Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[ForsakenRoe]

Will Atonement become our Fell Cleave?

no, that already exists: holy spirit. holy spirit = fellcleave, holy circle = decimate, requiescat = IR, and confiteor = primal rend, atonement right now in WAR terms would be like if SE said 'ok if you press storms path, you get to use butchers block 3 times (it has the same damage as path)'. atm we use 4 holy spirits then confetti, and have a 63s loop so we have to drop an atonement/holy spirit, depending which is weaker cos of SE's balance, so it seems like the low hanging fruit SE would go for, to make us use 1 less holy spirit per requiescat window, and buff something to compensate for the lost potency. it's 600p per holy spirit, and we would (after this change) have 3 holy spirits, confiteor, 3 blade hits, so i expect they would buff HS and each of the blade hits by 100 and job's done (confiteor is already bad for crit variance so please SE lets not buff that any more). it'd also make the full req window 7 GCDs long, which makes it more comfortably fit inside a 20s raidbuff window. anything more than that would be quite a surprise to me

[dspguy]

no, that already exists: holy spirit. holy spirit = fellcleave, holy circle = decimate, requiescat = IR, and confiteor = primal rend, atonement right now in WAR terms would be like if SE said 'ok if you press storms path, you get to use butchers block 3 times (it has the same damage as path)'. atm we use 4 holy spirits then confetti, and have a 63s loop so we have to drop an atonement/holy spirit, depending which is weaker cos of SE's balance, so it seems like the low hanging fruit SE would go for, to make us use 1 less holy spirit per requiescat window, and buff something to compensate for the lost potency. it's 600p per holy spirit, and we would (after this change) have 3 holy spirits, confiteor, 3 blade hits, so i expect they would buff HS and each of the blade hits by 100 and job's done (confiteor is already bad for crit variance so please SE lets not buff that any more). it'd also make the full req window 7 GCDs long, which makes it more comfortably fit inside a 20s raidbuff window. anything more than that would be quite a surprise to me

I love the PLD-to-WAR comparison. And that right there is why SE being so formulaic is hurting the game. I have my PLD and WAR hotbars nearly identical. The 1-2-3 Royal Authority combo is my Storm's Path combo. The PLD DoT combo is my Storm's Eye combo. Requiescat is slotted where Inner Release is. Holy Spirit/Circle are slotted for Fell Cleave and Decimate. Holy Sheltron is where Bloodwhetting is - Sentinel where Vengeance is. Etc etc etc. The differences are minor. While the rotation is different, it isn't that different.

[Gserpent]

I love the PLD-to-WAR comparison. And that right there is why SE being so formulaic is hurting the game. I have my PLD and WAR hotbars nearly identical. The 1-2-3 Royal Authority combo is my Storm's Path combo. The PLD DoT combo is my Storm's Eye combo. Requiescat is slotted where Inner Release is. Holy Spirit/Circle are slotted for Fell Cleave and Decimate. Holy Sheltron is where Bloodwhetting is - Sentinel where Vengeance is. Etc etc etc. The differences are minor. While the rotation is different, it isn't that different.

Having hotbars being nearly identical isn't a bad thing, IMO. That dramatically lowers the skill floor for any given class, as your hands are already somewhat used to what they'll be doing.

The issue is that Square-Enix has been lowering the skill *ceiling* of classes at the same time they lower the floor... and IMO, to a much greater extent than they lower the floor (since the floor in ShB was already fairly low.) About a thousand different issues with their current design of, "everyone uses everything in 20 seconds every 120 seconds." Hopefully they admit they screwed up and walk back some of these changes for 7.0, because the more things you sand off or homogenize away, the fewer things you can tinker with for the purposes of design and balance.

[Gserpent]

Hey guys, hope you're ready for a fucking braindead homogenized "WAR but it has a shield!" experience in 6.3, please look forward to it. There's apparently a Famitsu article making the rounds, and while the exact specifics of the changes were said to be held for the PLL coming up after the holidays, we have these choice (machine translated) bits to tide us over and show us exactly what they're about to do to our boy:

"The Knight job is one of the oldest jobs, having been implemented since I took charge of it in the middle of the old "FFXIV". It was carried over to the "New Eorzea" and actions were added and adjusted based on it. However, because it is a job that has not received much work in the tank rolls, the current playing style is more complicated than other tanks. For example, compared to other tanks, there are few "press a button and the effect is immediately activated. Many of them require the user to perform an action and then do something, or require the user to fulfill a condition in order to trigger the effect."

Goodbye, Goring Blade. Goodbye, Flight or Fight (probably.) Goodbye, current iteration of Oath Gauge (current Oath Gauge is trash though so I'm not upset about this one.) We may or may not have two separate 1-2-3's with a buff to maintain. I'm reading this as Atonement being scrapped, too, since Atonement isn't a "haha monkey press button get numbers" thing. The skill itself may be preserved, but it could just become our version of Fell Cleave (though it frankly lacks Fell Cleave's impact.) I'm also suspicious Sheltron is being scrapped - why not just remove Sheltron entirely and make Intervention something you can cast on yourself, identical to GNB's Heart of Corundum? This seems especially likely if the Oath Gauge is being turned into the I Can't Believe It's Not Beast Gauge! like I'm expecting from this. Basically, if it's not the kind of button that makes the braindead morons that cheered about the WAR changes happy, it's gone. Big flashy numbers are all the paste eaters care about, fuck you if you liked having PvE gameplay where you actually had to use a brain cell to remember your rotation and were allowed to make mistakes.

