Paladins NEED 'Fencer'

Fencer is WASTED on WAR because WAR generally uses a 2-handed weapon or dual wields. BRD NEVER melees. Beastmaster maybe could use it but Fencer implies swordsman, not axeman!

There's only ONE job in FFXI that generally relies on a 1h weapon more than anyone and that's Paladin. Paladin needs hate tools and Fencer is perfect for that extra punch to 1h sword ws(especially something like Chant du Cygne). Fencer means 'Swordsman' yet neither Paladin nor RDM, both jobs with high sword skill do not have this. None of the jobs that currently have Fencer make use of it, it's WASTED on them. Paladin is the only job in FFXI that uses a 1h weapon 99% of the time.

While I agree with this, SE has always been giving weird traits to certain jobs. Not sure if they're gonna do something about it. Guess they don't wanna part with some of their old ways and ideas, even if players disregard them completely.

Need? Not really. Want? Yes, very much so.

A large part of the reason WAR has fencer is, I feel, to help give an alternative DD sub for jobs that use 1 handed weapons. Sort of an alternative to dual wield. But in comparison to dual wield and /nin, /war still falls far short. It does make /war more attractive to me, as an Ochain/Chant PLD.

But yeah, I'd rather have native fencer, and I do think PLD would make better use of it. I just don't think SE will do it. But hey, I didn't think SE would give 2 other jobs shield mastery, so maybe there's hope.

Perhaps your bard friends don't melee, but mine probably has a higher -PDT set than yours does and does more damage.

Not really needed since you can just get it form subbing war probably the best sub job for pld.