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.

[Sarcatica]

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.

Except that LB3 tank is normally used, healers have ample of timing to heal back. DV doesn't do anything there at all, so basically just an illusion that it "helped" mitigate when you will still survive just fine without it, there is nothing to dps there as well so your healers shouldn't have issue at all. If you want to use situation where DV and Path/Delirium work best is things like Photon into double Whirlwind in A11S where shields and mitigation potentially play an important role to help top up (although ideally your healers should have enough tools to instaheal/mitigate for all members to full before 2x Whirlwind take effect) or A12S' Holy Bleed into Mega Holy where you take 18k~~ damage into 15k~ damage. The word mitigation is only ever important when you are potentially going to die without it, effective mitigation is not how you would perceive as mitigating damages that aren't consequential enough that you need it to clear.

You can't just bunch mitigation as overall damage mitigated because the stat alone is hollow and doesn't mean anything when you don't die, and that's not how tanking/healing works in the first place. It's like you are shielding a 10k aoe damage and you take 7k in the process when you have 22k HP, like that's inconsequential. If let's say you have 9k hp and the aoe dmg is 10k, then yes, the 3k shield works wonder for you. Effective mitigation isn't the same as passive mitigation, like Grit/ShO taking autos (you prolly mitigate 1k~ which regen will overheal anyway) VS Grit/ShO taking 40k tank busters (taking 20% less damage has more impact here).

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.

Early progression in week 1-3 was harder, if you do see the early kill videos where mitigations were used effectively. Now with more HP overall from gear, people clearing with less "optimal" mitigation is getting more common and is expected. IMO these tools help the poor healers more, while still maintaining the importance of mitigation where damages are fatal. The likes of Path/DV/Delirium will be pretty trivial in i270, it's already somewhat trivial for i260++ players with A12S on farm.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Brain_, Sarcatica, both of you are completely missing the point of what I am posting due to your early progression raider elitism.

I am not saying that Divine Veil is a bad ability or needs to be removed. In fact I think it is an awesome ability and very in character for the Paladin to have. The only real change I would make to it is perhaps boosting the shield to 20% the Paladin's hp.

Right now it is far to easy for players to develop "its nice but not necessary so you don't need to use it" mentalities around perfectly good abilities and I hope that 4.0 changes that.

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.

There are multiple ways of changing things such that those abilities are used more. Rotations can be changed and potencies adjusted so that constantly keeping the Storm's Path, Rage of Halone and Delirium debuffs up is not a dps loss. Divine Veil's shield could be made stronger in order to make it more obvious the amount of weight it takes off the healer's shoulders. Tempered Will's recast timer can be shortened and duration increased in order for it to be used more often.

Forcing use is not the only way to reduce underutilization. Making abilities easier to use is also a very good way (perhaps an even better way) to improve things.

Except that LB3 tank is normally used, healers have ample of timing to heal back. DV doesn't do anything there at all, so basically just an illusion that it "helped" mitigate when you will still survive just fine without it, there is nothing to dps there as well so your healers shouldn't have issue at all.

Which is exactly my point. Limitbreak attacks such as these are the intuitive places to use Divine Veil, but due to several factors the average player/raider see using it as useless/unnecessary/unhelpful.

[SpookyGhost]

The biggest problem with DV is you give up Reprisal for it. More often than not Reprisal is more valuable than DV, as it can affect a series of AOEs/abilities/etc whereas DV can only prevent a chunk of damage off one hit every 2 minutes. There are situations where DV is more useful than Reprisal, however - especially if the boss is doing AOE stuff and he can't be targeted. I'd say that DV is fine but imo it's a "can't see the forest for the trees" type situation where we really need to look at PLD as a whole.

Currently it really offers nothing particularly special, the most it has going for it is more mitigation on physical damage but because all tanks need to be able to tank all bosses that doesn't really help much - and, in fact, it hinders it when it's fighting magical bosses since particular CDs are designed specifically around physical damage (A4S and A12S come to mind as big problems for PLD mitigation-wise). It's utility is... okay, but it's not great - Clemency is practically useless, DV is alright but you need to give up Reprisal for it, and Cover is extremely situational as is Tempered Will. PLD's current identity is "the tank that can take physical damage better than the other 2 tanks", which is really, really boring and doesn't even do much for it.

