PLD changes

[ThatBigBirb]

PLD feels ugly to play in the current state.

My keybinds flowed like water before, but now I'm stretching across my entire keyboard mid rotation for normal damage coherency. And that's before I weave my oGCDs and mitigation cooldowns turning the practiced muscle memory of 6 years into a spiderweb of pain and carpel tunnel.

The changes made, as stated above served only to beat PLD over the head until it fit into the 20s every 2 minute shape every other class and to further Square's hatred of anything dot based.

Who actually asked for these exact changes?

[ForsakenRoe]

I'm not sure if I have wack skillspeed or something, but the rotation doesn't loop at a smooth 60s still right? Not looked up an opener, I tried Fast, Riot, FOF, Goring, Req, Conf, BladeX3, Royal, HS, Atonex3 then looping. But when FOF came back up at 60s, I was at Fast Blade as my next step, meaning that I'd have to drop Atones at some point, or fill with unbuffed Holy Spirits? Did SE seriously not bother to do adjustments to make the rotation intuitively loop when they had the chance?

[RyuuZero]

I played PLD on my Endwalker Bunny a bit on a Striking Dummy to get a feeling of those changes and.. we lost Goring Blade as Combo Finisher. Goring is now a 60s Single Target CD, basicly Spirits Within but on 1 minute instead of 30s, which makes Goring line up with FoF perfectly, so I do now FoF into Goring all the time, just how I Ogi into Senei or Guren on SAM or Trickattack into Kassatsu on NIN.. back to PLD though Expiacion feels redundant to me but Hey! Bulwark is back! YES! but am I here to tell that those PLD changes are Good, because I adepted to them? No. They easily could just make the Goring DoT stack with the Valor DoT that would've been cool, so we didn't got it, here have a OG Spirits Within on 60s even though we turned Spirits Within into an AoE, even though Circle of Scorn already exists!.. I think I should try to run a dungeon.

[ForsakenRoe]

I played PLD on my Endwalker Bunny a bit on a Striking Dummy to get a feeling of those changes and.. we lost Goring Blade as Combo Finisher. Goring is now a 60s Single Target CD, basicly Spirits Within but on 1 minute instead of 30s, which makes Goring line up with FoF perfectly, so I do now FoF into Goring all the time, just how I Ogi into Senei or Guren on SAM or Trickattack into Kassatsu on NIN.. back to PLD though Expiacion feels redundant to me but Hey! Bulwark is back! YES! but am I here to tell that those PLD changes are Good, because I adepted to them? No. They easily could just make the Goring DoT stack with the Valor DoT that would've been cool, so we didn't got it, here have a OG Spirits Within on 60s even though we turned Spirits Within into an AoE, even though Circle of Scorn already exists!.. I think I should try to run a dungeon.

more accurate to say Goring Blade is another Sonic Break, since both are GCD and 60s CD

[Argyle_Darkheart]

I'm not sure if I have wack skillspeed or something, but the rotation doesn't loop at a smooth 60s still right? Not looked up an opener, I tried Fast, Riot, FOF, Goring, Req, Conf, BladeX3, Royal, HS, Atonex3 then looping. But when FOF came back up at 60s, I was at Fast Blade as my next step, meaning that I'd have to drop Atones at some point, or fill with unbuffed Holy Spirits? Did SE seriously not bother to do adjustments to make the rotation intuitively loop when they had the chance?

To loop optimally, you must either drop Atonements or use filler Holy Spirits. For the latter using a 2 minute loop, an optimal FoF window (Divine Might > Goring > Confi > Blade x 3 > RA > Divine Might) demands 5 filler Holy Spirits following each FoF, but this is MP negative. To regain MP, you can do 3 Holy Spirits after the 1st FoF, and no filler after the 2nd (the 2nd FoF will be weaker with only one Divine Might).

Following the opener is a special case that requires 6 Holy Spirits as filler. This is all under the assumption of 0 zero Skill Speed.

I don't know if this rotation will catch on, but that fact that it's even on the table is pretty interesting/funny. Dropping Atonements is the much simpler thing to do.

[Rongway]

I'm not sure if I have wack skillspeed or something, but the rotation doesn't loop at a smooth 60s still right? Not looked up an opener, I tried Fast, Riot, FOF, Goring, Req, Conf, BladeX3, Royal, HS, Atonex3 then looping. But when FOF came back up at 60s, I was at Fast Blade as my next step, meaning that I'd have to drop Atones at some point, or fill with unbuffed Holy Spirits? Did SE seriously not bother to do adjustments to make the rotation intuitively loop when they had the chance?

I'm fine with most of the PLD changes on their own but this is the one thing that really bothers me about them when you put it all together. With 0 skill speed, there are 24 GCDs in a 60s interval. The 60s burst Goring Blade > Confiteor > Blade > Blader > Bladest is 5 GCDs and the filler combo Fast Blade > Riot Blade > Authority > Holy + 3xAtonement is 7 GCDs. So one burst segment and three filler combos is 26 GCDs. As Argyle points out above, that means one of the following will happen:

• Your burst will drift out of party alignment
• Your burst will start at a different point in your combo each minute
• You will drop two Atonements
• You will drop a whole combo and replace it with five Holy Spirits

Dropping two Atonements somewhere means overall one of the three filler combos will have an average potency of (200p + 280p +380p + 450p + 380p) / 5 GCD = 338 p/GCD. This is lower than the 350 base (unbuffed) Holy Spirit potency, which means dropping a whole combo and replacing it with five Holy Spirits should do more damage than just dropping two Atonements. However, I don't think the MP refresh can support this. In one minute you'd be need 4000 MP for Confiteor combo, 2000 for the two combo Holy Spirits, and 5000 for the five weak Holy Spirits -- 11,000 MP per minute. It's only possible to regain 4000 MP from natural refresh, 2000 from the two Riot Blades, 1000 from two Expiacions, and 2400 from six Atonements -- 10,400 MP. So you would only be able to do this every other minute.

