Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Gserpent]

Hey guys, hope you're ready for a fucking braindead homogenized "WAR but it has a shield!" experience in 6.3, please look forward to it. There's apparently a Famitsu article making the rounds, and while the exact specifics of the changes were said to be held for the PLL coming up after the holidays, we have these choice (machine translated) bits to tide us over and show us exactly what they're about to do to our boy:

"The Knight job is one of the oldest jobs, having been implemented since I took charge of it in the middle of the old "FFXIV". It was carried over to the "New Eorzea" and actions were added and adjusted based on it. However, because it is a job that has not received much work in the tank rolls, the current playing style is more complicated than other tanks. For example, compared to other tanks, there are few "press a button and the effect is immediately activated. Many of them require the user to perform an action and then do something, or require the user to fulfill a condition in order to trigger the effect."

Goodbye, Goring Blade. Goodbye, Flight or Fight (probably.) Goodbye, current iteration of Oath Gauge (current Oath Gauge is trash though so I'm not upset about this one.) We may or may not have two separate 1-2-3's with a buff to maintain. I'm reading this as Atonement being scrapped, too, since Atonement isn't a "haha monkey press button get numbers" thing. The skill itself may be preserved, but it could just become our version of Fell Cleave (though it frankly lacks Fell Cleave's impact.) I'm also suspicious Sheltron is being scrapped - why not just remove Sheltron entirely and make Intervention something you can cast on yourself, identical to GNB's Heart of Corundum? This seems especially likely if the Oath Gauge is being turned into the I Can't Believe It's Not Beast Gauge! like I'm expecting from this. Basically, if it's not the kind of button that makes the braindead morons that cheered about the WAR changes happy, it's gone. Big flashy numbers are all the paste eaters care about, fuck you if you liked having PvE gameplay where you actually had to use a brain cell to remember your rotation and were allowed to make mistakes.

"The "tank who can attack from a long distance" has also been inherited, but in recent contents, we have made the target circle of bosses larger to eliminate the stress of melee jobs in general. For example, when a boss attacks and leaves, if the attacker persists to the utmost, he or she will be able to return to the attack range while the GCD is still circling. As a result, the knight's advantage of being able to attack at a distance itself has been diminished, making it difficult to burst when you want to burst, or accumulate damage by focusing on continuous damage (DoT), so it is difficult to gain damage when the boss disappears due to a gimmick. The mechanics of the game did not fit with the current content."

Earlier context had Yoshida explicitly state that they were doing a full rework of Paladin, not just an adjustment, so this isn't surprising. The magic phase is definitely gone. This *could* mean that we keep Fight or Flight (now as I Can't Believe It's Not Inner Release! form), or it could mean that Req becomes its own thing and you only get the spells during Req. Req just literally being Confetti into Blades buttons makes the most sense, because these are hugely flashy abilities with large potency values - remember what I said about the paste eaters determining class design? This would fit the bill. I'd assume they'd retain the range on these spells because why not? But I bet we're losing Holy Spirit and Holy Circle entirely now.

"Please assume that the defensive buffs that are more difficult to use compared to other tanks will be tweaked."

In response to a question about Sheltron. So this further confirms my belief that we're losing Sheltron and Intervention and getting a new button (possibly just a reworked Intervention) that is I Can't Believe It's Not Heart of Corundum!, probably costs no gauge, and probably has a 25 second cooldown.

So in regards to the OP? Yeah, this is why we were all in dread of the upcoming rework. Paladin needed help, make no mistake, but they're just going to take the lazy way out and make it a clone of Warrior because they can't be bothered to expect players to actually give a shit about content that's supposed to be challenging (meaning, you need to actually fucking read guides and learn to play the class) and their crusade against player choice and allowing players to make actual mistakes in rotations requires them to do this. I wish it were feasible to revert their fucking stupid "2 minute paradigm" changes, but that's just hindsight at work - there's no way they could have known how badly it would pan out during development of EW. Literally all of the issues we're facing right now are directly tied to them dumbing down the game far past the point of what makes any fucking sense. The more things you homogenize or sand down, the fewer things you can tweak or toy with to try and solve problems that crop up. This will be a good lesson in game design down the road, I think.

FWIW, Paladin is called Knight in JP. They don't have the quasi-religious connotations in the native Japanese that they have in the English translation. It's assumed they chose Paladin because Knight may have felt too generic in a game already full of knights (apparently in JP it uses the loanword Knight and not the native word for it.)

[Fryfor]

snip

Ignoring your wall of text, is there a reason why you don't do savage? Asking for a friend.

[Gserpent]

Ignoring your wall of text, is there a reason why you don't do savage? Asking for a friend.

Was busy with work for Asphodelos and I was taking a break from the game for most of Abyssos. Progging fights is a lot of fun, but you can do those at any time with MINE enabled if needed. The actual nitty gritty of reclearing fights wasn't very fun even back in ShB, but I did it because I was part of a static that was pretty fun to play with. Unfortunately, EW has doubled down on making classes rather uninteresting to actually *play* and PLD was one of the few exceptions where you still needed to use your noggin occasionally or risk losing significant damage. Won't know for sure until the PLL, but it's likely we're going to see that removed like they did with WAR.

I don't really understand why Square-Enix is so dead-set against having a low floor *and* a (reasonably) high ceiling. The two aren't mutually exclusive. WAR in ShB was actually a pretty good baseline to work off of - it was maybe a little *too* simple, but it still had an appreciable difference between floor and ceiling, and the floor was fairly low which made the class accessible for newbies (there's a reason it was almost always recommended as babby's first tank.)