Quote Originally Posted by Taj View Post
I merely want a Paladin with more support skills to maximize my allies DPS potential and ensure stability of the party.
So the idea is the best tank in the game gets the second best support in the game and the 3rd best healing/party stability in the game?

I'm sorry - I totally understand that your gripe is with the playstyle of the class, but before you go singing doom and gloom about how the PLD doesn't feel like a PLD, do you think you could go get to level 50 and then check back in? I am not being sarcastic or snippy at all, but its a different game at level 50, and you will find yourself using the stoneskin you worked very hard for a lot, and using cover more often, and a plethora of other "Support" type work.

At level 41 (or whatever you are as of this moment) your experience is not indicative of what the game has to offer for PLDs. While I agree I wish there was one or two extra elements of White Magic to the Paladin, you also have to remember that this is a different game than I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, and XIII. The PLD story line mentions VERY little about magical infusion of PLD defining them, its more about honor, and being a more or less mundane guard for the Ul'Dah palace.

Circling back to my original point, I think you are asking for too much. In traditional FF games, you could have the class that could cast Eden as a GF, attack for 9999, and use Cure3>All to heal the party for 7k+ each, because you had a 3-4 man party dynamic operating on a sophisticated turn-based platform in which you had to manage all of the characters; you needed to be able to pull off powerful moves every time you could touch a character.

That is not the case in this MMO, you get 1 character who needs to specialize dramatically in their given role during a dungeon, and there is no need to have a wide swathe of impressive abilities. If you had that, everyone else would be pretty bored : D PLDs don't need stabilizing magic or support magic because they would break the crap out of end-game. Even something like a small group heal without cutting away some of their mitigation (which they need, desperately) would tilt the survivability scales to an unreasonable level in most encounters.