PLD feels underwhelming lately

[Kyana]

If you are having enmity gen problems, you're doing something very wrong.

There are times where I can literally not act for 1-2 minutes and not lose hate. For the opening of the fight, enmity gen is mostly your priority, but once you get 1+ minute into the fight, you should be 10s of thousands of points of enmity ahead of 2nd place.

Of course this is assuming the fight does not require tank swapping or enmity resets.

I don't have problems generating enough enmity or holding hate, but if you have some BLMs who are worth their salt and go full out, you won't be able to stand there for 1-2 minutes and do nothing.
Tank swaps are easy too if you build up combo before provoking and if the other tank doesn't spam hate combo after swap.
Generating enough enmity on a single target is not hard at all, but keeping 5+ mobs on you while DDs go crazy with AoE damage, leaves you no alternative to Flash and Riot Blade spam.

I don't want to make PLD a better tank, I'd like to have a bit more variety than Flash+RB or 1-2-3.
As some already said, there is not much you can do to stand out of the crowd of average PLDs.

[kukurumei]

Tank swapping is no easy task. It starts easy like ultima and ADS but gets harder, titan you have to be disciplined to not accidentally LS or MB people, ifrit you have to be really careful with tank swaps, moogle you can wipe a team for doing stupid swaps moving that king wrong, and T6....uuugh very good communication is needed.

DO NOT TAKE TANK SWAP LIGHTLY.

A pld will have trouble generating threat as oppose to war(they have next to no problems). You're probably young if a blm is ripping hate off you. the biggest offenders are mnk/drgs and whms they will almost always be #2 in most contents. There's just no way around it when things get critical and you need to pop a stoneskin in to get above the damage curve, but there are tricks to spike that hate.

Certain "secret" tricks have been known to pld in situations for instance to deal with spawn hate on loose pulls. HG was an age old one (because a whm is not generating hate with HG up) (useful in t5), etc.

Another thing is making sure your auto attacks are hitting. Some tanks love to dance and dance some more, and missing a lot of AA in the process. Every little bit of damage helps.

[Kyana]

snip

While I'm sure there are inexperienced tanks who struggle holding hate or swapping with another tank in various situations, it's not that hard if you know what you do and what to expect.
I agree that good communication helps, and that every action you execute to maintain stable enmity does count.
But this fact can limit a PLD's potential because there are only 2 melee attacks, 1 ranged attack and 1 spell which generate additional enmity.
Going full VIT further lowers your damage and, as consequence, enmity generation potential.
In theory, you could be forced to keep spamming RoH combo to keep hate, no Shield Swipe, no Riot Blade, no Stoneskin, in a worst case scenario.

[Karilyn]

The part where Paladins don't have a second combo to use is because they -don't need one-

You say this like it's a downside, when in reality it is the single biggest upside to playing a Warrior tank. Forget the Brayflox Speedruns. Forget the Inner Beast. Forget the everything else. Forget the AOE threat and damage. The single biggest pro to playing a Warrior, is that they have to use a second combo.

Because oh my fucking god, a Paladin will put you to sleep faster than a 3 hour lecture on the exciting world of toe fungus, hosted by Ben Stein. It doesn't matter if you drink a gallon of coffee before beginning a raid. A tank that's asleep is a dead tank, and if you can stay awake while tanking as a Paladin, science should extract your blood and inject it into the human population so we can get an extra 8 hours of being awake per day, because you are the next evolution of humanity.

Dat quality of life perk of having something besides Rage of Halone combo.

[Kenji1134]

Well its been brought up before. Change Shield Swipe or some other lesser used endgame ability into a 3rd part of the fast-riot combo.
Hell, lets make the 3rd part a frontal cone and have it provide a 50% buff to the next Flash. Make AoE tanking a little less mind-numbing.

The issue is that we need something "original" and not "unbalancing".
We cant get a global damage buff or targeted slashing debuff, Warrior has that.
We probably cant get any new mitigation tools or stack limited mitigation mechanics, like "get hit X times" or "use Y abilities Z times" and get a free instant Stoneskin-esque buff.
Most likely we cant get a targeted magic mit debuff, as that would affect dps balance, and really only help us when using Flash, and though it would free up bards, it would have to be aoe to be useful w/ Flash, and would kinda phase out Warriors and Bards in SR's... Bring 2 BLMs and a PLD, watch things melt.

