Dear Paladins...

[SwordCoheir]

Shortened for the sake of posters.

Firstly, I'd like to thank you for taking the effort to actually write out your response.

Reading over your response I think we can all agree things like server latency, lag, and other issues are ongoing problems, and there is always those "Oh, Shit!" moments, your caught off guard, or mis-time your abilities, we're not arguing that, it's a given.

(BTW These are my assumptions based on what you wrote and have written in the past, not a statement of your ability to play being I cannot fully validate your capabilities from personal experience.)

Now if your having issues with latency and lag as whole which prevents you from performing like normal players, it might be just due to your graphics card playing catch-up with the game itself. If you haven't already, I suggest lowering the General / Background Drawing Quality (5/1 are my current settings) and lowering / disabling some of the effects (especially shadows). I had all kinds of issues with Eruptions, Mistral Shrieks, and 100-Tonze Swings until I had lowered the settings some. Even if you find your current style more suitable still, it should help in situations like Chimera where avoiding his moves is necessary.

Putting Latency and Lag aside now, you mentioned that avoiding the move was an issue for you sometimes. I'm just curious if you ever noticed there were two types of 100-Tonze moves (Swing and Swipe), Swing being the potentially 1-Shot move and easily avoidable, while Swipe hits hard but is much faster and much more survivable than Swing. I'm not trying to insult your intelligence or anything, it's easy to miss and hard to judge the moves apart if your not carefully reading the chat log to anticipate attacks, but if that's the case then making attempts to try avoiding Swing should be much easier for you if you choose to do so.

As for my earlier statement about your method not good in methodology or practice, allow me to go over some of the finer points of what I'm getting at and why it looks very unattractive to the majority (and myself for that matter), it has much less to do with being decked out and being able to easily take the brunt of 100-Tonze Swing and relies more on principle of what avoiding the move really does for your party.

-100-Tonze Swing does have the capability to one shot PLD (HP/DEF/VIT or otherwise) without mitigation abilities, stoneskin, w/e up. (Shit happens, everything's on cool-down, etc.)
-Surviving 100-Tonze Swing can be painful, and WHM can only heal about half of a PLD's HP in a single Cura, which could leave a PLD in a predicament if the WHM's cannot heal fast enough and CC follows through with another 100 Tonze move or Glower.
-At 50% CC will start spamming Weaponskills back-to-back leaving little to no breathing room for your healers, who may need to assist the melee's or regain mp. For example, if CC decides to spam 100-Tonze Swings, and your WHM/s get's silenced from slugs it can ruin a PLD's day.
-Additionally, (as you mentioned some of these) CC on his ass means WHM's have additional time to heal, regenerate mp, nuke, recover from silence, etc., but it also means the WHM's don't have to heal as often overall meaning more mp conservation and time to nuke and assist. PLD themselves, will also have enough of a breather to throw out a combo or two without worrying about mitigation abilities, or toss a Holy Succor on themselves, and let the WHM's focus on other things.
-Decreases the chances and opportunities of annoying moves like Animal Instinct and Eye of the Beholder from disturbing the flow of battle.

Taking those points into consideration, taking 100-Tonze Swing head on means your taking more damage overall, diverting the WHM's attention to you more than necessary to heal that extra damage taken (even if you can help yourself every 10-15 seconds), and giving up a solid opportunity for DD's to attack without hesitation (it can be hard for DD's to combo when he's spamming back to back moves). Overall, I can't see any distinct or real advantage to taking it head on aside from necessity, which is more of the effect of bad game design and hardware or bad luck than player skill or schematics.

As far as the DEF/VIT thing goes, I've already said I've been in favor for the DEF/VIT setup in the past and even speced myself for it, however I can also look at the other side of the coin and see what disadvantages it could bring.

I'm afraid I'm also find it difficult to discern weather or not your just having trouble communicating your thoughts and interpreting what other's try to convey to you, or if your just being stubborn and biased in your postings which seems apparent in some of your replies to players (outside of flamebait posts).

[Aceofspades]

Firstly, I'd like to thank you for taking the effort to actually write out your response.

Reading over your response I think we can all agree things like server latency, lag, and other issues are ongoing problems, and there is always those "Oh, Shit!" moments, your caught off guard, or mis-time your abilities, we're not arguing that, it's a given.

(BTW These are my assumptions based on what you wrote and have written in the past, not a statement of your ability to play being I cannot fully validate your capabilities from personal experience.)

Now if your having issues with latency and lag as whole which prevents you from performing like normal players, it might be just due to your graphics card playing catch-up with the game itself. If you haven't already, I suggest lowering the General / Background Drawing Quality (5/1 are my current settings) and lowering / disabling some of the effects (especially shadows). I had all kinds of issues with Eruptions, Mistral Shrieks, and 100-Tonze Swings until I had lowered the settings some. Even if you find your current style more suitable still, it should help in situations like Chimera where avoiding his moves is necessary.

Putting Latency and Lag aside now, you mentioned that avoiding the move was an issue for you sometimes. I'm just curious if you ever noticed there were two types of 100-Tonze moves (Swing and Swipe), Swing being the potentially 1-Shot move and easily avoidable, while Swipe hits hard but is much faster and much more survivable than Swing. I'm not trying to insult your intelligence or anything, it's easy to miss and hard to judge the moves apart if your not carefully reading the chat log to anticipate attacks, but if that's the case then making attempts to try avoiding Swing should be much easier for you if you choose to do so.

