Is PLD actually weaker than before?

[HyperiusUltima]

I looked at metrics on logs for tanks, and PLD in particular seems to be a whole point below everyone else in every metric except aDPS. This is quite inexcusable for a rework, since somebody on the development team must've botched their math, and this is accounting for all fights in Savage. I haven't looked at DSR, but I think we need to take a good look at PLD and determine what's actually harming it.

- Fight or Flight and Req. Considering that they didn't cut either of these abilities(which honestly they could've cut FoF and baked it into the kit a la DRG) it just pushes more button bloat. Requiescat could easily stay due to it being tied to Confiteor, but it being Melee instead of ranged is baffling. We could even get rid of it too if we wanted to and replace that with something else while Confiteor is just a standalone Cooldown.

- Goring Blade. A lot of people have been on one side or the other when it came to removing the DoT - I was in the latter thinking it might be better, but only if they actually do the potency right. While they did do it right, the issue isn't the potency now - it's interaction within the kit. It is literally changed to be exactly like Sonic Break, except for the fact that it has 0 interaction with the kit and is only used every FoF rotation. It used to be a key weaponskill we used every other rotation, but why this? It makes no sense in its current iteration, and is merely tacked on. I'd honestly rather have an entirely different skill than this. Another part of why PLD is lacking right now is that the frequency of Goring Blade has gone down, and barely been buffed to compensate. We did Goring twice every FoF Rotation, now it's only once, making PLD weaker in retrospect.

- Divine Might. This I think was a good idea gone bad with implementation. The fact you can only stack one Divine Might at any time is not ok. When I thought Divine Might, I was thinking they'd allow us to stack during filler, keeping to Atonements like we used to. However, by only allowing us one, we have to stare at the FoF timer half the time and determine for ourselves whether we have time for Atonement or not - hence you drop an entire Atonement Stack because of DM Holy Spirit's potency of 450 to line up FoF. This is BAD DESIGN. If they allowed us to stack it up to 3 times, I'd be all for it; it would also allow us to create our own Magic Mini-Burst as well, and implement MP Management in a sense.

That mostly covers my current gripes with PLD and also just my perspective on the job, but I'd like for the PLD community to actually discuss why PLD is the way it is right now this patch.

[Rithy255]

It's likely generally better despite performing lower, OLD PLD suffered from many reasons damage was but one of them In 6.2 PLD was generally really bad Offensively and defensively also having a complicated rotation that didn't work under raid buffs, in general made it just a really bad tank that had no real place in the meta. There were zero upsides to bring old PLD, outside of having weird utility such as Cover.

Looking at current PLD, Just the general changes in it's defensive kit makes it a lot more appealing then it was, I think it's pretty clear that new PLD is way stronger defensively then old PLD, it's likely even above some of the other tanks in actual "tanking" with how shelltron is generally able to be stacked twice, how it's got two raid wides, bulwark is actually pretty good compared to other tanks like GNB's Camo, sure it has some situational weaknesses in fights with a lot of DOT's but it will still be a useful ability if used right, having ranged/sustain flexibility from GCD attacks is unlike any other tank while that's not the strongest upside it's still a decent one. I personally think they should reduce atonement to 2 uses but give you another stack of divine might, after doing atonements (being able to hold 2) for this to be better, but current divine might is actually great for the job, do I think this new PLD is meta? not at all, it's viable but the meta tanks will always be about the ones who can deal the most DPS, I don't think it's fair if PLD did the same amount as DPS as a gunbreaker or Dark knight either, it should be where warrior is at, all it needs is some pretty small potency buffs and the job is in a perfect spot.

Some changes should and need to be still made, It feels like the direction of PLD in 6.3 was overall positive but to me it seemed a bit rushed from how I feel about it, FOF and goring blade are perfect examples of why the Job just feels clunky and weird still. Divine might is good but it can be improved on, also atonement needs to just not break your basic 1, 2, 3 I don't know why it does.