There's just not a lot of things they can do with PLD to make it more interesting, without either copying some other mechanic, making PLD upset the dps balance, or having to *gulp* nerf PLD and then add something new to bring it back to its current level.

Only thing that kinda comes to mind is a CD based combo, again off of Riot Blade, or if it can be coded as such, off EITHER Savage or Riot, that reduces the cooldown on... well, our cooldowns.

So we would have the RoH Combo that we can spam for maximum aggro. And we would have a second combo where the 3rd step has a 12-15 second CD.
Again, IF it can be done coding wise, this ability could look something like this:

---
Blessed Blade - Replacing Awareness (most likely) or Shield Swipe (quest would be adjusted)
Delivers an attack with a potency of 100.
Recast Time: 15 seconds

Combo Action: Riot Blade
Combo Bonus: Delivers an attack with a potency of 150 in a 5m cone in front of you (aka Overpower) with a 5x hate mod. (~1.5x as strong as Flash)

Combo Action: Savage Blade
Combo Bonus: Delivers an attack with a potency of 300, 5x hate mod, and reduces the current cooldown of ALL abilities (except itself) by 5 seconds.
---

This kind of ability, if coded as such, would give us an effective THREE combos!
RoH for straight aggro all the time.
Riot-Blessed for AoE aggro once we're out of MP for Flash, once in a while.
Savage-Blessed for boss fights to get a lil more aggro, and give us more flexibility with CD's.

Would this be overpowering... mmm, possibly. =)

For example, Rampart is on a 90s CD, so with this on a 15s refresh, you could use Rampart, then Blessed, and use Blessed on cooldown. After 4 uses of Blessed, Rampart would have 10 seconds left on its CD, so it'd effectively be a 70s CD, down from 90s.
For Sentinel, it would be exactly 9 uses to get Sentinel to refresh... Bringing its CD to 135s, down from 180s.

All in all, this would reduce the net CD on our... CD's, to ~76% of their current values.

Edit.
Been thinking about the best way to get this ability into the current lineup.
When I first saw Awareness, I thought "I guess there will be some boss that gets a large crit rate buff"... but that does not seem to be the case. All raid mobs have a low crit rate, so this ability is pretty useless.
So what we could do is:
Remove Awareness, and put Cover - yes Cover from Paladin - in its place. And make the existing trait for Awareness increase the range and duration of Cover, OR add a small ~25% damage mitigation effect to Cover. (Applied to damage received FROM the Covered person)
Move Shield Oath to 35, Spirits Within to 40, and put "Blessed Blade" in as the lvl 45 ability for Paladin.
Lastly, make Tempered Will a cross-class skill for Warrior.

[LOLyYOUcryin]

I never get the sense that they are underwhelming, just that they lack options. I would love for them to get a way where we can sacrifice enmity generation for an increase of DPS or shield block.

I personally would like to see them remove block rate all together and turn cover into "next attack is a block" on global cooldown and applies 0 damage/enmity.

I would also like to see a damage ability added that uses mp so that we can move to a riot blade combo for bonus damage when enmity is not an issue. Maybe add it to something like tempered will or awareness since those are rarely thought of as is.

This would at least give us options to make on the go for those fights where there really isn't much for us to think about.

dont ever play PLD again please.

[LOLyYOUcryin]

Play more end game. PLD just have more tools...for everything.

Wars have better upkeep but matters very little in endgame. SE doesn't like warriors...or perhaps they are continuing to evaluate how they design fights. 2.2 is far more fairer then 2.1, but still a far cry, from war anything.

Heck pretty much every content in 2.0 and 2.1 is completely war-phobic.

PLD is king of end game, and that's not on paper.

as it should be. i have both. but PLD for life yo!

[Instrumentality]

A tank that's asleep is a dead tank, and if you can stay awake while tanking as a Paladin, science should extract your blood and inject it into the human population so we can get an extra 8 hours of being awake per day, because you are the next evolution of humanity.

Where do I go to donate? I feel pretty alive when playing my Paladin.

[Codek]

dont ever play PLD again please.

[LOLyYOUcryin]

yeah exactly... nope. never again, generate less threat and more DPS? not sure if you are high or trolling.