Are my mitigation numbers off ?

[Februs]

If there was a problem, it's that there weren't more adjustments. Specifically to other abilities to deal with PLD shortcomings in terms of TP and threat.

That doesn't change that it is currently a bad change to Pld's and can actually be considered a nerf in terms of everyday mob tanking... and, quite frankly, I don't think it's likely that they will make the changes that would be required to restore balance.The only 3 that I can even think of off of the top of my head are: 1. Increased Enmity gen off of RoH. 2. Shorter CoS CD and increased enmity gen, or 3. make flash do dmg. 1. Might be viable if Tp consumption wasn't such a nightmare. 2. Seems okay, but they could have done this at any time over the last year and have refused to, and 3... well, 3 is just straight up unlikely due to the fact that it's a cross class skill.

BLIND

Oh jeez. Speaking of blind, apparently I am XD. Sorry about that. I don't have any problem with Blind being cross class effect... But I don't think it would really make a difference. The diminishing returns on Blind would be the same, and it's hardly a noticeable effect when Pld's use it, so, really, take it or leave it. Casters would probably get more use out of it than Plds do (all the power to them), but I don't see it making enough of a difference to warrant anyone changing their cross class skills for it.

All the casters have access to moves to control enmity. If they use them appropriately, there shouldn't be an issue regardless of who is tanking.

That is fine and dandy on paper, but it makes no difference in practice. Casters already have the ability to control their enmity right now, but they can still steal hate easily enough off of Plds. Even as small a difference as 10 item levels can crush a Pld's underwhelming enmity over AoE spamming Dps. If they can steal hate with nerfs to their own enmity, giving them a buff would make it all that much easier.

Now, I'm not saying that it's a bad idea outright. I'd be fine with it, but not with the current state of Pld. Right now, they just don't have enough enmity to warrant making this viable. Pld's already have enough things that force them to over-use Flash to hold hate. Buffing caster dmg without giving Pld's a way to compensate would only make this worse.

[Launched]

Shield Swipe complaints

Taking Shield Swipe off GCD was a good change. It adds the same amount of DPS as Spirits Within/Circle of Scorn in single target (~50 with a Thordan weapon and STR accessories). If you ever used Shield Swipe in 3.1 you were honestly just wasting GCDs. The TP you saved likely wouldn't be enough to make up for the damage you lost, and using it on trash pulls is an even bigger waste because it means you're not applying Goring (your highest potency ability) to multiple targets. I've never had trouble holding aggro with a couple of Flashes followed by a buffed Circle of Scorn, with another Flash or two later for the blind. I don't need the tiny damage reduction from having Halone up on 2.5 targets, or from pacification.

[eagledorf]

Pacify+Blind was actually pretty huge in dungeons since you could prevent things like the Rotoswipe from the dread or cleave from the giant in Fractal basically as you wished while taking limited auto-attack damage. The threat was also very helpful if I got a bad (DPS) healer and decided to SwO the entire dungeon since it let me generate threat quickly if one target was dying faster without having to prep my combo or cancel my Goring Blade combo.

All told I think it was better than no change at all, but still a bad change. Now we don't have a valid method to make our Goring Blade DoT duration make sense and the TP situation is worse than it was in 3.0 (even in A4S where you only got to swipe on adds!) The DPS gained is also quite small unless you're really lucky (if you get it to proc 100% of the time on cooldown it's like 50 DPS, but my experience has been more like 15-30). Increasing the potency so that it was a comparable gain on average to Reprisal instead of just taking it off the GCD to be as similar to Reprisal as possible would have been preferable. It's just another symptom of the total lack of any thought that's been put into the tanks as of 3.0 and SE's attempt to give us the easiest possible change and pretend it will fix a deep problem.

[Reynhart]

That would be terrible because if it's balanced at an equal amount of gear, that tank would be overpowered during the middle part of progression when the DPS get weapons first

Why ?

Just give up on this stupid insistance that PLD is the pure tank when we all know it would be game-breaking to actually make them a measurably better tank than the other two and increase Paladin's DPS

Again, why ? For the increase "tankiness" part. The "increase DPS" part, for me, is not a good solution if we want each tank to be really different than the others.

It's a good thing to explain your reasoning, and even give examples, of why something would be "game-breaking" or "break the balance".

[Isius]

Buff Paladin correctly/better plz FFXIV dev team


Step 1: Stop listening to your boss Yoshi-P, and do what is right, and fix the problem, then ignoring it.

Step 2: Buff emnity on Savage/Rage of Halone multipliers to that of the other tanks, and boost the potency of Halone.

