I remember a long time ago, I posted a thread, musing my dislike of a few flaws with the PLD job back before Heavensward came out, and I know that I am rather late in posting something like this as the expansion will literally "end" in less than two months, but still.
Today, I tanked the Great Gubal Library, which is the first thing I've tanked in Heavensward that was not Bismarck (in which tanks are basically glorified DPS 'cept for the two dragon part) and once with Ravana which I horribly failed at because I was undergeared and not experienced with trying to tank him.
But now, with decent-ish gear, and all of my quested abilities, I got stuck in the GGL.
I struggled at first, but after moving some hotkeys around (Trying to figure out where to put all of those hotkeys is a pain lol), I finally worked out a solution that gets me most of my hotkeys, and towards the end of the dungeon, after the second boss, I got into a routine finally and I would have to say...
They fixed most of the issues I had with PLD! First off, I will say that Clemency rocks. I love that spell already. During the last boss, I saved the healer's b*tt with it twice, and used it on myself a few times to give the healer a little bit of a break whenever I had a chance to do so.
I also noted its sheer power when doing a couple FATEs and Treasure Chests... I'm pleasantly surprised with how good that spell actually is.
Next up, Goring Blade is a nice addition; it gives me not only a reason to use Riot Blade, but also if I need RB for recovering MP spent in Clemency, I have something to actually combo with it.
Then, we have Royal Authority. I'm of two minds on this one. I like the higher DPS output, which is certainly nice, but then I realize that RoH is still good for the -Strength and +Enmity. I also find it amusing that they recycled FFXI's Requiescat WS animation and made it the highest damage-dealing ability PLD has, when it is easily one of the worst Merit weaponskills in XI, lol.
That shieldtron ability or whatever it is called... while it isn't exactly unwelcome, I didn't find it all THAT useful. I suppose one could pop it when you know something's about to throw a huge ability at you to negate 20% or so of the damage guaranteed, so it does have uses... even if it seems a little lack-luster in common trash pulls.
And Divine Seal... I've yet to find it a spot on the hotbar. I want to use it, but I'm out of buttons and I can't for the life of me, figure out what to take off the existing bar... I could try assigning the Alt+numbers and make a 3rd row that can be accessed with keyboard shortcuts instead of using it for mouse-click stuff, but I'm afraid I'll get tied up with my fingers. I could also maybe move the enemysign1 button to a mouse-click button, but I like being able to mark a "kill this now" target while in combat without having to click a button in the middle of battle.
But yeah, otherwise, loving Heavensward Paladin. Muuuuch better than Pre-HW, lol. I'm of two minds about Stormblood, especially when they've seemingly revealed so little about what exactly they intend to do.. I'm hoping that this won't be a rollercoaster ride of down, up, down.. but I'll just have to enjoy what we got now, and hope that it is at least as good, if not better, once SB comes out. Hopefully they will either consolidate or tweak a few things to free up some of these buttons, especially some of the defensive cooldowns. I don't like having, how many again, 4? 5? defensive cooldowns? I think one or two of those could be combined, IMO.
Edited, Apr 30th 2017 7:31pm by Lyrailis
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The plan, as I understand it, is to gain 5 more abilities, but have roughly the same number of actual buttons that you have right now.
They're going to prune away some things that people just don't use. As a BLM main I'm looking at you, Freeze. I've used you like twice... total. They're also going to combine some similar abilities shared across a role into a cross-role ability. The example used was Rampart and Foresight. Though I would point out to them that those are NOT the same thing. They're similar and with a little tweaking, they could become the same thing. DRK also has Shadowskin which IS Rampart, just with more edgelord. So I expect those to get combined.
We can speculate from the Stormblood benchmark trailer that PLD is probably getting some kind of AoE damage source other than Circle of Scorn. Beyond that we just don't know. More information about combat changes is expected mid-late May.
