The Core of Paladin Mechanical Mundaneness

[Jim_Berry]

Paladins are simple, sturdy tanks. The challenge in playing a Paladin comes in keeping enmity, especially on large groups, because of our comparatively low DPS.

What are your thoughts on the matter?

Maybe I'm lucky, but unless a DPS pop all CDs at start AND pull before I do, I generally have no issue keeping hate on mobs. I'm Level 54, and did an unsync'd Titan and Ramuh, and those Primals stayed at me at all times (unless we tank swapped when fighting Ramuh). Not saying I'm an expert at the job, but I do what my job requires.

On Ramuh, there was even a point when the OT died (he was Lv60 DRK), and I needed to Overcharge. While collecting Orbs, the DPS were still attacking Ramuh. While one of the DPS got extremely close to being "A", all it took was for me to use Scorn to stay on top.

[Jim_Berry]

Honestly and I've played all tanks i'm even about to hit 60 on my DRK. Paladin is my favorite tank and is actually the funnest to play for me. A good part of it comes from them having my favorite set of weapons the sword and shield. I like the idea of being the person who is supposed to be protector of the party.

I was a "bow and arrow" type of guy, but eventually fell for being a ninja in games that allow it. Since playing Skyrim and Elder Scrolls Online, I grew fond of Sword & Shield. That said, I went back to playing PLD here, and am enjoying it. My survival rate is extremely higher on my PLD than my WAR, and I am just overall more comfortable with PLD being a defensive tank.

[JackFross]

Paladin isn't mundane.

It has 3 basic combos, yes. It has two basic stances that only offer flat passive bonuses, yes. This is all true. But it's anything but mundane.

The skill floor for Paladin is - far and away - the lowest of all three tanks. I define skill floors being the bare minimum you need to do to successfully play the class "properly." For tanks, the floor is literally just maintaining enmity. Warrior's is higher because to be playing properly you also need to manage Wrath. For Dark Knight, you're managing Dark Arts. With Paladin, you're managing Goring Blade. That's... a little simpler!

However, the skill ceiling for Paladin is EXTREMELY high. Higher than the other two tanks, I'd argue. And that's where the class loses its mundane aspect and becomes something really beautiful, complicated, and enjoyable to play. Note that I'm only going to be discussing playing Paladin as a Main Tank, because Off Tank Paladin's skill ceiling - while high as well - doesn't require most of what makes Paladin so enjoyable.

1. Stance Dancing. It's not about turning Sword Oath on or turning Shield Oath on. It's about doing it properly. Staying switched JUST long enough. Utilizing your mitigation properly for the fight you're in to maintain your health and longevity without compromising the upcoming tank busters or your healers' mana pools. It's more complicated than Warrior because it interrupts combos, generally. You CAN turn Shield Oath off (with a very slight GCD delay that's not noticeable) without interrupting, though, to pick up the full potency on a Goring Blade, follow it up with a quick RA combo, then hop back into Shield for the next cleave. If you do this at the end of your opening Fight or Flight, you can snapshot both Goring Blade and Circle of Scorn with no stance + Fight or Flight for a rather significant gain.

You have one free GCD between Goring Blades. (GB>RA>RA>repeat) Stance Dancing saves more TP than Shield Swipe and causes DPS gains, rather than losses.

2. Fight or Flight. The way the rotation functions causes - in standstill - Fight or Flight to come back at perfect times. Your rotation is around 30 seconds long, and you can *always* delay your GCDs by an extra 1 if Fight or Flight is gonna come back just AFTER a Goring Blade. If you use it before Fast Blade, Riot Blade, or Goring Blade in that combo, you will fit two hits of Goring Blade under one Fight or Flight. You can do this without ever delaying the use of the buff. This is not necessarily "easy" to do.
2a. Circle of Scorn. A lot of misinformation has Paladins thinking that you ideally want to hold your CoS so you get 2 under every FoF, simply because you can. The issue is that doing so loses you a LOT of Circles over the course of a fight - so unless it is literally going to be the very next GCD that FoF is back, you shouldn't hold Circle and should pop it. It's a minor thing but a dps gain nonetheless.

