FINAL FANTASY XI Job Adjustments Manifesto: Paladin

[Defiledsickness]

back when nin was a dd!

[Zagen]

outside abyssea (voidwatch) pld is awesome. even without almace and just using Atonement pld's are good. (of course aegis and ochain are awesome to have) not saying other jobs maybe cant tank, but they dont want to tank Ironclad :P

I haven't done the Voidwatch fight but from the ones inside abyssea and what I've read about the fight, I would first think of Ochain/Aegis PLD as Tank options, and then NIN or THF for evasion tanking, and then MNK for weaker Evasion/DD/HP tank, and then finally PLD with a non-relic/emp shield.

Now you're probably thinking well you haven't done it so you wouldn't know, and you know what you're right I don't know the fight first hand what I do know is that En-Stun, En-Amnesia, and Encumbrance all gimp PLD's ability to tank which is why without the high block rates of Aegis/Ochain I wouldn't think of a PLD first as my tank choice.

but dont act like SAM is good in abyssea or DRG or DRK. so pld's cant really complain.

I hope you're talking about NM fights for proccing red/yellow/blue because DRG is an amazing DD inside abyssea.


PLD is severely broken when the player base can think of 1 event, and only the upper tiers of that event is where a PLD is needed. On top of that it is preferred to have a Relic/Emp Shield to be the preferred tank in that portion of that 1 event.... SE is really blind to this is all I'm getting from their responses.

[Alaik]

I just LOVE how their answer to tanking is "Bring a useless THF". We should totally do it, so that when they realize a THF ain't doing shit for enmity in an alliance, maybe they'll actually fix some of the jobs. (THF, PLD, unbalanced DD classes)

[Defiledsickness]

its ok you havent done the fight im not judging anyone on that. but i have done the fights many many times with my LS. i dont believe Ironclad does any en-amnesia or en-stun like the abyssea versions. mostly aga's and just plain brutal hits. but normally i play rdm and try to keep the mob enfeebled, tanks alive, and whm refreshed (so i dont know exactly what tanks go through). i've seen drk's, thfs, and all kinds of jobs flee in terror from VW mobs.

VW mobs have huge acc, large eva, and impressive damage. any DD with capped skill and an empy can do great dmg and most jobs can do well tanking lower tiers, but PLD is just the best tank here. just like nin and mnk are the best tanks in abyssea.

i agree pld is missing a huge detail somewhere as no one WANTS to be a pld. sure it has its uses but if it wasnt for book burns, none of us would have a tank to party (nin is an okay tank, but even their spike in popularity was leaving parties tankless). so my gripe isnt as much with the fail we got in abyssea, just with the lack of desire to play pld without the fun Almace or to show off aegis/ochain.

[Zagen]

its ok you havent done the fight im not judging anyone on that. but i have done the fights many many times with my LS. i dont believe Ironclad does any en-amnesia or en-stun like the abyssea versions. mostly aga's and just plain brutal hits. but normally i play rdm and try to keep the mob enfeebled, tanks alive, and whm refreshed (so i dont know exactly what tanks go through). i've seen drk's, thfs, and all kinds of jobs flee in terror from VW mobs.

I see so basically it sounds like if you don't have a shield with ridiculous block rate and absorption rate (hi aegis/ochain) you're not that much better off than any other job...

Is your PLD a non-Aegis/Ochain PLD? If so do they /NIN or /WAR?

I'm trying to find out how accurate my guesstimated order of tank preference would be. I would take the questions to PMs as they aren't really on topic necessarily but I can't

[Zhronne]

I can accept but I don't understand this approach of not willing to raise the current enmity cap. I assume FFXI developers have their good reasons. But even so, there are other ways to fix the enmity issues.

The current enmity system in the game (the amount of enmity generated by specific JAs like Provoke and all other abilities) is balanced for level 75. Back at level 75 the average damage of a WS or of normal hits was much lower than it is today at level 90.
This is especially true in Abyssea because of Atmas and other buffs, but it's partially true even outside of Abyssea.
This destroyed balancement seriously reduced the efficiency of abilities, spells and other things which were (almost) perfectly balanced for the average damage numbers performed at level 75.

If FFXI developers say they don't want to raise the enmity cap, then they should definitely rework the current Damage>Enmity conversion. I'm sure there is such a value somewhere in the FFXI formulae. Slightly adjusting this value would be much quicker and efficient that fine-tuning every single ability/ws/spell in the game, or creating new job traits/abilities to generate more/less enmity.

Maybe I'm blind or I'm just oversimplifying things, but a slight adjustment of the Damage>Enmity conversion sounds like the smoother and most efficient solution to re-balance the enmity values of fights.

