Tank Balance

[Nadirah]

all of those situation, if you play like should made no a single difference if you use it or not. like I said only serve to be lazy not real usefulness to the class or the party just....prevent for giving a few steps back IF YOU PLAY CORRECTLY if it saves your life or your life depens on this ability then "git gud"

Using the ability properly is a sign the " got gud" though...

[Brian_]

First, enmity wasn't an issue in 2.X because all PLDs did was spam RoH. If all they did was spam RoH in HW, enmity would also not be an issue. That changed.

Second, in 2.X, shield swipe was worth using as a TP conservation skill. With the addition of two higher potency combos in HW, it's a DPS loss now.

Third, Clemency, a skill that gets crapped on pretty hard didn't exist in 2.X.

Fourth, in 2.X, while in Sword Oath, PLDs actually did more damage than WARs. That changed.

Fifth, encounter design in general is different from 2.X. The DPS checks in HW are real and Healers and Tanks are being pushed to deal as much DPS as possible. But, the meta regarding survivability has also shifted. Block and HG in 2.X were much more useful than they've been in HW.

To lack perspective is one thing. To insinuate that people are being disingenuous because of your own ignorance is quite idiotic.

[Strident]

I want two changes for PLD:

1. Sword Oath and Shield Oath are now on their own, separate 10 second cooldown. Oaths can no longer be dropped and then recasted, but they can be casted alternately outside of the GCD.
Casting Sword Oath grants the buff "Stalwart Sword" for 10 seconds. Auto attack speed is increased, or something like that.
Casting Shield Oath grants the buff "Stalwart Shield" for 10 seconds. Block strength is increased, or something like that.

2. Tempered Will no longer sucks.

And that's what I want for Christmas.

Or Halloween. That's cool too.

[Donjo]

Seriously, what's with all the Tempered Will hate? I already explained how it's the most useful of Paladin's situational skills. Why aren't people attacking Shield Bash instead or something?

[Strident]

Seriously, what's with all the Tempered Will hate? I already explained how it's the most useful of Paladin's situational skills. Why aren't people attacking Shield Bash instead or something?

I would argue Cover is the most useful Paladin situational skill, since you can absorb a single damage type (physical) another player takes for 10 seconds. By popping defensive cooldowns, you also reduce the overall damage inflicted, or outright negate it with Hallowed Ground.

Meanwhile, with Tempered Will, I debate your contention that those described usages are of good design. First, any open world or soloing usage should immediately be discounted as being a valid angle of argument. A situational skill should be empowering and used in often occurring occasions in a raid/dungeon based setting as we are discussing game balance with a focus on team play. Second, I do not believe in the 'safety net' arguments. For fights like Titan, knockbacks basically only have one significant mechanic to them: instant death if not dealt with appropriately. In addition, you take large amounts of damage when hit by them, as opposed to taking large amounts of damage as a direct result of getting knocked back. These cases have an obvious pattern: don't get hit in the first place, because it's suboptimal. Using Tempered Will here brings the benefit of letting you play suboptimally, which is absolutely not what a well designed skill should do.

It would be a different case if the effect of being knocked back leads to a direct disadvantage and said knock back is neigh unavoidable. This is why I can agree with the sentiment that having more uptime on the boss is a good benefit of this skill, but tanking Landslide is a terrible reason why this skill should even exist.

However. This skill is on a 3 minute cooldown, and DRK can just Plunge to get back anyway. PLD's also deal the least damage of the 3 tanks and have nothing that needs to be critically refreshed. Furthermore, there just are not enough of these benefical cases that exist in the game, which leads me to find this skill to be terrible because if it were removed, I wouldn't even notice and would barely be considered a nerf.

[Sigmakan]

Seriously, what's with all the Tempered Will hate? I already explained how it's the most useful of Paladin's situational skills. Why aren't people attacking Shield Bash instead or something?

I don't get it either. Its up there with people saying DRK's Plunge is worthless. Movement abilities are very useful

[karateorangutang]

I don't get it either. Its up there with people saying DRK's Plunge is worthless. Movement abilities are very useful

Plunge has a 30 second cooldown, tempered will has a 3 minute cooldown. That separates these abilities in usefulness quite a bit.

Plunge gets bonus points for being a oGCD attack as well.

