New Job Concept: Riskbreaker

[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.