Thread: Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

Originally Posted by Launched

Cover and Tempered Will need fixing way before Awareness. Both are incredibly situational, and useless in most fights.

Cover and Tempered Will are worth tweaking and keeping imo. Both of them have the potential to be interesting/fun utility skills and at Cover at least is an iconic skill. Awareness doesn't have that stuff going for it, and if they're trying to cut out some questionable abilities I can think it's the best place to start (for paladin, anyway. One Ilm Punch is the actual best place to start).

After that they should combine Unleash and Abyssal Drain kekekekeke. It also occurs to me that DA Power Slash could use some tuning up so they could stick something on that sucker. Power Slash in general just feels like garbage to use since you have to skip a Syphon Strike. Maybe drop Spinning Edge and just buff up the enmity on PS to compensate or make HS->PS a 2 hit combo or something.


Also about the whole paladin on alexander prime thing: do Sentinel->HG->add phase (you can rampart and stuff on the general) -> Sentinel -> Rampart -> Rampart (judgment crystal phase)-> Sentinel (teleport 1) -> Rampart (teleport 2) -> HG (Scourge/Chastening). That should work. You should probably bring a mnk though. Paladin can do it but it's way more convenient to just use dark knight. That way you get to bring a ninja and just not worry about anything.

Originally Posted by Brannigan

After that they should combine Unleash and Abyssal Drain kekekekeke. It also occurs to me that DA Power Slash could use some tuning up so they could stick something on that sucker. Power Slash in general just feels like garbage to use since you have to skip a Syphon Strike. Maybe drop Spinning Edge and just buff up the enmity on PS to compensate or make HS->PS a 2 hit combo or something.

PS is supposed to be something you don't want to use as a DRK. The loss of the Syphon Strike is supposed to sting, it's not an unfortunately accident that your main MP draw outside of BW is on your DPS combos. They don't need to buff PS combos, you just need to use fewer of them one way or another if MP is such an issue that a PS is a crisis moment.

Originally Posted by Brannigan

One Ilm Punch is the actual best place to start).

I am legit the saddest person alive every time I read this (I'm just mildly sad and prone to hyperbole at midnight). This skill is incredible for pvp and we're going to probably lose it because they can't figure out what they want out of it in PvE.

Awareness can head right on out the door, though.

To me, more than anything else so far up till now, DRK wins a huge margin. PLD can CLEAR A12S just fine, yes, they can but DRK can do the same and better. Call me whatever you like, but you can't deny the prowess of a DRK in speedruns. Literally every single speedrun attempt features DRK instead, PLD can't compete with DRK's damage. People like to use what's optimal and you can't deny that. PLD is far from that and again there is nothing much you can do. If you think PLD allows healers to DPS more, DRK can do it just the same and parses back that up. There is no distinction especially in speedruns where everyone has to chime in DPS to make it work. It's like people say WHM can clear just fine but AST is still strictly better while not sacrificing anything much. If you aren't fond of speedruns, then that's fine. But you have no power when literally all the parses at the top features DRK and AST heavily. I personally view speedruns as a good challenge to keep myself in the game since there is nothing else hard to do. What do you do when you have nothing to do?

PLD vs DRK in current Creator Savage:
1. PLD with Less DPS than DRK.
2. PLD don't have enough CDs to cycle in A12S, leading to taxing WAR to tank some tank busters, unlike DRK (DADM OP). PLD's overall A12S clear is about 10% of DRK's.
3. Whatever PLD can tank, DRK can tank. Good healers don't have problem keeping DRKs up.
4. Speedruns heavily favours DRK mostly due to PLD doing less DPS naturally and DRK can tank just as well, no tax on healers in a 0 death parse.
5. In a speedrun, you skip so many things that PLD's Sheltron on physical tank busters doesn't do as much and also for DRK basically sitting on extra CDs to survive.

Not to hate on PLD, I love PLD but in this situation where PLD is again in a spot where DRK heavily contests the MT slot, I have to do the job because that's optimal. You are forcing your team to adjust strats just because you are PLD, just like how Gordias treated PLD where I had my WAR stun legs and I go in to kill adds.

Like I mentioned before, MT has to be able to do both PLD/DRK well enough. Unable to do so will gimp your group to clear earlier. I have seen so many PLD mains in Tonberry admittedly struggling with A12S. Another MT I know also said "I feel so useless, I feel like getting carried by my team". My 2cents.

Originally Posted by Sarcatica

2. PLD don't have enough CDs to cycle in A12S, leading to taxing WAR to tank some tank busters, unlike DRK (DADM OP). PLD's overall A12S clear is about 10% of DRK's.

