Do you find the PLD rotation enjoyable?

[DanielNegreanu_Adamantoise]

Well maybe thats a damage gain under raiding conditions if your raid group even has raid buffs. But if it is, thats still nothing to feelsbadman about.

Like I don't want every job rotation to be designed around chain strategem and divination. We players can choose to optimize our play around certain things, and if it turns out being a damage boost, thats great.

But we should never be all like "man I hate losing 18s of fof" yeah cause under normal operating conditions its a damage loss so it feels bad, but if its a damage gain, then we have nothing to complain about. Its a damage gain, smile


I'm not against making fof and req more dynamic, but I'd hate to see every rotation turn into dork knight/warrior/etc where every rotation is priority based around 60s where every rotation dumps their big ones around 15 seconds every 2 minutes.

It would make the game so boring that it would be better to change raid buffs instead of chainging every rotation. Like change raid buffs to affect different jobs differently or something would be better than having all rotations be different flavors of warrior.

[Eorzean_username]

It's true that a lot of jankiness would leave a lot of Jobs if there were no raid buffs to coordinate with.

But, at the same time, a cooperative game where you don't feel stronger when there are other players teamed with you can feel strange, or unsatisfying.

WOW went down the route of 'Let's just delete raid buffs' for many years, and most players decided it felt gross, and they missed being able to actually buff and enhance their teammates. I wonder if there's simply no ideal solution to the issue of players feeling caged by the ability to optimize their performance.

I think the heart of the problem is the combination of very rigid / meticulous internal rotations + rigid external timers, creating a situation where there's a lot of pressure to keep everything clockwork-aligned. That can feel very satisfying when you do it correctly, but it also puts a lot of clamps on what rotations can do without players beginning to protest or feel frustrated.

If you look at WOW, it's easier to respond to raid buffs because most of the rotations are very dissociated and reactive, without a strong overall structural loop like FFXIV implements. It makes the internal rotations far less satisfying to play (in my opinion), but it also makes raid buffs a lot less 'intrusive', in the sense that most classes can usually respond effectively even to 'surprise' raid buffs from uncoordinated uses, since you're not trying to capture that one perfect moment in time that FFXIV rotations are always seeking.

[Burmecia]

From my perfectly subjecive, unelightened perspective:
yes
but as fancy as, ahem, the "holy spirit >holy spirit >holy spirit >holy spirit > confiteor > swords? > more swords!? > look at all these swords!!" is,
i would have preferred to get sometthing else(?) than bringing single button smashing from WAR/DRK here. ngl, that gives my brain no fell cleave placebo dopamine, because it was never my vibe.

though, since putting stuff behind other buttons is vibe it seems, i would appreciate if they just went and put Atonemen in same button as Royal Authority. EW has left my crosshotbar in less than satisfactory order, and i have no time to begin to retrain my muscle memory.

[DanielNegreanu_Adamantoise]

For PLD we could kinda fix our -18s "problem" with just an extra 2min CD GCD that doesn't benefit from FoF
Blade of Gore: 200p immediate; 97p 21s dot SPELL (doesn't gain from FoF) Doesn't stack with Goring Blade nor Blade of Valor
Thats the equiv of a fof'd gore over 21s. It's lower immediate potency by design to not make it a damage gain to use during normal rotations.

With this, for whatever reason you find yourself wanting to open with req, you could Blade of Gore into req, and fof at the end of Valor, and have no reason to -18s, without designing the whole rotation around chain stratagem.

[Lieri]

It plays fine. Just wish they change holy spirit into something cooler. I dont like both the animation and the sfx.

[ThatRobGuy]

It's true that a lot of jankiness would leave a lot of Jobs if there were no raid buffs to coordinate with.

But, at the same time, a cooperative game where you don't feel stronger when there are other players teamed with you can feel strange, or unsatisfying.

WOW went down the route of 'Let's just delete raid buffs' for many years, and most players decided it felt gross, and they missed being able to actually buff and enhance their teammates. I wonder if there's simply no ideal solution to the issue of players feeling caged by the ability to optimize their performance.

I think the heart of the problem is the combination of very rigid / meticulous internal rotations + rigid external timers, creating a situation where there's a lot of pressure to keep everything clockwork-aligned. That can feel very satisfying when you do it correctly, but it also puts a lot of clamps on what rotations can do without players beginning to protest or feel frustrated.