I'm fine with PLD being great at tanking physical damage, but it's utility or some other aspect needs to be bumped up as well. DRK suffers from similar problems (if PLD did more DPS than DRK, DRK would be where PLD is now) - but since this is about PLD I'll leave that for another time.

[Brian_]

Brain_, Sarcatica, both of you are completely missing the point of what I am posting due to your early progression raider elitism.

I am not saying that Divine Veil is a bad ability or needs to be removed. In fact I think it is an awesome ability and very in character for the Paladin to have. The only real change I would make to it is perhaps boosting the shield to 20% the Paladin's hp.

Right now it is far to easy for players to develop "its nice but not necessary so you don't need to use it" mentalities around perfectly good abilities and I hope that 4.0 changes that.

It's elitism to point out blatant misinformation with actual facts and real examples? Or explain why things are how they are?

This is the actual reason why people develop the mentality you speak of. I'm telling you that DV is an incredibly strong and vital skill and you are just staying inside your own bubble of thought.

A 7k shield stacking shield that will only scale upwards going forward? On demand crit-lo level shielding. That's just stupid and imbalanced.

Again, you have no concept of content balance. Anyone that actually understands how tightly tuned the hardest content in this game is will tell you it's a terrible idea to power creep raid mitigation. There is a real argument that the reason why we have such ludicrous eHP checks is because of how ridiculously strong SCH shielding is and that imbalance has forced SE to buff the crap out of Noct AST in order for a non-SCH comp to have any hope of clearing content early on. In order for the eHP checks to actually be challenging, they need to push the upper end of raid-mitigation and when you have DV as a 7k on-demand stacking shield, that standard changes completely. You end up either trivializing eHP checks or making PLD a must-bring job. You also accomplish the total opposite of making the game more casual friendly by further increasing the gap between players that use DV well and players that don't.

So in your blindness, you are throwing a wrench into end-game tuning and job balance because you didn't want to take the more sensible and logical path of just teaching players how to play the game so that they can see the value in skills that are already incredibly strong. Lots of people, including you before this topic, don't even know how or why DV is so good. That's the problem.

[Ultimatecalibur]

It's elitism to point out blatant misinformation with actual facts and real examples? Or explain why things are how they are?

The facts you use are not the only facts and are only true of 1% of the player base. Also you are looking at things as part of the top 1% of 10% of the player base. You need to consider what things look like for the average player not what they look like to just you.

You have also been attacking someone who mostly agrees with you on Divine Veil from the start. You have been attacking an ally not an enemy.

It seems you thought that "nice but not necessary" means useless. It means that less skilled players have a bad mentality where they think the ability is unnecessary or useless because of how content is done at their skill level and do not use it.

You have been pretty much preaching at the choir from the start and accusing them of being the devil's servants. I have bee trying to point out that that is what you have been doing.

This is the actual reason why people develop the mentality you speak of. I'm telling you that DV is an incredibly strong and vital skill and you are just staying inside your own bubble of thought.

What? Where are you getting that I think DV is a weak, useless ability? I've said multiple times that I wish more of the less skilled Paladins would find good reasons to use it more. And more often than not the mentality actually forms because they fail to notice the effect and just give up on it.

You are the one stuck in your own bubble of thought. Divine Veil works great in high level min-ilevel early progression content but less skilled players start failing to see how good it is the farther away from that very narrow section of the game they are.

A 7k shield stacking shield that will only scale upwards going forward? On demand crit-lo level shielding. That's just stupid and imbalanced.

Are you aware that Crit-los are ~11k shields base right now and they are continuing to grow? A normal adloquium shield at i255 is ~3.5k and should be 4.5k+ at i270. With Defiance+Convalesence, an adloquium should be putting out a 5k+ shield and a Crit-lo should be putting out 16k+ shields. A 7k shield would only be about 55% more than a deployed boosted adloquium and have no change of criting into a 20k mega shield. Scholars are must have because there is no other way to get even close to their Crit-lo shields.

