03-28-2023, 05:14 PM
For the record, Rest Beat already got nerfed to dispel Tempo/2 debuffs. Dev just never updated the description after the nerf that happened about 7~ months ago when Dancer was at its peak.
As I noted in a past thread Dancer is in a precarious spot right now. It's extremely potent when it works and feels terrible when it doesn't.
For ease of readability and clarity I'll be analyzing every ability of Dancer/Bard's Dance skills, along with some of my own input on what the OP's had to say.
One Two Step and Signature Step: I agree entirely. The former is useless in most scenarios and the latter is actually useless due to being walled out entirely by status resistance exceeding around 90-100, which many new mobs have in spades (some attaining well over 150).
Thunder Steps and Ice Slide: The former being an amazing mobility and damage tool and the latter having the highest damage potential + scaling off a MANDATORY stat to play the class means you're not going to see any of its other abilities. Just adding cooldowns will only make the class feel worse though. As the OP suggested, the other skills (Fire Dance, Wind Pirouette, Quaking Step) need to be better somehow to feel worth using. Only Wind Pirouette is even feasible for a Dancer to currently use without totally compromising on its stat lineup, all to do 40% less potential damage than Ice Slide whilst not being able to move in the same action. While the statuses may be valuable, the extremely low infliction rate of Signature Step means you'll almost never see these statuses on anything with above 0 status res.
Wind Pirouette: The only other dance skill you MIGHT see from Bard's repertoire, as mentioned earlier. Its status effect is powerful (Confusion) but as I'll mention later, is highly unreliable to ever even land. Combined with randomly picking targets and only ticking 3 times at the same level of power as Ice Slide, you rarely want to use it. 210% Wind ATK vs an average of 280% Ice ATK. Arguably, it's useful if you do not want to move at all, but very rarely is it worth it to remain immobile.
Quaking Step: Got nerfed immediately. Went from being map-wide and 200% Earth ATK to 180% and only 7-9 range. It'd be nice to have this back to being a map-wide if it had a 1-2 round cooldown. The whole thing that made it overbearing was being double-tapped constantly from across the map. It didn't need to have both its damage AND its range slashed. It's already using an elemental ATK that Dancer doesn't want without Luminary. If only Signature Step's inflict wasn't so terrible, its status would be useful. The mobs you need Magnetize on will never get inflicted due to having 100%+ status resistance.
Fire Dance: If you're using this, it's because you're a Salamandra. Otherwise stop and get help. Its range is extremely limiting and scales a stat no Dancer wants bar using Luminary. It really should've had the range of Ice Slide, especially with how hard it is to stat for currently. Either adjust its range or adjust its damage to be more worth using.
Rose Toss: It's a meme skill. You use it to BM people. Seriously though, its only purpose is to provide charm to activate Double Dance or ensure Dancer's Invitation works. The LVL of charm is far too low to make much use of and you're going to lose it immediately the next round if you try to damage them yourself. It's just to enable the meme setup of getting people in range to Double Dance on their friends, which is entirely reliant on the enemies setup as to how effective it'll even be. It's fantastic if you find low status res non shaitan excel weapon users, but that requires having Rose Toss and Double Dance in your back pocket, otherwise it's entirely separate from what Dancer normally wants to do for damage.
Skating Spin: This is just Peddling Wheel without elemental augment. You even punch and kick things as per the skill description too! On a class that hardly incentivizes using a weapon at all due to how few things it has that make use of it. This and...
Double Dance: A nice utility skill for when you're with teammates who primarily basic attack, and a hilarious counter measure in group fights against those same people if you can actually land charm on them AND have them close to an enemy to even hit. Extremely situational, and doesn't help Dancer at all 90% of the time, but hey, you can puppet your friend's dead bodies with it.
Curtain Call: Along with the prior two skills, among the only skills Dancer has that use SWA at all. For this reason you'll almost never see it, as a MC Dancer does not want to use a weapon. Even if it did, the damage of Curtain Call isn't that great (175% Dark ATK + 175% SWA at max tempo). It's about comparable to Duelist's Eclair Lacroix. Except Duelist actually wants to use a weapon. Why couldn't Curtain Call just be pure Dark ATK scaling like Idol Step? Even if it was, Dancer doesn't have the stats to spare to use it, which I'll address near the end.
