PLD changes

[Rongway]

Wait, really? How does that work? Is that related to crit-DH variance? Or am I missing something?

I was assuming that hardcast holy spirits were just the "Oh well, better than nothing" kinda damage floor for it. I wasn't aware that it could pull ahead. Kinda cool.

Without doing a thorough battery of simulations, here are my thoughts.

Royal Authority and Atonement1, Atonement2, and Atonement3 are the same potency, so you have lots of flexibility in which of the four go in the extra FoF slots. You might not think of it that way, but there is a difference between

Royal Authority + Mighty Holy Spirit + Atonement1
Mighty Holy Spirit + Atonement1 + Atonement2
Mighty Holy Spirit + Atonement2 + Atonement3

There's basically always some way to get a Mighty Holy Spirit and an Atonement or Royal Authority in two of the FoF filler slots, leaving only one that could be the worst case Fast Blade. And when you do end up with that Mighty Holy Spirit + Atonement + Fast Blade worst case, you naturally set yourself up for the Mighty Holy Spirit + Royal Authority + Mighty Holy Spirit best case two FoFs later.

Trying hard to force (Mighty Holy Spirit + Royal Authority + Mighty Holy Spirit) or (Mighty Holy Spirit + Atonement + Atonement) might sometimes require you to drop so much potency elsewhere that you might as well have just gone with the Fast Blade worst case. And as for weak Holy Spirit, on its own it has the same potency per GCD as a complete melee combo with a Mighty Holy Spirit, so that's why it does well as an out-of-burst filler when you can afford it; it's just so expensive you can't always. If you had infinite MP, you could FoF a Mighty Holy Spirit + Royal Authority + Mighty Holy Spirit every minute by using five weak Holy Spirits and this is probably why they made it too expensive to do so every minute.

Sorry, I'm rambling and repeating myself at this point. I may have spent way too long staring at that spreadsheet (which I still could have messed up). It'll be interesting to see what the Balance folks come up with.