Quote Originally Posted by Tadus View Post
650? wow, nice. you had melded gear and were stance dancing correct?
Basically to o optimize all parts of the fight, I tanked the entire first section in Shield Oath which allowed the WHM to solo heal and the SCH to just DPS for the first 3 minutes. We tried Sword Oath but the threat was too poor; even using Halone ender's for 60-70% of the combo's I still lost threat around the first knock back. Maybe woulda been fine if the SCH healed more but our SCH ended the first section of the fight at 700-800 DPS, so me sitting in Shield Oath to let that happen was worth it.

Adds: Rampart/Shield Oath first tether, swap to Sword Oath and then Sentinel the 2nd one. I tanked the first section in Sword Oath, which was fine because the WHM had used Shroud so threat was fine. (cleaves in Sword Oath were Shelltron, Bulwark, Rampart overlapping 3+4, and Shelltron could get the 4th also). That also saved a GCD from switching during the tank swap. I used 2 stuns on the hand (stun -> goring blade combo -> stun -> RA's), then took it back in shield oath for the tether/ball section. Healing always seemed very tight at times during the 3rd type of whirlpool phase so I never tried to sword oath there... rest of fight = sword oath not taking, shield oath tanking. The 2nd hallowed ground of the fight used for the 2nd tether in the 6th whirlpool phase (we used Hallowed to single tank the first cleaves for the first hand). I think the first tether usually had both Sentinel+Rampart ready, so shield oath wasn't required there either. Oh fun tip people probably know/figured out since then but Tempered will lets you just run through those protean waves to pick up the tether, fun times.

As far as gear, I bought Hauteclair since you could get it the 2nd week, and then I believe for the kill I used.... 3 melded accessories and 2 STR accessories. My lodestone profiled showed all 5 melded after the kill, we noticed some JP posts saying I was lucky I didn't just randomly die during the fight (wonder if it would blow their minds if they knew I didn't use all 5). And then some others that said Hauteclaire was cheating lol, but it probably only added 10-15 DPS for PLD but that was enough to net us the kill so it was worth it.

I'm interested to see the 3.1 PLD changes, one of their largest disadvantages right now is the stance dancing, its by far the worst of the 3 tanks. If they switched those to offglobals or allowed you to keep your place in the combo while switching PLD would be a lot stronger in a fight such as A4S. PLD felt very natural in A3S to me, but extremely clunky in A4S. I guess its worth noting I tried PLD in A4S right when we started for like... a day. I switched to DRK, not really knowing anything about how to optimize it and was doing over 200 more DPS every attempt than I was doing on PLD, and the scariest part back then on PLD... the quarentine, was completely trivialized by Dark Arts Dark Dance, dodge those paunzerfausts all day, i'd use it on the big dolls too, dodge the kauzstrals or cleaves or whatever is really awesome.