There's one aspect of DNC design that bothers me...

[Raikai]

Greatly, and I don't see anybody else looking at it, so I wonder if this is an issue just for me?

The Fourfold Feather gauge
It's optimal that, to achieve the maximum potential at the Technical Step burst windows, we have to go through the whole pre-TS phases treating that gauge as if it had just "one slot", because we need to hoard 3 feathers for the burst phase.

What is the issue? Um, despite it probably not being an intentional design choice? Having a 1-slot feather gauge leads to a very inflexible charge system. We can't use our feather pool in a clever way because we need to save 3/4 of it, unless you want to risk reaching the TS phase starved of feathers.

What, then? My proposed solution is to have Flourish (the ability) also force the flourished weaponskills to have a 100% chance to proc a feather, this way we can align Flourish recast timer with TS and having an empty feather gauge when you reach it wouldn't be as bad

[OmegaStrongtan]

Yeah it kinda blows.
Wouldn't it fix DNC's DPS issue as well if Tactical finish automatically grants 4 stacks? ans normal finish grants 1?

[Connor]

This does suck, worst part for me is anytime I get to three feathers the four one just decides it never going to appear lol, except maybe when I hit Flourish after TS

Maybe it’s from playing Bard with Bloodletter procs, but I have fight against every instinct not to hit them as soon as they poor lol, my brain like can’t handle the fact they’re stackable for some reason.

Not sure where it’d go but I do think maybe having an ability grant even just 1 guaranteed feather would go a long way to making it feel smoother

[Labrini]

A good idea! I haven't felt like i've been sitting there with 3 "Fourfold feathers" for long though. I tend to not be worried too much about it with "Flourish" on the picture!

[Naoki34]

Yeah it kinda blows.
Wouldn't it fix DNC's DPS issue as well if Tactical finish automatically grants 4 stacks? ans normal finish grants 1?

DNC was created to bring his buffs to his team not to have a good dps, let's rerol BLM.

[ReiMakoto]

DNC was created to bring his buffs to his team not to have a good dps, let's rerol BLM.

But the buffs arn't making up for the lower damage atm, so you either buff the pdps or the rdps further, buffing the pdps is easier to balance around

[Burningskull]

I don't hoard feathers for burst windows. I use them when I get them. I'd rather somewhat consistent, as consistent as you can get with RNG procs, over the whole fight as opposed to having a high burst phase.

[OmegaStrongtan]

DNC was created to bring his buffs to his team not to have a good dps, let's rerol BLM.

DNC overall contribution is too low so why not add a tiny bit more pDPS bundled with a QoL change? And if you are telling me to reroll BLM I say nah, I was BLM main since vanilla and kinda bored of it.

I don't hoard feathers for burst windows. I use them when I get them. I'd rather somewhat consistent, as consistent as you can get with RNG procs, over the whole fight as opposed to having a high burst phase.

Bro, your overall DPS!

[ShadowNyx3]

The feathers are definitely working as intended.

There are two main features of stacking resource mechanics like feathers: 1) A means to pool your resources to expend them when you want 2) To prevent over-capping uses of the action in the event you can't use it.

Since the only way to earn stacks is to press a GCD, the second one doesn't apply to Dancer but the first reason fits the design concept and directly mirrors the other aspect of Dancer which is Sabre Dance since, ideally, you also want to pool your Esprit for a phase like Tech Step while also leaving wiggle room (3/4 stacks vs 80/100 Esprit). Having two job features pretty much designed in the same way tells me that it's working as intended.

It sounds like you just don't like the randomness of the job's mechanics which is a valid opinion to have about the feel of the job but I disagree with your assertion that it's not working as intended.

[Makeda]

I highly suspect dancer won’t get any buffs to it’s DPS until it’s a little less popular.

Right now it is just a super fun rotation and set of tools to play with, so it’s got a lot of “stick” for “flavor of the expac”. People don’t want to switch off of it... better to not get a static than to give up playing dancer... the lower performance is just going to be a thing until the community gets over it...

If you want a buff to dancer... you gotta fix some of the other DPS first so they get their fun back. All the former BRD and RDM and SAM and NJN and SMN players that switched to DNC because their job fun got sacrificed on the “class identity” altar of dancer...

Make all of them fun again, and when less than 103% of DPS players are DNC mains, SE will look at it.

As for balancing dancer...

I like that feathers are seriously random. I get that making them surefire off of certain other skills is an easy balance. But then we would just be sacrificing DNCers class identity.

I would rather buff the buffs... that’s a change in numbers that can be done without any impact to the random and playstyle... harder to do? Yes. But better long term result. If we just smooth out the random then all we’re doing is hurting the class identity of yet another FFXIV job in the name of homogenity