PLD 4.0

[Februs]

what does RA need, really? As it is, it's just 20 potency short of a DRG's Full Thrust combo, and I don't see many people complaining about FT needing any buffs.

Need? Nothing, really. Like I said, no changes are actually necessary for RA. It's just that it seems rather odd that it is literally the only Tank combo in the game that had no additional effects whatsoever.

A few people have mentioned in the past that they'd like to see it provide raid utility of some kind, like a dmg buff. Personally, I'm not too fond of this idea, because I think that it would make Pld's too similar to War's. If i had to come up with something for it, I'd rather see it have a personal effect. Off the top of my head, one option would be to have RA work in a similar fashion to Soul Eater, only instead of providing Hp, it would provide TP. As things are right now, this would be a welcomed effect since Pld's are constantly starved for Tp ... however, if Pld's got any other means of making up Tp (like your Tempered Will idea) this would probably be too over powered, as Pld's would literally never run out of Tp. Though, that's kind of the way War works right now, and no one seems to mind; so, maybe this would be fine.

Another option would be for RA to simply ignore the dmg penalty of Shield Oath. Comparing RA's potency to Full Thrust is fine, and RA admittedly does have a pretty hefty potency; however, that potency is consistently nerfed by Shield Oath's dmg penalty, which ultimately makes FT and RA incomparable. Pld's OT dps is actually not bad, but their MT dps is garbage. Allowing RA to ignore the penalty of the Tank stance would at least bring Pld's up a little. They would still be miles behind Drk's and War's in the MT position, but it would help. If it really bugged Pld's too much to do it, they could always nerf RA's potency a little to compensate, but I don't think it would be necessary.

In any case, these are just two ideas off the top of my head. Neither of them are required. Nor do I expect RA to go through any changes, because honestly it's fine the way it is. I only mentioned it because it's been brought up on the forums before, and when you look at all the Tank combo's side by side it's pretty easy to see that "one of these things is not like the others."

[Reynhart]

Given that it guarantees the block though, I don't see how this would be a fair test.

Sheltron doesn't really guarantees a block. It only makes you Block roll 100% succesful.
If a parry roll can go unrestricted by block, it means that, sometimes, you would do a successful parry roll even with Sheltron up.
If you never parry, then the parry roll is restricted by a failed block check, making them dependent...and making your parry rate unaffected by the size of your shield a bit strange.

For my last sentence, it means that a critical hit will bypass Sheltron, not activating it.

As for miss...Actually I don't recall ever seeing an incoming "Miss" instead of a "Dodge", so I'd say that's a single accuracy/evasion check. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that.

Another option would be for RA to simply ignore the dmg penalty of Shield Oath.

Simple, subtle, elegant.
Thumbs up !

[Shurrikhan]

Snip

Simply responding to the suggestions you've mentioned (RA giving a dmg bonus of some sort/ignoring ShO dmg reduction, or giving TP):

My issue with these is that there are far simpler means to fix both TP issues and Shield Oath dps. Moreover, I'm not certain TP fixes truly necessary, especially without similar changes to pure-Grit DRK. Ever since the Goring Blade change to 50 TP, though less efficient than using Swipe once per GB on a 2.4s GCD before, we've been even with MT DRKs (whose only lead prior to that was Scourge). The rest is dependent on their Blood Weapon and spending a GCD returning to Grit. If PLD were to trim their TP consumption to DRK's stance-dancing level, then DRK's would be penalized in intensive tanking situations equally to PLDs now. Of course, I'm not saying that's reason enough not to give PLD something, but forcing them to use their no-enmity combo (RA) just to hold TP, when they're already the lowest-enmity-output Tank does not seem like a good solution.

I'd much rather just see them be the only job with a 60-TP opener by changing Fast Blade to 60 TP, perhaps with Goring Blade returned to 60 TP, causing the PLD to consume 20 to 30 less TP per 9 GCDs:
560->540 per GB duration | 9 GCDs = 3.6% reduction to TP costs

Or take both:
560->530 per GB duration | 9 GCDs = 5.4% reduction to TP costs

As for MT dps, that too seems like it has a simple fix. Changing Shield Oath from "reducing damage dealt" to "reducing weaponskill damage dealt" would increase MT dps by ~9.6%. Further making a Rage of Halone a non-option by increasing its relative potency gap with Royal Authority seems a bafflingly bad fix by comparison.

There are also more PLD-ish ways to improve PLD MT dps, such as by reducing the cooldown on Shield Swipe based on potency blocked (1 second per 150 potency, for instance, if 500 were the maximum assigned to any mob in an instance, and all mobs given the same base attack power), or giving it a chance to refresh CD on block. The only issue with all this would be that these bonuses would be niched out of (pure) magical fights, since Yoshi has apparently stated that PLDs will never block magic (even when it takes the form of flung rocks).

[Shurrikhan]

As for miss...Actually I don't recall ever seeing an incoming "Miss" instead of a "Dodge", so I'd say that's a single accuracy/evasion check. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that.
)

There definitely hasn't been a distinction in display since 1.x, where you originally could tell when an enemy dodged vs. you missed, and vice versa, but I haven't been able to find any definitive evidence yet as to whether this was a change to display or coding when everything turned into just "dodge". It certainly favors Haymaker, now, at any rate.