3. Maintaining Threat. When in Shield Oath, with an appropriate amount of Strength allocated to your character, you should rarely, if ever, need to use Rage of Halone for anything other than mitigation. You don't need to have the entire party's aggro meters down in the 0th percentile. It's okay if they're at 50%, 75%. You can slack a little on aggro generation. Also of note:

In Sword Oath, GB>RoH>RoH is more overall damage dealt in those 9 gcds than using GB>RA>RA in Shield Oath. Rage of Halone in Sword is approximately as strong as Royal Authority in Shield, regardless of your gear level or Strength stat. I haven't run the numbers to be sure on enmity generation, but I doubt those two combos are that far off on that front, either. All I know is when I'm tanking in Sword Oath, if a dps or healer starts to threaten me for hate, I just make my next Royal Authority a Rage of Halone instead and suddenly I'm golden.

Additionally, since you should always be opening with Fight or Flight, it's not a bad idea to turn one of your initial Royal Authority combos under FoF into a RoH combo to maximize threat early and give yourself a bigger lead to use less RoH and more Sword Oath later on.

4. Cooldown usage. You shouldn't only use them for tank busters. You need to learn a fight to maximize it - learn how long there is between certain mechanics and so find ways to squeeze Ramparts in in other places. Sword Oath + Rampart is the same amount of mitigation as Shield Oath. So if you pre-pop Rampart, drop Shield Oath, hit GB, turn on Sword Oath, use two full combos, hit Bulwark or Foresight to finish through your next GB, then turn Shield Oath back on, you just gained a SIGNIFICANT amount of damage you wouldn't otherwise have gotten without impacting your healers even a little bit. Maximizing.



These are just four main points to maximizing Paladin. There's a lot more. A good example is how I run A3 normal as the Off-Tank. I never - EVER - turn Shield Oath on for the entire fight. There is literally never a reason to.

Your Main Tank establishes hate on the start. You'll Provoke in when you have to, so no need to build more. In the hand phase, when you pull yours, you can pop Rampart right after it slaps you the first time and it will last long enough to see the phase transition. If it doesn't, you can even burn Sentinel here for the last couple hits (6 and 7 stacks). Add phase is easy. Man phase is easy. You can do the same thing again if dps is low in the next hand phase, but usually you should be pushing this far into gear.

Last phase, you provoke at 5 stacks. He'll immediately be using (I think?) Splash. Might be Cascade. Either way, don't bother mitigating it. Once the animation finishes, Bulwark>Convalescence. As Bulwark drops, Rampart. Then Sentinel. Then Hallowed Ground. By the time HG is falling off, your MT should be provoking and taking over again, because you have 5 stacks. Or it should die before HG even is needed. Either way.

I don't cause any additional stress on my healers. Bulwark is slightly worse than Shield Oath, yeah, but it's only the first 15 seconds, and I give them the bonus of Convalescence to make up for the damage I take.



tl;dr: If you find Paladin to be boring, you're probably just not playing it right. Look a little harder and you'll see that there is a LOT of depth to the class. It might not be as mechanically interesting as Warrior or look as cool as Dark Knight, sure, but that doesn't make it mundane. It's simple. But its simplicity breeds a LOT of room for some really beautiful gameplay that neither of the other tanks can emulate.

[Jpec07]

Paladin isn't mundane.

It has 3 basic combos, yes. It has two basic stances that only offer flat passive bonuses, yes. This is all true. But it's anything but mundane.

I disagree. Because that's all there is to the class.

The skill floor for Paladin is - far and away - the lowest of all three tanks. I define skill floors being the bare minimum you need to do to successfully play the class "properly." For tanks, the floor is literally just maintaining enmity. Warrior's is higher because to be playing properly you also need to manage Wrath. For Dark Knight, you're managing Dark Arts. With Paladin, you're managing Goring Blade. That's... a little simpler!

Or just...using Flash when someone gets close to your enmity.

However, the skill ceiling for Paladin is EXTREMELY high. Higher than the other two tanks, I'd argue. And that's where the class loses its mundane aspect and becomes something really beautiful, complicated, and enjoyable to play. Note that I'm only going to be discussing playing Paladin as a Main Tank, because Off Tank Paladin's skill ceiling - while high as well - doesn't require most of what makes Paladin so enjoyable.

1. Stance Dancing. <snip>
2. Fight or Flight. <snip>
3. Maintaining Threat. <snip>
4. Cooldown usage. <snip>

Of the four, only one is even slightly unique to Paladins. Every other class has all of those, with all the minutia that you've discussed and more. It's incredibly basic for an MMO tank. But both of the other tanking classes in the game have all of that. And more.

