Reasonable buff to war

[Launched]

Then Paladin would be meta and you'd have literally the exact same situation

You mean the PLD that's been the best, most popular tank for all of Stormblood and the first raid tier of Shadowbringers? PLD could definitely use a few nerfs, more than GNB.

[RadicalPesto]

You mean the PLD that's been the best, most popular tank for all of Stormblood and the first raid tier of Shadowbringers? PLD could definitely use a few nerfs, more than GNB.

PLD was also literally unable to pull bosses and ran out of mitigation extremely quickly for the entirety of Stormblood. Despite having slightly better damage than other tanks, PLD still maintains overall worse personal mitigation due to a low number of actual mitigation skills, with all of them being either unimpressive, equivalent to their counterparts on other tanks, or on obscenely long cooldowns. The thing that made PLD a borderline mandatory pick in Stormblood was Cover being a broken skill that effectively acted as a free, extra cooldown every 2 minutes, but aside from that PLD had horrendous mobility, would quickly run out of cooldowns (O10S giving you no swaps on PLD was a nightmare), and by the end of SB, wasn't even all that impressive in DPS. PLD has been compensated DPS-wise for the fact the biggest saving grace of the class in SB (broken Cover) has been removed due to being impossible to balance. If you want to nerf PLD's DPS it will absolutely need buffs to personal mitigation and to usability of skills like Divine Veil, since we're no longer in a SB situation where PLD and WAR hog all the party mitigation while DRK gets stuck with none.

[BarretOblivion]

PLD was also literally unable to pull bosses and ran out of mitigation extremely quickly for the entirety of Stormblood. Despite having slightly better damage than other tanks, PLD still maintains overall worse personal mitigation due to a low number of actual mitigation skills, with all of them being either unimpressive, equivalent to their counterparts on other tanks, or on obscenely long cooldowns. The thing that made PLD a borderline mandatory pick in Stormblood was Cover being a broken skill that effectively acted as a free, extra cooldown every 2 minutes, but aside from that PLD had horrendous mobility, would quickly run out of cooldowns (O10S giving you no swaps on PLD was a nightmare), and by the end of SB, wasn't even all that impressive in DPS. PLD has been compensated DPS-wise for the fact the biggest saving grace of the class in SB (broken Cover) has been removed due to being impossible to balance. If you want to nerf PLD's DPS it will absolutely need buffs to personal mitigation and to usability of skills like Divine Veil, since we're no longer in a SB situation where PLD and WAR hog all the party mitigation while DRK gets stuck with none.

Eh? What? What group were you in? The almost the entirety of SB our PLD was pulling hte boss and did just fine on mitigation when planned properly. Now? PLD has no trouble at all in mitigation, in fact I would argue almost all the tanks are nearly the same in mitigation. Tank busters right now are spaced out perfectly to where each tank can comfortably cooldown them with ease.

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Cover was broken? It was useful in a few fights but that's it, it wasn't busted. It was really useful in Guardian, it was really useful in Omega 1 and it was useful in using cover + tempered will for your physical ranged. If you honestly needed to use cover to help cooldown for tankbusters in SB... you were doing an extremely poor job of spacing out cooldowns and party mitigation planning.

[RadicalPesto]

Eh? What? What group were you in? The almost the entirety of SB our PLD was pulling hte boss and did just fine on mitigation when planned properly. Now? PLD has no trouble at all in mitigation, in fact I would argue almost all the tanks are nearly the same in mitigation. Tank busters right now are spaced out perfectly to where each tank can comfortably cooldown them with ease.

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Cover was broken? It was useful in a few fights but that's it, it wasn't busted. It was really useful in Guardian, it was really useful in Omega 1 and it was useful in using cover + tempered will for your physical ranged. If you honestly needed to use cover to help cooldown for tankbusters in SB... you were doing an extremely poor job of spacing out cooldowns and party mitigation planning.

