Give us back the old Paladin

[Renathras]

Yes and no, healers are complaining about the amount of downtime of pressing the same DPS button in contrast to the amount of time spent actively healing (which are mostly done instantaneously with oGCDS and without much thought required). Usually that leads to 2 points of discussion - add more DPS-oriented skills to keep engagement or add more damage to heal. Renathras is one of the few who oppose giving more DPS rotations to healers. This is a more recent thread if you want to see where that discussion is going.

One of the few on the forums. Though even there, there are a number of people with the "Either give us more to damage or give us more to heal (or both)" camps. Most of the people that are "more DPS buttons" only are so because they genuinely feel that the game design can't support a GCD healing model. Thing is, it used to, so it clearly can. It's more a matter of if the community would adapt to it...which it probably can, since it managed to adapt from it just fine.

I'm actually in favor of a hybrid approach where each Healer is given a different rotation (one like today probably WHM, one based on DoTs probably SCH, one based on GCD buffs probably AST, and one based on non-DoT damage rotation like RDM or SMN probably SGE); so I'm not, strictly speaking, opposed to more DPS buttons. I'm just opposed to them across the board. I don't favor trading one form of homogenization for another, with the other being even more divorced from the concept of Healer than the present.

Aren't healers complaining at how little they have to heal now?

Some are.

Many aren't.

This last tier nearly broke a bunch of groups because the Healers weren't used to the spicier damage from all the bleeds and were having to adapt to actually needing to use some GCD heals, which they'd gotten used to not using.

Ultimates are weird, since the healing is HYPER scripted (moreso than any other encounters in the game) and comes in very exact, but heavy bursts. It's why an AST could solo heal the last one.

By "more engaging DoT gameplay" - If you apply something as part of your standard rotation, it's not engaging, especially if it's rigid. Old PLD and still DRG both have/had DoTs that area applied as part of their standard rotation. They don't have to track a DoT timer to know when to refresh it, they simply do their standard rotation and the DoT is applied. Both Goring and Swords DoTs were applied this way. If you were simply doing your rotation, your DoT had complete uptime on Old PLD. There was no chance of your DoT falling off unless you deviated from your rotation, since the DoT was tied to the rotation. It wasn't a separate button, it wasn't a timer you watched for when it was about to fall off to reapply it. WAR Storm's Eye was more engaging than Old PLD DoTs, because Storm's Eye isn't part of WAR's standard rotation (Storm's Path is), meaning they had to at least keep an eye on its timer to know when to get ready to refresh it. Old PLD's main two DoTs, Goring and Swords, were both braindead since they required no thought to apply. The only thought was in Circle ofScorn (which you used/still use on CD or you were wrong) and in remembering to use FoF before the first Goring of your physical phase so its buff would capture both DoTs.

The DoTs themselves weren't engaging, since you did nothing special to apply them and you weren't tracking when they fell off. There was no risk of them falling off unless you weren't doing your rotation at all, in which case you had bigger problems.

Contrast Healer DoTs, which while not terribly engaging either, were still more engaging since they could fall off. They weren't part of your standard rotation (insomuch as Healers...have a rotation), so they could fall off and you had/have to pay attention to their timers to know when to refresh them, and have to refresh them manually and deliberately. It's not an automatic part of "Well, if you're spamming Glare correctly, your DoT will be up 100% of the time without you having to do anything", which is what Old PLD's DoTs were.

That is - by being "baked into the rotation", it wasn't engaging, since the DoT application and risk of it falling off were nonexistent unless you simply weren't doing your rotation.

"the old burst was just as easy"

That's my point, yes. The punishment is just an accessibility argument, not an argument of good design. Being punishing isn't inherently god-tier design.

The filler didn't require thought, though, that's my point. The entire rotation was Royal, Goring (FoF just before -3), Royal, Goring, Swords, repeat ad nausea. That's not terribly engaging compared to New PLD, with the difference being New PLD actually gives the player agency. Where you move your HS to, for example, gives you agency in how the fight plays out (both in terms of sustain and disengages), where Old PLD didn't. The rigidity of Old PLD meant you had two options: Doing it right or doing it wrong. There was no variation. The only "choice" you had in an entire 2 minute or so rotation was "do I drop an Atonement from the first Royal or the second Royal?", which was less agency than New PLD has.

