PLD dps needs to be buffed, current dps a joke

[Casper]

1) Pld is more sturdy for a number of reasons. Shield alone is 5 to 10% reduced physical damage, native, without doing anything. While not of much use regarding tank busters, it does mean that pld are easier to heal outside of tank busters. In particular, when healers are focused on the party, the MT taking reduced "day to day" damage means healers are not as stressed by having to heal on two fronts at once. Another point is that they naturally get their damage reduction debuff while main tanking. They ARE going to use rage of halone. I am currently in a Pld/War group with no ninja. Having the Pld MT means we have close to 100% uptime on both path and halone debuff. That combination is the only one where you will have close to 100% uptime on 2 10% damage reduction debuffs. Reprisal from Drk is nowhere near 100% uptime, and should the War MT, then it is not realistic to maintain both path and halone up, since that means the MT not using his aggro combo while the pld use his.

2) The utility of pld cannot be understated either. You are brushing it off like it is nothing. As far as i know, almost any group went into A2S with a pld, and for good reason -- their sturdiness along with their utility are invaluable in there. Their aoe shield is extremely usefull to mitigate big aoe hits. Cover has lots of great uses; in A2S, covering a healer targeted by snipers really make some waves much easier. It is by no mean "mandatory" but it make some things soother. HG remain an amazing tool to push your group through your current struggling point to experience more of a fight. It is better than the Drk and War equivalent by miles, allowing healers to catch up when behind, providing a substantial DPS boost to the group by allowing an insane amount of dps from healers for 10 to 12 seconds, when it is not simply allowing you to bypass some hard parts purely and simply.

3) The dps difference is ridiculously low with other tanks.

It seems you have started ignoring empirical facts and just started sticking to that one fulltime sword oath no rage of halone parse as the gospel of truth, as if it genuinely demonstrated PLD's massive DPS drop when going into Shield Oath.

Well what it seems is that you are trying to compare the dps of warrior that are tank dancing as much as possible with Pld staying in shield oath all the time. It really is a case of "GIT GUD" -- i'm sorry that's all there is to it.

Here is a video of a clear of A3S using a warrior and pld. The Pld did 650 dps, the warrior 778. That it despite the Pld main tanking the whole phase 1, the whole phase 2, and one more cascade phase in phase 4 than the warrior. Despite all this time main tanking (and thus having to use shield oath for a lot of it, and having to use rage of halone both for debuffs and aggro), there is only a 128 difference in dps. It is almost certain that should they have decided to reverse the roles: 1) the warrior would most likely not have done much more than the Pld, and 2) that would have come at the cost of a serious decrease in the safety of the MT.

You can continue having your head in the sand if you want. But the facts are here for you to consider. Pld is doing a MARGINAL amount of dps lower than the other tanks. It has only been significant for world first group on a3s without weapons, a feat that Yoshida admitted himself he did not think was possible. They won literally 1 second before wiping, if even that, they had to squeeze just EVERY bit of dps in, hence the choice of a Drk instead of a Pld. For anyone else, the difference is so minim it doesn't matter -- if anything it is BETTER to attempt A3S with a pld than a drk for anyone else, because it is a physical heavy fight, and Pld provide much more safety for the group compared to a Drk.

War just work amazingly as an OT. Their kit is super synergetic, as others have said, and being in an OT position allow them to maximize it, by keeping eye up 100%, having path usable as much as they want, making awesome use of unchained. War MT / Pld OT used to be higher dps, but that's not true anymore, now that War has their DPS stance and Pld have options to do more damage as a MT.

TL;DR: all three tanks are quite balanced at the moment. Pld offers the best Physical mitigation by far, and requires less day-to-day healing, while offering significant utility advantages over the other tanks. Drk offers the most mitigation in magic heavy fights, and provide slightly more DPS than a Pld as MT. War just work much better as an OT than a MT, not that they are "bad" at MT per say, but their kit can become ackward as MT (most notably due to the pressure between eye, path, and butcher), whereas it is pure gold as OT.
So you just have War best as OT, Pld best MT on physical encounters, Drk best MT on magical encounters. All three have their place in the wheel of life, and all is good.

