Maybe not as a main stat, but as a secondary for sure. Skill Speed and Determination are that bad.

I think a better approach would be to flatline the defence penalty to 10% regardless of how many you have and similarly crunch the crit rate boost, starting at 10% at 1 stack, then growing by 5% per each additional stack, up to a maximum of 30% at 5 stacks, letting you stack more on top of that from gear. That would be more fair and give you room to incorporate more into the rotation. You mention that this would be a mace/hammer user, but the way this feels (as far as I can tell) is a lot of little hits, very much like Bard, which ill suits a heavy weapon user. I think by making this reduction you can make more room for hard hitting abilities and pull away from the defensive kit a bit as well.

[Seraphor]

As for the concept, I like the idea of trying to maintain Risk stacks in this manner, but I don't think Crit Rate is entirely appropriate. You're still going to stack Crit alongside this because of the damage modifier. Even if you force a cap on the rate. Maybe not as a main stat, but as a secondary for sure. Skill Speed and Determination are that bad.

I think a better approach would be to flatline the defence penalty to 10% regardless of how many you have and similarly crunch the crit rate boost, starting at 10% at 1 stack, then growing by 5% per each additional stack, up to a maximum of 30% at 5 stacks, letting you stack more on top of that from gear. That would be more fair and give you room to incorporate more into the rotation. You mention that this would be a mace/hammer user, but the way this feels (as far as I can tell) is a lot of little hits, very much like Bard, which ill suits a heavy weapon user. I think by making this reduction you can make more room for hard hitting abilities and pull away from the defensive kit a bit as well.

Thing is I'm trying to break the mold, not fit it. Skillspeed shouldnt be that bad.
Spellspeed works for BLM, so this coukd be the physical class that Skillspeed works for.
With thr job being based around its own Crit generation, it does make Crit less effrctive to meld. A good player would spend a good portion of their time at maximum Crit without melding any, so the benefit of melding it drops right off. Direct Hit therefore would be their main focus, and after that, theyd have the room to fit and afford Skillspeed. With faster attacks, theyd hit those Risk stacks more often and more reliably, indirectly raising their Crit via Speed.

As for the values and potencies, it suits the identity of hammers (and axes) from XII. Yes they're heavy weapons that deal a lot of damage, but they also have more random damage that can result in weaker attacks than other weapons, its about averaging that out. Hence the low base potencies, crossed with a reliable almost 50% average Crit rate.

You could cap the defence penalty and remove the defensive skills, but again, that wouldn't reflect the nature of a Riskbreaker from VS.
Having to balance your DPS versus your defence would be part of the jobs function, its gimmick, like RDMs magic-melee cycle, or Ninjas ninjutsu. A high Crit rate alone wouldnt be interesting enough.
Besides, other DPS jobs have plenty of defensive skills already. For example, NIN has Shadeshift, Smokescreen and its own emnity dump skill.
This concept only really has three defensive skills too, the other two are more resource management.

[Grimoire-M]

Thing is I'm trying to break the mold, not fit it. Skillspeed shouldnt be that bad.
Spellspeed works for BLM, so this coukd be the physical class that Skillspeed works for.
With thr job being based around its own Crit generation, it does make Crit less effrctive to meld. A good player would spend a good portion of their time at maximum Crit without melding any, so the benefit of melding it drops right off. Direct Hit therefore would be their main focus, and after that, theyd have the room to fit and afford Skillspeed. With faster attacks, theyd hit those Risk stacks more often and more reliably, indirectly raising their Crit via Speed.

While I agree that we should try to encourage using all stats, your proposed crit changes do not fit with how the game works currently. You have to pre-suppose that there is an artificial cap of 50% assigned to it to make this come close to working at all, and it still doesn't solve the problem of crit damage still being worth it. If you have to assume that SE's staff would make that kind of core mechanical change in the first place (even if it's tame compared to some of the suggestions people put up) then the better option is to simply assume it can't be done and implement something better based on what has been done before.

As for the values and potencies, it suits the identity of hammers (and axes) from XII. Yes they're heavy weapons that deal a lot of damage, but they also have more random damage that can result in weaker attacks than other weapons, its about averaging that out. Hence the low base potencies, crossed with a reliable almost 50% average Crit rate.