Idol Step: is mostly seen as OP because when it gets every single proc on both ends on the same two targets it's incredibly potent (450%-610% Light ATK + 98-105 damage and the same amount healed to the user). Its extremely long cooldown (7 rounds) means you'll typically only ever see it once per fight. Currently it does not feel like a healthy ability. It's far too powerful in 1v1s and extremely unreliable in scenarios with multiple targets (be it enemies or allies), as your healing could all end up wasted if you don't position yourself to only heal yourself or gamble on healing an injured ally (and still be susceptible to healing only yourself every single time). For an ability with such a long cool down, you want to make sure you get the most out of it, so it's encouraged to ensure you are the only possible healing target and that you're hitting everything on one target. This needs to change if it's ever going to be more than a single target burst.
Dancer's Invitation: Because for some reason Dancer needed Forced Move. It's entirely a support tool for your allies unless you've grown tired of living and want your face caved in pronto. It has a niche use if the planets align and your enemies are perfectly in position to setup a Double Dance on an ideal target on ideal target(s). Otherwise this is mostly for enabling other classes/allies, Dancer itself can't make much use of it beyond Double Dance. It's not bad.
Rest Beat: I honestly don't think the change to make it a movement skill was necessary. It already has an 8 round cooldown and burns all their tempo for it. This on top of limiting the number of debuffs purged made it far less useful in PvP, being unable to purge the debuffs the Dancer needs to remove the most (Frozen, Immobilize, Clumsy) thus forcing them to crutch on Dance Hour for the latter two---which has a 10 round cooldown and removes all their tempo as it is not a dance skill, or be entirely helpless as the enemy has removed them from the game effectively. If being unable to immediately CC the Dancer out of existence means they're OP something else needs to change, not their one way out of it. The HP/FP heal of Rest Beat is fine, it has an insanely long cooldown attached to it. If your fight is lasting long enough that they're rest beating again you have other problems.
Dance Hour: If only this cured Frozen. Having an answer to Clumsy/Immobilize is nice but it costs all your tempo and has a 10 round cooldown, meaning you're never going to get to use it again in most fights, so you're forced to end the fight in 3 rounds or have your class turned off. As I mentioned in my linked post, it could afford to have its cooldown reduced by the tempo you lost in casting it. I mean come on, Martial Artist has an answer for immobilize, why can't the class that entirely relies on NOT being immobilized to use any of its skills have a reliable skill to react to immobilize?
Polished Step: Not much to say. It's a nice 1m move and provides you 1 free tempo every 2 rounds. You always want this.
Discourteous Dip: As the name implies you use this skill to BM people. It's just Fegen. No, seriously, it's literally just Fegen, except you lose all your stacks to cast it. Why? Just make it a Dance skill. It doesn't need to sack your tempo. How often do you see Boxers spamming Fegen on people every two rounds? Not often because they usually spend their full stacks on Grand Upper or just keep hitting you until you die. Not something you typically want to pick up on a Dancer unless you're building it for another class/ally.
One-Two Step: As mentioned by the OP this is borderline useless being at 1 round duration. Just make it two rounds, please. So your allies have a better chance of making use of it ever. Dancer loses way too much potential damage not just casting one of their damaging skills to try and pop their One-Two steps. Curtain Call sucks too much as is to want to use for that purpose (and has a massive cooldown + destroys your stacks + scales on a stat you don't typically want on a Dancer).
Limbo: A unique and very nice defensive ability provided you've built CEL, even without it it might still work though. Solidifies CEL as the go-to defensive stat for Dancers. Something you always want to have regardless of your stat-line given it potentially negates entire attacks.
Dancer's Tempo: Mandatory to make use of Dancer abilities primarily for your damage. As Sadbot mentioned, this should really not be a main-class skill. You lose so much from not having tempo that Dancer's hardly worth using without it.
Wide Stage: +2 range on Dance skills. Mandatory.
Dancer's Agility: Just change this to be like Boxer's Wind Weave. Evade bonus based on current tempo. More reliable in the current evade environment where you always want to be capped on your evade buffs.
Dancer's Confidence: Great for....double tapping people through resists? It's nice but at the same time it doesn't feel necessary. You can Polished Step without worrying about losing your second Dance skill that turn, so in a way it's good to prevent Polished Step from feeling like a liability.
Dancer's Intensity: More damage good. Needing to build for crit make stat spread tight. Lacking weapon crit make crit almost impossible sometime.
Dancer's Stat Spread: Moving on from all its abilities, and onto what sort of stats Dancer even ends up wanting.
Generally you're looking at WIL SKI VIT FAI LUC. For more durability, FAI gets dropped for CEL and if you still want beefy Idol Steps, you Luminary it. These stats are largely unchangeable if you want to be dealing damage as a Dancer. You need WIL for sustaining your FP and extra elemental atk as a bonus, SKI to even do damage in the first place lest you miss everything you do, VIT so you don't explode the first time an enemy looks at you, FAI to amp the self heal and damage your Idol Step does, and LUC so you can crit and add damage to your best ability, Thunder Steps.
