Quote Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima View Post
I’d like to know people’s opinions on this since I’m noticing a lot of anxiety over changing their rotation* mid-expansion. These have happened before with other jobs, namely those that have inherent job issues that haven’t been brought up until new systems and changes in the expac are already in place.
You know, I'm actually quite afraid of a PLD rework only during this period of time only due to their job design choices as of late. Healer forums are going up in flames from simplicity of pressing 2 damage skills over and over again, from normal content to high-end content due to downtime, but the developers have yet to change things. It can then be inferred that the developers think this job design philosophy is the right thing to do because they don't believe the playerbase is good enough to handle any complexity. No one still wants to play healers because the role itself is boring when there's such a significant amount of downtime in every type of content (normal to high-end). Rather than just giving healer damage skills back for 2 expansions now (4 years), they still tried to convince people to play not play tank/dps and play healers instead without making any changes to the number of damage skill variety. SAM losing Kaiten is also a big sign of reducing complexity -- they didn't merge Shoha with Shoha II when they mentioned button bloat, but instead directly removed Kaiten and turning the Samurai gauge into purely a Shinten gauge. No one even expected Kaiten to be removed. I haven't even seen complaints about Samurai until Kaiten got removed. If healers and DPS were targeted with these changes, why wouldn't tanks be next on the list? The rework would suddenly be a good opportunity for them to "try it out".

So what if the the PLD rework in 6.3 was to give a similar healer gameplay experience to tanks by reducing the complexity immensely? What if they will remove every damage skill but 1 single target, 1 aoe, and 1 ranged attack? There would be no issues with aggro generation because they can just triple the aggro generation on their main skills and have the combos just be an upgraded trait like healers main attack skill.

Lately, SE has been removing DoTs from the game in general. Healers lost a lot of DoTs/AoE DoTs until it became the standard 1 DoT per healer. SMN no longer have DoTs. Goring Blade is a DoT. Circle of Scorn is a DoT. Whose to say one of these skills won't go next?

Then, because blocking cannot compete with mitigation under bleeds and critical hit, PLD just gets a bunch of new mitigation skills to replace their damage skills. Because it's a starter class and because there have been complaints that their rotation drifts (atonement), it could also receive the White Mage treatment of being simple to play by losing their rotation entirely.

To fit in-line with the 2 min burst meta, PLD could just get 1 additional skill to use every 120 seconds - which will be their "super burst phase" (Confeitor-> Blade of Valor combo). So instead of 2-1-1-1-1-1 like healers, tanks is 2-2-2-2-2-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1. To reduce any issue of critical hit variance, the Confeitor combo will always critical hit. At best, they say "they heard the complaints of a 2 min burst meta" and changed the 1 additional skill's cooldown from 120 seconds to 60 seconds.

Because people say tank anxiety makes them play really badly, now that tanks don't have a DPS rotation, they can fully focus on mitigating correctly. And this kind of change is actually a possibility, because they removed healer DPS skills. For the vast majority of players who were playing healers before, they can DPS and heal simultaneously. The healer DPS skill changes wasn't targeted for them but for people who struggle to heal and DPS -- aka heal anxiety from having to worry about DPS buttons. So the PLD rework change could very well be made for tank anxiety.

I think this kind of change will be what I'm most afraid of from happening. It's a very lazy way of doing things, but it's something that works for balance, and all their decisions lately have been taking the easy way out for balance. There's a very low chance SE would do this because this is PLD we're talking about and tanks at least have very good precedent on changes, but the Kaiten change blindsided so many people that at this point, anything is possible. I sure hope I'm overthinking things.