PLD dps needs to be buffed, current dps a joke

[Tyrial]

Check out all the WAR mains telling PLD and DRK players to grow up.

I'm a WAR main because that's what my group needed. Previously (and since I started playing at beta) I was a PLD main. I'm also in the process of leveling up the other two tanks so that, unlike some narrow minded people, I have all of the options available to me. What I main doesn't change my view on the situation and I wouldn't be on the forums complaining if PLD or DRK was doing something better than WAR.

[OPneedNerfs]

Somewhere down the line people seem to come up with this fantasy where WARs and DRKs can't take hits/survive as well as PLDs.

That would be true if the game was focused mainly on High damage Physical attacks that happened frequently enough that passive mitigation is king.

However, Ever since the introduction of 2.1, all tanks have been homogenized to a point where "Pop cooldown before X attack" is the only thing in meaningful content.

The only time a PLD's shield and skills related to it is worth anything is when tanking thrash mobs that constantly deal damage by auto-attacks.

However, because their AoE damage is as good as none, things end up dying slower and thus ends up requiring more healing in the end anyway.

The fantasy that is "PLDs mitigate damage better than other tanks" which in turn lead to "Other tanks are squishier than PLD" is something that died when 2.1 changed WARs to become damage reduction tanks just like PLDs.

Of course, this being the OF Tank Forums, I have no doubt that people are going to continue propagating the aforementioned fantasies as facts.

A good example of this is ever since Page 38 in this thread where certain evidence was disproved so hard the poster likely is not going to post in this thread anymore, yet is still seen posting the same evidences elsewhere. That's the state of how it is in the OF Tank Forums now where the people who make sense just can't be bothered with people who just want to continue spreading misinformation because that's apparently what they do for their own satisfaction.

[Praesul]

The way I see it is, higher damage is always a benefit. It's almost always useful. Okay, so not all the time because sometimes it makes for awkward phase pushes or pushes things into enrage on extremely overgeared content (see unsynced ifrit EX or mog HM). But that's stuff you can control.

The so called higher mitigation that PLD brings to the table? When is it useful? And by how much? In any hard content that matters, tanks are still taking bonkers amount of damage, so "increased healer DPS" isn't really a benefit from having to heal a PLD less. And it's SLIGHTLY less, by the way. It's like, okay, the PLD blocked. He took 28% less damage. Cool. He's still gonna get cure 2'd right after just like a DRK or WAR would anyway.

Of course it would be dumb if they designed content so only certain tanks could main tank it, so I understand why they don't make things impossible (and I'm glad for it!) but I feel like what PLD brings to the table isn't good enough at the moment. No one complained in Pre-HW because the viable comp took both tanks ANYWAY, so it's not a matter of "butthurt PLD" complaining all of a sudden.

[Sapphidia]

I think the problem with PLDs is that they're balanced around "utility" rather than damage as their secondary role, and right now their utility is so negligible it might as well not be there.

Warriors are in a good spot because they have a similar tanking mitigation kit to paladins in terms of overall effectiveness, just a little harder to use (pressing Rampart is easier than ensuring you have 5 Wrath stacks for an Inner Beast and timing it right so the 6 seconds are at the best spot). Point for point though, the "higher mitigation" paladins have is pretty much a myth. It's not in their cooldowns because the Warriors have parity there. Vengeance is 10% less than Sentinel but has far more average uptime. Foresight/Awareness are traited differently but balance out. Rampart and Inner beast are roughly equal. Hallowed Ground is better than Holmgang but have similar roles and Holmgang has a shorter CD. Raw Intuition and Bulwark are roughly equal, if anything RI is better due to much higher uptime. Paladin has 10% better Convalescence but Warrior has Thrill of Battle too. Warrior has Equilibrium and improved Bloodbath for self healing, Paladin has Clemency which is stronger but much harder to get off without interruption.

The major comparison between Warrior and Paladin mitigation is the fact that for -sustained- damage rather than bursty EHP a Paladin is slightly better, as the 20% Shield Oath reduction works out slightly better than the 20% healer boost on Defiance (it should be 25%), and the fact that a Paladin's innate block chance comboed with Sheltron use beats out the increased Parry chance warriors get from Wrath stacks. And this difference only affects physical attacks, and isnt reliable on tank busters. Basically you'll only ever notice the difference between a Paladin and a Warrior in toughness when tanking large packs of rapidly hitting mobs, rather than a big single boss (hence why Paladins are viewed as noticeably more survivable in A2S, at a cost of much lower aoe damage).

So whilst we can quibble slightly over the exact numbers, in practise when tanking your average single target big raid boss Warriors and Paladins do a near equal job of mitigating the incoming damage. The advantage of Warriors is that they can dish out more damage whilst doing so, and MUCH more damage whilst sitting in an offtank role. ALL of their skillset is geared towards pretty much nothing but dealing enhanced damage.

Paladins however... they have Divine Seal. Cover. Clemency. Crossclassed Stoneskin. These all give Paladins the role of a "support tank". The Warriors have the damage, the Paladins have the healing and the protection. Warriors will kill bosses faster, Paladins -should- make the healing requirements much easier on a group. Right now however there arent really any fights where healer output is such a difficult problem that these supporty abilities brought by Paladins can make any major difference to success. They're little more than emergency buttons for when something messes up in the healing, and not anything you'd really bring a Paladin for specifically. They -can't- really be a requirement because if Paladin-specific utility skills were needed for an encounter then you'd be forced to bring one. This is before you factor in the fact that the Paladin's low mana pool coupled with the long cast times of Clemency/Stoneskin and the fact you can be interrupted means in practise these moves can only be used at very specific times in an encounter.

