Why does Clemency get interrupted? And why does Sword/Shield Oath reset combo?

[Sapphidia]

For reference, what I was told (and tested to seemingly be the case) is that casts are interrupted in FFXIV when you take a single hit of damage that's equal to or greater than 25% of your health. At least, I believe it's 25%, it might be a lower number, maybe 10 or 15. I'm 90% sure at least that the -size- of an individual single hit determines whether or not you get interrupted.

You can actually often spam clemency whilst tanking a pack of instance trash despite being hit hundreds of times because none of the trash mobs hit you hard enough to trigger this interrupt. On bosses of course, most autoattacks or spells will be over the threshhold and will thus interrupt any cast you make. Amusingly this means that Clemency is easier to get off with a high vitality build and with tanking cooldowns up, though the -size- of the clemency scales with Strength of course.

If the devs do what they implied they might in 3.2 and rebalance tanks to use vitality as their damage stat, such that all tanks start wearing full fending and going 35 stats in vitality, tanks will end up with higher health pools and thus will naturally be less likely to have a Clemency interrupted compared to now. I still feel clemency needs some kind of way of Surecasting it via a stance or cooldown, but if SE decide to ignore it and leave it as it is, it might be slightly more useful in 3.2 anyway simply due to tanks having bigger health pools.

If anyone can actually confirm the mechanics of interrupting and health threshold though, I'd be grateful - this is from word of mouth and casual tests so might be incorrect.

[fm_fenrir]

If anyone can actually confirm the mechanics of interrupting and health threshold though, I'd be grateful - this is from word of mouth and casual tests so might be incorrect.

I'm pretty sure there's a damage threshold for an interrupt, but I'm not sure what the value is. I've only had one clemency cast interrupted as PLD, but I also got blasted with a crit for the interrupt, so I don't know if it was the crit or the damage that did it.

Anyway, OP, ShO/SwO are spells, so they interrupt combos. Defiance/Deliverance are abilities (which don't interrupt combos), and the "tank bonus" for Defiance doesn't come into play unless someone hits you with a Lustrate/Tetra immediately after you pop it; ShO is an instant -20% damage taken, so yes, it has a penalty associated with it.

[Freyyy]

Anyway, OP, ShO/SwO are spells, so they interrupt combos. Defiance/Deliverance are abilities (which don't interrupt combos), and the "tank bonus" for Defiance doesn't come into play unless someone hits you with a Lustrate/Tetra immediately after you pop it; ShO is an instant -20% damage taken, so yes, it has a penalty associated with it.

Unleash and Flash are both spells and both don't interrupt combos so it has absolutely nothing to do with this. And Oaths being on the GCD is enough of a penalty, interrupting combos is too much.