Edit: actually, I think you can Haymaker after "dodging" magic attacks, and since magic does not trigger dodge rolls, as far as I'm aware, then it must be combined with miss chance. Sorry for my memory loss there.

I would imagine then that it goes Crit y/n </> Hit y/n > Block y/n > Parry y/n, if they do use sequentials, given that, as you said. But I could have sworn one of the benefits of bucklers originally was to make critical strikes against you less frequent, because they blocks and crits taken shared a table, like an extended Awareness, back when Twintania crits were killing tanks. I don't see they would choose to make Crits would be exempt from blocks and parries... It works, sure, but just seems a really odd choice not to have that side continue down the remaining checks. Even in this system, taking out crit chance via Awareness would make it less likely (well, impossible) for the incoming attacks to skip your dodges, blocks, and parries, essentially increasing their chance, but it just seems really weird that they'd do that... Oh well, that among many things.

Edit: Should be Hit > Crit > Block > Parry, as Reynhart said.

[Reynhart]

I would imagine then that it goes Crit y/n > Hit y/n > Block y/n > Parry y/n, if they do use sequentials, given that, as you said.

Wouldn't it make sense to check hit before crit ?
Were Ninjas able to take critical hits with Perfect Dodge up before it was changed ?

[Shurrikhan]

Wouldn't it make sense to check hit before crit ?
Were Ninjas able to take critical hits with Perfect Dodge up before it was changed ?

I was supposing that it checks whether the ability, when it hits, will be a crit or not, but may still miss, much like how Life Surge can still miss? ....Nevermind, that too could go either way. Hit checks no, doesn't check for crit. Wastes LS. Yep, as you said.

As for the Perfect Dodge question, if we had physical attacks that could auto-crit back when Perfect Dodge was around, I could test this, but as PD is gone now and the only auto-crit I know of from ARR was T11, magical, I have no way of checking vs. auto-crits. As for regular crits, I don't remember ever seeing a critical hit go off when tanking / PvPing as a Ninja while my Perfect Dodge was up, but I did that relatively little, and may have forgotten. Never had a Life Surge used against me, though I would assume it would be auto-dodged and wasted?

Yeah, hit check > crit check. My bad there.

[MPNZ]

A separate limit break that prevents all damage to members of your party for 15 seconds, but 5-10% of that damage is dealt to you. Hopefully, one that costs just one bar and a huge cool down, and tied to the MSQ.

Making parry useful again.

Bonus point caps.

Doing something so that when you switch to PLD/MRD/DRK that your tank stance is automatically activated, and if not: the DPS stance if it's available.

Mapping the stance switches to one button.

Making the ShO and SwO icon more distinctive.

A damage bonus for party members who are not between eleven and one o'clock of any enemy (with 12 being its front) that the PLD is holding aggro of and PLD.

Making it so that flash works off either VIT or STR.
Or both!

All jobs/classes will have 1 Bonus point added to every stat, and doesn't effect our previously allocated points. This may be tied to Job crystals to place more pressure on players to unlock jobs and make losing some majorly missed cross class skills as less of a perceived negative by players who have just unlocked the class.

[Instrumentality]

Not being able to be crit would be cool and awesome.


(For all tanks, not just PLD.)

[Jpec07]

Should be Hit > Crit > Block > Parry, as Reynhart said.

I'm quietly hoping they change it to something like Hit > Crit = Block = Parry. It would cut down on the effective mitigation brought by Awareness from making all physical attacks parryable (instead of just non-Crits), but the skill is extremely powerful on its own without that component (more than most would probably guess - still working on that spreadsheet I kept mentioning).

And I will rebut the comments made on the first page here: RNG is not the problem with parry. Parry's problem, as others have said, is that there simply aren't enough physical attacks being made on tanks for it to make a difference. Bosses in this game have an extremely slow white damage tick; and at least in 3.0, that tick also hits about as hard as a wet noodle. If encounters are designed to trigger at least more frequent physical damage (say 2-3x as many hits in a fight as there are now), Parry would suddenly become more useful again. We'd also need encounters that don't rely on DPS checks so heavily, but that's a different can of worms I'd rather not open.

Saying that it's not useful because it's RNG is inane. It is damage mitigation, plain and simple. Sure, Parry won't save you from a tankbuster, but it will smooth out incoming white damage ticks a little bit, and make it so you can soak more damage and require less healing. And frankly, anything that can be done to make yourself easier to heal, even if only a little, is very worth doing (and no, "killing it faster" doesn't make you easier to heal, it just means the healer will be healing you for a shorter amount of time while cursing you for making their jobs that much harder - especially if you're paired with a low-throughput healer like SCH).

[AlexiIvaniskavich]

1. AOE
2. Tempered Will additional effect - equivalent to Surecast
3. Shield Swipe cost 0 TP on proc – I love this FM-Fenrir!!!
4. Shield Oath additional effect – reflect x% of damage mitigated from a blocked attack (this could be broken as all get out, but would make sitting in ShO not be as terrible as it is now)
5. *New Skill* - when in shield oath increases party (healing/defense/something better than I have listed here) – when in sword oath increases party (damage, skill/spell speed/or ???) really just looking for a skill that does something different, depending on oath - with personal leanings to more utility tank.