They're going to prune away some things that people just don't use. As a BLM main I'm looking at you, Freeze. I've used you like twice... total. They're also going to combine some similar abilities shared across a role into a cross-role ability. The example used was Rampart and Foresight. Though I would point out to them that those are NOT the same thing. They're similar and with a little tweaking, they could become the same thing. DRK also has Shadowskin which IS Rampart, just with more edgelord. So I expect those to get combined.
We can speculate from the Stormblood benchmark trailer that PLD is probably getting some kind of AoE damage source other than Circle of Scorn. Beyond that we just don't know. More information about combat changes is expected mid-late May.
svlyons wrote:
If random outcomes aren't acceptable to you, then don't play with random people.
Well, for us to gain 5 buttons, but still have "about the same as we already had", we would either need to consolidate/remove 5 abilities, or have some of the new abilities make old abilities obsolete. Otherwise, giving us 5 buttons is going to......give us 5 more buttons.
And I really wish they would come up with a system that automatically scales certain spells up/down depending on Level Sync status.... I hate having to switch around, say, Stone 1/2/3. I gotta have 3 versions of Stone on my hotbar because of Level Sync issues and the fact I don't want to pull up my abilities menu each new dungeon/trial/etc I end up in because of different levels.
That's not so much of a problem with PLD, but ROG has the same issue with Kiss of Wasp/Viper. Gotta have both on the bar because I hate opening the menu each time I end up in a Sub-30 dungeon.
I think they should take WoW's idea of pullouts... like... if there's a Stone 1/2/3... if you Unlock the hotbar, you can click the pullout button to choose which stone is in that button and then lock the bar again and voila. you're good the rest of the dungeon.
or.....something.
But even with this, I still don't see where I'm going to have any more room.... I've already got 24 hotbar buttons that I have access to with 1 through = and ctrl+1 through =. Adding Alt I don't think is an option, I've tried that in WoW and I started getting messed up on what was what. I even do that now occasionally, hitting ctrl+ something when I meant to hit the regular number key instead.
I am simply out of buttons, and to put any more on there I'd have to start taking off defensive cooldowns, etc. I hate to do that, though...
EDIT: For example... Royal Authority... I don't understand why they didn't simply just use it to make Rage of Halone obsolete, like how they did Stone 2 and Stone 3. But, it lacks +Enmity and Strength Down, so you still need RoH accessible. But even if so, you'd still have the Level Sync problem....
EDIT2: That, and you mentioned Freeze... useless abilities aren't really a problem (though they should be pruned anyways). Useless abilities simply don't end up on the hotbar. The problem is, too many abilities that ARE useful but only in very niche situations, enough that you need them accessible (can't open the actions menu in the middle of combat to use them), but yet too useful that you simply can't just dump them off the hotbar altogether. That's the real problem.
Edited, May 1st 2017 12:40am by Lyrailis
And I really wish they would come up with a system that automatically scales certain spells up/down depending on Level Sync status.... I hate having to switch around, say, Stone 1/2/3. I gotta have 3 versions of Stone on my hotbar because of Level Sync issues and the fact I don't want to pull up my abilities menu each new dungeon/trial/etc I end up in because of different levels.
That's not so much of a problem with PLD, but ROG has the same issue with Kiss of Wasp/Viper. Gotta have both on the bar because I hate opening the menu each time I end up in a Sub-30 dungeon.
I think they should take WoW's idea of pullouts... like... if there's a Stone 1/2/3... if you Unlock the hotbar, you can click the pullout button to choose which stone is in that button and then lock the bar again and voila. you're good the rest of the dungeon.
or.....something.
But even with this, I still don't see where I'm going to have any more room.... I've already got 24 hotbar buttons that I have access to with 1 through = and ctrl+1 through =. Adding Alt I don't think is an option, I've tried that in WoW and I started getting messed up on what was what. I even do that now occasionally, hitting ctrl+ something when I meant to hit the regular number key instead.
