3.1 PLD changes look good

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Which combined generates roughly the same amount of enmity as Flash + CoS.

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Damage...damage...

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

If a Dark Knight wants to stack DA + DP and DA + DD they need to expend a lot of MP and it may not have the same average mitigation benefit as a Paladin stacking Blind and Bulwark.

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Which he will restore far earlier than your PLD will have Bulwark ready again...In fact, against a lot of small adds, a DRK is virtually immortal for 40s with Blood Price, Dark Arts and Abyssal Drain.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

But the NA/EU playerbase did decide what strats they would use.

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No, in fact, every community decided to stick with their beloved tanks...and failed. So, they throw PLD out of their setup.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

The Hardminds/Hardhelms of A2S seem to have been intended to be mechanisms to reduce the viability of stack and burn strategies, but groups figured out ways of getting around their debuffs.

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Yes, because it's faster and more simple to stack them and just burn them to the ground.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

That is because it is far to easy to over gear the pre-3.1 non-raid content by a good 20 to 30 ilevels around patch release.

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A2 and A2S were cleared that way on first week, before you could outgear it.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

The designers try to balance classes around all tiers of content not just raids and they tune the numbers for around the ilevel of the rewards and difficulty around the expected skill level of those doing the content.

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No, they need to design it with high end tier, because if all jobs can clear it, they could clear low-tier. You can't say that PLD is fine because you can clear expert dungeons with it if the lacking DPS is really a problem for Savage.

They probably thought that no party could really clear A2S before farming several accessories from A1S, or having a full 190 set from Alex Normal...but they were wrong. If PLD viability is on par with their "expectation" (and thus, they decide to keep it that way) and WAR or DRK are above, then WAR and DRK should have been nerfed to be "on par" too. But that would have caused a disaster in the playerbase.

The problem is that their very view of the PLD is flawed. You can't have one tank "focused" on mitigation if ALL tanks have enough mitigation to clear any content with the same support. Unless the PLD is so sturdy that he doesn't need a dedicated healer (Only occasionnal heals from the "raid" healer and 100% HoT), then the main strength of PLD is wasted. And if it were, I couldn't care less about having crap DPS, because we could bring an additionnal real DPS to compensate.

it would make sens to me if rage of the halone got potency higher : 300 like war and drk.
if they don't change the direction of the next raid off course.
Pld stun/cover exept if the pld is OT is almost useless in the current raid,
The shield swipe in CD is a good news

Cross-class skills maybe need looking at. The only "had to have it" of 2.x was Stoneskin and even that is a bit redundant, Cure is outright pointless, Protect - again redundant, and what Paladin slots out-of-combat Raise on their hotbar? Even MRD contributes very little to PLD - Bloodbath on a tank with no AOE damage is just sad, Foresight is useful against... AA right now? Which our Shield kind of handles. Mercy Stroke is just free damage or to pad your dummy parse in most cases since it rarely lands for a heal even in dungeons...

Seriously pick two classes;
Archer: Raging Strikes (20% Damage), Straight Shot (10% Crit)
Pugilist: Internal Release (10% Crit), Second Wind (HP Instant), Featherfoot (Evade 12%)
Lancer: Blood for Blood (Damage), Invigorate (400 TP), Feint (Slow), Keen Flurry (40% Parry)

Personally would kill for Lancer, and Pugilist as sub-classes to snag Invigorate, Internal Release, and Blood for Blood on Paladin simply because it would make sustaining our spike DPS & OT DPS possible.
Archer would seem funny but 20% damage stacked on with every other Fight or Flight while popping up extra Crit regularly could be a big gain for Paladin too.

Why does Paladin even get Protect, Cure, and Raise as potential secondaries - hell I'd much rather take Stone for the gravity effect.

Blah.

I too feel the Paladin Crossclasses are the weak spot. They have Conjuror mostly for RP/Lore reasons. Stoneskin has limited use but that's about the only useful thing, and with Clemency on the table now Stoneskin has less applications than before.

Marauder is fine, but honestly if they -must- keep Conjuror for lore/series reasons I'd rather they drop Marauder for either Lancer or -Rogue-. Foresight, Bloodbath and Mercy Stroke are okay but very minimal tools - only Foresight would be a noticeable loss really and that's a very underpowered cooldown (and it's not like Paladins suck at Physical Mitigation without it).

Rogue is a class no other Job can use the crossclasses on, and would give Paladins access to Goad (yay for some raid-dps-increasing utility), Shade Shift (a self 20% stoneskin, scaling with max health - a perfect paladin tool) and Death Blossom - which is really poor but actually gives Paladins a weak but spammable AOE attack if they need it.

Couple the fact that Gladiators are kind of skilled with shortswords and Daggers, similar to Rogues, and it feels like those class skills would be much more appropriate. Failing that, Lancer offers Invigorate to truly solve the TP starvation issues, Blood for Blood to be used carefully when offtanking for DPS, and Keen Flurry which is a pretty poopy tank cooldown but likely no worse than Foresight in practise.

My ideal Paladin would use Marauder and Rogue crossclasses, but Conjuror/Rogue and Conjuror/Lancer would both be preferable to the current option in my opinion if CNJ is so vital to the lore.

Rogue cross is OP. It was more OP in 2.0 but it'd still be crazy strong. It is true though that paladin has like maybe the worst cross class selection of all time. This double sucks since its crossclass was kind of rad in 1.0.

