PLD 6.2: Take Away and Rotation

[Cervani]

I was understandably not very happy with the new paladin changes. Some things that COULD be fixed, weren't, and some things that DIDN'T need to be fixed, were.

The rotation, for example, now seems to be Burst/Downtime as opposed to the Phys/Magic weave we did before:

For burst it seems to be: 1>2>3 >FoF>Goring>HS>Req>Blade combo> Atone x2 (or x3, if you SKS is high enough).

What we THOUGHT would be used, which is Req>HS>Blade Combo due to HS being buffed by Req, is NOT possible due to the way DM now works. With DM taking priority over Req in regards to HS/HC, you get a unbuffed HS because you need to use one of Req's charges in order for the pot buff to be attached. This could have easily been rectified with SE leaving Req at it's 5 charges, where the buffed HS and then the full blade combo would be doable with no issues whatsoever.

Basic combo is simplified down to: 1>2>3>HS>Atonex3. HS and Atone are interchangeable in that rotation, dependent on whether or not you need the spot heal from HS quicker or not. You get two of these rotations in by the time FoF is back up.

So in basic terms we get a burst window, then two "downtime" rotations. Rinse and repeat. I'm unsure what they were going for with the phys/magic weave change, but they seemed to have missed the mark on this.

Shelltron change is decent in the fact we now have another DR tool. 30% every 22.5s, based on auto attack and oath per attack. The change is bad because they COULD have used this as a chance to make Shelltron a two charge, 20 second cd per charge cooldown instead. Linking oath gauge production based solely on auto attack is just a bad way to do it, especially with dodging mechanics and shifting position in content. So now that shelltron every 22.5s is anywhere from 22.5 to possible 40s or more depending on how many AA's you had to miss due to moving or mechanics.

Bulwark is just bad. 10s of guaranteed block on a 90s cooldown. Block would be nice, if could mitigated everything. But it doesn't, new bleed mechanic included. What SHOULD have been done is block should be baked into the class itself. Your block should be 100%. You're carrying around a giant slab of metal for a damn reason, and the only class to do so. Make it a unique class mechanic of PLD, make block a 100% trait. If you think it's too powerful, fiddle with the damage reduction. Change it to 15 or even 10%. Anything is better than the current unreliable mechanic you have currently.

These are my opinions and thoughts on PLD. I'm not even going to touch on PoA or Cover or anything tied to the oath gauge to avoid giving myself brain damage.

[nia_saeli]

Pretty much 100% agree. The rework was phenomenally disappointing. I was prepared to become WARv3 or GNBv2, but now we're just a bad GNBv2 rotationally. I think PLD is going to be pretty solid defensively, but it's just not very fun to play anymore (especially since I enjoyed the dual phase playstyle).

Oath generation could have largely been fixed by just tying it to weaponskills/spells. Then you wouldn't have to worry about time on target as much. Downtime is still an issue, but being able to effectively bank two charges gives us the additional flexibility so it's an okay trade off.

The biggest problem comes in the strictness of the burst. If you want to optimize your burst, you need (at minimum) a 5 GCD set up so that you can feasibly get 2 Divine Might buffed holy spirits inside the window. (You do this by holding a previous divine might stack leading into the burst and having your combo at Royal Authority so you can "Holy Spirit -> Royal Authority -> Holy Spirit" at some point in the combo.

This just feels like it was largely untested. Does SE even have a PLD main on their team to run the changes by? At this point, they would have been better off just slapping 50-100 extra potency on all abilities on all the abilities and calling it a day instead of this half baked Gunbreaker rotation.

[ForsakenRoe]

Thought comes to mind, because of the whole 'lol drop 2 atonements to make your loop, loop', and bear with me:

Sheltron/Intervention 2 charges, shared, 20s recharge time. Cover changed to standalone 2min CD. No defensive uses Oath Gauge anymore.

Oath Gauge converted to a damage based thing.

Fast, Riot, Royal, HS all generate various amounts of Oath Gauge (maybe 5, 10, 10, HS 15 (full 1234 combo total 40) idk), autoattacks do not.

Atonement no longer requires Sword Oath stacks, instead consuming ALL Oath Gauge, scaling in potency based on gauge consumed, minimum cost 10 gauge. Like Apex Arrow.

This would lead to a potential optimization thing, where you'd dump out 'low Atonements' at downtime not-burst parts of the rotation, to fill it out to get it to be a 60s loop. You wouldn't 'lose damage' by doing lower gauge Atones, as it'd be X potency for every 10 gauge spent, so 100 gauge would give a (10*X) potency Atone. The big thing though, would be that by keeping your gauge under control in the downtime, you could have it line up to be filled to 100 right as you hit the burst window, allowing you to get the BIG Atone in the 2min window. So your raidbuff window might look like (going in at 100 gauge, with Royal as next combo action) FOF, Atone, Req, Goring, Conf, Blade, Blade, Blade, Royal, HS (FOF ends here). Something like that. Actually I guess potency would need to be tweaked to make sure it's a better choice to use a 'low Atone' over just doing the combo and overcapping.

