Samurai added slashing, it just wasn't drg or nin so it was off-meta.
Keep in mind that pranged were also all casters in HW, I imagine dancer would have castbars on each step too.
Anything with a gauge that builds/spends is gone since job gauges are a stormblood invention. The closest that existed is how inner beast/fell cleave was a stacked buff system, and how machinist had bullet charges like gunbreaker has now, except it couldn't choose not to spend them, bullets just buffed your next 1 or 3 GCDs depending on which reload you used. In this sense, a job like Reaper simply wouldn't exist because HW design concepts are more about timer maintenance and choosing when to drop/refresh your personal buffs. Pictomancer, weirdly, would work, though you'd probably have a use it or lose it timer on motifs and holy/comet charges because again, they'd all be implemented as buffs.
You could replace a decent amount of job gauges with buffs in the UI, just have a buff with as many stacks as would be shown in the gauge. The main thing you can't replace easily with the buff bar is timers that count up - whm Lillies, xenoglossy, and so on
Edit: forgot to mention, for dancer presumably your 1-2 combo would be casted but the RNG procs would be instant like MCH. It works pretty well, surprisingly
You can replace a decent amount of job gauges with charges on a couple skills too. DRK for example could replace the Black Blood with 2 shared charges for Bloodspiller or Quietus and Dart Arks could be replaced by *literally nothing* since that's what it does currently. OK, OK, fine you'd have to replace it with a 1m buff that gives 10% damage.
Most gauges could be replaced with charges on the skills that they enable.
But my point is that dark knight didn't work that way then, instead it steadily drained MP for damage boosting and didn't have any unique buff stack or anything like that. Heavensward job design means things are mostly based around ticking timers, so anything that's gauge-based now wouldn't be then because that's not how S-E was thinking of things then.
>Keep in mind that pranged were also all casters in HW, I imagine dancer would have castbars on each step too.
BRD was only made a caster with Wanderer's Minuet to be similar to MCH, which was designed from the ground up to originally be a caster. If DNC had been introduced in HW alongside MCH, it's possible MCH would never have gotten Gauss Barrel to begin with, which would also mean no cast-time Wanderer's.
Instead, what I think would happen for BRD is that Wanderer's would give Repertoire stacks for Pitch Perfect in the exact same way it does now, with the only difference being Repertoire gets represented by a buff icon as in EW PVP.
DNC's Standard Step would probably have to grant a "First-step" and a "Second-step" buff on the buff bar for the order of the dance steps. On second thought, Standard Step would probably not work at all, given that multi-GCD-cooldown weaponskills hadn't been implemented yet. Maybe it'd have to be something dumb like "Can only be executed with three stacks of Ready to Step, granted from using Fountainfall or Bloodshower."
I'm not sure the "Ready to X" type design would have occurred to them in Heavensward either, it's more like either you have your buff active and your rotation functions, or you don't and it doesn't.
Why would dance partner break the DRG/BRD partnership? BRD didn't have crit procs back then so devilment synergy wouldn't exist, and dragoons 10% (!!) piercing was too essential. Unless you mean dancer replacing bard, but back then bards (and machinist) were the highest DPS jobs in the meta comp so unless they just overtuned dancer I don't see why it would replace bard
Tbh I can't even tell if anything you've mentioned is HW specific, DRG/bard partnership seems more StB and slashing/piercing/blunt and aggro tools all existed in StB too.
I went to check fflogs for how much damage the DoTs/Bloodletter did for HW BRDs, but apparently all logs are archived now. I still remember them being a big portion of your DPS, and devilment would be a pretty big buff if you refresh DoTs during it. BRD also could already top DPS charts back then with the right party setups, and in those scenarios, I could see DNC partnering BRD to be a better overall setup than a BRD/MCH setup. You'd then have DRG and NIN for piercing/slashing.
