Paladin Mitigation(For mobs at least)

Wondering how Paladins do Mob pulls in Dungeons these days cause..., hmm.

DRK has of course Blackest Night.
WAR can use Raw Intuition
Even Gun Breaker has Heart of Stone later on.

What's Paladin supposed to use? Shelltron? The thing we have to build Gauge to use?

Shelltron is great man, the problem is SE nerfed block -_-

I really hope they bring it back up to 30%

Also, I wish SE would let us use Intervention and Divine Veil on ourselves too.

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Originally Posted by TheForce

Shelltron is great man, the problem is SE nerfed block -_-

I really hope they bring it back up to 30%

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I'm not saying it isn't great. But as someone with a level 30 PLD, I question how fast we can generate Oath to actually be able to use it as often as the other tank CDS.

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Originally Posted by MerlinCross

I'm not saying it isn't great. But as someone with a level 30 PLD, I question how fast we can generate Oath to actually be able to use it as often as the other tank CDS.

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Oath comes pretty quickly, you get 5% each time you land an auto attack, and you're gonna land a ton of auto attacks lol. Also don't forget about Clemency, and Clemency can even be buffed after you use Requiescat to become an instant cast on gcd and get a 50% healing boost. It absolutely embarrasses The Blackest Night as far as self sustain and mitigation goes imo. We also have Hallowed Ground in our back pocket ;)

PLD is insane.

I use HG on first and third big pulls (typically) then cycle sentinel and rampart with shelltron on cooldown. Key is to try not leave melee distance so you can build up gauge. Clemency is great in a pinch (altho you sacrifice dps).

At the current highest item levels, blocks reduce damage by 20%. It only goes up from here. But, the cooldown is what you're concerned about. Sheltron costs 50 Oath. You gain 5 Oath every time you auto attack. This means that you get a Sheltron every time you auto attack 10 times.

So, how often is that? A Paladin will auto attack every 2.24 seconds. Multiply that by 10 attacks, and you can eke out a Sheltron every 22.4 seconds. The downside, of course, is that you've gotta be hitting the enemy to generate Oath Gauge.

Either way, the "cooldown" is right on par with the rest, and you can use it twice in succession if you have 100 Oath Gauge. It's just fine.

Im now 77 pld and a 75 sch having healed all the tanks. Pld does fine. I always do large pulls. You have hallowed ground on the first large pull rampart when that goes down, everything should be dead and you have 100 gauge. Next large pull you use sentinel followed by 2 sheltron followed by rampart. Everything is dead. Should be on the first boss by now, if not it means there where breaks in the pull where you could not progress and the groups where small. No need to use cool down there other then sheltron if it hits 100 since youll build it up again. Plus you can heal for 20-30k depending on if you crit and have a pretty much infinite mp pool. Pld is the best mitigation tank by far because of this in dungeon runs. There where times i was on a 3rd pull before the 1st boss that has a bunch of mobs and i had no cool downs up yet. No reason to stop as i can pull everything with aoe as i run by, sprint, run back, aoe again for hate so the healer doesnt die, then help heal myself for 5 seconds or so until my cool down is up.

As a healer the tank that requires the most non stop healing is gunbreaker.

I don't seem to have any issues with PLD either, although I'm usually a bit more cautious in the SHB dungeons because I did lose 2 defensive CD's, but by managing the ones I have with shelltron I don't have issues pulling

I personally use HG as a last resort, though. I don't want to use it just in a pull and then not have it if something goes south and I need it.

Also, I don't over-use shelltron toward the end of pulls because I don't want to go into the boss fight with 0 oath. I make sure to have enough oath to use shelltron on the tank busters.

Overall I think PLD is pretty great and the new aoe abilities are pretty fun as well.

Don't forget you have arms length which has a built-in 20% slow for anything that hits you. It's a great defensive measure when pulling mobs.

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Originally Posted by KingStyles1

Don't forget you have arms length which has a built-in 20% slow for anything that hits you. It's a great defensive measure when pulling mobs.

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I always read that as "If an enemy hits you with slow or heavy, apply slow to them".

Does it kick in with any attack whatso ever? If so that might actually be good.

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Originally Posted by MerlinCross

I always read that as "If an enemy hits you with slow or heavy, apply slow to them".

Does it kick in with any attack whatso ever? If so that might actually be good.

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Yup. It simply says "Slow +20% when barrier is struck." so it should theoretically proc on any attack that hits you. Provided the enemy can be slowed, of course.

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Originally Posted by Donjo

Yup. It simply says "Slow +20% when barrier is struck." so it should theoretically proc on any attack that hits you. Provided the enemy can be slowed, of course.

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I'll have to make sure that's actually assigned to buttons.

Kinda wish they did this with more skills, make it useful for Raid and dungeons cause I just chalked it up as a Raid skill.

Maybe they can make Lowblow bloody useful in Raids.

I haven't been having any issue tanking SHB dungeons, I haven't really done any low level dungeons since 5.0 though. Rampart/Sentinel/HG work fine rotating around for big pulls. Plus shelltron, while you have to build it up, is more useful in aoe situations now.

If you mean something to use while gathering up the enemies, I generally havne't needed anything and I pop my cooldown once everything I'm pulling is gathered up and about to start hitting me at once.

I´m surprised nobody mentioned Requiescat buff at 78, that makes your "Clemency" heal instant.. Use this instead of spamming AOE damage, if your unsure about survival during the mob pull. This buff for 12 seconds is insanely strong, because you can run and heal, your literally impossible to kill.

