Thread: PLD 6.2: Take Away and Rotation

Originally Posted by 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.

Man I didn't think about doing this, seems legit. It makes me wish they made divine might stackable.

Originally Posted by Gserpent

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.

Apologies if it were unclear. My statement was more that job resources don't have to be exclusively generated for DPS. Oath Gauge being used defensively provides a much more interesting and meaningful decision than making it just another "Get 50 and Fel Cleave" option.

I agree with all your points on the combat system as they've decided to try to evolve it beyond Stormblood. There's a lot of potential options and design space that they cut out during ShB that further cemented the DPS meta in place and the Devs have been actively making decisions to enforce the DPS-centric meta. So I hope they do something in 7.0 to help alleviate this in the future, but I'm not really counting on it.

Originally Posted by nia_saeli

Apologies if it were unclear. My statement was more that job resources don't have to be exclusively generated for DPS. Oath Gauge being used defensively provides a much more interesting and meaningful decision than making it just another "Get 50 and Fel Cleave" option.

As opposed to 'get 50 and Sheltron'? A suggestion I had made (without much thought for potency balancing) was to make Atonement the Gauge consumer, and scale its potency based on Gauge at the time of use (like Apex Arrow). Meaning you could purposely use lower gauge amounts, to reset to 0 at 'down times', and thereby line up your 'I have hit 100 Gauge it's time to smite' to be at a specific timing, such as, idk, the 2 minute raidbuff window? Is that not 'more interesting and meaningful decision' potentially than 'hit Sheltron if you need mit, or Intervention if your buddy needs mit, or often cases just do both'? Like, yeh it's another DPS related gauge. But 'Paladin's defensiveness via Sheltron is scuppered by the boss using the hidden jutsu of walking away from the arena'' is not a cool unique trait. It's a bloody annoying trait.

Originally Posted by nia_saeli

Apologies if it were unclear. My statement was more that job resources don't have to be exclusively generated for DPS. Oath Gauge being used defensively provides a much more interesting and meaningful decision than making it just another "Get 50 and Fel Cleave" option.

I agree with all your points on the combat system as they've decided to try to evolve it beyond Stormblood. There's a lot of potential options and design space that they cut out during ShB that further cemented the DPS meta in place and the Devs have been actively making decisions to enforce the DPS-centric meta. So I hope they do something in 7.0 to help alleviate this in the future, but I'm not really counting on it.

I would love to swap to "active mitigation" where your damage is a bunch of builders and your spenders are defensive tools. WoW went that direction and while it's had a few potholes, it's been a roaring success and is *dramatically* better than what they were doing before.

But that would require an immense change in XIV's combat system and how it's laid out. I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Yes, the interesting and 'unique' part of PLD's Sheltron/Intervention, the good unique at least, is that you can store up 100 gauge, and use Sheltron AND Intervention at the same time. So if Sheltron had 2 charges, shared with Intervention, with a 20s recharge time, it'd be pretty much functionally identical.

I agree with all of your points, I think the only point of contention for me is that I trust SE to decide to remove oath gauge entirely and make Shell/Intervention's go inline with Bloodwhetting/Nascent glint at a 25 second shared CD with no charges". They have a tendency to look at an issue with a job (like SB-era Dark Arts) and just remove it entirely instead of tweak it and improve it.

Given the recent PLD rework, I feel like skepticism is warranted. That being said, I think your proposed changes to Shell/Intervention are good and I'd be happy if PLD got them. I just don't think that the oath gauge would get repurposed if they went that route.

Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

I fear the problem with Active Mit is that this game's playerbase is so against the idea of 'losing damage' for any reason, it'd be reviled.

Yeah, pretty much. Even if we made active mitigation DPS positive (e.g. TBN gives the ability to hit Edge of Shadow twice for the same MP), I can't shake the feeling that we'd end up with situations with tanks or healers saying "stand in the bad, it's DPS positive for me". Maybe just applying damage downs to everything would be enough of a deterrent? IDK.

Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Once upon a time I started theorycrafting a change to DRK to make it into a 'stagger tank' back in like SB (when people hated it), didn't get very far though. I fear the problem with Active Mit is that this game's playerbase is so against the idea of 'losing damage' for any reason, it'd be reviled. For example, Guardian Druid in WOW has Rage as it's resource. It can spend that rage on Maul for big ST damage (and a 15% DR effect for like 6sec via a talent), or it can spend it on Ironfur to increase it's physical DR via increased Armor stat. In FFXIV, that'd be hated because everyone would insist on spamming Maul for more damage, and eating dirt as they blow up on a TB because they didn't mitigate it with Ironfur. SOTR on Paladin wouldn't be spent to mitigate, it'd be spent to do more damage. Prot Warrior Rage would all be dumped into Revenge, leaving both Shield block and Ignore Pain unused.

(actually I realize now Shield Block increases damage dealt by Shield Slam, so it sort of refunds in that regard. Maybe if we had stuff like that, where eg Sheltron makes Shield Bash do bonus damage during it's duration, that might be cool)

On the other hand, a system like Stagger, where Purifying and Celestial Brews don't cost you your damage (and your damage actually helps restore them faster) would be a lot more acceptable to this playerbase I think. Well, the 'it doesn't cost your damage' part at least.

The thing is though, it's not costing your DPS to use these defensive skills. In an active mitigation design, WAR wouldn't spend gauge on Fell Cleave, they would be spending gauge on Bloodwhetting or something. Fell Cleave would be a free button you can push that either has a cooldown, or becomes available after certain criteria are met. There's not a case where you're losing damage to use mitigation, they're separate. In WoW's case, your big fancy buttons like Fell Cleave will often be gauge builders (Shield Slam generates a flat amount of Rage, for example.)

The primary downside of active mitigation is that it by design kind of needs players to be doing something roughly equivalent to proper DPS - if you aren't using your Fell Cleave every time it's available, your mitigation uptime will suffer because you won't have as much gauge to spend. But this shouldn't be an issue for casual content, because casual content is intentionally tuned to be very, very easy. Even now, you don't even need to be a tank to soak tankbusters in dungeons. This wouldn't change.