Thread: 3.1 PLD Changes

People either need to learn to read, or learn to not comment on stuff they clearly don't understand. I specifically said the current end-game is not tuned to balance the value of eHP and DPS. The point is that SE has said they're looking to change hard-core raid design in the future and such a stance is theoretically viable.

This has nothing to do with allowing healer DPS. This has to do with the balance of mechanical margins for DPS vs. eHP vs. utility.

With the current tuning of end-game raiding, having more DPS equates to more stability and safety than having more eHP. Fights are not designed in a way that utility makes a real difference.

I'll give you a few very specific example of alternative tuning --

When you solo heal A3S, PLD becomes immensely more valuable to raid comps. Why? Because during liquid limb, your only healer is trapped and cannot heal. So, while the party is trying to break the healer out of the limb, the PLD can spot heal the current tank. On the second limb (if you get a second limb), the PLD can HG it while the healer is trapped. Are other tanks also viable choices? Yea, but you'll have a much harder time with the mechanic.

A3S in general has a lot of mechanics that favor PLD heavily even when done with a conventional raid comp. There really are only a few issues that stop PLD from being the best tank for A3S. If the margins for add phase were much thinner, then PLD's stun and silence would be even better than they already are. It would be a more equal trade-off with having higher DPS -- you can either stun the adds for longer to allow DPS more time to kill them or you can just try to kill them with higher raid DPS. If the boss hit harder and the blunt resistance duration was long enough to force tanks to tank with more stacks before swapping, then PLD's higher physical mitigation would matter more (RoH + being able to reliably sheltron slaps). At a certain threshold, they would be able to stay in SwO while the other two tanks would be forced into their tank stances to survive. If they spaced out the cascades / splashes / sluice + protean enough for Divine Veil to have 100% uptime (and maybe made reprisal and path not stack) then PLD would be the best option for overall raid mitigation.

Or, if in A4S, royal pentacle didn't just straight up kill you through hallowed ground when using the sac strat, maybe the benefit of not being weakened by resurrection would make PLD a slightly more competitive choice despite how stacked the rest of the fight is against them.

My overall point is the tuning and balance CAN exist. It just currently doesn't. So, when SE says that they're going to try to balance the tanks through the content, I can see how it would work. It's not a hard idea to understand. You either balance the tanks by equalizing their contributed raid DPS, raid mitigation, survivability, and viable utlity, OR you design and tune content that balances the differing elements of the tanks.

Do I think PLD is now balanced with the 3.1 changes? I don't. But, that is relative to the current content. People just don't understand what is wrong or how to fix it. That they can claim to know better than SE when their posts fail to acknowledge the entire picture is proof of this.

Originally Posted by Brian_

My overall point is the tuning and balance CAN exist. It just currently doesn't. So, when SE says that they're going to try to balance the tanks through the content, I can see how it would work. It's not a hard idea to understand. You either balance the tanks by equalizing their contributed raid DPS, raid mitigation, survivability, and viable utlity, OR you design and tune content that balances the differing elements of the tanks.

And, sure, the game would likely be better as a whole for it if SE would make more fights that can actually make use of these perks of utility between jobs. I think the main reason people are pointing at the jobs rather than fights, though, is that frankly it's a lot easier to believe that SE can make the tank fights more on par in each aspect than that they can create fights that consistently better equalize the values of the tanks' varying potential dps, eHP/mitigation, and utility, and simply because unless those opportunities can apply near-equally across all fights, there's going to be a preferred tank for each, at which point eso gear will be the only reason we'd have not to force our static tanks to swap out accordingly with each fight (hell with their preferred job).

Originally Posted by Yonanja

Real balance is when you can't point at a given situation and right out say that class A is better for this, as class B can't handle it as well.

I'd be fine with just pointing to an encounter- or dungeon-wide set of situations and being unable to say that a given class is best. If anything, I welcome one tank coming out ahead of the others for a single situation. It's what makes us really notice... uniqueness.