PLD changes

[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.

[Rongway]

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).

It looks like it's not that strict though. You can basically fill any of the extra FoF GCDs with anything--including Fast Blade or Riot Blade--as long as you FoF promptly every 60s and you don't break your 1-2-3 such that it costs you a Divine Might. They made it really hard to do crap damage. And even when you can cram two Mighty Holy Spirits and a Royal Authority into a single FoF, the funny "just do a bunch of weak Holy Spirits" rotation still sometimes pulls ahead.

[nia_saeli]

It looks like it's not that strict though. You can basically fill any of the extra FoF GCDs with anything--including Fast Blade or Riot Blade--as long as you FoF promptly every 60s and you don't break your 1-2-3 such that it costs you a Divine Might. They made it really hard to do crap damage. And even when you can cram two Mighty Holy Spirits and a Royal Authority into a single FoF, the funny "just do a bunch of weak Holy Spirits" rotation still sometimes pulls ahead.

Wait, really? How does that work? Is that related to crit-DH variance? Or am I missing something?

I was assuming that hardcast holy spirits were just the "Oh well, better than nothing" kinda damage floor for it. I wasn't aware that it could pull ahead. Kinda cool.

[Rongway]

Wait, really? How does that work? Is that related to crit-DH variance? Or am I missing something?

I was assuming that hardcast holy spirits were just the "Oh well, better than nothing" kinda damage floor for it. I wasn't aware that it could pull ahead. Kinda cool.

Without doing a thorough battery of simulations, here are my thoughts.

Royal Authority and Atonement1, Atonement2, and Atonement3 are the same potency, so you have lots of flexibility in which of the four go in the extra FoF slots. You might not think of it that way, but there is a difference between

Royal Authority + Mighty Holy Spirit + Atonement1
Mighty Holy Spirit + Atonement1 + Atonement2
Mighty Holy Spirit + Atonement2 + Atonement3

There's basically always some way to get a Mighty Holy Spirit and an Atonement or Royal Authority in two of the FoF filler slots, leaving only one that could be the worst case Fast Blade. And when you do end up with that Mighty Holy Spirit + Atonement + Fast Blade worst case, you naturally set yourself up for the Mighty Holy Spirit + Royal Authority + Mighty Holy Spirit best case two FoFs later.

Trying hard to force (Mighty Holy Spirit + Royal Authority + Mighty Holy Spirit) or (Mighty Holy Spirit + Atonement + Atonement) might sometimes require you to drop so much potency elsewhere that you might as well have just gone with the Fast Blade worst case. And as for weak Holy Spirit, on its own it has the same potency per GCD as a complete melee combo with a Mighty Holy Spirit, so that's why it does well as an out-of-burst filler when you can afford it; it's just so expensive you can't always. If you had infinite MP, you could FoF a Mighty Holy Spirit + Royal Authority + Mighty Holy Spirit every minute by using five weak Holy Spirits and this is probably why they made it too expensive to do so every minute.

Sorry, I'm rambling and repeating myself at this point. I may have spent way too long staring at that spreadsheet (which I still could have messed up). It'll be interesting to see what the Balance folks come up with.