[AlessaImpera]

I looked at metrics on logs for tanks, and PLD in particular seems to be a whole point below everyone else in every metric except aDPS. This is quite inexcusable for a rework, since somebody on the development team must've botched their math, and this is accounting for all fights in Savage. I haven't looked at DSR, but I think we need to take a good look at PLD and determine what's actually harming it.

ADPS is the ONLY metric that matters in regards to Tank damage. RDPS is completely irrelevant to Tanks. ADPS is what matters for them.

[Ayche]

In the latest unreal, all the tanks median scores at within 1-2% of each other.
That is about as balanced as you can get.

[Cabalabob]

I imagine they’re going to tweak potencies, they tend to fall on the side of caution when it comes to potencies then buff it as needed. For me I think the rotation would be fine if atonement didn’t break combos so we could prime royal authority then spam atonement until FoF is ready and don’t always need to be 2 GCDs ahead.

But even that wouldn’t be perfect because we’ll occasionally run into scenarios where FoF is about to come off CD a GCD after atonement and we have nothing we could fill that GCD with without using up our divine might, at which point we then have to use royal authority again and then prime royal authority again, so that 1 GCD turns into 4. In an ideal world they would have made our rotation just align every 60 seconds with a rework as I’m sure many of us were expecting they would do, but they didn’t so let’s assume we’re working with what we’ve got here.

I don’t want to suggest another filler GCD…. Buuuuuut if they buffed shield bash potency to 300 (with a trait at later levels) and made it not break combos it could be another tool to keep our rotation aligned.

[dwodmots]

Pretty sure people are just worse at new PLD than old PLD. Give it a few weeks so players can build up muscle memory.

[MagiusNecros]

Damage is pretty much the same. Or is the same. It's just a Warrior/Gunbreaker Frankenstein monster that now fits into the crap 2 minute burst design philosophy the devs have a boner for.

I'd argue it's a 50/50 split between PLD players that love or hate it.

But if veteran players were paying attention you knew this was coming and it's why players were fearful and why the devs omitted the changes from prelim notes as a form of damage control.

DRG and AST are next on the chopping block. Look forward to it.

I'm lowkey hoping all this DoT pruning is just to make way for a job class that focuses on DoTs. A simple way to remove concerns over debuff caps on enemies is to remove all the other classes DoTs even if you would never reach the cap outside incredibly rare instances in 24 man raids or Eureka/Bozja/Zadnor.

A lot of the rebalancing in this game seems to just be to throw everything under raid buffs across like 15 seconds and just do a big burst of damage and wait to do it again. Except for like every class so you can do the best you possibly can with little room for improvement or deviation.

The QoL changes to PLD defensives I see as overall good. The DPS portion looks more streamlined. Kinda tired of everything being a Fell Cleave Warrior.

That's all I have to say about that.

[Absurdity]

A lot of the rebalancing in this game seems to just be to throw everything under raid buffs across like 15 seconds and just do a big burst of damage and wait to do it again. Except for like every class so you can do the best you possibly can with little room for improvement or deviation.

I'm very interested in what they're going to do with 7.0, the 2 minute meta is already stale halfway through this expansion.

Since the devs have turned me into an absolute cynic when it comes to their ability to design good gameplay nowadays I expect that exactly nothing will change and we'll be stuck with everyone spamming their burst on cooldown every 2 minutes and this sleep inducing gameplay for another 2 years, but I don't think this can continue for much longer either.

[HyperiusUltima]

ADPS is the ONLY metric that matters in regards to Tank damage. RDPS is completely irrelevant to Tanks. ADPS is what matters for them.

I'm aware of this. I'm just stating this as a fact. I never said that PLD actually was doing ok in any metric. Regardless, your nDPS and aDPS should still not be so low. If PLD is dead last in rDPS, it should be at least high in aDPS or nDPS - but it isn't. There's an issue here that should be telling that they rushed this rework.

[Marxam]

I guess the only way to find out is if ppl bring WAR/PLD into OWU next week and see if they can't beat enrage.