Savage Alexander and the Paladin Exodus

[Kyne_Lyons]

If players must play more than one job in end-game content, no problem. I leveled 2 tank jobs in case something happened, and I perform better as Dark Knight with less gear anyways. I would simply like the developers to acknowledge that Paladin is currently being intentionally left out of A4S by groups because due to current design they are a drain on resources for poor performance compared to the other two tanks. If the intention is that players must swap jobs in the middle of progression, then they should say so and tell players to plan on switching since Paladin is an underperforming job to bring to a raid. Spending nearly 2000 Esoterics on Paladin would hurt more if using i190 gear as Dark Knight would mean I would be a weaker tank. That's currently not the case.

[xaventh]

I think if the community as a whole took on the philosophy of Roles (Tanks, healers, magic dps, melee dps) are Jobs, and Jobs are specs these issues wouldnt even matter as much.

I know the underlying argument will be gear lockouts but in reality you can get 2 eso weapons in a 5 weeks as with full alex i190 that all tanks can share. Sure, the counter argument to that is its not optimal, but its absolutely plenty to clear the content up to AS4 and in that time your getting 210 gear as well and you provide your static with versatility for current and future raids. By the time you your knocking on AS4 you can choose what eso gear you pour into which spec and guess what, a few weeks later 24 man comes at i200! Voila.

My opinion is theres a mindset that dictates we need the highest ilvl possible. The only thing it does is cushions your mistakes and thats no excuse not to roll 2/3 tanks, healers, dps.

If the next cutting edge raid is mostly physical damage then drk is in the same boat and thats fine. Spec up!

[Kyne_Lyons]

I'm performing better than Paladin anyways with my i190 set on Dark Knight so I should be good. If the next raid is mostly physical damage, Paladin will still suffer from inferior DPS.

[Fated]

I'm performing better than Paladin anyways with my i190 set on Dark Knight so I should be good. If the next raid is mostly physical damage, Paladin will still suffer from inferior DPS.

Exactly. FFXIV "tanking" is all about doing the most damage you can while barely meeting the survival stat requirements. Paladin is and always has been the worst at this. Until this changes, Paladin will not have a spot in early raid progression now that a third tank job exists.

[Faeon]

It almost feels that SE want you to have multiple jobs and switch to what the content is dictating, at the moment it favours high dps tanks, so you should have at least all three tanks leveled up. And have a 200i weapon for the current tank job that is required, in this case WAR / DRK. Either that or SE has got some hidden trick or something.

[Keyln]

Balance is overrated.

[Gooner_iBluAirJGR]

Making more enrages soft(but not every enrage),

I miss soft enrage timers. If you were around for Titan hard-mode when ilv.70 was legit, Titan would use more Tumult's (AoE raid wide damage) the longer the fight progressed making it more and more difficult to keep the party alive if you were slow.
Coils T1 had something like this as well with Caduceus gaining damage stacks over time.

Even the instances with Hard Enrage timers in the 2.xx series were survivable to an extent. Coils T2, the room would pulse massive raid wide damage if you were slow—Coils T4 had the same thing.

Regarding the OP, I think more soft enrage timers would go a long way towards fixing the issues Paladins have in this meta but there are still other changes that would definitely be welcomed.

p.s. Hard Enrage timers are still fun but I think they've gone overboard lol. Every boss says "Fuc* You, I aint got time for this" after 8minutes in 3.0.

[Donjo]

2.0-2.1 Experiences

Oh, yes. I was there. Although I was braving Titan HM for a Monk Relic at that time, not a Tank Relic.

[Craiger]

Having to switch between jobs for different fights are a really bad excuse... Especially since you can't optimize with Eso spending. SE wants several possible combinations of jobs in groups, they don't want everyone to switch to one job.

I like that content have a high DPS check, but I would prefer if tanks actually played like real tanks, and not DPS with more defense... They could make bosses attack in such a way, that having a PLD with better defense, would be a good pick, and going for all out DPS would be impossible until you're a lot more geared.

Overall, the tanks are designed to have as little defense as possible for staying alive, then focus all on DPS... So if you don't need that extra defensive capability of PLD, they're not bringing anything to the fight.

So... PLD is the worst tank in the game at the moment. A4S might be the fight where it really shows, but it's not like they're much better(or better at all) in other fights...

Also, saying that SE intended for players to have better gear when doing A4S doesn't change anything... Their DPS would still be behind the others if everyone have better gear, and it would still be a problem for groups that isn't world first competitors. It's not like all groups do the same amount of DPS as Elysium or Lucrezia, and are held back by something else. It's the DPS that's holding back the groups, and even if the extra DPS isn't technically needed for these groups when they're more geared, it's needed for them.

[HorseBoots]

I think the biggest issue highlighted here can be called back to the current set of weekly gear. Having each set be exclusive to individual jobs means you have to commit to a job before you can even gauge the current content. The way loot tables are handled this round with its linearity also throws a wrench into things. Any serious progression group worth their salt has players willing to switch jobs in their role to better suit what the party needs for a fight, but it's not so simple with hard gear checks.

A decision needs to be made on how developers expect players to gear up and progress. Back in BCoB, AF+1 was job exclusive, but every single turn had a handful of large meaningful pieces of loot, so teams could easily get enough gear from each floor to quickly be able to switch if they ever felt like it.

Except now your weekly token gear is job locked AND your raid gear comes in a linear fashion, with all your big pieces at the very end.