Quote Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima View Post
I am in agreement with this thought, but we also must consider that it's not just rotational nuance - it also is about fight compliance and party synergy. PLD hasn't synergized well with parties since ShB dropped due to Atonement Drift, and having a rigid rotation based around forcing a 1-2s damage buff drift isn't something that synergizes well with other jobs damage-wise - the only thing they've ever had to run with was their party utility and their sustained damage, but even then that sustained damage was overall lower than other jobs.
That depends, too, in relation to DoTs.

A rotationally-excessive DoT (say, a 24s Goring Blade) allows for flexible space without forcing the job to be balanced around that additional potency-per-execute (since it only applies to two- or three-target cleave, at best, anyways). And the punishment of clipping a DoT (e.g., for sync with macrorotation) is typically far, far more lenient than the punishment of clipping a combo, since combos tend to be so back-loaded (damage per GCD skews heavily towards the end of the combo).

Moreover, a PLD could always just be tuned higher to compensate for their reduced ability to exploit raid buffs. Yes, they'd then be faintly overtuned in light-party content or relative to other tanks in a full party composition with minimal raid buffs, but the latter hosts zero serious (and rewarding) content anyways and the latter still wouldn't even be wholly competitive.