Give us back the old Paladin

[Renathras]

Hm...

I disagree. PLD right now is more responsive and more flexible than it's been since HW, and feels a lot more polished. I don't like that everything's bowing to the 2 min meta, but New PLD feels more functional than Old PLD did. Having one ranged GCD you can move up to 5 GCDs is far more useful than having 4 of them at once whether you need them or not that have a static location in the rotation and can't be relocated. Not having to deal with ANTI-intuitive cursed openers like popping FoF 15 seconds before the fight isn't a loss. Complexity is one thing, but clunk, anti-synergy, and anti-logic are not complexity, nor are they good design.

My big issues with the current design is it didn't address PLD's button bloat, even though it could have (instead adding slightly to it), FoF and Requiescat should be one ability (since you never use them separately anymore), Requiescat should be ranged at this point instead of melee (they even fixed GNB's Continuation because it was doing that same thing), Goring Blade has no purpose in existing, Expaciation and Circle of Scorn should honestly be combined together, Cover shouldn't cost Oath Gauge to use (and never should have), and...honestly that's about it.

Everything else in the kit works, there's a lot of flexibility now that it lacked before, the rotation's no less engaging than before (the rigid rotation of Old PLD was hardly anything to write home about and the new one offers more choice; more choice = more skill expression), and some of the unnecessary clunk has been removed. There's still some there that could use some work and PLD really needs to have the button bloat addressed, but aside from those two things (which were also problems with Old PLD), New PLD is shaping up to be an actual good rework. Rare as such a thing may be, they seem to have caught lightning more or less in their bottle this time.

[Lamarcy2699]

Everything else in the kit works, there's a lot of flexibility now that it lacked before, the rotation's no less engaging than before (the rigid rotation of Old PLD was hardly anything to write home about and the new one offers more choice; more choice = more skill expression), and some of the unnecessary clunk has been removed. There's still some there that could use some work and PLD really needs to have the button bloat addressed, but aside from those two things (which were also problems with Old PLD), New PLD is shaping up to be an actual good rework. Rare as such a thing may be, they seem to have caught lightning more or less in their bottle this time.

The only choice you have now is when you use HS, that's it. Both rotations are just as rigid as each other, just you can shift one button now within the next 5 GCDs. Both rotations have mandatory atonement drops to fit all your buttons in. The old rotation was rather damage consistent throughout so you could do 2 different openers for killtime/mechanic dependant things. One was early Requiescat which helped align with the burst design of jobs and requires a ~17s countdown timer, the other opener was the "standard" opener which was slightly less optimal but allowed for you to be flexible with your Req. timings for if you needed to move out of melee range to help your team with a mechanic or if the boss was going to jump and required no timer.

[Mikey_R]

Honestly the one thing the "rework" was set to achieve failed so hard. PLD right now is only worse in almost every way than it was before the changes in 6.2. Damage-wise, under buffs it's about the same as 6.18 PLD but in lower buff comps it's now the absolute lowest of all the tanks when before it was sitting rather comfortably just below DRK.

PLD was the lowest tank DPS wise before the changes as well. Also, Goring Blade's VFX have not changed.

Both rotations have mandatory atonement drops to fit all your buttons in.

Current PLD does NOT have mandatory Atonement drops. Your DPS is all but identical whether you choose to drop them or not.

[Lamarcy2699]

PLD was the lowest tank DPS wise before the changes as well. Also, Goring Blade's VFX have not changed.



Current PLD does NOT have mandatory Atonement drops. Your DPS is all but identical whether you choose to drop them or not.

I meant to put .28 not .18 and I did fact check myself and yes you are right goring did not recieve an animation change, that must have been me huffing copium on release hoping they did SOMETHING to it. Also yes, you are right the atonement drops are not mandatory but they are if you want to optimize. As for PLD damage, the only fight PLD performed worse on was P8S phase 2 specifically. Every other fight besides P8S P2 my point stands as that's just the job interaction with the downtime of the fight.

[Renathras]

The only choice you have now is when you use HS, that's it.

