The Definitive State of Paladins Thread

[Brian_]

Introduction -

So, with the recent live letter, it appears that while changes to PLD skills are planned for 3.1, it's pretty clear the developers aren't fully aware of the issues.

The point of this thread is to compile all the valid and thoroughly justified concerns about PLD into one thread. These concerns come from this forum, various outside forums, and reddit. A lot of ignorance is spreading around these forums and it's clouding the overall focus of PLD concerns.

This thread is NOT about how the problems can be fixed. That should be up to the developers. As players, our job is to play the game and provide feedback, not tell the developers how to do their job. If you want to make a post about your opinion on how to fix PLD, take that elsewhere.

Before getting into the issues, I think it's more important to establish what the players want from this game and the tank role in general.


Job Design in General - "Bring the player, not the job."

The idea of bringing the players you want to bring and not the jobs that they are on has been a design idea that the developers have tried to uphold. Needless to say, they haven't exactly done a good job. Whether it be in 1.X, 2.X, or 3.X, progression content has never been balanced for all jobs.

For this raid cycle, certain classes have been benched by the content while others are mandatory for progression. You don't have to try very hard to find examples of players who have had to switch jobs or play multiple jobs just to experience the highest level of Savage content. This issue has only been made worse by job-locked esoteric gear.

As it relates to the tank role in specific, due to the strict DPS checks and prevalence of magic damage in Alexander Savage, people are clearly bringing certain tank jobs over others often with no regard for the quality of player.


Tank Design in Specific - "Different but Equal."

So, while people want jobs to be balanced, they don't want them to be the "homogenized."

The problem is a lot of people use the term lightly and incorrectly. Jobs are not homogenized when they all have the same contributed raid DPS, HPS, or survivability. They are homogenized when they achieve those ends through the same means.

Design should be based around an equality of basic functionality achieved through different ways.

Example: Defiance and Shield Oath / Grit provide virtually the same eHP boost to the tank. Equal in basic functionality but different in approach. Defiance gives raw HP and effective healing. Shield Oath / Grit give mitigation.


Tank Design in Specific - "The Definition of a Tank."

So we've established that there needs to be a balance in basic functionality. Next is understanding what that functionality is in relation to tanks in the current end-game meta.

As content is currently designed, tanks have 3 major roles.

They need to be able to hold hate over their OT, DPS, and Healers.
They need to be able to survive through incoming damage.
They need to be able to contribute enough raid DPS to pass DPS checks.

While the first two roles are inarguable, there will be a lot of people who argue against the third. The reality is across various levels of progression, the raid DPS contribution from healers and tanks is necessary for clearing DPS checks. You can disagree or dislike this reality but it is still the reality we have to deal with until the meta changes either through design or through gear.

[Brian_]

The State of Paladins

While there is definitely some overlap between the points, I will try to break it down piece by piece.

1. PLD raid DPS contribution lags far behind WAR and DRK.
   
   WARs bring the highest single target DPS while MTing and OTing, the highest AoE DPS, and the highest contributed raid DPS.
   
   DRKs bring the second highest single target DPS while MTing and OTing, the second highest AoE DPS, and the second highest contributed raid DPS.
   
   PLDs bring the least single target DPS while MTing and OTing, the least AoE DPS by a huge margin, and the least contributed raid DPS.
   
   In 2.X, PLDs were the highest single target DPS tank when in Sword Oath. What has happened since?
   
   Det has been nerfed and weapon-skill potencies across the board have been increased for all classes. As a result, Sword Oath's auto-attack bonus is not as impactful and did not scale as effectively with HW adjustments.
   
   Shield Swipe's potency was not properly adjusted to account for PLD's two new combos. In 2.X, it was a DPS neutral / slight gain and thus its use as a TP conservation skill was encouraged. In 3.X, it's a DPS loss.
   
   WARs have gotten Deliverance, Fell Cleave, Decimate, and a TP refresh.
   
   DRKs started with a higher baseline and Delirium has allowed groups to run NIN / DRG melee comps without losing MNK's INT debuff.
   
   
2. PLD enmity generation lags behind WAR and DRK.
   
   Skull Sunder / Butcher's Block (WAR enmity combo) and Spinning Slash / Power Slash (DRK enmity combo) both have higher enmity modifiers (3.5/5.5) than Savage Blade / Rage of Halone (PLD enmity combo)(3.0/5.0).
   