I'm sorry, but the fact that most meaningful content where you're using your kit to the fullest can take 8-10 minutes means the game will naturally average out the variance. Time is the biggest factor in getting the required sample size to ensure each member of a raid was able to contribute. All you're accomplishing by nerfing the potencies to compensate for that crit rate and adding lots of low cooldown oGCDs is making every hit feel less powerful but over all make the class more busy, which suits a light armor, speedy class more. Look at Warrior's Inner Release window. That's how a heavy weapon DPS class should feel at times. And Warrior does reward skill speed within that window to a certain degree, just to squeeze out one extra Fell Cleave.

On that note, you've created a dragoon-like GCD rotation that's honestly more limiting than it should be (especially regarding AoE) with no real payoffs yet, which is something I'd look at. I'd start with removing the DoT ability and think of something more creative to replace it. That's one of the main limiters of skill speed when it comes to melee classes compared to BLM. BLM can throw its only DoT out when it wants to. Combo classes have to avoid clipping, whether it's their GCD or DoTs. Better to scrap the one DoT and work from there.

You could cap the defence penalty and remove the defensive skills, but again, that wouldn't reflect the nature of a Riskbreaker from VS.
Having to balance your DPS versus your defence would be part of the jobs function, its gimmick, like RDMs magic-melee cycle, or Ninjas ninjutsu. A high Crit rate alone wouldnt be interesting enough.
Besides, other DPS jobs have plenty of defensive skills already. For example, NIN has Shadeshift, Smokescreen and its own emnity dump skill.
This concept only really has three defensive skills too, the other two are more resource management.

The problem is they're superfluous. You wouldn't need the defensive skills in the first place without that debuff present. Flavor should not come at the expense of function. And for what it's worth, Samurai and Monk are the only DPS classes with multiple personal defensive cooldowns present on their kit rather than simply getting them from role actions, and each pair of abilities are already linked to one another on those two classes specifically in order to pair it down. Aggro management tools don't mitigate damage on you as much as they enable tanks to go ham at the moment. They're not actual mitigation in practice. Forced movement abilities can be used to maintain dps uptime by allowing the player to take risks, including those disengages on SAM/DRG. And the various defensive buffs/debuffs that affect allies or enemies are not personal by nature of what they target. They're party utility, and the majority of that is on the role action list too currently.

If you want some suggestions for how to make skill speed feel better within a kit, make more oGCD weaponskills styled after Empyreal Arrow so they benefit from skill speed. Similarly, Machinist's Ammunition mechanic could be fleshed out to accomplish something similar to a DoT effect. You could also use GCDs that are on stack-based timers, meaning you can only use them once every X weaponskills, but not tie them down to a combo. Buffs already kind of do this, but they have timers on them. It makes sense for the risk stacks, but outside of a few proper cooldowns I'd just experiment with non-combo rotations and see if something more fluid emerges.

[Seraphor]

While I agree that we should try to encourage using all stats, your proposed crit changes do not fit with how the game works currently. You have to pre-suppose that there is an artificial cap of 50% assigned to it to make this come close to working at all, and it still doesn't solve the problem of crit damage still being worth it. If you have to assume that SE's staff would make that kind of core mechanical change in the first place (even if it's tame compared to some of the suggestions people put up) then the better option is to simply assume it can't be done and implement something better based on what has been done before.

Pretty much every other title in the franchise has a hard cap of 50% crit except for some limited abilities that guarantee a crit, I'd be surprised if this wasn't ALREADY in FFXIV. Basically more than 50% crit is too OP and defeats the purpose of critical hits in the first place.
And if I am pre-supposing this is a change that's made... what's the problem with that exactly?

I'm sorry, but the fact that most meaningful content where you're using your kit to the fullest can take 8-10 minutes means the game will naturally average out the variance. Time is the biggest factor in getting the required sample size to ensure each member of a raid was able to contribute.

Exactly...

All you're accomplishing by nerfing the potencies to compensate for that crit rate and adding lots of low cooldown oGCDs is making every hit feel less powerful

Disagree, you'll hit crits more often, making you feel more powerful.

but over all make the class more busy

...how?
The idea is that you're hitting hard and fast, haphazardly swinging your hammer/mace around, building up momentum that makes your attacks hit harder, you're not doing acrobatics.
The weaponskills might be a bit quicker with higher SkS, but there's not that much to weave besides the Chain skills, which you'd perhaps weave 3 per 6-weaponskill-combo, so certainly no double weaving.
Meanwhile you have DRK, which is most certainly a slow, heavy job, and you're constantly double weaving with Dark Arts and such.

