In Light of the WAR 2.1 Adjustments, Can We Expect Tweaks to PLD as Well? My Thoughts

[Obsidian]

I ask because most of the WAR adjustments are pretty potent. I'll attempt to tackle each one below. This is going to have to get split into several posts because of the 1000 character limit, so I apologize in advance and would appreciate it if folks could avoid responding until the entirety of this post is available for digestion.

Edit incoming.

Storm's Path

This is most analogous to the STR-down effect on Rage of Halone, but likely more potent. How much more potent remains to be seen, but even 10% (equivalent to Rage of Halone's combo bonus) would be an advantage here.

Holmgang

Seems reasonably balanced, at half the cooldown of Hallowed Ground but also half the duration.
[*]Vengeance

This is a nice change to Vengeance, but one that doesn't really fall in line with the cooldown/duration ratio established by Rampart, Sentinel, and especially Bulwark.

Vengeance is now 10% more damage reduction than Rampart, but has a 5 second shorter duration and 30 second longer cooldown. Seems fair.

However, it's only 10% less than Sentinel with a 5 second longer duration by a 60 second shorter cooldown. That's a little off to me, but the real issue is Bulwark.
Bulwark has two problems in how it stacks up against the Improved Vengeance. First of all, blocks only work on physical damage, which puts Vengeance ahead already. Second, it's a raw increase to Block Rate by 60%. Assuming a block rate of 28% with Holy Shield+1/Allagan Round Shield (10% base block rate plus 1% for every 10 points of Block Rate on the shield), and assuming the best case scenario of Bulwark being additive and not multiplicative, we have an effective block rate of 88%. Assuming a block strength of 28% (it's reasonably difficult to get enough STR to hit this), over 1000 hits for 500 damage each, Bulwark will mitigate ~25% of the damage done (880 blocks that reduce each hit by 140, so 123,200 damage blocked out of 500,000 damage total).

So effectively, Bulwark is 5% less mitigation (at least, because again, it only works on physical damage) with a 60 second longer cooldown than Vengeance (and hilariously, it's 15% less than Sentinel with the same cooldown).

To summarize, Bulwark sucks, and Vengeance is more mitigation per second than Sentinel. You may think this balances out because WAR has fewer mitigation cooldowns to stack, but combined with some of the other changes, I respectfully disagree.

Defiance

This is an excellent change to Defiance... in a vacuum. In practice, when combined with the Vengeance change above and the Inner Beast change below, this becomes extremely potent. Defiance is now effectively the same as Shield Oath (except hopefully the increased enmity bonus actually works on Defiance, because it sure isn't working properly on Shield Oath). To compare effective mitigation now:

A PLD at 6500 HP, and a WAR at 8000 (the actual numbers don't matter, but this is approximately the HP gap between well geared PLDs and WARs with Defiance up), both get hit for 4000 damage:

PLD at 3300/6500 because the attack only did 3200 with Shield Oath up, WAR at 4000/8000.
PLD requires 3200 HP cured to be back at full HP. The WAR requires 4000 HP to be cured after the 20% bonus from Defiance, so effectively it requires ~3333 HP restored. The difference between PLD and WAR is about 100 HP, which can be made up for with Storm's Path or Inner Beast: both of which also reduce damage taken for a period after their use.

Inner Beast

The significant change here is the additional effect: Rampart. Because it's the same potency as Rampart we can directly compare them both. Assuming it takes a WAR ~20 seconds to rebuilt their Wrath stacks, the buff from Inner Beast can be up 30% of the time. Rampart is comparatively prohibitive in that it can only be up ~22% of the time, assuming you use it every time you're able. Considering all the now useful abilities that provide Wrath stacks and their accompanying buffs (Maim's damage buff, Storm's Path new debuff, and Storm's Eye's slashing resistance and cure potency debuff), Warrior has gained a significant amount of raw damage mitigation.