Step 3: Buff Plds dps, mainly looking at Plds dps loss while in shield oath, and bring Shield Swipe potency back up to 210.

Step 4: Buff Plds utilities or overhaul them, or just completely throw away Clemancy/Divine Veil out of the window, and just give us two skills that are actually more useful, like idk a dmg aoe for Pld, then more niche items in a already heavy, niche, Pld tool set, or give our highly situational skills to have dual uses, like Tempered Will giving Pld a Surecast or Swiftcast effect.

Step 5: Make Plds cross class skills more useful to Pld(seriously I only use Mercy Stroke/Bloodbath/Foresight anymore during raids, and that is it....stoneskin lol..cast time, and -dps, but still a great skill, but current meta just makes it less useful.

a. If Pld is meant to cast spells then have Skill Speed affect the speed which spells are casted by a Pld.

b. Vit is suppose to be tanks main stat so have spell strength on Pld be scaled with Vit, looking at Cure 1 cross class skill a less powerful, but a more mp friend alternative to Clemancy, with a actual gcd cast time of 2.5secs, and not 3secs. So scale CNJ spells first before giving Pld other spells or heals. Seriously why doesn't Pld have a trait to make CNJ skills useful for Pld.

Edit: Mmm...spell strength is also effected by weapon strength, correct? So have spell scale off both weapon strength, and Vit for Pld.

Step 6: Stop this terrible meta of physical/magical, and heavy dps tanks ideology. Tanks are tanks telling a tank by class design they can't or are less effective to tank whatever is a very bad idea, and design choice. Change the physcial/magical mitigation, and dps heavy meta, so each tank can mt or ot effectively. Tank differance in mitigation/dps should not leave a big enough gap, where a tank can't perform it's primary role, or seen less effective/burden in content.

But whatever just my quick thoughts, and means nothing on the OF, but these are things I find annoying when I play Pld, and need to change imo, and all we got is wait till 3.2 for these "tank dps changes," since Pld really didn't get buffs it needed in 3.1. But really if SE can't fix a class now, and refuses to fix, and prefers to just ignore it. I don't see how these 3.2 whatever changes are going to be anything different. It's like putting another a band-aid on top of a band-aid, does that really help? :/

***And really Plds mitigation doesn't make up for it's difference in less dps compared to the other tanks in the current raid tier. Maybe if it was so high it allowed raid groups to only bring 1 healer or just 1 tank to a group, but people would only scream unbalanced, and how broken Pld defenses are if that was a thing, Pld already has this stigma from past raids in Coil. Easiest change would be just boost Pld dps in general.

[eagledorf]

Why ?

Currently PLD is just about 20% under the other tanks for a few Paladins in the world and much more than that for the rest. To make up for that you would need a vulnerability up debuff that adds about 4-5% to total party DPS. That's like 3x Trick Attack so it would be by far the biggest party-wide DPS buff in the game.

If you give the DPS weapons first, the PLD's DPS added would go up along with theirs since that 5% is tied up in party DPS while the other tanks' would not go up. In fact, you could give the other tank and the Scholar a weapon first since the PLD buffs each of their DPS as well. This is sort of what you see with Bard (except their gear also gives much less weapon damage than other jobs). This is really bad, but it wouldn't really be game-breaking since we're still talking about less than 100 DPS. On the other hand, if they don't eliminate DPS gearing for tanks in 3.2, a PLD could gear for HP when needed and still retain a few hundred extra DPS for free on top of that in the form of this vulnerability up debuff, which really does start to cause serious balance problems on one side or the other.

As for the tankiness part, we know that that is a problem because of how 2.0 worked out. If damage on the tank is sufficiently threatening then the tank with superior mitigation provides an excessive advantage over the other tank. (Basically, an i70 PLD could fairly comfortably survive Death Sentence and even an i55 one could if perfectly prepped and WARs struggled even with higher tiers of gear until they got a mitigating toolkit in 2.1). If damage on the tank is not sufficiently threatening, that extra mitigation has little value (not quite none, but it very quickly falls toward none) as we have seen with PLD in A3S in this patch. The only time this isn't true is if you can eliminate one of the tanks or healers entirely (like how a PLD could solo-tank Bahamut Prime even with the adds tethered to him and through Ahk Morn), but this is a problem in and of itself that SE has worked very had to make impossible with mechanics like Hand of Prayer.

Trying to make the tanks unique from one another by differentiating their capability at tanking...is not the way to go. A tank needs to hit all the functions of a tank that are required by the game (right now: mitigation, DPS, effective healing, threat generation) and the uniqueness of the class should be from mechanics or unique utility skills (like Defiance or Cover).