Can we make it so Atonement does 'one hit per 10 gauge spent' to reduce crit variance? I want to see 10 hitsplat texts fly off of one Atonement that'd be hilarious

[ClusterDreams]

I had low expectations for the rework but they somehow managed to put out something worse than what I expected. I don't wanna play a job that feels like they combined everything bad about gunbreaker and warrior into a single job.

[ThatBigBirb]

The only tank to feel like a tank in the game is now just a discount GNB.

[Gserpent]

The only tank to feel like a tank in the game is now just a discount GNB.

It's the Dollar Tree version of GNB. "Mom, I want GNB!" "We have GNB at home."

[nia_saeli]

I think it'd be a shame to turn yet another gauge into an offensive only thing. WAR used to actually use Inner Beast/Raging Cyclone for defense back in ARR before the DPS stance kicked in and it's always a bit more fun to me to have a gauge that I don't have to just pool or avoid overcapping.

I think it would be a much better solution to just move the gauge away from autoattacks and have oath gauge gained by different skills (like when HS gave us 20 oath gauge back in SB), then it would normalize it and we could even slap some oath gauge generation onto clemency for downtime.

Not everything has to be DPS DPS DPS, imo. It would be nice to have less of our rotation relegated to filler though

[Cabalabob]

For burst I’d say it’s more like

For opener:
Fast > riot > FoF > goring > req > royal > blade combo > HS (buffed) > atonements (as many as you can fit in the rest of the FoF window). I’m ignoring other oGCDs cause just use em in there somewhere.

On repeat: hold your divine might buff as FoF comes off CD.
Fast > riot > FoF > goring > req > HS (buffed) > royal > blade combo > HS (buffed) > atonements (as many as you can fit).

Royal and atonement have the same potency so no point delaying FoF more than you need to, 2 GCDs instead of 3. Then for repeat rotations you’re just replacing an atonement with an additional buffed Holy Spirit within the FoF window by using a divine might you gain from your filler rotation + the divine might you gain from using royal instead of atonement within FoF.

I wouldn’t bother with sks since 5-6 of our 8-9 GCDs in the burst window are spells and so not effected by it and without goring being a DoT we aren’t even getting any damage boost out of it anymore.

[Gserpent]

Not everything has to be DPS DPS DPS

Yes, it does. Because that is literally the only thing in the entire game that is (loosely) in the hands of the players. Healing? It's done automatically, and damage is scripted with minimal variance. Mitigation? Once again, done automatically and *rigidly* scripted. DPS is the only thing that's left, and even there they've been taking away player interactivity with it by making rotations increasingly "automatic" and removing things that might cause variance like melee having to lose uptime for mechanics or lose positional bonus because of the boss hitbox being small, etc.

FFXIV's battle system is complete trash. Straight up. It's the result of having to make certain accommodations in design due to very low tickrate servers (you can't really afford to have mechanics or concepts that are based on reaction rather than memorization/proactive behavior) and... whatever the reason for Square-Enix's crusade against player choice and "you are allowed to make mistakes" since Shadowbringers might be called. I really don't think it's being hyperbolic to say that the current battle system is just garbage and that they pretty much need to do engage in a top-to-bottom rework of it; if not in 7.0 (they will probably have their hands full with the other engine changes/improvements they're working on), certainly in 8.0. WoW ran into the same problem after Wrath of the Lich King - Cataclysm was an attempt to save the old system, but it caused as many problems as it addressed, and with Mists of Pandaria they ripped the bandaid off and just started down the road of major reworks.

Endwalker is a very good example of the problems that crop up when you start taking off too much to try and simplify things. It's paradoxically made things much harder for disorganized/inexperienced groups and players (PF), despite the changes presumably being aimed at getting more of those players into savage raiding. I think it's possible to walk back some of the changes going into 7.0, but that's kicking the can down the road - they will eventually need to completely rework them if they want to give themselves more design space to work with.

[Wyther]

It wasnt needed. PERIOD.

There was no reason to do this, PLD was in a good spot.the "2 minute meta" is garbage and just homogenizes every class it touches.

Theres a reason I havent touched my casters since 80, dont play my Reaper as much as I used to, and now only play Machinist when I feel like logging on. Because of the PLD changes, I dont even feel like logging on anymore. They took the class I started FFXIV with and kicked it to the curb.

NEVER have I hated a class more than PLD right now.

Why even stay subscribed when the class you loved since the start is now hated?