Quote Originally Posted by Quuoooote View Post
I'm glad you asked, actually, because between posting the OP and now I've been cooking the idea in my head some more and wanted to write either a follow-up or edit to clarify exactly this point.

To dig back into the Bard discussion, you mention that 30 second DoT duration is "just pressing Iron Jaws every 30 seconds". That's true! And that's exactly the type of interaction I'm aiming for and hope the development team adopts. In a vacuum, just like the Sekiro example, it can be reduced to a very simple action that you perform in a rote fashion, buts is depth lies in how other mechanics interact and interfere with the simple mechanic to force decision making and encourage engagement. Even though you "just press Refulgent 90% of the time", or "you just cycle the songs faster", eventually these goals might overlap or conflict and create tension, or depth (and this will happen with greater frequency if more upkeep is needed). If your hypothetical Straight Shot buff and DoTs are both going to fall off on your next GCD, which should you prioritize? Is managing double procs causing distraction and rotational mistakes like this in the first place? How can you be more mindful of this in the future, to make sure it doesn't happen again? How much raw Bard gameplay will the average player need to iron out all of these rotational nuances?
And I'm glad you answered. It's always fun to see how we might (dis)agree on such things when we get down to the small bits.

I picked this little bit just because it makes a decent illustration of what I'd consider complexity... and what I wouldn't.

To me, Iron Jaws, itself, is just two parts:

Tracking (what all you'd likely be rewarded for paying attention to):
How many seconds are left on the DoT? Was anyone late on their raidbuffs last time and therefore will be again this time? How many seconds til raidbuffs so I can refresh under them or have my next refresh at its tail? - OR - How many ticks more can I hold Apex Arrow (or seconds left on Burst Arrow Ready) for to get it or Burst Arrow to line up with adds/raidbuffs? - OR - How many GCDs will compete for priority with IJ over the end of the raidbuff window? Will the enemy die within 8 seconds?

Decision (which mostly comes down to memorized thresholds and are therefore answered passively from what you track unless there are future codependencies and branching paths around them):
Do I refresh now and at the tail of the next raidbuff on the assumption that I'll hit 80 Soul Gauge, or do I wait and refresh last-second just as raidbuffs go up (if no one was late and hoping they'll all go up in the same GCD-gap)? Do I refresh slightly early to avoid the possibility of wasting a Hawk's Eye proc?

And... that's it for Iron Jaws. The only unique parts it has are TTK and a far higher-than-average cost for delays, as underlined above. The last part regarding overrides is decent, but still only half-unique at best. And since dungeons will just devolve to AoE spam, 99.9% of the time it is, for all intents and purposes, just a 925-potency attack... that happens to be reduced if the enemy dies in fewer than 45 seconds and only keeps IJ from being worth using if the target would die in fewer than 3 server ticks (or, untracked, 7.7 seconds average).

Its complexity is absolutely minimal despite ultimately taking up 3 buttons for a vapid, uninteractive action (here meaning that it doesn't conditionally reshape decisions, not just that its value is codependent) used once per 45s. What's worse, though, is that the impact of Iron Jaws isn't just what Iron Jaws itself does, but what it replaces: without it, you'd have roughly a fifth more actions beyond just Burst Shot->Refulgent Arrow filler. But by wasting Caustic and Storm, it has both wasted buttons and increased filler spam.

________

On that note, yes, I too would like to shrink the DoTs and song durations back down a bit, but I think that in itself would be a miniscule change and so I'd want to go further:
  • Remove Iron Jaws or restrict it in some way,
  • put Caustic and Stormbite on different durations (say, 15s and 21s),
  • maybe let Hawk's Eye stack to 2 so there's at least some reason to have a filler buttons (Burst/Ladon) even when a stack of Hawk's Eye is active (even if they're still wasted on two except as a finger-trap) -- or make the proc something that actually feels like it ought to be immediately responded to instead of leaving a massive duration on it, and
  • remove the CDs on songs in favor of a softer system by which to be pushed/forced to swap between songs, such as an MP drain that increases with use and declines back to normal with disuse (including, ofc, using a different song), with greater but balanced distinction between song effects (which may in turn, yes, require yet more interdependencies).

I highlight the last bit because unless a change is enough to add new optimizations (i.e., new context-dependence, rather than just replacing one rote rotation or Action Priority List with another), it's at best just a small stimulus, like an average of one more thing to dodge per minute without any disproportionate costs or worrisome alignments.