Damage gap closer should vanish

[Zarkovitch]

Friendly reminder that abilities like Spirits Within used to have a silence attached to it, as did BRD also have a silence ability. Many other jobs had stuns with damage attached as well.
These were sensibly replaced with non-damaging abilities because it's ridiculous to combine utility with damage. Most jobs now have gap closers as non-damaging abilities, literally every job except WAR, PLD and SAM at this point. There's no reason these 3 jobs should have to deal with this when every other job in the game can have their utility be available whenever it's needed.
There is no "tactical decision-making" involved at high level, it is a binary "will I need to use this for it's intended utility? no? spam that shit in the burst window".
Just remove the potency from the final 3 gap closers and give us something else to weave/manage instead.

Preach Warrior of Light Preach.

[Carighan]

It's almost as if the comment about all the damage being removed from all the utility abilities (and them all being oGCDs now) hints at the underlying problem more than at the three remaining ones: The 120s burst window and its enforced alignment.

Because make no mistake: The damage gain from using your gapclosers under buffs is absolutely trivial. But since it exists, it naturally becomes the default. The problem here is this enforced defaulting and how there is no alternative.

That is to say, if:

* Burst skills did not align.
* Fight design used larger areas with constant needs to disengage and reengage.
* Bosses moved around move and hence needed reengagement anyways.

Then whether you had damage on your gapcloser or not really would not matter. You'd never use it for the damage. It'd not be a consideration either way, and the fact that it is, that is the problem in itself.

[Shurrikhan]

Why would it be a bad thing to have a(n admittedly minuscule) reward for knowing how many knockbacks you'll have within the next <charges_x_recast_time>'s time?

If the average player has even a one-third chance of misjudging their needs and thereby missing a GCD of full-uptime, they're be better if holding a charge still than blowing the last one under raidbuffs for the extra <60 potency.

Splitting and shuffling raid buff timings around won't remove the small incentives to burst bankables under said buffs; it will just reduce the reward slightly for doing so. But if you're already positing that such would occur no matter how small the reward (and therefore how large a net loss it risks), such is irrelevant. And if you remove that reward completely, you just turn the "default" from subtly knowledge-rewarding to actually outright braindead. Why would that be desirable?

Again, imo, it makes no more sense to remove damage from all gap-closers than to turn them all into additional one-nullification-max charges of Surecast, but neither does it make sense to remove raidbuffs just to prevent us from having any reward system from which to generate risk (and thereby reward fight knowledge and tracking).

[Rithy255]

Theirs actual skill behind having damage gain Utility abilities.

The skill of adjusting your rotation instead of going on autopilot is actually a interesting and fun dynamic in my opinion, because yes you use them a lot as "just extra damage" but knowing when to hold something or not for Utility, in this case you gain uptime, is actually something interesting that should be kept.

Not to say damage utilities should always exist, but gap closers with damage tied to them has actual skill to them, Considering the track record of not implementing something to replace that gap closer in form of a extra damaging weave, don't be surprised if this leaves PLD/WAR with even less weaves when they're already slow jobs.

I feel like we need less changes of removing "rigid" design honestly, we've got to the point where we're arguing over damaging gap closers should exist with how boring the job system has become, I don't really think we need less "complexity" even if it's very mild changes, not everything has to be simple and the same, Personally I'd love gap closers to have different benefits ect, from each other, I want more differences and removing damage from gap closers just feels like a very small step towards everything being the same, I won't be surprised in 8.0 but I much rather gap closers like PLD/WARs to still exist.

[Moqi]

This has been a problem is they took away damage from Fluid Aura (I will never forgive them for this). Player will look for any room for skill expression and optimization and SE is absolutely hell bent on destroying it. There is ever only one standard rotation that must never be strayed away from, even if the gains are so miniscule that people don't do it for the damage but just because it's fun to know you can.

[Carighan]

To put numbers to it, Paladin's Intervene is 150 potency twice in each 60s burst rotation window.

Half of these (the odd ones) it's just the +25% from FoF. This means using Intervene under FoF instead of outside gains a total of 75 potency (300 * 0.25). Over an 8 minute fight there are 4 such windows so these net us 300 potency.

The other half are under full raid buffs. Assuming you got one melee applying a buff (let's use a Reaper) and one Ranged (let's use a Dancer!) and being a tank you of course get no DP or cards, you'd be working at +33% total damage. Let's add a Scholar which would add ~12% damage for 45% total, clean number. At that level, both Intervenes together under this burst window instead of outside gains us 300 * 0.45 = 135 potency, since we get 4 such windows that's another 520 potency.

So, over the whole fight, that's a gain of 820 potency, assuming we're comparing using every single gapcloser for burst, and that otherwise not a single one would be in burst, ever.

