I was understandably not very happy with the new paladin changes. Some things that COULD be fixed, weren't, and some things that DIDN'T need to be fixed, were.
The rotation, for example, now seems to be Burst/Downtime as opposed to the Phys/Magic weave we did before:
For burst it seems to be: 1>2>3 >FoF>Goring>HS>Req>Blade combo> Atone x2 (or x3, if you SKS is high enough).
What we THOUGHT would be used, which is Req>HS>Blade Combo due to HS being buffed by Req, is NOT possible due to the way DM now works. With DM taking priority over Req in regards to HS/HC, you get a unbuffed HS because you need to use one of Req's charges in order for the pot buff to be attached. This could have easily been rectified with SE leaving Req at it's 5 charges, where the buffed HS and then the full blade combo would be doable with no issues whatsoever.
Basic combo is simplified down to: 1>2>3>HS>Atonex3. HS and Atone are interchangeable in that rotation, dependent on whether or not you need the spot heal from HS quicker or not. You get two of these rotations in by the time FoF is back up.
So in basic terms we get a burst window, then two "downtime" rotations. Rinse and repeat. I'm unsure what they were going for with the phys/magic weave change, but they seemed to have missed the mark on this.
Shelltron change is decent in the fact we now have another DR tool. 30% every 22.5s, based on auto attack and oath per attack. The change is bad because they COULD have used this as a chance to make Shelltron a two charge, 20 second cd per charge cooldown instead. Linking oath gauge production based solely on auto attack is just a bad way to do it, especially with dodging mechanics and shifting position in content. So now that shelltron every 22.5s is anywhere from 22.5 to possible 40s or more depending on how many AA's you had to miss due to moving or mechanics.
Bulwark is just bad. 10s of guaranteed block on a 90s cooldown. Block would be nice, if could mitigated everything. But it doesn't, new bleed mechanic included. What SHOULD have been done is block should be baked into the class itself. Your block should be 100%. You're carrying around a giant slab of metal for a damn reason, and the only class to do so. Make it a unique class mechanic of PLD, make block a 100% trait. If you think it's too powerful, fiddle with the damage reduction. Change it to 15 or even 10%. Anything is better than the current unreliable mechanic you have currently.
These are my opinions and thoughts on PLD. I'm not even going to touch on PoA or Cover or anything tied to the oath gauge to avoid giving myself brain damage.
PLD 6.2: Take Away and Rotation
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01-11-2023, 02:28 PMCervaniPLD 6.3: Take Away and Rotation
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01-11-2023, 02:57 PMnia_saeli
Pretty much 100% agree. The rework was phenomenally disappointing. I was prepared to become WARv3 or GNBv2, but now we're just a bad GNBv2 rotationally. I think PLD is going to be pretty solid defensively, but it's just not very fun to play anymore (especially since I enjoyed the dual phase playstyle).
Oath generation could have largely been fixed by just tying it to weaponskills/spells. Then you wouldn't have to worry about time on target as much. Downtime is still an issue, but being able to effectively bank two charges gives us the additional flexibility so it's an okay trade off.
The biggest problem comes in the strictness of the burst. If you want to optimize your burst, you need (at minimum) a 5 GCD set up so that you can feasibly get 2 Divine Might buffed holy spirits inside the window. (You do this by holding a previous divine might stack leading into the burst and having your combo at Royal Authority so you can "Holy Spirit -> Royal Authority -> Holy Spirit" at some point in the combo.
This just feels like it was largely untested. Does SE even have a PLD main on their team to run the changes by? At this point, they would have been better off just slapping 50-100 extra potency on all abilities on all the abilities and calling it a day instead of this half baked Gunbreaker rotation. -
01-12-2023, 01:45 AMForsakenRoe
Thought comes to mind, because of the whole 'lol drop 2 atonements to make your loop, loop', and bear with me:
Sheltron/Intervention 2 charges, shared, 20s recharge time. Cover changed to standalone 2min CD. No defensive uses Oath Gauge anymore.
Oath Gauge converted to a damage based thing.
Fast, Riot, Royal, HS all generate various amounts of Oath Gauge (maybe 5, 10, 10, HS 15 (full 1234 combo total 40) idk), autoattacks do not.
Atonement no longer requires Sword Oath stacks, instead consuming ALL Oath Gauge, scaling in potency based on gauge consumed, minimum cost 10 gauge. Like Apex Arrow.
