Paladin Change(s)

[AegisKiddo]

This isn't really correct. The highest potency combo on WAR is BB, their enmity combo. It generates significantly more enmity than SB does in PLD's RA combo.

I've had many discussions and testing, storm's eye over and over is a dps gain over butchers, since you can keep up both fracture and eye without either falling off, I'm sure you know just because butchers has a higher potency than eye doesn't mean it's a gain this is pretty fundamental. But I believe this can be further debated elsewhere, not on a pld change thread

[Reynhart]

I've had many discussions and testing, storm's eye over and over is a dps gain over butchers, since you can keep up both fracture and eye without either falling off, I'm sure you know just because butchers has a higher potency than eye doesn't mean it's a gain this is pretty fundamental. But I believe this can be further debated elsewhere, not on a pld change thread

I'd like to see real test numbers to back up this claim.
If it's a true, it's a nice bit of information.

However, my raw testing doesn't point towards that way.

[aleph_null]

snip

You can keep 100% eye uptime with fracture and fell cleaves without skipping block combo. There are few things to watch out though, for example:

If the last combo before you use berserk for triple cleave is block combo, you should do 2x eye combo during berserk, otherwise you'll drop eye debuff due to pacification (unless you have a brd);

If you do a block combo and 2 cleaves then you should skip fracture until you reapply eye unless you have very high sks since you can at most insert 5 gcds between each eye combo with average sks. So doing "SE combo > BB combo > frac > 2x cleave > SE combo" is bad unless you have high sks or external boost (card/fairy), you should do "SE combo > BB combo > 2x cleave > SE combo > frac" instead.

tl;dr there are times when repeating eye combo is necessary to maintain eye debuff uptime but most of the time you can slip in block combo too for more dps.

[Hierro]

doing "SE combo > BB combo > frac > 2x cleave > SE combo" is bad unless you have high sks or external boost (card/fairy), you should do "SE combo > BB combo > 2x cleave > SE combo > frac" instead.

Say what? Using frac before 2x cleave means it gets to benefit from 5 stacks and IR.

[aleph_null]

Say what? Using frac before 2x cleave means it gets to benefit from 5 stacks and IR.

Not worth it if you lose eye debuff on your next storm's eye, that's why I said you need high sks (over 700 but idk how much exactly) or external boost.

[SpookyGhost]

I've had many discussions and testing, storm's eye over and over is a dps gain over butchers, since you can keep up both fracture and eye without either falling off, I'm sure you know just because butchers has a higher potency than eye doesn't mean it's a gain this is pretty fundamental. But I believe this can be further debated elsewhere, not on a pld change thread

It is true that you should 2x Eye if you're going to 2x FC + Fracture after the first Eye (IE s/t like this http://ffxivrotations.com/adl) but if you're in a situation where you're just applying Fracture and doing 1x FC then Eye won't actually drop. It's certainly safer to just Eye on repeat (unless you're the MT in which case you might as well BB whenever you can actually do it), but that doesn't mean BB isn't literally a DPS gain as long as Eye doesn't fall off and you can apply Fracture (both of which you can @ 1 of each). So realistically the only places where you can't touch BB are in your Berserk window and with the 50s 3x FC opener you technically can BB by putting Fracture at the end, but that loses you IR crit buff and also would give you a lot of threat so not really worth it (unless you're MT).

There is the argument to be made that using BB enough will cause your PLD/DRK to need to use their threat combo and completely negate the potency you gained from BBing, but your BBs open up a bit with a NIN in the party. On top of this the optimal opener is to have WAR pull and get Vengeance ticks under Berserk which will probably result in you wanting to BB in your opener even if it isn't optimal for Fracture usage.

Basically you're really not losing a lot if you stick to just spamming SE to infinity and beyond, but there's certainly a time and place to use BB. Then again no real point in being this min/max when Savage is going to be below Midas in terms of DPS checks lol