PLD synergy issues

[shao32]

dont forgeth about tank without grit/shield/defiance, one of the biggest adventage against WAR are grit and shield oath when maintanking ofering better pasive mitigation at the cost of little dps compared to defiance, PLD and DRK change betwen stances without losing much dps compared to WAR, but thanks to the agresive tanking meta making splayers call you to tank without it or you are not good, this give WAR a huge adventage against DRK and PLD apart they natural raid utility.

if for maintaking you have to keep up you tank stance yes or yes fights with multiple tank swaps you can take more adventage form a DRK/PLD comb forcing WAR to dealt with they limitations something they never are doing now bcs they can avoid it so easily, stills storm eye is so damm good a SAM with slashing debuff or how knows meaby WAR loosing the effect to give it to SAM, anything can happen.

[Venoshock]

That says nothing about Samurai not applying a version of the Storm's Eye/Dancing Edge Slashing resist down debuff as part of its combo attacks.

Part of the reason Nin has better synergy with War/Pld and War/Drk than Drk/Pld is that Dancing Edge is not actually part of the Ninja's optimal dps rotation while Storm's eye is part of the Warrior's. Ninja's would rather use Aeolian Edge than Dancing Edge.

If the Sam naturally applies a slashing debuff with its optimal dps rotation (just like how the Dragoon always applies the piercing debuff with Disembowel due to always wanting to keep Chaos Thrust's DoT up) then War/Pld and War/Drk would not naturally be better than Pld/Drk.

Every class that has a set rotation (as opposed to the priority system that summoner, bard and machinist follow) which has one of three purposes:

-DoT rotation; sometimes tied to your main damage or buff/debuff rotation; shadow fang, chaos thrust, goring blade etc. they're your strongest attacks if allowed full uptime. Not every class has a full rotation per sé, but as a stand alone attack that should be used as soon as it expires like; mutilate, scourge, fracture etc.

-main damage rotation; aeolian edge, full thrust, snap punch, butchers block, royal authority, soul eater etc. these do the most immediate damage and (apart from butchers) have no other side effect as opposed to DoTs being the most damaging with the catch being, they have to be up for the full duration.

-buff/debuff rotation; armour crush, dancing edge, dragon kick, disembowel, delirium, storms eye/path etc, these enhance other abilities and are to be upheld 100% but the trade off is that they are almost always your weakest rotation (dancing edge should be used instead of aeolian edge in situations where you cannot meet the positional requirement)

if SE was to follow this like they have with pretty much all classes so far then no, Samurai's slashing debuff ( if it even gets one, for all we know they could have a slashing buff for themselves instead of a slashing debuff on the enemy making the class more selfish like monk) will never be stronger than the main damage rotation. I hate to say this as a warrior main, but the problem is warrior. Warrior not only has highest personal dps but it also brings utility. It has evrything.

thats like having a monk with the highest personal dps + the ability to use shade walker, smoke screen, battle litany and trick attack. Warrior has it all. You wither take away storms eye from warrior and all tanks are equal. ninjas will be a bit upset but at least warrior isn't mandatory oooor you can give paladin at the very least it own version of storms eye and now paladin/dark knight compositions are more viable.


Edit- Now that i think about it, if SE realy cared about tank balancing, they'd change the way storms eye works by making it give warrior a personal slashing buff (or get rid of it all together and buff maim(which cannot stack with dancing edge and whatever slashing debuff samurai gets)) and giving samurai the slashing debuff of storms eye . Samurai and ninja will now have synergy with each other and the tanks.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Every class that has a set rotation (as opposed to the priority system that summoner, bard and machinist follow) which has one of three purposes:

-DoT rotation; sometimes tied to your main damage or buff/debuff rotation; shadow fang, chaos thrust, goring blade etc. they're your strongest attacks if allowed full uptime. Not every class has a full rotation per sé, but as a stand alone attack that should be used as soon as it expires like; mutilate, scourge, fracture etc.

-main damage rotation; aeolian edge, full thrust, snap punch, butchers block, royal authority, soul eater etc. these do the most immediate damage and (apart from butchers) have no other side effect as opposed to DoTs being the most damaging with the catch being, they have to be up for the full duration.

-buff/debuff rotation; armour crush, dancing edge, dragon kick, disembowel, delirium, storms eye/path etc, these enhance other abilities and are to be upheld 100% but the trade off is that they are almost always your weakest rotation (dancing edge should be used instead of aeolian edge in situations where you cannot meet the positional requirement)

Each class has a set of combos with the durations of various buffs, debuffs and dots creating a rotation of those combos.

Fast Blade -> Savage Blade -> Royal Authority is a combo.