My point is that the basic nature of Paladin mechanics is what most players, myself included, find boring. Min-maxing in the way that you're suggesting is something that can be done on any of the classes. But my point is that aside from that, there isn't anything to the job. Warriors have Wrath to manage. Dark Knights have Dark Arts and mana to manage. You suggest Paladins have Goring Blade. But maintaining uptime on a DoT is not compelling tanking gameplay. Every tank - no, every job has a DoT to maintain.

tl;dr: If you find Paladin to be boring, you're probably just not playing it right. Look a little harder and you'll see that there is a LOT of depth to the class. It might not be as mechanically interesting as Warrior or look as cool as Dark Knight, sure, but that doesn't make it mundane. It's simple. But its simplicity breeds a LOT of room for some really beautiful gameplay that neither of the other tanks can emulate.

If min-maxing and precisely timing your CDs allows you to enjoy the class, then props to you. But that is something you can do on literally every other class in the game, and it isn't enough to allow most of us to enjoy Paladin gameplay. It is entirely unremarkable, because there isn't anything to separate it from the other classes. Both Warriors and Dark Knights do everything that Paladins do, more interestingly, and more efficiently.

[VargasVermillion]

Sure, PLD is meant to be simple and those saying it should be that way don't make much sense to me mainly because literally any other class in game is more complex than PLD.

If a large portion of the playerbase wants something simple without 'difficult' mechanics or rotations then why are any of the dps classes still more popular when they are all more complex than PLD by a landslide?

[PogueX]

it depends on who you ask. I found the DRK to the most boring tank cause all it is is unleash...unleash....unleash (combos)

I love being the guy who protects the party, the person who survives major attacks that would kill a DPS and unlike the WAR and DRK their is very little risk. Players are glad to have a paladin in a trial to absorb all the big hits.

[MrTherm]

it depends on who you ask. I found the DRK to the most boring tank cause all it is is unleash...unleash....unleash (combos)

I love being the guy who protects the party, the person who survives major attacks that would kill a DPS and unlike the WAR and DRK their is very little risk. Players are glad to have a paladin in a trial to absorb all the big hits.

End-game vs Casual-game. In dungeons spamming unleash is the same as spamming flash to me. However, in endgame content, unleash is removed from my hotbar as i never use it. While doing any raid content on DRK, i'm typically trying to squeeze an oGCD or 2 and a defence buff between 1 GCD cooldown as the nature of the job is so busy. On pld, I am typically able to eat my dinner between an GCD as there is very few oGCDs for pld.

The fact that there is such a big contrast in both jobs is perfect. DRK feels like a good mix between PLD and WAR in some aspects, but does stand apart in many other aspects. If we had PLD changed to match and be as busy as them, than what would be the difference and even having more than 1 tank job?

Diversity is good. Please don't change it.

[Eye_Gore]

If a large portion of the playerbase wants something simple without 'difficult' mechanics or rotations then why are any of the dps classes still more popular when they are all more complex than PLD by a landslide?

There are those who lead and those who follow. The followers will always outweigh the leaders.

[Duelle]

Diversity is good. Please don't change it.

This. Blizzard made the mistake of making the tanks similar when they made all tanks have active mitigation as part of their core gameplay. It basically killed tanking for me in WoW (prot warriors before the change were similar to how PLDs play here, except that instead of Circle of Scorn we had a frontal cone ability called Shockwave that stunned all enemies it hit), as I purposely stayed away from Death Knight tanking because I'm not into that style of gameplay only for them to force it down my throat.

[Archaell]

Compared to war/drk paladin feels kinda "traditional" and that can get dull. Of course it is not just paladin's fault, other classes having interesting mechanics make it "shine".

I was pondering about oaths, cleric stance, dark arts and asked myself a question "what is the point of not being in oath" - there is no adventage. If auto attack was higher, it could have saved one keybind. This is also the place where developers could have done their magic. Imagine paladin would have skills that change based on the oath. Like doing more dmg/debuffs in sword oath, doing defensive/enmity/reflecting-hits stuff in shield oath, and something in the middle without the oaths. Something simple like potency boost, or faster cooldowns on defensive skills, would be a good start to raise morale. And if one could be a little bit greedy, different animations based on oaths would be golden. Putting shield aside while in sword oath, and holding it with both hands while in shield oath would be pure bliss.