If you look at WOW, it's easier to respond to raid buffs because most of the rotations are very dissociated and reactive, without a strong overall structural loop like FFXIV implements. It makes the internal rotations far less satisfying to play (in my opinion), but it also makes raid buffs a lot less 'intrusive', in the sense that most classes can usually respond effectively even to 'surprise' raid buffs from uncoordinated uses, since you're not trying to capture that one perfect moment in time that FFXIV rotations are always seeking.

We also have to keep in mind that WoW's raid buffs all last the entire fight except BL/Hero, which lasts 40 seconds. This is done so they boost both burst and sustained damage classes as evenly as possible. FFXIV is set up more around a raid buff window which heavily favors classes that can cram more of their damage into a short amount of time. You're absolutely correct that much of a FFXIV paladin's jankiness is due to trying to fit a sustained damage type of class into a buff window meta.

It would also be grand if they would give paladin a passive that gives them spell speed equal to any skill speed gained from gear. I understand the coding may not allow them to combine the 2 stats, but a job passive tacked on at the end should work. If that were the case I wouldn't be surprised to see some paladins favoring speed over all other secondaries.

[LittleImp]

I play PLD for its rotation. If it were made anything like the other tanks, I'd stop tanking altogether. Some level of jank is good, keeps the job fun to optimize.

[Storm-Driver]

Going into Endwalker, I don't... mind the new changes with Req. I feel they're hastily implemented though. They wanted something big and flashy for PLD, but they didn't wanna interrupt the core identity of the class, so they made Confiteor just have it's own Goring Blade combo at the end that was slightly strong, healed you, and could be used at range/AOE. It's REALLY nice in terms of how much damage you dish out, but it takes way. too. long. to get your damage going. Especially compared to the other tanks, that just have burst on demand. Example being, in the current Ultimate Raid. The check-point boss has a lot of cluster mechanics where he leaves for long periods of time, comes back for only 30 seconds, and then leaves again. PLD's only really started to do damage after they get through their entire FoF rotation, Req rotation, and the DoT from the Confiteor combo has been ticking for 11-ish seconds. That's almost 45 seconds before your damage actually starts to compare to the other tanks. Which, with only 30 seconds to smack the first boss, you're obviously gonna be way lower than the other insane burst tanks in your party.

It's the same with dungeon pulls. While PLD is fine in terms of AOE damage, it takes so long to do a good Req rotation on a mob, that by the time you're applying your Confiteor DoT to the entire pull, they're probably about to drop dead. Either you hit Holy Circle 4 times, then Confiteor 4 times, and the pull is about to die. Or you skip straight to your Confiteor combo and then use FoF to spam your physical AOEs. Doing that means your 1-minute rotation gets thrown off, which means if the boss is the next pull, you're a little borked. Or if you're speed-running, you don't have anything up for the next pull and it takes longer to kill.

Saving FoF for the next pull is a valid solution. But I think I would prefer if they let us save the Confiteor combo instead. After patch 6.1, we got a change to the combo that let us execute the Confiteor combo even if we messed up and didn't hit Confiteor, or the timer on Req ran out before we could use all the stacks. However, executing any action AFTER Req runs out/you use that last stack of Req will immediately make the Confiteor combo cancel. Thus, you can't save the combo for the next mobs you wanna pull. You either use it now and waste the super powerful DoT/AOE on mobs that are about to die, or you hit your head on a wall anyways and use your physical AoE combo.

It feels clunky, and not in a good pay-off way. Not like SMN's rotations would get during Stormblood, where doing all the jank stuff meant you could do some insane DPS. It feels like I'm playing a really weird class that just wasn't meant for the quicker encounters they had planned for this Ultimate, and the inevitably short mob pulls for dungeons. It's fine in casual content, but I'm not playing in lower-end roulettes. I'm doing them with my raid friends because we just wanna do our roulettes and head out.

[Tracewood]

Starting to play this again to get this to 90. I'm reminded how scarce your job feels when synced down during a dungeon below 70. Also they need to expand the range of Cover, I'm trying to save people but they run far away.

[Tlamila]

For me PLD it's the best it's ever been. This expansion brought me for sure to main tank over the other roles for just how fun PLD is, tbh. The rotation is very long and satisfying, having such a long magic phase is great for uptime, I laugh at my partner when we co-tank and he cries about downtime on his warrior. And like others said everything loops just eprfectly, while at the ame time the rotation is now even more adaptable than before, since one doesn't break the other. Not to talk about the whole "oh look at me in my magic phase, just healing myself by doing damage and badass looking spells".
Honestly, I feel a bunch of classes were ruined this expansion but PLD, and tbh kinda all tanks in general imho (idk well about GNB, I don't play it) got a big upgrade. If anything probably DRK still needs some help...