Paladin Parity Suggestion Package

[MrTherm]

Just going to compile my recent responses all here:

I could totally do the first part (in bold). Instead of Shield Oath "reducing damage dealt" it would just read "reducing weaponskill damage dealt". It would only equate to about a 2% dps increase though, or 6-9% total when combined with the refreshable Shield Swipe. I don't see how AAs being revised to work with SS would provide enough of an effect to be worth the loss of dps per TP compared to Det/Crit, however. Similarly, Determination still affects Auto-attacks, just at a lesser level (probably equal to or less than Crit's average effects, now), and changes there, like my Skill/Spell Speed merge, would have external effects. Especially when taking into account the balance from external effects, that would be no less complicated that +25 potency to all attacks (and 25% of weaponskill damage done to nearby enemies). I personally like the %HP-dependence of Spirits Within, but would not be sad to lose it, either.

[MATH] Each GB-RoH-RA does 2200 weaponskill per 22.5 seconds without the Sword Oath modifier suggested in the package (using 280 RoH). With Shield Oath, that would be 1760. Normally Shield Swipe, 100% health Spirits, and CoS would each do 10 potency per second or 225 potency per tri-combo or 8 pps and 180 per tri-combo in Shield Oath. oGCDs ignoring Shield Oath's .8 modifier would save 2 pps or 45 rotational potency, increasing MT WS/Abil DPS by 2.05%. A single Riot - Royal combo would drop this to 2.02%. A single RoH dropped for RA would reduce it to below 2%.

Now, that correction also allows AAs to bypass the reduction, so let's calculate those too to test:
100p/3s * 22.5s = 750 potency. With Shield Oath, 600 potency. 150 potency saved. (2200+225+750)/(2200+600+180) = 1.065, or 6.5% dps increase if Shield Oath's modifier ignored both AAs and oGCDs (only affected weaponskills). Now that would be sizable, though far from able to make up a gap between, say, 650 and 800 dps (23%).

Best part: that damage bonus wouldn't fade when not proccing blocks.... I like.

(I still want some unique way to supply Shield Oath AoE dps though, such that a DRK would swap into MT position for Blood Price, but if low on CDs, the PLD could swap back into MT position for AoE burst via Bulwark while the DRK spends his mana gains without being fettered by Grit's damage modifier, etc. I don't want PLD to be limited solely to OT when paired with a non-PLD.)

Even though I thing it would work I myself am still a bit weird with the whole SS effecting AAs. One of the reasons I personally lean towards this is its rather unique for PLD to have AA buffed. No other class gets that.


While I'm sure you could math this out better than me, currently my AA does 375 a swing on average for the main hit, with 230 being average secondary hit. With FoF, it averages to be 480 and 300 a swing. So for 60 seconds we do ~605 damage and for 30 seconds I do 780 damage every 2.24 seconds. 60/2.24=26.7 swings. 26*605 =15730 30/2.24= 13.3 swings 13*780 = 10140 15730+10140=25870 total damage for 90 seconds. I should mention this is all NON-crit attacks 25870/90 = 287.4 DPS just from auto attacks if all non crit in 90 seconds.

DRK does 560 average (with darkside) every 2.96 seconds 90/2.96 = 30.4 auto attacks in 90 seconds 30*560= 16800 total damage /90 = 186.6 DPS from auto attacks with no crits in 90 seconds.

Sorry, no WAR to give numbers on ATM.

100 DPS difference from AA is a pretty LARGE difference. This is why I feel that they should re-evaluate SO effect on AA to close the gap on overall DPS. DRK gets TONS of skills. WAR gets really HIGH burst skills, so whats PLD get for a niche? If a PLD does 900 DPS in a 3 minute fight, then 30% of it is from AAs. If DRK does 1100 DPS total, only ~15% of its DPS is from AA. So if somehow, SE made PLD do an extra 100 DPS in 90 seconds to bring its DPS up, i feel that it would be more than enough of a boost. Would it be top? Nope. Would it be last? Sure. But it could still compete, and its damage is going to be a hell of a lot more consistant. Nothing wrong with having 'entry level, easy to play' jobs. I know personally, in raids, I'm typically focusing on the fight and yelling at people to do things rather than trying to maximize my DPS. AKA, busy being a leader and guide people thru things while also not eating dirt. But blah, i'm going off on a tangent about how I feel tanks should be played. Lets not get into that one.

This would also help keep the way PLD is played very much the same and very much in its own genre rather then copy-pasta "stacks" like so many other jobs have. Could SS effecting AA bring the damage up proper levels? I think it depends on how its done. What if you only had that effective bonus when under SwO and FoF and the AA delay was dropped.. 25%? or even 50%? I don't know, random numbers. Good chance that they do need to revisit DET's effect on AA also for this to work. (Random personal note: I remember reading about the DET effect on AA in patch notes, but i thought it was removed, not reduced. Either way it was bad. Kinda like how they screwed with shield block %s. But maybe that's just me being bias.)

I also have some more opinions about how much DPS they should do while under ShO but meh. Its late an i'm tired so it can wait.

