Please Bring Back DoTs and Debuffs

[Mikey_R]

The ones where you watch your opponents die by stacking DoTs on them, or stop them in their tracks or make them more vulnerable with debuffs helpful to the whole party like slows, or lowering the boss' damage and defense. I enjoy managing all of those things, and I love being this annoying thorn in the boss' side that they just can't get rid of, ...

I will preface this by saying nothing against a DoT job, I would like to see one, I just can't cut out that part without losing context for the rest.

Starting with slow. How would that work? a boss takes longer to cast their actions? How is that going to affect fight balance? If a mechanic has multiple casts, does the slow down mess up debuff timings? It is just something that is going to mess up fight flow and is likely to cause more problems that it solves.

As for a debuff that lowers the bosses damage, I will use HW as an example. WAR's Storm's Path effect was a 10% damage down, PLD had a 10% strength reduction on Rage of Halone (which was in the enmity combo so it was a DPS loss for PLD as well) and DRK had [old] Delirium, which was 10% INT down. Now, Storm's Path and Delirium were both 100% uptime debuffs and, as a result, the Devs mentioned that they had to take into account these debuffs when designing raid damage, however, with the way things were setup, you would have WAR then either PLD/DRK dependant on what the main damage was from the raid (mainly DRK at the time) and, to use something else, you effectively lost some free mitigation and it went against the idea of every job being viable for every encounter. A PLD/DRK combo was going to be inferior to either of them paired with a WAR. You could make it so that all tanks could reduce damage by 10%, however, then comes the point of, well, if you have it up virtually all the time anyway, is there really a point to it? You wouldn't be mitigating anything extra as the devs would just increase the damage to compensate, so it really wouldn't be doing it's job then. Stuck something like that on a DPS, where you could have 100% uptime, and it could either be an amazing job, or terrible and it would all be down to it's damage. You could make it a cooldown so that it isn't a 100% uptime, though Feint and Addle exist.

As for reducing damage, I will make the assumption that it is for all damage (see HW piercing meta for why restricting damage types is not healthy), of which, it would have to be very very low (assuming 100% uptime). If it is more of a debuff during the burst window, that then comes down to encounters where you have to burst down groups of enemies. You can have a debuff that affects the one enemy, or a raid buff that hits everyone and benefits everyone for the whole time. I would say this is one of the contributing factors as to why the piercing/blunt/slashing debuffs were removed.

What you also have to consider is that every job has to be able to clear everything with any (sensible) party composition. With that in mind, I can see a heavy debuff job either being too strong, or too weak, which makes it either mandatory or not desired.

[MagiusNecros]

Slow won't work on bosses but it will work on mobs. Just like Stuns, Silences, Deep Freeze, and the rest. Damage Down can be done since Bad Breath exists.

I think a DoT caster should be strong and rival Black Mage.

Blue Mage when allowed into content can clear the content in parties just fine. So the argument of must be good for party content is rather moot.

Only time content isn't cleared is when you are undergeared and not doing meta comp in Savage which most players don't do Savage anyway.

The job class should be about fun. Not about being a spreadsheet minmaxer.

A lot of people find "debuffers" fun as opposed to burst DPS.

[Renathras]

Nothing I want to add to the conversation, other than clearing up something...

So no, Chain Stratagem will not turn into a "crit rate version of Divination" just for being a debuff.

Fair enough. No idea then. Devs work in strange ways.

[Keichi]

I never understand the usefullness of dots. Having skills, who are doing dmg without your input is nice. But, wouldnt it be better, when the skill simply is doing the full dmg at once?

Dots are looking so slow. And is anti climaxing, when the enemy is falling down.

[Boffy]

A DoT job's appeal, at least for me, lies in the compounded effects of several DoTs at once steadily ticking, making the enemy's health constantly sink rather than taking off bigger chunks with big hits.
The DoTs currently in the game don't feel like that at all, and especially the healer DoTs feel like they're literally only there to provide minor busywork.

The entertainment value would come from optimally refreshing, and watching that steady damage roll in as opposed to alternating between burst and wet noodle.

