Is PLD actually weaker than before?

[nia_saeli]

But that’s the point. To go into your burst with DM and RA primed you need to drop atonements for it to align with FoF so you need to be 2 GCDs ahead to make sure you’re ready when FoF comes off CD.

If you just start FoF whenever it’s ready without any setup then you won’t have RA primed and you’ll end up wasting GCDs on fast blade and riot blade and won’t have enough GCDs in FoF to use RA and a second DM HS.

In summary: It's not so easy to judge whether you should or shouldn't drop atonements. The gains of setting up are super small at best and you'd need a spreadsheet to figure out whether or not dropping the atonements is actually a gain because the damage between filler abilities is just too close to tell otherwise.

The beautiful thing about the PLD rotation is that the filler GCDs are all so close that not doing the setup may actually be a gain.

- Worst Filler - Fast -> Riot -> Royal Authority: 860 base potency (FoF Potency: 1075)
- Second worst filler - Hardcast HSx3: 960 base potency (FoF Potency: 1200)
- Practical Filller - Holyspirit (DM) -> somethingx2: 930 to 1210 base potency (FoF potency: 1162.5 to 1512.5)
- Best case - Holyspirit (DM) x2 + Royal Authority: 1280 base potency (FoF Potency: 1600)

Based on the above combinations, whether you'd want to be dropping the atonement(s) for alignment is still up for debate. This is primarily because dropping atonements is also a potency loss and with everything being so close, you can't exactly say for certain it is a gain without a spreadsheet taking into account everything later in the encounter.