Suggestion of Paladin "utility and fun" improvement

[bob13bob]

pld skill cap too low and it's boring. needs to ahve more complex skill rotations/reactive play. Tank Ifrit HM with 3 skills and no movement. Offtank 1 skill if. Tank titan HM with 3 skills almost no movement (haven't hit beaten him yet though). Tank tonberry with 3 skills and no movement. Tank AK boss 3 skills and no movement. Sometimes mix flash in for aoe pulls. Give us oath rotation or something. please.

Change boss mechanics to Tanks have to do something. right now all the skill checks are on dps (tonberry king = kill 3-4 adds between nukes, demon wall = dps skillcheck/gearcheck. etc). Dps even handle the adds while tanks stays in place.

AV is way more fun and challenging for tanks, but unfortunately only relevant for a sliver in time from i47-i50. AV such a great design, make it part of the fresh 50 progression please.

[Kenji1134]

Alright, here's another option, again if the code can support it... Though I don't see why it wouldn't.

Make RoH combo off of 2 abilities with different effects for each.
If RoH is used after Savage Blade, it deals 260 potency worth of damage to 1 target with a 5x hate mod, and lowers STR by 10% for 20 sec.
If RoH is used after Riot Blade, it deal 230 potency worth of damage to 1 target with a 3x hate mod, generates an equal amount of enmity on all other targets within a 5y radius (basically Flash), and lowers the INT of the target hit by 10% for 20 sec.

This way we do not have to add any new abilities, but we get a nice situational combo chain.
You can generate 2050 hate potency on 1 target using Fast-Savage-RoH and debuff its STR.
Or you can generate 1300 hate potency on 1 target using Fast-Riot-RoH and debuff its INT, while also generating 690 hate potency on everything else.

It wont really serve to magically make tank-n-spank content more dynamic, but it will break up rotational monotony a bit, make the Riot chain useful, improve our aoe aggro, and make us less reliant on bards.

[Yunnie]

How about give us an /ac that combos after "Riot Blade" that does the SAME amount of combo potency as "Rage of Halone" but Decays our own enmity equivalent to the damage done. If duty finder wants 2 tanks for Titan, then please let him have fun... Sometimes 4 plds are looking for a hydra fight... Sometimes you want to help your lower level tank friend through tam-Tara...

[Colyo]

Take shield swipe off the GCD. Done.

[PiedPiper]

A fair point, if what your fighting uses only physical str based attacks. That is rarely the case. In most instances, where incoming damage tends to spike, it is from a magic source, effectively negating the eHP from Bulwark and RoH and it is never crit, negating returns from Awareness.

Umm... other than ultima... what boss is hitting you with magic that matters?

In 4 man, all of the magic attacks neither class should get hit (walk through the cast).

Titan: Physical.
Garuda HM during sisters (red line): Physical. Slipstream is also physical (can be blocked).
Ifrit HM: Physical.
Moogle: Two tankable adds are both physical. Mog King's damage all/mostly physical.

Turn 1: Physical. Also, pld has like, all of the advantages here (high sustained dps on tank really hurts warrior due to their 5% lower healing efficiency, and their paltry self heals pale in comparison to the amount of damage going out.

Turn 2: Magical, but no spike damage, and kinda irrelevant since the fight requires 2 tanks for a normal clear. In a solo tank run.. it really doesn't much matter which tank is there since the final boss will do little/no direct damage to the tank.

Turn 3: Biggest threat to you is team mates sending you the wrong way for lulz. IMO, HQ > any war skill :PPPPPP

Turn 4: All physical again.

Turn 5: Annnnd.... physical.

Garuda EX: Physical

Titan EX: Physical

Ifrit EX: ....wait for it. Wait.... Physical.



More over, we have no real way of being sure that Ultima's attacks are actually based on her INT and not her STR. Unless you have pretty conclusive testing data to show me, I'd be pretty easily convinced it was based off Ultima's Attack potency, which is probably tied to her STR (since that is, after all, a big part of how virus works as well).

[Kenji1134]

Part of the issue is that every class and job has an exact number of abilities.
A class has 17 abilities, a job has 5, and the max a player can have is 27 total.

GLA already has 17 abilities, so we cannot just "add" a new ability out of the blue, that's the problem. We need to replace or modify an existing ability to make combat a little more engaging, and justify it by proving that it won't "destroy the delicate tanking balance".

The general goal is to add a 3rd step to the Fast-Riot combo, since the idea of a Wrath-like stacking mechanic is being called OP left and right. To add a new combo step, we need to either replace an existing ability, or modify an existing ability.
Our prime candidates for replacement are: Shield Swipe, perhaps Awareness, and Tempered Will (which suddenly does have some use in Garuda EX and Titan EX).
Our candidate for modification are: RoH, and maybe Shield Swipe, if it can be coded to work in some form of case-structure.

All in all, we want to replace some less used, and sometimes useless abilities, with a new 3rd combo step. Failing that, we would like to adjust an existing ability to function in different ways under different conditions.