Miscellaneous

The above doesn't even consider the offensive (albeit marginal) advantage WAR already had. Paladin's only three step combo is a combined potency of 610. WAR's primary enmity combo is Heavy Swing > Skull Sunder > Butcher's Block which is a combined potency of 630. Maim's 20% damage increase can be up effectively 100% of the time as opposed to the 30% of the time Fight or Flight is up, and is a combo that is still 10 potency ahead of Fast Blade > Savage Blade. Indeed, two of the three three-step combinations for WAR provide increased enmity, a damage mitigation boost, and a damage buff for the WAR. The other provides a three step increase in enmity. In contrast, PLD has one three-step combo, which increases enmity, and a two-step combo that restores some MP.

Now consider that Unchained's cooldown is being reduced by 1/3 to 120 seconds, meaning WAR is negating the damage penalty from Defiance 17% of the time, while PLD has no way of negative the penalty from Shield Oath. The decreased reliance on being Infuriated for survival also means that WAR is now free to use Steel Cyclone and Inner Beast more liberally, adding more overall damage to WAR.

In response, I have some proposals for Paladin adjustments.

• Shield Oath
  
  - I'm convinced the enmity increase on Shield Oath is not working as intended, based on how easy it is to pull threat on the Dreadnaughts in Turn 4 while having Sword Oath up.
  
  
• Sword Oath
  
  - Auto attack potency isn't good enough. I would much rather see this stance provide a raw 10% increase in damage dealt. Additionally, and more importantly, I think it would be worth considering adding an enmity suppression attribute to Sword Oath to allow PLD to contribute to party damage without complicating the tanking situation by straddling the threat threshold. In situations like ADS, a PLD off-tank is relegated to auto-attack damage and Fast Blade spam (Riot Blade's TP cost is prohibitive) for thirty seconds at a time. Adding a more useful effect (or two) would add some more activity to PLD by proving an incentive to more actively switch stances based on your current role.
  
  
• Shield Swipe
  
  - The Pacification effect on this skill is largely useless because it doesn't affect anything worth affecting. The potency is decent but with no increased enmity attribute and no Combo bonus it's a skill skill that sees limited application, and can't even be used when you aren't being attacked.
  
  - I would like to change this skill to a normal skill, and allow it to combo with Riot Blade. I would remove the Pacification effect and replace it with a Combo effect that either increases PLD's damage mitigation (similar to Inner Beast but less potent), or increases damage dealt by PLD (like Heavy Thrust/Twin Snakes/Maim). This would give PLD a second three-step combo (Fast Blade > Riot Blade > Shield Swipe) to use with good Potency and an additional buff to maintain if the PLD so chooses that would also alleviate threat management issues between co-tanks.
  
  
• Tempered Will
  
  - This skill is, by and large, useless. On a 180 second cooldown, it prevents knockback (but not all knockbacks! It doesn't work on Landslide, for instance) for 10 seconds and erases Heavy. There are a lot of issues with this ability. It's duration is too short and its cooldown too long to be of any strategic use against any enemy that actually uses a knockback/draw-in skill with any frequency that would warrant negation. The other issue is that there are all of three top-tier enemies that actually have a knockback/draw-in ability: Titan, where Landslide ignores Tempered Will anyway, Demon Wall, where you can only negate one Repel per encounter thanks to the cooldown, and the Clockwork Soldiers in Turn 4 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut, where 10 seconds of draw-in immunity makes a negligible difference in your quality of life. It also removes Heavy - another debuff that gets applied incredibly rarely -, but so does Esuna and Leeches; neither of which is on a three minute cooldown.
  
  - I would like to see this ability significantly reworked. I think one good option that also addresses a point from above would be to have Tempered Will negate the damage penalty from Shield Oath, similar to Unchained, and reduce the cooldown in step. Regardless, something must be done to Tempered Will, because if you could observe total number of activations across all abilities, I can guarantee Tempered Will (and the current iteration of Holmgang) is sitting at the bottom of that list, by a comfortable margin.
  
  
• Bulwark
  
  - Bulwark is currently rather abysmal as far as effective mitigation goes. Using the calculations above, its effective damage reduction is 2.08% (duration divided by cooldown, result multiplied by .25). Compared to Rampart at 4.4%, and Vengeance, at 3.75%, this is frankly pathetic when considering its cooldown is twice Rampart's.
  