   In 2.X, Warriors ideally rotated through 2 combos with the situational application of their third combo. Only one of their combos in this rotation generated enmity. PLDs on the other hand only used 1 combo, their enmity combo. So, PLDs needed lower enmity modifiers in order to alleviate enmity juggling issues between tanks. Even with the lower modifiers, PLD enmity was more than sufficient due to pure enmity combo spam.
   
   In 3.X, PLDs were given 2 new DPS combos (bringing them in line with WAR and DRK) and now rotate the three combos based on DoT upkeep and enmity. But, despite their enmity combo dropping in usage, its modifiers were not properly readjusted. While PLD enmity is still sufficient while in Shield Oath, their DPS suffers. The more time a PLD needs to spend in Shield Oath, the larger the gap will be between them and WARs / DRKs.
   
   
3. PLD utility is incredibly underwhelming.
   
   WARs provide raid groups with Storm's Path and Storm's Eye. Both are incredibly effective and near irreplaceable in progression.
   
   DRKs provide Delirium. As detailed earlier, it's huge to be able to drop MNKs from raid comps without losing an INT debuff. They also provide Reprisal albeit somewhat inconsistently.
   
   The utility that WAR and DRK provide have a significant impact on raid-wide damage mitigation and raid DPS.
   
   PLDs provide Rage of Halone, Cover, Stoneskin, Divine Veil, and Clemency. It's a long list of skills that are slightly useful at best, generally very situational, and completely unusable at worst.
   
   Rage of Halone - While the strength debuff matters in AS3 and provides raid-wide mitigation, the debuff is underwhelming elsewhere. With a lack of physical tank busters or physical raid-wide AoE, the strength debuff is often reduced to minor mitigation on auto-attacks.
   
   Cover - Useful in AS1 when properly coordinated to redirect a hydrothermal missle. But, from personal experience, healers prefer consistency over occasionally needing to readjust to a PLD using cover. Also useful but not necessary to protect your WHM/AST on W8 of AS2 or to absorb a cleave in AS3 P4.
   
   Stoneskin - Generally pretty useful but is generally counterproductive when you're pushing tight DPS checks and can already survive through the incoming damage.
   
   Divine Veil - Useful when popped before hard hitting party-wide AoEs but it has an incredibly long CD for such a weak shield that has a cumbersome activation condition. The up-time on this skill is horrible.
   
   Clemency - Unusable. It's too frequently interrupted when cast while tanking to be consistent or coordinated, too slow to cast when not tanking for the heal to be efficient.
   
   All of PLD's utility has no significant impact on raid DPS. Only a small portion of their utility has a real impact on raid-wide mitigation.

[Shining_Tiger_Excalibur]

I think and hope this is broad enough to actually be THE thread that gets noticed. It's the only way the player base will agree on things even slightly. "Discussions and suggestions" was a horrible suggestion from moderators when it concerns anything other than theory crafting/crafting or jobs that might be implemented in the future.

And if what I said isn't enough to count as discussion I guess I'll just suggest rewording the part about the Monks. If a person just glances at the text it almost seems like we're throwing them under the bus. You don't have to, it's just "discussion."

Also, yes, I agree with it.

[Sapphidia]

Yep, I agree with this. The key things that people reading about PLD balance issues need to understand is what DOESN'T need to be changed:

Paladin mitigation is absolutely fine, even on mostly magic encounters
Paladin DPS in sword oath with optimal DPS rotation, when not forced to worry about threat, is fine.

So many of the changes people suggest try to buff those two things, but they're fine. We excel at physical mitigation, we can do -okay- at magical mitigation (this is the domain of the Dark Knight so we should be behind them). Mitigation levels between Physical/Magical is not really the major factor in determining viability of tanks in the current meta - they can all perform okay. Likewise when able to go all out on a boss as an offtank and not care about threat, PLD does good enough DPS, relative to the other tanks (they should be the lowest, but not significantly).

What DOES need to be addressed in some way is:

Threat Levels (to let us use our lower threat DPS moves more).
Quality of Life regarding various Utility Moves.
DPS contribution to a raid when tanking/holding aggro.
TP regeneration.
Shield Swipe being poopy (always a dps/threat loss to use).