PLD would lose enormous amounts of DPS and completely misalign its rotation with party buffs if it tried to pull, it would effectively put most of your burst out of trick attack range for huge chunks of the fight if you pulled as PLD, and even then, you would require extra levels of aggro babysitting due to the PLD MT opener just straight up generating pitiful aggro compared to WAR and DRK. PLD has no issues with mitigation now, largely thanks to them fixing the horrible cooldown on Sentinel, but its personal mitigation is still kind of unimpressive compared to WAR and DRK, since WAR has a much shorter CD immunity and two self-healing CDs, and DRK has TBN. You're not going to run out of CDs on PLD very easily now, but its self-mitigation is only describable as "functional", not amazing.

Cover was "broken" in that entire strategies relied on it. In particular, the standard cooldown rotation for God Kefka in O8S relied heavily on abusing Cover for Hyperdrives in order to save coooldowns for the MT, who would usually be a WAR, and would also abuse Holmgang for Ultimate Embraces. O8S was certainly doable without cover, but Cover made the fight a lot easier for both tanks and healers in a way that a DRK/WAR composition wouldn't have been able to. So no, it's not a matter of "doing an extremely poor job spacing out cooldowns", it was a matter of O8S having a lot of tankbusters with bleeds that could be trivialized by Cover, which would allow the MT to save their immunities to cheese Ultimate Embrace with them.

[BarretOblivion]

PLD would lose enormous amounts of DPS and completely misalign its rotation with party buffs if it tried to pull, it would effectively put most of your burst out of trick attack range for huge chunks of the fight if you pulled as PLD, and even then, you would require extra levels of aggro babysitting due to the PLD MT opener just straight up generating pitiful aggro compared to WAR and DRK. PLD has no issues with mitigation now, largely thanks to them fixing the horrible cooldown on Sentinel, but its personal mitigation is still kind of unimpressive compared to WAR and DRK, since WAR has a much shorter CD immunity and two self-healing CDs, and DRK has TBN. You're not going to run out of CDs on PLD very easily now, but its self-mitigation is only describable as "functional", not amazing.

Cover was "broken" in that entire strategies relied on it. In particular, the standard cooldown rotation for God Kefka in O8S relied heavily on abusing Cover for Hyperdrives in order to save coooldowns for the MT, who would usually be a WAR, and would also abuse Holmgang for Ultimate Embraces. O8S was certainly doable without cover, but Cover made the fight a lot easier for both tanks and healers in a way that a DRK/WAR composition wouldn't have been able to. So no, it's not a matter of "doing an extremely poor job spacing out cooldowns", it was a matter of O8S having a lot of tankbusters with bleeds that could be trivialized by Cover, which would allow the MT to save their immunities to cheese Ultimate Embrace with them.

Cover is just classified as 'nice' to save a cooldown, that logic you are using can be applied to every shared TB in this raid tier where a PLD can just share their intervention on their fellow tank to share their cooldowns, doesn't mean its busted its 'nice'.

Look I am not going to argue it wasn't optimal, as I stated, he was 'hard-headed'. He is pretty decent at positioning and lining up cooldowns... but he has never been good at damage as a Tank. Usually greens and blues but again he's hard headed. Technically our group also had issues with hate management when me "WAR" pulled later on in the fight because the BRD refused and I do mean "vehimently" refused to Tactitian and drop his own hate as he would say "manage hate better, use a aggro combo" which I would always respond "U Wot M8? We don't use Aggro combos almost ever". Didn't help our PLD would b**** that he had to shirk me ( even though I would shirk him on cooldown) and I was getting oranges every run... sooo yeah.

[Shurrikhan]

You mean the PLD that's been the best, most popular tank for all of Stormblood and the first raid tier of Shadowbringers? PLD could definitely use a few nerfs, more than GNB.

All it would have taken to fix Paladin's place in Stormblood was for them to actually do as players asked in having Cover use the greater mitigation of yourself or the target rather than giving it a flat Rampart buff over its duration. But alas, where you could simply throw a bandaid, hammer-sized buff at a precise mechanical issue needing fairness...