  - I would like to reduce the cooldown on this ability to 120 seconds, and additionally, have it reflect blocked damage for its duration, and add an increased enmity effect on the reflected damage. This would afford PLD some additional crowd control without eclipsing WAR's area-of-effect damage.
  
  
• Circle of Scorn
  
  - I don't have many grievances with this ability, but the one adjustment I would like to see is an enmity increase effect similar to Overwhelm's. To balance this, an MP cost could be associated with Circle of Scorn, which would provide more incentive to use Riot Blade (and the new three-step combo created by the Shield Swipe adjustments I outlined above).
  
  
• Miscellaneous
  
  - Drop Sentinel's cooldowns to 120 seconds to fall more in line with Vengeance's level of efficiency (Vengeance will be effectively 3.75% damage decrease (15s/120s, quotient divided by 30%), Sentinel is currently 2.22%, Bulwark is 2.08% using the math above. Inner Beast's effective damage reduction is 6% assuming you IB ever ~20 seconds, Rampart is 4.4%). With a 120 second cooldown, Sentinel would be an effective 3.33% decrease in damage taken, as opposed to Vengeance's 3.75%.
  
  - Fix Brutal Swing and Hallowed Ground so that the effect is applied at the beginning of the animation instead of at the end, so I stop dying AFTER I've already stunned/gained the effect of Hallowed Ground.
  
  - Fix or adjust the increased enmity associated with Shield Oath, because the current implementation has no appreciable impact on threat generation compared to Sword Oath/no Oath. Apply this to Defiance as well.

Conclusion

The thoughts and ideas above are designed to not only balance PLD against WAR, and WAR against PLD, but also to allow PLD to have a more active roll it its own survival, as well as that of the party's. Obviously the bulk of my post is no more than my own thoughts given voice, and the adjustments described in the other thread may not end up arriving as-told which will in turn require the reassessment of the above propositions, but I think they provide as good a place as any to start brainstorming ideas to balance the two tanks against each other, instead of being sucked into a process of escalation where one tank is always one-upping the other.

I fear that, in lieu of these (potential) enhancements to WAR, PLD will also require some adjustments to attain balance between the two, instead of the see-saw of dominance we currently see. Everyone wants WAR to be able to participate in all content, but WAR's participation should not come at the cost of PLD's exclusion (or any other class/job). We should not be striving to return to the Sixth Umbral Era of Warrior supremacy, just as PLD's iron grip on the Seventh Umbral Era should come to an end.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully at some point I made some sense.

[zdub303]

Pretty interesting suggestions you've got here.

I agree with most of it (enmity suppression on sword oath is direly needed).

I do like Sentinel in its current form, I know you've got maths and I don't but the idea of a high mit and high CD ability is really cool, however the 8s duration makes it really situation, and I think it could be longer to warrant the long CD).

Bulwark's CD is way too long I agree, I think they should lower bulwark to 60s to give us more of a focus on the fact that PLD has a shield and wants to use it.

This gives us a well rounded CD suite:

Bulwark (60s) > Rampart (90s) > Foresight + Convalesence (120s) > Sentinel (180s) > Hallowed Ground (420s) - you see a nice ramp here of power vs CD.

Tempered Will and Awareness are terrible and need to be reworked entirely - I agree

Shield Swipe - I would rather see this go off GCD with the pacification effect removed and increased damage and a 4-6s cooldown. Just have it be raw damage.

Circle of Scorn is honestly a very 'meh' ability imo, I only use cause its essentially free. Increased enmity could go a long way into giving CoS a burst aoe threat roll, where you flash - CoS - flash and have high burst aoe threat on a pull.

Anyways, you've got some good ideas here. Not trying to disagree just some thoughts of my own (some of which i've seen posted elsewhere)

[Maqaqa]

Everyone wants WAR to be able to participate in all content, but WAR's participation should not come at the cost of PLD's exclusion

Seriously! Id give you one week of what we had to swallow for three months.

No but really i think its a bit too early to ask for a PLD buff, isnt it?

