Thread: A PLD breaks his silence about 4.2 nerfs.

Much as I don't see why having a 400 Potency Holy Spirit is such an egregious game breaker, I'm not going to go off on a tangent about it.

Now Shield Swipe... This really boggles me. SE took a Proc (yes, a Proc; it's not guaranteed unless you want to spend half of your Oath Gauge on it) and lowered it from 150 Pot to 100. Why? Yes, it's an OGCD... ...with a 15s timer. Even with Bulwark popped, I have had moments where I didn't see a single proc even with it active, not to mention the countless times where I have had it proc, only to have it vaporize just as the CD timer was about to run out.

Folks, Shield Swipe is not the "big [redacted] DPS" ability it's being made out to be. It can't even be used with any great degree of frequency. >.<

Originally Posted by Dzian

To be honest I might just take it off my bars.

That's certainly an option. I intend to keep it regardless for the extra little bit of enmity and OGCD damage it does while my main rotations are going through their timers. Your mileage, as always, will vary. ^^

To be honest it'll probably stay on my bar solely because I don't need the slot for anything else.

But still it doesn't make sense to nerf it

"But still it doesn't make sense to nerf it"

Precisely my point.

SE, are you reading this? ;P

Originally Posted by Kacho_Nacho

Well, to be honest, I don't see the nerfs being that big of a deal. Shield Swipe is just icing on top of the cake. It's basically free damage.

S.E. appears to have intended to adjust paladin damage by a small amount and this was the way they wished to do it without affecting our core two combinations. You can get a good idea of what the goal is by looking at the adjustments for all three of the tanks.

Duly noted. As someone who's mained as a GLA/PLD for two years, however, I don't see the incremental pushes back to the days of Heavensward as "[not] that big of a deal." I'll explain my reasoning in a subsequent post.

On one hand, I can understand breathing a sigh of relief that they left our bread and butter DPS combo alone. On the other, I'll never quite understand why Holy Spirit was such a grievous mistake on SE's part. I can't speak for everyone, but I find that I can only get off four, maybe five buffed HS's in between at least seven or so RA combos. It's basically burst damage interweaved among our usual combos.

Was nicking away at HS's pot yet again a small price to pay for leaving our DPS combo pots alone? That's certainly arguable. My question, though is: Why? What is it about that burst damage that causes such a great "imbalance in the Force," so to speak? Especially when it doesn't come as frequently as first impressions would lead one to believe. (We must needs remember that we also don't get the Requiescat buff whenever our MP is below 80%.)

The Reason why SE is so amendment about nerfing HS is because how many PLD's learn to abuse the skill to the point where we sacrafice RA combos to pull off unbuffed HS. At Launch 430 potency was so broken that it was basically making PLD gods at DPS. The First nerf was deceent but again not enough. 3x HS at 400 potency is 1200 potency unbuffed. That's stronger than a FoF RA combo (975 w/o slashing and 1075 w/ slashing) adding in the buff just makes it stupidly strong. A PLD would learn to abuse HS during refresh windows to cut out RA combos in favor of pushing out this dmg. Look at any skill and the game and none of them come close to the potency per GCD like HS. At 380 this drops down to 1140 which is still stronger than a buffed RA combo.

Shield swipe is free DPS. It has zero drawbacks to use, although the nerf was to much it was just a small way to balance things out. Although they need to boost the enimity generation from it.