Buff/Debuff Overwrite Suggestion

[Burningskull]

Everyone knows that when two NIN's use Trick Attack right after one another the buffs don't stack they overwrite one another. Same with Ranged's Defense, DNC's Technical Step buff, and I'm sure there are others.

What if instead of overwrite or stacking so that Trick Attack now did 20% Damage Increase or DNC's buffs suddenly giving 10% or 15% Damage Increase to the entire party, they instead added to the duration.

So if 2 NIN's used Trick Attack back to back instead of having a 20% damage up for 10s the mob would have the regular 10% damage up for 20s. Same for the other things that don't stack.

This IMO would help regular players out that already don't care about the overwriting and Raiders would still be able to plan out when they wanted each party member to use what buff.

[Seraphor]

That sounds a little too easy and 'hand-holding'. There'd basically be no penalty to improper timing.

One thing they could do, is allow buffs like that to form stacks, but have successive stacks have diminishing returns.
1 stack of Trick attack gives a 10% debuff.
2 stacks of Trick attack give a 15% debuff.

This way, it certainly wouldn't be worth having two Ninja's, but if you did, and their buffs overlapped, it wouldn't be wasted, but there's still incentive to time them apart.

[Burningskull]

I don't know about easy and hand-holding. However right now one of the jobs, NIN or DNC, isn't getting the most out of their attacks. If one of them postpones their Trick or Technical to line up then that job will effectivly get less uses out of their attacks. Where as this way they could use those attacks and technically do more damage cause they are getting to use their attacks more often.

[Taranok]

That sounds a little too easy and 'hand-holding'. There'd basically be no penalty to improper timing.

One thing they could do, is allow buffs like that to form stacks, but have successive stacks have diminishing returns.
1 stack of Trick attack gives a 10% debuff.
2 stacks of Trick attack give a 15% debuff.

This way, it certainly wouldn't be worth having two Ninja's, but if you did, and their buffs overlapped, it wouldn't be wasted, but there's still incentive to time them apart.

There's nothing handholdy about a system where players are expected to play their class with them being the only example of it, but sometimes being thrust into a system where you have multiple copies of the same class. Savage raids require you to have unique classes across the board, no duplicates, so you're expected to play the class as if no one else is there of the same class.

While I'm not certain buff stacking versus flat duration increases is the correct way to go about it, it's simply a fact that the current system is also not how the game is, strictly speaking, intended to be played.

[Ardox]

That sounds a little too easy and 'hand-holding'. There'd basically be no penalty to improper timing.

One thing they could do, is allow buffs like that to form stacks, but have successive stacks have diminishing returns.
1 stack of Trick attack gives a 10% debuff.
2 stacks of Trick attack give a 15% debuff.

This way, it certainly wouldn't be worth having two Ninja's, but if you did, and their buffs overlapped, it wouldn't be wasted, but there's still incentive to time them apart.

Most classes have burst phases and having a stackable debuff would be less punishing than having an extended debuff in my opinion..

In both case, you'll lose some efficiency anyway (either the buff is so long everyone had time to do their burst phase and are now back to their standard rotation or you get a slightly bigger debuff to use your burst on..)

Problem with upgrading the buff (10% to 15%) is: what will be that debuff duration? It's easy to implement +10 seconds to TA, it's less clear how your proposal will work. What happens if NIN2 use his TA at the 9th second of NIN1's TA? Do we now get another 10 sec of a 15% debuff? Do we get 1 sec of 15%? Something in between?

[Raldo]

I don't foresee this ever happening.

The obvious solution to your proposal is to simply not have the buffs/debuffs overwrite each other. Allow multiple Trick Attack debuffs on the target. Allow multiple Technical Step buffs. Etc. I suspect they foresaw that as some sort of balancing issue, and very specifically chose which buffs/debuffs weren't allowed to stack (after all, DoTs stack just fine). ASTs have been dealing with this "the other AST overwrote my card(s)" since they were introduced.

I believe the way it currently works is a conscious design decision.

[Ardox]

I don't foresee this ever happening.

The obvious solution to your proposal is to simply not have the buffs/debuffs overwrite each other. Allow multiple Trick Attack debuffs on the target. Allow multiple Technical Step buffs. Etc. I suspect they foresaw that as some sort of balancing issue, and very specifically chose which buffs/debuffs weren't allowed to stack (after all, DoTs stack just fine). ASTs have been dealing with this "the other AST overwrote my card(s)" since they were introduced.

I believe the way it currently works is a conscious design decision.

It is a design decision, and limited skills within the same job: AST/SCH also need to deal with that AST/SCH shield overriding each other, and back in SB, slashing/bludgeoning/piercing debuffs would override each other too.

The problem is that buffs and debuffs multiply each other: a 2nd vulnerability from Trick Attack would bring the total debuff to 21% not 20% and a 3rd would bring the total debuff to 33%. I don't know what the ideal solution would be, but overriding other's buff doesn't feel good..

[Acidblood]

While I agree, I think there would still need to be some loss for improper co-ordination (we have chat for a reason); and duration is a much better mechanism than potency (which gets messy very quickly).

One solution could be that overriding a buff adds half the remaining duration of the existing buff to the new buff, for example:
NIN-A does Trick Attack, 3s later NIN-B does Trick Attack; NIN-B's Trick Attack would apply with a duration of 10s + (7s / 2) = 13.5s

This would make it more punishing to override buffs early than late, so communication / co-ordination is still encouraged, but it's not a complete loss if you mess it up.