I am simply out of buttons, and to put any more on there I'd have to start taking off defensive cooldowns, etc. I hate to do that, though...
EDIT: For example... Royal Authority... I don't understand why they didn't simply just use it to make Rage of Halone obsolete, like how they did Stone 2 and Stone 3. But, it lacks +Enmity and Strength Down, so you still need RoH accessible. But even if so, you'd still have the Level Sync problem....
EDIT2: That, and you mentioned Freeze... useless abilities aren't really a problem (though they should be pruned anyways). Useless abilities simply don't end up on the hotbar. The problem is, too many abilities that ARE useful but only in very niche situations, enough that you need them accessible (can't open the actions menu in the middle of combat to use them), but yet too useful that you simply can't just dump them off the hotbar altogether. That's the real problem.
Edited, May 1st 2017 12:40am by Lyrailis
I know they're talking about removing BLM's Thunder 2 and 3 spells that all do the same thing with different cast times and instead scale Thunder 1 based on level. The Stone family sounds like a another good candidate for that. Scale up Stone 1 with the character's level and just throw in the heavy effect because why not.
NIN poisons... you really should have both of them available anyway. There may be times when you don't want Jugulate to stun things and then it really DOES make a difference which one of those two poisons you're using.
If you're limiting yourself to 24 buttons, I'd say that's your problem there. You say you get messed up when you have to deal with the alt series as well, but I'd suggest that you could probably alleviate that with practice.
Here's a picture of my UI that I took to demonstrate for a friend of mine. I've cleared away my notes so you can see the hotbars clearly: http://i.imgur.com/4e61aak.png
Now I've told you I use a Razer Orbweaver to handle this many buttons at once, so I doubt you'd be able to do THIS many without like... growing an extra hand or something... but you should be able to handle the single-modifier buttons just fine with your ordinary human hands. May take some practice, but you could easily double the number of buttons you have access to like this.
EDIT: Some notes:
Only 5 of those bars are keybound: unmodified, shift, ctrl, alt, and ctrl+alt.
There's another bar you can't see because I'm a MNK in the picture for pet actions that uses ctrl+shift.
I wouldn't expect the double-modified keys to be practical for you.
The larger button bar up by itself on the right there is for monitoring short cooldowns. I started using it when I was playing NIN and just kind of kept the habit. It's useful as hell.
My raid frames pop up to the left of my party frame there when I'm in 24-man content.
The limit break bar appears below the hotbars.
My target, target of target, and buff/debuff bar appear just above the hp/mp/tp bars.
Focus target appears to my right just above the cooldown bar.
Target list appears to my left about even with the cooldown bar.
Tooltips occupy that enormous space on the lower right.
Any other questions about how this works, please ask.
Edited, May 1st 2017 8:29am by Callinon
NIN poisons... you really should have both of them available anyway. There may be times when you don't want Jugulate to stun things and then it really DOES make a difference which one of those two poisons you're using.
If you're limiting yourself to 24 buttons, I'd say that's your problem there. You say you get messed up when you have to deal with the alt series as well, but I'd suggest that you could probably alleviate that with practice.
Here's a picture of my UI that I took to demonstrate for a friend of mine. I've cleared away my notes so you can see the hotbars clearly: http://i.imgur.com/4e61aak.png
Now I've told you I use a Razer Orbweaver to handle this many buttons at once, so I doubt you'd be able to do THIS many without like... growing an extra hand or something... but you should be able to handle the single-modifier buttons just fine with your ordinary human hands. May take some practice, but you could easily double the number of buttons you have access to like this.
EDIT: Some notes:
Only 5 of those bars are keybound: unmodified, shift, ctrl, alt, and ctrl+alt.
There's another bar you can't see because I'm a MNK in the picture for pet actions that uses ctrl+shift.
I wouldn't expect the double-modified keys to be practical for you.
The larger button bar up by itself on the right there is for monitoring short cooldowns. I started using it when I was playing NIN and just kind of kept the habit. It's useful as hell.
