Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Brannigan]

I think War's would weep at this, because it pairs magnificently well for them. Even Drks see a better pairing with it when using it with Dark Dance. Pld's, on the other hand, probably couldn't care less. It might be a different story if the CD timers lined up better, but right now it's not really something to bat an eyelash at.

Yeah well if warriors want the skill so bad they can waste an ability slot and trait on it. Enjoy giving up Thrill of Battle I guess. Awareness is fucking trash but a few dudes on the forums pushed this idea of "WOAH IF YOU PAIR IT WITH BULWARK IT'S AMAZING." Then they turn around and complain about Foresight.

The only time it's a decent cooldown is when the devs force a situation with artificially inflated crit rate once per raid tier. You can pretty much count those on one hand. Cut it or give it to someone else.

edit: this came off a bit meaner than I intended but what people never seem to get is that it's about opportunity cost. If Awareness and its shitty trait weren't on gladiator then something else useful or interesting might be. Everyone loves to bitch about how paladin lacks identity or is bland but when you talk trash about one of their blandest and worst skills everyone is horrified for some reason.

[SpookyGhost]

Awareness is, and has always been, pretty good. While it excels in situations where you will be crit (since, y'know, this nullifies that) it still has plenty of use for preventing crits after a tank buster happens. You also have situations like A11S OT, where the only time you actually tank something is for the duration of Awareness' uptime. It's not like, say, Tempered Will where a very specific situation needs to come up for it to actually do anything - Awareness will always work as a preventative measure when being crit would be either a big hassle for your healers or would result in your death. That's not to say Awareness couldn't be replaced with something better, but just that ~currently~ it's a pretty decent CD that does what it's meant to do.

[Brannigan]

Nah. Auto attacks get less dangerous with every raid boss and early raid bosses in 2.0 couldn't even crit. Awareness is, and always has been, pretty bad. It's an uncreative filler ability made in the era when the devs thought 2.0 warrior was a good idea. It's what you throw out when you're trying to make a "generic tank" but you're completely out of ideas. It should be the first thing on the chopping block.

[Launched]

Nah. Auto attacks get less dangerous with every raid boss and early raid bosses in 2.0 couldn't even crit. Awareness is, and always has been, pretty bad. It's an uncreative filler ability made in the era when the devs thought 2.0 warrior was a good idea. It's what you throw out when you're trying to make a "generic tank" but you're completely out of ideas. It should be the first thing on the chopping block.

Cover and Tempered Will need fixing way before Awareness. Both are incredibly situational, and useless in most fights.

[Brian_]

I think a lot of Pld's have come to the realization at this point that their job is just not keeping pace, and SE doesn't at all seem invested in trying to do anything to fix that. It's almost like they're always playing catch up. Each new patch leaces Pld behind, then they get minor patches later to make them temporarily viable until the next major patch puts them out to pasture again. It's been back and forth like that for the entire expansion, and it's exhausting to put up with. It's easier to just swap to War or Drk and not have to worry about it at all, rather than sticking it our for the sake of the underdog.

Seriously? PLD is better than DRK in 3 of the 4 savage fights this tier and still you get people posting garbage like this. They were also completely fine in Midas and were arguably better in 2-3 of the fights.

Yea, if your sense of self value revolves around pushing parses on fflogs, DRK is "better." But, for the purposes of clearing the content and not just vanity, PLD has been perfectly viable and basically equal to DRK post Gordias. They didn't get put out to pasture in Midas or the Creator. They crap on DRK for 3 of the fights and then when they get the short end of the stick for one fight, they're back on here crying.

With how emo PLD players are, you'd think they're the ones that'd flock to DRK.

[Fernosaur]

Seriously? PLD is better than DRK in 3 of the 4 savage fights this tier and still you get people posting garbage like this. They were also completely fine in Midas and were arguably better in 2-3 of the fights.

I agree.

