Give us back the old Paladin

[nia_saeli]

Fair enough. Like I said, I don't think they should have removed Old PLD.

I have not gotten this sense from your prior messages, my apologies.

I think New PLD is honestly a better GNB, just with bad number tuning.
...
I was more trying to show that if you zoom out too far, everything looks the same. Moreover, in some of the cases (like Requiescat/Inner Release), PLD is more similar to WAR. So rather than being "a worse GNB" it's more "a mid-point straddling WAR and GNB".

1. Why is it gunbreaker when you talk to one person, but WAR when you talk to me? It almost feels like you are being a contrarian for the sake of it?
2. Old FoF/Req were only like no mercy as they increased the damage of your abilities. Because FoF and Req buffed different parts of the kit, it ended up not being "shove your big hits into these 8 GCDs" and it was more of a "phase transition", imo. While I can understand your argument, the purpose and usage was different enough that it didn't feel like no mercy. For clarification this is just my opinion.
3. The feel of a job is relatively subjective. If it feels like "mid-point between WAR and GNB" then that is correct for you, and while I understand your reasoning, it doesn't feel that way for me.
4. I understand that you can reduce all damage rotations into "Memorize this sequence of button presses to do optimal damage" when you "zoom out enough" and over simplify. I was never arguing that, so I'm still not sure why it was relevant to the discussion. My entire thought was "here are the abilities and how they compare along with how they work in the rotation and it looks incredibly similar".

The point was: Most of the Tanks are similar at this point, especially if you look at things from a distance.
this is a problem that the 2 min meta's forced on us

The tanks are too similar even when you look at them closely as well. This is not a problem with DPS jobs (even in the same role). You could remove melee combo of RDM and enochian from BLM and they feel very different in how you approach them. SAM and MNK both share similar resource builders with the Sen/Nadia and they still feel very different and engaging in their own way.

The two minute meta doesn't force any problems on us, it's just making the problems (that have been here since 5.0) with SE's tank job design more apparent. SE if just creatively bankrupt when it comes to designing tank jobs. If you browse this forum, there's so many folks with interesting ideas and creative ideas over what they've done with all the tanks since Shadowbringers. Stormblood wasn't the most balanced of times, but tanks all felt different and were completely viable (even if there was still a lot of jank around optimization).

At the end of the day, I am still of the opinion that PLD could have been sufficiently balanced in the current meta by making it deal more DPS outside of burst with the old rotation (instead of outright deleting it). As the rework to make it burst harder still didn't fix the DPS, obviously lack of burst was never the problem. If upping overall damage made it overpowered in dungeons and solo content, that's fine because "balance only matters for savage/ultimate raid". And don't give me the "but, it's hard to balance burst against sustained" argument, it's just math that you can figure out with a spreadsheet like we've always done. It's not rocket science it just takes the smallest amount of creativity and work.

Out of things to say. I'm just incredibly disappointed that we got a mediocre rework that serves no purpose.

[ForsakenRoe]

It's not rocket science it just takes the smallest amount of creativity and work

Think you answered your own question there, it takes the smallest amount of creativity and work, and SE doesn't want to put that in. No, seems they'd rather move classes more and more towards this 'window of power' where EVERYthing happens. Eventually we might even end up at the point where 95% of the damage is in that small 15-20s window every 2 mins, and then for the next 100s you can absolutely ape-mode your keyboard and it's fine, you can still do good damage, as long as you nail that all-important raidbuff window!

Mark this down, future predicting time. 8.0 comes out, GNB will change, it'll have 4 cartridges (so inspired), Bloodfest will change from being a 2min CD that restores 3, to a 1min CD that grants 3 stacks of 'can use Burst Strike with no cost', making it the not-Fell Cleave you use 3 of in a row. The 'Shell Cleave' as it were. Double Down will have it's cost removed, and instead require 'Double Down Ready' from Bloodfest, making it into not-Primal Rend.

Oh, and they'll add a Continuation to Sonic Break that nobody asked for

[Lyth]

One important difference between tanks and melee dps is the proportion of your total action budget that is allocated to defensive actions. That's where job design tends to be the most conservative, because it relates to pass-fail mechanics.

