Dancer suggestion change in 5.1

[Super_Smiley]

I know some want a potency buff on certain weapon skills, but what if the feather system was changed instead? For example, after executing a Reverse Cascade, Bloodshower, Rising Windmill, and Fountainfall you are guaranteed a Fourfold Feather. Would some like this change or prefer to have certain weaponskills receive a potency increase?

[TaiyouSeishin]

I know some want a potency buff on certain weapon skills, but what if the feather system was changed instead? For example, after executing a Reverse Cascade, Bloodshower, Rising Windmill, and Fountainfall you are guaranteed a Fourfold Feather. Would some like this change or prefer to have certain weaponskills receive a potency increase?

Or maybe when using those skills you get a buff that that increases your chance to get a feather from that skill by 50% if you domt get one. which goes up to 100% if you dont get one again.

This will do a number of things. One, give a more consistent and dependable number for dps, guarantees you wont hit a skill 7 times (ive been that unlucky) and not get one, meaning wvery third time you WILL, and finally maintains the random proc that honestly i find rather fun about the class, without the feeling of punishment for no procs.

[Super_Smiley]

That sounds like an interesting idea. There is so many cool things I'm sure the development team can do. And I want to see more suggestions from other players on what they would like changed in patch 5.1.

[RivinStormfang]

Feathers definitely feel like the weakest point of dancer's rotation to me. The flourishing attacks feel pretty good with their current proc chance, but feathers being a proc-off-a-proc mechanic makes them feel very feast-or-famine, and any change to increase their proc rate would be welcome. I've gone entire dungeons with only a few feather procs despite getting plenty of flourishing attack procs, which just feels bad.

[Vendalwind]

I've never been a fan of rng proc based abilities.
So I like the idea of this change, but it would hurt dps even more if im understanding you correctly. unless you meant every one of the moves alone always guaranteed a feather.

TBH tho DNC doesnt need really any flow or QoL changes, but it does need a dps boost.

Thus to me the best thing that would be a simple change would be to move Saber dance to a oGCD, this would be a significant dps boost, and would raise the skill cieling slightly.

Beyond that these are the changes I'd make:

changing your idea a bit. Make it so using both single target flourish skills guarantee rather than random procs a feather. And both aoe flourish skills guarantee a feather. THe effect would be the 50% chance was removed but still required two moves, thus being the exact same average dps and removing one rng proc involved in the class.
This is hard to explain. trying again more clearly
To gain a feather one would need to use reverse cascade AND fountain fall. Proccing and using a second reverse cascade before using fountain fall would gain nothing.
This would slightly nerf dps, slightly because originally each was a 50% proc. now it requires two moves (maintaining the same balance as the already earlier 50%) but occasionally a proc might be wasted because of the randomness that enables them from basic fountain and cascade.

Then finally i would make feathers always trigger feather flourish, which again would remove a random proc and boost potency of the class again a little.

Also add a small dmg buff to en Avant so the dancers movement itself has to be placed properly to perform at its skill ceiling. by adding a small aoe dmg strike to the impact zone of en avant with its 3 charges dancers would keep two for mobility, but try to use the the 3rd charge on cooldown with positioning in mind to dmg the boss.

So in summary:
-Make Saber oGCD without potency loss, its meant to be strong, this is the main potency boost.
-remove feather procs randomness, slightly boosting the skill ceiling, while nerfing dps very mildly.
-remove feather flourish randomness, slightly boosting dps, and again removing another random proc.
-Add aoe to landing zone of en avant, making movement and dancing not just an escape effect, but an actual part of dancers dmg output.

[Shurrikhan]

What would I like to see?

