Addressing Concerned Pugilist's Concerns
Just to start things off, I have to promote Silverdragon's thread as being the best solid example of a list of possible issues that might arise in 1.20. Note the emphasis here on *possible* issues, since as Arcell said in another thread, we have no idea what the numbers involved will be yet. What I'd like to address is a different issue, that being the ungodly amount of complaining about the current state of pugilists. I'd prefer to address those concerns, since it's been driving me insane since I started reading.
First, the common consensus that Pugilists are useless in endgame content. This is an extremely ignorant statement to make. Let's take a look at the current two endgame fights, Batraal and Ifrit. Different styles of fight, to be sure, but Pugilists are hardly useless on either encounter. Batraal, for example, has minions that are offtanked and killed. You could use a marauder for this, to be sure, but if your options are lancers or pugilists, the pugilist is better-suited to getting hit in the face than the lancer by far, while still dealing comparable single-target damage.
There we go, I said it. Comparable single-target damage. Yes, I know what you're thinking, lancers are the unrivaled kings of damage right now. Perhaps if you're looking at lancers and pugilists with only lancer or pugilist abilities, this is true. But the idea of cross-classing abilities is to *add* to your class' effectiveness. Using a simple ability that doesn't take long to learn, Keen Flurry, completely offsets the long CD of Victimize in the Ifrit encounter, especially given that you're stuck waiting like everyone else for a chance to drop a big number on him later in the fight.
Given that we already have Blindside for increased damage and automatic crit, we can add Ferocity to the mix, which we already have if we've leveled to Keen Flurry, right? Given the base damage of Victimize and the fact that your boss has enfeebling effects on him, which he's basically going to full-time if anyone has abilities set and like face-keyboard action, Victimize spikes harder on average than Doomspike through the first 80% of the fight. Don't believe me? Go look for parses.
It's a little harder, to be sure, but we're far from useless. As for MP, the only time I run out of MP on Ifrit is if I screw up and throw a few sacrifices on myself to compensate. And this is given some of our worst kills, edging over 10 minutes, sometimes 12. Even less of an issue during Batraal, as you can abuse the hell outta Featherfoot.
I'm sure I didn't cover everything, but I really needed to type this crap out, because I was going to explode otherwise. tldr, we're not remotely as bad off as some make it sound, and besides, at least we're not archers!