Originally Posted by
Byrth
Yeah, you have to ask yourself why you bother using a paladin in those fights when your DDs can survive regularly taking hate (known in some circles as tanking).
The answer is that some people design their parties under the assumption that their DDs will (probably) die at least once per fight and they bring a Paladin as insurance in case all their DDs die and they need to hold the monster until a party member unweakens. So the Paladin is effectively only tanking the monster to keep it from killing the mages. Sometimes groups like this do manage to win without deaths, but it's far from normal because the healers become preoccupied with keeping the Paladin (the most durable job in the party) alive at the expense of the DDs. It ends up being a sloppy death fest more times than not, but I'm not going to deny that the strategy also can generally beat lower tier BCNMs. That doesn't validate the Enmity system, though.