Is Paladin the least fun class to play?

[Alywell]

Paladin is in a weird spot. It has a lot of really powerful buttons that are pretty boring and a few really crappy buttons. Additionally, most of our subclass skills are pretty underwhelming. There's little reason to ever use Riot Blade. Shield Swipe is similarly mediocre. Awareness, even without the bug, is one of the worst skills in the game. Two of our five job abilities are passive stances, cover is very situational, and Hallowed Ground, while strong, has a very long cooldown. If you compare our current defensive cooldowns to 1.23's paladin, there's a pretty huge difference. 1.23 cds were generally multi-function and shorter cooldown compared to what we have now. In addition to mitigating damage, Old Rampart generated enmity if you hit allies with it, Old sentinel gave an enmity bonus, Divine Veil caused an AOE regen, and Aegis Boon healed you. Current Rampart, Sentinel, and Bulwark mitigate only, so there's no choice to make there. "Am I going to take a lot of damage soon? Guess I better hit one of these."

The main thing paladin could use is for its bad skills to be fixed up. I'd say that Riot Blade, Shield Swipe, Awareness, Cover, Tempered Will, and a few others could use some changes. Additionally, Paladin really needs to use a lot more MP than it currently does. This would give it another resource to manage and really make it stand out from the other melee classes. Things I'd like to see happen:


-Delete Awareness and replace with Aegis Boon. Raises your shield, blocking the next attack made against you and healing you for the amount blocked. Same MP cost as Flash, breaks combos. On magic GCD. Learned at level 2 to make sure GLAs know to equip a dang shield.
-Rampart moved to lv 34, "Enhanced Awareness" and "Enhanced Rampart" levels swapped.
-Enhanced Awareness trait is now called "Awareness" and reduces the effectiveness of crits against you in some way (reduced damage, reduced chance, whatever)
-Tempered Will: Same as current, but CD reduced and add "restores MP upon taking damage."

-Riot Blade potency increased to 255 (so that the potency/GCD is similar to Halone combo). MP regeneration is increased slightly, but given over a period of time (9 seconds?) instead of instantly.
-Shield Swipe pacification removed. Pacification is OP on stuff it works on and useless on stuff it doesn't work on. Shield Swipe now gives attack speed for a short duration.

-Cover cooldown reduced to 1 minute. Range increased. During cover, any enmity generated by the covered target will be given to the paladin instead.
-Sword Oath and Shield Oath combined into one skill called whatever (Solemn Vow/Paladin's Pledge/Gallantry/whatever). First press toggles Sword Oath, second press toggles Shield Oath, third goes back to sword. Oaths remain as-is, but oath effects linger for 12 seconds after switching. MP cost is the same, still on GCD.
-Lv 40 Paladin Job ability: Holy Succor. Roughly 40% MP cost for base piety. Healing spell, ~3s cast time. Should heal for roughly 20% of the paladin's max HP. Heals the paladin for half of what was healed if cast on another target. Generates double enmity, rather than reduced. Also, for the love of god, scales with weapon damage and strength instead of magic damage and mind.
-Spirits Within: Same as now, but add Combo Action: Shield Swipe. Combo Bonus: Increased enmity (5x would put it at 1500 hate potency, which is slightly higher than Halone.)
-Circle of Scorn: Same as now, but add Combo Action: Shield Swipe. Combo Bonus: Reduces the cooldown of Circle of Scorn by 5 seconds for each enemy affected.

Basically, it adds two combos to paladin (Aegis->Shield Swipe->Spirits, Aegis->Shield Swipe->Scorn), adds a lot of MP usage to encourage Riot Blading often, adds an actual healing spell with a prohibitive MP cost, and allows the paladin to actually control his shield arm a little bit with on-demand blocks. I don't know why I bothered with this since nothing like it will ever happen! But basically I'd be happy if they just deleted Awareness so I don't have to look at that horrible ability.

I just got back to the forums, been reading the replies, and this is pretty good. I 100% agree with all of what you wrote.

Now to read on the rest..

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.

This is exactly what I had in mind. We cannot blame the game too much though, as it's still pretty brand new, so obviously the boss mechanics will be harder/more exciting as the patches arrive.

Although, what I've been trying to say is as long as tanking mechanics are concerned, if you play a Paladin you will always breeze through everything if you are "above average", thanks to the 2.5 GCD and Paladin's fairly "straight-forward" (will use this word as advised) gameplay. You literally have SECONDS to think of your next move if something unexpected happens, hell, I still have all the time in the world to type in chat when abilities are on cooldowns during a GCD. The decision making is not HARD as a Paladin, because you barely have any choice. The right choice is always very obvious, given it's not the ONLY choice. Movements and positioning will always be a complete joke as you are free to move in any direction you want, compared to games like TERA where if you did some skills, you were committed to it and couldn't move until it was over, which made you unable to spam all your skills without thinking of what could happen next.

[Leiron]

This is exactly what I had in mind. We cannot blame the game too much though, as it's still pretty brand new, so obviously the boss mechanics will be harder/more exciting as the patches arrive..

Sure we can, the company made FF11, and has several other MMO's to draw upon for ideas.
The reason its simple/boring is due to how they intended it to be designed.
The long GCD, the delayed actions, yeah.