Februs, I usually agree with most of the things you say on these forums, but I think you're exaggerating it a bit with the pessimism on this particular matter. Hell, our DRK even levelled PLD for A9S because he hated tanking that as DRK due to the comparative lack of defensive CDs, and it's been a pretty good decision for the rest of the content so far.

After being both MT and Off-healer spot for my group, I have come to value the tanks' capability to be defensive much more than their personal DPS because it helps healer DPS a lot. And when they can manage to pull good DPS while also being capable at defense, I think that's the perfect balance. PLD does that way better than DRK for this raid tier, at least until you get to A12s, and I find that the gap between DRK and PLD DPS is heavily outweighted by the increase in both healers' DPS that PLD offers for these particular fights.

I do agree with you that PLD has a lot of design issues that, if adressed, would make the job infinitely more interesting and dynamic, but it's not way behind at the current tier. Boring? Probably, I guess your mileage may vary. Situational? Heck yeah, but in a way I kinda like that. If you think about it, PLD has enough tools to compete with DRK (which is the biggest "concern" here) with the parts of the toolkit that are usable 100% of the time, so those tools that are incredibly situational can be seen as an extra something that gets to shine every now and then. I DO think Tempered Will, Cover and Awareness need a rework, but I don't think having those actually holds PLD back. If anything, I like their situational, utility concept, but their effects need to be broader to cover hopefully slightly more situations than they do right now.

The age of Gordias and 3.0 is long gone, as should be our sorrows of being outpaced by our peers.

[Brannigan]

Cover and Tempered Will need fixing way before Awareness. Both are incredibly situational, and useless in most fights.

Cover and Tempered Will are worth tweaking and keeping imo. Both of them have the potential to be interesting/fun utility skills and at Cover at least is an iconic skill. Awareness doesn't have that stuff going for it, and if they're trying to cut out some questionable abilities I can think it's the best place to start (for paladin, anyway. One Ilm Punch is the actual best place to start).

After that they should combine Unleash and Abyssal Drain kekekekeke. It also occurs to me that DA Power Slash could use some tuning up so they could stick something on that sucker. Power Slash in general just feels like garbage to use since you have to skip a Syphon Strike. Maybe drop Spinning Edge and just buff up the enmity on PS to compensate or make HS->PS a 2 hit combo or something.


Also about the whole paladin on alexander prime thing: do Sentinel->HG->add phase (you can rampart and stuff on the general) -> Sentinel -> Rampart -> Rampart (judgment crystal phase)-> Sentinel (teleport 1) -> Rampart (teleport 2) -> HG (Scourge/Chastening). That should work. You should probably bring a mnk though. Paladin can do it but it's way more convenient to just use dark knight. That way you get to bring a ninja and just not worry about anything.

[Februs]

Seriously? PLD is better than DRK in 3 of the 4 savage fights this tier and still you get people posting garbage like this. They were also completely fine in Midas and were arguably better in 2-3 of the fights.

You really have the shortest trigger I've ever seen ... which is fairly amusing.

Regardless, you're off base here, and you're flippantly putting words into my mouth. I never said anything about parsing dps numbers on the fflogs. I also didn't mention any specific examples about savage raid tiers, nor did I say anything about them being not viable in Midas. I also didn't say a damn word about Drks. The only thing I did say was that SE is constantly playing catch up with the job ... which they are. That's not exactly a contestable opinion. PLD had Dps problems. SE patched it after the fact. Pld had Tp problems. SE patched it after the fact. Pld had enmity Problems. SE patched it after the fact ... etc (repeating as far back as 2.1). I'm sure that even you can see a trend in the patch notes, given just how many patch jobs have been done to date.

Being "put out to pasture" also wasn't referring to any particular raid tier. I simply meant that SE has a habit of ignoring problems until after they've happened instead of taking measures to avoid those problems in the first place. That's not exclusive to Pld, either. I didn't mention Drk because I was responding to someone who was specifically talking about Pld, but that doesn't mean that Drk is somehow exempt from the issue. They've had their own problems and have had to do their fair share of catch up as well. I just didn't think that I'd need to go through a checklist of those problems just to avoid sparking someone's oversensitive sensibilities. I figured the context of the response would speak for itself ... but I guess some people only see what they want to see.