Fast Blade -> Riot Blade -> Goring Blade -> Fast Blade -> Savage Blade -> Royal Authority -> Fast Blade -> Savage Blade -> Royal Authority (usually shortened to GB -> RA -> RA) is a rotation.

The Warriors combo rotation to keep up the Maim debuff while dealing the most damage is SE -> BB -> BB with Fellcleaves and Fracture replacing BB combos when optimal.

The only reason that Dancing Edge isn't in the optimal dps rotation is due to how Ninja has 3 combos (Dancing Edge 280+Slashing debuff, Armor Crush 260+Speed buff extension, and Aeolian Edge 340) off of one combo start. If they can hit the positional they should always be replacing Dancing Edge with Aeolian Edge if someone else is providing the Slashing debuff.

if SE was to follow this like they have with pretty much all classes so far then no, Samurai's slashing debuff ( if it even gets one, for all we know they could have a slashing buff for themselves instead of a slashing debuff on the enemy making the class more selfish like monk) will never be stronger than the main damage rotation.

No. The Samurai would only need to apply the debuff as the 1st or 2nd step of a 3 step DoT combo just like how Dragoon applies the Piercing debuff with Disembowel when reapplying the Chaos Thrust DoT.

Also the Monk isn't selfish. There just isn't another job that deals bludgeoning damage so Dragon Kick only helps Monks currently. When there are two Monks in a party currently one will drop Dragon Kick from it's rotation and start using Bootshine in its place.

thats like having a monk with the highest personal dps + the ability to use shade walker, smoke screen, battle litany and trick attack. Warrior has it all. You wither take away storms eye from warrior and all tanks are equal. ninjas will be a bit upset but at least warrior isn't mandatory oooor you can give paladin at the very least it own version of storms eye and now paladin/dark knight compositions are more viable.

As long as War+Pld/Drk+Sam+Nin is not better than Pld+Drk+Sam+Nin then the situation would be a bit more balanced.

[ADVSS]

Simply turning Flash into a 60 potency x10 enmity Holiest of Holy at some level would fix the AoE damage problem.



A fair amount of the Drk/Pld synergy problem is that both War/Pld and War/Drk have better synergy with the current only other source of the slash damage up debuff. Since Nin gets a damage boost from being in a party with a War, replacing either Drk or Pld in a Drk/Pld comp is a net gain. Hopefully Samurai can change that.

I totally agree with this. If reprisal were more ot friendly, and perhaps the debuffs of roh/delerium/path or eye were somehow made to work well with either 2 on at once...for example roh doing a phys vuln down, or straight up damage down like path
dlerium/dragonkick in the same boat with the slashdebuff and ninja... maybe switcch around what the tanks debuff could work

[Sqwall]

This problem with the tanks is balance between them all and trying to make them all the "samey" for just being a tank. When I play MNK it plays TOTALLY different then say my SMN. And for good reason. Because that's a play style that works for each class. I have some grips with MNK and the constant spamming chakra (so annoying), but the dps mnk offers is great.

I don't understand why they really try to make all the tanks play the same just for the masses to "use them more" or "we would really like to see more PLD". That's a crap excuse. Just make the class viable in it's own right. Don't adjust it to make it more like WAR's dps level. Just offer something that makes the class unique. Shields need to offer more for the class honestly, it's our bread and butter.
I think it's time that PLD get's the spell reflect!
This would make the class unique and gives the PLD more of it's knight/mage ethos.
Food for thought. Thoughts?

[ADVSS]

I don't understand why they really try to make all the tanks play the same just for the masses to "use them more" or "we would really like to see more PLD". That's a crap excuse. Just make the class viable in it's own right. Don't adjust it to make it more like WAR's dps level. Just offer something that makes the class unique. Shields need to offer more for the class honestly, it's our bread and butter.
I think it's time that PLD get's the spell reflect!
This would make the class unique and gives the PLD more of it's knight/mage ethos.
Food for thought. Thoughts?

There is a reason why i felt that holding off on a new tank and healer isnt the worst decision they can make.
Look at 2.0 warrior as an example of why they had to make it the monster it is today, same for AST actually
The problem with both roles is that they have to do their job as same as the others if not better in regards, dps can get away with a less strenuous sort of mechanic. All the big fights are predictable and require tanks to mitigate in short bursts or tank busters, on demand. And healers have to have a similar kit to meet that, big heal small heal, group heal raise,esuna you get the point. 2.0 WAR was meant to mitigate by lifetapping, which really didnt work out as much as popping cooldowns with mitigation burst, so they were retooled. Ast having lower potencies with their heals, got them retooled among other things and yet now theyre both good, but it still isnt balanced properly.