PLD was the worst Tank in terms of damage before. Recall that WAR got buffs in 6.1 and 6.2, that put it ahead of PLD. PLD also had a wider spread (variance), while WAR's (due to being easier) was much narrower. PLD _IS_ doing less damage now, which I suspect will be addressed with some kind of potency buffs in the next patch, but PLD wasn't doing god-tier damage before. It was back of the pack before the change. P1S (using it because it was well before the patch and people aren't running and parsing it in modern gear), the first PLD in the list, that is, the top PLD in damage in the fight records, is...well, I'd like to tell you, but I went through 10 pages, the top 1000, and they were all DRK and GNB. There is not a single WAR or PLD in the top 1000 for P1S.

...okay, I kept going. 1168, page 12, is the top PLD.

P4 phase 2 the top PLD? 537 on page 6. PLD's median report was only a smidge above WAR's, as was its absolute 100 max, but its low point was also well below WAR's. PLD's upper quartile (75%) was about even with DRK and GNB's median (50%). And that's for all of P1-4S.

PLD is also the bottom of Ex4 per the current spread. WAR (oddly enough, though I guess it makes sense as that fight's hectic and WAR is easy to keep chugging along with) is the top, then GNB, DRK, then PLD (though GNB's 100 is actually a big higher than DRK's which is a bit higher than WAR's, which is...higher than PLD's). We get the same picture in Ex3, just with GNB and DRK swapping places.

No, PLD was not topping the charts before by any stretch of the imagination. You may be able to find individual PLDs that were top for specific moments in time, but merely clicking over and looking at the bar graphs OR the long-form rankings, the truth reveals itself.

.

Now, don't mistake my argument:

New PLD isn't perfect, and Old PLD had a different "feel", which it's valid to complain about if you enjoyed the feel of it. I'm not being sarcastic when I say this. Feel is a good chunk of how enjoyable a Job is to play, balance, numbers, and mechanics be damned. A Job can be the best in the world but not feel good, and it won't be fun. A Job can, conversely, be doing poorly in a balance sense but just feel good to play.

But in objective terms, Old PLD was not just fine or anything. It was not topping the charts, it wasn't in a happy place, and the nuance was often not actual choice but a binary "doing it right or doing it wrong" situation.

Now, as a person that advocated for the old WoW talent trees before they were taken away, even such illusions of choice can sometimes be good for a class or good for a game. So I don't want to discount that. But objectively speaking, New PLD does actually offer more true choice and agency to the player than Old PLD did. It offers more skill expression, it just doesn't punish failure as harshly.

Old PLD performed fine as a Tank, but so did every other Tank, in terms of being able to keep agro and mostly in terms of mitigation. Old PLD actually had a slightly weaker personal mitigation suite (was "missing" one and another was based on block, which didn't work against bleeds) than the other Tanks, but it was still generally functional. Though it was bottom tier in terms of DPS, which is largely all people care about once you've met the bar of "don't die to tankbusters and can keep agro", which every Tank can.

I also have my own complaints with New PLD, such as several of the abilities seem tacked on "just to keep them" (I have a similar issue with New SMN where the entire Energy Drain/Aetherflow/Ruin 4 just seems tacked on legacy and is dissonant with the new design...but in that case, New SMN has such a slim kit already that removing them would remove what relatively few abilities it has overall). Like I see no reason for FoF and Requiescat to be two separate buttons (since you'll always use them together) or why Goring Blade...even still exists.

But on the whole, it wasn't a bad rework.

I do agree that Homogenization is an issue, and the 2 minute meta is driving that hard right now. Healers still have that worse than Tanks, though. I guess I just don't feel that the Tanks are the same playing them. Maybe it's just me, though. DRK is the only one I don't play, but WAR, PLD, and GNB all feel different to me to play. Any Job in the game can be distilled to "button that does damage, resource spender, buttons that don't do damage", but at an actual, functional analysis level, the three all play differently from one another (as differently as you're going to get and still be Tanks in a fantasy setting, anyway...)

I highly disagree that PLD is a GNB clone. Honestly, it feels closer to WAR to me than it does to GNB. People say it's the same because it builds a resource to spend, but GNB's stocks to 3 and it has 3 different ways (4 if we include AOE...let's not) to spend it vs PLD's 1 + 3 where there is only one way (again, ignoring AOE) to spend each. Not to mention two of the hallmarks of GNB play are that it has a super rigid rotation (more akin to DRG and, honestly, OLD PLD was more akin to GNB in that sense) and a fast pace, high APM rotation. PLD lacks both of those. Old PLD was closer to GNB in the rigid rotation department, and New PLD doesn't have a higher APM or pacing than Old PLD did. PLD is still thin on oGCDs...which I honestly like. "Builder-spender" is hardly GNB exclusive, as WAR has the same thing. Indeed, DRK is the one Tank that DOESN'T strictly work that way...because it doesn't build in the same way.