Taking a look at PLD and what could be a quick(er) fix.

[Malicewolf]

I think thats part of the problem though...

It WAS a perfect situation for Clemency...but why is it we're the only tank class that has to wait on "perfect situations" for many of our abilities to be useful?

I mean, when is "dealing damage" situational? The only time I can think of is not pushing phases too quickly, but even that can be gotten used to....

Divine Veil, Clemency, Cover, Tempered will, they're all so situational...they're useful during perfect circumstances and the rest of the time its just kinda there, and maybe you use it, and maybe its useful, but most of the time its really purely for those "perfect situations" that they matter.

I can definitely agree with this statement. So many things about PLD is dependent on circumstances occurring to create a perfect situation for us to be at our utmost usefulness. I've been trying to use macro's lately to assist in making them easier to deal with. For cover, i've found a pretty good one for boss fights (since I usually just do provoke > shield lob for mob mistakes). Boss's often throw out AoE's without actually taking their aggro off of tanks. This makes <tt> useless for cover.
I play on ps4, so it's not quick for me to quickly mouse over a teammate or pick them via the party as it requires me to put my weapon away in order to cycle through teammates (and then it's exactly that, I still have to cycle). So I came up with a separate macro so I don't have to do anything but click a button. The /p is just for my own fun as a side note but those can easily be modified. Biggest point of them is to ensure the person you are covering knows and stays near you.

/target <triangle>
/p Covering <t>. Notice me senpai. Run to me!
/ac "Cover"
/wait 10
/p Cover is ending, flee for your life!

I use a premade icon instead of using the Cover icon, corresponding with whatever mark symbol I use.
The requirement for this is to mark the key player's you wish to cover BEFORE the boss fight (and tell them not to remove it as it's for your macro). This is mostly used by me with my FC mates and I connect to my healers, the other tank and usually leave the last undone. This particular macro cover's triangle, but I've made one for circle, triangle and cross as well. So it takes up 4 slots, yes, but now I can customize who I protect easily since <mo> is difficult on ps4, as is <t> (and <tt> is unreliable). I do also keep cover available as well incase of an odd scenario where I do need to cover someone outside of my usual situation.

But the nice thing about this is, you don't have to target anyone during a fight. You just need to know who it is you want to cover and either run to them, or make sure they know to run to you (once again, do this for my FC, so we're on a skype call and I just tell them to run to me). And yes, i know Cover is 12 seconds long. But usually, you don't need to cover someone for the full 12 seconds. I'd rather them not be on top of me when it runs out, so I tell them to leave 2 seconds early.

SNIP

Yes, it is true, we can dish out more stuns in a row than anyone else. But if you're throwing out 3 stuns in a row on an enemy, you effectively made it impossible to stun that enemy anymore as they can now resist it. If you are running around hitting all the enemies in your mobs with shield bash... i don't know what to say. It has no increased enmity effects, so anyone else hitting it will pull. And if you do 3... well, GCD is 2.5 seconds. So the 1st enemy is already well out of the stun and the 2nd is just about to be. I hardly find this argument a good one. In a boss fight, I hope i'm not the ONLY one stunning. More so, this is a case of, just because you can... doesn't mean it's good. Perhaps I just haven't run into a boss that spams unavoidable AoE's on such a constant basis yet as I haven't finished all content. But I usually save the stuns for such moments where they use unavoidable or huge AoE's that would be difficult for everyone to get out.

And I'm definitely not saying every tank should be able to dish out massive AoE. DRK does not do such by any means with unleash. 100 potency. But flash does no dmg and circle of scorn is a lvl 50 move. So any lower level dungeons means I can't use it. Basically, anything before castrum, I lose my AoE. So while DRK and WAR focus on damaging to get their AoE and enmity, I'm flashing away, effectively, not helping to reduce the mob's hp (meaning the mobs take longer to kill). Then, i'm cutting into my combos if a DPS is wailing away too much on a different enemy or the healer is spamming medica a bit too much (once again, cutting out my effectiveness on dmg as I don't produce any dmg with flash). It's not the most horrible situation. We take an extra min or two to kill off mobs. But it's something I noticed which puts us below the others. That's all. The 1st part of my original post was simply my observations. As you can see, my end statement actually doesn't really have to do with giving us AoE. It's instead, to allow PLD's to take a different avenue than the other tanks with what they've already given us. We just can't utilize what they gave us for cross skills very well.

And sword oath, ok. Thanks for the info! Sounds like I have indeed been underestimating sword oath. Guess it truly does add up quicker than it looks. And at least for me with my current gear, I'm only dishing out about 150-250 per auto attack hit on lvl sync'd dungeons of lvl 50. It's a steady stream of incoming dmg, but it just seems off when you see a WAR dish out huge 3000 damage hits and then you're sitting there saying, "don't worry guys, I have sword oath on!" and you see a little 150-200 pop up over the enemy. I've already had to explain to my FC that SO is better than it looks, but I still didn't think it would add up to the offensive tank stances of the other 2 in the long run.