CEL being your go to if you want to be more viable in PvP/survive at all in higher level content (maybe).
As it stands Dancer literally cannot crit some mobs without heavy sub-class support and gets 70%~ hit at best against the more evasive mobs at higher levels. Then explodes immediately when the mobs turn around and hit them, as their desired stat spread leaves them no room for defenses. Some might drop their FAI for CEL then get pigeonholed into running sub-class VA or ST due to the current state of evade crutching on Rogue to function well (which dev's already aware of), as Dancer + Bard itself offers no evade buffs beyond Dancer's Agility which isn't reliable due to being for only one attack.
In response to Sadbot's comment about Dancer's stat options....no. Dancers cannot cheat their stats. They use the stats above or they're not dealing damage with their dance skills or they're dying immediately.
This means that Dancer has little to no freedom in even deciding a weapon to use for its SWA. Their stats are already bound to their class. Comparing it to Razor Rune is disingenuous as that requires no stats at all, whereas everything in Dancer needs stats. They're forced to use something like a Crossbow that scales a stat almost every single build needs by default.
In Conclusion:
Thunder Steps/Ice Slide/Idol Step are the meat and potatoes of Dancer. Its other abilities need to be brought up to par, as currently they're borderline useless outside niche scenarios. In relevant content (lvl 60-80 dungeons) it struggles to survive and deal damage (no i dont count Lava Lake).
Idol step needs to be altered to not make it a 1v1 monster.
Dancer needs a good answer to Immobilize/Clumsy/Frozen/Grappled that doesn't leave it a sitting duck immediately afterwards.
Dancer's damage is a hard issue to solve without totally reworking the class. Simply gutting its high performing skills and giving it nothing in return will kill the class. Something like changing all Dance skills to be Fist skills, then lowering their elemental ATK and giving Tempo a greater bonus to Elemental ATK to compensate, but even then you may run afoul of minimal viable options for weapons to use as a Dancer with their stat-line up.
Whatever changes with Dancer, it needs to address the large amount of FP it uses or its need to crit for ideal damage, or its stat crunch will be largely unchanged.
As I noted in a past thread Dancer is in a precarious spot right now. It's extremely potent when it works and feels terrible when it doesn't.
For ease of readability and clarity I'll be analyzing every ability of Dancer/Bard's Dance skills, along with some of my own input on what the OP's had to say.
One Two Step and Signature Step: I agree entirely. The former is useless in most scenarios and the latter is actually useless due to being walled out entirely by status resistance exceeding around 90-100, which many new mobs have in spades (some attaining well over 150).
Thunder Steps and Ice Slide: The former being an amazing mobility and damage tool and the latter having the highest damage potential + scaling off a MANDATORY stat to play the class means you're not going to see any of its other abilities. Just adding cooldowns will only make the class feel worse though. As the OP suggested, the other skills (Fire Dance, Wind Pirouette, Quaking Step) need to be better somehow to feel worth using. Only Wind Pirouette is even feasible for a Dancer to currently use without totally compromising on its stat lineup, all to do 40% less potential damage than Ice Slide whilst not being able to move in the same action. While the statuses may be valuable, the extremely low infliction rate of Signature Step means you'll almost never see these statuses on anything with above 0 status res.
Wind Pirouette: The only other dance skill you MIGHT see from Bard's repertoire, as mentioned earlier. Its status effect is powerful (Confusion) but as I'll mention later, is highly unreliable to ever even land. Combined with randomly picking targets and only ticking 3 times at the same level of power as Ice Slide, you rarely want to use it. 210% Wind ATK vs an average of 280% Ice ATK. Arguably, it's useful if you do not want to move at all, but very rarely is it worth it to remain immobile.
Quaking Step: Got nerfed immediately. Went from being map-wide and 200% Earth ATK to 180% and only 7-9 range. It'd be nice to have this back to being a map-wide if it had a 1-2 round cooldown. The whole thing that made it overbearing was being double-tapped constantly from across the map. It didn't need to have both its damage AND its range slashed. It's already using an elemental ATK that Dancer doesn't want without Luminary. If only Signature Step's inflict wasn't so terrible, its status would be useful. The mobs you need Magnetize on will never get inflicted due to having 100%+ status resistance.
