Paladin Cross/Class skill changes please

[Enfarious]

I agree sort of with most of what you've said.
The well established identity of Paladins in the Final Fantasy franchise has been lost in this iteration. Somehow we've all but lost the ability to cure, raise, buff, and otherwise support a party.

Of course this has made us into a simple "knight" class analogous to what many know from other games, RPG and MMORPG alike, which is probably viewed as "good" by some as it means the majority of people understand it without thinking too hard. Of course to long time FF players, we are interestingly a minority in the gaming world even in an FF game, it feels all wrong.

Paladin should have a useful cure, not one cast on itself though, Holy Succor from 1.0 was a good example. Cast on yourself it wasn't worth the MP most of the time, cast on another it was potent and also healed you, generating a good amount of enmity in the process.

Battle raises should also be a Paladin thing, casting raise in an "Oh shit" moment after popping Hallowed Ground can turn a wipe into a win, and is what Paladins do.

Due to the 2x tank nature of this game, where one is often found in a DPS role a change to Sword Oath to generate less enmity from all attacks would be great, and seeing a Riot Blade > Shield Swipe[or a diff attack] combo that isn't an enmity generator would be nice. I mean really, we have ALOT of rarely used, or never used skills sitting there.

Holy isn't needed, but to balance against steel cyclone probably wouldn't be terrible, Circle of Scorn alone doesn't compare to War AoE output, honestly idc about that very much though.

I'd really like to see a useful Cure variant, Battle Raise, and Cover modified to be useful, again this is what Paladins do, they support parties by keeping enmity, healing, buffing, and when shit goes sideways covering the weaker members, pulling out the "Oh shit save a party button" and tossing the dead healer a raise.

Honestly, I think our cross class skills from Conjurer are fine for the most part. In fact these all fall in line with almost the same spells used by the first Paladin seen in the series, Cecil Harvey. The only thing I would probably change is swapping Protect for Esuna, cause debuffs suck and it would more beneficial in a party situation. I will agree that Cover needs to be changed to be more appealing, like was mentioned earlier in negating all damage rather than physical. As for Riot Blade, I would like to see a third ability combo off of this skill, mainly for variety sakes. But damage wise Riot Blade only does 30 less damage that Rage of Halone for combo potency. Damage wise we have sufficient self buffs through Sword Oath and Fight or Flight. In short, the reason why we do so little damage is because we take ages to kill.

Except that Cecil's cure, and every other Paladin's, was actually useful, ours is like one of the adhesive portions of a bandaid, we don't even get the "good" pad in the middle lol.
A change there, and to Sword Oath to make it more viable, and to Cover (which I think everyone can agree with) would go a long long way to bringing it back to it's roots.

As for damage, it's not way way off, but a 3 hit combo maybe with less potency than RoH but a buff/debuff (a slashing damage increase for the pld perhaps):
As they are:
RoH combo (str debuff to mob) = 150+200+260 = 610
Riot combo = 150+230 = 380

For an equal number of GCDs (6 means 3 full Riots, 2 full RoH) you end up at:
RoH 610*2 = 1220
Riot 380*3 = 1140

Your DPS in a fight that lasts for just 6 GCDs is barely reduced, but over any significant time it's pretty big. Having a proper DPS combo while in sword oath and off tanking would help this significantly.

As they could be:
RoH combo = 150+200+260 = 610
Shield Swipe combo (10% slashing damage increase to pld) = 150+210+240 = 600

For an equal number of GCDs (6 means 2 full Shield Swipes, 2 full RoHs) you end up at:
RoH 610*2 = 1220
Shield Swipe 600*2 = 1200

You get a little less potency per combo, but with the damage increase your overall DPS would still be higher, but no enmity boost at all. Cycling between Shield > RoH keeps your buff up so RoH enmity gains could be boosted slightly, of course off tanking this could get you into some trouble so the Shield combo would remain the better choice more often than not.

[Lex_Luger]

stuff

You realize your shield swipe combo is completely unviable as a DPS combo because shield swipe requires you to proc a block to use it in the first place.

[Enfarious]

You realize your shield swipe combo is completely unviable as a DPS combo because shield swipe requires you to proc a block to use it in the first place.

So I should have said "Rework Shield Swipe to be a part of a combo." first. Meaning, make it no longer a proc that we ignore anyway. It's a waste of a GCD that doesn't effect most of what we care about stopping from using abilities anyway, a useless ability added to a bar so we can wonder why we have half a bar of uselessness.