All of that of course is just to make the rotation feel good inside a 60s or 120s cycle. If you can stand a 180s cycle, you can just add a single weak Holy every three minutes, wich pushes Royal Authority back just far enough that you can have a Royal Authority and two Mighty Holy Spirits in one FoF window.

Of the four options I looked at

1. Start your burst every minute no matter where it falls in your combo. Delay Holy Spirit if you can fit it into the burst without losing a Divine Might.
2. Every three minutes, insert a single weak Holy Spirit.
3. Every minute, drop two Atonements.
4. Every two minutes, drop two Atonements and replace one whole melee combo with five weak Holy Spirits

the difference between the best and worst was only about 0.3%, which would be the difference between doing 7,500 dps and 7,475 dps, so do whichever one is most comfortable, I guess?

I probably broke math though. Feel free to check my work and let me know if you find any glaring errors. Spreadsheet here.

Running potency/s is bolded for each rotation at the end of the 6, 9, and 12 minute FoF windows. Didn't include Expiation and Circle of Scorn, because you're just going to fit those into the FoF window regardless of which rotation you wanted to use. I did not confirm that option D is practical given MP refresh rates; I just wanted to present the hypothetical. Whether non-Confiteor actions in the FoF window come before or after Confiteor combo will depend on how your burst lines up with the party's. I didn't consider any other possible action sequences for the opening because I was just interested in the rotation loops. The weak Holy Spirit in (B) rotation can be used as early as right after the previous FoF window; it is shown on the sheet at the latest point that it can be cast.

Based on these preliminary calculations -- on which I could easily have made an error somewhere, and which assume 0 Skill speed so even if it's all right on paper they won't be perfect in practice -- I'm probably going to see how I do with option (B) (cast a single weak Holy Spirit every three minutes).

[Magikazam]

IMO new paladin suffer from the fact they tried to keep it the same, while reworking some of it option to make it more similar to GNB and WAR. Now it just a weird hybrid that can't decide what it wants to be and have a weird synergy with itself.

[Simple_Barghest]

I'm not optimized with end-game raiding and yeah no, this doesn't feel good.

[Cabalabob]

We get 9 GCDs in FoF, so seems like ideally you want those to be: confiteor, blade combo, goring blade, royal authority, atonement x2 and a divine might buffed Holy Spirit. But that means we have to sit on FoF until riot blade which makes the rotation flow worse than what we had previously and the rotation alignment is really off.

Would be nice if FoF would grant us 3 sword oath stacks and req a divine might stack so we can get right into our burst without that build up. Could even open with a hard cast Holy Spirit into FoF instead of fast blade.

Also feels like we’d want some skill speed to make that FoF window less tight, but then more than half our burst is magical so it may not even be worth it and will just cause goring blade to drift. They seriously need to just remove skill and spell speed and just have a single speed stat at this point. I used to occasionally miss an atonement under FoF with the old rotation and that was entirely physical, it feels even worse now with that forced 2.5 second GCD on magic attacks in the window.

[nia_saeli]

In short. It's fine, but it's not for me. It feels more like it should be call Shieldbeaker, rather than PLD, tbh. I'm not particularly optimistic that they are going to fix the issues because it's kind of obvious that no one on their team plays PLD consistently.

The truly baffling thing is that they managed to make it _stricter_ than it was previously. Yeah, dropping atonements to realign periodically always kinda felt a bit jank, but now we are back to dropping atonements or hardcasting. And we can't even just go into the FoF burst, we have to do a 3 GCD lead up (or a 5 GCD lead up if you want to do double Divine Might Holy Spirit).

Granted, if you aren't upset about losing some DPS, you can pretty much put a Holy spirit anywhere in rotation and it's a minimal loss. But I'm still baffled that the PLD rework ended up with us doing SB era hardcasted Holy Spirit as a regular part of our rotation.

I think it's absolutely playable, and I'm curious where it sits in the meta (hopefully on the top by a country mile or two), but I feel that all of my cynicism leading up to 6.3 was 100% justified.

As a slight follow-up, I also think that they did a disservice to PLD by basically copy-pasting GNB's single target burst rotation into PLD

- FoF is No Mercy
- Req is like bloodfest on a 60s CD
- Goring Blade is Double Down
- Spirits Within/Circle of scorn is Blasting Zone/Bow Shock
- Divine Might is a cartridge that must be spent on HolySpirit (Burst Strike).

I will grant that they had the decency to not make us WARv3, but when making us GNB v2 it would have been nice to be able to have divine might actually behave like cartridges instead of making us do the lead-in jank that comes with burst. The previous iteration was totally fine to just yolo unless you were trying to optimize on a fight by fight basis with spreadsheets. Now it feels super off when trying to do anything past the first FoF.

Honestly, the more I play with it, the less I understand how it made it out of testing. I kind of feel like YoshiP didn't give us any details because he didn't understand how to play it either. I was expecting to be disappointed, but I did not expect to be _this_ disappointed.