How to Get Players to Love PLD Again.

[Arkine]

S.Coheir, I would totally rip on you for saying that dmg output is half the enmity generation that PLD can accrue, but I know you're smarter than that. You're not the typical person I've seen so far ranting on about how PLD tanking is so weak and SE needs to overhaul the whole idea. I've agreed with you on most of your posts, so I'll just take a slight jab to the ribs for this one in saying: (bear in mind, I know XIV is nothing like XI, nor do I want it to be, I'm just bringing it up as a point)
Remember when PLD got that spiffy new Nyzule WS, the enmity based one. Can't remember the name of it, I quit like 3 years ago. Anyhow, people generally started trying to DD tank on PLD, and failed uber hard at it. It was a massive influx of "hey let's use Joyeuse and HASTE/ACC gear and not worry about enmity at all. omg this WS owns so much I can hold hate and do DMG now!" .....no. In some cases, it worked, because you had 4 /thf's pounding 1500's on you all day long. But the general rule of thumb in XI was that a PLD did not have it's enmity generation through damage output. It was minor, if even a factor. I usually did Flat Blade for the chance to stun and pop a Cure IV if I needed it. Dropping Cure IV's always was an epic way to generate some enmity if it got pulled.

But, I don't want to get out of line here. Generally, damage output has never been a strong point of PLD in the terms of tanking. You need to buff Enmity, HP and defense too much to stack offensive stats for it to be effective. If that's the route SE wants to take.. well then they just made a weak warrior with the ability to cure. That's about it.

Atonement.

The way it was used was not by entirely focusing on DDing, you played the same way. PLD's TP was used mostly for 2 things, Chivalry (Turn TP to MP) and Spirits within (@full TP you deal damage equal to 45% of your current HP), what Atonement did was take Spirit's place since it can be used at 100tp for 750 damage so used three times you did 2250 damage which is ALOT more than what spirits did and that much damage was a massive enmity boost and most optimizing anybody did to effectively use Atonement was use a Joyeuse (occ.atks twice) over the Mac+1 enmity sword and a haubergeon over AF2 body (+atk +10-12 acc) and accuracy food (sole sushi) over Tav tacos (DEF food) just so more attacks landed to speed up the TP building to use it more, however PLD/NIN relied on haste to keep shadows up and spam flash instead of stacking HP and blood tanking, and it worked great.