I have a few thoughts on dancer.
Dancer's tempo being main class only makes no sense to me. It is incredibly powerful, but making class resources that the whole skill set interacts with main class only just makes the class not worth playing at all as a sub class. It probably should have all of its effects cut in half, then made not main class only as well. To be honest I'm not a fan of its design in the first place in the same way as schwarz sturm. These 'do this class stuff and nothing else or get punished' type class resources mesh very poorly with a dual class system that's supposed to encourage variety, in my opinion at least.
Dancer's damage is insane. This is particularly egregious when you consider that dancer has the same issue that runemage had during the giant beyblade days, that most/all of their damage has nothing to do with their weapon or swa. This allows them to essentially 'cheat' with their stats, equipment and other build choices, because what is a core part of any other class or build is just an afterthought for dancer. Dancer can take stats, equipment and other things that would usually come at a heavy price to a build's swa or damage at large because swa is essentially irrelevant to a dancer. Dances should absolutely be swa + ele scaling rather than pure ele scaling, even if it still leans more into ele atk than swa. I've added some rough numbers for the usual suspect dances below, using 70 of the corresponding elemental attack. This seems like a very conservative estimate to me, given that dancer is free to do things like forego less useful weapon scaling stats entirely to dump extra points elsewhere for more ele atk. This is also not even taking the bonus ele atk and damage multiplier of tempo into account, or the likes of dance crits, spirited skills, impure element or other potential boosts. Keep in mind that any normal 3m attack hitting 250 or more total damage before reductions is on the higher end of power, in my experience.
Ice slide - 25 base damage per hit, 70% of 70 ice atk is 49, 5 hits = 370 damage (296 even on four hits assuming you don't have good positioning)
Thunder steps - 25 base damage per hit, 200% of 70 lightning atk is 140, 2 hits = 330 damage
I'll do two here for idol step. One with 30 light atk assuming little investment, as it's not so easily dumped into as other elements even for dancer, and one with 60 just to show the kind of war crimes it can pull off if the dancer does decide to lean into it. Both assuming one target for both healing and damage.
Small idol step - 25 base damage per hit, 150% of 30 light atk is 45, 5 hits (4 at half damage and heal) = 210 damage + 210 heal
War crimes idol step - 25 base damage per hit, 150% of 60 light atk is 90, 5 hits (4 at half damage and heal) = 345 damage + 345 heal
That's easily a 500+ hp swing in your favor after even the beefiest of damage reductions and all you need is 60 light atk, because swa isn't real. Yikes. Obviously these numbers are more susceptible to magic armor than the average attack, but they still come out the other end of even around 20 magic armor with more damage than a 250 damage attack that's only getting a single reduction. I think these numbers pretty much speak for themselves, and I'm left scratching my head wondering how dance scalings have gone without a change or nerf since bard's release. I guess maybe it's just that other parts of the class are so uninteractive, one dimensional and generally dysfunctional otherwise, that it needs damage numbers this overtuned to prop it up into looking balanced in the middle somewhere. I don't know. Moving on.
Dancer is way too susceptible to immobilization. No one class is as shut down by a single status effect as dancer is by immobilize. Even silenced mages can use skills, some basic mage spells or at least run away until it wears off. Dance hour is a flimsy band aid, which only serves to deal with builds that can't immobilize very often or to buy you a little more time to finish off those who can't handle your absurd damage. I think that dance hour, or perhaps a second skill alongside dance hour, should be more like whispering cant. Something that allows you to still function under immobilize at least, just at reduced capacity. Make dances cost 4m, increase their fp costs, reduce their range, something like that.
Tl;dr - Dancer is a very dysfunctional class, propped up by bat shit crazy damage numbers. It needs a few things:
Dancer's tempo being main class only makes no sense to me. It is incredibly powerful, but making class resources that the whole skill set interacts with main class only just makes the class not worth playing at all as a sub class. It probably should have all of its effects cut in half, then made not main class only as well. To be honest I'm not a fan of its design in the first place in the same way as schwarz sturm. These 'do this class stuff and nothing else or get punished' type class resources mesh very poorly with a dual class system that's supposed to encourage variety, in my opinion at least.
Dancer's damage is insane. This is particularly egregious when you consider that dancer has the same issue that runemage had during the giant beyblade days, that most/all of their damage has nothing to do with their weapon or swa. This allows them to essentially 'cheat' with their stats, equipment and other build choices, because what is a core part of any other class or build is just an afterthought for dancer. Dancer can take stats, equipment and other things that would usually come at a heavy price to a build's swa or damage at large because swa is essentially irrelevant to a dancer. Dances should absolutely be swa + ele scaling rather than pure ele scaling, even if it still leans more into ele atk than swa. I've added some rough numbers for the usual suspect dances below, using 70 of the corresponding elemental attack. This seems like a very conservative estimate to me, given that dancer is free to do things like forego less useful weapon scaling stats entirely to dump extra points elsewhere for more ele atk. This is also not even taking the bonus ele atk and damage multiplier of tempo into account, or the likes of dance crits, spirited skills, impure element or other potential boosts. Keep in mind that any normal 3m attack hitting 250 or more total damage before reductions is on the higher end of power, in my experience.
Ice slide - 25 base damage per hit, 70% of 70 ice atk is 49, 5 hits = 370 damage (296 even on four hits assuming you don't have good positioning)
Thunder steps - 25 base damage per hit, 200% of 70 lightning atk is 140, 2 hits = 330 damage
I'll do two here for idol step. One with 30 light atk assuming little investment, as it's not so easily dumped into as other elements even for dancer, and one with 60 just to show the kind of war crimes it can pull off if the dancer does decide to lean into it. Both assuming one target for both healing and damage.
Small idol step - 25 base damage per hit, 150% of 30 light atk is 45, 5 hits (4 at half damage and heal) = 210 damage + 210 heal
War crimes idol step - 25 base damage per hit, 150% of 60 light atk is 90, 5 hits (4 at half damage and heal) = 345 damage + 345 heal
That's easily a 500+ hp swing in your favor after even the beefiest of damage reductions and all you need is 60 light atk, because swa isn't real. Yikes. Obviously these numbers are more susceptible to magic armor than the average attack, but they still come out the other end of even around 20 magic armor with more damage than a 250 damage attack that's only getting a single reduction. I think these numbers pretty much speak for themselves, and I'm left scratching my head wondering how dance scalings have gone without a change or nerf since bard's release. I guess maybe it's just that other parts of the class are so uninteractive, one dimensional and generally dysfunctional otherwise, that it needs damage numbers this overtuned to prop it up into looking balanced in the middle somewhere. I don't know. Moving on.
Dancer is way too susceptible to immobilization. No one class is as shut down by a single status effect as dancer is by immobilize. Even silenced mages can use skills, some basic mage spells or at least run away until it wears off. Dance hour is a flimsy band aid, which only serves to deal with builds that can't immobilize very often or to buy you a little more time to finish off those who can't handle your absurd damage. I think that dance hour, or perhaps a second skill alongside dance hour, should be more like whispering cant. Something that allows you to still function under immobilize at least, just at reduced capacity. Make dances cost 4m, increase their fp costs, reduce their range, something like that.
Tl;dr - Dancer is a very dysfunctional class, propped up by bat shit crazy damage numbers. It needs a few things:
- Its class resource in tempo needs toning down, but also removal from main class only.
- Dances need reduced scaling that's split between swa and ele atk, even if they still lean more into the ele atk for class theme.
- Its ability to deal with immobilizing effects needs to change. Maybe something akin to whispering cant, that still allows it to function at reduced capacity under immobilize.
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