• Chances to proc increase by 10% with each failure to proc.
• Espirit is now generated per step (upon Finish, with a further bonus for the Finish itself) and per Fan Dance I/II/III. Allies affected by Closed Position no longer play any part in Espirit generation.
• You now generate Espirit over time, to a maximum of 50, and enter or respawn into instances with 50 Espirit.
• Devilment now also increases your proc chance by a further 25% and has no cooldown but now costs 40 Espirit and lasts only 12 seconds.
• Closed Position CD reduced to 10 seconds.
• Saber Dance is now oGCD, but triggers the GCD (like old Empyreal Arrow), allowing more nearly its full potency and still fully displaying its animation while making it a bit more fluid and reactive. It, too, now costs 40 Espirit, down from 50.
• The percentage damage provided by Steps reduced while their utility and agility is greatly increased. Standard Step and Technical Step now trigger a 50% GCD but are themselves triggered outside of the global cooldown, Standard Finish and Technical Finish GCD time reduced from a full GCD to 50% of a GCD and Emboite, Entrechat, Jete, and Pirouette are reduced to 30% of a GCD.
• Steps made mostly free-form, choosing between Damage and Life-steal (Emboite), Movement Speed and Attack Speed (Entrechat), Healing Dealt and Received (Jete), and Critical Hit and Direct Hit Chance (Pirouette). You may pick the first move, and two options are made available to you per step thereafter.
  At Finish you also inflict additional damage and heal self and partner accordingly, grant a brief burst of movement and attack speed, grant a burst of HP and MP, and/or immediately grant a greatly increased critical strike chance on their next critical-capable action.
• Standard Step cooldown now scales with GCD speed (think Drill, or formerly Empyreal Arrow). Between the two, all DNC skills in some way scale with Skill Speed, while Skill Speed also increases Espirit generation.
• Improvisation does mostly the same thing as Technical Step now, except that its "Finish" is produced with every Step atop a brief buff.
• Your Closed Position partner using a movement skill increases your movement speed by 30% for 2 seconds, and En Avant generates 30% movement speed for 2 seconds for them.
• <Potency adjustments>

...

Adjustments made. I just tied the burst of activity to Devilment itself, avoiding any future rampant scaling issues instead, leaving such to only overpower further the already overpowered Monk.
However, I have to fundamentally disagree, in kind, with removing choice of buffs. A Dancer absolutely should be attentive to what buff works best for whom and at what times. That's kind of the whole point of playing a support, instead of just an otherwise pure DPS who loses rDPS in solo play.

[Vendalwind]

snip

I disagree on principle with a few of these. Not saying it's all bad, just want to point out some problems that some of these could cause given you might not have thought about the consequences.

1: would make crit the only way to build dancer. I HATE being forced into a single stat. And the boost it would give it is huge already. at only 2000 crit you already have 14.8% crit chance, meaning from this point on your chances would already be at least 55 with the 10% gaining each miss as well. thats WAY more than the current 50% over a long duration. It would be such an out balance that dancers would nearly be required to use crafter gear some so they could overmeld crit further. This is just a bad idea from my perspective that forces less interesting sub stat interplay. I really dislike how some classes are stuck in one substat.

3: Less team interplay isn't really fun. Espirit being linked to a player I feel like was a good choice even if it isnt super reliable.

5: I just think this over complicates devilment, and the trade off might make it weird between it and Sword.

6: I love this idea. Reducing closed position would make some dance partner switching mid combat for burst windows an actual positive gain. Drastically increases the team coordination and skill ceiling for this class.

8: this has some issues because of skill speed, and how server tick works in this game. My experience with mudras as a ninja tells me this would be nice, but probably wont ever happen unless they can fix the servers somehow. (tied to gcd would cause technical issues, and make the class ping reliant)

9: This is another idea that has already been tested in game, and removed. AST. the devs basically removed it cause certain things were just more valuable than others, additionally skill speed buffs are a bad idea as seen from AST's card because they can directly mess up certain characters rotations as un-intuitive as that sounds. Additionally this would just make it too much like old AST. My mains right now (true main is NIN) are DRK, AST, DNC, and NIN. I do not like it when one class effectively steals a mechanic from another class. This would be stealing from AST.
Im actually somewhat happy with the dances, and dont feel they are the part of the class that needs to be touched.

10. Improv could use a change, but im not sure another effective raid buff is the right choice. More dancing is a good thing, but too heavy on the rdps side and any class becomes unplayable outside of statics because SE does have to do some balancing with the skill ceiling in mind.

11: I love this idea too! Dancers should be able to do SOMETHING with their en avant. I also would posit adding the damage bonus I mentioned in my earlier post to it. I've wanted movement speed buffs for a long time, because they are not game breaking, but work as an interesting survivability mechanic.

[TaiyouSeishin]

Personally i think espirit should be changed a little. Rn its a CHANCE to get it (which is not what the tooltip tells me) id rather it give you espirit for each skill you and your partner do, but it gives you like, 2 or 4.. 5... something so you have direct generation.

[Crushnight]

I'd personally like;
-Sabre Dance to become ogcd with 1s recast (currently the only skill i feel like i was punished for too good rng)
-Espirit to always be gained off a successful proc. This will inherently increase our pdps without affecting rotation when combined with above.
-Forefold feathers rng increased to 75% chance still a proc of a proc but much better sided after getting the 1st proc.

[Neela]

Personally the only change I’d like to see is saber dance becoming ogcd- that would be enough : /