Again, you have no concept of content balance. Anyone that actually understands how tightly tuned the hardest content in this game is will tell you it's a terrible idea to power creep raid mitigation. There is a real argument that the reason why we have such ludicrous eHP checks is because of how ridiculously strong SCH shielding is and that imbalance has forced SE to buff the crap out of Noct AST in order for a non-SCH comp to have any hope of clearing content early on. In order for the eHP checks to actually be challenging, they need to push the upper end of raid-mitigation and when you have DV as a 7k on-demand stacking shield, that standard changes completely. You end up either trivializing eHP checks or making PLD a must-bring job.

Just like how the Scholar is the must bring healer because it can trivialize ehp checks? What you fail to see is that an improved DV could potentially change the meta so that Scholar is not must have allowing for Whm/Astro healer comps.

You also accomplish the total opposite of making the game more casual friendly by further increasing the gap between players that use DV well and players that don't.

Wrong. Currently the problem is not the difference between players who use it well and those who do not use it well. The difference is between those players who use it and those who fail to activate the ability at all. This is the difference between a Paladin who uses a GB -> RA -> RA and one that spams RoH, not the difference between two Paladins who use FoF at different points in the GB -> RA -> RA rotation.

So in your blindness, you are throwing a wrench into end-game tuning and job balance because you didn't want to take the more sensible and logical path of just teaching players how to play the game so that they can see the value in skills that are already incredibly strong. Lots of people, including you before this topic, don't even know how or why DV is so good. That's the problem.

Actually you are the one who is blind. You have been attacking me since I replied to a post complaining about the lack of impact that Tempered Will, Cover and Divine Veil has and pointed out that Divine Veil has a good (but low impact) effect with proper timing but far to many Paladins fail to see that impact or have that impact negated by the actions of others leading to them having a mental image of DV being "Nice, but not Necessary" in a large percentage of content and therefore stop using it.

[Brian_]

The facts you use are not the only facts and are only true of 1% of the player base. Also you are looking at things as part of the top 1% of 10% of the player base. You need to consider what things look like for the average player not what they look like to just you.

Except I am the person here considering what things look like for the average player and you are not. Should everyone be required to use every single skill a job has to good effect? No. It's not reasonable to expect casual players to do that.

You have been pretty much preaching at the choir from the start and accusing them of being the devil's servants. I have bee trying to point out that that is what you have been doing.

First off, you implied that DV was unnecessary because healers could already handle eHP checks with DRK / WAR comps that don't have DV. I replied to that and pointed out how that's blatantly false. You then tried to reference some largely irrelevant example of Divine Judgement's required mitigation to support the incorrect assertion that DV is unneeded showing a complete lack of understanding of why DV is good.

You then said that they should buff DV to make people want to use it more and make the impact easier to feel.

I replied to that by pointing out how obviously short-sighted and self-serving that change is and the detrimental overall impact it would have on content tuning.

I've been saying DV is fine and it's fine that bad players can still function fine without it. It's a skill that becomes increasingly important as you get better at the game and that's perfectly fine. At the entry level, the job is easy to pick up and play and the intricacies of the job begin to shine at the higher levels of play. That's completely reasonable and hardly an elitist stance.

Are you aware that Crit-los are ~11k shields base right now and they are continuing to grow? A normal adloquium shield at i255 is ~3.5k and should be 4.5k+ at i270. With Defiance+Convalesence, an adloquium should be putting out a 5k+ shield and a Crit-lo should be putting out 16k+ shields. A 7k shield would only be about 55% more than a deployed boosted adloquium and have no change of criting into a 20k mega shield. Scholars are must have because there is no other way to get even close to their Crit-lo shields.

First off, SCHs are not must have because of crit-lo shields. You cannot rely on getting a crit and the basis of healing is consistency. They are a very strong healer because of their extremely efficient DPS, infinite MP fairy, efficient oGCD utilization, incredibly versatile healing-kit with excellent recovery tools, and great general utility on top of their raid mitigation.

Secondly, I specifically said stacking shield. When you stack DV with other shields like galvanize and noct shields (something you cannot do with a deployed adlo), you get an on demand crit-lo tier shield.

