Isn't it about time for SE to bring parity to paladins

[Donjo]

There are far FAR better ways to boost Paladin dps without a measly 2nd hit to AA worth barely anything.

I'll tackle this one. The difference between Shield Oath and No Oath should be, as the tooltips suggest, 20% damage.

I was doing some testing of the effects on additional Strength on the Paladin a bit ago and found that my Sword Oath DPS was approximately 31-33% higher than my Shield Oath DPS. Let's remove the 20% that the loss of Shield Oath gains us. That makes Sword Oath increase DPS by 11-13% when compared to No Oath.

That little bitty 50 potency hit goes a long way when it's constantly happening.

[zthebadger]

I don't know op. I think something some be done to make paladin actually fun to play. It just looks so boring from what I've seen. I don't think shield bash should not interrupt a combo. You need some sort of sacrifice to being able to use it so often imo.

But shield bash only stuns three times on one enemy, so once you use it three times on the same enemy, won't stun again. And it does come with a sacrifice, say an enemy is doing an aoe, you can stop it with stun, but if you're mid combo, it cancels the combo, so you need to start the combo again, you, I.e, fast, savage, rage is a combo, but, fast, savage, bash then rage of halone, is not, the rage of halone won't be counted in the combo. And if you don't do a shield bash to interupt your combo, you could use spirits within if the aoe is a magic attack, because not only does this have a potency of 300, it also silences the enemy.

[zthebadger]

As a paladin, people will probably find it weird when I say, shield oath and sword oath should not ignore the global cooldown, and this is for the sake of balance. If people can just freely switch between sword oath and shield oath mid combo, our enmity gaining abilities would overthrow the warrior by miles, and our damage would only end up tying with this. So far, no one even seems to be considering the fact that one single paladins buff alone reverses the detrimental effects of shield oath, shield oath increases your defence by 20%, and makes your ability to gain enmity greater, however it also reduces the damage you do by 20%. Fight or flight, increases damage dealt by 30% for 30 seconds . That's 30 seconds you can have, taking less damage, gaining more enmity, and doing 10% more damage than you would without the oaths on, and this increase in damage would affect the paladins ability to gain enmity too!

[zthebadger]

And now the next part of my reasoning. Highest damaging of the warriors and paladins moves, Inner beast, and spirits within. Spirits within, is better than inner beast. And here's why. Inner beast requires your wrath to be full, in a state of infuriation, so the criteria to use this attack is much stricter than spirits within, spirits within, it's potency simply decreases based on your health. So, even though inner beast has a much loewr reload time than spirits within, spirits within can be used much more than inner beast, in the middle of your combos that gain enmity, and this is because, with such a quick reload time and strict criteria to be met for inner beast, you'll be concentrating on gaining and keeping enmity, not using inner beast, however paladins can freely use spirits within every 30 seconds, without it being possibly detrimental to our enmity, as well as the fact it can interrupt magic aoes as it inflicts silence. And then we can discuss steel cyclone and circle of scorn

[zthebadger]

(and a quick note, spirits within potency hardly decreases as your either against non-dungeon enemies which don't do much to paladins, or your in a dungeon, where you have a healer backing you up) . Steel cyclone has the same criteria as inner beast, and as an aoe, is not as risky as inner beast in terms of enmity, as well as the fact that it provides some good damage with decent range. Circle of scorn, decent range, decent reload time, not on the global cool down, damage over time, and good for an enmity combo when combined with flash. So, with this reasoning, I can say that steel cyclone and circle of scorn are equally as good as eachother, although both can surpass eachother depending on the situation.

[zthebadger]

I have many more reasons but don't want to spam this thread, so I'll leave it down to my final opinion, not a fact, because a one on one pvp fight is mostly based on skill, I've found. But it is an opinion that I think can be taken and used in pvm aswell. Paladin, can beat warrior any day in a one on one, no healer fight. Reasons behind this you ask? Simple. A warrior is based around taking the damage and recovering it as a tank, a paladin, reducing the damage and even avoiding it completely, this fact alone, weakens the warriors tanking ability. A warrior has more damaging moves than a paladin, and a paladin has more buffs, so where a paladin can reduce the damage taken by the warrior, cancel out the warriors holmgang using tempered will, a warrior has to use his abilities to heal himself while attacking, which can be stopped or weakend by the paladin aswell!