On that note, you've created a dragoon-like GCD rotation that's honestly more limiting than it should be (especially regarding AoE) with no real payoffs yet, which is something I'd look at. I'd start with removing the DoT ability and think of something more creative to replace it. That's one of the main limiters of skill speed when it comes to melee classes compared to BLM. BLM can throw its only DoT out when it wants to. Combo classes have to avoid clipping, whether it's their GCD or DoTs. Better to scrap the one DoT and work from there.

Thank you, this is something constructive that I could think about.

The problem is they're superfluous. You wouldn't need the defensive skills in the first place without that debuff present. Flavor should not come at the expense of function. And for what it's worth, Samurai and Monk are the only DPS classes with multiple personal defensive cooldowns present on their kit rather than simply getting them from role actions, and each pair of abilities are already linked to one another on those two classes specifically in order to pair it down.

And the problem with adding another DPS with defensive cooldowns is...?
I would revise the skills to make the two purely defensive skills exclusive, so that they can't be stacked. One is then not so different to DRGs, and the other is essentially a DPS Eye-for-an-Eye, and both can be used on party members in order to boost own DPS via gained job gauge resource.
Meanwhile MNK has it's own 10% damage reduction, plus a party-wide Convalescence. I don't see the problem...

If you want some suggestions for how to make skill speed feel better within a kit, make more oGCD weaponskills styled after Empyreal Arrow so they benefit from skill speed. Similarly, Machinist's Ammunition mechanic could be fleshed out to accomplish something similar to a DoT effect. You could also use GCDs that are on stack-based timers, meaning you can only use them once every X weaponskills, but not tie them down to a combo. Buffs already kind of do this, but they have timers on them. It makes sense for the risk stacks, but outside of a few proper cooldowns I'd just experiment with non-combo rotations and see if something more fluid emerges.

Again thanks for some constructive feedback, however this sounds like it's starting to go in a direction I don't intend for this job and which I don't think would fit into the Riskbreaker/Foebreaker identity.

[Grimoire-M]

Pretty much every other title in the franchise has a hard cap of 50% crit except for some limited abilities that guarantee a crit, I'd be surprised if this wasn't ALREADY in FFXIV. Basically more than 50% crit is too OP and defeats the purpose of critical hits in the first place.
And if I am pre-supposing this is a change that's made... what's the problem with that exactly?

You're pre-supposing a change that makes all of the current crit-rate raid buffs nearly worthless at this current raid tier, and certainly discourages stacking them together. Of course I'm against it. It's a fundamental change to the game that requires more work to accommodate than the class itself is worth. I would honestly say that a better but muckier route would've been to bake proc-rate potency boosts into each ability instead if you want to double down on the variance aspect, but I still feel that misses the point of a heavy weapon class.

Disagree, you'll hit crits more often, making you feel more powerful.
...how?

The idea is that you're hitting hard and fast, haphazardly swinging your hammer/mace around, building up momentum that makes your attacks hit harder, you're not doing acrobatics.
The weaponskills might be a bit quicker with higher SkS, but there's not that much to weave besides the Chain skills, which you'd perhaps weave 3 per 6-weaponskill-combo, so certainly no double weaving.
Meanwhile you have DRK, which is most certainly a slow, heavy job, and you're constantly double weaving with Dark Arts and such.

I disagree on the fast part. And Crits don't make players feel more powerful, big numbers in general do. Like I said, you don't need to add weaker but more frequent hits in order to accomplish padding out variance. You get 24 GCDs per minute minimum assuming full uptime. The game's design does that for you already. That was my point. Hell, BLM already does the job of a hard hitting nuke that doesn't have a single oGCD they have to weave in their rotation except for mobility, and arguably they accomplish the concept you're shooting for already within the caster role. I'm not going to preclude a melee class from wanting to feel like Warrior or them, but I don't think you've hit that aspect with your current kit. By going for speed, you've missed the opportunity to add more meatiness to your rotation.

