I’m not sure. For me, what’s essential is merely that anything attempting to fill RSV’s shoes feels big-brain, i.e., that skills like DoT-spreads don’t merely feel like CD-locked basic affordances nor combos merely like multi-GCD singular actions.
(I realize that RSV was by no means actually “big brain” during any iteration, much like Arms Warriors have never once particularly felt like tactically-minded, veteran weaponmasters (“Masters of Arms”), Balance has scarcely ever had anything to do with balance, regardless whatever iteration they’ve of Eclipse they’ve tried to shoehorn it in through, or Feral even that much like a giant f’ing cat ripping people apart—though it’s gotten a lot closer than the other two. That said, it feels like it’s the primary promise of how the spec should play, the sort of unique rush one should get from playing it.)
How those perceptions are weighed will vary from person to person, but I think some criteria that are at least typical and/or indicative would be something like…
- in-play options having meaningful competing choices (such as seen in spenders sharing a resource system) where the obvious or typally-fit choice might not ultimately be best, and choice efficacy depends greatly on future choices, and
- response systems that have relatively long reach (i.e., impact future choices) but are nonetheless integratable into nuanced play (i.e., do not dismantle or otherwise cause your current strategy to suddenly become an inferior choice, such that you’re better off wasting the actions spent building towards it).
Now, those are really high bars, but (1) we can nonetheless work towards them and (2) such, or similar concerns of how the spec actually feels to play, ought to be our lead concerns.
To all connect that somewhat to the ideas you’ve presented here, just to be a bit more concrete, let’s compare your utilization of Freezing Trap as a potential (quantizing, I’d assume) defensive against, say, Exotic Munitions (currently an AA-based chance to extend a random one of your DoTs).
The first isn’t necessarily a deliberate sacrifice, but if used defensively it is an affordance that you must be wary of wasting (by actually trapping an enemy, unless the effect works even then) and can stem from cautious or otherwise divergent play.
The second, on the other hand, does not alter your gameplay in any sense, since Catalysis is unlikely to be worth holding Explosive Shot until your next Black Arrow, since the latter has thrice the prior’s CD and thus the occasional avoidance of that need (i.e., being able to use ES instantly, rather than holding for BA) would not be notable.
The same can largely be said of allowing Black Arrow to stack up to three times. By doing so, you’ve sacrificed negative gameplay (again, not necessarily “bad” or even more punitively-minded than anything else, but simply moments in which to hold onto X or Y) in favor of less unique or more reliable/unaffected capacity. There’s less to playing with Black Arrow for having made it less susceptible, and any cleave niche the spec would otherwise have is that much less emphasized.
/rant