[Giantbane]

I don't know about "parity", but both of those requests are good ideas for PLD.

I would prefer Sword/Shield Oath to function like the Rogue's "kiss of the X" abilities so they may be swapped between GCDs and does not disrupt the current combo.

And I don't think there's any problem with Shield Bash being changed so that it does not break combos (but is still on the GCD).

[Ceodore]

Stuff in 5 posts

Just a note, you can edit your post and edits ignore character limits. I didn't read anything you wrote really, but yeah, 5 posts in a row can be all put into 1 I think. 2 at the most I hope. I'll go back and comment on anything though I might want to in another post.

[Ceodore]

Turns out, I wanted to comment on everything...

But shield bash only stuns three times on one enemy, so once you use it three times on the same enemy, won't stun again.

Not a balancing trait, as this applies to all player stuns, so don’t know what this has to do with anything.

And it does come with a sacrifice, say an enemy is doing an aoe, you can stop it with stun, but if you're mid combo, it cancels the combo, so you need to start the combo again, you, I.e, fast, savage, rage is a combo, but, fast, savage, bash then rage of halone, is not, the rage of halone won't be counted in the combo. And if you don't do a shield bash to interupt your combo, you could use spirits within if the aoe is a magic attack, because not only does this have a potency of 300, it also silences the enemy.

Mentioning we also have a silence on a 30s Cooldown that doesn’t interrupt combo doesn’t help with getting any balance toward Shield Bash, since both are on the same class, which means that class has more than 1 crowd control tool to use, where Warrior (ignoring Holmgang) only has 1 on a cooldown with a shorter initial duration. So points go to warrior with this argument. Sacrifice combo or not, Shield Bash is incredibly powerful, and 10 seconds of stun lock is THE MOST powerful crowd control ability available to any melee class in this game. The only ones with more practical application is sleep on WHM and BLM, and that is interrupted by damage. So yeah, Shield Bash is really just fine as it is. I’d gladly give up one combo to save my party a world of pain, even if it means I have to OT instead because the other tank just wants to spam enmity skills. The fact is, the GCD, the combo issue, are both non-issues to a talented tank, meaning this isn’t a matter of balance/unbalance, but a matter of “I just want it to be easier”.

As a paladin, people will probably find it weird when I say, shield oath and sword oath should not ignore the global cooldown, and this is for the sake of balance. If people can just freely switch between sword oath and shield oath mid combo, our enmity gaining abilities would overthrow the warrior by miles, and our damage would only end up tying with this. So far, no one even seems to be considering the fact that one single paladins buff alone reverses the detrimental effects of shield oath, shield oath increases your defence by 20%, and makes your ability to gain enmity greater, however it also reduces the damage you do by 20%.

Okay, these skills being off GCD would be a better balance actually than I considered. I must give a lot of thanks to Donjo who corrected me a few posts ago with this –

I'll tackle this one. The difference between Shield Oath and No Oath should be, as the tooltips suggest, 20% damage.

I was doing some testing of the effects on additional Strength on the Paladin a bit ago and found that my Sword Oath DPS was approximately 31-33% higher than my Shield Oath DPS. Let's remove the 20% that the loss of Shield Oath gains us. That makes Sword Oath increase DPS by 11-13% when compared to No Oath.

That little bitty 50 potency hit goes a long way when it's constantly happening.

If these skills were off GCD, that wouldn’t really throw our enmity off the charts. For 1, if you use Rage of Halone while in sword oath, it will do less enmity than if you used it in Shield Oath. This goes for Savage Blade as well. So really, the only skill it would technically effect (enmity wise) is Fast Blade, which is only a 150 potency to begin with. You might also see one proc of Sword Oath’s extra hit switching between the two during Rage of Halone combo rotations if you only used Sword Oath during Fast Blade. Furthermore, that would be vastly balanced by the loss of MP while switching. Even with a Riot Blade combo (I can’t see how this would really apply that heavily to Riot Blade besides maybe increase the damage some, which would have very little to do with enmity) I doubt you’d be able to just spam switch these skills. These bonuses, if you call them that, are hardly worth risking a 1-2 second window of a possible big hit from a boss where you don’t mitigate the damage with Shield Oath, so even with them off GCD, I doubt I’d use them like this (As I am assuming some people are thinking of doing).

