Ninja DPS Output(A possible Fix)

[Shurrikhan]

Yeah especially with GL becoming a passive it feels a bit like it doesn't belong in the way the game plays anymore.
They could bring Shadowfang back as a combo and make Huton a passive.

I'd be fine with that. But, again, there are also other things we could do with Armor Crush / finishers besides just "DoT" or "More Direct Damage / Filler".

It's kinda strange to me that Huraijin didn't replace Armor Crush to begin with, why does crushing someones armor refresh my Huton lol?

On that note, they needed only change AC from "refreshing" to "granting" GL, move that from a "Combo Bonus" to "Additional Effect", and raise its potency floor and voila, you've got all the QoL of having Huraijin without needing to waste a button on it.

If not replace it with Shadowfang they could bring back Dancing Edge and make it buff Aeolian Edge or something so you're swapping between the two.

Honestly, I'm not at all a fan of rigid combo alternation, especially if you can't manipulate the timing in order to cause one to get in more of the buffed attacks (and fewer of the buffing attacks) under damage bonus windows.

I don't much like it in Leaden Fist, and that at least has Perfect Balance, a not-quite synced Demolish, and other manipulables to try to manage some actual complexity from what would otherwise just be convolution.

But regardless of what they do, Huton only makes for irritation in that often times tanks will insta pull in duty finder and welp your opener is messed up and you've just wasted a Ninjutsu.
And keeping it up with Armor Crush isn't rly all that fun.
At least Shadowfang taking its place it'd feel a little more interesting than just '' guess imma do my lower dmg combo now to refresh Huton ''.
The damage difference isn't even big which makes it feel even more pointless.

The saddest part is just that, even with Dancing Blade, Shadow Fang, and the (anti-synergy of) Duality making Armor Crush feel more vital, I preferred Huton being just a Ninjutsu than an ever-maintainable mechanic. At least, back then, if you got greedy at the wrong time, you would need to replace it, and the damage loss from Armor Crush was proportionately larger, so it more or less worked. But now? It's no more interesting than Storm's Eye, all while depending on a weird, clunky vulnerability.

:: Final note: I'm not a fan of the Hide mudra resets, regardless. I wish that, if they must insist on leaving Huton a cast, they'd just had Huton not trigger its cooldown if used outside of combat or within 3 seconds of entering combat (as a tank pulling a trial boss will put you into combat anyways), had Huton duration not drain outside of combat, and/or had one enter an instance with Huton already fully charged (a la Addersgall). And/or, again, just get rid of Armor Crush so there's much little point in a pre-combat Huton. Any combination of those solutions would be simpler and cleaner. (Of course, I'd also want adjustments to just about any mechanic that obliges more than a 5-second pull timer, so....)

tl;dr: In general, I kind of despise any buff that you'd want to keep 100% uptime on unless it's damn hard to do so and doing so would cause you to interact with more factors of complexity than, by outweighing other options, it'd remove. Since HW, Huton has been one such 100% uptime buff with little if any net gain to complexity. It was still basically fine to me, though, until we lost other our finishers (and Duality). Now it has basically no complexity, no real required effort, and has no times in which it'd ever be favorable to let it drop. That just pointlessly shallow, compared to other ways the capacity could be handled if it's supposed to be actively generated. Alternatively, we could just make that passive, have X-X-Ten perform some other effect (e.g., Bunshin, though such that it's only a potency gain over Raiton if used during downtime, before Trick Attack, or when Phantom Kamitachi [the remaining cooldown] can be cast), and change the purpose of Armor Crush to something more interesting.