Paladin Cross/Class skill changes please

[Leiron]

Even in the quote you quoted I stated I am glad old FF players agree with me. I did not state that I wanted everyone to agree with me. 2/10

Implicit not explicit, but he if that wasn't your intention we'll leave it at that.

@Deusteele: A limited cover and aggro abilities does not make a FF paladin. If it were meant to be a knight, where are the breaker debuff skills? A gimpy cure, gimpy protect, gimpy raise offers little to party support.

Except that in FF games a Paladin was never comparable to a full healer.
They always had gimpy capabilities compared to a true healer in the FF games.
Heck, Cecil in FF4 dd not have any breaker abilities.

[Deusteele]

@Deusteele: A limited cover and aggro abilities does not make a FF paladin. If it were meant to be a knight, where are the breaker debuff skills? A gimpy cure, gimpy protect, gimpy raise offers little to party support.

Underlined: Yes, yes it does. In fact that is all the Knight/Paladin job is in Final Fantasy. Cover and being in top slot in forward group, is what they are meant for. And as for the breaker skills. Those have been passed around to different jobs within the games metaverse that "Knights" don't have a particular claim to them. They are just as often granted to the Soldier and Fighter jobs then Knights.

And here's something to blow your mind; Paladins in FF:TA/A2 are portrayed as dual wield attackers in official artwork.

To get back on topic. PLD doesn't have better cross-class skills due to GLD being rebuilt for the ground up to become PLD. The developers had decided to force PLD to be tied to CNJ. This lead to GLD having a full suite of dps abilities to compensate for only being able to draw from the other tank based DoW.

[Taj]

And here's something to blow your mind; Paladins in FF:TA/A2 are portrayed as dual wield attackers in official artwork.

They also wear turbans, your point being? The Knight Job and Paladin job were two different job classes. Paladin are more an evolved version of the knight with mediocre healing abilities and support skills. You seem to have the idea I want a Paladin with all the healing power of a White Mage. I merely want a Paladin with more support skills to maximize my allies DPS potential and ensure stability of the party. Many Paladins would like a stronger heal and a functional raise. If we're going to talk about what the Paladin role in iterations of the series why don't we mention the Holy sword skills (Seiken) in Final Fantasy 9, Tactics, Tactics Advanced that would fall under not only dps but ranged dps?

[Deusteele]

Players have cleared all content with Paladin's tanks as they currently are. If you need 'more" to do the game I would suspect that the issue with closer to a PEBCAK then with class design.

[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.

[Taj]

The issue isn't functionality, it's about playstyle and versatility. People have been able to clear all content as warriors yet people were unsatisfied (for good reason) and it was changed. This topic was about personal dissatisfaction with the cross class skill set based on previous iterations of Paladins in the Final Fantasy series. I am by no means saying "HUR DUR PALADINS 2 HARD I WANT TO BE ABLE TO SOLO EVERYTHING IN HARD MODE". If that's what you're getting you either need to read more carefully or remove your bias.

[Steeled]

There's a difference between mediocre and not-worth-casting.

Stoneskin is mediocre (aside from idle time during a fight, like Garuda teleport [add-phases], titan after jump, ifrit after jump). It has it's uses but it's hardly game breaking. Aside from pre-empting damage, which is not so easy because the animation-complete-crap, a pld is try to contribute to the kill.

Cure is not-worth-casting. You are better off using the GCD to contribute to damage than to try to cast a cure upon yourself or anyone.

I've saved a few Garudas because of struggling healers, by spamming stoneskin. If cure were equipped instead, I wouldn't even bother casting it.

[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.

[Ehayte]

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.

[Steeled]

I'll say it for him, PLD (at 50, been 50 since a week after launch) doesn't feel like any other paladin I've ever played. Flash is the only native use for MP.

I've never seen a paladin tank in any game be a competent healer, but they still had worthwhile heals. Both can be achieved at the same time by being prohibitively expensive on MP and/or long cooldowns (10,15s).