Paladin nerf INC

[MomoOG]

As a paladin myself, I must say I think they need an extreme nerf. Stupid amounts of utility, good damage, able to block physical and magical damage. They seem to have all of the upsides with none of the downsides that DRK/WAR has. I think reducing their damage by 90% while increasing their enmity in Shield Oath only to compensate would be a good enough nerf. Extreme looking? Definitely, but with all the utility the PLD brings, I think it'll be needed. That way if you want a balance of damage and utility, you take DRK, and for all out damage (near enough), take WAR. Where you need lots of defence and utility, take PLD. Make each one situational and useful in different ways.

I think this is literally the worst thing you could do. At the end of the day dps is more useful than mitigation on tanks. Also utility needs to be defined because dps utility is again far more useful than mitigation utility. I realize this sounds paradoxical but I will explain by copy and pasting a reply I had made in another thread on the same subject.

"Okay let me break it down. Mitigation at the end of the day for a tank is fairly binary. You either have enough mitigation to survive what you are tanking or you don't. It does not have an infinite cap in utility the way damage does (infinite is a clear exaggeration as dps limits are set by the amount of hp the enemy has but on a practical level dps cap is infinite). In simple terms, more dps is always useful while mitigation has a hard drop off in use. Why does this cause a problem? If all tanks are able to survive an encounter there is no purpose to being a "mitigation specialized" tank. Everyone will min/max their groups with "dps tanks". If an encounter is designed so that only the mitigation based tank can survive than we have a very problematic situation where some classes designed as tanks (the dps tanks) aren't even able to perform their basic role of being a tank. More often than not the first scenario is going to occur and "mitigation tanks" get the short end of the stick and get excluded from groups. Or Mitigation tanks are more useful as progression occurs and then once people understand the encounters or become more geared the mitigation based tanks are again excluded from groups.

Now one can argue that the mitigation based tank can be designated as the main tank and the dps tanks can be designated as the off tanks but this would again only hold if the encounter is designed such that there is so much damage that the dps tanks simply can't fulfill the role of the main tank.

One could finally argue that the mitigation tank is able to take so much less dmg that the healers are than able to dps that much more to make up the dps loss of having a mitigation tank. This results in far more difficult balancing act because now balance is now going involving interdependence of classes."

[Marxam]

Highest warrior parse is right now 3198.8 and pld 3200.5 both players are in the same team and same balance rate. Dps actually seems pretty similar, pld may just lot easier play.

yeah when the numbers are that close it doesn't bother me. What does bother me is the discrepancy in raid utility. PLD far outweighs WAR in that regard. WAR really only brings the slashing debuff but every raid comp has a nin so that is out of the question. I can see why PLD would be nerfed. In almost all scenarios it beats out the other two tanks. It's literally a repeat of 2.0 launch and double PLD is a viable option. I do hope that they bring up the other two tanks instead of bringing PLD down because PLD finally achieved the perfect theme and gameplay of what it's job represents. Though I wonder how they will bring WAR up to par when we got no defensive cds in the expansion.

[Soraki-Muppe]

Let me predict how the tank balance will be in 5.0.
New tank: deals 2x the damage of a dps, has a permanent 50% damage reduction... just permanent and that is before all the 20s lasting 10s cooldown def buffs, buffs the entire party with 20% damage up and mitigation by simply looking at the boss.
PLD: Will have a shield, just a shield since a sword = to much damage and you might trip and fall on it.
DRK: Will have a mp pool of 1 without any way to increase it, also the sword is a tupperwear sword since it would be dangerous otherwise.
WAR: Has an axe... well not as much an axe as a stick with the word axe written on it, also get a new skill at lvl78 by the name of "poke it" that makes the war poke themselves in the eyes so the screen goes black while the war and the player of said war see nothing, "poke it" share keybind with all the other skills.

But seriously, should PLD be nerfed? No they should not. What should happen is that SE actually listen to the tanking community and balance the tanks. There are countless suggestions on the forums, heck there was countless people voicing their concerns after the media tour after which SE did nothing to change things, had SE listened then we might not have this horrible mess... a mess that will not be solved by nerfing the one tank that happens to be in a good place. There are many things with the current state of tanks that I am angry about but all but one of those has to do with what a needless mess they made out of war, the only other thing is how SE fucked up our attack power calculation.

[Takamorisan]

I think the only possible nerf is the self healing ability, basically you can tank with PLD without healers. Now the other abilities in the toolkit they should keep the way it is or they will end up gimping the class.

Buff WAR and DRK to be on par and that's it. Hate this design philosophy of nerfing to oblivion a class just because the other are not on par.

[TouchandFeel]

DRK: Will have a mp pool of 1 without any way to increase it, also the sword is a tupperwear sword since it would be dangerous otherwise.

Tupperware sword?

I guess that makes sense for DRK since we could store our BlackBlood in it. It better be microwave and oven safe though.

[Felorr]

? base potencies of our skills arent going to magically change with better gear, damage between tanks will still be the same in comparison to how they are now

Your base potency will not change correct. But even assuming SE never touches any of the tank's skills/potency, we may see a change in performance once we're in i380 gear in a year or two from now. Consider for example, how SMN only stands to gain from an increase in spell speed over the course of an expansion, more so than BLM has in the past. Over the course of the expansion, we may see a similar change in the way PLD benefits from skill speed in Sword Oath, or how WAR/DRK rotations will change from higher skill speed. I really doubt SE balanced the jobs in just the right way so that they all equally benefit exactly from the increase in various substats.

[Dizzy_Derp]

Pld do not need a nerf, the other two need a buff. DPS order Should be War>Drk>Pld but all within 50-100 of each other played at max capacity, there has to be a sacrifice for having better mitigation (pld) and less mitigation (war) and the middle ground (Drk). It shouldn\\'t be Pld best of both worlds, but I\\'d hate to see them get a nerf (though that Oath Gauge, what is the point honestly?)

