Thank you SE

[BlackironTarkus]

Yea, just like they were in each and every tier of alexand- no wait, bad example...

PLD were great if played correctly, they were only 5% behind a DRK but brought superior defensive options on:

A2S, A5S, Half of A6S, A7S, Second half of A8S, A9S, A10S, A11S
Thordan EX, Ravana EX, Nidhogg EX, Sephirot EX, Zurvan EX.

They weren't that bad to be completely honest.

The reason pld were shunned at the higher levels of play is because trick attack was insanely strong and ninjas didn't want to apply their own debuff. In comes warrior with it's slashing debuff and immensely powerful 10% damage down on the boss and it locks in the warrior. Dragoon paired with Bard and SMN/BLM was a given too because of the nature of their buffs/damage. This pushed monk out and made the -10% INT from DRK to replace dragon kick more desirable than -10% STR.

Really gotta understand all aspects of what pushed out Paladin from the meta.

[Alphras]

The reason pld were shunned at the higher levels of play is because trick attack was insanely strong and ninjas didn't want to apply their own debuff. In comes warrior with it's slashing debuff and immensely powerful 10% damage down on the boss and it locks in the warrior. Dragoon paired with Bard and SMN/BLM was a given too because of the nature of their buffs/damage. This pushed monk out and made the -10% INT from DRK to replace dragon kick more desirable than -10% STR.

This is so much. Most people don't even understand why PLD was not Meta in 3.x and just parrot what they read on the forum or reddit.

Paladin was shunned because the devs attempted to force a physical and magical mitigation dichotomy that pitted either it or Dark Knight against each other. With a large amount of fights using magic based damage, Dark Knight always won out. Paladin also suffered from slow mitigation options and no aoe damage to speak of. None of these issues exist correctly, thus Paladin is nowhere near in the same spot as back in 3.x.

Every tank could tank every fight just fine. Mitigation (on tanks) was never a problem.