Pld buff or War nerf in 1.22?

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Originally Posted by ChiefCurrahee

Few days away from 1.22. What do you think we'll see as far as job balancing?

a Pld Buff?

or

a War Nerf?

I'm hoping for a Pld buff myself.

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Easy fix. Leve warrior as it is. And improve the eminty from paladin AF. Eminty will be improved as materia, so with a boost to AF gear eminty ppl would think. Should I go with a tank that even if the guy handling it isn't a good tank, but can hold hate easier, but give less dmg, or should I use warrior as tank, that can atk stronger but needs someone who knows his way tanking to hold hate?

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Originally Posted by Duelle

Tank classes should be performing roughly the same, if only because it doesn't dilute your tank pool to niches where tank A is not good for certain content, but tank B is not good for other content and such. If a guy wants to gear their WAR as a tank, then by god they have the right to do so.

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This is not much of a problem in a game where you can have multiple classes in one character. I would be perfectly fine with expanding the PLD niche by buffing its resistance to magical damage and thus making it the preferred tank where an overwhelming majority of incoming damage is magical in nature.

I don't think you'll want to touch WAR too much because I find it to be one of the most successfully designed classes. It really is the unstoppable force of destruction depicted in FFXIV lore without actually dominating multiple roles.

It doesn't have quite the damage output of other melee but its toughness lets it go all out much more safely and dominate groups of lesser foes. You don't want to bring a WAR for a purely focused DPS role but it's excellent when you need a combination of high AoE damage output and ability to survive focused fire from multiple enemies. It's similar to how the arms warrior performed in vanilla WoW and ToB: on single targets you would lose to squishier classes and fury warriors but your ability to cleave through groups of enemies was unmatched, yet you weren't nearly as good a main tank as a protection warrior (though I did once take over at Firemaw when the MT died and we still got the win). FFXIV doesn't actually have encounters where you need a completely defensively focused tank, however, so WAR is always preferred even if PLD defense was substantially better (which it isn't).

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Originally Posted by Frein

This is not much of a problem in a game where you can have multiple classes in one character. I would be perfectly fine with expanding the PLD niche by buffing its resistance to magical damage and thus making it the preferred tank where an overwhelming majority of incoming damage is magical in nature.

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I'm not for niche play, mostly because what makes a "good" player is not his understanding of the tank role or his gear, but whether he has X number of jobs levelled and geared. I'm not a fan of inventory clutter, which is facilitated by niche play. That and I'm also against forcing people to play jobs and classes they have little interest in for prolongued amounts of time. It's a courtesy I grant others and I expect to be granted to me.

To me the problem with war it has to many hate gaining skills it needs to hold hate from pure DD I'd rather See SE buff wars dmg a bit and make them tank off pure DD and get rid of their gla sub for lnc. Right now pld holds hate with skills and heals but it can hardly do the former cause whms spam cura cause the class is always in yellow cause it has lower hp and takes the same dmg as war. War holds hate with heals dmg and skills.

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Originally Posted by Duelle

As I said, then aim to make classes a little more versatile. Also, consider this. If you grab WAR and give it two stances, one that scales offensively and one that sacles defensively, this means that once the fight starts the WAR is stuck with whatever they chose to equip. If the WAR in tank gear tries to go offensive, he's not going to be anywhere near what he'd be in DPS gear. And because (thankfully) gear cannot be swapped mid-combat, it wouldn't cause a problem. A guy in tank gear trying to DPS doesn't generate good numbers. Just like a guy in DPS gear trying to tank is very unlikely to survive. It balances out and we get to keep our options, so it's a win-win.

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The only problem with that is the base damage of the weapon has the biggest influence on the possible damage a player can do. Being WAR has the strongest and PLD has the weakest weapons there isn't any competition with the enmity that can be produced. I could go out and auto attack a mob with my blade for 100-200, and my WAR in the same equipment could land anywhere between 300-600 damage, that averages to three times the Enmity gained over PLD in a single attack round. Sure PLD's combo bonus can produce four times the enmity vs WAR's skull sunder combo, but followed up by a increased critical chance Steel Cyclone that can massively heal (with rampage), stun, and deal often 1k+ damage, even PLD's combo is often still choking on the dust of WAR's Enmity generation. Hell even the damage produced just by steel cyclone often destroys the amount of Enmity produced by Flash, upstanding our only AoE job ability we can use reliably for crowd control.

Problems are only compounded where offensive/defensive gear/materia does not really conflict with one another (at least not enough to make a major difference in DPS), and VIT becoming one of WAR's damage bonus stats makes it even more offensive and defensive in the end while PLD just receives defensive benefits.

Speaking of defense, there really isn't any difference between the two jobs save a minor +12 defense due to an extra Trait GLA gets. This isn't really beneficial when PLD's tactic is supposed to be a turtle tank over WAR, and things are only compounded worse when it comes to Shields because...

-Partial Parries often reduce the damage taken below 20% of what the attack would have originally done, while blocks only reduce a small portion of damage off the top. (IE: 3k damage move is parried down to ~600dmg, while a block only reduces it to 2800.)
-Parries occur about as often as Shield Blocks.
-Wearing a shield causes PLD to lose the ability to parry.
-PLD is FORCED to wear a shield in order to utilize half it's abilities.

So essentially PLD is FORCED to take more damage over time than WAR to function properly.