[Reynhart]

Currently PLD is just about 10% under the other tanks. To make up for that you would need a vulnerability up debuff that adds about 2-3% to total party DPS.

Isn't that the same with slashing debuff ? WAR increases damage for NIN and other tanks, included itself. Of course, it doesn't increase the damage for the whole party, but you can have it applied 100% of the time. Adjusting the uptime of the vulnerability debuff is an easy to prevent too much DPS increase...and of course, not stacking it with Trick Attack.

As for the tankiness part, we know that that is a problem because of how 2.0 worked out.

2.0 was a little extreme on that. It wasn't that PLD had better mitigation than WAR, but that WAR had barely enough mitigation for the content.
Personnaly, I think they overdid it a little between :
- not any mitigation and healing boost tied to wrath
and
- constant healing boost to Defiance, mitigation in Inner Beast, mitigation in Storm's Path, mitigation in Vengeance and "ultimate survival" in Holmgang

Again, the extra mitigation is not inherently useless. Tanks survive because healers cure them. More mitigation requires less healing, thus healers could do something else...like DPSing.
The problem, in the current state of the game, is that the tank with the worst mitigation (Whatever it is) already allows healers to do lot of DPS, so, whatever additionnal mitigation PLD offers, it's not significant...whereas its personal lesser DPS is.

the uniqueness of the class should be from mechanics or unique, moderate-power utility skills (like Defiance or Cover).

Which is already a problem, since every tank use the same mechanic to survive. It could have been much more interesting to have one tank that survives through mitigation, one through self-healing, one though leeching, etc...
If they were, they could have the exact same mitigation and the exact same DPS, because each player would pick one depending on the gameplay. Exactly like how most DPS are mostly on par with each other, but with different mechanics.

[eagledorf]

It could have been much more interesting to have one tank that survives through mitigation, one through self-healing, one though leeching, etc

EDITING

I mean in 2.0 WAR had the self-healing and that just didn't work for the way the game works. Mitigation for tank busters is the main mechanic for tanks right now.

I'm talking about Wrath vs. oGCD Cooldowns+Casting. Unfortunately, they've made casting basically un-viable on PLD so it's just oGCD Cooldowns, oGCD Cooldowns with Dark Arts before one of them, and oGCD Cooldowns+Wrath.

I edited my post since PLD is actually 15-25% behind it seems when I checked the latest numbers.

As for mitigation=>healer DPS...it has to be a lot of extra mitigation. Like so much extra mitigation that damage that would kill a DRK or WAR in a few GCD can just be handled by Regen on a PLD. First of all healers don't get accuracy on their gear anymore and their DoTs are like twice the potency of their filler spells. Second of all this content cycle they've intentionally prevented defensive tanking from improving healer DPS by making mechanics like DPS down in A3, Throttle, and massive damage on the raid instead of on the tank so either the healers can DPS with any tank or they can't DPS with any tank.

Once you get that much extra mitigation, it's going to become a distinct advantage while learning content to just have this invincible tank that can help you top the party up instead of one of the other tanks.

[Reynhart]

I mean in 2.0 WAR had the self-healing and that just didn't work for the way the game works.

I'm not sure that self-healing really didn't work.
The problem was that Defiance (by itself) was clearly weaker than Shield Oath. To be on par, you had to keep all your Wrath, but by doing this, you couldn't use Inner Beast...
So, basically, to use your self-healing, you had to withdraw your healing boost...
If WAR had kept the same self-healing abilities (And they're even better now with Equilibrium) AND their current healing boost, they probably wouldn't need that much "mitigation".

As for DRK, I really think it should have been more interesting to give them a "spike" stance, where each time you're hit, you reflect a fragment of the damage (20% and capped by your HP max) and leech for the same amount. Which would have also been their major mean of DPSing, so their personal skills would have their potency reduced, for balance purpose.

[Alistaire]

Even your #s for rampart/sentinel are off since 2 forms of the same reduction are multiplicative not additive.

Since your form of "tank stance" is % taken, rampart is actually 16% reduction and sentinel is 32%, assuming you're using those with shield oath. (20% and 40% x .8 not 20% off +20% off or 20+40%)

And you can't just not include holmgang/walking dead. Maybe it'll turn out to be too complex to calculate but you can't just say they get nothing for it. When used properly the only difference between them and Hallowed is a benediction after. So damage taken becomes irrelevant and you might as well count it as on par with Hallowed (or figure out how much mitigation that benediction is worth and subtract it). And then multiply it by how much more frequently it can be used vs Hallowed.

PLD is truly in a sad state.