Quote Originally Posted by Carighan View Post
They pull the -5s CD with most 120s-relevant skills eventually to protect against drift.

Though now that you mention it, I feel the game as a whole might benefit if they changed SkS (and SpS!) to work like this:

* SkS now affects the cooldown of abilities. All of them. All your skills.
* SpS affects the cast-speed of spells. Spells only.
* Neither affects your GCD, which is locked at 2,5s barring any job-specific modifiers to it.

Meaning SkS would give you some drift-resistance to how your skills line up, SpS gives you improved mobility (assuming re-evaluations of the scaling of both given the functional changes, of course!) as a caster. Neither can affect that you use 1 GCD-ability every 2,5s, or as a Monk every 2,0s.

The big upside of this would be that not only would SkS in particular have a real use outside of edge cases, it'd also bake "drift resistance" into a secondary stat. Which could be optimal or not based on a lot of factors, and most importantly is a "soft stat" (it depends on your connection and the weather on that day and whether jupiter and libra align among other things).
Hard pass. The primary benefit of SkS thresholds has traditionally been permissible ("nonstandard") rotational forks that in turn allow for increased adaptability, unique capacities (see late StB Triple-Kick), or new playflows (see Demo-drop in ARR, rotations to forgo the ToD/Frac lines in HW and StB, 2-2-3 in ShB, extra-Opo per RoF OD in EW, etc.). All that depends upon the ability to affect GCD speed.

Why must we constantly degrade, constrain, or outright axe permissible play or nuance just to ensure ease of raid-sync or, even worse, change for change's sake?

And no, what you suggest would not bake drift-resistance into SkS. It would specifically worsen both raid-drift even if you were to forgo some fraction of a GCD's uptime to minimize said drift and hurt GCD-CD sync at least as badly.