My raid frames pop up to the left of my party frame there when I'm in 24-man content.
The limit break bar appears below the hotbars.
My target, target of target, and buff/debuff bar appear just above the hp/mp/tp bars.
Focus target appears to my right just above the cooldown bar.
Target list appears to my left about even with the cooldown bar.
Tooltips occupy that enormous space on the lower right.
Any other questions about how this works, please ask.
Edited, May 1st 2017 8:29am by Callinon
svlyons wrote:
If random outcomes aren't acceptable to you, then don't play with random people.
Hmmm.
I could try Alt+ I suppose for Cooldowns. That alone would probably free up like 5 or so slots lol. Another idea I had was placing Rage of Halone and Royal Authority on the same number, but one would be unmodified and the other ctrl+, etc.
I'll move some buttons around I think and then take a SS.
One small problem with having lots of 'bars is that I am playing on a small resolution (1360x768) because that's the only resolution my TV actually likes (didn't know that when I bought it, lol). However, I've managed to find a few helpful kludges recently, so I'm slowly modifying things bit-by-bit.
We'll see what happens when I do my roulettes today lol.
I could try Alt+ I suppose for Cooldowns. That alone would probably free up like 5 or so slots lol. Another idea I had was placing Rage of Halone and Royal Authority on the same number, but one would be unmodified and the other ctrl+, etc.
I'll move some buttons around I think and then take a SS.
One small problem with having lots of 'bars is that I am playing on a small resolution (1360x768) because that's the only resolution my TV actually likes (didn't know that when I bought it, lol). However, I've managed to find a few helpful kludges recently, so I'm slowly modifying things bit-by-bit.
We'll see what happens when I do my roulettes today lol.
Okay, here's another revision...
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/807678125588818803/3528AC1A9C48BC6079DABD47D23D73E24B8F9394/
I moved Protect, Raise, Shield Oath, and Sword Oath to a new hotbar I stashed underneath my HP/MP/TP meters, I moved the XP bar and shrunk it, moved all cooldowns to Alt+, and I got Savage Blade and Riot Blade on the same Number (one's unmodified, the other is ctrl+), same for Rage of Halone/Royal Authority, I was able to move Clemency to an easier-to-reach key (which will make it far faster/easier to cast in a pinch!), not sure where to put Sheltron, though. AND I was able to put enemysign1 on the unmodified key bar which is nice too.
So I'll try this setup and see how it works (and probably fumble all over the keys, lol. I wonder how many times I will use Rage of Halone thinking it's Savage Blade, etc).
EDIT: What do you know, I got stuck in the Vault of all places. Like the very last dungeon I wanted to tank, lol. But, only one wipe at the last boss, it didn't go too badly, though as predicted I was doing a little fumbling and forgetting to use cooldowns at some points, BUT, I can see a small increase of ease to use commonly-used abilities, especially clemency.
EDIT2: Apparently leaving off the "/" on the end results in a 404. fixed.
Edited, May 1st 2017 12:58pm by Lyrailis
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/807678125588818803/3528AC1A9C48BC6079DABD47D23D73E24B8F9394/
I moved Protect, Raise, Shield Oath, and Sword Oath to a new hotbar I stashed underneath my HP/MP/TP meters, I moved the XP bar and shrunk it, moved all cooldowns to Alt+, and I got Savage Blade and Riot Blade on the same Number (one's unmodified, the other is ctrl+), same for Rage of Halone/Royal Authority, I was able to move Clemency to an easier-to-reach key (which will make it far faster/easier to cast in a pinch!), not sure where to put Sheltron, though. AND I was able to put enemysign1 on the unmodified key bar which is nice too.
So I'll try this setup and see how it works (and probably fumble all over the keys, lol. I wonder how many times I will use Rage of Halone thinking it's Savage Blade, etc).
