A video showcasing all of Paladin's removed job actions. Thoughts?

A video was posted that shows all the job actions that have been purged from a Paladin's skill list, including a few that people seem to talk about a lot (in a bad light). Reddit didn't seem to care much, but I've been curious about this kind of thing as I was only able to start playing when Shadowbringers came out.

You can watch the video in the following link:
- https://youtu.be/er9huBEamPg?si=kASt2UQWMVUNfRfo

I never got to see any of these skills live in the actual client, so I'm curious to see what people have to say or think about any of these; or if there's any you'd like to see brought back to the game. Some look pretty cool, but I can see why SE ended up cutting most of them. I seriously don't get the point of stuff like "Shield Swipe" and "Flash". How did the stances work?

It is interesting to see how the original "Provoke" and "Rampart" ended up becoming actions that are now shared across all tanks. Did these make Paladin stand out in some way back then?

These animations also aren't all that interesting to look at compared to what Dark Knight lost.

"Flash" was one of the few ways Gladiators/Paladins had of getting enmity on multiple enemies at once, so it was used a lot.

Back when we had cross-class skills, "Provoke" was the main reason all tanks needed (in practice if not in theory) at least 20(?) levels of Gladiator so they could equip "Provoke"

Shield swipe was originally higher potency (something like 210) and was a GCD action which was a dps increase because it was higher than your average combo potency, you could only use it after blocking an attack, it was essentially a counter attack and a dps increase for blocking. Later it was reworked into an oGCD only available after a block to simplify things. It was removed because they didn’t want tanks using their mitigation to increase dps anymore.

Flash was literally PLDs only way to generate AoE enmity, it had no damaging skills for AoE other than circle of scorn at 50.

Provoke was always shared across all tanks but it used to be a gladiator cross class skill, meaning you needed to level gladiator all the way up to 22 (still fairly easy but not as easy as it sounds back then) just to basically function as any other tank.

Every tank used to have a rampart equivalent, WAR had inner beast and DRK had shadowskin. They just decided that they didn’t want to make a rampart clone for every job going forward, so they simply removed every other tanks version and reworked the cross class skill system into the role action system and made rampart one of them.

There were 2 stances, shield oath and sword oath. Shield oath reduced your damage taken by 20% but also lowered your damage dealt and increased enmity, it was your “tank stance”. Sword oath just added extra damage to your auto attacks but couldn’t be used at the same time as shield oath, it was your “dps stance”. The idea was obviously use tank stance when you want to tank and dps stance when you’re OT or solo. But players soon realised it was very easy to hold hate in dps stance and make up the mitigation loss with cooldowns so the devs spent the next 5 years fighting the player base who wanted to just tank in dps stance with STR accessories while they wanted you to tank in tank stance with VIT accessories until in shadowbringers they finally took their ball and went home (made tank stances how they are today and forced tanks to wear fending accessories).

Just to talk about the ones the above posters haven't talked about (except PvP actions):

Savage Blade - this was a combo ability with Fast Blade that formed the enmity combo with Rage of Halone (Fast Blade > Savage Blade > Rage of Halone). This is before Shadowbringers where they changed how enmity worked. Back in Heavensward, it also formed a combo with Royal Authority (Fast Blade > Savage Blade > Royal Authority) but RA was changed to combo off of Riot Blade in Stormblood.

Flash - Whilst it was the only way to get AoE enmity initially, that did change in Stormblood when Paladins finally got access to Total Eclipse, which is the first AoE damage GCD they got and even then, it was only obtained at level 44 IIRC (assopposed to level 6 where it currently is, where Flash used to be).

Rampart (Original) - The original was also 20%, like it is now, Gladiator just had a trait to boost it from the 10% shown in the video.
Provoke (Original) - Has been changed slightly in that it now boosts your enmity a bit over the highest as opposed to giving just 1 enmity over lead.

Awareness - Prevents crits, not really useful as they are just RNG, which meant it either done it's job, or it done nothing, except for a few special circumstances. 2 are Shiva EX in her Bow phase, she had a high crit rate then, so it proved quite useful as a reliable as a damage mitigation tool and Hallicarnasus Savage (O3S) where the tank buster always done a critical hit, so you could negate it that way (it is worth noting that critical hits do also prevent you from blocking or parrying the damage). As of Shadowbringers however, they have all but removed critical hits from all mechanic based attacks (and it might even be all attacks, I do not quite remember). So it really just became useless. Gladiator did have a trait here to make it better.

Convalescence - Whilst extra healing sounded nice (Gladiator also had a trait to boost this), it really didn't matter much. It didn't help you survive anything, so you would always pair it with mitigation anyway and the healing bonus wasn't necessary. It probably didn't help it only worked on GCD healing IIRC and with healers trying to keep GCD healing to a minimim, it saw barely any use.

Tempered Will - This has just been replaced with Arm's Length and it also had a trait for Gladiators to make it better. It didn't have the added slow enemies who touch you though, so Arm's Length is better.

Awareness and Convalescence might not've been great for raids, but they were extremely useful for mass pulls in dungeons at the time. That said they *would* be pretty worthless in modern FF14.

Your comments provide a lot of further clarification, thanks!

They should have kept the cross-class system. It isn't like it is hard to level a job to 34 or whatever was needed to get all the cross-class abilities. And it forced players to try other jobs in the process. It was a good system.