The more constraints that you add to the design process, the less unique solutions exist that satisfy those constraints. Let's say that I give you a total action budget of 25 actions. Let's say that 8 are defensives that don't allow for a whole lot of variability. Tank stance, a ranged pulling action, and a gap closer are also mandatory. You have a base single target and AoE combo which locks in another 6 actions, leaving us with around 8-9 actions to work with. Now I also tell you that players expect the jobs to have roughly the same rDPS, roughly the same burst profiles, and whatever else we argue about in these subforums to try to gain a competitive edge over everyone else.

Now let's say a new expansion and one tank gets a really cool action that everyone is excited about. Guess what everyone is going to demand on their jobs? So any existing designs themselves will naturally converge over time in response to player demand, no matter how different they start out. If you'd like, I'd encourage you to try to rebuild the existing jobs subject to the constraints I've offered and try and make them all as distinct as possible. I think it would be quite straightforward to illustrate how those job designs would converge over a few expansions in response to player-driven pressures.

[nia_saeli]

Eventually we might even end up at the point where 95% of the damage is in that small 15-20s window every 2 mins, and then for the next 100s you can absolutely ape-mode your keyboard and it's fine, you can still do good damage, as long as you nail that all-important raidbuff window!

No question about it. I daresay we're a few dodgy potency adjustments away from it on PLD and DRK already >.>;;

One important difference between tanks and melee dps is the proportion of your total action budget that is allocated to defensive actions [...]

The more constraints that you add to the design process, the less unique solutions exist that satisfy those constraints. Let's say that I give you a total action budget of 25 actions. [...]
Now I also tell you that players expect the jobs to have roughly the same rDPS, roughly the same burst profiles.

Please note, this is just my opinion on the design. I think you raise a very valid point on the challenges of creating 100% unique tanks. The tighter action budget (due to the role requirements) along with player demand present challenges.

On the otherhand, I still feel that both are just cop-outs for a lack of creativitity. Even with a very small action budget, you can still be creative and create different feeling jobs. As an example, let's clone warrior's entire kit skill for skill. Even if superficial, by changing the base combo we can change the overall flow and feel of the job by just changing Heavy Swing, Maim, Storm's Path, and Storm's Eye. Here are two examples that took me about 5 minutes to think of:

- Idea #1: Decouple the combo of all skills and give them cooldowns that last multiple GCDs and are adjusted by skillspeed (assume that higher recast means higher potency): "Heavy Swing (1): 2.5 recast", "Maim(2): a 7.5s recast", "Storm's path(3): 12.5 recast" "Storm's Eye(4): with 25s recast". Basic combo becomes: "4 -> 3 -> 2 -> 1 -> 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 1 -> 2 -> 1 -> 4 -> [continue]".
- Idea #2: Combos are decoupled and Heavy Swing (1), Main(2) and Storm's Path(3) change your "stance" based on order that you press them. Storm's Eye consumes the stance effect attack to do a unique effect. e.g. 1-2-3: Storm's Eye applies a dot, 2-1-3: Storm's Eye becomes a damage buff, 3-2-1: Storm's Eye does boosted damage potency. Using storms eye mid-combo would still consume the stance for downtime/alignment (small potency bonus or something)

Do something with a similar flow to the AoE side and perhaps add relevant resources and you have a tank with a completely different flow than any of the existing tanks. Are these ideas good? I don't know, probably not amazing as I'm not a game designer. But SE has a bunch of them, if they had an onze of creativity they could take these ideas and refine them into a fun job. My point here is just that it's about creativity and not constraints.

Regarding "equivalent rDPS" or whatever metric raider's want, that's just math and a bit of work and testing. 6.3 PLD has (almost) the perfect burst profile for the meta and it's still bad.

As far as homogenization of "cool new abilities that everyone asks for" goes, people don't want the ability itself, they want the function. In a similar vein to giving PLD a gap closer in ShB, copy-pasting onslaught was the boring (and possibly lazy) way to approach it. Again, look at melee DPS, we have 5 jobs that all have movement abilities that vary in some way (shukuchi is ground targetted, thunder clap is targetted on enemy/ally, RPR has a blink, SAM/DRG charge an enemy), while tanks are all Onslaught/Plunge (I forget which came first) with a either 2 or 3 charges.

In summary: It's not constraints that make tanks samey, it's a lack of vision, creativity or interest on the part of the job design team.