Those are what need to be targeted to bring them up to spec. I still hold by the idea that a massive buff to Shield Swipe's potency and threat levels might be the only thing paladins need, as this would solve four problems at once - they'd do more damage when tanking, could use Royal Authority more, would have a rotation that used less TP, and these fixes wouldn't increase their DPS when off-dpsing.

[RapBreon]

Dropping to say; why u no call Yoshi a scumbag?

Were you always on my server 0.o?

[Airswimmer]

I still hold by the idea that a massive buff to Shield Swipe's potency and threat levels might be the only thing paladins need

I'm glad I'm not the only one. PLD's would still be plagued with TP issues while OTing, but DRK's have a similar issue.

[Ercapote]

this threat is perfect and should be the main focus this is exactly what's going on and there's nothing else to be discussed here, doesn't matter if you are war nor drk and you feel pld are fine, this is not up to discussion, what change could be done that can be discussed, but pld needs adjustment is a FACT.

[7hurricane]

I'm a major forum lurker, and after reading what feels like a billion threads on the current state of PLD, I'd like to say thank you to the OP for starting a thread that is not only constructive, but provides specific recommendations on how PLD may be buffed to become more viable in endgame.

This is not the first time (nor will it be the last) that the community has raged and called for job buffs. It happened with DRG in 2.0, WAR in 1.0 and 2.0, AST in 3.0. People are still raging about the current state of BRD/MCH also. Class balance is an ongoing issue for every MMO because of the multitude of variables affecting how every skill behaves. One thing I feel the need to point out that I have yet to see anyone state anywhere in this forum: developers aren't stupid. There is a very high probability that SE is fully aware that PLD was not the best tanking choice for A4S. Heck, they were probably aware of that when they released the content in the first place. This is not an issue, but people seem to think that it is.

Let's suppose that, hypothetically, SE knows exactly what's happening with the tanking situation. What can we learn from it?

- PLD is not required or even ideal for every situation. In the entirety of FFXIV history, A4S is the only content where PLD has been less than ideal.

- DRK can shine at endgame because of higher magic mitigation, therefore carving out a unique role for itself in specific encounters. Particularly important given that the new 3.0 jobs need to make themselves feel viable against the reputation of the old ones. Both AST and MCH have yet to prove themselves in this way.

Both of these points are important, and neither of them indicate that the game is not properly balanced. Job optimization is a part of design strategy, and is often a conscientious decision on the part of the battle planners. I'm willing to bet that someone in SE, somewhere said: "Hey everyone! Let's design a boss fight that isn't great for PLD and get the community to play differently!" (I would pitch that idea at a table because 3.0 has all the tools to allow for such flexibility in party makeup.) Is it a bad thing that this happened? Absolutely not. Is it a bad thing that PLD players everywhere got upset? Absolutely not. Is it the end of the world for PLD? Absolutely not.

MMO game design is a pendulum: some jobs, by the innate nature of design, will shine for some content over others regardless of whether the developers have said all are equally viable. And that is perfectly okay. PLD will once again shine in the bright light of the sun, with or without buffs. But SE devs are not dumb: they are tracking statistics on every single click you make in-game, and they know what they are doing.

This thread will help them do that. Kudos.

[NFaelivrin]

A4S isn't the only fight in the game where PLD is suboptimal, I think you'd be more correct to say that A2S is the only current raid fight where PLD is even viable.

[7hurricane]

A4S isn't the only fight in the game where PLD is suboptimal, I think you'd be more correct to say that A2S is the only current raid fight where PLD is even viable.

My static runs A1S to A3S with PLD and WAR and clears are not an issue. In fact, before I had a static, I never saw DRK in savage at all. This is, of course, only my opinion, but PLD perform just hunky dory, and our PLD has never expressed concerns about his ability to do the content.

That said, you may be right about PLD being sub-optimal, but it is definitely more than capable for the first three turns of savage. In all the PLD threads I've read, very few people seem to be complaining about anything but A4S. Many guides and videos also show PLD performing the first three turns just fine as well. Hence why A4S is the only content (current or historic) in the game where PLD is considered by the majority of the community to be not optimal.