Can anyone give me some PLD tips?

[Yuni_Queen]

D: Well, i responded to that guy trying to double check that!

[JackFross]

At MAX level and with top end gear, you should able to reduce your use of Flash usage to the duration of its blind application, varying slightly on the number of enemies you are pulling (additional Flashes may be needed if the number of enemies exceeds your ability to land enmity strikes on all of them before losing hate).

For the record:
When you're max level on Paladin with good (i220+) gear, you should use few more than 3 Rage of Halone combos in every level 60 dungeon run you do. Once at the start of each boss if you plan to be in Sword Oath, and from there only used during said boss battles to replace a Royal Authority when you need extra hate. Beyond that, you should never press the button.

With Shield Oath active, you can Flash 2-3 times and then drop a Goring Blade combo (with CoS, FoF optional) on the first target your ST dps is hitting, and maintain FB>RB on that target while spreading GB to the rest of the mobs. If you /need/ a Savage Blade to maintain hate, follow it with Royal Authority, not RoH. The latter should really never be needed in trash pulls when you're evenly-geared. 5% Strength debuff on a single mob who's doing all of 500 damage to you isn't worthy of note for its utility to mitigation.

Also with Shield Oath active, you should never ever need to hit RoH to maintain hate on a dungeon boss. Ever. I don't even need it to hold raid bosses if I tank in Shield Oath!


Also actually on-topic: At any level, if you use FoF before the third hit of your combo, delayed about halfway through the gcd, you can get off a total of 5 combo finishers under that FoF, compared to 4 if you use it at any other time. Especially helpful when fighting from 26-39, when you're stuck with no stance or with Sword Oath. An extra FoF RoH is a significant boon to your enmity generation at the start of a boss.

Other word of advice: Pre-26, Fast Blade > Riot Blade is your highest potency combo. If you safely have hate, you should be using this for additional damage. In solo content out of dungeons, this is the combo you should be spamming. Rage of Halone changes this, making Fast Blade > Savage Blade > Rage of Halone your best combo until level 54.)

[ashwich]

It's pretty funny in a 60 dungeon. You can Sword Oath on bosses the whole way. but with any decent DPS in group, you'd basically be doing nothing but ROH spam just to keep up. which... is still more dps than if you did only DPS combos in shield oath. You end up keeping up the STR DOWN debuff on boss in sword oath. If you're gonna shield oath, I presume the reason is you have a good healer who can put out tons of dps, in that case you might as well ROH every 3rd combo, to increase the dmg reduction, because it honestly doesn't hurt your already low dps that much.

[JackFross]

It's pretty funny in a 60 dungeon.

I regularly run with good healers on my PLD, staying in SwO for bosses. We usually end at 1k and 800-900 (me and the healer) after the boss fights. It really doesn't change much. You go from needing literally 0 heals with a tank in tank stance to needing like 3. As SCH, those "3" heals amount to "press Rouse on cooldown" lol.

[iAMspecial]

Avoid shield oath wherever you can, it's a massive DPS loss. Do 1 agro combo in shield oath then swap to sword oath for more DPS and faster clears, also helps with meeting enrage.

[Ragnorak]

Trade your sword and board in for an axe ... Kappa lol

[Destous]

At low levels, when in doubt, just hit Flash.

PLD gets NOTHING for AoE after Flash until you hit 50. Then you have CoS, and it's pretty nifty as it's oGCD. Your ability to hold a single target is pretty great with your basic combo; you really don't have to try very hard. After you get CoS, use Flash to get all mobs in range for CoS, then hit CoS. In general, making a Flash/CoS sandwich of Flash > CoS > Flash will set you up to hold pretty much everything as long as you remember to tab and spread the love. Shield Swipe procs will help a lot too as it's another oGCD enmity skill, albeit a single target skill.

[Violette]

As much as I'm advocating SwO tanking in another thread, doesn't always Halone and drop. There are always some bastard casters who will go full throttle without quelling and make you sad.

[Yawnie]

As much as I'm advocating SwO tanking in another thread, doesn't always Halone and drop. There are always some bastard casters who will go full throttle without quelling and make you sad.

Yeah, lately I've had members who seem to go out of their way to attack something else :c

[Ebonwings]

Yeah, lately I've had members who seem to go out of their way to attack something else :c

That's why we PLD stay in Shield Oath when tanking multiple targets. We expect people won't be playing nice ( attacking different targets). In this situation Flash,Riot Blade combo, and Circle of Scorn (CoS) are our best friends.

We only go Sword Oath only if we are sure that the enmity generated by dps are really low.