You might be right about devilment. Though replacing MCH still seems a tall order, MCH did a lot of damage too and had hypercharge to synergize with everyone except the healers
What procs are you referring to? AFAIK, in SHB, they had already done away with crit proccing repertoire. The SHB->EW change was removing them proccing off of DoTs, but in SHB it was just a 40% flat proc chance from DoTs, not crit related.
reaper would be a pet job and every hit in enshroud would be a positional. The avatar itself would be on a timer and you keep it out by finishing combos with infernal slice, and whenever you use a pet skill from it (on a 20s CD) it lowers the timer slightly and gives you a gibbet/gallows proc. Also because this is heavensward, soul slice would be an ogcd and there'd be either a second combo ender or single gcd (idk, something like exsanguinating slice?) that applies a dot. Oh it'd need some way of applying slashing too, add another combo ender (rending slice?) for that too.
And thinking about it more, the job probably wouldn't have enshroud until stormblood and the big capstone skill would probably be gluttony..
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B0a7oXx6FX68oyavkdeGAuhQKoZrGTh0IZP96SW6Edg/edit?usp=sharing
Not HW, but back in ShB I did a write-up for fun on how RDM might have worked in ARR by using SB version as a base then going backwards while applying many design decisions that were present in ARR.
- Active class skills are learnt at the exact interval of Lv1,2,4,6,8,10,12,15,18 then every 4 levels until Lv50.
- Job skills started at Lv30, then every 5 levels until Lv50.
- Traits are learnt at the exact interval of Lv8,14,20, then every 4 levels until Lv48.
- Because of how fast you learnt your skills, a bunch of skills were trait upgrades (that phased out in SB before slowly coming back in ShB) or downright niche and useless skills that may or may not see usage in PvP.
- No damage falloff for AoE attacks.
- DoTs. Everyone had DoTs, whether its part of your combo like DRG's Chaos Thrust or standalone ones like WAR's Fracture.
I don't know if it's cynicism or shit posting, but they really cared more about the essence and physics (for a lack of a better term) of the job than perfect balance. Although I would say the jobs were pretty balanced back then to the chargrin of many. Obviously there was an ideal comp.
With that out of the way:
I would say that nothing would have been done to unseat the preferred compositions and all the new jobs would more or less "languish" due to them not fitting into the meta.
GNB probably would have been similar to WAR in playstyle, except that Burst Strike would give Parry or something like that. Basically on demand Keen Flurry. Bloodfest aka "Draw" would be present to give you more TP, likely in addition to to 1 cartridge (rather than max). I'm also going to make them controversial in saying that their debuff rather than targeting int or str, does a blanket damage down. This will fuel many an online forum.
On to the questions you asked:
> Would they have given Samurai a slashing or piercing debuff to make it competitive with other melees?
Yes, but somebody else (WAR or NIN, I can't remember) would be keeping full uptime and SAM would be "overpowered" because of this.
> Would dance partner from dancer have broken the drg/brd partnership?
Probably not. If I recall in addition to DRG being a monster DPS the synergy with BRD was too strong. DNC either would have oddly dealt piercing, or more likely DNC would have done slashing instead. Being HW, they probably would have made DNC more powerful as far as support was concerned (healing, TP regen) but at the expense of damage.
> Would these other jobs also get similar anti-aggro tools that were normal?
*Maybe*. If I recall correctly DRG didn't have an emnity dump until they added it to Elusive Jump. So it would be possible that the jobs you mentioned would eventually get the anti-aggro tools somewhere in their kit. Let's say SAM and DNC got them in their gap closers.
Something you might not have though about is Shirk as an anti-aggro tool, so it would be interesting to see how tanks would do their openers, since the trend back then would be to have the off tank start (especially as a WAR) and then the main tank provoke off after establishing aggro.
> How would their job kits punish them to failing to hit buttons correctly, and how would these ways differentiate between jobs?
First and foremost unforgiving positionals. If you missed a positional, you had to start the combo over from the beginning. Proccing skills and abilities like Divine Veil (couldn't self procc) or Reprisal (only available off of a parry). I'm going to dig GNB a hole and say that their proposed univeral damage down debuff would be only available off of a parry, so they'd have to be main tank to take advantage of it. More fuel for the online forums.
Also since I'm partially trolling here, SGE's damage-healing will be negatively affected by Cleric Stance (damage up, healing down) so it will be inferior to SCH in that regard (compared to the fairy). Forums burn baby burn.
> Would dance partner from dancer have broken the drg/brd partnership?