[Lyth]

Idea #1 is a simplified version of MCH, and Idea #2 is a simplified version of SAM. Which are both perfectly fine approaches. We could see either on used in a tank design in the future. But a lot of people would still complain that you're just functionally following a fixed combo sequence without a significant change to gameplay. Burst profiles do add an additional constraint, because everyone is going to have some variant of 'burst button', be it of the 'No Flight' or 'Inner Delirium' varieties.

The only way to achieve true variety is if less of the action budget is dedicated to defensives. A good proportion of the playerbase would probably be happier overall if you made tanks function more like melee dps, and if you made healers function more like caster dps. The behemoth in the room is that if this game were to be re-released now, it probably would be as an ARPG and not as a circa 2004 Trinity design. The former is what we're slowly moving towards, but the transition leaves us at an awkward crossroads where tanks and healers just don't feel valuable.

[ForsakenRoe]

The more constraints that you add to the design process, the less unique solutions exist that satisfy those constraints. Let's say that I give you a total action budget of 25 actions. Let's say that 8 are defensives that don't allow for a whole lot of variability. Tank stance, a ranged pulling action, and a gap closer are also mandatory. You have a base single target and AoE combo which locks in another 6 actions, leaving us with around 8-9 actions to work with. Now I also tell you that players expect the jobs to have roughly the same rDPS, roughly the same burst profiles, and whatever else we argue about in these subforums to try to gain a competitive edge over everyone else.

There is a world of difference between '25 actions total' and '25 action buttons on the hotbar'. SMN has one of the lowest hotbar-real-estate counts in the game, but it's 'actions' menu is absolutely rammed, due to how those few buttons swap into other buttons. So, yeh, I could give you a GNB that has 25 buttons, but actually has closer to 35 'actions', via clever application of systems like Continuation. God help the playerbase if I had been in charge of GNB design for it's launch, cos first thing I'd do is make it have 6 cartridges (you know, like the trailer implies?), and everything would have been designed around that. 'oo spend one cartridge on burst strike' get outta here

As far as homogenization of "cool new abilities that everyone asks for" goes, people don't want the ability itself, they want the function. In a similar vein to giving PLD a gap closer in ShB, copy-pasting onslaught was the boring (and possibly lazy) way to approach it. Again, look at melee DPS, we have 5 jobs that all have movement abilities that vary in some way (shukuchi is ground targetted, thunder clap is targetted on enemy/ally, RPR has a blink, SAM/DRG charge an enemy), while tanks are all Onslaught/Plunge (I forget which came first) with a either 2 or 3 charges.

the playerbase: boo we hate homogenization, make the classes different from one another
also the playerbase: yes dood i am making the pog face because PLD now also has a gapcloser, that we won't even use for closing gaps because it has damage attached!

Like, don't get me wrong, some homogenization is good, and necessary. Nobody thought that ShadowWall being 180s CD, and 30% mit, so equal to Veng but with an extra minute CD attached for no gain, was good. Sentinel/SW/Veng being standardized was good. But we didn't need 'all tanks have gap closer, and it has 2 charges', and especially not on 'the tank that has an entire dedicated section of it's rotation being ranged'. What next, we give BLM a raise skill because the other two have it? Or we give DRK a 'this skill heals for 1000+ potency, 1min CD' because GNB and WAR have Aurora/Equil?

[Raraka]

The new paladin is pretty fun. Only needs a few potency tweaks and it will be on a great spot

Goring blade sucks without a VFX change tho, that would be the only thing I dislike about the rework changes

[Lyth]

...

I'm aware that the devs have opted for action upgrades/shared hotbar slots in favor of removing actions over the past expansion or so. 25-30 action slots is the average range that most jobs aim for including these tricks, and freshly reworked jobs are naturally on the lower end of this. You can take this as a rigid constraint in job design. You're never going to have 40 unique buttons to press.

[Renathras]

I have not gotten this sense from your prior messages, my apologies.

I generally hold the position, whether I like something or not, that nothing should ever be outright TAKEN AWAY. I think, for example, New SMN is more fun, more intuitive, more understandable, and really more of a Final Fantasy Summoner (mixing both the "persistent" summons of something like FFX with the "big attack fire and forget" summons of games like FF4-9 with a little something of an evoker that takes on the aspects of their summons from what I guess will be FF16), but I also feel that they should have taken all the parts of its kit they just kind of REMOVED FROM THE GAME and instead made a genuine DoT Mage Job, like Green Mage or something, that was basically all those parts that people liked about Old SMN that weren't the Egis. That playstyle existing for people that liked it rather than them losing out.