[NFaelivrin]

1)Well what it seems is that you are trying to compare the dps of warrior that are tank dancing as much as possible with Pld staying in shield oath all the time. It really is a case of "GIT GUD" -- i'm sorry that's all there is to it.

Spare me your condescension. There are real reasons why a PLD who stance dances as much as a WAR does will do less damage objectively speaking given an equal skill level, 100% of the time. Since you apparently don't seem to realize these by yourself I guess I'll have to point them out.

1) In Sword Oath, PLD's extra auto-attack damage accounts for somewhere between 10% and 13% of their DPS, depending on weapon delay.
2) PLD has no means whatsoever to ignore the damage penalty from Shield Oath.
3) PLD has the single clunkiest stance dancing system of all 3 tanks, with every stance switch interrupting combos and resulting in a lost GCD.

Assuming that Sword Oath's extra added damage is 10%-13% of PLD's DPS, and the fact that Shield Oath applies the 80% damage reduction and entirely removes the extra damage from Sword Oath, PLD's DPS goes down to somewhere around 70% of the Sword Oath base, lower than Warrior's 75% from Defiance, and not taking into account that simply going into Shield Oath for high damage phases results in lost GCDs, might interrupt combos if done at an inappropriate time, and also that unlike Warrior you have 0 means whatsoever to sidestep the major damage penalty from Shield Oath, you don't have off-GCD stance dances, you don't have Unchained, and you don't have any moves that ignore the damage penalty. Essentially, every single second you spend in Shield Oath increases the DPS gap between PLD and WAR, and thus, assuming you stance dance an equal amount, the DPS difference between PLD and WAR will be higher than comparing both of them in fulltime DPS stance.

This is still a thing? Why are people still pretending that their world first? By this time any tank should be able to clear savage A1-A3 due to gear progression.

It's still "a thing" because you people seem incapable of understanding that just because a raid can be, feasibly, once gear levels get high enough, be cleared with any composition, it doesn't change the fact that imbalances create optimal compositions which are easier to clear with because they're objectively better. You can probably clear A3S with, of all things, double AST, once gear catches up enough. Does this mean double AST is good? No. You could probably clear all of Final Coil with a DRG pre 2.45 despite the class being a broken, clunky mess of punishing positionals with the lowest DPS of all melees and astoundingly awful survivability against magic damage. That it's possible doesn't mean it's a good idea, and any static that is serious about progression will prefer to go for optimal party compositions because few people enjoy wiping a few extra dozen times on a raid because one of your members wants to be special and bring a class that has been demonstrated to be inferior at the job. You can probably bear with it if you raid casually or with friends and thus your attachment to that one goof who insists on playing AST forever is because they're your friend, but it doesn't change the fact you'd probably still clear faster and more efficiently if that person switched jobs.

Ultimately it feels weird that you all have such a kneejerk reaction to PLD requiring some buffs to bring them to a similar level to WAR in terms of usefulness, the buffs PLD requires are frankly quite minor and basically boil down to "make Shield Oath less punishing to occasionally swap to". PLD Sword Oath DPS is decent and within acceptable parameters, the major holes in PLD as a class are 1) Shield Oath sucks compared to every other tank stance in terms of damage 2) Stance dancing for PLD (and to a lesser degree DRK) is unnecessarily clunky 3) Both PLD and DRK need some means to restore their TP as either OT or MT and 4) PLD having no AoE at all is an oddity and at this point in the game makes no sense.

[Phoenicia]

Snip.

Assuming PLD can even dance like a WAR, PLD is only ~8% DPS behind WAR. PLD isn't the only clunky stance dancer and DRK pays more MP with Grit alone than PLD going to Sword Oath and back to Shield Oath. Usually by the time you want to go back to Shield Oath, it's almost full. MP is not even a vital resource for PLD and is very easy to refill. I won't argue why PLD stances should remain the same way and not be similar to WAR's stances.