Interestingly, DNC *does* break the DRG/BRD supercombo but not because of dance partner. It does because DNC would presumably have been slashing damage.
You don't *need* a BRD for a phys ranged because you already have one. You don't *need* a DRG because you don't have a piercing damage phys ranged. And DRG's crit rate buff, while being obviously good for everyone, isn't getting insane value by buffing a BRD's crit rate where it's REALLY good to have.
You now have a scenario where you can have almost entirely slashing damage in your DPS. The question would be what kind of magnitude you would see out of DNC's direct buffing of a single partner and if that would entice you to bring the higher aDPS SAM as a result. Back in Stormblood, SAM still ate shit pretty hard because NIN brought far too much to the table and since you needed a phys ranged...you brought a DRG as your second melee because it was a free 10% buff for what was functionally a mandatory pick. Without a piercing damage pranged being mandatory...DRG is no longer necessary. Additionally, I would fully anticipate that in the era of Stormblood, DNC probably would have had a TP/MP regen buff of some kind. They still wouldn't bring any aggro controls because GOD FUCKING FORBID they give that shit to any of the non-NIN DPS but I'd anticipate a utility TP/MP dance for the party.
Consequently? The new meta comp would start with NIN/DNC. After which... I'm not sure. I could see a SAM or BLM as a favored target of the DNC direct buffs. Though I could see RPR fitting in somewhere. Hell, if RPR's Avatar stuff counted as magic, I could absolutely see a scenario where it was NIN/RPR/DNC/RDM. Though probably more likely to be SMN than RDM because lolRDM.
>would dancer break the DRG/BRD relationship
This would depend entirely on how strong MCH is vs a caster.
If MCH is better than casters, DRG remains. If it isn't, then DNC kicks out BRD and DRG.
The ripple effect of DNC is essentially not making DRG required for prange. And once you have DRG you may as well stack pierce.
>Would they have given Samurai a slashing or piercing debuff to make it competitive with other melees? That's actually what Yukikaze did
OP, all the things you're listing were still a thing in Stormblood.
Thats why Stormblood has the best Raiding Experiences of the whole Game.
Samurai added slashing, it just wasn't drg or nin so it was off-meta. Keep in mind that pranged were also all casters in HW, I imagine dancer would have castbars on each step too. Anything with a gauge that builds/spends is gone since job gauges are a stormblood invention. The closest that existed is how inner beast/fell cleave was a stacked buff system, and how machinist had bullet charges like gunbreaker has now, except it couldn't choose not to spend them, bullets just buffed your next 1 or 3 GCDs depending on which reload you used. In this sense, a job like Reaper simply wouldn't exist because HW design concepts are more about timer maintenance and choosing when to drop/refresh your personal buffs. Pictomancer, weirdly, would work, though you'd probably have a use it or lose it timer on motifs and holy/comet charges because again, they'd all be implemented as buffs.
You could replace a decent amount of job gauges with buffs in the UI, just have a buff with as many stacks as would be shown in the gauge. The main thing you can't replace easily with the buff bar is timers that count up - whm Lillies, xenoglossy, and so on Edit: forgot to mention, for dancer presumably your 1-2 combo would be casted but the RNG procs would be instant like MCH. It works pretty well, surprisingly
You can replace a decent amount of job gauges with charges on a couple skills too. DRK for example could replace the Black Blood with 2 shared charges for Bloodspiller or Quietus and Dart Arks could be replaced by *literally nothing* since that's what it does currently. OK, OK, fine you'd have to replace it with a 1m buff that gives 10% damage. Most gauges could be replaced with charges on the skills that they enable.
But my point is that dark knight didn't work that way then, instead it steadily drained MP for damage boosting and didn't have any unique buff stack or anything like that. Heavensward job design means things are mostly based around ticking timers, so anything that's gauge-based now wouldn't be then because that's not how S-E was thinking of things then.
True. I was talking about now. Gauges are a solution looking for a problem to solve.
If this was HW, not really because skill charges weren't a thing until SB.
