Is Paladin the least fun class to play?

[Alywell]

Before I begin, I would like to make two points clear:

1. I'm not talking about usefulness, as the Paladin seem to have no problem with that, but about the enjoyment a player gets by playing a Paladin.

2. While fun is subjective, I'm making this thread to hear different opinions from different Paladins. So it's very likely that we do not agree with each other, but please keep it civil


I'm not the first to bring it up, but to me, Paladin seems very dull to play when compared to other classes; even when compared to the other tank, the Warrior. And in my opinion, this need to be addressed just as warriors' "usefulness" is being addressed. Let me explain:

It's as if every class has a little something that makes it interesting, a little dept that keeps the gameplay dynamic. If you played any of the DPS class, you'll notice they have time where they get proc (using a skill has a chance to make another one more powerful), placement bonus (being behind or on the side of a target) or different ways of managing your resource (think of Black Mage). Those make sure that the same fight won't happen exactly the same way, thus why I used the word "dynamic". Healers have the most dynamic job at the core, but that's just how they work.

Now, let's take a look at the Warrior. Anyone who played both Paladin and Warrior will know the "complexity" difference between the two. While Warrior is nowhere near complex, when compared to the Paladin, it sadly is. I'm not talking about self heal vs mitigation cooldowns, because those are pretty much the same. I'm talking about skills like Maim, that you must almost always have on, making their rotation more dynamic. Wrath stacks are also that little thing Warriors have to keep track of on top of their main resource, and you have different ways of building/using it.

Then we have the Paladin, devoid of all kind of dept/complexity. You are AoE tanking? Spam flash. You are single target tanking? Fast Blade > Savage Blade > Rage of Halone. Oh, and use those skills on cooldown: Fight or Flight - Spirits Within - Circle of Scorn. The only arguable complexity others have talked about is the defensive cooldowns. Since the Paladin has a lot of them, they must "manage" them and use them intelligently to be as efficient as possible. I'm sorry, but it looks like an utterly lazy design of a class. Not only do they all have long cooldowns (90s+), but it's not even remotely as complex as the other mechanics listed above. You press a button and you get rewarded for 20 second. That's what a cooldown is, and that's all Paladins got. It becomes dynamic for the rare times you actually make those decisions of using said cooldowns, and then nothing else.

If you do the same fight as a Paladin again, it will be the exact same fight as the previous one, besides very slight variables on the defensive cooldowns. Still, you'll know when to use the good cooldowns as you know when the big hits are coming. Basically, it's almost as if you could macro your -entire- rotation and movements (when there's actually movement involved) and no one would be likely to notice.


So, do you agree or disagree?

If you disagree, then can you explain why is Paladin fun for you? Why do you think it doesn't need any change at all?


If you agree, then what could be changed to make the class more interesting to play? Feel free to post your ideas here.


Here is my personal idea. It will most likely never happen, but this is a revamp I would love to see.

Basically, remove Paladins Awareness and Sentinel and replace them with 2 additional oaths, while changing the 2 current ones. Also, make Riot Blade (which would still always need to be combo'd from Fast Blade) and Flash affected by the current oath you are in. Both would keep their same cost (80tp/212mp)

All oaths should be off the global cooldown, cost nothing, and have a 5 second recast.

Sword Oath - Increases potency of all weaponskills by 50% and doubles the TP cost of all weaponskills.
Riot Blade: Doubles the potency.
Flash: Adds a potency 100 damage.

Shield Oath - Decreases physical damage taken by 20%, while quickening TP regeneration rate (80 instead of 60)
Riot Blade: Removes the TP cost. Restores 40tp on hit
Flash: Restores 20tp

Divine Oath - Doubles the healing potency of healing spells and doubles the MP cost of healing spells. Every time you receive damage, grant one stack of Divine Power (stacks up to 10)
Riot Blade: Changes the cost to 212 MP (same as flash). Consumes all Divine Power and cast a healing spell on self (100 healing potency per stack consumed).
Flash: Consumes all Divine Power and cast a healing spell on self (100 healing potency per stack consumed).

Holy Oath - Decreases magical damage taken by 20%, while quickening MP regeneration rate (double the rate)
Riot Blade: Restores MP (Same effect as of now)
Flash: Reduces MP cost by half.


Now to explain what these changes actually affect. Basically, you have 2 oaths to burn down TP/MP and 2 oaths to regenerate them (a little similar to Black Mages).

Sword Oath should make you almost as good as a DPS, if not as good, but you may not stay in this oath for very long as you'll be TP starved very quickly. Uses of this oath:

-Great aggro spike, if you use the Rage of Halone combo during it
-Good if you want to add DPS on the AoE pulls
-Good DPS in general if you're on OT duty and you are not tanking anything. Doing the Fast Blade > Riot Blade combo would result in highest DPS without taking additional threat

You have no mitigation in this oath, though.