The only problem with PLD flash was that it was their only AOE to grab hate on a job that otherwise only offered single-target damage. Keep in mind, back then, physical DPS couldn't just spam AOEs. They simply didn't have the TP to do it. It was a different game. WAR had Overpower, but they'd probably only use it 2-3 times and then fall back on a single-target rotation. Different times.

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Originally Posted by Icecylee

Awareness and Convalescence might not've been great for raids, but they were extremely useful for mass pulls in dungeons at the time. That said they *would* be pretty worthless in modern FF14.

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They were great...just not on Paladin, but on Warrior instead, lol.

Convalescence combined with Defiance made for some ridiculous Adlo shields and with the high HP pool (boosted even more by ToB) you could survive busters with just your face.

Awareness on the other hand negated the major flaw of Raw Intuition (attacks against your flank or back being 100% critical).

What's interesting is how little PLD has actually lost compared to other jobs. It's a bit amusing seeing 'Shield Oath' being listed as a 'removed action' when it's just been renamed to Iron Will. Rampart is still unchanged as a Role Action. Awareness and Convalescence were in a similar boat, and bosses no longer Critical Hit anyways. Tempered Will has been replaced with the more powerful and more generic Arms Length. Flash was replaced with Total Eclipse and Prominence at the same time, so ended up with a net gain of an action. Two actions were PvP only. At the end of the day, the only things that you can really argue have been lost from the toolkit are Savage Blade and Shield Swipe.

Somewhat unsurprising, given that PLD has the highest action count out of any job in the game.

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Originally Posted by Maulclaw

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I think this is one of those "quality vs quantity" arguments. For example, I have four Jobs I got to 50 before 3.0. So I've been playing them all since at least 2.4, and CNJ/WHM I've been playing since 2.3 (I started just a bit before 2.4 dropped). My other three "legacy-lite" Jobs were SCH, SMN, and PLD.

I remember leveling PLD with the Flash-spam + 1-2 Riot Blade for MP (since Flash costed MP, you had to occasionally get more MP to keep up the spam). Flash was a very lore/thematic PLD ability, you might say, but while it inflicted enemies with Blindness (so it was a semi-mitigation), it did no damage. In the modern game, people would call you bad for using it instead of Total Eclipse (which you now get at level 6). And with Iron Will (Tank Stance) at level 10 (before any group content), your Total Eclipse will do what Flash did (agro generation for AOE enemy packs) while also dealing damage. So is Flash being removed from the game some horrible tragedy when no one, today, would be using it, and any who tried would be called bad?

You also have stuff like Tempered Will, which we still KIND OF have in the form of Arm's Length - would having a second button that only does KB immunity really be useful in the modern game? Sure WAR gets Inner Release's immunity but...is this REALLY a loss? - or...I forget the name, but the one that makes the PLD crit immune...but that's more or less baseline now in encounter design for Tanks and Tank Mastery kind of covers for that. Not to mention you have no way of telling if a crit would occur, so it made it kind of a crapshoot to use.

Offensive/Defensive stances have been removed, which is more a mixed result, but as the thread here last month discussed, most Tanks don't really miss the old enmity stance, and it was more an argument of how much you could stress your healers to stay in damage stance than it was amazing gameplay.

An alternate branching combo was a thing back then, but we also didn't have any of the magic spells, burst phase, or Atonement sub-combo stuff we have now. So it being removed isn't as damning as it might seem, not to mention a -2a vs -2b isn't exactly the most thrilling gameplay.

Convalescence I kind of miss, but then at this point in encounter design, healers have so many healing tools, I'm not sure we really NEED a relatively minor boost to healing received.

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There are also actions we haven't really lost.

Provoke and Rampart are still there as Role Actions.

Shield Stance is still MORE OR LESS there as Iron Will (the damage reduction is baked into the Tank Mastery Trait and Iron Will is the agro generating component.)

Testudo is Divine Veil. And...a PvP action?

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So overall, I don't think that we've really lost a ton in terms of removed actions.

EDIT:

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Originally Posted by dspguy

They should have kept the cross-class system. It isn't like it is hard to level a job to 34 or whatever was needed to get all the cross-class abilities. And it forced players to try other jobs in the process. It was a good system.

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It...really wasn't. I remember getting chewed out in level 50 content on WHM "You don't have Swiftcast for Raise?!". I didn't even know Swiftcast was a thing and I HATED leveling THM to get it. Leveling back then was WAY slower than it is now. It wasn't like you could get to 20-something in a few hours, it took a pretty solid grind. Further, the Cross-Class system was LARGELY uninspired. You had a bunch of random things that were like "Why is this even a Cross-Class option?", and there were very clearly a "best 5" for a given Job, making everyone coookie cutter anyway. And they didn't even do the things they should have. For example, Blizzard 2 was a Cross-Class action (not Blizzard 1, though). "Cool," you think, "SMN, WHM, and SCH could Cross-Class it and get a stack of Umbral Ice to help with MP regen!" ...except it didn't do that. It was JUST an AOE damage spell. And that's it. For WHM, once you got Holy, it was better, so Blizzard was only "useful" when doing lower level content. Maim could be Cross-Class (and I think had a DoT), but didn't get the combo action bonus since you couldn't Cross-Class Heavy Swing or whatever.

Cross-Class COULD have been a neat system, but it wasn't. And FORCING players to do things is generally NOT a good thing. I hated my time on THM so bad I didn't touch the class again until ShB, and only did so then to get the "all DoM" achievement since I had leveled all the others.

Horrible, horrible system. It was removed for very good reason, rose-tinted goggles aside.

Something like FF11's sub-Job system is a good system. Cross-Class wasn't that.