Why does Clemency get interrupted? And why does Sword/Shield Oath reset combo?

[Giantbane]

Because they're meant to have their own advantages and disadvantages, they're not meant to be clones of Equilibrium/Defiance/Deliverance.

In most instances it seems like WAR gets most of the advantages.

[Kaizer]

Wild stupid head canon conspiracy crap text incoming...

So initially WAR was not a good job and not looked favorably upon. It was the job that was depicted as the WoL in the cutscenes for 2.0 (and I think even before). Then boom, buffs came in and now its super good.

In 2.0 everyone was loldrgfloorbbq and it wasn't look favorably upon. Then it HW it was depicted in the cutscenes and a major focal point. Now boom, awesome dps.

Paladin is next... tinfoil hat off...

[Culfinrandir]

Maybe it's to prevent skill/ability bloat and that, as the game gets 'harder' they can loosen up the current rules to enable the skills to remain relevant. They did something similar for the release of 3.0 where some skills got nerfed, buffed or otherwise changed to keep them all useful.

[Freyyy]

I'm a little embarrassed to admit I don't know exactly what Oaths cost, but they're in the neighborhood of ~1k MP at 60 if I recall correctly. I *think* it's about 1,200, but I don't recall for certain.

Pretty sure it's 884. Grit is 1326.

[Februs]

Wild stupid head canon conspiracy crap text incoming...Paladin is next... tinfoil hat off...

Dragoon wasn't really broken. If the player was good and used their rotation correctly you could roll extremely high Dps even before 3.0. Proof in the pudding is that none of Drg's abilities were actually buffed or nerfed with 3.0. They only added the new mechanic of Blood of the Dragon (which essentially turns Drg's into monsters). People only looked unfavorably at Drg's because of the persisting notion of them dying frequently which carried over from FFXI. Sometimes the "lol Drg" is justified, because their jump animation tends to get them caught in AoE's when everyone else can move (hence why their jump animation time has been adjusted twice, that I can remember). Otherwise though, the job was fine and nothing was "fixed." It was only hyped in HW advertisements to get people more into it.

War had serious problems that made them nearly unplayable in the First Coil. A lot of those problems are similar to what Pld is facing now, especially Tp consumption (which was also a War issue and subsequently saw every combo finisher they have reduced in Tp cost in 2.1), but War still had it worse back then. Their Cd's were awful and made then unsuited for Tank Busters. Their Hp regen was heavily nerfed compared to now, and they ran dry on Tp all the time. The only thing they exceeded at was Threat generation.

By comparison, Pld is a tiny bit better off. They're not strictly unplayable in end game. They're just ridiculously unbalanced and substantially harder to play than War's and Drk's. The rest of the team has to cover the slack, and that's not cool. There's also the added community stigma of them being wimpy compared to Drks and Wars (dmg wise), so less and less people want to play as them.

Right now, its definitely a safe bet to say that Pld is by far the job in FFXIV that requires the most attention and fixes from SE. I just hope that it doesn't take a full expansion (Drg) or a mass abandonment (War) to see it happen.

[Anubis_Nephthys]

You can achieve your goring blade desire by turning off shield oath instead of turning on sword oath.
But I usually just tank in sword oath. Being in shield for ~5 GCDs

[VanilleFang]

Weren't DRGs buffed a few patches before 3.0? And as far as I can remember SMN were the weakest DPS before 3.0. The complaint threads about how weak SMN was clogged the DPS forum for months. This has nothing to do with the thread though, so...

I think PLD buffs are almost guaranteed if the meta stays the way it is.

[Callidus]

While it's not a perfect solution you don't always have to switch to Sword Oath to increase your DPS.

You can simply remove Shield Oath, which doesn't use up your GCD, does not break your current combo, and removes the 20% damage penalty that Shield Oath was giving you. Being in this Oathless state is great for when you need to push that extra bit of damage without forcing yourself into another clunky oath.

I agree that this is a nifty trick, and can come in handy in some cases, but I rarely use it for more than a couple GCDs just to finish a combo... usually when I've screwed up and started one in ShOath when I had intended to switch to SwOath. *facepalm*

For other cases I've found that you either have a few second between phases to lessen the impact of changing to SwOath or you'll need to be in SwOath long enough that it isn't beneficial to stay Oathless to save the GCD.


So we have the following assumptions for our math
1. 600ish skillspeed - within a pretty average range at 60 and conveniently is about equal to a 2.4sec GCD. From the data I've seen plus or minus 50 skill speed is only a couple hundredths of a second in either direction when scaled to these levels, so minor variances in SkSpeed should have small impact on the final numbers.
2. 2.24 delay weapon, which most 60 PLDs use.
3. For the sake of example, we'll assume our example PLD does about 900DPS in Sword Oath. This number can really be anything as long as the % contributed via Sword Oath remains the same; and it should, more below.
4. With a standard DPS rotation, Sword Oath equals about 13% of a PLDs damage when active. Data seems to back this up. The % of contributed damage by SwOath with a DPS rotation should stay about this percentage even at various gear levels since we're talking potency here. As damage scales with weapon damage and attack, so too will SwOath's 50 potency per attack scale an equal amount. Minor exceptions to this should be minimal.

First, how much DPS does SwOath give us:
900*0.13 = 117DPS from SwOath

So without any Oath, you're looking at:
900-117 = 783DPS

Take these numbers and work it out for several GCDs:


This holds true at different DPS levels as long as the relative potency stays the same so the proportions are the same:




So, on average, you're better switching to SwOath if you plan on being out of ShOath for more than 7 GCDs. Otherwise it would be a DPS gain just to turn off ShOath. This is based on average DPS though, if you've saved a bunch of oGCDs to cram into your Oathless window it would skew a little more toward more time Oathless being either a gain or DPS neutral. I'm too lazy to do the math for various scenarios, but given we only have a few oGCDs and they're fairly short timers, I doubt you'd see more than *maybe* 8GCDs being worth while Oathless.

In summary, turning off Shield Oath is a viable alternative to switching to Sword Oath, but only if you'll be Oathless for ~19 seconds or less. That number goes even lower if you're using any sub-optimal GCSs from a potency perspective (RoH combo, etc).

[Kotemon]

I'm a little embarrassed to admit I don't know exactly what Oaths cost, but they're in the neighborhood of ~1k MP at 60 if I recall correctly. I *think* it's about 1,200, but I don't recall for certain.

Its been a long while since I used Paladin and looked at the mp drop between oaths. I may still be thinking of what I noticed back in low levels and roulette. I'd have to check next time I go Paladin.

Pretty sure it's 884. Grit is 1326.

Thanks.

[Brannigan]

Dragoon wasn't really broken
-

They could hang on DPS for the most part, but frequently turning bosses really screwed them before their positionals got changed to not break combos upon failure. The bigger issue with them was magic defense in Final Coil. For the first few weeks depending on your drops they'd get smashed by unavoidable magic damage like megaflare much harder than the other jobs. Not much changed from 2.55->3.0 for dragoon because it all got fixed back in 2.4. Actually, Dragoon got a ton of tiny adjustments over the life of 2.0 - jump animation and cooldown used to be much, much longer.