[Zhronne]

Also, and this is an even more personal comment, I find it a bit sad that in all SE official statements they always consider PLD as the only "real" tank in the game. Not saying this is not true, but it makes me think about the old times.
Back in the very very old days we had NIN as the best tank, then PLD was a laughable second choice, but you also had WAR as an excellent offtank, and in some instances MNK. Talking about easier content. NIN was the one used mostly at the time and everybody was laughing at PLD.
That situation was corrected, first they progressively nerfed Utsusemi for NIN, they they added NMs that made Utsusemi less effective and at the same time they buffed PLD. New Sentinel, Shield Mastery, new gear, etc etc. PLD/NIN slowly became the only tank that you could possibly use for end-game events, with NIN as a laughable second option which was still used by some stubborn people/ls, with interesting results which usually required much more effort and worse results. Usually as /RDM or /DRK.
Let's forget for a second about when RDM was the best tank, things got patched quickly anyway.

A lot of this tendencies may have been the fault of the players' limited and oneway mentality, very little people can think out of the box and mostly everybody follows what the "good players" do. Still, we can't deny the changes SE made, or avoided to make, are to blame as well.

What I'm saying is that while I apreciate PLD being an excellent tank, I'd love SE to *seriously* think about giving players other *efficient* tanking options. Be it with new specific gear, abilities, job abilities or whatever. Most other MMO games offer a good selection of tanks, healers, supporters, ranged DPS and melee DPS. It seems to me FFXI has been very "unbalanced" on these regards for way too long. It's time SE really does something *big* to offer new real and useable alternative to tanking, or at least make changes that will consequentially open up the players' mentality.
Am I asking too much for SE to at least acknowledge this request, instead of continuing in their path of thinking of PLD as the only "real" tank for serious situations?

(not talking about Abyssea of course, tanking there is a whole different situation)

[Zagen]

Let's forget for a second about when RDM was the best tank, things got patched quickly anyway.

If by very quickly you mean about 8 years then sure >.>

[Zhronne]

I meant more something like "quickly after more than a bunch of very competent knew about it and it started to spread around a lot even among more average linkshell".
Because before those months when RDM tanking kinda went on a boom, I think only a few people knew about it or rather had the gear, skills and trust to efficiently make use of it?

Maybe I just got the wrong impression, but while I always heard about it, I never really saw a lot of video/people taking full advantage of it (not talking about Avesta or other RDM's soloing things).
Then there has been a certain "boom" of usage on boards like BG and others and more and more and more people started using it. I had some very competent ls mates who started using it, and I saw with my own eyes how powerful it was.
A few months after this boom things got patched.
Did I just get a wrong impression and RDM has awalys been widely used as an HNM tank by HNM ls? Could be.
But it sounds more logical to me that SE eventually decides to "patch it" the moment when its usage has started to spread too much, while they didn't do anything before because they either didn't know or they thought they could tolerate a moderate usage by only a handful of players in the world.

Pardon me if I got a wrong impression or made a very wrong descriptions of the facts that happened back then.

[Zagen]

I meant more something like "quickly after more than a bunch of very competent knew about it and it started to spread around a lot even among more average linkshell".
Because before those months when RDM tanking kinda went on a boom, I think only a few people knew about it or rather had the gear, skills and trust to efficiently make use of it?

Maybe I just got the wrong impression, but while I always heard about it, I never really saw a lot of video/people taking full advantage of it (not talking about Avesta or other RDM's soloing things).
Then there has been a certain "boom" of usage on boards like BG and others and more and more and more people started using it. I had some very competent ls mates who started using it, and I saw with my own eyes how powerful it was.
A few months after this boom things got patched.
Did I just get a wrong impression and RDM has awalys been widely used as an HNM tank by HNM ls? Could be.
But it sounds more logical to me that SE eventually decides to "patch it" the moment when its usage has started to spread too much, while they didn't do anything before because they either didn't know or they thought they could tolerate a moderate usage by only a handful of players in the world.

Pardon me if I got a wrong impression or made a very wrong descriptions of the facts that happened back then.

As far as I know RDM tanking never made a "boom" of any kind even after the AV video from SE with them using a RDM tank. The biggest reason I've found is while RDM was the best tank it had much less room for error, it used support that was fairly similar to PLD and NIN tank options, and the gear well it required -PDT/MDT, after that other gear made it easier, Fast Cast set, Auto-Refresh set, etc. just made it easier to do the job.

Honestly I have no clue why SE chose to wait until they did to nerf RDM tanking, I mean by the time it was nerfed it was a dead art.