The goal theme of a heavy weapon melee class that focuses on critting in the first place is to see BIG numbers at a slower pace, not lots of little ones all the time. They should not feel like a Monk, or Bard, or Machinist. I've played Bard for two tiers, and played Summoner now and in Heavensward, and I can tell you they don't hit hard. They hit a LOT, yes, but not hard. I don't get a meaty, big hit feeling from most attacks on BRD, except the one time I've ever seen a Barraged Refulgent Arrow land a triple direct crit for 100k in aggregate, and that was still split across three consecutive hits between 30-36k that flashed up consecutively, making it feel rapid, not hard hitting. Akh Morn and Deathflare come close to half of that if the stars align, but they get pressed once every 30 seconds when averaged out. Fester used to be up there in burst during ARR but has since fallen out of favor. You use that three times relatively quickly in a minute, which is a lot, but each hit is still small. Fell Cleave, Fire IV, Foul, and Midare, on the other hand? Those hit hard by themselves, and when you direct crit on them, you notice it FAR more because of it, because you see their damage numbers individually, rather than it getting crowded in the noise of 3-4 other hits between each GCD.

The frequency you're pressing oGCDs overall in the first place and the amount of attention you have to pay to which you press next creates that busy feeling I described. You're basically spamming Temper twice every three hits with the current numbers unless you intentionally limit its cooldown because it's potency per momentum ratio is higher than everything else (something to fix, by the way), and you still have to track your momentum bar due to the staggered momentum costs even if you do limit it, resulting in the pain skills being spammed first (likely once every 3.5 GCDs if they were the real focus, depending on auto attacks), then the saps, if there's ever room.

It's funny you mention DRK because they actually avoid this issue due to the fact you know exactly when to press Dark Arts for filler and their lowest cooldown oGCD aside from it is Plunge at 30 seconds, only deviating in feel when you need TBN or want to DA Dark Passenger (meaning you just drop your next few DAs on Souleater if you need to), have Blood Weapon running, or have enough Blackblood to spend. And in regards to Blackblood, each of those abilities has a hefty 50 blood cost, and requires you to use the GCD to spend two of them while not disrupting your combos, which means you don't need to pay too much attention to them, provided you never let yourself cap. They have their busy moments for sure due to their staggered cooldowns, but they're not nearly as bad as any of the DPS classes at all, excepting maybe BLM and RDM.

And the problem with adding another DPS with defensive cooldowns is...?
I would revise the skills to make the two purely defensive skills exclusive, so that they can't be stacked. One is then not so different to DRGs, and the other is essentially a DPS Eye-for-an-Eye, and both can be used on party members in order to boost own DPS via gained job gauge resource.
Meanwhile MNK has it's own 10% damage reduction, plus a party-wide Convalescence. I don't see the problem...

Little, in of themselves. The only problem I have with it is that you make it necessary by overdoing the penalty on the Risk debuffs. I don't even have a problem with the utility in of itself, but you could use some of those slots to add more DPS cooldowns, tune up their AoE, or add spike abilities the class is lacking, again playing into that heavy weapon theme of big, infrequent, inconsistent damage that is nonetheless powerful in aggregate. The utility is pretty weak numbers wise too. Riddle of Earth at least gives you more than 10% mitigation after the first hit you take. Mantra I'd classify as party utility, not personal, and I made that distinction for a reason, because I don't have a problem with party utility if it's usable when you want it to be used. That is not the case here. Instill results in you using the abilities it interacts with nearly on cooldown for the sake of your own DPS more than anything, giving you even more more double weaving for little payoff, except when you know a mechanic and/or a weak healer is going to get you killed and can use one of them in time to avoid it over dropping Risk with Clearance. It's frankly a better idea to make those abilities more powerful and not affect your Risk stacks or Momentum in any manner so you can make the consideration of what to use independent of what's optimal for your DPS, but if you're doing that, then why have such a high Risk penalty in the first place? Flavor. That's it.

I made the leap to lowering the penalty and bonus on Risk because it fixes both of these problems and gives you room to address the rest.

Again thanks for some constructive feedback, however this sounds like it's starting to go in a direction I don't intend for this job and which I don't think would fit into the Riskbreaker/Foebreaker identity.

The main point there was the focus on avoiding the things that result in skill speed being a worse option as much as possible, and adding things that encourage stacking it instead. You certainly don't have to use oGCD weaponskills, an ammunition variant to replace a DoT, or a spike weaponskill like Midare that can only be used after X GCDs, but they fit in better with your stated goal of making skill speed good, hence the recommendation in the first place. I don't expect you to use them, but I do hope you consider why they fit in if that's your primary focus. But I don't believe it is, either.