Shield Oath uses:

-You need to regenerate TP
-You need to take less physical damage from a boss or a group of adds


Divine Oath is the "self healing" oath that will help when healers aren't as available or to give healers time to breath a little more. Like Sword Oath, you cannot stay in it for very long as you'll be MP starved quickly. (And c'mon, this is also to make the Conjurer's cross class skill shine just a tad more!) Uses for this oath:

-You need to give breathing room to healers during a boss fight or an AoE pull
-Not die (or less) when you are solo
-You may even be a sort of side healer for the time of the oath, as I hope cure would heal for around ~600-700 (or as much as a Black Mage's physick at least)

Like Sword Oath, you have no mitigation, but the self healing should be more worthy than the mitigation.


Holy Oath uses:

-Regenerate MP
-When you foresee magical damage coming at you, helps you mitigate it. Would be the preferable defensive oath against a magic exclusive boss
-Great for constant AoE threat, as you can spam flash without running of MP (but MP wouldn't regenerate when spamming flash, obviously)


There it is. This way, we would bring the "stance dance" concept to Paladins. The short cooldown and the fact that they're not on global would make it easy and rewarding to often switch oaths, according to the situation you're facing.

This is just a few ideas I had when I went to bed last night. I'm aware they are nowhere near perfect, balance issues would arise and more, but it's just an example of how more interesting Paladins could be.

I'm eager to read your replies.

[Sasagawa]

In response to your original question

No,

Its quite fun timing CDs and understanding the fight mechanics to get the most out of your tank class. is it an easy class to play ? yes but its equally a very hard class to master. you need to know what to do in every fight and you also need to know every boss mechanic including the ones you don't dodge so that when they happen you always have a back up plan. example of this is popping hallowed on titan to give healer time to raise someone "comfortably"

[Alywell]

Its quite fun timing CDs

Fair enough

and understanding the fight mechanics to get the most out of your tank class.

Every role has to understand the fight mechanics. And maybe you haven't noticed, but the DPS and healers have their load of "mechanics" that YOU, as a tank, don't even need to know/worry about. That's not exclusive to tank, let alone paladin I'm afraid.

is it an easy class to play ? yes but its equally a very hard class to master.

Do people really believe this? I mean, maybe it's because I've been playing MMOs for a long time, and FFXIV happens to be one of the easiest I've played, but anyone who has a little experience at tanking in MMOs in general will "master" their Paladin a mere few weeks after they are capped. This doesn't apply if, say, this is your first MMO though. It will take more time, of course.

you need to know what to do in every fight and you also need to know every boss mechanic including the ones you don't dodge so that when they happen you always have a back up plan. example of this is popping hallowed on titan to give healer time to raise someone "comfortably"

This goes for tanking in general. And I'm afraid that "knowing every boss mechanics including the ones you don't dodge" is the least everyone in your party expect you to do, as it is the least you expect of a healer to keep everyone alive.

[Valhinjin]

This goes for tanking in general. And I'm afraid that "knowing every boss mechanics including the ones you don't dodge" is the least everyone in your party except you to do, as it is the least you expect of a healer to keep everyone alive.

Yes but even the devs stated that melee and tanks deal with a larger brunt of mechanics (hence the buffs to melee), and it's pretty evident and obvious (to me) playing the game. The points above just illustrate the fact that tanking isn't a mash "1,2,3" job like people seem to think. As a matter of fact, whenever I want an "easy" run, with little thinking, I run with my DPS class for this very reason (exception being some of the endgame fights... but in dungeons playing DPS is easier bar none). It's all about the rotation and the occasional "get out of the way" most of the time.

I find that the "fun" in paladin stems from the fun in tanking though. I like tanking, so to me PLD is fun.

[Grembo]

Its quite fun timing CDs and understanding the fight mechanics to get the most out of your tank class. is it an easy class to play ? yes but its equally a very hard class to master. you need to know what to do in every fight and you also need to know every boss mechanic including the ones you don't dodge so that when they happen you always have a back up plan. example of this is popping hallowed on titan to give healer time to raise someone "comfortably"

Seems like you're talking about Gameplay/Boss mechanics more than PLD itself here.

Sure if you want to get the most out of your class you'll have to learn what you can and can't do in specific situations but the fact that these gameplay mechanics exist doesn't mean us PLD's get to do much more than our 1-2-3 combo and pop some cooldowns when they are needed.

As an example, let's take the Tonberry King. You can tank it straitgh up, with Shield Oath, using your cooldowns for grudge move.
Or you can tank it with Sword Oath to do far more DPS, pop Shield Oath for the first Grudge, go back to Sword Oath, pop Shield Oath and Rampart for the second grudge, and so on...When trying to optimize both your tanking and your DPS, that's when PLD becomes reaaally fun to play.