I mean it's not amazing but you do have at least a Rampart for everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBzS...ature=youtu.be

took this tonight just cause I wanted to paladin it. Played drk on the other floors for funsies. Paladin and DRK are really too similar so sometimes you just gotta accept that you'll have to switch.


Anyway to get back on topic if they want to close the gap between decent tanks and bad tanks they'll probably need to make tank stance way more required for actual tanking - probably by by buffing tank stances to like 40% (or equivalent) mitigation and increasing boss damage to match. Alternatively they could make the tank stance enmity (even more) required. That'd suck but it's one way to do it.

Originally Posted by Brannigan

Anyway to get back on topic if they want to close the gap between decent tanks and bad tanks they'll probably need to make tank stance way more required for actual tanking - probably by by buffing tank stances to like 40% (or equivalent) mitigation and increasing boss damage to match. Alternatively they could make the tank stance enmity (even more) required. That'd suck but it's one way to do it.

There are two 'gaps': a skill gap and a performance gap. The present stance design allows a tank who is less familiar with the damage patterns in a fight to give themselves an extra defensive cooldown by sacrificing their damage output. You sacrifice performance to tank something that is pitched at a higher skill level. It's a bit like having different difficulty settings.

If you make tank stance mandatory, or if you remove stances altogether, then you can't pitch the same fight to people of different skill levels. Failing a mitigation challenge results in a death or a wipe. Without the safety net of tank stance, a fight pitched at a higher difficulty becomes inaccessible to less experienced tanks, instead of merely lowering their dps. The fights then have to be pitched at an easier difficulty, to allow for players with inefficient cooldown usage to clear.

If you wanted to reduce the performance difference without running into this problem, you would need to reduce the damage penalty on tank stance. This would make it so that higher tank stance uptimes would reflect less poorly on your dps. I'm not advocating this, nor do I feel that this needs adjusting.

I would, however, like to see fights where it was more challenging, but still possible to stay out of stance, potentially through carefully timing short duration, short recast cooldowns like Sheltron (in addition to correctly managing long recast cooldowns, though: if you can mitigate everything with just a short recast move alone, then it defeats the purpose of having a cooldown rotation). I'd like to see fights that cater to a broader range of skill levels, rather than a narrower range. The skill gap is a good thing - it gives players more room to grow. The only requirement is that the content remains accessible (i.e. narrower performance gap) so that novice tanks have the opportunity to do so. There doesn't need to be a compromise, as long as both needs are met.

I mean yeah One Ilm Punch is a great PVP skill... so they should make it a PVP skill. There's no reason there can't be a PVP-only WS. Actually, what I'd prefer is if they just added like 4 other dispels to the game and then made dispelling buffs a thing in PVE, but that's not gonna happen. Monk has a LOT of garbage though compared to other classes. Like their stances are all of questionable value (you could probably give them all 3 at the same time and it wouldn't be OP), One Ilm Punch, Haymaker, the AOE Silence, etc. Featherfoot looks good compared to some of those.

So, harkening back to an old thread from a little over a year ago, SE might not be satisfied with the fact that progression-level tanks "need" to stance dance to be successful. But the problem isn't tank design here so much as encounter design.

Fights in FFXIV require dedicated tanks specifically and exclusively because of tankbusters. The white damage they do to tanks is simply not enough to usually require any more healing than Regen plus the occasional Cure/Cure II (this may be different in Savage), and usually the damage that tanks take outside of tankbusters is comparable to the rest of the group. Especially when this is coupled with tight DPS checks, the push for maximizing tank DPS is natural - since they only need to be "tanky" once every 30 seconds, they can spend the rest of the time maximizing their output and contributing more to group success (this is also why Parry is so undesirable - there isn't enough incoming damage to make it worthwhile in most cases).

If they want to change it, they will need to up the ante for how much damage tanks take, and how frequently. "Death by a million needles" would need to be the mantra--but in this case, too, they'd need to adjust how tanks work (though not in a way to eliminate DPS stances--that would be silly, and more something Blizzard would do). Instead, I imagine we'll see a few PLD skills revisited, as well as an adjustment to the combat table to make Parry more desirable.

In any case, I don't imagine we'll see too much of a change to either of these things. SE is a lot more iterative in their changes than some other companies, and they have tended very well to avoid overshooting the fixes they need to make. Many very strongly like this DPS meta, and it would do them well to consider that as they move towards Stormblood.