Hey all! Energy Charge is a unique skill that Buccaneers get as part of their 3rd job skill set. To activate it, we have to charge the skill Spoiler by attacking monsters, bosses and what have you. It grants attack, Power Guard and Power Stance effects upon activation (yay!). But another unique quality of this buff is that it cannot be cancelled via right-clicking the icon on the top right of your screen. This brings me to my grievance and proposal. I have participated in several Horntail expeditions in which I acted as the seduce target. As many of you may or may not know, Horntail inflicts the seduce debuff every 3 minutes, roughly. To properly serve as Sed, Buccs have to time their Energy Charge buff to be active during Sed so that they do not get knocked off the rope. The issue arises here. It takes around 20-30 seconds to fully charge the buff using the Barrage+Demolition combo (taking into account getting knocked off platforms and returning to the attacking position). The buff lasts 50 seconds. When I have my stopwatch up for timing Sed, I typically have about 1min 10sec left before Sed comes and the Energy Charge bar is just about full. At this point, I stop attacking until 35-40 seconds are left on the stopwatch before activating Energy Charge. This leaves approximately 10 seconds of stance to hang on the rope with for Sed. This can inconvenience the Bishop if Sed happens late and I lose stance. More importantly, it inconveniences the whole party since I have to stop attacking, lowering our DPS. 20-30 seconds every Sed cycle adds up! I feel as though this small change would be a great quality of life improvement for bossing Buccaneers and would not alter our playstyle too profoundly. Do you think being able to have stance up whenever is a luxury meant only for warriors? Would this break the game? Am I doing something wrong? Do I just have to git gud?! Let me know your thoughts! Spoiler: TL:DR Let Buccaneers be able to cancel Energy Charge whenever they want so it's easier to sed.
I don't sed when I ht, but if you're getting knocked off, could you stand farther back with demo? If you're just spamming demo, it takes 15 seconds to charge bubble without being knocked off. Another possibility to vary the bubble charge time to sync better is by using different attacking combos -- barrage demo is doing about 3.5 hits per second, and barrage dragon strike does about 2.4 hits per second (though depends on number of targets hit of course). If you're doing heads or something and really want to slow it down, you could even try snatch + dragon strike. Also note that if you get dispelled you lose the speed / jump buff from trans but stay in trans, meaning you get a bit less knock back if you don't reset super trans after. I guess another option could be to not care about the syncing as much and just try to get bubble on every other sed. That way you could hero's will (6 minute cd) every other sed, perhaps using time leap aggressively to reset hero's will if it begins to roll over too much. Being able to attack during the normal sed period would also allow you to further vary your bubble charge time. Though time leap may not be worth on will because you could just time leap res instead. What I miss is being able to see my character in its normal appearance / nx when bossing because of permanent super trans ;_; Edit: another semi meme suggestion is manipulating timings by taking points out of energy charge so buff lasts less time
While this would be a nice QoL change, I personally think they'd be better off just slightly increasing the time energy charge buff is active. Even if this was implemented, stance is still 90% and not 100% so its still going to be somewhat of an inconvenience in some cases. And if a buccaneer were to sed, I think the gameplay is more interesting overall to find ways around timing the charge. Especially when the class is attacking with consistent iframes, I think its necessary to keep some form of drawback. Also RIP Pirate NX weapons.
Thinking back on it now, being knocked down really only poses an issue on the right side of HT when barrage+demoing Head C or wings since after demo, there's a short period of vulnerability where I get hit and fall more often than I'd like (this vulnerability is fine and doesn't need to be changed). If C is on weapon cancel, I usually move to the upper platform to spam demo on B, so it looks like I can't quite stand "farther back" there. I suppose I could just focus arms for more consistent damage. And thanks for the suggestion for different attack combos, but I feel that one of my main problems with not being able to cancel the buff is not being able to output maximum/optimal damage the whole time. This could work, but I guess I'll have to let the Bishop know what they're in for lmao. And I usually conserve TL for things like crash, res, or echo (mainly res) in case there's some freak accident, but this is just my personal preference. Increasing the buff time is also a viable alternative that I'm open to. I also thought that having to time the charge would make for an interesting playstyle when sedding, but this eventually amounted to having to wait out a handful of seconds to prevent from activating it too early, haha. Maybe this is interesting for some. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. And you make a good point about how we may need some sort of drawback. After all, NLs/Shadowers have Shadow Shifter and all Warriors have Power Stance which sum up to a good number of other classes that can take on the Sed role. Whether or not letting Bucc have an easier time sedding would increase diversity (more variety of classes in parties) or decrease diversity (multiple classes can cover the same role) is up for interpretation. Thanks to both of you for your thoughtful input!