Shield Swipe is in dire need of help once you hit endgame content. Other than trash, most (all) bosses are immune to Pacification, and the 210 damage is really weak in terms of hate generation.
Similarly Awareness is extremely situational. Most coil bosses do not crit. That said, they do occasionally seem to have a large variance in their attack damage, but it is not registered as a critical hit, making Awareness fairly useless.
Tempered Will is also situational, though less-so than Awareness. The only uses I have found for Tempered Will are not getting punted by Demon Wall, running through tornadoes in Garuda EX, and maybe eating a Landslide on Titan EX (which I have not tried yet).

These 3 abilities could easily be replaced by something that will serve as the 3rd part of the Fast-Riot combo. If not, then we could always implement the case-structure modification to RoH that I described above.

[PiedPiper]

Shield Swipe is in dire need of help once you hit endgame content. Other than trash, most (all) bosses are immune to Pacification, and the 210 damage is really weak in terms of hate generation.

Nooooo! Do not change shield swipe! This is how paladin maintains its TP on long encounters. Any GCD you spend using shield swipe is a positive TP gain (as it costs less than the natural tp regen). Shield swipe is awesome as it is. Its just not overly explicit what its intended use is (namely tp replenishment). Shield swipe is our astral ice or invigorate. Please please please do not call for shield swipe changes. Shied swipe is NOT meant as a threat tool in and of it self, just like blizard 3 is not a dps tool in and of itself. Both of these skills, however, replenish the resources need to achieve the primary goal (more ROH's / more fires).

Also, bulwark + Fight flight -> Shield swipe spam = massive dps gain.


That said, awareness is shit, and tempered is only like.. vaguely useful on twin and titan ex. Have your way with this skill.

[Enfarious]

...

If your maintaining Path then the 10% damage reduction more than makes up for this, why is no one acknowledging this still?
To the point of literally everything else, Path debuff, WAR better for single targets. Ok so every onze of incoming damage is physical (not true, but not worth arguing), w/ Path up full time (no reason for it not to be, aside from jumps) WARs total mitigation and eHP is better, and makes the supposedly mathed out healing deficiency simply wrong.

For the sake of argument, PLD survivability is better against groups since rampart is a CD and IB requires wrath, but WAR damage far outweighs PLDs on that same group, so there is a fairly even trade off in survivability vs. killspeed.

Working with math we've all seen:
Assuming both have 6000 HP before stances
Warrior: 6000 * 1.25 = 7500
Paladin: 6000 + 20% dmg reduction = HP/(1 – 0.2) -> HP = 6000/0.8 = 7500
So without heals the effective health is the same, but things change once healing is taken into account. Tanks take 5k dmg over time and need to healed.
Paladin: 5000 * 0.8 = 4000 dmg to be healed
Warrior: 5000 * 0.9 (this is the missing factor) = 4500 dmg to be healed

White Mage Cure II = 1k
Paladin gets 1k * 4 = 4k to recap.
Warrior gets 1.2k * 4 = 4.8k to overheal 300.

The impact of RoH isn't a straight damage reduction, and the actual effect of a 10% str reduction to a mob would mean having to make a mob by mob study. The same is true for Foresight since the effect of increased defense would vary by player and mob.

[Kitru]

It wont really serve to magically make tank-n-spank content more dynamic, but it will break up rotational monotony a bit, make the Riot chain useful, improve our aoe aggro, and make us less reliant on bards.

I still don't get why exactly you're so hung up on getting PLD an INT debuff, especially since you're asking for it to be on what amounts to an AoE enmity tool. The only reason that it would possibly be needed would be if it's determined that PLD *requires* it, which is doubtful since PLD has excellent survivability already. As it stands, it really just seems like you're asking for it because you have an arbitrary desire for symmetry on the debuff to match, to some extent, the damage debuff that WAR gets. Should PLD *also* get something to match the WAR slashing debuff because that's something the WAR brings that the PLD doesn't? In the context of what you're actually, which is a Riot Blade combo as an AoE enmity tool, if you really wanted the INT debuff, you should just ask for it to be placed on RoH in additional to the STR debuff that it already provides.

As to turning Riot Blade into an AoE enmity combo (of which it already functionally belongs: FB>Riot Blade>Flash), PLD doesn't have AoE enmity problems so you're attempting to fix a problem that doesn't actually exist and, honestly, is actually pretty well balanced, regardless of how much PLDs want to complain about Overpower. If you want to get into any "problems" that PLD might actually have now, the only *real* one is that PLD doesn't have an effective offtank rotation (i.e. does approximately the same damage as MT rotation without generating nearly as much enmity) which your idea *still* doesn't solve because Riot Blade's RoH would *still* be a tank attack even if you've set the attack to generate the same damage as the normal RoH combo because, in your own words, you're basically giving it Flash in addition to it's normal effect.

[Kitru]

Part of the issue is that every class and job has an exact number of abilities.
A class has 17 abilities, a job has 5, and the max a player can have is 27 total.

Not true. Arcanist gets 18 because it gets 2 abilities at level 4 instead of the 1 that other classes get, which means that SMN and SCH get 28. The number of class abilities is basically an arbitrary choice. There's no real *reason* why there couldn't be more abilities provided to a class, especially since the number of *useful* abilities that a class gets, which is a *much* more important number, varies pretty heavily, especially when you factor in cross class abilities (WAR will pretty much always have at least 4 truly useful cross-class abilities whereas you'll be hard pressed to say that PLD has more than 2: Foresight and Stoneskin)