[ReiMakoto]

I never understand the usefullness of dots. Having skills, who are doing dmg without your input is nice. But, wouldnt it be better, when the skill simply is doing the full dmg at once?

Dots are looking so slow. And is anti climaxing, when the enemy is falling down.

You can make bursty damage that involves dots and satisfying loops.

Example: A class has 2 dots, one which 15s and one that lasts 30s, casting these dots again extends the duration of these dots up to a maximum of 45s.

This class could then have their "filler" ability deal more damage for each dot being on the enemy, but casting it removes 10s of duration from both dots.

Burst windows could then be created around off global refreshes, off global dot duration spenders, dot freeze windows etc.

[Ralphe2449]

Even with a burst focus design you can still create a dot focused class, there’s dot classes that are focused on burst, you focus on stacking up a number of dots and during a burst phase you can either use something that increases that amount of dot damage by a lot, or a skill that does damage based on amount of dots or simply a skill that consumes dots at enough stuck for a high burst dot etc

Many ways to create a dot focused burst class, and we definitely need one

[Tulzscha]

I never understand the usefullness of dots. Having skills, who are doing dmg without your input is nice. But, wouldnt it be better, when the skill simply is doing the full dmg at once?

Dots are looking so slow. And is anti climaxing, when the enemy is falling down.

This is true, dots are inherently flawed in most games without additional mechanics to support them, and with additional mechs like making dots pop immediately you just have a burst job with extra steps.

The primary upside is having constant outgoing damage without having to do anything giving you more time to do things like deal with boss mechs or use utility. The best case scenario is having 2-4 enemies on which to maintain dots for a long period of time, that's where dot jobs truly shine, especially if the enemies are not stacked. Unfortunately none of these things are very relevant in FFXIV.

Regardless I still prefer my enemies to slowly rot or bleed to death. Dot jobs can offer a higher skill cap to keep jobs interesting, depending how they're designed. Dots can be interacted with in a lot of ways which technically burst jobs could emulate but it doesn't feel the same, for example having dot ticks proc other abilities or resources means you're kind of gaining things for free and with multiple targets it can get nutty which is super fun imo.

[MagiusNecros]

Personal testing has shown BLU could function as a DoT specialist with Primal bursts given that stacking Bristled SoT, Bristled Mustard Bomb(you have just enough time to bristle ONE MB off of the first PS), Bristled Aquabreath is doing 2600-3200 damage every tick and your filler spells do about 2200-2600 when they aren't crits so you have phases where you are doing around 5k damage every GCD for 3-5 GCDs(tested on lvl71 mobs). A bit more with Feather Rain.

If it wasn't for Mustard Bombs Lightheaded requirement from Peripheral Synthesis I could see a BLU DoT build being viable outside of Primal Bursts.

If they removed that prerequisite off of PS then MB could be an amazing attack to use considering bosses are immune to Lightheaded which is factored as a Stun debuff in the debuff table)

I kinda think it should considering you have to do a Omega raid to get those skills.

Hoping the BLU update(whenever it happens) expands on DoTs in some form.

[Inanegrain]

While dots seem interesting... FF14 is not good with dots/debuffs. I'd be neutral on it if it didn't have a glaring issue which I've posted a thread about before.
It'd be another choice for people to choose, but, this issue that shouldn't exist makes it a concern more likely to occur if it does become a thing.

Too many debuffs will prevent anymore debuffs from being applied, easily seen in populated hunts/fates, somewhat uncommon in bozja, shouldn't happen in 8 mans thanks to smn no longer needing dots, and likely to happen in 24 mans depending on the jobs you get. People get screwed over if they're all rprs, or any job that commonly has uptime of debuffs at the boss at any given moment. Some people would not have any effect on 60/120 windows because of the excessive amount of "debuffs" that should've been buffs, i.e. ta and rpr

Then there's too many buffs forcing effects to not apply, which I've rambled before as it shouldn't happen, but can happen in 8 mans coincidentally. In which I lost an entire IR as WAR cause I didn't expect to be overbuffed in zodiark ex.