I guess my main point is I feel the current kit doesn't really fit the traditional theme of what you're aiming for, nor does it fit with the current design paradigm SE has given us to work with. This is someone swinging a big 2-Handed Hammer or Mace in Heavy Armor absolutely recklessly. Which means they should have slower, heavier, wild swings, and while doing that they sometimes get to connect with a big, powerful hit that absolutely flattens their opponents. It wouldn't be out of place for some of their skills to have cast bars to suggest that wind up. Nothing you've put in there hits hard enough in order to achieve that, because you've pushed too hard on the 'high crit rate with a drawback' aspect of Risk and spent more time focusing on compensating for it. It needlessly limits your own concept currently. If you specifically narrowed in on 1-Handed Maces and were aiming for a lighter armored melee class, then it would be fine to have a lot of small hits and constantly float between 4-5 stacks like your current kit achieves, but that's another Striking gear class, not a Maiming one. It's certainly 'risky' in the sense it doesn't let you slow down and crits a lot, but it isn't as hard hitting as you've stated. Whether by slowing things down with more infrequent ability usage, consolidating the 'busy' moments with clearer periods of downtime, or tuning Risk down in order to allow for abilities that get to hit for massive damage and offer better utility, you need to address that. At the moment, this kit would play out more like a Monk or Machinist rather than Black Mage or Dragoon. The latter two classes and Samurai all have mechanics and potencies that are closer to the concept you're after, and so if you stick to a big hammer or mace I'd recommend adding more weight on your GCDs and tone down on how much you're doing between them in order to achieve that 'go big or go home' feeling. Or shift the aesthetics to striking class with a lighter blunt weapon. Right now, it's simply a mismatch.

[Ursa_Vonfiebryd]

Yes to this. I'm glad someone else in the free world played Vagrant Story. The Riskbreaker system was so unique for the time.

[Seraphor]

I do see where you’re coming from with small/quick hits and it feeling more like a light-armour class, so perhaps my initial thoughts of working in Skillspeed wouldn’t work out.

However I’m not keen on losing the Crit aspect of the concept, and in fact on looking more indepth into how Crit works in FFXIV, I don’t think this is a problem like you’re making it out to be.
As it currently stands, even with loads of Crit you’re only going to reach a max Crit rate of around 22% so a hard-cap of 50% Crit rate doesn’t seem very outlandish and not incompatible with anything currently in the game.

As for how that works with my proposed Risk stack values, lets say you did meld Crit, and assuming further progression in SB2 to round it up to 25% base crit rate:
1 Stack: 25% base crit + 5% stack crit = 30% total crit.
2 Stack: 25% base crit + 10% stack crit = 35% total crit.
3 Stack: 25% base crit + 20% stack crit = 45% total crit.
4 Stack: 25% base crit + 30% stack crit = 55% total crit.
5 Stack: 25% base crit + 50% stack crit = 75% total crit.

Vs someone who didn’t meld much Crit and had a base Crit rate of about 8%:
1 Stack: 8% base crit + 5% stack crit = 13% total crit.
5 Stack: 8% base crit + 50% stack crit = 58% total crit.

Without a hard cap, with such a high crit rate you’ll be hitting those crits so often that the low base potencies won’t be an issue, but of course your crits won’t deal quite as much damage as a crit from a DRG or a BLM.

With a hard cap, a crit melder is hitting that cap at 4 stacks, and being nearly there already at 3, which would make hitting those higher stacks detrimental due to only getting the defence debuff. The crit boost values could be lowered and still have the desired effect, perhaps as low as around 35% instead of 50% at 5 stacks would be ok. Therefore it’s not essential that you fully meld as much crit as possible, but some crit mixed with direct hit will still be beneficial.
In this case, base potencies could be increased a bit and you’d see those ‘bigger numbers’.

1 Stack: 25% base crit + 4% stack crit = 29% total crit.
2 Stack: 25% base crit + 8% stack crit = 33% total crit.
3 Stack: 25% base crit + 16% stack crit = 41% total crit.
4 Stack: 25% base crit + 24% stack crit = 49% total crit.
5 Stack: 25% base crit + 36% stack crit = 61% total crit.
At this point I’m not sure having a hard cap on crit makes too much of a difference either way so I’m not too fussed about losing that idea, but with a cap you’ll be encouraged to mix in more Direct Hit (and therefor leave that room for crit buffs to have an effect) so I’d rather keep that idea and assume that a 25% base crit rate isn’t going to be the norm, but something more realistic around 15~20% would be.