You a 1 or 200 dps difference is not going to convince anyone to ring a war it has no use in raid. You bring pld be side it has all the utility then some, you bring del because it is the only tank siuited to pull the boss and can shield the boss as ot. War though? Nothing, seriously nothing for you group. It needs to be doing around 500 more dps to even start to think about bringing one.

[Falar]

I guess its official, DRK nerfed to the bottom.

What I don't understand is PLDs claiming 3 years of being "bad". In 2.xx, PLD was king and WAR was 2nd class. In HW, WAR was king with PLD being 3rd. Now in SB PLD is back to being king while DRK got nerfed into the ground---why? Everyone I know assumed WAR nerfs were coming in SB and Yoshi stated PLD was going to get much needed attention (I knew it was going to at least get a spammable AoE and it did) but DRK was never really mentioned but they got hit the hardest with the nerf bat.

[Nayrr]

I don't see how one can defend PLD's current situation by using the logic that for one expansion it was the weakest tank, and in said expansion they were not even weaker by that much for single target situations and I know how PLDs like to blow it out of proportion. It's a rather childish excuse, and people who defend it that way really need to get over themselves. (Also, 2.0 PLD says hi).

They wanted to *balance* the tanks, not create another situation where one tank is way better than the rest. In this case, PLD does indeed have the highest potential single target damage and best utility and also best mitigation tools (though in this aspect it is not by very much), therefore in raid content it will take the place that WAR has taken for all of HW as the best OT since DRK and WAR currently do not even come close to it in that regard, mostly due to the utility part of it. Thus, this is not balanced at all.


I figure SE will take the easy way out and just nerf either PLD's potencies and/or its raid utility rather than buff DRK or WAR, which definitely is not what I would prefer, but whatever. As a DRK main, I'd rather they buffed up a few abilities, like Dark Passenger (so it's not useless), Living Dead (so it's not quite as risky to use), and some other abilities that would allow it to be approximately on par with utility (AoE TBN?). But, that's just me hoping, lol.

[Phoenicia]

What I don't understand is PLDs claiming 3 years of being "bad". In 2.xx, PLD was king and WAR was 2nd class. In HW, WAR was king with PLD being 3rd.

People seriously need to stop b*tching and moaning about the balance state in one other expansion or patch. Imbalance in some previous patch/expansion does NOT justify imbalance now.

Because that is as relevant as saying "PLD is the only viable tank in FFXI with barely any situational competition where Rune master, Puppet master or Ninja being able to fill in, not even replace, but just be an alternative if you don't have the best one." which is NOT relevant at all in case you missed the point.

I mean, based on that logic, PLD here should be nerfed to the ground because in that game PLD has been the best if not the only tank for over 15 years now. WAR should be the only tank in FFXIV, with DRK and PLD being inferior 3rd class citizens that are barely better than a DPS inside their defensive buffs where their only reason for existence is to fill in in case you don't have a WAR...... Which is beyond silly.

What is relevant now is one fact: PLD blows both tanks out of the water in EVERY, SINGLE, RESPECT. Almost to the degree that PLD+PLD is the only combo you want/need. And, ladies and gentlemen, dogs and cats, babies and elderly, THAT is what needs fixing. Not necessarily by nerfing PLD (Please don't, it's FINALLY fun to play), but by bringing the other two tanks back up or close to where they were in HW.

SE buffed PLD with SB and I'm really happy for that. They also finally made it "fun" to play. Now it is not the snore-fest of spamming RoH or ending up not being able to hold hate, all while having the worst DPS, defensive CD gaps, massive TP issues and awkward tank swaps garbage it was in ARR and HW. That's a step in the right direction. HOWEVER, SE did NOT need to go the 100 extra miles to nerf-hammer DRK and WAR to the ground which is absolutely unreasonable.

And before anyone brings up the stupid line of "you're just salty your favorite tank isn't the FotM" crap, it's not a matter of FotM, it's a matter of ruining options. I do not main jobs, I main roles. As such I'm a tank/caster player. I like having my options, in HW and ARR, I enjoyed both caster options, a trend that's continuing in SB while adding a THIRD caster that is also fun and strong. In HW, I enjoyed WAR a lot and DRK wasn't far behind in the "fun" aspect. As things stand now, it's PLD or gtfo. DRK isn't bad at all right now, TBN is fun utility and the blood gauge is interesting, but it's not as "good" as PLD. PLD makes you feel like you're in control of your own fate along with the rest of the parties. Something WAR had a bit of (specially the own part) but was taken from and given to PLD.

WAR was my "favorite" because it was "fun". It had 3 combos instead of 1. It had 5 defensive options + ridiculously short and responsive ultimate instead of 2 + one prohibitively long "ultimate" that you end up dying before it takes effect while still costing you the CD. And it had fluid swapping between defensive and offensive tools. Not to mention a playstyle of "take actions to build towards something", be it fell cleave, unchained or massive self healing. Add the "bring it" attitude the WAR style and animations have and you have an absolute bad-a$$ class. Which was not the case of the snore-fest playstyle that plagued PLD for 4 years where you spam 1, 2, 3 and then press a button to take less damage... once a year.

I won't go into why any of the classes is over or under tuned right as everyone knows that. And if anyone pretends to not know then they're either lying to themselves or don't know much about tanking in this game at all. The point of my post is all about people need to stop justifying imbalance now because of imbalance in some previous patch. Otherwise as a RDM that found tanking on RDM fun in FFXI because it wasn't supposed to work but it did, I will demand that PLD gets deleted in XIV and RDM take its place!

~ Phoenicia ~