Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[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.

[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.