I see your first suggestion was more in line with this anyway, so I apologise for overlooking that, as I wasn’t fully appreciative of the fact that melding crit could get you as high as a 22% crit rate. So your figures seemed like a larger ‘hit’ to the concept than they really were, and a hard-cap of 50% being rejected when I didn’t think we could get anywhere near that anyway seemed uncalled for. I still stick by “for all we know, there is already a hard cap of 50% crit rate” though.
The defence penalties could be reduced in line so a maximum of 20% at 5 stacks too, and there your issue of being overly reliant on defensive cooldowns is somewhat addressed. I could also remove the mitigation from Reflect damage, making it purely an offensive buff (you still receive full damage but also still reflect 10%) whereby its only defensive nature comes from removing a Risk stack. Increase the MP/TP cost of Instill so that you’re not throwing these buffs out to party members everytime they come off cooldown, and does that help address those issues?

I said your previous advice on the AoE stuff was constructive, and so I would separate the AoE skill from the combo so it could be used more freely. Without wanting to add a whole other AoE combo however, because button bloat, I can only think of giving it the RDM Scatter treatment. A 50% chance of it combo’ing with itself basically, still giving some Risk stack generation and high damage procs.

As for weaving cooldowns, and such. I haven’t listed cooldown figures, but they’d be prohibitive enough that you couldn’t pop a Temper every 3 weaponskills, or spam the Pain skills. I’ve not fully mapped it out to settle on exact figures, but 30s at the very least for Temper seems about right. This means that you will only actually hit 5 stacks for a maximum of 5s every 30s, you’ll spend most of your time at 4 stacks.
And because 5 stacks and 50 momentum wouldn’t be available as often as you think, placing the Pain skills on the GCD, much like Bloodspiller, would be viable. Then you have an indirect 30s cooldown on Crimson pain, and Phantom Pain becomes a valid AoE skill you can use every few GCDs instead if necessary.
This is what I always intended in practice, even if I hadn’t settled on the 30s figure, and I think it ticks the boxes you’ve suggested already.
I could also potentially bump Temper from 10 momentum to 20, but no higher as the intention is for a full 100 momentum to be enough to use three of those skills in a combo chain.

[Grimoire-M]

You also have to factor in that in certain spike windows with the right classes you can have up to 37% additional crit rate (15% Chain Stratagem for 15s on one target, Litany at 15% for 20s, 5% AST using Spread Spear over 20s, AoE, BRD passively giving 2% via songs, near 100% uptime, these are additive, not multiplicative) stacked on the whole party over a short but still substantial period of 15s, 52% if an AST caters to you specifically by giving you an enhanced Spear. This is admittedly only 15s, about 6-7 single target GCDs out of every six minutes, but this still happens twice per most fights, under potion timings no less, and these buffs still get used independently from one another in-between. That's the problem with a hard cap. Without the cap you're able to overcap crit rate with raid buffs in specific scenarios without factoring in gear at all, which is why I initially said to lower the rate to 30% at 5 stacks. It's still unreasonable as you've noted, but puts you on par with where you wanted Risk to be in power while still mostly working within the system we've got.

This is also why I find Bard particularly frustrating, to be quite honest, because they get to basically triple the length of these ridiculous windows for themselves thanks to DoT snapshotting and it plays heavily into their performance. Access to these buffs can make or breaks the classes that are that dependent on crit, which worries me about your concept (though really as long as you don't do what BRD does and extend the benefit of the window somehow, then it's fine). Yet this kind of synergy is also why there can't be a hard cap implemented in the game at all. Because most of it is intentional.

The alternative involves a juggling act between these raid buffs to ensure they never overlap while maximizing their individual benefits under what's attainable with gear, which SE does not want to enforce in their design. I get the idea that you might want a melee DPS that can crit so hard that they don't need these buffs, but SE does not like that approach to balancing classes. It's not good that this can be done and abused heavily on Bard specifically but SE would also not want your alternative, where it makes you weaker with certain classes instead. It would make these raid buffs needlessly frustrating to coordinate around for everyone and specifically provide nothing to your kit. It's essentially the Bard problem in reverse, an anti-synergy as opposed to a synergy. Thankfully, even though they were dumb enough to let Piercing and this sort of stacking exist for so long, they have gone on record to say that the former makes both of the ranged DPS too good and are starting to look at it, finally, so I hope that means they'll address it (and hopefully skill speed being garbage too) next expansion.

