PLD changes

[Gserpent]

well the notes are out https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...aa3c79b2e733d2

And there is a lot to take in.

What is amounts to is: Yoshida is full of shit.

Talking about an emergency rework, how PLD doesn't really fit into the current design of the game, doom and gloom. Being really shy with sharing notes or details on the changes. Now we know why - not because they were a big change, but because they *weren't* a big change. I'm glad the overall identity of the class and rotation will remain largely intact, but I don't like how they were portraying all these changes. Was it just a huge translation error that, for some inexplicable reason, never really went corrected?

Completely against expectations, it's actually the defensive toolkit - whose changes I thought were going to be pretty much a no-brainer! - that has me flummoxed. Clemency is still effectively unusable outside of early prog. Sheltron is still tied to oath gauge, and oath gauge is still tied to autoswings, so PLD remains the only tank to lose *mitigation* during downtime. Wings still... exists. Divine Veil finally finished being turned into Shake It Off, only a few patches later than it should have been! But then they added an additional regen effect to Shake It Off, so Divine Veil is just categorically worse than Shake It Off.

This is presumably because wings still exists... even though wings is almost never usable outside of what amount to cutscenes. They should have just removed wings and made Divine Veil better. Or changed wings to be an instant-effect circle instead of an awkward cone. Or *something.*

Like... this is supposed to have been an "emergency rework." It's not just making a few minor adjustments, it's supposed to be major changes to how the class operates. But I'm not seeing that here. They *should* have made major adjustments. Oath Gauge should have been turned into beast gauge or cartridge gauge and Sheltron/Intervention should have been divorced from gauge usage. Clemency should have been changed to become DPS neutral under certain circumstances, or just DPS neutral at all times but only usable with resource/cooldown.

Someone is fucking up over there, and they're fucking up pretty bad. This is pretty poor showing, especially juxtaposed to the rest of the patch's content being generally pretty good. Raid design is still decent, mechanic design is still good, but combat design has been getting worse and worse ever since Shadowbringers. Who keeps fucking up, and who keeps allowing them to remain on the "combat design team"? They need to be taken off that team before they cause even more damage to the gameplay systems.