Lets talk about the NERF..

[Hoshikogi]

Did some quick testing on the 5 star GC leves at Halatali. Every mob was level 52.

With Rampage up, Steel Cyclone crit damage ranged from ~500-1000 against the same mob. What caused the difference?

When only one mob was attacking me, Steel Cyclone did 500-600 damage. When I had 3+ mobs attacking me, Steel Cyclone did 800-1000 damage. Now take a look at the patch notes on Rampage:



My guess is that the effect on Rampage decays so quickly that it can never be fully stacked when fighting only one mob. Thus, you will never get the full bonus damage to Steel Cyclone unless you are tanking multiple mobs.

This is all just eyeballing of course. Wish I had some numbers pre-patch so that I could compare. If someone wants to do better testing, please feel free to do so.

This is just speculation, but it appears as though PLD and WAR damage is almost equal now vs. a single target while tanking. Warrior has only one viable and spamable weaponskill (30 second recast) chain set while tanking while Paladin has two (both at 1 minute recast which can easily be alternated). Against a lv 52 monster in natalan Goring Blade provided ~550 points of damage while a full (or nearly full) Spirits within did ~750 damage (and phalanx can be spamable for ~280 damge ever 6 seconds for 250 tp with Divine Veil active). Please note that this information was gathered before this hotfix, so Goring blade may well do over 600+ damage against these foes.

It seems SE has finally made war into the optimal AoE tank without overshadowing PLD capacity on single target bosses.