Also i find "Passage of Arms" really strong also, use it with caution though :)

The nerf to Block sucks (and really should be reverted, even if it costs PLD a bit of DPS) but otherwise the new Sheltron is at least on par with WAR Raw Intuition (at 20% every 25s) and better than GNB Heart of Stone (at only 15% every 25s). Sheltron is more flexible as its hard cooldown is only 5s; i.e. with 100 gauge you can use it back-to-back for a total of 12s mitigation (compared to only 5s for RI or HoS), and even a third time in about another 10s (depending on attack speed). The downside of course is that gauge starts at 0 and you need to be hitting something to build it (i.e. no gains while moving between pulls, or during a phase transition).

DRK The Blackest Night is the hands down winner though, at 25% HP every 15s (and no ‘build-up’ delay) it not only has the shortest cooldown by a significant margin but depending on how much damage you take in those 5-6s its effective mitigation can be very high.

Hopefully this helps! I've played PLD since 2016 and 5.0 scared me because bulwark + sheltron + clemency went away. If you played PLD in 4.0 you might have the same fears. Here are some tools I use now (and am very satisfied with). I say "tools" because I try to play around what my healer is doing.

New Tools:
1. "Bulwark + Sheltron + Clemency" is now "Requiescat + 4 x Clemency + Confiteor" with only a 60s cooldown and any Clemency cast can be swapped to a Holy Spirit/Circle if you're healthy enough. Remember that Confiteor is as good as 2.3/3.2 Holy Spirits/Circles so at level 80 try not to waste it.
2. I try to use Sheltron whenever I'm at 95 oath unless the pull is very small (don't use it) or big (use even if below 95). Typically in my first pull I like to Requiescat -> Holy Circle / Clemency x 4 -> Confiteor without any damage mitigation and then use mitigation skills while my MP regens.
3. Very occasionally I don't use all of my MP during a Requiescat phase. This happens if I think my healer and I are out of sync and they're burning all of their heavy heals on me while I still have MP. In my experience this tends to make the back half of the pull feel very dry and HP-scarce so occasionally I pop Confiteor early and just move on with my life and my cooldowns. It feels bad to waste the Clemency/Holy Spirit potency but in my experience it's easy to detect when this out-of-sync starts to happen and I tend to regret not having MP later.
4. In theory you can get more mp per swing (366 instead of 250) by doing an Atonement rotation. I do this if I think I've overpulled and need to remove a mob ASAP in order to reduce how much damage I'm taking. Unsure if this is effective use of time.

Old Tools (that still work!):
1. In general, use Rampart before using Sentinel if you can tolerate it. It will come off cooldown faster and your healer is very capable of using burst heals early but will likely start to struggle if the pull exhausts their cooldowns.
2. HG is very useful as a way to give your healer time. I like to use it after I've taken some damage so that I'm not wasting a full HP bar + a healer sitting on cooldowns that are up. For example, I could use requiescat+clemency (easy for the healer) into Rampart (hard for the healer because the pull is still healthy) into HG (low HP but healer has lots of time to heal me up) and by the time that's over I have some MP, Sheltron's available, and Sentinel is still up.
3. Sometimes I do small or sliding pulls if my cooldowns aren't up. I'll pull the first group, and as my cooldowns start to come up I'll move into the second group. Be careful of doing this with BLMs as they might get sad. I do this a lot if I accidentally pop an extra cooldown in an early pull and then don't want to regret it later.
4. Shield Bash is nice near the end of a pull if your HP is kind of low but you don't want to use mitigation skills in preparation for the next pull.

^^ Good tips.

I would also add that Stun can be quite effective. I've noticed that a lot of packs have an enemy in them (usually the biggest) that does a mini tank buster, if you can stun this you'll save yourself a good 10-20K HP.

Finally, try and learn the timing of enemy attacks and time your mitigation accordingly; for example, some enemies will cast an AoE (during which they won't be hitting you, so hold off on the cooldowns) then turn around and do few big hits, if you can time your mitigation to absorb the big hits you will be well ahead.

Gonna give this the biggest shoutout as it's a new thing for tanks in Shadowbringers.

Arm's Length is your best friend for big pulls now. 6 seconds long, prevents knockback, but mainly using it for the Slow effect. With tools like anticipation and awareness being removed, Arm's Length is a fantastic CD to use in pulls. Using it at the start allows your healers more wiggle room to heal but also gives you more time to bide your cd's if they are just coming off your previous pull.

I can't believe no one has mentioned the fact that PLDs passively block. You're literally taking less damage over extended periods compared to the other tanks with no sort of input or requirement from yourself, and it will continue to scale as you get higher ilvl shields.

Even without sheltron, in mass pulls you will be blocking a LOT.

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Originally Posted by MerlinCross

I'll have to make sure that's actually assigned to buttons.

Kinda wish they did this with more skills, make it useful for Raid and dungeons cause I just chalked it up as a Raid skill.

Maybe they can make Lowblow bloody useful in Raids.

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I already had it on a button, because it also greatly helps against pulls and pushes from most of the dungeon bosses. I use it quite frequently for that actually. As an example, the boss in the lv 75 dungeon, that targets the entire room as a push field to push you into poison fields? Yeah, use that skill and you won't have to worry about it at all nor lose any uptime on him. :)

The nerf to Block does not stay at 20%.
Every single expansion they reduce it to 20% to prevent it from getting too powerful.
After getting better gear it slowly goes back up to 30%.

Also, you have Passage of Arms people. 100% Block for like 18 seconds. It's not just for party mitigation.
And worst case scenario you can Shield Bash (stun lock) whatever monsters you want for 9 seconds without worrying about TP.
(Unless a White Mage is already doing that for you of course.)

These are pretty powerful mitigation tools that lower your DPS output, but are still options if your healer is falling behind with their heals.

In dungeon i use Hallowed Ground for the biggest pack, i use Sheltron non stop, Sentinel/rempart on cooldown, Clemency to help the healer if needed.

We can use Arm's Length slow effect too, but i alway forget it so ...