Damage gap closer should vanish

[Carighan]

Is there any real reason we couldn't have both Plunge and Shadow stride as two separate buttons?

Other than most jobs including DRK already having too many instead of too few buttons, no. Like, if you made them intelligently swap out (say Plunge out of combat, Shadow Strike once in combat), sure!

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Other than most jobs including DRK already having too many instead of too few buttons, no. Like, if you made them intelligently swap out (say Plunge out of combat, Shadow Strike once in combat), sure!

They could actually do something fancy with that snorefest of a LV84 Unmend trait and do the following rather than the CD reduction on Shadowstride...

Enhanced Unmend (Lv.84 Trait)
Upon execution of Unmend, you gain the effect of "Plunge ready", changing the action Shadowstride to Plunge.
Effect Duration: 30 seconds

Plunge (Lv.84 Ability)
Recast: 1 second
Potency: 200
Additional effect: Enhanced Enmity
Can only be executed while under the effect of "Plunge ready".

Would make using Unmend less painful without it being a gain, keeps your Shadowstride dashes as is, retains Plunge as an action. The only thing I'd possibly consider is moving this interaction to lower than Lv84, at least in the 61-70 bracket if not straight up being baseline obtained at Lv54 with Shadowstride. Or we could stop pretending that "button bloat" and "busy rotation" is this much of a problem and just give us back Plunge along with our new dash as a usable action with like an additional effect - like Sole Survivor, similar to PvP. WAR also gets to have two dashes (yes I count Primal Rend), so what gives?

[Oizen]

Other than most jobs including DRK already having too many instead of too few buttons, no. Like, if you made them intelligently swap out (say Plunge out of combat, Shadow Strike once in combat), sure!

DRK doesnt have too many buttons.
I don't even think you'd need a swap out. Just two seperate buttons. 4 gap closers.

WAR has 4 gap closers and the server is still running.

[Carighan]

DRK doesnt have too many buttons.

#respectfullydisagree

I should add that I think all jobs have too many buttons for how insanely shallow their gameplay loop is. GW2 achieves far more interesting core gameplay with just 12-15 buttons. Hell I'd go as far as saying that most MOBAs achieve deeper gameplay with four buttons.

I could understand 20-25 buttons for jobs if that were actually relevant, but it's really not. Just on Dark Knight, consider that all the following abilities could be removed cleanly if the skills did full damage to the main target then reduced damage to extra ones:

* Unleash
* Stalwart Soul
* Quietus
* Flood of Darkness
* Abyssal Drain

That's 5 hotbar buttons freed up at not a single spit of depth lost. And in turn shows how absolutely irrelevant the existence of these skills even is, beyond some funky visuals (which I very much enjoy, don't get me wrong!).

[Arohk]

I could understand 20-25 buttons for jobs if that were actually relevant, but it's really not. Just on Dark Knight, consider that all the following abilities could be removed cleanly if the skills did full damage to the main target then reduced damage to extra ones:

20 is the sweet spot for buttons, FFXIV is very very bloated on hotkeys.

[Oizen]

#respectfullydisagree

I should add that I think all jobs have too many buttons for how insanely shallow their gameplay loop is. GW2 achieves far more interesting core gameplay with just 12-15 buttons. Hell I'd go as far as saying that most MOBAs achieve deeper gameplay with four buttons.

I could understand 20-25 buttons for jobs if that were actually relevant, but it's really not. Just on Dark Knight, consider that all the following abilities could be removed cleanly if the skills did full damage to the main target then reduced damage to extra ones:

* Unleash
* Stalwart Soul
* Quietus
* Flood of Darkness
* Abyssal Drain

That's 5 hotbar buttons freed up at not a single spit of depth lost. And in turn shows how absolutely irrelevant the existence of these skills even is, beyond some funky visuals (which I very much enjoy, don't get me wrong!).

You just listed aoes. Then every job has too many buttons? And its not even true

Unleash/Stalwart have a unique niche of gaining 600 MP and 20 Blood in two GCDs instead of 3, making it optimal to switch to this on any boss that is at .01% HP but doesn't die due to game mechanics to build gauge faster for next phases.
Likewise, Abyssal Drain has a niche of being a Ranged AOE pull on DRK. Its not available enough to ever justify this but it is a thing it uniquely does over Carve and Spit.

[Carighan]

Yeah and so many things have no purpose. Like the AoE versions of single-target skills I mention before, now you might say "But hold on, plenty games have separate AoE skills equivalent to single skills, and they both serve a purpose", and yes, that's correct. But there's an important second part in that sentence, and they both serve a purpose. As FFXIV doesn't use mezzes as CC any more (or CC at all if we're being honest), single-target skills also automatically dealing some AoE damage and removing the separate AoE skill has no downside. It just frees up hotbar at 0 cost. Other games have mesmerize effects and hence the player has a need to have single target skills to not wake targets up even in AoE situations, sure.

[Kabooa]

Yeah and so many things have no purpose. Like the AoE versions of single-target skills I mention before, now you might say "But hold on, plenty games have separate AoE skills equivalent to single skills, and they both serve a purpose", and yes, that's correct. But there's an important second part in that sentence, and they both serve a purpose. As FFXIV doesn't use mezzes as CC any more (or CC at all if we're being honest), single-target skills also automatically dealing some AoE damage and removing the separate AoE skill has no downside. It just frees up hotbar at 0 cost. Other games have mesmerize effects and hence the player has a need to have single target skills to not wake targets up even in AoE situations, sure.

There's also the matter of there being staggered cooldowns, where sometimes your best single target line is your AoE combo because your Single finishers are on cooldown.

Likewise, sometimes the best AoE damage is the single line because the AoE finisher is on cooldown.

There shouldn't be only single and only aoe skills, there should be skills you use in both but prefer over the other when both are available.

[Connor]

*Laughs in no-potency Repelling Shot*
*Launches self off edge of arena*

The only damage gap closer I have experience with is RDM’s. I like having to consider when best to leverage while also weighting up things like upcoming mechanics, raid buffs, charges, etc etc.

But then, would removing damage from gap closers really make much of a different to how they’re used anyway? I’m not sure it would matter either way really. Or maybe I’m just using them wrong lol

[Shurrikhan]

But then, would removing damage from gap closers really make much of a different to how they’re used anyway? I’m not sure it would matter either way really. Or maybe I’m just using them wrong lol

It would, for most fights. If you have a 5 minute fight with 10 use cases for a gapcloser's mobility spaced 60 seconds apart for every 2 uses, then no-damage gapclosers would see 10 uses in that 5-minute fight. More typically, though, you get maybe 2 use cases, in which case it will have

• lost 80% of the apm it would otherwise have provided (down from 10 uses to 2),
• lost any cognitive load regarding what relevant mobility needs will occur within the next X (/ 2X) CDs' time vs. fall-back/direct damage maximization,
• if primarily CD-based, lost any cognitive load that would otherwise engage cost calculations on more than 15 seconds of total desync for the given gapcloser (such as from holding it) over the course of a fight,
• if primarily gauge-based, lost any cognitive load otherwise engaged through finer control of gauge spending and thereby optimization of gauge spending in a given window,
• etc.

Put simply, removing damage from gap-closers...

1. reduces the skill expression/floor/ceiling available for the affected job, making the game that bit easier for it
   —and—
2. makes a given job's damage very less by making mobility mechanics less important (which tends to be more balancing if everyone has obvious ways of making would-be mechanics into simple cues-and-response near-non-mechanics but more imbalancing when each job faces its own challenge[s]).