Musing: What if Clemency had only 0.5 second cast time and cost 25% of the mana cost it does now. That would be overpowered? A paladin able to spam out 4k heals on the raid without risk of interruption? In a hypothetical situation where Clemency was THAT strong... would it be strong enough to warrant bringing a Paladin over a Warrior? I mean with so much casting spam a paladin woudl do even LESS damage. At what point can you buff utility to be so hugely powerful that it actually beats out "much more damage"?

I guess I'd -prefer- to see Paladins fixed by having their DPS left where it is and having their utility buffed so they're a definite choice over a Warrior/DRK for a different reason. The more you buff tanks to be closer to each other, the more raw DPS numbers dictate which is optimal. I doubt there's any way to easily increase utility without unbalancing things though. Let Warriors have their niche as the high damage tank, let DRKs sit in between Paladins as the medium damage tank that excels at mitigating magical tank busters. Those seem to be good, popular niches. Paladins just need a more clearly defined niche that isnt just "well you can help out a crappy healer a bit sometimes".

[Reynhart]

At what point can you buff utility to be so hugely powerful that it actually beats out "much more damage"?

To the point where bringing a PLD means that you can replace one healer by an additionnal DPS, because the PLD could keep the MT alive and the sole healer would only cast Esunas or Regen on it while keeping the raid alive.

For me, that's exactly what PLD should be able to offer as a tank. And if you don't want PLD to keep the whole party alive by itself, make Clemency scales with the target's enmity so that it would be specifically designed to keep a tank alive.

As for DRK, my idea is that it could debuff the monster so that anyone who hit on it would recover either TP or MP (only one at a time), meaning that BRD or MCH could be full time DPS. I'd really see this kind of effect applied on Sole Survivor to be useful on bosses too.
Either "Basic Effect: recover MP, Dark Arts effect : Recover TP" or "Physical damage : Recover TP, Magical Damage : Recover MP"

[Faeon]

Snip

Well do you really think that fixing PLD's utility is the answer? If you look at the current state atm! from an PF & Full Party Compositions, be it for Alex Savage or Extreme Primals. It favours DPS as fast as possible gameplay to get it over and done with, their really is no need for utility based tank gameplay, this is the problem with the current content and also previous content. Why would I bring a Utility based tank class, when i can bring two others who output more DPS to make the encounter faster and easier, by pushing the phases quicker, you see this all the time with PF Rava EX, where you have a single tank. That is a clear indication that the content is not really about tank utility? if you make it that a tank brings party wide utility then the BRD's and MCH's and AST have a problem.

So how does SE fix this? is the question, do they make all tanks output the same DPS numbers? which is really what all the threads are about if you read between the lines. The current meta for tanks since there is only three, its either WAR & PLD, WAR & DRK, DRK & PLD, so if you look at having a tank of each job in your group, and not double stacking. You also have two physical mitigation tanks and one magic, so prefered makeup is WAR & DRK, due to the current state of pushing DPS as fast as possible.

I am not sure myself if buffing the DPS of a PLD is the answer. It would be a nice to have tbh!

[Mclyde]

Why would I bring a Utility based tank class, when i can bring two others who output more DPS to make the encounter faster and easier, by pushing the phases quicker

Cause you're a gamer ?

[Faeon]

Cause you're a gamer ?

Well yes, but then you can also say, I am a gamer I should have all three tanks equally geared and swap between encounters as to what is needed. In a perfect world yes that would be great. But not all players are like that.

[OPneedNerfs]

Well yes, but then you can also say, I am a gamer I should have all three tanks equally geared and swap between encounters as to what is needed. In a perfect world yes that would be great. But not all players are like that.

Also add in the fact that you can't be equally geared on different classes due to 1 simple reason. Weapons.

Even if the latest tank gear is shared unlike the current eso ones are, weapons are still unique to each different class.

If there were no tome caps for the 2nd highest tier of gear, this wouldn't be an issue at all but that's obviously not going to happen until said gear is outdated anyway.

And so the cycle continues...

Maybe just maybe having a third tank class was the problem, should have maybe have been WAR is physical DPS Tank and PLD was a magic based tank. WAR could still do the same with the slash buff, but PLD would do something similar with magic buffs etc.

The issue with the current tank situation is this:

You can't replace the spot of WAR in a 8 man party without losing significant utility and DPS.

If they had made it so that having a combination of ANY 2 of the 3 tank classes was optimal at the highest level of play, then we wouldn't have this problem.

Some people seem to be thinking it's fine but as I've said before elsewhere, this is an MMORPG where you spend time and effort to gear up a certain class. You can never predict what the devs are going to do to buff/nerf the class you're playing but it is expected that the class you are spending time and effort for will be able to be used as optimally as someone who spent an equal amount of time and effort to gear up another class.

Imagine if the next patch the devs suddenly decide to nerf WARs to the ground and make PLDs OP. Now we would reverse the situation and have PLDs gloat at WARs telling them to "Git Gud" or that "There are multiple tank classes, I heard PLD is good". Would that make the current WAR players who have invested their time/effort into WAR happy? Unless you're a masochist, I highly doubt so. So why is it that people are saying it's fine for PLDs and to a lesser extent DRKs to be performing less than optimal?

[Faeon]

Also add in the fact that you can't be equally geared on different classes due to 1 simple reason. Weapons.

Even if the latest tank gear is shared unlike the current eso ones are, weapons are still unique to each different class.

If there were no tome caps for the 2nd highest tier of gear, this wouldn't be an issue at all but that's obviously not going to happen until said gear is outdated anyway.

And so the cycle continues...

Correct Mz OPneedNerfs thanks for including the extra info