EDIT: What do you know, I got stuck in the Vault of all places. Like the very last dungeon I wanted to tank, lol. But, only one wipe at the last boss, it didn't go too badly, though as predicted I was doing a little fumbling and forgetting to use cooldowns at some points, BUT, I can see a small increase of ease to use commonly-used abilities, especially clemency.
EDIT2: Apparently leaving off the "/" on the end results in a 404. fixed.
Edited, May 1st 2017 12:58pm by Lyrailis
Quote:
EDIT: What do you know, I got stuck in the Vault of all places. Like the very last dungeon I wanted to tank, lol. But, only one wipe at the last boss, it didn't go too badly, though as predicted I was doing a little fumbling and forgetting to use cooldowns at some points, BUT, I can see a small increase of ease to use commonly-used abilities, especially clemency.
Yeah Vault can be rough when you're testing things. I'd actually recommend any time you're changing keybindings around is that you go to a training dummy and just bash through your rotation for a couple hours (no kidding). This helps to sort of reset your muscle memory so you're not reaching for the wrong keys when you want something. Use cooldowns too, maybe not consumables, but full cooldown usage. Do the whole thing and get used to where your buttons are. If something isn't working, move it and start again.
Also remember that UI elements can be scaled down to something like 60% of their normal size. I think the key combination is ctrl+page up or something like that in the UI editor. This can help a lot on smaller resolutions so your UI isn't taking up more space than it needs to. I'd definitely recommend scaling down your minimap and quest tracker just for a start. Those things are enormous.
Quote:
I could try Alt+ I suppose for Cooldowns. That alone would probably free up like 5 or so slots lol. Another idea I had was placing Rage of Halone and Royal Authority on the same number, but one would be unmodified and the other ctrl+, etc.
It's good to think ahead about where you want an ability to be. Think about how often you use it and where your hand has to go to do it.
Personally since I play so many jobs (all of them) I like to standardize my button layout as much as possible. So you saw my screenshot up there where the button placements look kind of random? They're not. They're set that way deliberately so that no matter what job I'm playing, all my buttons are in basically the same place.
I'll give you a rundown of how I lay out a melee dps job just to give you an example:
1 - 4: Primary rotational abilities
5: AoE, usually point blank. On MNK this is Arm of the Destroyer
6: Execute, most jobs have one
7: Interrupt
8: Snare
9: Heavy rotational ability or endcap ability. On MNK this is Dragon Kick because of how late you get that
0: Cooldowns, on MNK this is Perfect Balance
-: Movement ability or gap closer. On MNK this is Shoulder Tackle
=: Ranged attack. Most jobs have one of these, MNK doesn't. On MNK I put Howling Fist here
Shift
1 - 4: Rotational abilities and DoTs
5: AoE (I keep all my AoE abilities on 5 if I can), on MNK this is Rockbreaker
6: Auxiliary AoE, on MNK this is Elixir Field
7: Potion.. this is a tough one to hit for me because of where the button is so I try to make it something I'm not going to use a lot
8 - =: Throughput cooldowns. On MNK I only have 2 which are Internal Release and Blood for Blood. On BRD this group is packed
You can start to get the idea here. I'm keeping cooldowns on the later keys. Usually the ones around 0. The modifier keys help me remember which cooldowns are for what. Unmodified and shift will be throughput cooldowns. Ctrl cooldowns are defensive. You can see Foresight and Featherfoot in my MNK screenshot there. Alt cooldowns are raid cooldowns or cooldowns that specifically affect other people. This is where Mantra goes. By keeping this standard in place no matter what job I'm playing, I know where my buttons all are without having to memorize a hojillion jobs worth of key combinations. This works about 90% of the time. On some jobs I just have too many of something for it to all fit in its neat little slots like this, but then I only have to remember the exceptions.
The ctrl+alt bar on the left there is for things like mounts and target markers. Stuff I want to have access to easily but don't need to be part of any rotation.
svlyons wrote:
If random outcomes aren't acceptable to you, then don't play with random people.
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