PLD Cross Class Skills

[Viridiana]

Edit: Forgot Fracture. Which kind of says how useful it is. It basically gobbles your TP and causes interruptions to your enmity-generating combos, for a ridiculously small DPS boost. If you want to do more damage at the expense of enmity generation, use Shield Swipe instead... as it does more damage than Fracture, doesn't interrupt your combos (only costing you a 2.5 second GCD) and actually consumes less TP than you regenerate whilst casting it.

Err, 210 versus 220 potency, in Fracture's favor. And if you don't want to generate enmity, there's a decent chance it's because you're the off-tank, in which case it's going to be hard to block reliably to proc Shield Swipe. Otherwise, all valid points.

[Maelwys]

Edit: Forgot Fracture. Which kind of says how useful it is. It basically gobbles your TP and causes interruptions to your enmity-generating combos, for a ridiculously small DPS boost. If you want to do more damage at the expense of enmity generation, use Shield Swipe instead... as it does more damage than Fracture, doesn't interrupt your combos (only costing you a 2.5 second GCD) and actually consumes less TP than you regenerate whilst casting it.

Err, 210 versus 220 potency, in Fracture's favor. And if you don't want to generate enmity, there's a decent chance it's because you're the off-tank, in which case it's going to be hard to block reliably to proc Shield Swipe. Otherwise, all valid points.

In terms of raw potency, sure. But I tend to block more often than once every 18 seconds (Fracture Duration) unless I'm fighting something that deals only Magical damage. On average with an i90 shield and decent parry, block and parry each trigger roughly one hit out of every four (not counting Bulwark).

In the rare cases that I'm off tanking on a single boss mob (not adds) I tend to spend it helping to mitigate damage on the MT (via throwing out Stoneskins, Flashing, whatever) since generally-speaking taking some of the heat off the healer means that they can spend a bit more time in Cleric Stance and contribute more extra damage than I would by using another on-GCD ability.

The only situation I can think of where I'd consider using Fracture would be in a single-enemy DPS-race where I am main tanking, already have a large enmity lead and need zero damage mitigation. That's precisely one fight: Titan during the Heart Phase. Even on Demon Wall I'd rather stay in Shield Oath and Tank the bees to keep them away from the DPS. On everything else I generally consider it to be better for me to be generating as much enmity as physically possible so that I can either Stoneskin myself more often (Bosses) or throw out Stuns etc. (Trash mobs).

I'm not saying Fracture isn't a slight DPS boost (region of ~3% I think) but that there are usually better options available whenever you have a free GCD. If it lasted 30 seconds like the Warrior Traited version, I'd probably take it instead of "Cure"... but as it is, I consider it to sacrifice too much for too little performance. I know there are some PLDs out there who disagree with that viewpoint and use Fracture in their rotations. As long as those PLDs can manage enmity and not bottom out on TP, it doesn't bother me in the slightest