~First And Final Line Of Defense V2.0~

I'm curious if the Atonement adjustment will be a shift to static CE/VE generation rather than dmg based enmity, or if they're actually going to make it hit worth a damn. I have a hard time believing it will be the latter since SE seems to be allergic to PLD DPS.

That said, it would take a pretty crazy change to make Atonement worth using either way. Do it SE. Let's see an Atonement spam tanking meta. lol. Give me a reason to R15 my Burtgang. XD

Whatever they do, retesting Atonement is gonna suck. It's been my enmity testing tool since the JP figured out the formula.

Also, Large rampart adjustments.... Hmmmm. Well, it's definitely a JA that needs attention. The def+ effect is a bad joke, and the magic shield is garbage. Even the merit/relic aug effects are underwhelming. Changes welcome.

Static enmity as a base, scaling up with TP is my guess. As much as I would love to see a change to the Atonement formula to increase it's damage and bring it in line with other WSs, our last update destroyed my faith in their ability to competently fix PLDs short comings.

I have faith in you being able to test it Martel!

The adjustments to merit points makes part of me think they'll slap on the SIDR onto Rampart and call it good, the other part is wishfully hoping they actually do change it significantly for the better.

I would love Atonement to have no SC property so I can spam it, or buff the enmity it gives but I don't expect much.

Oh, great. Just when i finished the atrocious killing with atonement trials they gonna change the ws.

Ouch, that sucks. Atonement trials sucked hardcore.

Atonement will do 20k unresistable damage regardless of buffs as long as enmity is capped. 20k seems like small potatoes to 50k Fudo but now nobody uses attack buffs anymore and only brings PLDs, BRDs and RDMs to everything. Maybe COR for some TP boost rolls. The safety of PLD with Atonement spam and ability to switch to mostly haste, accuracy, and defensive songs breaks the game as we know it. Calling it now.

Alliance composition:
Tank party: PLDx3, WHM, BRD, RDM
DD party 1: PLDx4, WHM, BRD
DD party 2: PLDx4, WHM, BRD

And you time out in dynamis before even reaching wave 3 boss, unless you skip whole wave 1 and wave 2.

But with no deaths!

With 11 Paladin's spamming 20k damage Atonements, with no MA or STP (to increase WS rate), you'd kill a Disjoined in about ~29 minutes.

Assuming Atonement bypasses fetter damage reduction, it's not a terrible time.

The JP note talks about a "means to generate more enmity", so I'm uncertain if they're changing the enmity=>damage formula... I hope they don't. (Though they could raise the cap by a factor of 10.)
TBH I'm expecting just a higher enmity gain from the pathetic damage it deals atm.
They're also changing the merits for it somehow. So maybe PLD will get a new merit category and augment that's good...

Rampart by itself is actually pretty easy to make equal to One For All. Just making it last the whole duration as a phalanx for magic like OFA does would arguably make it a better ability. (More enmity gained, longer duration with relic head, easier to get larger number reduction since VIT*2 is larger on PLD than HP*0.2 for most jobs is, etc.)
Though they're probably just making the defense bonus larger....

Swap the RDM for a GEO for barrier and just pull all of W1/2 into a corner and supertank while the rest of the PLDs kill W1/2 bosses. Don't need the other WHMs just bring more PLDs and go /whm on a few they can just Majesty cure and /na themselves

So if we are throwing PLDs at everything, do we call the it The Great Crusade, for Vana'diel lore, or name it the 11th Crusade after ours?

Atonement for the Beastmen hoards!

A note about rampart. BG wiki is rather badly off about how the magic SS effect is calculated. I've meant to go update the page a few times now, but I keep putting it off. <,<; Feel free to jump on that, especially if you can get a better translation than google. ^^;

From JP wiki via google translate.
A being the multiplier that is applied to player VIT.
So rampart's magic shield potency varies based on the number of targets hit by it, up to a max of VIT*3.5 with 6 players hit.

>___> That's even better than One For All's variability based on the individual. Since everyone gets Rampart's PLD'sVIT x #ppl instead of their own VIT (or in the case of OFA one's own maxHP).

And fixed.

Can do this right now, just change PLD to RUN

O O F. You hurt my heart.

Be interesting if they throw a real curveball with Rampart and make it transfer 50~100% of the hate each person hit with it has to the Paladin. This mechanic already exists with Scholar's 2nd SP Caper Emissarius so it's not unprecedented.

I do think they're changing what Iron Will does entirely, to what though I honestly have no idea.

A little theory crafting

If they fix atonement and its worth trying to get tp + tanking, what would be our ideal sets? Is it worth having a AM3 up STP/DT, and AM down Multi/DT sets?

This is what I have at the moment, its 50 pdt with set bonus, 2935 hp no food:
ItemSet 369859

HP and 5 DT on back
Emicho path B: HP+65
DEX+12
Accuracy+20

and maybe this for multi attack no AM?
ItemSet 371323

with DA on the back

ItemSet 371328
I use this for a TP set and it does pretty well at survivability as well as tp gain. Swap to Moralltach A for even more TP at a cost of PDT.

62% PDT
34% MDT (caps if switch to aegis)
26 DA / 13 TA
31 STP

The downside is haste, at an abysmal 18%.

Tempus Fugit +1?

Just swap DA from cape to haste instead.

DA should be the weakest offensive stat. While haste should be strongest.

Pld buff looks awesome!!! Better rampart magic protection on allies and reduced cooldowns on emblem and shield bash!!! 1 min on bash and 3 on rampart and 3 on emblem. This is huge! Also idk how the atonement works but if someone can test. Im guessing this basically makes something like burt our top dog at holding hate garunteed since am3 will help alot.

As we have no idea on the potency or even the actual mechanics, on the new rampart it's a bit premature to say it's better. I mean, it'd be hard to make it worse than it was, but this is SE. give them some credit. <,<;

The really interesting thing there though, is that it just says "damage", rather than specifying magic. So it may work on physical as well now.

The recast reductions were unexpected, and nice to have.

Atonement depends entirely on how much enmity it generates now. Just need the servers back up so I can test.

I do have to admit that I'm disappointed that we didn't(I assume) get a dmg increase. Actually doing good dmg with atonement would have been really nice.

The timers are what makes me most happy truthfully. More hate tools at our disposal is always very welcome. But you are right i didnt think about how rampart works. Hopefully we didnt get gimped on that.

Well, I suppose with the change to atonement, there's no need to worry about WSD(I suppose as bad as the dmg was there wasn't before anyway but) now you'd just go full enmity+ while maintaining HP/DT.

It sorta makes me wonder about the Atonement: enmity+ on Burtgang too. Cause you're going to hit the +200 gear cap pretty easily with +100 in one slot. Makes me wonder if the burtgang aug actually counts as normal gear enmity+.

I really doubt anyone has actually tested it. Might get a bit more attention now.

It would be VERY interesting if they made it into say, DT II, I'm leaning more towards DT I but a man can dream right.

I would have more liked to see Fealty's recast dropped down to 3 minutes.

The way they worded it, makes me think the enmity won't even scale with TP. I'm worried it's going to be lackluster and we'll end up right back where we were.