So, it is fair to calculate the bonus lost from Sword Oath and add it to the malus from Shield Oath, but not the bonus from Deliverance and loss of 200 potency per Inner Beast that WAR loses? Your logic is astounding.

You want to throw some percentages and potencies at random? I can do that too! So let's do it!

DoTs You have the second highest potency skill in the game: Goring Blade at 540. That's higher than *gasp* Fell Cleave! Fracture is shit in comparison at 300 potency and 80 TP and no wrath/abandon generated.

Combo Finishers You have Royal Authority at 340. That's 60 potency higher than Delirium (DRK's strongest non-DA finisher). That's also 80~120 potency higher than any of the WAR combo finishers. It is actually so strong that the only DPS with a stronger finisher is DRG!

Off GCDs You have 2 VERY potent oGCDs on short CDs in SW (300) and CoS (250).

WAR has Maim for a reason: It has generally lower average potency on all its combos than PLD and DRK and WAR has no oGCDs.

More to the point:

PLD is no effing where near AST. AST is pure garbage. AST is almost as bad as 2.0 WAR.

PLD is no where near pre-2.45 DRG. DRG wasn't as garbage as you make it sound. Content has been cleared with DRG at a relevant time. People didn't need to "outgear" T13 to beat it with a DRG. The problem back then was MNK's INT Down was too strong to ignore. DRG was second highest single target DPS and did at least twice or triple the DPS of a monk in AoE. DRG was fine in SCoB and DRG only got into a bad spot when NIN came out. NIN did higher DPS than DRG and increased raid DPS with TA and Goad so it pushed DRG out of raid comps. DRG was never in a state similar to AST today. Actually for the entirety of 2.0 and most of 2.1, DRG had a VERY solid raid spot when DRG/BRD/BRD/BLM was a thing. Bringing DPS balance when it's been dancing so much with far more (7) classes to fill twice as many spots as tanks is totally irrelevant.

Bringing up DPS imbalance is irrelevant since tanks are FAR MORE BALANCED than DPS. Also get it through your thick skull that Lucrezia dropped a DPS class for another as well.

Again, you are not Lucrezia or even anywhere near world 200th. You play on a whole different level. I'll quote myself:

Let's face it, there is no effing way you'll play half as good as Lucrezia. Reasons you shouldn't compare yourself to them:

1- You do not spend 18 hours a day banging your head on the same boss and throwing potions and waiting on CDs in every pull.
2- By the time you do any of the content they did, you have at least 2 or 3 more pieces of 10 ilvs higher.
3- You do not have the technical knowledge that Bleeding Edge groups work with. The very fact that you are crying here over PLD's DPS is proof enough.

Any uneducated misinformation you get from their decisions do not affect your average raid balance in ANY way, form or shape. Stop bringing them up. Lucrezia dropped a tank for another tank to squeeze DPS, so what? They dropped AN ACTUAL DPS CLASS for another. It's called "Bringing the right tools for the job." It's strategy and class synergy, not imbalance.

Let's not forget that Lucrezia tried with a PLD MT first before they finally decided to go DRK. And the main reason for DRK over PLD is INT Down since they dropped the monk. Yes, PLD is THAT good.

Ultimately it feels weird that you have such a kneejerk reaction to PLD having slightly lower DPS than WAR when its main role isn't even to DPS.

Again, I'll quote myself:

If you do not let your healers do more DPS as a PLD over a WAR or DRK, getgud. (you or the healers or both)
If you are more than 150 DPS behind a WAR MT as MT with the slashing debuff, getgud.
If you are more than 100 DPS behind a WAR OT as OT with the slashing debuff, getgud.
If you feel unsafe, play WAR, if you still feel unsafe, getgud.

If you do not want to do the above, of if you are unhappy with how PLD plays still or think it's too damned under-powered, don't effing play it. There is a reason there are different classes. We have 3 tanks now.

No body is saying tank DPS is irrelevant. Difference between the tank classes DPS however, is irrelevant!

Honestly I can't take you seriously if you argue these points any more.