Since Everbody's Grudge completely ignores Shield Oath i'm not sure why you would do any of this.

[Sunah]

I would honestly like to see maybe a % chance to proc a off the gcd % based Cure to give our CNJ side a bit more meaning. Maybe a 15% max hp heal, nothing too big to be considered op but enough to give it more meaning.
Also a skill to make us more dynamic such as a charge or even a hook skill (pull them to us or pull us to them). But the OP has his point, the class is pretty lacking in the "fun" factor even though I am only level 43 and will continue to play it I hope they put some interesting changes such as the OPs or just anything in general one day.

[Sasagawa]

-cut-

Thanks for the reply,

I do think its a hard class to master, yes in 90% of the fights you do the same skills over and over, but I play PLD for the oh shit moments. the moments where the healer dies and you have to do something. an example of this is hallowed ground raise.

A good tank isnt simply a damage sponge, a good tank knows the entire fight and every mechanic - not only the ones the tank needs to know about.

It is also up to the tank to think of ways to use his/her CDs better and to experiment with the boss skills.

A master tank will be able tp monitor the emnity list for the whole party, cover people who are low on health and cure them if needed. in case of aoe and generally communicate to DDs to reduce emnity or when its safe to do burst damage. Another great skill is being able to stone skin the party members during the fight while the whm heal or stoneskin the other tank to reduce healing.

There are so many facets to tanking that people simply choose to ignore.

[kayuwoody]

First off, like your Oath ideas overall. With that said, going to have to disagree with you. Main reason being, all of the classes bar healers are bout the same 'depth'. I personally don't see how following my dps pew pew rotation and occassionally switching targets or moving out of void zones is any 'deeper'. It's the fight mechanics that make the fights interesting or not. As a tank, Titan HM? Zzzzzz. As a healer though, can be challenging. ADS or Turn 4 are quite interesting to tank on the other hand, and you'll quickly be able to tell apart the good tanks from the average ones.

For me personally they haven't really put in fights with a lot of mechanics like we saw from WoW like 0 lights Yogg-Saron, or HM Lich King.
I haven't really done T5 yet so can't comment too much, but I don't think it's going to be really that bad. The general consensus was that the timing was unforgiving especially when you consider the game engine, rather than actual mechanical dificulty.

[Vortok]

It's the fight mechanics that make the fights interesting or not.

A thousand times this. I don't need a tank (or dps) rotation that requires me to hit 25 different abilities with multi-branching split second decision making. The fight is what provides the complexity, and also the variety.

Look at something popular like Zelda or Pokemon. The actions available to the player are fairly straight forward. Enemy variety plays a huge part in making the game interesting from one encounter to the next.

Now some people really love classes that require you to manage 20+ abilities, so it's great to have them around as well as an option - but the encounters should be providing the meat of the experience.

[TouchandFeel]

To me this is a really tough question to answer.

I wouldn't say that it is the most boring class since, as many others have expressed, I love playing a tank and find the gameplay involved in tanking to be more interesting than playing DPS or Healer. Now if they had more quirky Support or Utility style classes, I might find those really fun but since support has been sort of watered down and lumped into DPS, not so much.

Now comparing the two tanking classes currently available, that is a bit of a different story. On one hand PLD has very simple and basic skillsets that are detached from each other and many of the defensive abilities are detached from the offensive ones. On the other hand with WAR you have more complex ability rotations that have many of the defensive aspects built into the combat/offensive ability rotations. I can see the two different styles of play appealing to different types of players, and in truth I am not entirely certain which one I like more.

I like the PLD more conceptually as I like the whole holy knight and sword+shield schtick so that makes me enjoy them, but as far as gameplay mechanics I think I might like the WAR a little more.

If I were to say what could be done to make PLD more enjoyable to play (not buffed, but tweaked/fixed) I would do the following.
- Fix broken/bugged skills such as Awareness.
- Tweak some of the very underwhelming abilities such as Shield Swipe ( I like idea of removing pacification and changing it with a different buff/debuff), Cover (shorter cooldown and greater range so that we can actually protect people), Tempered Will (This one needs to either be lumped into another skill like Awareness or completely redone as it has very little use).
- Take another pass at the cross class abilities as many of them are not really useful in high level group content, for example tweak Mercy Stroke so that it has a larger buffer for it to proc the heal and maybe make the PLD crossclass Cure healing based off of STR instead of MND so that it isn't so weak.
- Adding another attack ability that combos off of Riot Blade so there are two different 3 ability combos to rotate between, one being the tanking/enmity one and the other being the mp regen+dps/ot one.

Mainly it is tweak/fix broken and underwhelming skills and add in a little more complexity/flexibility and I feel the class would feel and play a lot better.
Many of these things have been stated by others already but that is my 2 cents.