That same old plea, bring back paladin

[OmnysValefor]

This post is not complaining about paladin's ability to survive. With Ochain and Aegis, Paladin couldn't ask for more longevity.

This post is not complaining about invites. If I want to go to a Delve group on Paladin, I get on Paladin and I go.

There's no fun in the job anymore. The most fun I have is doing nonsense stuff with my small group of friends, but there's nothing to do with a small group of friends anymore, and certainly nothing that requires a paladin, or even benefits from having one.

It feels greedy to ask for buffs to paladin's DD, but you've made most front-line jobs as capable of tanking (in DT sets) as paladin is with ochain and/or aegis on his arm. The melee will bounce hate between the 2 or 3 best in the group, but honestly, a melee in dt capped set can hold hate and survive for quite while.

For the week, or maybe two?, that you had "fixed" enmity, things were looking really good. Hate was a thing, and that had promise. It felt like you were aware of the issues beleaguering the game.

At that point, you had given us false hope, you knew the weapon changes were there on the horizon, just waiting to shock us all, but you gave us a moment of dusting off our plate armor.

Some suggestions people have been made to give paladin some DD potential--

Give Paladin a shield-based attack. The return on it could be direct damage, or a chunk of TP (maybe 25 tp?). If it was damage, it would need to scale with the weapon.

Give Paladin Monkey-Grip... the ability the wield a 2h weapon and a shield (not dual-wielding 2h weapons). I don't know that I support this, though it would look cool. I think it could be broken to give Paladin that much DD, but there's not a lot of combat that I don't think is broken right now.

Give Paladin stances, like Seigan/Hasso, Yonin/Innin, Berserk/Defender. A stance to increase our dps at the expense of our shield block rate. If this route was taken, paladin would need some base dps buffs anyway, but this could improve things.

Berserk and Defender are my favorite "stances" because they can overwrite each other in the sense that say, a tank can have defender up, pop berserk (zeroing-out his attack bonus/penalty), ws, and cancel berserk. A melee dps can make the opposite manuever if he got hate and wanted to boost his fortitude.

Paladin is where I have the most fun in this game, but that is fading. Supertanking is rarely fun. Standing there, waiting to recast phalanx, and maybe cure myself sometimes isn't that fun. It's hard to believe this is where Paladin ended up.

* Ninja could use some love as well, and maybe the 1h adjustments will bring some of that, maybe that won't be enough. I've never seen a ninja in a fracture, or at a boss fight, so I realize paladin is in a better spot but possibly not for long.

[OmnysValefor]

A hasso style ability would be a great benefit to pld, increases damage or damaging stats, slows down spellcasting/recast, increases enmity (to make up for the slow, so that whatever enmity paladin has is still there).

It should also nerf blocking in some way probably, to make up for the damage increase.

A counter ability that increased block rate and say, cure potency would be equally nice. A lot of people on these forums feel like paladins without aegis or ochain need some sort of buff to survivability. Such an ability would help.