Fight or flight, increases damage dealt by 30% for 30 seconds . That's 30 seconds you can have, taking less damage, gaining more enmity, and doing 10% more damage than you would without the oaths on, and this increase in damage would affect the paladins ability to gain enmity too!

If you use Fight or Flight while in Shield Oath, the damage dealt increase is actually less than it would be while out of Shield Oath. This buff effects damage being done after your ‘perma-buffs’ so essentially, you’re doing an increase of 30% of the damage you’d normally do under Shield Oath, which is really only an increase of about maybe 25%, probably even less. While yes, this skill DOES effect enmity generation, doing it while out of Shield Oath generates less than while in it. So the balance comes from the fact that this skill is less effective while in Shield Oath (not actually a 10% increase in normal damage outside of Shield Oath) but while out of Shield Oath with Sword Oath on, you get the full real 30% damage increase plus with no hindrance from Shield Oath and an increase on AA and the extra attack from Sword Oath (Again, thank you Donjo)

And now the next part of my reasoning. Highest damaging of the warriors and paladins moves, Inner beast, and spirits within. Spirits within, is better than inner beast. And here's why. Inner beast requires your wrath to be full, in a state of infuriation, so the criteria to use this attack is much stricter than spirits within, spirits within, it's potency simply decreases based on your health. So, even though inner beast has a much loewr reload time than spirits within, spirits within can be used much more than inner beast, in the middle of your combos that gain enmity, and this is because, with such a quick reload time and strict criteria to be met for inner beast, you'll be concentrating on gaining and keeping enmity, not using inner beast, however paladins can freely use spirits within every 30 seconds, without it being possibly detrimental to our enmity, as well as the fact it can interrupt magic aoes as it inflicts silence. And then we can discuss steel cyclone and circle of scorn

A few quick corrections. Inner Beast can be used between skills without interrupting combo. Its only requirement is the GCD. It’s more like PLD Shield Swipe in this sense. Also, generating 5 stacks of Wrath takes at most 3 full combos, which = about an effective cooldown of 20-22 seconds, less though is you have a lingering stack of Wrath from a final skill of a previous cooldown. So the real CD of Inner Beast is between 14-22 seconds, less than Spirits Within. Furthermore, with Infuriate at their disposal, Warriors can almost effectively “pop” Inner Beast, with enough timing and talent. While Spirits Within does silence, there are only so many applications in this game for silences. It’s a debuff with really a strict list of criteria. So no, Inner Beast is not detrimental to enmity, and I’d much rather have the 20% damage reduction for 6 seconds than a silence. This is the only skill I am actually jealous that warriors got, but they really needed it. It, and I guess Vengence too, but, you know, balance and all… maybe Steel Cyclone too >.>

(and a quick note, spirits within potency hardly decreases as your either against non-dungeon enemies which don't do much to paladins, or your in a dungeon, where you have a healer backing you up) . Steel cyclone has the same criteria as inner beast, and as an aoe, is not as risky as inner beast in terms of enmity, as well as the fact that it provides some good damage with decent range. Circle of scorn, decent range, decent reload time, not on the global cool down, damage over time, and good for an enmity combo when combined with flash. So, with this reasoning, I can say that steel cyclone and circle of scorn are equally as good as eachother, although both can surpass eachother depending on the situation.