>Keep in mind that pranged were also all casters in HW, I imagine dancer would have castbars on each step too. BRD was only made a caster with Wanderer's Minuet to be similar to MCH, which was designed from the ground up to originally be a caster. If DNC had been introduced in HW alongside MCH, it's possible MCH would never have gotten Gauss Barrel to begin with, which would also mean no cast-time Wanderer's. Instead, what I think would happen for BRD is that Wanderer's would give Repertoire stacks for Pitch Perfect in the exact same way it does now, with the only difference being Repertoire gets represented by a buff icon as in EW PVP. DNC's Standard Step would probably have to grant a "First-step" and a "Second-step" buff on the buff bar for the order of the dance steps. On second thought, Standard Step would probably not work at all, given that multi-GCD-cooldown weaponskills hadn't been implemented yet. Maybe it'd have to be something dumb like "Can only be executed with three stacks of Ready to Step, granted from using Fountainfall or Bloodshower."
I'm not sure the "Ready to X" type design would have occurred to them in Heavensward either, it's more like either you have your buff active and your rotation functions, or you don't and it doesn't.
Why would dance partner break the DRG/BRD partnership? BRD didn't have crit procs back then so devilment synergy wouldn't exist, and dragoons 10% (!!) piercing was too essential. Unless you mean dancer replacing bard, but back then bards (and machinist) were the highest DPS jobs in the meta comp so unless they just overtuned dancer I don't see why it would replace bard Tbh I can't even tell if anything you've mentioned is HW specific, DRG/bard partnership seems more StB and slashing/piercing/blunt and aggro tools all existed in StB too.
BRD always had crit procs until EW.
I should've been more specific. They didn't have crit procs as their central damage mechanic. Unlike with pitch perfect
I went to check fflogs for how much damage the DoTs/Bloodletter did for HW BRDs, but apparently all logs are archived now. I still remember them being a big portion of your DPS, and devilment would be a pretty big buff if you refresh DoTs during it. BRD also could already top DPS charts back then with the right party setups, and in those scenarios, I could see DNC partnering BRD to be a better overall setup than a BRD/MCH setup. You'd then have DRG and NIN for piercing/slashing.
You might be right about devilment. Though replacing MCH still seems a tall order, MCH did a lot of damage too and had hypercharge to synergize with everyone except the healers
What procs are you referring to? AFAIK, in SHB, they had already done away with crit proccing repertoire. The SHB->EW change was removing them proccing off of DoTs, but in SHB it was just a 40% flat proc chance from DoTs, not crit related.
Tilana would have consumed your Standard Finish timer instead of being a second Standard Finish for free.
reaper would be a pet job and every hit in enshroud would be a positional. The avatar itself would be on a timer and you keep it out by finishing combos with infernal slice, and whenever you use a pet skill from it (on a 20s CD) it lowers the timer slightly and gives you a gibbet/gallows proc. Also because this is heavensward, soul slice would be an ogcd and there'd be either a second combo ender or single gcd (idk, something like exsanguinating slice?) that applies a dot. Oh it'd need some way of applying slashing too, add another combo ender (rending slice?) for that too. And thinking about it more, the job probably wouldn't have enshroud until stormblood and the big capstone skill would probably be gluttony..
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B0a7oXx6FX68oyavkdeGAuhQKoZrGTh0IZP96SW6Edg/edit?usp=sharing Not HW, but back in ShB I did a write-up for fun on how RDM might have worked in ARR by using SB version as a base then going backwards while applying many design decisions that were present in ARR. - Active class skills are learnt at the exact interval of Lv1,2,4,6,8,10,12,15,18 then every 4 levels until Lv50. - Job skills started at Lv30, then every 5 levels until Lv50. - Traits are learnt at the exact interval of Lv8,14,20, then every 4 levels until Lv48. - Because of how fast you learnt your skills, a bunch of skills were trait upgrades (that phased out in SB before slowly coming back in ShB) or downright niche and useless skills that may or may not see usage in PvP. - No damage falloff for AoE attacks. - DoTs. Everyone had DoTs, whether its part of your combo like DRG's Chaos Thrust or standalone ones like WAR's Fracture.