That's btw pretty exactly the potency gain from getting one extra crit on Goring Blade or BoF, and less than getting an extra crit on BoT or BoV.

I don't want to say "using gapclosers with damage for damage doesn't matter the least bit to how a fight ends", but... Okay, forget it, yeah, it doesn't matter.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

-numbers-

Hi, I'm just gonna pull up my post from like a few pages prior for a more comprehensive analysis about potencies. Feel like it may benefit when people may argue for or against it.

OK, I'm getting really tired of this rethoric being said ad nauseam, so let's actually talk about it.

1.) We were given the Charge system in Shadowbringers specifically so we have the luxury to hold dashes for re-engagement without outright losing potency from losing recasts (drifting the CD unused). The only reason you guys are complaining about this is because of how fixated you are on the damage metric of stuffing everything into a condensed burst window at all costs.

2.) The three jobs with damaging OGCD dashes are currently Paladin, Warrior and Red Mage. I'm not counting Samurai, because their's is damage neutral to their ffiller spender. Going by a 120s burst window with a combined +28,8% damage boost (AST, MNK, NIN, DNC, PCT) from raid buffs, let's actually break down what you "lose" if you drop a charge outside of the burst window:

• Paladin's Intervene is on 30s recharge @ 2 charges doing 150 potency + you have a personal burst every 60s, you gotta make choices if 1-2x Holy Spirit (400p, 500p with Divine Might) isn't enough.
  Math (Burst window): 150p * 1.25 (FoF) * 1.288 (raid buffs) - 150p = 91.5 potency gain during a raid buff window
  Math (FoF-only): 150p * 1.25 - 150p = 37.5 potency gained during a Fight or Flight window.
  
  An auto attack is like 100 potency. Your Fight or Flight window every minute is ~8160 base potency, ~10200 with Fight or Flight unconditionally, without either charge of your dash used. Tell me, does losing 38-92 potency per charge matter if this is what you drop out every minute at Lv100? Crit variance on a Fast Blade has a bigger impact than this.
  -
• Warrior's Onslaught is on 30s recharge @ 3 charges doing 150 potency, with no personal burst window that affects Onslaught. So at most, 2min raidbuff contribution can be taken into account here.
  
  150p * 1,288 * 1.1 (self buff) - 150p = 62.5p per Onslaught gained under raid buffs (43p without Surging Tempest). Your base burst without Onslaught (8 GCDs, with 2x Inner Chaos + 1x normal Fell Cleave) if done right does about 10703 potency (Crit-DH multiplier x1,9875, ignoring DH bonus damage from DH stat because math hard), 11774p with Surging Tempest. Moving an Onslaught or even two per 2min window has negligible impact to your DPS contribution, especially when looking the whole party's damage output as a whole.
  -
• Red Mage's Corps-a-Corps is on 35s recharge @ 2 charges doing 169 potency (130 + 30% Magic & Mend trait), plus you are a caster so you don't even "need" it as utility most of the time anyways, you could just walk up to a boss half the time for melee attacks after a dualcast.
  
  Red Mage's 120s burst (2x Verflare/Holy, 2x Scorch, 2x Resolution, 1x Melee combo, 1x Fleche + Contre + Corps + Engagement, Vice of Thorns, Prefulgence) is 11733 potency with Maim & Mend II, including your own Embolden applying to all applicable attacks. This leads to 15313 potency under raid buffs + Spear card from AST. This leads to a 49 potency gain for a Corps-a-Corps if you drop it under a raid buff window. Surely the message should be clear by now.

Conclusion: At Lv100, your total damage contribution of your dashes in your burst windows is so utterly negligible, you will lose MORE damage by drifting your GCD if you make a mistake and not have a dash (let alone two) when it would help you keep your uptime/avoid weaker ranged attacks.

So let's PLEASE stop repeating about how in savage "every bit of damage counts". My brother/sister in christ, your crit/DH variance and even auto attack uptime will have a bigger impact than losing potency from not having dashes under a raid buff, it's not even funny at this point.

[Mikey_R]

If the damage is negligible, then there is no reason to keep damage on gap closers. You can pretend there is some sort of decision making, but if the reward for fight knowledge is negligible to non existent, it is pointless.

[Rithy255]

If the damage is negligible, then there is no reason to keep damage on gap closers. You can pretend there is some sort of decision making, but if the reward for fight knowledge is negligible to non existent, it is pointless.

With that logic it's also pointless changing it.

[Mikey_R]

With that logic it's also pointless changing it.

Which is absolutely true.

The question then is does the potency on the action mislead people into thinking it is actually relevant and not just a 'flavour' thing. If the potency was actually relevant, this would be a different discussion, but in my opinion, the potency is just a distraction.