PLD dps needs to be buffed, current dps a joke

[Ivellior]

I normally wouldn't post anything since I believe I have covered the subject with the previous posts, but I'll make an exception because I see the very same people who are claiming that PLD dps is fine and that PLD should sacrifice defences for more dps claiming that DRK needs to get more physical mitigation without sacrificing anything.

This will a rather long post, might seem a bit off topic but I feel like saying it.
First of all lets get define a few things in the current META which I believe most people will agree on:
1. In raids there are 2 kinds of damage a tank takes: Autoattacks and tank busters. Auto attacks right now are pretty much irrelevant since you can basically tank them in your dps stance and you (and your healer) wont even a break a sweat doing it. Tank busters require tank stance and a cooldown to survive.
There might a be a few power attacks in between that do non-trivial damage but you can usually take them head on and live. You could use a spare cooldown or go to tank stance for these attacks if you feel sorry for your healer, but it's on something that you must use ccooldowns.
2. Parry is bad. You can look up in this thread and other threads to see why.
3. The most optimal way to play a tank is get enough defences to survive the tank busters and put everything else in damage.

Next, I explain why I believe that DRK and PLD pretty much have the same cooldowns and similar survivability in raids. So let's start by comparing their cooldowns:
1. Rampart and Shadowskin is the same thing.
2. Sentinel and Shadow Wall are the same in every aspect but Shadow Wall reduces 10% less damage than Sentinel.
3. Both can cross-class Foresight
4. DRK can cross-class Awareness
5. DRK can cross-class Convalescence
6. PLD has Bulwark and DRK has Dark Dance. Neither is good as a raid cooldown because parry (and PLD shield is just another parry mechanic) is bad.
Dark Dance is +30% parry for 20 secs with 1 min cooldown where as Bulwark is 60% block for 15 secs with a 3 min cooldown. Both of these skills need a large number of monsters attacking you to really be effective.
That means that they will only probably be effective in dungeon speed runs where you have a dozen of monsters attacking you. Using Dark Arts with Dark Dance for the extra evasion makes the skill just as good, if not better for this scenario.
In raids the PLD will probably save Bulwark when he is running low on TP in order to use gain TP (the DRK equivalent of spamming unmend) and the DRK to help trigger reprisal. Both of the work great for their intended purposes.
7. PLD has Hallowed Ground and DRK has Living Death. Hallowed Ground is better than Living Death and no Living Death is not crap as most people say. (I will go into more detail on these later).

So basically DRK looses 10% from Shadow wall, the extra parry from shield, has a worse "I will not die" cooldown. Instead he gains overall more single target damage, WAY more AOE damage (since PLD has almost none) and a magic defence cooldown.
However the WAR Hivemind thinks it's fine to buff DRK defences without loosing anything (contrary to what they are saying for paladin) and will collectively present "Hallowed" or "Living Death is bad" as an argument.

Is Hallowed better than Livin Death? Yes and it's more PUG friendly. Is Living Death bad? No and let me explain why.
Hallowed Ground, Holmgang and Living Death fulfil the "I will not die button" role in raids. They all work well for that purpose, with Hallowed being the easiest on the healers. I have posted this again on this thread and you can look it up for more details.
Now let see why Living Death is not bad. Living Death is basically Holmgang without the bind, without the need to have a target and with more lenient timer and duration. If it didn't have the "you die unless you get healed X hp (where X your life total)" it would have just been a much better Holmgang.
I think the death part is mostly to balance it, since WARs would go crazy if it didn't have that.

The most obvious way to use it, is the tank buster cooldown. You will basically pop it a little before the tankbuster, take the tank buster hit from the boss, and continue doing what you were doing before as the healers are healing you. Holmgang works the same way and PLD will use Hallowed the same way (with the difference being the healers wont have to heal you while hallowed is up).
Sure it's not as good a Hallowed and it will give your healers more anxiety than Holmgang but it also gives your healers much more effective time to top you up. With Living Death you get up to 10secs to get hit and then another 10 to get healed, with Holmgang you have 6 secs in total, so if you mess up and use it too early and leave your healer with 1 or 2 secs afterwards to heal you, dying from an auto attack can be a real possibility.
What most people fail to mention is how great it synergies with WHM's Benediction. If the WHM saves his Benediction for Living Death, that means that the DRK doesn't need healing from the time he poped the cooldown, until the death counter reaches 2 or 1 sec.
So in the worse case scenario you are looking at 10 secs that the DRK wont be needing healing. However since you have 10 secs before you need to get hit and 10 secs afterwards, if the player is skilled enough he can easily get 15 seconds that he wont be needing healing.
It's probably not that great for tankbusters with a long casting time but it's great for those that are instant or have a short casting time (like the hand on T3 savage before it splits). However it has the downside that getting the most out of it depends on player skill.
So if you don't have a WHM (or you are in PUG) it's like Holmgang (Worse if you are in a PUG). If you have a WHM and he uses benediction it's way better than Holmgang, since you can safely get around 12-15 secs that you wont be needing healing.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying that DRK shouldn't get more physical mitigation. Heck I'm not even saying he should loose anything for getting it. He should get more physical mitigation because it's something that will make DRK better.
I'm posting this mostly to point out the hypocrisy of the WAR hivemind that is saying the PLD shouldn't get more dps, but somehow it's fine to have a PLD with more damage as long as it has another name and doesn't have a shield (because parry is good for PLD apparently?).

Like I said before, I don't think they should change the classes but rather change the tank META (ie the way raids are made) so that you can be a tank and not a dps with more defensive cooldowns and more HP. I find it sad that the only defensive stat (parry) is the worst stat you can get.

And to add something meaningful in this conversation, besides my rant that is, if you want to balance tanks in the current META (where tanks need to pull big numbers) you should do the following:
1. Change Shadow Wall to 40% reduction like Sentinel
2. Remove the "death" side effect from Living Death. It's now a Holmgang with longer duration, no bind and no need for a target.
3. Give PLD and DRK the same single target damage as MT and OT.
Now you have 2 tanks that pretty much survive the same and do the same damage. If you go PLD you have a slightly better "I wont die button" and physical resistance, but you the loose aoe damage and the extra magical resistance. If you go DRK you gain AOE and magical resistance but you loose some physical mitigation from the shield and you have a slightly worse "I wont die button". So they are pretty much interchangeable and you can just pick the one that you like playing more.
While that will pretty much balance PLD and DRK, you still need to balance them compared to WAR (so that you can have a any combination of tanks instead of WAR + Something that you have now). I'd say do the following:
4. Increase WAR healing in defiance from 20% to 25%
6. Remove bind (or make it toggle-able) for Holmgang and change it so that it wont require a target.
7. Increase PLD and DRK single target damage around 10%-15%. That way PLD/DRK and WAR will be closer to WAR damage-wise (but still below him) and WAR will survive pretty much the same as them.

As final note, the whole situation with the tanking raid meta (where the developers say want tanks to tank and not do damage, the tank items are full of parry and VIT and then you get a raid that is the exact opposite) makes me feel that they the team who is designing the raids is living in a tower on a different castle far away from the castle in which the team that designs the classes and items lives in.