New Job Concept: Riskbreaker

[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.