Hey look another suggestion Thread, Except this one is awesome.

[Greatguardian]

I have MNK, PLD, NIN, SAM, COR, WHM, RDM on my main character so I can most certainly see things from a Pld's perspective; which is part of why I'm so baffled as to the actual complaints of so many PLDs on these boards. My Mnk is easily my best geared job, but none of the others are slouches (aside from lolSam, I've let that go downhill a bit admittedly) and my PLD was, until the level increase, one of the main tanks in my linkshell assuming we weren't short on WHMs (when it became a choice between sending in a backup tank or plain not having a healer). Whether I'm Counter-tanking on Mnk, Eva tanking on Nin (which I make sure to maintain capped Haste with), or tanking on Pld, Enmity is the least of my concerns and hardly changes between the 3. All 3 can easily do upwards of 3,000 damage per WS, so even though my MNK destroys my Nin and Pld in terms of overall Damage, it doesn't make any sort of difference from an Enmity standpoint because all 3 jobs will have capped Enmity by the second WS.

Sure, I may take MNK and NIN out more often than my PLD, but that's because my MNK has Blue procs and the highest damage potential of the 3, and my NIN has Red/Grellow procs. If I needed PLD procs I'd bring PLD, but the only Reds it has that a NIN wouldn't are Freezebite and Sunburst. But since PLD lacks Shadow of Death, NIN+PLD won't cover all 13 Reds. War+Pld obviously won't cover them either, as anything PLD has, WAR has too. The only time I can see myself having to bring PLD for Red is if the War or Nin was missing skills and needed gaps filled in; but that's both rare and dumb.

If PLD wants a bonus that makes it more attractive, look for offensive abilities. It has an A+ skill weapon and monster weaponskill access, but since its best sub is Ninja (which also has no offensive JAs as a sub), it has practically no active abilities that would benefit its damage output.

[Runespider]

Ultimately Square don't really care about balance anymore anyway, not like they have for a while. So the job system being skewed makes very little difference.

The emnity things I mentioned would be a good step but a lot would still need to be added to the jobs to make it work (like damage mitigation auras or something to allow you to put more onto a mob that would normally be a pain), especially for pld, they won't do any of this in reality though and I can see things pretty much just staying as they are now.

Only thing I can see bringing pld back to some manner of importance in reality is if they add mobs which have a lot of -dmg taken and/or are difficult to gain hate on in other ways, Dark Ixion was a decent example of this in the past I think. That will make the hate tools more important than the dmg they do, thats about the best I can see Square actually doing. They won't rework the hate system or change much at this point.

[Billnye]

I wrote up a little tidbit in the pld section here:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...Better-Balance

Hope to help shed some light on the situation. Would love some feedback on it.

[Mordanthos]

All i see are repeated responses about PLD enmity isnt the problem, blah blah you can cap hate easily with CdC. Yeah thats not the problem, PLD is an awesome tank in Abyssea, they literally take little to 0 dmg. The issue isnt being able to cap it, the issue is that the cap is tooooooo low. Yeah thats amazing you can cap hate with that CdC, but not too long after you cap it, is someone else going to cap it, and then what? It's just going to bounce back and forward, and its at this point of bouncing back and forward, where the job is broken, because now, there is no "real way" to "keep" the enemy on you. If not for the threat cap being so low, PLD would be outstanding and the best tank by far, they mitigate dmg to rediculous proportions. And i dont give a crap if a MNK can tank with pure brute force and survive with cure bombs, wouldnt it be easier to just barely have to heal the pld at all "WHILE" a monk beats the crap out of something.

[Vold]

All i see are repeated responses about PLD enmity isnt the problem, blah blah you can cap hate easily with CdC. Yeah thats not the problem, PLD is an awesome tank in Abyssea, they literally take little to 0 dmg. The issue isnt being able to cap it, the issue is that the cap is tooooooo low. Yeah thats amazing you can cap hate with that CdC, but not too long after you cap it, is someone else going to cap it, and then what? It's just going to bounce back and forward, and its at this point of bouncing back and forward, where the job is broken, because now, there is no "real way" to "keep" the enemy on you. If not for the threat cap being so low, PLD would be outstanding and the best tank by far, they mitigate dmg to rediculous proportions. And i dont give a crap if a MNK can tank with pure brute force and survive with cure bombs, wouldnt it be easier to just barely have to heal the pld at all "WHILE" a monk beats the crap out of something.

You can't just up the hate cap without breaking the rest of the game. Believe it or not, and this might cause heart attacks, but Abyssea isn't going to remain the be all end all content. And the way you fix this issue is to design content that doesn't give mages unlimited MP and melees god mode. Plain and simple. It doesn't have to be content everyone does day in and out like exp. End game content is perfectly fine. And according to how reps talk this is exactly how they are going to go about it.

[RAIST]

They actually could do a simple tweak for PLD. Give them a trait/ability at 90 that somehow gives them extra headroom on the cap. If the enmity counter is restricted because of the bit count on the value, then implement a soft cap that restricts the cap to all jobs to a lower value, and give PLD a trait/ability that makes it go to the hard cap. Let Volatile hate still spike to the hard cap, it will fall quickly and that player would be at matched hate only briefly while it decays and they fall back to the soft cap again. Granted, this could be a nightmare to code with the volatile spikes being allowed to still hit the cap briefly, but it would be the answer to preserving balance.

Example:

Value is an 8 bit field, logically limited to run 0-255.
Place a software cap at the 7th bit, so by default everyone can only go to 223.
PLD gets a trait or JA that activates that 8th bit only for them, allowing them to go to 255.
Volatile hate from a WS, provoke, Nuke, etc that has a fast decay rate is still allowed to spike briefly to that 8th bit, but because of the nature of volatile hate, it would quickly decay and jobs would once again be capped to 223.

That way, the only way anyone would take hate off the PLD at level 90 would once again be only for the volatile spikes, but (if the PLD is doing their job) the PLD would be able to reclaim and hold the hate a gain. The catch with this idea is coming up a way to manage the volatile spikes from jobs without the PLD JA/Trait so that it can still spike to the hard cap. Might need to be something where when anyone does something to hit the cap, a check is made to see if the PLD JA/Trait is present for that player. If present, hate is capped and plays by normal rules, if not then it is capped for 30 seconds and then is immediately dropped to the soft cap.

Alternatively, they could just increase the decay of hate maybe. Means PLD will have to work harder to maintain the caps, and it wouldn't be as much a sure thing...but it could help balance things out a bit more.

Edit: to clarify ways to balance volatile hate spiking in original idea

[Atomic_Skull]

Value is an 8 bit field, logically limited to run 0-255.
Place a software cap at the 7th bit, so by default everyone can only go to 223.

7 bits is 0-127 Every bit you add onto a binary number doubles the maximum possible number that can be represented.

Also, Volatile and Cumulative enmity both cap at 10,000 units each.

[RAIST]

brain fart... havent' done binary translation in my head since high school. But you get the idea. It actually goes to like 14 bits or something for each of VE/CE according to some of the guides out there. The point is, there is single point that they can easily cut off and isolate just for PLD to use if they wanted. Probly not the high bit though now that I think about it--that would be a swing of like 8k or something.

But they could just as easily put a numerical value in the database for CE to cap at like 8192 for all other jobs, but let PLD scale to 10k CE with a job trait/JA active. That way, other jobs would still be able to grabe hate brielfy from VE, but not hold it because of CE unless that PLD is not keeping that CE above 8192 with that trait/JA.