"The "tank who can attack from a long distance" has also been inherited, but in recent contents, we have made the target circle of bosses larger to eliminate the stress of melee jobs in general. For example, when a boss attacks and leaves, if the attacker persists to the utmost, he or she will be able to return to the attack range while the GCD is still circling. As a result, the knight's advantage of being able to attack at a distance itself has been diminished, making it difficult to burst when you want to burst, or accumulate damage by focusing on continuous damage (DoT), so it is difficult to gain damage when the boss disappears due to a gimmick. The mechanics of the game did not fit with the current content."

Earlier context had Yoshida explicitly state that they were doing a full rework of Paladin, not just an adjustment, so this isn't surprising. The magic phase is definitely gone. This *could* mean that we keep Fight or Flight (now as I Can't Believe It's Not Inner Release! form), or it could mean that Req becomes its own thing and you only get the spells during Req. Req just literally being Confetti into Blades buttons makes the most sense, because these are hugely flashy abilities with large potency values - remember what I said about the paste eaters determining class design? This would fit the bill. I'd assume they'd retain the range on these spells because why not? But I bet we're losing Holy Spirit and Holy Circle entirely now.

"Please assume that the defensive buffs that are more difficult to use compared to other tanks will be tweaked."

In response to a question about Sheltron. So this further confirms my belief that we're losing Sheltron and Intervention and getting a new button (possibly just a reworked Intervention) that is I Can't Believe It's Not Heart of Corundum!, probably costs no gauge, and probably has a 25 second cooldown.

So in regards to the OP? Yeah, this is why we were all in dread of the upcoming rework. Paladin needed help, make no mistake, but they're just going to take the lazy way out and make it a clone of Warrior because they can't be bothered to expect players to actually give a shit about content that's supposed to be challenging (meaning, you need to actually fucking read guides and learn to play the class) and their crusade against player choice and allowing players to make actual mistakes in rotations requires them to do this. I wish it were feasible to revert their fucking stupid "2 minute paradigm" changes, but that's just hindsight at work - there's no way they could have known how badly it would pan out during development of EW. Literally all of the issues we're facing right now are directly tied to them dumbing down the game far past the point of what makes any fucking sense. The more things you homogenize or sand down, the fewer things you can tweak or toy with to try and solve problems that crop up. This will be a good lesson in game design down the road, I think.

FWIW, Paladin is called Knight in JP. They don't have the quasi-religious connotations in the native Japanese that they have in the English translation. It's assumed they chose Paladin because Knight may have felt too generic in a game already full of knights (apparently in JP it uses the loanword Knight and not the native word for it.)

[Fryfor]

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Ignoring your wall of text, is there a reason why you don't do savage? Asking for a friend.

[Oizen]

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*buff that lets you cast 4 exactly 3 times for free*

[Rithy255]

The time has come, we will see the rework soon. Lets not really speculate anymore one what's going to happen really, theirs going to be a lot of outcry eitherway, I just HOPE, they don't go in the direction of making it "similar to warrior" dark already does that.

I think just keep in mind, that plds issues extend outside it's rotation, while a way to PLD's viability better would be "Make it's damage best!!" it wouldn't really correctly "fix" PLD, most people play PLD to be the support tank with strong defensives not "DPS DPS DPS" that's more Gunbreaker, even dark knights thing, PLD needs actual changes to it's defensives with abilities Like Cover being practically useless on the job Give it utility and upsides that actually make it a good pick, I worry we're either just gonna get "busted dps" changes which doesn't even fit PLD in the first place and if we keep the amount of damage we got, PLD still would be practically a useless tank when other tanks can just do what the PLD does but better with no Jank Abilities.

At the end of the day I'm just hoping we get more then "rotation changes" highly doubt it, but i've accepted that I may just have to switch mains despite loving PLD.

[Absurdity]

The time has come, we will see the rework soon. Lets not really speculate anymore one what's going to happen really, theirs going to be a lot of outcry eitherway, I just HOPE, they don't go in the direction of making it "similar to warrior" dark already does that.

They obviously will, because they seem to actually think warrior is peak design and anything requiring more than 2 brain cells needs to be stamped out.

[Puremallace]

Anxiety increases....live letter is Friday and confirmed will show the new changes.

[Gserpent]

Ignoring your wall of text, is there a reason why you don't do savage? Asking for a friend.

Was busy with work for Asphodelos and I was taking a break from the game for most of Abyssos. Progging fights is a lot of fun, but you can do those at any time with MINE enabled if needed. The actual nitty gritty of reclearing fights wasn't very fun even back in ShB, but I did it because I was part of a static that was pretty fun to play with. Unfortunately, EW has doubled down on making classes rather uninteresting to actually *play* and PLD was one of the few exceptions where you still needed to use your noggin occasionally or risk losing significant damage. Won't know for sure until the PLL, but it's likely we're going to see that removed like they did with WAR.

I don't really understand why Square-Enix is so dead-set against having a low floor *and* a (reasonably) high ceiling. The two aren't mutually exclusive. WAR in ShB was actually a pretty good baseline to work off of - it was maybe a little *too* simple, but it still had an appreciable difference between floor and ceiling, and the floor was fairly low which made the class accessible for newbies (there's a reason it was almost always recommended as babby's first tank.)