This would lead to a potential optimization thing, where you'd dump out 'low Atonements' at downtime not-burst parts of the rotation, to fill it out to get it to be a 60s loop. You wouldn't 'lose damage' by doing lower gauge Atones, as it'd be X potency for every 10 gauge spent, so 100 gauge would give a (10*X) potency Atone. The big thing though, would be that by keeping your gauge under control in the downtime, you could have it line up to be filled to 100 right as you hit the burst window, allowing you to get the BIG Atone in the 2min window. So your raidbuff window might look like (going in at 100 gauge, with Royal as next combo action) FOF, Atone, Req, Goring, Conf, Blade, Blade, Blade, Royal, HS (FOF ends here). Something like that. Actually I guess potency would need to be tweaked to make sure it's a better choice to use a 'low Atone' over just doing the combo and overcapping.
Can we make it so Atonement does 'one hit per 10 gauge spent' to reduce crit variance? I want to see 10 hitsplat texts fly off of one Atonement that'd be hilarious -
01-12-2023, 01:58 AMClusterDreams
I had low expectations for the rework but they somehow managed to put out something worse than what I expected. I don't wanna play a job that feels like they combined everything bad about gunbreaker and warrior into a single job.
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01-12-2023, 09:41 AMThatBigBirb
The only tank to feel like a tank in the game is now just a discount GNB.
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01-12-2023, 09:42 AMGserpentIt's the Dollar Tree version of GNB. "Mom, I want GNB!" "We have GNB at home."Quote:
Originally Posted by ThatBigBirb
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01-12-2023, 05:42 PMnia_saeli
I think it'd be a shame to turn yet another gauge into an offensive only thing. WAR used to actually use Inner Beast/Raging Cyclone for defense back in ARR before the DPS stance kicked in and it's always a bit more fun to me to have a gauge that I don't have to just pool or avoid overcapping.
I think it would be a much better solution to just move the gauge away from autoattacks and have oath gauge gained by different skills (like when HS gave us 20 oath gauge back in SB), then it would normalize it and we could even slap some oath gauge generation onto clemency for downtime.
Not everything has to be DPS DPS DPS, imo. It would be nice to have less of our rotation relegated to filler though :( -
01-12-2023, 09:48 PMCabalabob
For burst I’d say it’s more like
For opener:
Fast > riot > FoF > goring > req > royal > blade combo > HS (buffed) > atonements (as many as you can fit in the rest of the FoF window). I’m ignoring other oGCDs cause just use em in there somewhere.
On repeat: hold your divine might buff as FoF comes off CD.
Fast > riot > FoF > goring > req > HS (buffed) > royal > blade combo > HS (buffed) > atonements (as many as you can fit).
Royal and atonement have the same potency so no point delaying FoF more than you need to, 2 GCDs instead of 3. Then for repeat rotations you’re just replacing an atonement with an additional buffed Holy Spirit within the FoF window by using a divine might you gain from your filler rotation + the divine might you gain from using royal instead of atonement within FoF.
I wouldn’t bother with sks since 5-6 of our 8-9 GCDs in the burst window are spells and so not effected by it and without goring being a DoT we aren’t even getting any damage boost out of it anymore. -
01-13-2023, 01:53 AMGserpentYes, it does. Because that is literally the only thing in the entire game that is (loosely) in the hands of the players. Healing? It's done automatically, and damage is scripted with minimal variance. Mitigation? Once again, done automatically and *rigidly* scripted. DPS is the only thing that's left, and even there they've been taking away player interactivity with it by making rotations increasingly "automatic" and removing things that might cause variance like melee having to lose uptime for mechanics or lose positional bonus because of the boss hitbox being small, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by nia_saeli
FFXIV's battle system is complete trash. Straight up. It's the result of having to make certain accommodations in design due to very low tickrate servers (you can't really afford to have mechanics or concepts that are based on reaction rather than memorization/proactive behavior) and... whatever the reason for Square-Enix's crusade against player choice and "you are allowed to make mistakes" since Shadowbringers might be called. I really don't think it's being hyperbolic to say that the current battle system is just garbage and that they pretty much need to do engage in a top-to-bottom rework of it; if not in 7.0 (they will probably have their hands full with the other engine changes/improvements they're working on), certainly in 8.0. WoW ran into the same problem after Wrath of the Lich King - Cataclysm was an attempt to save the old system, but it caused as many problems as it addressed, and with Mists of Pandaria they ripped the bandaid off and just started down the road of major reworks.