You cannot depend on a crit-lo. You play around the standard adlo deploy amount and a crit-lo is just a bonus. You also cannot always get (and should not always go for) a perfectly coordinated adlo-deploy on a conva buffed defiance warrior. With your DV buff, you are guaranteed an easy to activate 7k shield every 120s that stacks with galvanize / noct shields. That is a huge difference.

So again, I will explain the situation to you. Right now, content is tuned to make eHP checks challenging with the assumption that you can reliably but barely survive using our current tools. They already had to buff Noct AST in order to normalize the raid mitigation between different healer comps. When you suddenly introduce the ability to pump out a 10k+ shield on your party every 120s, either you change your tuning formula to account for that and turn PLD into a mandatory raid job like SCH was until they buffed Noct AST or you just allow DV to trivialize one eHP check every 120s. That's not good design either way.

Just like how the Scholar is the must bring healer because it can trivialize ehp checks? What you fail to see is that an improved DV could potentially change the meta so that Scholar is not must have allowing for Whm/Astro healer comps.

WHM / AST comps are already perfectly viable in early prog. What the DV change would potentially do is make PLD + X the only viable tanking comp. That's not a good thing.

Wrong. Currently the problem is not the difference between players who use it well and those who do not use it well. The difference is between those players who use it and those who fail to activate the ability at all. This is the difference between a Paladin who uses a GB -> RA -> RA and one that spams RoH, not the difference between two Paladins who use FoF at different points in the GB -> RA -> RA rotation.

Actually you are the one who is blind. You have been attacking me since I replied to a post complaining about the lack of impact that Tempered Will, Cover and Divine Veil has and pointed out that Divine Veil has a good (but low impact) effect with proper timing but far to many Paladins fail to see that impact or have that impact negated by the actions of others leading to them having a mental image of DV being "Nice, but not Necessary" in a large percentage of content and therefore stop using it.

Your GB>RA>RA example only proves my point. Currently, whether you use an optimal rotation or not doesn't matter for all the content except for A12S and maybe A11S. You are trying to imply that that's not okay. I'm saying it's fine that casual players can still clear content even without using every tool they have and yet I'm the elitist basing my opinions around the 1%? I'm the person here who is actually considering the full impact of your shortsightedness.

You can clear most content by spamming a single combo with a few CDs. Not every skill needs to be relevant at every level of skill. That's fine. It's a problem when certain skills like Cover and Tempered Will (and Clemency to a lesser extent) are not relevant at any level of skill.

[Fernosaur]

Tbh PLD being able to trivialize eHP checks every 120 seconds could be pretty good for the job, seeing how it's lagging behind, as always. Then again, as long as that amount of mitigation is not necessary or does not counterbalance DRK's personal DPS and Reprisal, PLD would be in exactly the same place even with such power to Divine Veil.

You want to see something that absolutely broke the meta? Take a look at the buffed Balance on AST. If AST can get a Raging Strikes on a DPS and make it last more than one minute, I don't see why you'd be so against an on-demand 7-10k shield every two minutes.

[SpookyGhost]

You want to see something that absolutely broke the meta? Take a look at the buffed Balance on AST. If AST can get a Raging Strikes on a DPS and make it last more than one minute, I don't see why you'd be so against an on-demand 7-10k shield every two minutes.

They intentionally over-buffed AST so they'd be meta-relevant for the last raid tier.

[Brian_]

If you're a selfish PLD-only player, then maybe that prospect looks good to you. If you actually care about the health of the game, then it should worry you.

In concept, it's really no different from nisi or water cheese in A4S and A8S. Mechanics that were meant to be difficult are made trivial and for a lot of people, it cheapens the experience. It's not different from how the strength of DA DM trivialized tank buster rotations in Gordias and skewed balance heavily in favor of DRK. It's not good design and it's not healthy for the game.

And the only real purpose Balance serves is to pad fflogs parses. The DPS checks were already largely trivial even in early prog with no Balance.

If we get another Gordias Savage, then yes, I'd be against Balance as it currently exists because it would have an actual impact on content and job balance.