Swoard Oath & Shield Oath

[Tronic]

Flash should be rotated every so often though, not just at the beginning of a fight otherwise it wont even hold hate vs a healer.

Wow, strike two... ever heard of tab tanking?

[MorbidAngel]

Wow, strike two... ever heard of tab tanking?

There's more than one way to tank in this game...

[Fiosha_Maureiba]

Wow, strike two... ever heard of tab tanking?

Wouldn't call it a strike. Flash grabs enmity through my crowd control.

[Kyp]

Flash should be used regardless of tab tanking or not. YOU MUST tab tank to hold agro against any decent dps with aoe
Flash is good for blind and build threat against sleeping targets

[Duelle]

Post

I guess the general message to carry in this is that you perform better with one or the other up, and decide on which to use depending on the situation. I've always postulated that Sword Oath would shine in spots where you're not the main tank for whatever reason (tank swaps, mechanics where you can't generate threat for X seconds).

[Brannigan]

Hi everyone,

A lot of you seem to be operating under the assumption that Shield Oath still has a 2x enmity modifier. I am fairly certain that this is not the case. Just based on some quick stuff out in the desert (and casual observation during parties), Shield Oath appears to increase enmity generation by 20%, while Sword Oath's bonus attacks seem to generate double their damage in enmity (for example an auto attack with Sword Oath that produces a 100 damage hit and a 50 damage SO will generate 200 hate). I could be wrong about this, so I encourage you to go check it out for yourselves. Grab a paladin with equal stats (same race, same gear, same distribution) and have one use Shield Oath and the other go oathless. If both use Flash it's easy to see that one Flash is definitely not generating double enmity. Damage testing produced similar results.

[Raymeo]

A lot of you seem to be operating under the assumption that Shield Oath still has a 2x enmity modifier. I am fairly certain that this is not the case. Just based on some quick stuff out in the desert (and casual observation during parties), Shield Oath appears to increase enmity generation by 20%, while Sword Oath's bonus attacks seem to generate double their damage in enmity (for example an auto attack with Sword Oath that produces a 100 damage hit and a 50 damage SO will generate 200 hate). I could be wrong about this, so I encourage you to go check it out for yourselves. Grab a paladin with equal stats (same race, same gear, same distribution) and have one use Shield Oath and the other go oathless. If both use Flash it's easy to see that one Flash is definitely not generating double enmity. Damage testing produced similar results.

Not quite the same test, but I can tell you how my Bowl of Embers (Hard) runs were going whenever I ended up with another Paladin in Duty Finder last week. Whenever this setup happened, I let the other Paladin main tank while I stayed on stun duty, because I trust my own knowledge of Ifrit's patterns more than I trust a PUG to predict them. Therefore, not anticipating any tanking of my own, I figured that I might as well contribute a little more DPS and switched to Sword Oath before each pull, while the other Paladin would use Shield Oath. I would let the Shield Oath Paladin run in with their Shield Lob, let Ifrit do his opening fire breath attack before he got turned around, and then I would run toward Ifrit while the other Paladin began their first Halone combo. Pretty standard opening to the fight from the tank's perspective, and from mine as a melee DPS for all intents and purposes. Here's where things get weird though:

The first time we did this, when I arrived at Ifrit's backside, I immediately went into my own Halone combo, and I pulled threat after finishing off my first Halone. Ifrit turned back to me and swiped through all of my melee DPS buddies, a bolt of panic struck everyone in the party, and I threw my hands in the air to stop myself from doing anything until the Shield Oath Paladin managed to pull hate back. I thought that this was a fluke -- maybe the other Paladin messed up their combo or something, the way that sometimes I can hear my own actions fire off even though the enemy moved out of range and canceled them. However once things were back under control, and I started paying extra attention to the threat bars and battle log, it became apparent that I was accruing enmity SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the main tank Paladin with the same abilities. I spent the first half of that fight sitting on my hands because if I threw out just a few combos between stuns, I'd easily be at risk of surpassing the main tank's enmity. Party after party, this continued to prove itself as the case.

In short, I think that the opening moments said it all. One Halone combo by itself in Sword Oath outdid the threat generated by the same Halone combo + Shield Lob + first strike bonus + better gear in the hands of the Shield Oath main tank.

After experiencing several more dual-paladin Ifrit pulls and seeing the same enmity trends time after time, I can say with the utmost assurance that if your healer has proven that they can keep up without putting the party at risk, but enmity concerns are the only thing preventing you from using Sword Oath, then you actually have no good reason not to switch to Sword Oath over Shield Oath. The enmity is actually better, and is probably the main purpose for Sword Oath being given to us in the first place, while the bonus damage is just that -- a bonus to ice the already sweet cake with. Shield Oath may say that it gives bonus enmity, because when you sacrifice damage (and consequentially enmity) for defense you need some extra enmity in order to stay viable as a tank, but Shield Oath's bonus enmity still doesn't compare to the extra unspoken enmity generated by the bonus damage of Sword Oath.

Therefore the only reason to ever use Shield Oath, as things stand now, is if you actually need the extra defense against an especially hard hitting foe or if your healer is weak and struggling to keep up with their job. As the enmity of Shield Oath actually falls below that of Sword Oath, despite the misleading tooltips, rather than defaulting to tanking in Shield Oath and only using Sword Oath for burn phases or off tanking, we should probably be defaulting to Sword Oath and only use Shield Oath for it's one remaining purpose: sacrificing damage and threat in order to mitigate the lethal damage of especially hard-hitting foes that we otherwise couldn't survive.

With that in mind, rather than baffling me the way that it did when I first read the tool tips in beta, it actually makes sense that we get Sword Oath unlocked before Shield Oath. Generally speaking in mid-game, tanks find themselves having to struggle for enmity, and while the tooltip for Sword Oath might read simply as a way to give us viability as off-tanks in dual-tank end-game situations while Shield Oath misleadingly reads as the threat-generating skill that struggling tanks should be crying out for, Sword Oath is actually the superior threat-generating stance that main tanks of all party sizes should be using in order to most effectively compete for enmity. It isn't until end-game that the enmity generated by everyone's abilities begins to feel better balanced, at which point it's no coincidence that Shield Oath is presented to us and the first hard-hitting bosses begin to appear -- because it isn't until the more balanced threat levels of end-game that tanks can realistically justify the situational viability of sacrificing their grip on enmity for a little extra damage mitigation.