Fire Dance: If you're using this, it's because you're a Salamandra. Otherwise stop and get help. Its range is extremely limiting and scales a stat no Dancer wants bar using Luminary. It really should've had the range of Ice Slide, especially with how hard it is to stat for currently. Either adjust its range or adjust its damage to be more worth using.
Rose Toss: It's a meme skill. You use it to BM people. Seriously though, its only purpose is to provide charm to activate Double Dance or ensure Dancer's Invitation works. The LVL of charm is far too low to make much use of and you're going to lose it immediately the next round if you try to damage them yourself. It's just to enable the meme setup of getting people in range to Double Dance on their friends, which is entirely reliant on the enemies setup as to how effective it'll even be. It's fantastic if you find low status res non shaitan excel weapon users, but that requires having Rose Toss and Double Dance in your back pocket, otherwise it's entirely separate from what Dancer normally wants to do for damage.
Skating Spin: This is just Peddling Wheel without elemental augment. You even punch and kick things as per the skill description too! On a class that hardly incentivizes using a weapon at all due to how few things it has that make use of it. This and...
Double Dance: A nice utility skill for when you're with teammates who primarily basic attack, and a hilarious counter measure in group fights against those same people if you can actually land charm on them AND have them close to an enemy to even hit. Extremely situational, and doesn't help Dancer at all 90% of the time, but hey, you can puppet your friend's dead bodies with it.
Curtain Call: Along with the prior two skills, among the only skills Dancer has that use SWA at all. For this reason you'll almost never see it, as a MC Dancer does not want to use a weapon. Even if it did, the damage of Curtain Call isn't that great (175% Dark ATK + 175% SWA at max tempo). It's about comparable to Duelist's Eclair Lacroix. Except Duelist actually wants to use a weapon. Why couldn't Curtain Call just be pure Dark ATK scaling like Idol Step? Even if it was, Dancer doesn't have the stats to spare to use it, which I'll address near the end.
Idol Step: is mostly seen as OP because when it gets every single proc on both ends on the same two targets it's incredibly potent (450%-610% Light ATK + 98-105 damage and the same amount healed to the user). Its extremely long cooldown (7 rounds) means you'll typically only ever see it once per fight. Currently it does not feel like a healthy ability. It's far too powerful in 1v1s and extremely unreliable in scenarios with multiple targets (be it enemies or allies), as your healing could all end up wasted if you don't position yourself to only heal yourself or gamble on healing an injured ally (and still be susceptible to healing only yourself every single time). For an ability with such a long cool down, you want to make sure you get the most out of it, so it's encouraged to ensure you are the only possible healing target and that you're hitting everything on one target. This needs to change if it's ever going to be more than a single target burst.
Dancer's Invitation: Because for some reason Dancer needed Forced Move. It's entirely a support tool for your allies unless you've grown tired of living and want your face caved in pronto. It has a niche use if the planets align and your enemies are perfectly in position to setup a Double Dance on an ideal target on ideal target(s). Otherwise this is mostly for enabling other classes/allies, Dancer itself can't make much use of it beyond Double Dance. It's not bad.
Rest Beat: I honestly don't think the change to make it a movement skill was necessary. It already has an 8 round cooldown and burns all their tempo for it. This on top of limiting the number of debuffs purged made it far less useful in PvP, being unable to purge the debuffs the Dancer needs to remove the most (Frozen, Immobilize, Clumsy) thus forcing them to crutch on Dance Hour for the latter two---which has a 10 round cooldown and removes all their tempo as it is not a dance skill, or be entirely helpless as the enemy has removed them from the game effectively. If being unable to immediately CC the Dancer out of existence means they're OP something else needs to change, not their one way out of it. The HP/FP heal of Rest Beat is fine, it has an insanely long cooldown attached to it. If your fight is lasting long enough that they're rest beating again you have other problems.
Dance Hour: If only this cured Frozen. Having an answer to Clumsy/Immobilize is nice but it costs all your tempo and has a 10 round cooldown, meaning you're never going to get to use it again in most fights, so you're forced to end the fight in 3 rounds or have your class turned off. As I mentioned in my linked post, it could afford to have its cooldown reduced by the tempo you lost in casting it. I mean come on, Martial Artist has an answer for immobilize, why can't the class that entirely relies on NOT being immobilized to use any of its skills have a reliable skill to react to immobilize?
Polished Step: Not much to say. It's a nice 1m move and provides you 1 free tempo every 2 rounds. You always want this.