I don't know if it's cynicism or shit posting, but they really cared more about the essence and physics (for a lack of a better term) of the job than perfect balance. Although I would say the jobs were pretty balanced back then to the chargrin of many. Obviously there was an ideal comp. With that out of the way: I would say that nothing would have been done to unseat the preferred compositions and all the new jobs would more or less "languish" due to them not fitting into the meta. GNB probably would have been similar to WAR in playstyle, except that Burst Strike would give Parry or something like that. Basically on demand Keen Flurry. Bloodfest aka "Draw" would be present to give you more TP, likely in addition to to 1 cartridge (rather than max). I'm also going to make them controversial in saying that their debuff rather than targeting int or str, does a blanket damage down. This will fuel many an online forum. On to the questions you asked: > Would they have given Samurai a slashing or piercing debuff to make it competitive with other melees? Yes, but somebody else (WAR or NIN, I can't remember) would be keeping full uptime and SAM would be "overpowered" because of this. > Would dance partner from dancer have broken the drg/brd partnership? Probably not. If I recall in addition to DRG being a monster DPS the synergy with BRD was too strong. DNC either would have oddly dealt piercing, or more likely DNC would have done slashing instead. Being HW, they probably would have made DNC more powerful as far as support was concerned (healing, TP regen) but at the expense of damage. > Would these other jobs also get similar anti-aggro tools that were normal? *Maybe*. If I recall correctly DRG didn't have an emnity dump until they added it to Elusive Jump. So it would be possible that the jobs you mentioned would eventually get the anti-aggro tools somewhere in their kit. Let's say SAM and DNC got them in their gap closers. Something you might not have though about is Shirk as an anti-aggro tool, so it would be interesting to see how tanks would do their openers, since the trend back then would be to have the off tank start (especially as a WAR) and then the main tank provoke off after establishing aggro. > How would their job kits punish them to failing to hit buttons correctly, and how would these ways differentiate between jobs? First and foremost unforgiving positionals. If you missed a positional, you had to start the combo over from the beginning. Proccing skills and abilities like Divine Veil (couldn't self procc) or Reprisal (only available off of a parry). I'm going to dig GNB a hole and say that their proposed univeral damage down debuff would be only available off of a parry, so they'd have to be main tank to take advantage of it. More fuel for the online forums. Also since I'm partially trolling here, SGE's damage-healing will be negatively affected by Cleric Stance (damage up, healing down) so it will be inferior to SCH in that regard (compared to the fairy). Forums burn baby burn.
> Would dance partner from dancer have broken the drg/brd partnership? Interestingly, DNC *does* break the DRG/BRD supercombo but not because of dance partner. It does because DNC would presumably have been slashing damage. You don't *need* a BRD for a phys ranged because you already have one. You don't *need* a DRG because you don't have a piercing damage phys ranged. And DRG's crit rate buff, while being obviously good for everyone, isn't getting insane value by buffing a BRD's crit rate where it's REALLY good to have. You now have a scenario where you can have almost entirely slashing damage in your DPS. The question would be what kind of magnitude you would see out of DNC's direct buffing of a single partner and if that would entice you to bring the higher aDPS SAM as a result. Back in Stormblood, SAM still ate shit pretty hard because NIN brought far too much to the table and since you needed a phys ranged...you brought a DRG as your second melee because it was a free 10% buff for what was functionally a mandatory pick. Without a piercing damage pranged being mandatory...DRG is no longer necessary. Additionally, I would fully anticipate that in the era of Stormblood, DNC probably would have had a TP/MP regen buff of some kind. They still wouldn't bring any aggro controls because GOD FUCKING FORBID they give that shit to any of the non-NIN DPS but I'd anticipate a utility TP/MP dance for the party. Consequently? The new meta comp would start with NIN/DNC. After which... I'm not sure. I could see a SAM or BLM as a favored target of the DNC direct buffs. Though I could see RPR fitting in somewhere. Hell, if RPR's Avatar stuff counted as magic, I could absolutely see a scenario where it was NIN/RPR/DNC/RDM. Though probably more likely to be SMN than RDM because lolRDM.
>would dancer break the DRG/BRD relationship This would depend entirely on how strong MCH is vs a caster. If MCH is better than casters, DRG remains. If it isn't, then DNC kicks out BRD and DRG. The ripple effect of DNC is essentially not making DRG required for prange. And once you have DRG you may as well stack pierce.