Ferry has strange number tuning across the board

Ferry is in an extremely weird position right now in ReLink v1.0.4. To describe the current state as quickly as possible:

  • Ferry spamming Launch -> Aerial Barrage is an standard-damaging character that has incredibly fast SBA gauge. It's high enough that speedrunners can and do leverage Ferry for the hold utility on that extra SBA that can be generated.
  • A Ferry player that uses Onslaught about how you'd expect from playing around with the kit will do so little damage with it, that an AI-controlled Eugen can outdamage a Ferry leveraging Hinrichten (a 150s cooldown and 30s duration superbuff) during their 30s rotation and dropping as much Onslaught as possible.

How is this happening? We'll go through real quick to explain how this is happening and how it can be fixed.

Ferry's Many Problems

Ferry is one of the party utility characters that runs into the problems at endgame mentioned in this thread about the viability of attack buffs and defense buffs at endgame..

She has some additional problems on top of this, in a couple of factors:

  • Ferry is probably the most affected by Damage Caps being unrelated from the scaling on attacks. I don't think there's a singular character that is remotely close on this.
  • Hinrichten also has issues alongside Benediction with respect to Attack up buffs, though it's a self-only buff. It is still near-mandatory as a skill to take because of the damage increase during link/SBA, as well as supplemental damage buff, and the dearth of functional alternatives.

I'm going to focus more on the former point than the latter one, as that's the most pressing issue by a longshot.

Let's Talk About Attack Motion Values and Damage Caps

In most action games, most moves have a different base value of damage. This is so a heavy slam on a great sword can do more damage than, say, the individual values of a rogue slashing an enemy multiple times. These are generally referred to as Motion Values by the Monster Hunter community, so we'll use this jargon for that concept.

On top of that, Granblue Fantasy ReLink has a system adopted from the phone game called a Damage Cap. This means that if you raise enough damage, that particular move will not do more damage than that cap, unless the Damage Cap value is explicitly raised as a stat.

Damage Cap isn't inherently a problem; they place an upper bound on damage so that calibrating fight difficulty can be done pretty well. The initial Versa clear in Proud difficulty was pretty well-tuned because of this.

The main problem is when those two diverge heavily, and that's exactly what happens for Ferry's kit across the board.

Motion Values and Damage Cap Values are NOT related

Here are the Motion Values and Damage Cap Values on Ferry's attacks and skills. The Motion Value is labeled "% Of Attack". Credits to /u/EternalRainbows who is recording values using a secondary save because it can be actually impossible to find some of these values once every weapon is capped.

It functionally amounts to each hit on Ferry's normal kit dealing 14,999 damage for singular whip hits, 4,999 for multiwhip hits, and 2,499 for summon hits. Across the entire movepool.

Other things not mentioned or have to be separated:

  • Umlauf's damage cap is bugged and will switch based on Ferry's last attack, so quickly after doing anything else that 24,999 damage cap will be replaced by something typically a lot lower.
  • There is a tipper mechanic for a lot of Ferry's whip moves that increases motion values by a certain amount for each move. None of these multipliers affect the damage cap.

What Makes Onslaught so Bad Right Now?

Onslaught's main motion values are in the pet damage when you have all three spirits active, and then in a big crunchy final hit Motion Value of 500%. That doesn't happen at endgame because it just deals standard whip damage with its cap.

The pets hitting alongside are also heavily nerfed from their own individual damage caps, which the Phantasm's Concord sigil won't raise.

Why is Jump Attack to Slam So Good Right Now?

In reality, this combo loop is only really good because of two factors: * It builds up SBA gauge fast because it's considered multiple "finisher" hits * The loop is the most amount of standard-cap whip hits over time, and that's the only relevant factor for damage right now on Ferry.

That's it! Those are the only reasons. Everything else is too nerfed by the damage caps to be relevant.

Would Onslaught be Good Even without its damage cap?

Because of the tipper mechanic on whip hold, if motion values drove the damage cap and all moves essentially required the same effort to cap, Onslaught would still not be ideal.

The whip hold at tipper range with all pets out would still be stronger than either holding or tapping Onslaught. It would also be safer since you're both at range and have a parry immediately available when releasing the whip hold.

Does Jump Slam ACTUALLY need to be nerfed?

If Damage Cap values were directly related to Motion Values, it would get nerfed by about 20% damage because of the Launch damage cap being halved. I think that's honestly fine enough alongside everything else being tuned properly.

It would still retain some speedrunner utility without being mandatory option to actually dealing regular damage. Ferry players would try to minimize the usage of it to just what's needed since there certainly would be better raw damage options.

It's also worth noting that it's currently filling in for Ferry's buff/debuff kit as party-based utility, since those don't do much in the current state of Proud difficult endgame.

The Worst Timeline

I think the worst possible outcome of all this Ferry discussion is the Jump-Slam getting nerfed, alone, and nothing else changed. That would actually make Ferry as a whole weak enough that any lobby leader with a geared alt would have an incentive to just kick Ferry players on sight and have an AI party member instead if they couldn't fill a lobby.

Having a balance skew that promotes that at any stage of the game isn't great, so there should obviously be other options than just nerfing that setup.

What Are the Solutions For This?

I think there are a couple fixes to Ferry's kit I can think of, I'll go from easiest to hardest:

  • Damage Cap Values of skills should be directly related to their Motion Values.
    • This just instantly fixes the vast majority of intra-character problems across the board. It also makes fans discussing and theorycrafting the game have a common grounding of how the character works, because Ferry discussion has been wildly fluxuating depending on the progression points of people as they gear up Ferry and progress through the game.
    • If there is a difference between the damage cap and the standard motion value, it should be to accentuate the desired gameplay, if anything. As an example, Ferry's damage differences between landing at the optimal tip of range versus not could have a more exaggerated damage cap, while having closer motion values. This would make her more forgiving to play specifically in story mode, while giving her even more incentive to be at the perfect range at the endgame.
    • Effects from sigils should probably just be applied after any damage cap so it's guaranteed they actually do something. If damage cap is hard to reach then a sigil that raises the cap may do nothing. If it's easy to reach then sigil effects that only raise damage do nothing. Meanwhile any non-damage-related effect is always working all the time.
  • Even with these changes, Ferry's kit still probably needs more of a look at Motion Values to make the Onslaught payoff worth it. Pet damage during onslaught specifically would need to be buffed a fair bit to make it worth leveraging without encouraging pet-less Onslaught spam.
  • You could try tackling some of the issues with Attack/Defense Buffs/Debuffs mentioned in this thread. Even if Ferry had standardized damage caps, she would also run into this problem hard, even with respect to just her own damage, because of Hinrichten.
    • I have no idea scaling is planned for post-launch content, so maybe new content makes these buffs/debuffs far more useful. It'd still be a problem for current content, unless we're getting a whole new difficulty tier where these are all relevant.
    • It seems pretty difficult to imagine these ever becoming relevant with how powerful damage bonuses are across the board. Boss DEF seems like it would have to be absolutely massive on any newer content for these to ever be worth taking past the main story.