As for my earlier statement about your method not good in methodology or practice, allow me to go over some of the finer points of what I'm getting at and why it looks very unattractive to the majority (and myself for that matter), it has much less to do with being decked out and being able to easily take the brunt of 100-Tonze Swing and relies more on principle of what avoiding the move really does for your party.

-100-Tonze Swing does have the capability to one shot PLD (HP/DEF/VIT or otherwise) without mitigation abilities, stoneskin, w/e up. (Shit happens, everything's on cool-down, etc.)
-Surviving 100-Tonze Swing can be painful, and WHM can only heal about half of a PLD's HP in a single Cura, which could leave a PLD in a predicament if the WHM's cannot heal fast enough and CC follows through with another 100 Tonze move or Glower.
-At 50% CC will start spamming Weaponskills back-to-back leaving little to no breathing room for your healers, who may need to assist the melee's or regain mp. For example, if CC decides to spam 100-Tonze Swings, and your WHM/s get's silenced from slugs it can ruin a PLD's day.
-Additionally, (as you mentioned some of these) CC on his ass means WHM's have additional time to heal, regenerate mp, nuke, recover from silence, etc., but it also means the WHM's don't have to heal as often overall meaning more mp conservation and time to nuke and assist. PLD themselves, will also have enough of a breather to throw out a combo or two without worrying about mitigation abilities, or toss a Holy Succor on themselves, and let the WHM's focus on other things.
-Decreases the chances and opportunities of annoying moves like Animal Instinct and Eye of the Beholder from disturbing the flow of battle.

Taking those points into consideration, taking 100-Tonze Swing head on means your taking more damage overall, diverting the WHM's attention to you more than necessary to heal that extra damage taken (even if you can help yourself every 10-15 seconds), and giving up a solid opportunity for DD's to attack without hesitation (it can be hard for DD's to combo when he's spamming back to back moves). Overall, I can't see any distinct or real advantage to taking it head on aside from necessity, which is more of the effect of bad game design and hardware or bad luck than player skill or schematics.

As far as the DEF/VIT thing goes, I've already said I've been in favor for the DEF/VIT setup in the past and even speced myself for it, however I can also look at the other side of the coin and see what disadvantages it could bring.

I'm afraid I'm also find it difficult to discern weather or not your just having trouble communicating your thoughts and interpreting what other's try to convey to you, or if your just being stubborn and biased in your postings which seems apparent in some of your replies to players (outside of flamebait posts).

Just rushed to respond is all, I play at work and this not only effects the hardware in wich I play with but everything else I do on this game/forums :/ , but it beats not being able to play at all

Now to the meat of the debate.

The advantage to strait tanking ANYTHING on pld is the ability to tank with PLD the way it was intended to. I do agree that the mechanic of CC falling on his ass was obviously intended by the developers but I am not soo sure as to the full degree of its intent. I suppose if you are an offensive tank, like a war, and you can not deflect damage like pld then avoiding 100 tonze would be a good tatic and its possable the devs saw this comming and incorperated a mechanic that allows enough time for the War to replace himself in a good tanking postion before the battle recommenced.

Anytime a PLD has to run/kite or avoid anything, they are at their deffensive weakest. Weather or not you actually succeed in avoiding the unwanted move is , in my opinion, always pure luck, as you said, "shit happens". Again this is my opinion , but , I see the beauty of pld as not needing to avoid half as many attacks as the offensive tanks. If you can do soo, I certainly see nothing wrong with it, but I personaly like to know exactly what the consequences of my actions will be. By turtle tanking on PLD I have full controll of the pace of battle. I do understand that there is an element of inconsistancy in any boss fight, that being said, if you understand the job well enough and gear your PLD to suite, it is very possable to hold on to some of your abilities with the intention to use them at the opertune moment. I belive that PLD is the only tank atm that can do this successfully, I at least know that pld certainly can do this because I have done it. Choosing to no simply spam abilities instead use them in a calculated order with methodology that as a PLD you can in fact controll the pace of the fight with more certainty of success by strait tanking vs atempting to avoid major tp/mp moves.

This being said, I fully understand and agree that there are situations where avoidance is not only a perfered method of tanking but somtimes the only method of tanking. I do not belive that CC is one of those fights however. BUT if you choose to avoid the only real threat in the CC fight you may as well go with an offensive tank , as you deprive PLD of its defensive advanatages.

As far as adding stress to the WHM, I can agree that several 100 tonze in a row, and yes i know the differance between the light and heavy swing, can be a bit of a "oh shit" moment for the WHM/s that being said, every fight has its moments in wich every aspect of the party (dd/healer/tank) need to be at peak performance. With my build and strait tanking 100 tonze I can at least pin point the "stressfull" zones of the fight for the whms soo they know when they need to be at peak vs an hp build that would add an increased lvl of stress through out the entire fight in comparison to a higher defensive build.

Not trying to boast, but I will remind you that, with my current build I can take 2-3 direct 100tonze in a row with little to no risk of death, IF my abilities are ready to go or at least close to ready, considering the fact that I have already survived the attack 3 times in a row, I think its safe to say getting hit a fourth time would be realy shity luck lol but would still leave breathing room for the WHMs to keep me alive.

again sorry for any mis-spellings.