I feel the same with PLD. I think New PLD is an outright improvement, but I believe the old version should still exist for players that enjoyed it.

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1) It was literally me saying it has aspects of all three and looks like any one of them from a far enough zoom. Did you read the part where I said think of the other three as points on a triangle and PLD is a point placed in the very center?

2) I think it mostly depends on the way you look at it, though I think it instructive here to point out that every Tank has an ability similar to that (except maybe DRK, since I don't know or play DRK to know how it works...but given how everyone talks about its burst, it almost certainly has to...)

3) Feel is, true. I was more talking with mechanics. It borrows something from each of them. Though, arguably, some is merely being borrowed BACK. FoF was No Mercy before GNB was even added to the game.

4) I was pointing out that such comparisons can be made between more than just PLD and GNB. Moreover, they can be made between the other Tanks pretty reliably. It's already a meme that's pretty much accepted at this point that DRK is just an edgy WAR.

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As for DPS Jobs, this also depends on how closely you look. Most DPS Jobs have one of several different types of rotation, and play similarly. Every Melee has a 1-2-3 core rotation, just as the Tanks do. RDM without the melee combo and BLM without Enochian would play...well, not much alike, because RDM would play like SMN. Jolt-Aero repeat 1-2. BRD and DNC are both proc fests of hitting things when they pop. RPR and DRG are different but the same, SAM and NIN are builder spenders, with MNK really one of the only Melees that plays particularly different than the others. You can start pointing out their specifics to argue "No, they're totally different!", but someone could do that with the Tanks as well. Not to mention their AOE rotations are, other than MNK, basically identical, and worse, more or less identical to the Tanks'.

The problem with burst vs sustain balance is you don't know party composition. Do you have a BRD or DNC or MCH? Do you have a SCH/AST or a WHM/SGE? SMN or RDM vs BLM? What about a NIN? If you have a SCH/AST/NIN/DRG(or...RPR?)/DNC(or BRD)/SMN(or RDM), each of those buffs stacks on top to make the burst even burstier and the filler lesser. So the sustain Job needs to do more damage in this situation. But, what if your party is WHM/SGE/SAM/MNK/MCN/BLM? Now THEY do higher damage, so in theory the party does, but now your sustain guy is doing too much damage. Because you buffed him to keep up with the other Tank (WAR/DRK/GNB) during that bursty comps high burst, he's doing way too much damage in the party with low buffs. So now you need to nerf his damage. Wait, but then he'll be doing too little compared to the burst comp and...

You get the idea.

This isn't a problem when burst is diffused - which it was in ShB and before, hence why this wasn't as much of a problem - since the burst won't all happen at the same time most of the time, and the burst vs non-burst case won't differ significantly, meaning you're balancing your sustain to a specific single point. But with the super high burst profile (as much as 45% during burst windows), you're now trying to balance to two different points simultaneously - the high burst party average (what the other Tanks do since they get super boosts) vs the low burst party average (what the other Tanks do when not getting any buffs), and you can't balance to both at the same time. You COULD shoot for the middle, but what this means is you'll be doing low damage in burst parties, which is the meta, meaning the other Tanks will be brought and you'll be left in the dust. Yeah, you're doing more than they'd do in a no-buff party, but no one's intentionally running a no-buff party. If a party ends up with a no-buff comp, it's by accident or circumstance (or in casual groups - where it doesn't matter - by preference of Jobs), not intent.

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Personally, I just want the 2 min meta to go away because then you don't have to worry about it forcing Jobs into the same paradigm. In older MMOs I played, there were often several kinds of damage profiles. Offhand, the main ones were sustain vs burst vs aoe/cleave, builder-spender, resource managers, and so on and so forth.

[Zedx]

As some one that came back after years away level 70 was cap last i played the pally does not even seem like a pally any more no real healing. so many spells that do mostly the same thing i mean how many def cooldowns do we need how but just lower the cool down a 2 or 3 tops. controller players only have so many bars. to work with