Is Paladin the least fun class to play?

[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.

[Duelle]

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.

This. Simplicity and straight-forwardness are not cardinal sins of game design. They are also not taboo to the point they should never be present in a game. You can feel as awesome as you want pressing 20 buttons and managing 10 buffs on some other class, so long as my straightforward tank gameplay remains unscathed and can still get through content. KISS (keep it simple, stupid) exists for a reason. Sadly, some people do lose sight of this, start demanding complexity due to misguidedly confusing "complex" with the word "fun" and then we get a mess in our hands and a very pissed off Duelle.