Steel Cyclone has MUCH more enmity on it, especially after the buffs given to it in earlier patches. Warriors constantly and consistently have better AOE enmity generation than Paladins, but have trade offs in other areas such as (noted earlier) CC skills, interruption skills, and ease on healers (debatable, but kind of true). A Paladin can boss agro easier though, with equivalent gear, we also get Fight or Flight, plus Warrior Defiance decreases their damage by 25%, where Paladin Shield Oath is only 20% reduction. Warriors gets a huge health pool, ideal for mob fights, where spike damage from lots of enemies is easily absorbed by a larger health pool. Paladins have slightly more straight forward mitigation, where taking 1 big hit from 1 source is reduced a lot. While out of tank stances, Warriors will wipe the floor with a Paladin in the damage department too, especially with buffs and debuffs to increase their damage done. When tanking a single target though, a Warrior doesn’t have a damage increase buff they can just pop on Cooldown with no work being put in or some kind of draw back, they have to spend nearly an entire rotation of non-enmity inducing skills to pop Maim, which doesn’t even negate all of their 25% damage reduction, which I should remind, effects Maim as well, so the 20% increase is not actually an effective 20% either. Or they have to spend 5 stacks of wrath to pop Unchained. They can also use Berzerk, but during a boss fight, good luck finding a healer who is willing to cleanse that Pacification debuff over maybe a poison or damage down debuff on another person, plus, it's only 5 seconds anyways.

I have many more reasons but don't want to spam this thread, so I'll leave it down to my final opinion, not a fact, because a one on one pvp fight is mostly based on skill, I've found. But it is an opinion that I think can be taken and used in pvm aswell. Paladin, can beat warrior any day in a one on one, no healer fight. Reasons behind this you ask? Simple. A warrior is based around taking the damage and recovering it as a tank, a paladin, reducing the damage and even avoiding it completely, this fact alone, weakens the warriors tanking ability. A warrior has more damaging moves than a paladin, and a paladin has more buffs, so where a paladin can reduce the damage taken by the warrior, cancel out the warriors holmgang using tempered will, a warrior has to use his abilities to heal himself while attacking, which can be stopped or weakend by the paladin aswell!

With this point, you MIGHT be right. Without a healer, Paladin may still fair better than a Warrior. But allow me to reword this a bit to bring out facts. 1. Warrior Defiance relies on healing received, but all their self-healing skills are based on damage done or attack strength (See Second Wind cross class from Monk), and use a % of the damage done as healing, healing that does not benefit from their Defiance buff. 2. Paladin skills, while they don’t heal, give them the ability to flat out reduce damage taken, or negate it all together, meaning they get the full effect of these skills, healer or not. (These two effects are what are known as “In the moment” effects and “After the moment” effects) Yes, Warriors do have more damaging moves, and that DOES mean that they will bring down a mob faster, so maybe they can rely on DPSing down a mob quickly before they do run out of health. However, a Paladin may take longer, but will be able to survive longer fights easier because of it. So again, tradeoffs are weighted differently depending on the situations. I don’t and can’t know which will effectively be better at any fight without a healer, as the outcome can be vastly changed with RNG. Say the Paladin doesn’t block enough, or the Warrior parries more, because the RNG gods favor one or the other? Say the Warrior gets a critical hit with a healing skill? Or the Paladin gets critically hit from a mob? So again, speculation and postulations.

Edit: TL;DR: This, that, and the other one at bat. "It's all just a bit whack", said the cat in the hat.

Note to Donjo and others who I can't remember: I have newly found love and appreciation for Sword Oath and Strength Trinkets after doing several second coils, thanks a bunch!

[Sokerimuro]

A notion on the Shield Oath vs. Sword Oath discussion/them being off-GCD and for any worries that someone brought up with the enmity factors:

Shield Oath, by far and wide with reliable testing (amongst Valks data) has been noted to provide an enmity modifier of x2, which multiplies with the existing enmity modifiers of skills. Aka. RoH has x5 combo multiplier, with Shield Oath up that becomes x10. And just to point out, Warrior has same multipliers.

So for the Oath dancing to actually affect enmity in an INCREASING manner, PLD in Sword Oath would need to push out over twice as much damage as he/she does in Shield Oath. Not much more complicated and not much more needs to be said on that. (And this takes into account only skills that actually do damage, Flash is affected by Shield Oath, but not in any manner by Sword Oath)

There is and would be no balance issue with the Oaths being off-GCD/not breaking our Combo. Especially with the manacost being in place.