Shadowbringers RDM Wishlist

[Kabooa]

And truth is, I totally get that. DoTs are tedious to manage; timers in general are stressful. And don't even get me started on multi-dotting..

Personally I just find them boring. DoTs are the least imaginative way to add timing constraints to a job. It's all potency in the end. Why not have something -not a DoT- that effectively achieves the same thing. (A singular action that deals greater potency but gated so you don't just spam it)

For example, what we don't have or have too little of.

Delayed Burst - A back end ability that ticks down and deals damage. Like wildfire.

VerFreeze
Spell
30s Recast
Effect: Inflict the enemy with creeping cold for 15 seconds. After 15 seconds, the enemy suffers a flash freeze, taking 450 Ice Potency damage and generating 13 Black Mana.

Trigger Burst - Similar to Delayed Burst, but requires Activation and Detonation

(Since Black Mage stole the ability name)
Mana Surge
Weaponskill
Effect: Inflict latent aether onto an enemy for 45 seconds. If latent Aether is present, deals 100 potency damage, generate 2/2 mana and refreshes Mana Surge's duration. The potency increases by 40 and Mana generated by 1/1 for ever 3 seconds that pass. These bonuses are reset to 0 when Mana Surge is reapplied.

On-Hit Damage - Additional damage to every applicable attack

Biting Blade
Trait
Effect: Upon using Contra Sixte or Fleche, your Weaponskills deal an additional 40 potency per hit for 9 seconds.

Environmental Damage - Creating a foreign object / effect to further interact with the enemy.

VerFlood
Spell
Effect: Create a flood of water 10y behind you that travels 20y forward. The wave deals 180 water potency to enemies it strikes. The wave gains 80 potency for every 5y it travels, and travels 5y approximately every 6 seconds. Enemies can only be struck by flood once per 10 seconds. Only one Flood may be active at a time.

Amplifiers - A foreign object / effect you can target to cast spells into that enhance the overall effect.

Rose Nexus
Ability
Recast: 120s
Effect: Places a Rose Nexus at target location for up to 20s. Rose Nexus is targetable by your spells, storing 110% of the potency of the spells used upon it. Upon absorbing 5 spells, Rose Nexus detonates, causing enemies within 5y to take the stored potency as damage.

[Shurrikhan]

Rose Nexus
Ability
Recast: 120s
Effect: Places a Rose Nexus at target location for up to 20s. Rose Nexus is targetable by your spells, storing 110% of the potency of the spells used upon it. Upon absorbing 5 spells, Rose Nexus detonates, causing enemies within 5y to take the stored potency as damage.

This basically sounds like Impact's animation applied rightly. Nice.

[Archwizard]

Personally I just find them boring. DoTs are the least imaginative way to add timing constraints to a job. It's all potency in the end. Why not have something -not a DoT- that effectively achieves the same thing. (A singular action that deals greater potency but gated so you don't just spam it)

For example, what we don't have or have too little of...

A lot of these suggestions are unique, true, and I love them all on some conceptual level. However...

• Verfreeze and Mana Surge have only arbitrary differences from effectively being a DoT -- in fact Verfreeze literally is a DoT, just with ticks 15 sec apart instead of 3 sec; in fact, the more limited number of ticks would normally mean it has an even stricter timer than regular DoTs, if not for the cooldown you wrote in.
• While the damage on Mana Surge has to be manually inflicted, there's nothing to say that couldn't be tied to reapplying a DoT effect -- unless the phrasing is meant to imply that the damage from each burst constantly goes up over the fight, which could both be impractical for many encounters (like ones where the boss can't be targeted for lengthy periods) and flat-out imbalanced in others without a cap (to which reaching a cap would be little different from the heavy buildup for SMN). In either case, you're behaviorally just tying a DoT to the melee combo.
• Biting Blade... is just mechanically awkward, particularly since Contre Sixte and Fleche aren't often timed with our melee, but rather best served between Dualcasts, and often cast in succession (where the effect is not noted to stack); Corps-a-corps is the natural oGCD to hit right before our melee. I suppose Reprise could benefit, but the real question is whether the added damage from this synergy would outweigh the loss of our melee combo, which is just complicated.
• Verflood is an interesting concept that I think could be generally dissected and expanded upon, particularly in the discussion of giving Displacement an actual value, but if targets can only be struck once by each wave thrown out (unless kited along or facing a very large stationary target), then calculating the damage with a delay comes out very arbitrarily compared to just applying a 24-25 sec CD on it. Mechanically it's of very little difference from a persistent AoE (such as Shadow Flare), just that the area moves and the damage grows each tick. More importantly though, the logistics of the moving particle effects that persist over long portions of a fight, particularly without a recast timer preventing one from existing at all times per RDM, could cause a huge amount of lag.
• Rose Nexus would have been a fun toy to play with if our AoE was more limited (don't think I didn't see the Arcane Mage's Prism influence, you). In single target though it would exclusively become a trick on your burst setup, since you now do two Verfinishers in a row that can take up the first two slots, then can either exclusively fire longcasts at it for the last three OR use Manafication (since they share almost the same timer and Scorch allows us to end combos with up to 27/48, a mere 2 GCDs from a perfect setup) and tack on another two Verfinishers on the crystal. And this is all assuming it doesn't get a double-dip bonus from casting Embolden just before popping the last spell or two.

While a DoT may be boring maintenance, the point is that it alters the player's behavior during the base rotation to make it a little more irregular, even if only by a cast every few GCDs. A lot of these really don't even accomplish that much, and those that do are little different from DoTs themselves, so I can't really say they effectively replace a DoT's function.

And if we consider RDM as a job meant to be simple... then maybe these would fit better on another job.