Not sure if you are understimating PLD or overstimating a buff that has yet to be implemented, but you are overthinking and PLD will most probably be the tankier tank of the two, just not by an enormous amount.

[Tanaya]

In terms of tankiness, Paladin will be able to survive better vs Physical mobs and consistent heavy damage due to the natural shield block rate. Warrior however will be better vs Mage mobs and bosses with predictable spike damage.

That said, we shouldn't be thinking about 4-man content (as WAR has and always been better for those anyway), but rather 8-man content. Is it better to go PLD/PLD, WAR/WAR, or WAR/PLD? The answer is WAR/PLD, as their abilities will now be able to synergize strongly with each other. Which job is MT or OT though will have to depend on the situation.

The only thing I worry about is the lack of need to hold Wrath stacks. This'll allow WAR to use their high potency abilities and push their DPS further. If it's pushed well beyond Paladin we'll return to the 1.0 era where PLD's surviability is not needed and parties will optimize for damage.

[Wizhard]

bosses with predictable spike damage.

So...every boss in this game then?

[Tanaya]

I'm assuming 2.1's content won't be a scripted snorefest for tanks.

[Steeled]

I want to see more fun in the PLD rotation but SE has set each class to have the same number of abilties, and given paladin so many cooldowns. Warrior has a ton of options and I always liked that.

I really like your shield swipe idea, but I'm afraid it's trying to be too much like Maim. Still, if they could also make sure it blocks the next hit (Imagine it, you've hit the target with your shield, dazing it, and its next attack is easily brushed aside. Another good reason for the change is that shield swipe is useless while offtanking, because it's not going to proc (an aoe might, but lol).

I like most of your ideas, but I feel like it comes off as a copy of warrior. Two main skill rotations, similar short term mitigation. I like playing warrior but I want them to find a unique path for paladin.

Seriously! Id give you one week of what we had to swallow for three months.

No but really i think its a bit too early to ask for a PLD buff, isnt it?

Not sure if you are understimating PLD or overstimating a buff that has yet to be implemented, but you are overthinking and PLD will most probably be the tankier tank of the two, just not by an enormous amount.

Largely, I think he's asking for paladin to be more fun. Warrior is currently way more fun than paladin.

I won't deny there's a lot of talk about mitigation abilities, but some of that is because they're disinteresting and weak (Like Awareness and Tempered Will.)

I have good hate!
I shall increase my damage done!
I shall now increase how much damage the target takes from my attacks.
5 Wrath! Soft phase in the fight, I'm gonna increase my damage more!
Oh, what's this, berserk is off cooldown? MORE damage.

It's not all about more damage, obviously, but it's fun to be able to do that. It's fun to be able to do better DPS as a tank. I can't say whether PLD or WAR does better DPS, but warrior is so much more active. There's no doubt, enmity rotation against enmity rotation, paladin does better dps (in shield oath).

This version of paladin is more bland than any I've played before (WoW, FFXI, 1.0's).

[Gilthas]

This version of paladin is more bland than any I've played before (WoW, FFXI, 1.0's).

What the?

/10 char

[Maqaqa]

Largely, I think he's asking for paladin to be more fun. Warrior is currently way more fun than paladin.

He is asking for the PLD to not be left out of content which is quite hilarious in a game where PLD is often the only accepted tank and WAR the one being kept out.
How can a PLD possibly be "fun" btw? Knights are booooooring too serious and cant take a joke

[enil]

snip

Couple of things that I think you need to re-look into.
You don't take into account PLD natural block - I believe Inner Beast is SE's solution to the approximate 5%~ DR reduction you can get from putting on a shield.
Holmgang - I would trade Holmgang for a 10 minute CD Hallowed Ground. You can't simply dismiss it as a half duration half efffectiveness Hallowed ground.

You can't compare direct enmity generation with BB w/ maim vs Rage of Halone. Warriors can either maximise enmity, damage or with the new storm's path - damage reduction.

I still think PLD have better and more CDs and mitigation to be a MT, Warrior buffs have brought them up a good amount but they are still not as good. There's a good argument to have both Tanks now with both of them bringing a damage debuff.