Is an addition to the Confiteor combo necessary?

[Rithy255]

Atonement made a lot more sense when you actually had to line up your rotation with buffs, manage dots and all that jazz. It was pretty helpful being able to hold the remaining stacks to realign your dots with your buffs.

It's pretty amazing how blindly the hacked away every actual rotational mechanic of this job, none of it actually makes sense any more. Like SMN got nothing on this butchery, at least it makes sense conceptually - PLD is like if every ability was the new SMN's Fester. Completely baffling it still exists as button without any overarching idea or flow to support or justify it. Except it's pretty much every button.

Pretty, without the 2nd combo finisher (aka goring blades dot), The rotation just breaks and becomes 1, 2, 3 "press what lights up" repeat. The only thing you really need to keep track of is lining up ocgds with your FOF window, which in itself is really easy because you don't have a lot of ocgds or a rotation that at least requires you to sometimes think...

I quit "maining" tank after this, because it's just not fun anymore, the job is slow and has a very boring rotation theirs pretty much nothing to learn or no room to grow on the job... it doesn't even feel "unique" from any other tank. Removing the DOT made the flow of the job just feel really off.

Small wonder why DRK is getting less ogcd's it feels so strange that tanks are being made more simple when they're so easy and bare bones, I guess "different animations" will distract most people at least.

Even if they had to make the DOT less strict or simplify the 2nd combo finisher the job would at least be somewhat like it used to but the fact is they just turns it into a generic 60s button, taking up space for reason, that you press once per minute, it might aswell not exist because we have 4.. now 5 spells for our "big burst buttons"

[Mikey_R]

Pretty, without the 2nd combo finisher (aka goring blades dot), The rotation just breaks and becomes 1, 2, 3 "press what lights up" repeat. The only thing you really need to keep track of is lining up ocgds with your FOF window, which in itself is really easy because you don't have a lot of ocgds or a rotation that at least requires you to sometimes think...

After I made the post, this was bough to my attention:

Isn’t the 5th blade hit an oGCD based on the Color around the character during the trailer

Which, after reviewing, does seem to be the case (my fault for assuming it would combo just like the rest). It does mean half the cases I provided aren't technically relevant, but I will keep them here non-the-less.

There are issues that come up with Goring Blade as a DoT. If we assume a 20 second DoT, you will be forced to drop 2 Sword Oath stacks, not out of choice, but because they do not have the required buff timer to allow it to happen. The 5th Blade hit will just make this issue worse.

If we assume a 30 second DoT, with the current 4 blade window, you can fit 2 Goring Blade combos, 2 Royal Authority combos and a 4 hit blade combo neatly into the 60 second window. It does mean that every 60 second window and burst phase is exactly the same, with the only variance being where you potentially put Divine Might Holy Spirit. There is no room to allow you to carry a Divine Might Holy Spirit into burst without overwriting other buffs. Not using and just overwriting these stacks is something I am not a fan of and was something that I did not like out of old PLD. You might disagree here though.

If we add the 5th blade hit in, it then necessarily pushes the whole rotation forward 1 GCD, which will lead to points where you need to refresh Goring Blade, but you have to do it early or wait for the next combo and apply it later.

So, there are issues in all cases here, whether you think they are an issue worth caring about is your opinion.

The main problem comes with Goring Blade being tied to the combo. This does mean a solution would be to keep it off of the comb, but shorten the cooldown so that it is used more frequently. Whilst I haven't laid out how the rotation would look, I don't think it interferes with anything, but of course, since it is no longer a combo, it goes against the whole idea of having a Goring Blade combo to begin with.

I would even take making the two damage damage oGCD’s have different timers that align under the two minute buff. Right now there is almost zero reason to not press those 2 as a combined double weave, same as there is near no reason to not press FOF and requiescat together

The thing is, PLD is a 60 second job, so, in theory, they need to end up in the buff window every 60 seconds. We could make 1 40 seconds, but it then falls out of the odd minute windows. 20 seconds lines up with all windows, and would desync them outside of those windows. However, making 1 15 seconds does come with another tidbit. 15 seconds allows you to have 2 uses in the buff windows. This means you don't want it to drift in order to keep that.

So, I would propose one being 15 seconds and one being 20 seconds. Mainly so that they can both stay in the 60 second buff windows and they only line up in the buff windows, with the extra caveat that you do not want the 15 second one to drift so that you can keep 2 uses of it in the buff window.