Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
Death's Design
Back in ARR and HW they used to have what I'd dub, "Execution" skills, and these actually persisted in some form up into Stormblood.

There was Mercy Stroke which came from Marauder and was available to use on WAR, DRK, PLD, DRG, and MNK. It was a 200 potency oGCD where if you killed the enemy with it, it'd heal you by 20% of your maximum HP. Fairly niche for its reward use, but for WAR main it was a 40 sec oGCD available the second the enemy got to 20% of their own HP, which in a raid fight meant that the last 20% of the fight you had more damage going out. For non-WARs it was a 90 second oGCD. It was the skill that allowed DRK to actually solo Turn 4 back in 3.2, not a big deal, but getting that heal was make or break at that level.

BRD has one that was like 15 second oGCD. I can never recall its name, but it was a big way for them to spike damage towards the end of boss fights. Misery's End I think. I don't think it had a reward, but it was basically free 4 actions per minute towards the last 20% of raid fights. Kind of a big deal.

SAM in Stormblood had Ageha, which gave 10 Kenki even if it didn't kill and then like 30 if did. Another nice thing to have towards the last 1/5th of long boss fights.

MCH had one originally called Heartbreak. Similar to Bard's. Low cooldown. Very nice for the end of longer fights for upping your damage.

DRK had Sole Survivor, which functioned a bit differently, being a minor debuff with a timer rather than an execution damage skill.

I think there were one or two more, but I can't really remember.

The idea behind these skills is that they were finishers, and imo, sort of a direction to think about how you might maximize your rotation in the final moments of a fight. When you've only got a minute or so left, then obviously you don't have the full breadth of the old 3 minute loops a lot of rotations were on. With the way some spenders like Kenki used to have multiple avenues to spend them, you could actually get gains from doing weird stuff like having your last GCD, no matter what it was, be buffed by Kaiten as a small gain at the very end of a fight etc.

Kind of niche, and not really something a lot of folks put thought into. Instead folks more think about how to sand bag so that some bloke can get their perfect burst right at the end of a fight for hounding parses, rather than the concept of a finishing touch.

Death's Design is kind of an elongation of the idea. You deal more damage when it's active, and then it also rewards you when they die. Good stuff. Kind of the refusal of them to completely let go of the concept, but also probably all we'll ever get with regards to it. Execution skills are dubbed that for two reasons, one being they execute the enemy and the other being that generally to get their reward you had to execute the skill itself at the right time.

A lot of people can't be assed to even do more than one combo, or maintain their own buffs, so they're likely never coming back. Gone the way of DoTs.

No complexity in my housing venue erp second life simulator please. Just pleasing taco cat eating stories and waifus and Good Guys R Us.