The one thing I really want for Paladins

[Brian_]

Wrong. Take for example Divine Judgement in A12N and A12S and similar limit break attacks that appear throughout the game, you can not mitigate the damage from the attack with either Path or Reprisal due to being unable to hit Alexander Prime with either attack less than 20s before the attack goes off. On the other hand the Paladin can help mitigate each and everyone of those limitbreak attacks by proper use of Divine Veil's shields.

Wrong? You don't understand the first thing about coordinating raid mitigation. As a raid, you have a finite number of mitigation tools that must be ordered in a way to give you sufficient coverage to survive all of the eHP checks. This is stuff like Storm's Path, Succor, Fey Covenant, Adlo + Deploy (which can be buffed by Convalescence, Defiance, and Mantra), Expanded Bole, Collective Unconscious, Noct Aspected Helios, Reprisal, Delirium, Dragon Kick, Divine Veil, Sacred Soil, etc.

During early prog when you have lower HP due to your ilevel, you typically need to stack 2-5 of those effects to consistently survive the frequently occuring raid-wide damage. This isn't only about gimmicky attacks like Divine Judgement. This is about early prog and fights like A3S, A4S, A7S, A8S, A11S, A12S which constantly hammer you with raid-wide damage that you need to mitigate before you have enough extra HP from gear to shrug it off. In A8S, P3 starts with a raid-wide hit that will kill you without heavy shielding / mitigation. 30 seconds later another sequence of mechanics happens that will kill you without shielding / mitigation. After another 30 seconds those mechanics repeat and can wipe you again without shielding / mitigation. Then, after 20 seconds, another raid-wide hit happens that will kill you without heavy shielding / mitigation. Finally, that entire rotation repeats itself again in 40 seconds. You need to budget out your stronger raid mitigation like DV and adlo+deploy in a CD rotation much like how you mitigate tank busters.

If you remove DV from that rotation, a PLD group is going to have some serious issues having enough raid-mitigation to survive all that damage while a DRK group with Reprisal will be just fine. That's the point.

Actually they are the exactly the players you need to check with to find out why they are not using (i.e. underutilizing) an ability because there is a cognitive gap somewhere.

High end players will show designers how abilities are best used for max output while average players will show average use for average effect and give them a better idea of how abilities are being used/not used. The average player is why many of the 4.0 changes are happening not the world first hardcore endgame raider.

You don't understand content balance at all.

What happens when you tune content so that skills like Path, Reprisal, and DV are no longer under utilized? You get the hardest Savage fights. When the eHP checks are so tight that the use of those skill is mandatory, all the players who can't perform at that level will get road blocked.

Content in general should not be designed for that level. By making it so that extreme degrees of coordinated raid-mitigation are not needed outside of early-prog in the hardest content, SE is catering to more average players. If you forget to apply path or DV, it doesn't mean that half your party will be dead as a result.