Discourteous Dip: As the name implies you use this skill to BM people. It's just Fegen. No, seriously, it's literally just Fegen, except you lose all your stacks to cast it. Why? Just make it a Dance skill. It doesn't need to sack your tempo. How often do you see Boxers spamming Fegen on people every two rounds? Not often because they usually spend their full stacks on Grand Upper or just keep hitting you until you die. Not something you typically want to pick up on a Dancer unless you're building it for another class/ally.
One-Two Step: As mentioned by the OP this is borderline useless being at 1 round duration. Just make it two rounds, please. So your allies have a better chance of making use of it ever. Dancer loses way too much potential damage not just casting one of their damaging skills to try and pop their One-Two steps. Curtain Call sucks too much as is to want to use for that purpose (and has a massive cooldown + destroys your stacks + scales on a stat you don't typically want on a Dancer).
Limbo: A unique and very nice defensive ability provided you've built CEL, even without it it might still work though. Solidifies CEL as the go-to defensive stat for Dancers. Something you always want to have regardless of your stat-line given it potentially negates entire attacks.
Dancer's Tempo: Mandatory to make use of Dancer abilities primarily for your damage. As Sadbot mentioned, this should really not be a main-class skill. You lose so much from not having tempo that Dancer's hardly worth using without it.
Wide Stage: +2 range on Dance skills. Mandatory.
Dancer's Agility: Just change this to be like Boxer's Wind Weave. Evade bonus based on current tempo. More reliable in the current evade environment where you always want to be capped on your evade buffs.
Dancer's Confidence: Great for....double tapping people through resists? It's nice but at the same time it doesn't feel necessary. You can Polished Step without worrying about losing your second Dance skill that turn, so in a way it's good to prevent Polished Step from feeling like a liability.
Dancer's Intensity: More damage good. Needing to build for crit make stat spread tight. Lacking weapon crit make crit almost impossible sometime.
Dancer's Stat Spread: Moving on from all its abilities, and onto what sort of stats Dancer even ends up wanting.
Generally you're looking at WIL SKI VIT FAI LUC. For more durability, FAI gets dropped for CEL and if you still want beefy Idol Steps, you Luminary it. These stats are largely unchangeable if you want to be dealing damage as a Dancer. You need WIL for sustaining your FP and extra elemental atk as a bonus, SKI to even do damage in the first place lest you miss everything you do, VIT so you don't explode the first time an enemy looks at you, FAI to amp the self heal and damage your Idol Step does, and LUC so you can crit and add damage to your best ability, Thunder Steps.
CEL being your go to if you want to be more viable in PvP/survive at all in higher level content (maybe).
As it stands Dancer literally cannot crit some mobs without heavy sub-class support and gets 70%~ hit at best against the more evasive mobs at higher levels. Then explodes immediately when the mobs turn around and hit them, as their desired stat spread leaves them no room for defenses. Some might drop their FAI for CEL then get pigeonholed into running sub-class VA or ST due to the current state of evade crutching on Rogue to function well (which dev's already aware of), as Dancer + Bard itself offers no evade buffs beyond Dancer's Agility which isn't reliable due to being for only one attack.
In response to Sadbot's comment about Dancer's stat options....no. Dancers cannot cheat their stats. They use the stats above or they're not dealing damage with their dance skills or they're dying immediately.
This means that Dancer has little to no freedom in even deciding a weapon to use for its SWA. Their stats are already bound to their class. Comparing it to Razor Rune is disingenuous as that requires no stats at all, whereas everything in Dancer needs stats. They're forced to use something like a Crossbow that scales a stat almost every single build needs by default.
In Conclusion:
Thunder Steps/Ice Slide/Idol Step are the meat and potatoes of Dancer. Its other abilities need to be brought up to par, as currently they're borderline useless outside niche scenarios. In relevant content (lvl 60-80 dungeons) it struggles to survive and deal damage (no i dont count Lava Lake).
Idol step needs to be altered to not make it a 1v1 monster.
Dancer needs a good answer to Immobilize/Clumsy/Frozen/Grappled that doesn't leave it a sitting duck immediately afterwards.
Dancer's damage is a hard issue to solve without totally reworking the class. Simply gutting its high performing skills and giving it nothing in return will kill the class. Something like changing all Dance skills to be Fist skills, then lowering their elemental ATK and giving Tempo a greater bonus to Elemental ATK to compensate, but even then you may run afoul of minimal viable options for weapons to use as a Dancer with their stat-line up.
Whatever changes with Dancer, it needs to address the large amount of FP it uses or its need to crit for ideal damage, or its stat crunch will be largely unchanged.
![[-]](https://neus-projects.net/forums/images/collapse.png)