This of course does not solve the overall TP issue and issues with Vial/clem, but hey, those are easy fixes.

Blah Blah Blah TL;DR - There are tons of fixes/changes to be made. Which is best? who knows. What will SE give us? Probably a steaming pile of poo because they probably already planned on what they are doing and are sitting back drinking beers while reading the forums like its a soap opera and laughing at us..

[Shurrikhan]

snip

Easiest comparison is just 33.33 potency / second from AAs (100/3*wepspd) per hit) for basic AAs. DPS value remains the same regardless of weapon speed. Sword Oath, however, deals the same damage, 50 potency, regardless of weapon speed, such that your AA DPS would be increased to 200% with a 1.5s sword (or, heck, 300% with a 1.0s sword), but would only be 150% with a 3.0s sword. At current that bonus doesn't scale with SS either, simply because AA frequency doesn't scale with SS.

That's what annoys me about the current Oath. We'd be roughly balanced on OT ST dps if we PLDs just all had, say, 1.2s swords (two thirds of an extra Fast Blade every GCD). But instead we get 2.08-2.24 weapon speeds. Bummer. If it at least had just been standardized to "increases AA damage by 70%" then we'd be at the rate of about a 2.0s sword all the time, and at least that much wouldn't annoy me, but I wouldn't get those bonuses to Sword Oath tank enmity that I wanted either (as compared to 25 more potency on all weaponskills and abilities, the prior of which at least scales with Skill Speed).

To compare across a GB-RA-RA tri-combo (22.5s at 2.5 GCD, 1 GB tick clipped):
WS dmg: 500+150+200+340+150+200+340+150+230 --> 2260 (65.3% of total dps)
oGCD dmg: 10 pps x 2 (x3 if blocking) * 22.5s --> 450 (675 if blocking) (13.0% of total dps, 19.5% with blocks)
Base AA dmg: 33.333pps x 22.5s --> 750 (21.7% of total dps)
Oath-less total: 3460
SwO w/ 1.8s sword: 22.5/1.8 *50 -> 625 :: (3460+625)/3460 = 1.181 --> Sword Oath increased your dps by 18.1%.
SwO w/ 2.1s sword: 22.5/2.1 *50 -> 536 :: 1.155 --> Sword Oath increased your dps by 15.5%.
SwO w/ 2.4s sword: 22.5/2.4 *50 -> 469 :: 1.136 --> Sword Oath increased your dps by 13.6%.
SwO w/ 2.7s sword: 22.5/2.7 *50 -> 417 :: 1.121 --> Sword Oath increased your dps by 12.1%.
SwO w/ 3.0s sword: 22.5/3.0 *50 -> 375 :: 1.108 --> Sword Oath increased your dps by 10.8%.

As for the other stuff, I'm not sure our block %s are that far below what they were in First Coil/CT, which is essentially where we're at right now. The only thing we know for sure is that they aren't affected by STR anymore.

In regards to closing the OT gap via SwO, my aim here was to standardize SwO contribution across varying sword weapon speeds (without necessarily increasing OT dps by SwO alone), while getting as many QoL adjustments out of a relatively simple SwO effect as I could. I'd rather not increase the ST DPS gap between SwO and no-Oath/ShO any further than it is. Instead, I've added a rotational option that would primarily be used by OTs in the form of the Riot Blade>Royal Authority combo option (for an extra 60 potency per GB, or 1.7% dps in the current system, or ~1.6% in the modified system). This combined with my Sword Oath should bring it to about a 16% dps increase, if my Excel charts here are up to date, about even with a 2.0s sword, which SE doesn't seem obliged to give us anything faster than, with numerous small QoL changes consequent to it.

If I need to push SwO further for balance, I could push the bonus onto 'all attacks' instead of just 'abilities and weaponskills', for half of the current SwO's bonus--overpowered at up to a 23.6% dps bonus--or write that but actually have it add the 25 to the per-3-seconds potency calculation of the auto-attacks, increasing it only by 25%, thereby adding only 187.5 potency per 22.5 seconds or 5.1% dps in the modified system, giving Sword Oath a total of just over 19% dps bonus, roughly a Maim instead of a Darkside. RoH adjustments, if RoH would have been frequently used, will add another 20 potency (.5% dps) per use per GB compared to pre-buff RoH usage, up to a 20% dps bonus from Sword Oath in a GB-RoH-RoH rotation.

E.g. If needed:
Sword Oath - increases the potency of all attacks you deal by 25, and causes your weaponskills to cleave enemies for 25% damage at 20% additional TP cost (to a maximum of 200% cost). [Cleaves do not apply additional effects.] [In actuality, AA dps is increased by 25%, or at the per-3-seconds calculation, not by 25 potency each AA.] --> ~19.5% increase in DPS.

Similarly, increasing the weaponskill/ability potency bonus from 25 to 30 would increase the DPS gain by another fifth, to around 18%. Increasing the ability damage bonus from 25 potency to 25% would increase DPS output by around 3%, to around 17%(?).