The biggest problem seems to be synergy between the roles, esp when WAR/WAR and AST/AST seems to be the best choice if not for the limit break being slower

[Jim_Berry]

That says nothing about Samurai not applying a version of the Storm's Eye/Dancing Edge Slashing resist down debuff as part of its combo attacks.

Part of the reason Nin has better synergy with War/Pld and War/Drk than Drk/Pld is that Dancing Edge is not actually part of the Ninja's optimal dps rotation while Storm's eye is part of the Warrior's. Ninja's would rather use Aeolian Edge than Dancing Edge.

If the Sam naturally applies a slashing debuff with its optimal dps rotation (just like how the Dragoon always applies the piercing debuff with Disembowel due to always wanting to keep Chaos Thrust's DoT up) then War/Pld and War/Drk would not naturally be better than Pld/Drk.

...unless you're a yolo NIN who will hit the boss with it from the front each time.

[Lyth]

You cannot balance mitigation against damage output. If you do, there will be one of two outcomes:
1) The mitigation advantage is required to clear the fight, in which case the job in question is the only one which is capable of tanking the fight.
2) The mitigation advantage is not required to clear the fight, in which case the job in question lose out to ones which provide more dps.

We saw the former with PLD in ARR and pre-Gordias HW, in which the community frequently viewed it as the only viable MT for certain fights, and we saw the latter in post-Gordias HW, where it saw much less use. Both of these outcomes are terrible. You need to balance mitigation against mitigation, and damage output against damage output. I'd really rather not see individual jobs swing from underutilised to underutilised and then back again, every other expansion. Flavour-of-the-month balancing is fake balancing.

This type of balance doesn't mean that the jobs have to end up playing the same. The end goal should be for the jobs to produce the same result in different ways. PLD doesn't need to have the same personal dps as a WAR, so long as they are capable of providing offensive damage buffs to their allies to bolster them and compensate through raid dps. PLD doesn't need to gap close back from a knockback if they can just shrug it off. PLD doesn't need a stack or MP management system to keep it interesting if you expand its repertoire of shield-based combat techniques and block proc oGCDs. Remove the MP costs and cast times from spells (PLD's MP management is non-existent, so skills that cost MP are either essentially free or rendered impractical because of the cast times), and have their buffs operate off of recasts and procs.

PLD's problem has never been mitigation. While WAR wins out in terms of recast, PLD has the most robust defensive kit in the game. This will become even more pronounced if they make good on their plan to bolster PLD's magic defense, without making corresponding adjustments to the other tanks. That being said, I would be happy if they scrapped this whole "physical defense" and "magical defense" tank system altogether and give all three tanks parity on their defensive toolkits (especially when it comes to ultimate abilities: there's no comparison between Hallowed and the other tanks' "equivalents").

The slashing debuff almost certainly will need to be addressed with the expansion. When Storm's Eye's slashing effect was introduced, there were only two jobs that could benefit from it. With Stormsblood, there will be five. Letting one job have a functional monopoly on the debuff is not gonna work.

[Launched]

The biggest problem seems to be synergy between the roles, esp when WAR/WAR and AST/AST seems to be the best choice if not for the limit break being slower

It would be real nice if people could stop spreading misinformation like this, because that's how we get bad balance choices like giving PLD more magic resist even though mitigation isn't the problem. DRK brings almost identical dps to WAR, and it also brings the most raidwide mitigation of the tanks through Reprisal and Delirium. Stacking 2 WARs doesn't have a single advantage over DRK + WAR. Stacking 2 ASTs would get you more card uptime, but it also means that you're missing out on the unique skills a SCH gets like Sacred Soil, Supervirus, Eye for an Eye and an absolute ton of free healing from the fairy. I'm pretty sure job stacking hasn't been the optimal composition since 2.0 with PLD.

[Sqwall]

Last night i decided to play my PLD in a pug and then my DRK in a pug. Very stark difference in tanking methods, BUT the same effect. Only difference I noticed mostly is that PLD played with to many options. When to use clemency or not, divine veil or wait we have scholar shield, ugh!
Openers: Fight or Flight, Rampart
My main rotation: Shield Lob, Flash, Flash, CoS, 123 RoH combo, Flash, Flash, sheltron, Goring Blade combo, Flash; Generally sprinkle Bulwark and Sentinel in there

After main rotation into advanced rotation:Royal combo, sheltron, Goring combo, Flash, CoS, Sheltron, Royal combo, Divine Veil, Clemancy; Generally sprinkle Rampart, FoF, Convalescence, Awareness.

NOW THE PROBELM. The AOE in this rotation is just that, ALL I have is flash and CoS. Thats it! For me I hate trash pulls in raids, pugs. People generally don't care about enmity. Never had this problem with my DRK.