If that doesn't constitute to peoples Idea of "BROKEN" I'd really hate to see what they think is broken.

Sorry Duelle, kinda went into rant mode. None of it's directed at you but I did want to build off what you said in the discussion.

Ah good thread, but I feel they will do further tweaks that will equal to jack shit being done about the balance, their idea of "balance" is not what everyone else on the planet thinks XD.

We will see nothing, or they will take the wrong idea from feedback and do completely the wrong thing.

/giveneuphopeonjobbalance.

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Originally Posted by Duelle

Taking damage when getting hit is part of being a tank. It's in the job description.
False. Gameplay, gearing and abilities make them quite different. This is the reason why WoW, Rift and Lineage II have multiple tank classes. WoW is going to have five (5) come next expansion. All five get hit and have their own slew of abilities for mitigation/damage/utility.

Again, if you're being influenced by the blood vs blink tank thing, get it out of your head. All it does is cloud your judgement. There is MUCH more to tank design and play than whether you're getting hit or blinking damage away.

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The difference is that FFXIV's content isnt based on how well a tank can tank, it's about how fast you can beat the dungeon. If they give PLD the same damage as a War, I see that happening, but's it's quite obvious that wont happen since they'd have to do another full class revamp. I think the problem is that you're thinking too much based on other game's content and not how FFXIV's current content is like. Now for 2.0 I'm all for this, but that's just unrealistic for the way the current version is portraying their content.

So pretty much what you're asking for is either a full PLD class revamp which will probably delay patch 1.22 and 1.23 or for the way content currently is changed, which I'm sure everyone would enjoy but I highly doubt that will happen any time soon before 2.0 because of this client/server's limitations.

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Originally Posted by viion

Ah good thread, but I feel they will do further tweaks that will equal to jack shit being done about the balance, their idea of "balance" is not what everyone else on the planet thinks XD.

We will see nothing, or they will take the wrong idea from feedback and do completely the wrong thing.

/giveneuphopeonjobbalance.

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agreed... sometimes I feel like SE's problem solving is just so different than mine, or my friends for that matter

I really think SE only really needs to take away some enmity/tank abilities from WAR and lower it's HP while allowing PLD to have more hp and/or some better MP regen.

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Originally Posted by SwordCoheir

The only problem with that is the base damage of the weapon has the biggest influence on the possible damage a player can do.

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I'm beginning to feel that some are not understanding my WAR suggestion. I'll paste what I posted many months ago in the "Fix MRD" thread:

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I've never been good at two-hander design, but something along the lines of:

Pillager's Grip: Offensive oriented stance. Emphasis on STR, granting accuracy and attack speed bonuses. VIT's value is reduced by 50% when in this stance.

Seadog's Guile: Defensive oriented stance. Emphasis on VIT, granting defense and Enmity bonuses. STR's value is reduced by 50% when in this stance.

Both stances cancel each other out, and MRD-native abilities have bonuses to damage when in the former, enmity bonuses when in the latter.

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Following the Offensive/Defensive stance paradigm, you'd have to lower potential MRD/WAR damage and survivability when "stanceless", then use the stances as multipliers to increase damage while receiving less defense or increase enmity generated while gaining less from strength and offensive stats. The point of this would be separate the tank and DPS aspects of WAR so that we don't have this class that can do both things at once and thus having a negative effect on things like party dynamics and PLDs. FFXI's Red Mage suffered because of this exact same problem. I'm surprised no one learned from it. Note: I'm aware Berserk and Rampage try to take this approach, but the difference between both is not really enough, IMO.

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Being WAR has the strongest and PLD has the weakest weapons there isn't any competition with the enmity that can be produced. I could go out and auto attack a mob with my blade for 100-200, and my WAR in the same equipment could land anywhere between 300-600 damage, that averages to three times the Enmity gained over PLD in a single attack round.

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Then scale enmity generated by PLD with something else. Enmity bonuses outside of Sentinel would give the job a leg up in that aspect.

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Problems are only compounded where offensive/defensive gear/materia does not really conflict with one another (at least not enough to make a major difference in DPS), and VIT becoming one of WAR's damage bonus stats makes it even more offensive and defensive in the end while PLD just receives defensive benefits.

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If this is indeed the case, then that needs to change.

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-Partial Parries often reduce the damage taken below 20% of what the attack would have originally done, while blocks only reduce a small portion of damage off the top. (IE: 3k damage move is parried down to ~600dmg, while a block only reduces it to 2800.)

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Wow...this is REALLY lopsided in favor of parries. That needs adjusting. Either bring shield blocking up or nerf the threashold for partial parries. I'd start with my suggestion to make blocks get a bonus from STR to help, then see how things develop.

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-Parries occur about as often as Shield Blocks.

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This is not a bad thing. Full mitigation (I.E.: Duelle parries King Behemoth's attack! <== no damage taken) would need to disappear or be lessened and make partial parries a WAR's mitigation mechanic.

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-Wearing a shield causes PLD to lose the ability to parry.

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This needs to be corrected. This in no way makes sense.

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So essentially PLD is FORCED to take more damage over time than WAR to function properly.

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...yeah that makes no sense.

It sounds to me like the devs are banking on what was basically timing your cures cast around mob swings. With little else. Forget nerfing WAR. PLD needs fixes.