Endwalker is a very good example of the problems that crop up when you start taking off too much to try and simplify things. It's paradoxically made things much harder for disorganized/inexperienced groups and players (PF), despite the changes presumably being aimed at getting more of those players into savage raiding. I think it's possible to walk back some of the changes going into 7.0, but that's kicking the can down the road - they will eventually need to completely rework them if they want to give themselves more design space to work with. -
01-13-2023, 02:57 AMWyther
It wasnt needed. PERIOD.
There was no reason to do this, PLD was in a good spot.the "2 minute meta" is garbage and just homogenizes every class it touches.
Theres a reason I havent touched my casters since 80, dont play my Reaper as much as I used to, and now only play Machinist when I feel like logging on. Because of the PLD changes, I dont even feel like logging on anymore. They took the class I started FFXIV with and kicked it to the curb.
NEVER have I hated a class more than PLD right now.
Why even stay subscribed when the class you loved since the start is now hated? -
01-13-2023, 03:07 AMOextraMan I didn't think about doing this, seems legit. It makes me wish they made divine might stackable.Quote:
Originally Posted by Cabalabob
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01-13-2023, 12:30 PMnia_saeliApologies if it were unclear. My statement was more that job resources don't have to be exclusively generated for DPS. Oath Gauge being used defensively provides a much more interesting and meaningful decision than making it just another "Get 50 and Fel Cleave" option.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gserpent
I agree with all your points on the combat system as they've decided to try to evolve it beyond Stormblood. There's a lot of potential options and design space that they cut out during ShB that further cemented the DPS meta in place and the Devs have been actively making decisions to enforce the DPS-centric meta. So I hope they do something in 7.0 to help alleviate this in the future, but I'm not really counting on it. -
01-13-2023, 02:18 PMForsakenRoeAs opposed to 'get 50 and Sheltron'? A suggestion I had made (without much thought for potency balancing) was to make Atonement the Gauge consumer, and scale its potency based on Gauge at the time of use (like Apex Arrow). Meaning you could purposely use lower gauge amounts, to reset to 0 at 'down times', and thereby line up your 'I have hit 100 Gauge it's time to smite' to be at a specific timing, such as, idk, the 2 minute raidbuff window? Is that not 'more interesting and meaningful decision' potentially than 'hit Sheltron if you need mit, or Intervention if your buddy needs mit, or often cases just do both'? Like, yeh it's another DPS related gauge. But 'Paladin's defensiveness via Sheltron is scuppered by the boss using the hidden jutsu of walking away from the arena'' is not a cool unique trait. It's a bloody annoying trait.Quote:
Originally Posted by nia_saeli
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01-13-2023, 03:11 PMGserpentI would love to swap to "active mitigation" where your damage is a bunch of builders and your spenders are defensive tools. WoW went that direction and while it's had a few potholes, it's been a roaring success and is *dramatically* better than what they were doing before.Quote:
Originally Posted by nia_saeli
But that would require an immense change in XIV's combat system and how it's laid out. I don't see it happening anytime soon. -
01-13-2023, 03:34 PMnia_saeliIt's the difference between only having to check "Is it raid buffs yet? No? Am I overcapping?" to "How much gauge do I need to keep for the next mechanic?" it's just something that allows us to play ever so slightly differently from the other tanks that just go "Do I need it in 25 seconds? no? Use it" on their mits. We still end up doing that when we'd overcap, but there's at least some leeway which makes it interesting to use defensively for me.Quote:
Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe
Granted, the oath gauge is basically a 25 second cooldown with two charges and the extra requirement to be in melee range or your cooldowns stop, so not great.
Overall, I just don't trust SE to leave the flexibility in if they remove the oath gauge and repurpose it for something else. I doubt they'd give it charges to compensate. I'd prefer if they just made it so that we generated our gauge from our GCDs and spells (including clemency for when the boss is untargetable).
This is more of a problem with SE encounter design, but it could also be resolved by generating gauge via spells including clemency or something.Quote:
Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe
I'm just overall not a fan of further homogenizing stuff that is unique to PLD that can be resolved while retaining PLD's identity.
