All this talk about Paladin needing buffs. Let's Royal Authority Brainstorm.

[Azorius]

aaannndd ...turn Spell Speed and Skill Speed into a single stat - Speed.
(And while we're at it, move Speed's effect on DoT damage from... 72.5 per 1% iirc to something a bit more in line with Determination?)

I suspect SE will do this with gear before long. Already merging the two when it comes to buffs in the form of attack speed.

[VargasVermillion]

More PLDs should be willing to get slaying acc and/or spec str if they want more damage.

[Synestra]

Paladin is fine. People choosing to not wear slaying accessories are the problem. If you want to do more DPS, and use Halone less, then get rid of your fending garbage.

Gotta agree with this as i already skip RoH in AS1 and go full RA spammage, i might use RoH now and then but mostly its RA spam while keeping Goring DoT up and there has been no aggro issues at all.

[Synestra]

Actually i'm pretty sure that SE is working on the enmity of PLD.

If this is only thing they will adjust i will be extremely dissapointed, its the Clemency, Divine Veil and propably Shelltron that could use some love instead lolenmity

[Arannon]

So, Seku brought it up in another thread, and I wanted to bring it here since the suggested involved the setup from this one...

Basically, letting Royal Authority provide the paladin with a way to speed up our casting. I really like this idea, for a number of reasons, but first I've gotta do a little armchair developer-ing and explain how I would see it working. Their initial suggestion was just a simple way to speed up casting, but that immediately set MY mind off on this idea...

Royal Authority would provide a buff thats a mix of Lightspeed from Astrologians and Dark Arts from Dark Knights...in that it would be a flat 1-1.5 second casting time reduction for the paladin (Thats the Lightspeed half), that is lost when a spell is cast (Thats the dark arts half).

So what does this provide? Well first off it makes Clemency a little more friendly for us to use on others. Right now 90% of the time Clemency is pure overhealing because the other healers get to people BEFORE mine can go off...even if I start casting first. A buff like this means once every 7-ish seconds or so (Global Cooldowns on the combo and all), I could toss out a 1.5 second Clemency. Nothing else changes, its MP cost is still about half of my bar, which, I feel is enough of a limiting factor on the ability.

Secondly, it gives us options. A fast casting heal is very useful, even with a large MP cost. We, however, have the option of using ours on others and still getting a moderate heal from doing so...we ALSO have stoneskin, a more moderate MP costing ability that provides some pre-emptive shielding...same cast time as Clemency before reduction. Technically also gives us cross class cure, that oft-maligned red-headed stepchild of our potential cross class abilities...now imagine weaving its half second cast time in via macro after a circle of scorn, or a spirits within, or a flash...if only it wasn't on the global cooldown...heh..just a little bit of self healing. (Very little bit...)

Finally, it gives us something to build upon in future expansions...Think back to the level 60 paladin job quest, and the ability that was used, Sultan's Brand, a large cone for heavy damage. In the fight itself it was on a five second cast timer when used against you...imagine if we got something like that, a heavy hitting attack that had a cast time which we had to mitigate through the use of Royal Authority. Imagine a trait that lets us STACK this buff, and suddenly instant cast clemencies and stoneskins every 15 seconds or so, and taking something like a 6 second heavy cone AoE and turning it into a 3 second heavy cone aoe. Continue limiting factors to our MP or having recast times and it could be not only balanced, but an interesting mechanic for us to build on.

SO, yeah, thats the idea I had at like 5 am while reading the suggestion from Seku in another thread about having RA provide a casting speed buff...felt like I needed to elaborate on that thought a bit more than I did in that thread...and this seemed like the place to stick it...

Total armchair devwork, sure I'm missing a few things that would make it broke as heck, but it could be a starting point, and could be really interesting in my opinion.

[DSaint]

I think RA combo need a raw dmg buff.
i'm not PLD LV 60 yet, but I was wondering... isnt Goring Blade more powerful than RA?

Doing some visual tests on dummy last night, doing GB combo over and over. First combo dot strike two times; second combo dot strike three times; third combo two times, and so on... [2,3,2,3... more or less, btw].
If it is 2 times, then GB combo have a 680 total potency***. If it is 3 times, 720 potency.
RA combo have a total 690.

So, whole RA combo is just 690 pot, while Gb can go from 680~720.

I dont know if I'm missing something, but... what you guys think about it?


*** It is not total potency, I know. But i'm talking about doing it over and over for a dps rotation.

[Sapphidia]

@DSaint you're sort of correct in that spamming goring blade combo and constantly clipping the DoT is more DPS than just spamming Royal Authority, but you've missed the point that if you do Goring -> Royal -> Royal you still have ticks of Goring Blade ticking "for free" during the Royal Authority combos which sort of bumps up the potency happening during those GCDs. Total Potency of Goring Blade is 830 if you let it tick the full 8 ticks, so one of those and two 690 Royals is better than three 680-720s.

[DSaint]

@DSaint you're sort of correct in that spamming goring blade combo and constantly clipping the DoT is more DPS than just spamming Royal Authority, but you've missed the point that if you do Goring -> Royal -> Royal you still have ticks of Goring Blade ticking "for free" during the Royal Authority combos which sort of bumps up the potency happening during those GCDs. Total Potency of Goring Blade is 830 if you let it tick the full 8 ticks, so one of those and two 690 Royals is better than three 680-720s.

Yeah, you right. I missed that point: GB ticks will still happen even if you go RA (after GB combo of course), so whole RA combo during that GCD with ticks will be 770-810 pot, while GB will still be 680-720 pot.

Thanks Sapphidia (: Main PLD whole game, so never worked with dots before (except some fractures).

[Seku]

If this is only thing they will adjust i will be extremely dissapointed, its the Clemency, Divine Veil and propably Shelltron that could use some love instead lolenmity

It's just what they noted on. But would also increase our damage some what by allowing us to stay in SwOath longer, possibly full time against good DPS.

I'd personally like to see our ability to self sustain ourselves go up. Makes us more flexible and beats in the ideal of healers not having to really focus on us as much as the other tanks, thus dps more in expert groups and for the inexperienced groups allows them to focus more on the DPS and themselves when mechanics roll through.

While one of my ideas was transferred over earlier. I'd personally like to see the following.

DV just activates (stupid that we need a cure to activate it.)
Blocking while casting needs to be implemented.
Cast times for Clemency and Stone skin need to be lowered to match GCD.
Shield Swipe's potency needs to be lowered, made into oGCD, and restore a small amount of TP.
And I'd like to see RA get something like a spell speed increase added onto it.



With the above suggestions it more or less allows PLD to further eat tank busters in both physical and magical fights and gives them more reliability as an OT there for support. The changes to shield swipe would up their MT damage slightly if the potency of swipe was lowered, but would aid what most PLD's have been using Shield swipe for in the first place in 2.0, Tp recovery and damage gain while MTing.

I don't really see these changes turning people away from their current mind sets of leaving pld for drk. As the reason behind that more or less has more to do with over all Raid set-up, which probably won't be fixed in this expansion since all tanks can do the encounters, just not all are "optimal". But would pave way for better moves later on in any future expansion and would make them really strong in their suited area of physical mitigation and slightly better at magical.