As far as hate control goes, I recall this one MMORPG I had played for a few years. About 5 years into the game's existence the warrior tank class got a pretty big boost to holding hate. Just by engaging the warrior would essentially get a dev created "cheat" where by the only way to drag hate off of the warrior you would need to not be using your abilities to lose hate(like what BLM gets for example)

I can provide more examples but what it boils down to is this: SE can make it so that a PLD holds hate forever. They just don't want to do it. They can't really do it. Not yet anyway until they are well into their new plans for EQ/WoW end game.


Beyond that I just don't have an answer for making PLD useful beyond the ochain/aegis. The only way to do it is to use cheats. Whether it's the above or have NMs detect jobs and if any job other than PLD is tanking it gets utterly raped(for example a war tanks it gets hit for 2k damage, PLD tanks they get hit for 300 dmg) or both or whatever. Cheats are cheats. A lot of MMORPGs have to resort to them for tank classes because the last thing you ever want to do is create a tank that's as powerful as DD and tanks. It just goes against the laws of... something.


I have an ochain and aegis and I'm totally for more options for lesser tiered shields. But make no mistake, no one who does their shout groups will care about anything less than ochain unless it is practically ochain. After going through my 75 colorless soul farming I'm not sure how I feel about such a shield. But I'm already used to the treatment with delve weapons so whatevs man. Whatevs.