PLD Cross Class Skills

[Maelwys]

Hence why I use Foresight, Stoneskin, Cure, Protect and Raise. Cure and Protect could easily be swapped for Bloodbath and Mercy Stroke depending on your playstyle and situation.

This is pretty much spot on.

I'll add a few personal observations though:

+ Foresight is NOT particularly powerful, since it increases your Defence just like Protect (not magic defence like ProShell) instead of being a raw damage resistance buff. But it IS one of the few cross-class mitigation boosts you can get and is on a fairly fast cooldown. So it should never leave your Hotbar. I tend to pop it alongside Convalescence since they're both on a 120 second cooldown.

+ Mercy Stroke is quite useful for two reasons: When soloing or in 4-man groups, you can much more reliably time the hit to recover HP. In larger groups, it's very unlikely that you'll get the last hit, but it can be used as a bit of extra OFF-GCD damage (useful for on-demand "spike" DPS and a little extra Hate generation) and can be used as an indicator to let you know whenever your enemy has EXACTLY 20% HP left.

+ Stoneskin is your best survivability cross class tool by a large margin. Use it whenever you have an enmity lead in boss fights. Once you get used to a boss's ability rotation you can use it quite reliably to take a LOT of pressure off the Healers.

+ Bloodbath is actually pretty powerful at endgame once you are geared up. It's effectively a mini-regen that cannot be affected by healing or Max-HP debuffs, and the cooldown is fairly short. Along with Rampart, it fits very nicely in between Bulwark and Sentinel: Bulwark -> 45 Secs -> Rampart and Bloodbath -> 45 Secs -> Sentinel -> 45 Secs -> Rampart and Bloodbath. (With Conv/Foresight as "Standbys" and Hallowed Ground saved for dire Emergencies)

Those four actually never leave my bar.

I have "Cure" as my 5th currently, but very very very rarely use it in parties. In fact, I've used it twice in the last two months: Once to top myself back up on Turn 3 whenever I was the only one left alive (and had aggroed mobs some 7 floors down so I was still "in battle" and was not regenerating HP!) and once on AK's final boss when the Healer died. I could use Stoneskin/Bloodbath and Rotate Cooldowns to keep myself alive, then topped myself back up with Convalescence + Cure during his casting "Imminent Catastrophe".

Raise/Protect/Cure are all fair choices for that 5th spot. If Paladins could Raise during battle I'd take it over Cure in a heartbeat... but out of battle you can just temporarilly swap another ability for it anyway...

Edit: Forgot Fracture. Which kind of says how useful it is. It basically gobbles your TP and causes interruptions to your enmity-generating combos, for a ridiculously small DPS boost. If you want to do more damage at the expense of enmity generation, use Shield Swipe instead... as it does more damage than Fracture, doesn't interrupt your combos (only costing you a 2.5 second GCD) and actually consumes less TP than you regenerate whilst casting it.