Which is MORE CHOICE than you had before. Not only that, for an "only", it's a pretty big deal. You can use it any time for increased uptime during disengage periods, and it increases PLD's sustain consistency. WAR, DRK, and GNB all heal as part of their base rotation. Old PLD did not. It was, in fact, the ONLY Tank that did not. All of its health regeneration/sustain was packed into Requiescat, unless you were being bad and using Clemency. Moreover, the rotation is no less engaging than before. "Ooooh, you don't press 1-2-5 after 4-4-4!!" Meh. Color me unimpressed. The upkeep on the DoT was hardly engaging, especially since it was automatic as part of your standard rotation, unlike BRD or the Healers where they have to actually go out of their way to apply/maintain them (not often I'll say Healers have more engaging DoT gameplay than something else, but this was one such case)

Being able to shift your disengage by 5 GCDs, or around 15 seconds of time (including its own GCD) is pretty significant for timing fight mechanics, something you COULDN'T do under Old PLD. Moreover, hardcasting HS isn't as much of a DPS loss as it was before, because there's no Goring DoT to drift, which was bad. This collectively makes the Job far more flexible in combat.

And, as Mikey_R already corrected, there is no mandatory Atonement drop under New PLD. If you want to hyper optimize, you can do it, but the math-heads have done the number crunching and said the difference is so negligible to not even bother with it; something those types of people generally don't say, meaning it truly is negligible. Besides, if you liked Old PLD, then you can hardly complain about that.

The Old PLD forced you to do one of five (FIVE, not two) openers depending on what you were fighting. New PLD requires only one, not because it's less flexible, but because it's MORE flexible and doesn't NEED nearly half a dozen openers to adapt to encounters.

PLD before was the worst DPS Job. That hasn't changed, and it will likely get some potency buffs to bring it up a bit now that they've made the changes to the rotation. The new rotation is no less engaging than the old one, and arguably a BIT more engaging since it's less hyper-mechanical and anti-intuitive and actually has a little bit of flexibility - some choice is better and more skill expression than NO choice. Old burst phase also required 0 thought; Old PLD's burst phase was hardly some galaxy brain operation - you hit Req, HSx4, Confetior x4 (since Swords was the same button). That's hardly more thought required than the new burst.

I can see some people complaining - because people will literally complain the sky is falling about any change at all (and also NO changes being done when they think a Job needs changes) - so that's something that's going to happen and there's no way to avoid it. But objectively, New PLD is better than Old PLD. All the complaints against it, Old PLD had and had worse. The only way New PLD is worse is it has one more button, but given PLD was already button bloated, that was a problem with Old PLD, and New PLD can fix that by just folding Goring's damage into Swords and combining FoF and Requiescat; I suspect one or both of those things to happen in the future. And at least it got something USEFUL, its "missing" mitigation.

.

Understand, there ARE such things as "bad reworks".

This PLD one is not one of them. In almost every way, it's an improvement. In the few ways it isn't, Old PLD had the same problems and so was no better.

[Lamarcy2699]

Understand, there ARE such things as "bad reworks".

This PLD one is not one of them. In almost every way, it's an improvement. In the few ways it isn't, Old PLD had the same problems and so was no better.

Aren't healers complaining at how little they have to heal now? At least every friend I have who heals in savage/ultimate says that. It's definitely better now than it was in the pandaemonium first tier with how much tanks need to be healed because of DoTs but adding more self healing only takes away from healers. Second, what do you mean healers have more engaging DoT gameplay than old PLD? Healers just press one button every ~30s and call it a day at least PLD had it baked into the rotation and it flowed well. Sure you can argue the old burst was just as easy but it at least punished harder for messing up unlike now how you can only mess up but using a physical GCD (except boring blade) during blades combo. Also at least the filler required a bit of thought of knowing when to drop the atonement and when to do your dot and if you do make a mistake, how to correct it. Now it's literally just 1-2-3-4-4-4 spam and that's not fun to me. PLD absolutely was not the worst DPS out of the tanks before, that was WAR and this is easily verifiable. In Ex4, PLD was top dps of the tanks (even though extremes are honestly getting super easy damage checks). P7s? 2nd highest tank. Every other fight than P8S P2? just below DRK. Now? Dead last in every fight by a fair bit so if that's not a nerf I really don't know what is. It performed fine as a tank in and of itself it just had a natural drift which set itself apart from every other job in their burst patterns but the lack of losing too much damage during filler more than made up for it. As I mentioned above, PLD only suffered in P8S Phase 2 because of the timing of the forced downtime there. It underperformed in DSR too for the same reason but it was only a little behind WAR. At least I think we can both agree that we disagree with how we feel about the changes because personally, they just stripped PLD of anything that made it unique or interesting and turned into "GNB we have at home" but that's just the DM change and the burst structure that makes it feel like that. They're going too far with the homogenization of jobs and I really hope they do something about it in 7.0 rather than double down on it.