Regardless, if you want to get technical about it, then yes. Drk has had a rough go as well, and they've had to be patched on occasion to compensate for their shortcomings. I'm sure that's a shock to everyone. Perhaps, just maybe, there might also be a correlation between that issue and War's being the undisputed king of tanks in this game ... That might be a bit too controversial though. Wouldn't want to upset anyone ... Maybe I should go through a check list of War's problems too, just to be on the safe side ...

[Sarcatica]

To me, more than anything else so far up till now, DRK wins a huge margin. PLD can CLEAR A12S just fine, yes, they can but DRK can do the same and better. Call me whatever you like, but you can't deny the prowess of a DRK in speedruns. Literally every single speedrun attempt features DRK instead, PLD can't compete with DRK's damage. People like to use what's optimal and you can't deny that. PLD is far from that and again there is nothing much you can do. If you think PLD allows healers to DPS more, DRK can do it just the same and parses back that up. There is no distinction especially in speedruns where everyone has to chime in DPS to make it work. It's like people say WHM can clear just fine but AST is still strictly better while not sacrificing anything much. If you aren't fond of speedruns, then that's fine. But you have no power when literally all the parses at the top features DRK and AST heavily. I personally view speedruns as a good challenge to keep myself in the game since there is nothing else hard to do. What do you do when you have nothing to do?

PLD vs DRK in current Creator Savage:
1. PLD with Less DPS than DRK.
2. PLD don't have enough CDs to cycle in A12S, leading to taxing WAR to tank some tank busters, unlike DRK (DADM OP). PLD's overall A12S clear is about 10% of DRK's.
3. Whatever PLD can tank, DRK can tank. Good healers don't have problem keeping DRKs up.
4. Speedruns heavily favours DRK mostly due to PLD doing less DPS naturally and DRK can tank just as well, no tax on healers in a 0 death parse.
5. In a speedrun, you skip so many things that PLD's Sheltron on physical tank busters doesn't do as much and also for DRK basically sitting on extra CDs to survive.

Not to hate on PLD, I love PLD but in this situation where PLD is again in a spot where DRK heavily contests the MT slot, I have to do the job because that's optimal. You are forcing your team to adjust strats just because you are PLD, just like how Gordias treated PLD where I had my WAR stun legs and I go in to kill adds.

Like I mentioned before, MT has to be able to do both PLD/DRK well enough. Unable to do so will gimp your group to clear earlier. I have seen so many PLD mains in Tonberry admittedly struggling with A12S. Another MT I know also said "I feel so useless, I feel like getting carried by my team". My 2cents.

[Februs]

Februs, I usually agree with most of the things you say on these forums, but I think you're exaggerating it a bit with the pessimism on this particular matter.

I appreciate that, but you should go back and read what I actually wrote, rather than what someone else perceived me to write. You might find there's a difference.

I'm not saying anything to be pessimistic about Pld's. I definitely didn't say it wasn't viable, and I didn't mean to imply that people should drop the job wholesale. I'm only acknowledged that, given the history of the job, it's easier to accept and move on when faced with a difficult fight rather than toughing it out for changes that will either come too late or not come at all. That might be pessimistic about how SE handles job adjustments, but I really don't think that's an unjustified pessimism, given the very real back and forth history of tanking problems. That's not exclusive to Pld, either. I may not have mentioned Drk, but they've had a pretty rough patch history as well (just not quite as long as Pld's). They could chose to tough it out in a fight that they're not suited for and hope SE will do something about it, or they could simply take the path of least resistance and swap jobs for that instance. It's not the ideal situation, but is it really all that surprising? Personally, I don't think so.

The fact is that both Pld and Drk have had to do their fair share of catch up over the life cycle of HW. The changes haven't been universally reliable. I'm just recognizing that fact.