[Shurrikhan]

That sounds a little too easy and 'hand-holding'. There'd basically be no penalty to improper timing.

One thing they could do, is allow buffs like that to form stacks, but have successive stacks have diminishing returns.
1 stack of Trick attack gives a 10% debuff.
2 stacks of Trick attack give a 15% debuff.

This way, it certainly wouldn't be worth having two Ninja's, but if you did, and their buffs overlapped, it wouldn't be wasted, but there's still incentive to time them apart.

I'd still rather not have to deal with 3+ TA icons simultaneously present on a 24-man boss. And if we'd be doing this all just for NIN, well... TA is already absurdly powerful in 24-mans and easy to time in 8-mans on the off-chance you get two of them, so it'd be far from necessary.

Personally, I'd rather take the typical approach: allow up, say, a tenth of any buff's duration to roll over from the replaced application to the new one. It fundamentally mitigate the issue of stacking (de)buffs, but it does make it easier for players to skillfully circumvent the issue.

Simply put, it allows for a small window of leniency. Replacing Trick Attack in its last second would still render its full effective duration, as would replacing Demolish in its last 1.8 seconds (about a SkS-heavy GL4 GCD), Higanbana in its last 6 (allowing SAMs to alternate between early Higan and late Higan so that Tsubame-Gaeshi isn't such a pain in the ***), etc., etc.

Pipedream:

If I had to pick a system for combined stacking, however, I'd prefer to see applications both enhance potency and extend duration, with the least flat gains to whichever dimension (rate or duration) is larger. In this way, lower potency (de)buffs aren't necessarily made pointlessly long and stronger potency (de)buffs aren't necessarily made stupidly bursty. Moreover, the game doesn't have to recognize multiple stacks as to let them fall off individually. Instead, the duration and potency would simply calculated upon reapplication, never after. Gameplay-wise, this would mean one could choose between burst and sustain almost evenly, but with burst opportunities softened a bit.

Let's take some TA examples, starting with their effects being applied simultaneously.

Single TA: 10% effect for 10 seconds' duration => .1 effect * 10 seconds = 1 effect-second.
Two TAs: 14.14% effect for 14.14 seconds' duration => .1414 effect * 14.14 seconds = 2 effect-seconds.
Three TAs: 17.32% effect for 17.32 seconds => .1732 effect * 17.32 seconds = 3 effect-seconds.

The pattern here should be obvious: 1.414 is the square root of 2, 1.732 is the square root of 3, etc., etc.

Stacked perfectly atop one another, each evenly increases the potency of the prior stack(s) and extends their duration by the difference of sqrt(n) and sqrt(n-1).

But, let's try this with stacks not granted simultaneously. I have the math for this worked out, but my explanations could use a bit more rounding out, so let's just follow the numbers for now...

Here we will have 3 TAs, each launched 5 seconds after each other. T=first Trick Attack.

T=0: First Trick Attack.
T+0 to T+5 = 10% effect --> .5 ES.
T+5: Second Trick Attack. Adds [sqrt(2)-sqrt(1)] potency and extends its duration by 5.6 seconds. At this rate, TA will last a total of 15.6 seconds, up from the normal 14.14 in exchange for having missed the .414 modifier across the first 5 seconds, at 14.14% effect, to a total of 1.5 ES (the .5 remainder + 1 for the next stack).
T+5 to T+10 = 14.14% effect --> .707 ES.
T+10: Third Trick Attack. Adds [sqrt(3)-sqrt(2)] potency and extends its duration by 5.35 seconds. At this rate, TA will last a total of 20.95 seconds, up from the normal 17.73 in exchange for having missed the .317 modifier across the first 10 seconds, at 17.32% effect, to a total of 2.5 ES (the .793 remainder on S1/2 + .707 for its effect on stack 2 specifically + 1 for the final stack itself).
T+10 to T+20.9: 17.32% effect --> 1.793 ES.

Total: still 3 ES.

So, you can burst at 17.32% from the start for 17.32 seconds or stack it up gradually (a second and third each 5 seconds later) for a total of 20.9 seconds. No matter what, you get the same nominal Effect-Second value in total -- that is to say, exactly the same nominal contribution as if you used 3 TAs with zero overlap. Just decide how the burst should best be timed. You don't get a ridiculous 30% burst, but neither do you get a lumbering 30-second duration. Gameplay-wise, it's simple and clean.

It sounds complicated if you're looking at these decimal values as if they were random, but when you just put it in the square root terms of 1, 2, 3, etc., it's really quite simple. It's basically just finding equivalent (additional) area as you shorten one dimension or the other and then allocating that across its dimensions accordingly.

[KaiBa]

Nin with lower HP uses standard opener. Second ninja eagerly awaits to see if the first nin can perform that. Then presses trick attack roughly .5 seconds before first trick runs out to catch trick on trick damage. Suiton was extended this expansion so it is even easier now.

In SB, you would cast raiton in the opener then have to kassatsu -> suiton inorder to catch trick with your own but only to be absolutely disappointed that the other ninja never applied trick. If you were to use trick attack -> bhavachakra as an opener in a 24 man raid you could count using the timer instead of counting the gcds until your trick was overwritten and adjust accordingly. Although that's old news.

Absolutely no reason to change it. It helps to just say in /p that you would trick 2nd.