Riot Blade > Rage of Halone Needs Work - Some Ideas

[Ladon]

Riot Blade > Rage of Halone Needs Work - Some Ideas


Hello. First of all I am fairly new to FF14, however have played many other MMOs in the past. I typically main tank classes in games so naturally I decided to go with Gladiator/Paladin as my main in this game. I wanted to share my thoughts on the particular combo Riot Blade > Rage of Halone as I believe it can be reworked from being a highly situational combo to a bread and butter combo of both classes. I know some of these concerns have been brought up before but I'd like to bring focus to this particular combo.

First to outline the issues I see with this combo:

• Combo requires positioning that a tank class should never find themselves in. The combo could be useful in the rare case that you have 2000 TP stored and the enemy turns it's back to you, however you will find that this conditions will almost never be fulfilled in actual party play. The other way is to force yourself to the back of the enemy, however this is almost always highly undesirable as you will be flipping the enemy after the combo which can cause positioning issues for the other DDs in the party.
• Risk of use is too high. We already have a very limited TP pool to work with. Add to the fact that actually landing weaponskills is a gamble in itself. In a party where you are expected to maximize enmity, your TP resource is almost always better used elsewhere such as Fastblade > Flatblade. Wasting 2000 TP on a miss can be disastrous and considering that in the grand scheme of things the actual damage of this combo and the low damage enmity it actually generates simply does not make it worth it. And we haven't even mentioned the additional positioning requirements to use it yet.
• Potential damage of the class suffers overall because this combo is never used. Applying the two above outlined issues there is a major dependency of the classes potential damage output on paper versus reality. The class and job already sacrifice a lot of damage for little return and it's reflected in the general view of the class. The ineffectiveness of this combo just greatly compounds general issues present with the class and job.

In general Gladiator and Paladin suffer from the same common issue found in many other MMOs when there are two competing tank classes: Slow and Steady never wins the race. Ideally a party with a Paladin versus a Warrior as a tank should see nearly equal single target DPS output or Paladins will be doomed to play second string which is far too common in games with both a defensive tank versus offensive tank. I think this can largely be accomplished with this combo alone with the following changes:

• Remove the positioning requirement Riot Blade or change it to front facing requirements. This is the number one must to make the combo viable rather than a highly situational option. The will give us far more opportunities to actually use the combo.
• Reduce TP requirements of Riot Blade to 1500. This will help lower the risk of using the combo in the event of a failure. Again the goal is to make the combo something worthwhile to use.
• Change the debuff mechanics of Riot Blade. This is an important change along with the rest. The idea is to make the physical defense debuff stack with all other debuffs, make the duration reasonable and change of the debuff landing very high. What this does is give Gladiator/Paladin a group utility that effectively increases the DPS of all other melee in the party. The overall group DPS increase will help close the damage gap a paladin brings to a party versus a warrior.
• Add a magic evasion debuff to Rage of Halone. Similar concept to above but effectively increases the magic DPS of a party when a Gladiator/Paladin is present in the party. Again this would be a unique, stacking debuff.
• Increase TP cost of Rage of Halone to 2000TP (?). May not be necessary but just some thoughts on considering overall balance. Since we're adding an additional, potentially useful effect to Rage of Halone that wouldn't require it be in a combo it's cost may need to be increased to compensate. It would also fill that 2000TP weapon skill gap.

Let me know your thoughts. I understand there are many other areas of possible improvement for GLD/PLD but please try to keep the discussion restricted to these two particular skills. Though understandably there may be impacts in other areas I haven't considered that may need to be brought up.