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.