I think that's fair.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gserpent
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01-14-2023, 04:21 AMForsakenRoeYes, the interesting and 'unique' part of PLD's Sheltron/Intervention, the good unique at least, is that you can store up 100 gauge, and use Sheltron AND Intervention at the same time. So if Sheltron had 2 charges, shared with Intervention, with a 20s recharge time, it'd be pretty much functionally identical. However, it'd come with additional benefits: current charge time is about 23s, so it'd be up slightly more often. It'd allow for the Oath Gauge to actually track something useful (atm you could take it off your screen and just see if Sheltron's ready by looking if the button is greyed out). "How much gauge do I need to keep for the next mechanic?" would become "Can I use a Sheltron charge here to mit/regen through these Autoattacks? Will I need just one for myself on the upcoming TB, or does my Cotank need an Intervention too?"Quote:
Originally Posted by nia_saeli
If we had Shel/Interv changed to 2 shared charges, 20s recharge time, that'd still be unique to PLD, as it'd be the only tank that can apply it's short mit to both itself AND it's cotank at the same time. Unless you count Oblation on DRK, but that's 10% and this is 15%+15% if you time it well. Way different level of strength, and Oblation's got a 60s recharge time. Identity isn't being infringed. Also we can take Cover off the Oath Gauge and make it a standalone again, that way it'd potentially see more use.
I think the Oath Gauge as it stands is in a dead end. It can't have anything else added to it of interest, because it's the 'Sheltron Gauge'. If it were reworked to be a damage tracking gauge like Wrath or Blood, yeh 'homogenization' but it opens doors to actually reduce homogenization in other ways. Adding new skills that have other costs like 20 or 30 or an Apex Arrow type that consumes all of the gauge and scales in potency. The fact SE's allergic to giving classes gauge spenders that don't work on a multiple of 50 is just as limiting. Having to remember to save 20 for Upheaval didn't take much brain, but it at least took 'more than zero brain'.
Once upon a time I started theorycrafting a change to DRK to make it into a 'stagger tank' back in like SB (when people hated it), didn't get very far though. I fear the problem with Active Mit is that this game's playerbase is so against the idea of 'losing damage' for any reason, it'd be reviled. For example, Guardian Druid in WOW has Rage as it's resource. It can spend that rage on Maul for big ST damage (and a 15% DR effect for like 6sec via a talent), or it can spend it on Ironfur to increase it's physical DR via increased Armor stat. In FFXIV, that'd be hated because everyone would insist on spamming Maul for more damage, and eating dirt as they blow up on a TB because they didn't mitigate it with Ironfur. SOTR on Paladin wouldn't be spent to mitigate, it'd be spent to do more damage. Prot Warrior Rage would all be dumped into Revenge, leaving both Shield block and Ignore Pain unused.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gserpent
(actually I realize now Shield Block increases damage dealt by Shield Slam, so it sort of refunds in that regard. Maybe if we had stuff like that, where eg Sheltron makes Shield Bash do bonus damage during it's duration, that might be cool)
On the other hand, a system like Stagger, where Purifying and Celestial Brews don't cost you your damage (and your damage actually helps restore them faster) would be a lot more acceptable to this playerbase I think. Well, the 'it doesn't cost your damage' part at least. -
01-14-2023, 11:39 AMnia_saeliI agree with all of your points, I think the only point of contention for me is that I trust SE to decide to remove oath gauge entirely and make Shell/Intervention's go inline with Bloodwhetting/Nascent glint at a 25 second shared CD with no charges". They have a tendency to look at an issue with a job (like SB-era Dark Arts) and just remove it entirely instead of tweak it and improve it.Quote:
Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe
Given the recent PLD rework, I feel like skepticism is warranted. That being said, I think your proposed changes to Shell/Intervention are good and I'd be happy if PLD got them. I just don't think that the oath gauge would get repurposed if they went that route.
Yeah, pretty much. Even if we made active mitigation DPS positive (e.g. TBN gives the ability to hit Edge of Shadow twice for the same MP), I can't shake the feeling that we'd end up with situations with tanks or healers saying "stand in the bad, it's DPS positive for me". Maybe just applying damage downs to everything would be enough of a deterrent? IDK.Quote:
Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe
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01-15-2023, 06:01 AMGserpentThe thing is though, it's not costing your DPS to use these defensive skills. In an active mitigation design, WAR wouldn't spend gauge on Fell Cleave, they would be spending gauge on Bloodwhetting or something. Fell Cleave would be a free button you can push that either has a cooldown, or becomes available after certain criteria are met. There's not a case where you're losing damage to use mitigation, they're separate. In WoW's case, your big fancy buttons like Fell Cleave will often be gauge builders (Shield Slam generates a flat amount of Rage, for example.)Quote:
Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe
The primary downside of active mitigation is that it by design kind of needs players to be doing something roughly equivalent to proper DPS - if you aren't using your Fell Cleave every time it's available, your mitigation uptime will suffer because you won't have as much gauge to spend. But this shouldn't be an issue for casual content, because casual content is intentionally tuned to be very, very easy. Even now, you don't even need to be a tank to soak tankbusters in dungeons. This wouldn't change.