For starters, Fracture needs a buff. From what i've read, WARs aren't even bothering in using it. Why not buff it s that crossed Fracture will yield 300 pot and 500 pot on WAR?

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Originally Posted by rawker

For starters, Fracture needs a buff. From what i've read, WARs aren't even bothering in using it. Why not buff it s that crossed Fracture will yield 300 pot and 500 pot on WAR?

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They should be, it's a flat DPS increase every time you press it (well...unless you're clipping it super early... you know what I mean). The entire difficulty of WAR comes from maximizing Fracture uptime while balancing offense and defense with stack management. I do agree, though, that Fracture has become largely useless for everyone else and could do with a buff.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

The point of the game is that you CAN play the job you want, not that you HAVE to play the favored job of the month. Again, the fun thing is that, when WAR was "supposed to be" inferior, you didn't see PLDs come and slap you for wanting to be better...

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Are you doing progression? Yes. Pick the party setup that min/maxes the best because you are trying to push through content that you arent geared well enough for yet so you can get gear sooner. If you arent on the bleeding edge then the small difference in tanks dont matter because you'll have more than enough DPS. Your DPS should be doing their job, you shouldnt be carrying them.

WAR min/maxed the best because incoming tank damage wasnt remarkable other than it was predominantly magic accross the board and DRK reduces magic damage better than anyone else so AS1 and 4 were cake walks. Looks like it's their time to shine. If they dont design any content around PLD being the better tank because of it's physical mitigation superiority next raid cycle then ill call SE on intentionally leaving PLDs out but for right now you guys are all premature with your criticism.

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Originally Posted by ManaKing

If you arent on the bleeding edge then the small difference in tanks dont matter because you'll have more than enough DPS.

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Jobs should be equally viable especially on the bleeding edge. Again, no one cares than PLD can do Expert dungeons fine...

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Originally Posted by ManaKing

If they dont design any content around PLD being the better tank because of it's physical mitigation superiority next raid cycle then ill call SE on intentionally leaving PLDs out but for right now you guys are all premature with your criticism.

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And again, again, designing content for one particular tank is a bad idea. If the next cycle is purely physical, then DRK will be thrown out of the loop, it won't be better on the overall balance.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

And again, again, designing content for one particular tank is a bad idea. If the next cycle is purely physical, then DRK will be thrown out of the loop, it won't be better on the overall balance.

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What they need to do is develop the next cycle to have several different types of encounter design. Physical, magical, pure damage check, crazy (but not too crazy) mechanics -- maybe even mix up types, depending on fight phase. That way, you can have all 3 tanks be equally viable.

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Originally Posted by Ralvenom

What they need to do is develop the next cycle to have several different types of encounter design. Physical, magical, pure damage check, crazy (but not too crazy) mechanics -- maybe even mix up types, depending on fight phase. That way, you can have all 3 tanks be equally viable.

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To be quite honest, the content being Physical or Magical, has little meaning. Toolkit wise, DRK is stable enough that it can survive an encounter that has majority physical damage (A2). However WAR also offers the ability to be a main tank. Which means that in actuality the DRK + WAR meta is too strong for PLD to compete against. For a PLD to even barge into this at current, a raid turn would have to be so explosively physical that both DRK and WAR would have a struggle keeping up which almost seems impossible.

If they want to help PLD, I agree that first they should switch one of the cross classes. PLD could definitely do without MRD or CNJ and subbing in say, Lancer would be a really nice change both with TP support and a new offense CD, and a semi swap for Foresight, with Keen Flurry. Stoneskin by itself isn't a strong enough skill in light of 3.0. This change would simply boost there physical damage but this gears towards homogenizing the three tanks which ideally is something we don't want.

Which leaves the outside example of what a PLD can do differently that neither of the other tanks can do. I think that SE should focus on their defense. It seems to be the basis of the class already so they should expand on it. Either make magic damage blockable (should be re-evaluated) with a shield only or buff Shield Oath.

An example of this would be Shield Oath can either be kicked up to 40% reduction in damage (brings to the table more Healer DPS)or offer a potential rebound effect (something that stacks when a PLD receives damage in Shield Oath) and after a certain amount of consecutive hits, a debuff (named maybe Disarmed) is applied that increases damage received (similar to Trick Attack). You can't gain stacks when the debuff is applied. Granted this is only an idea, but I think they should encourage the defensive capabilities of the one tank that specializes in it. Sword Oath could also be changed to affect all of its skills instead of just auto attacks but this again goes more in line with homogenizing the stance swapping from other tanks. I think only focusing on the PLDs personal DPS, is a stop gap solution to what it can't bring to the table in that environment.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

And again, again, designing content for one particular tank is a bad idea. If the next cycle is purely physical, then DRK will be thrown out of the loop, it won't be better on the overall balance.

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I don't think DRK will be thrown out of the loop if the next cycle is purely physical unless Shieldtron is required. I see them using their cool downs roughly the same way as PLD.

But I get your main point.

I could care less about the TP issues because of the constant stops.
Would be nice if their TP costs and perks were adjusted similarly to a speedy melee archetype, to make them as fast as they are made out to be as a Gladiator at least. And/or to add a freaking cleave so that they can not only have something spamable, but to also get more PLDs to stop being in the center of the mobs because you cannot block/parry anything from behind AND for better enemy placement.