Sorry OP, you make a lot of good points - however, just as we compared how Dark Knight would do in old fights compared to Paladins we have to look at how Paladins fare in the new content. The fact is new savage fights have strict DPS requirements and you are vastly underestimating how much Dark Knights do in compassion to Paladin. It's not 100 DPS, it's a couple hundred. Dark Knights self healing rotation is also their DPS rotation capable of putting up around 700 in Grit while ranking. PLD can't do that, it can't come anywhere near it. Not only that, we handle a majority of the tank busters better than Paladin. The time in between matters very little when we have bards and machinists recovering the mana of our healers and the amount of damage going out between tank busters being fairly negligible. PLD has issues.