I think you could honestly accomplish a similar feeling to the current Risk concept with a built-in baseline proc rate tied to Risk specifically that randomly boosts the potencies of certain skills by 30-40% rather than relying on a stat that already exists. It feels clunky, but it would allow you to add traits to tune all of your kit around it based on level, and wouldn't affect gear priorities at all. You would still be able to create that hard hitting but inconsistent feeling and focus more on leaving more room for skill speed as a result too if you wanted.

I'm fine with the concept you have in mind for the momentum changes too. Just keep in mind that the most efficient option will almost always be to simply spam the highest potency per momentum ability or GCD during each 5 risk stack window as much as possible, regardless of what that is. A combo potency on the saps/chains could fix this if they're oGCD, but feels a little counter-intuitive putting a combo chain on an oGCD.

And really if you want to address the defence issue, just make it only apply to physical defence or more to it than magic defence. There was a time in ARR when DRG was simply kicked from raids due to not having enough of the latter on their gear. That, especially when combined with old BfB, lead to unavoidable one-shots even under stoneskin in some cases. It helped start the 'tank the floor' meme just as much as the old jump animation locks did. Last I recall it had something to do with the mitigation formula, making direct boosts to the both defence stats far weaker than they seemed and the penalties even stronger. Maiming gear had to be buffed on the mdef side to match Monk, but they still have higher physical defence built in compared to Striking gear, so it should work out fine at 20% there.

[Ursa_Vonfiebryd]

There... is so much math in this post. I think some backstory to the Riskbreaker job itself might help further your cause, from a conceptual standpoint. Because you can skin a melee job any way you want really, but for the Vagrant Story aspect at least, well... There's an overall aesthetic trying to be achieved. I haven't played FF11 but I still occasionally boot up VS, so let me give you the layman's view on that.


In Vagrant Story, Riskbreaker is treated as a specialist job even though it's basically all you get. You get various skills (some from just doing the story and some from dungeoning) that you program to 3 of your controller buttons (I think one button was a cancel). Each successful skill strike adds to your Risk Gauge. Timing is important. Vagrant Story has a pseudo 'Style' system like DMC where successful combos/chains make it so you can use your flashy finishers, called Break Arts. These were different based on the weapon you were equipped with (there was one for bare-handed too, I believe) and also had different buffs/side-effects as well. The better your timing, the faster you could use your Break Arts, but conversely the more risk added to your gauge per strike. Why would this be bad? Well...


Here is how Risk works: the higher your Risk the higher your potential critical severity, but the lower your hit percentage. Like... REALLY LOW. With a full Risk Gauge you can expect 2% or lower for hit percentage but the hits you do land hit much much harder. Thus making Risk management your priority. Generally speaking anything higher than 75% Risk Gauge (maxed at 100) is pretty much unfeasible in a combat sense. Vagrant Story allowed you a full range of spells as well but these were not a part of the combo system, though they also affected your Risk Gauge. (Everything but items did, really).


So the OP is spot on with the Crit aspect of this job. Implementation would be fairly easy. Successful combos would fill your Risk Gauge, letting you use various finishers or Break Arts depending on how high the gauge (each Break Art would deplete the gauge depending on Risk cost). I don't see the Risk system translating over directly (like with the penalties) but it'd work a lot like other jobs with such a gauge (like Warrior and Ninja) so it wouldn't be too much of a learning curve. Break Arts should have various buffs or debuffs and having a full or partial Risk Gauge should like... buff your critical chance with a full one granting a buff to critical damage (but not enough to stay in that state--I'm thinking of doing duties in lower levels where finishers are often not available). Like maybe 1-50 Risk Gauge giving you a Crit chance buff and a 51-100 giving you a Crit damage buff (or however that works here now--it's changed around a bit since I last mucked around with it). There should be a few skills you can spend Risk/MP/TP on that do some magical damage. I'd personally like to see 'Banish' since that spell already exists in FF14 and was an awesome instant-death spell in Vagrant Story.


Sorry I'm not familiar with the Foebreaker class, but WE'VE DONE ALL THE WORK FOR YOU SE--lets do this.

[Seraphor]

Hmm.. so perhaps lower the crit rate of stacks a little more, change the defence penalty to just physical defence, and add an additional effect of "increases potency of critical hits by%"?