[Kali-ka]

I've been trying very hard to prevent myself from jumping into these discussions lol...but couldn't stay out of this one.

So as far as balancing goes, I really can't speak on everything. Although I have PLD and DRK at 60, and currently leveling WAR (@40) I can only speak on my experiences with the jobs as well as what I have read thus far. The TLDR of WAR and PLD: WAR seems perfectly fine to me (and a very fun job so far), and PLD could use some tweaks here and there, but I haven't had many problems with the job in my experiences (have done most content up to A1S on PLD).

And then there's DRK...I really pictured this job to be much different before it came out but was "mostly" pleasantly surprised by some of the things it could do. I'm a bit divided like most of the people who post on these forums about what I WANT from it and the changes I could realistically EXPECT them to make from the job.

Unrealistically: If I could redesign the job, I would completely get rid of Dark Arts first and foremost and somewhat bring back the absorb system. For a comparable MP cost (read lower) than DA, have Absorb Offense which would not only debuff the targets damage done for a fixed amount of time (just throwing it out there: 3-5% for 10 secs maybe?) and give the DRK the option to use a one time charge on any WS to boost it (much like DA works now) and still have the same affects on other WS such as HP absorb from SE, more enmity from PS and such, but would probably add a modifier to siphon to absorb more MP. Then have Absorb Defense (or call it whatever) would lower target's defense an amount (again thinking 3-5% for 10 secs)and would be able to enhance any of the DRK's defensive cooldowns (more mitigation on shadow skin/wall, more parry on dance, etc). So basically with this system DRK would be able to switch and choose which debuffs it could have on a mob while being able to enhance its own abilities. As far as everything else, it would be pretty much kept the same and just maybe add some way of getting back TP (absorb offense + delirium maybe).

Realistically what I would hope to expect with the job:
1) Make reprisal something we could trigger without parry. Just make it an oGCD ability that we could keep up at least 90% of the time.
2) Give the job SOMETHING that helps with TP drain
3) Completely fix living dead. This is the one thing that I can't forgive about the job. I haven't had to worry about it much before, but I just joined a new group for Alex savage and I had to spend a significant amount of time trying to explain to my healers about how to cure me when I pop LD. This should NOT be an issue. No one should have to worry about popping an ability and dying because they got cured too much and it didn't trigger, or being not cured enough and just dropping to the ground without something actually hitting you for that 1 HP. This was SE trying to be too unique compared to the other 2 tanks and it is just not practical. Honestly if it worked similar to Holmgang (just cant go below 1HP) but with a recast inbetween it and Hallowed, that would be perfectly fine with me and I'm sure everyone else.

Now there's one more thing that I have to address and it is what people say about the job's defensive abilities not being synergized (mainly the whole blind/dodge of DA+DD and DA+DP not synergizing with Dark price) and this doesn't bother me since I see it as something you should be using when your other defensive CDs are down (at least on trash) but it shouldn't cost a crap ton of MP to do both of those things. Now I do wholeheartedly agree with what Phoenicia said earlier that it is dumb to have parry and evasion on the same damn skill though...

[F_Maximillian]

Disclaimer: I'm still yet new to the game. This is all from what I've read and theorized based on game systems.

It seems a lot of the problem lies with the initial plan for party design not being followed through on. I believe there's two tank slots in an 8 person party for a reason and why one tank was the defense oriented with less damage tank and one was the offense oriented squishier tank. Tank swapping was intended to be a key mechanic, the high defense oriented tank would handle phases of fights where heavy damage that the more offensively oriented tank couldn't handle effectively. It was probably designed for something like start phase (mild to moderate damage tanked by offense oriented tank) high damage phase (switch to the highly defensive tank) and so forth until the end of the fight. However, that presents the issue of not having that offensively oriented tank be able to perform evenly so they equalized defensive abilities.

In trying to equalize defense capability they essentially took from the defense specialized tank the one thing that made them better in those situations. I think the best way to fix paladin would be to match current aggro output to the other tanks but also to boost their defense notably and return to that time where that high defense was good to have. I believe DRK was also designed in mind only instead of offensively and defensively it was split between physical and magical damage, where the DRK would handle magical damage and the PLD would handle physical. However, because of how well warriors preform and how paladins lack damage output in this DPS race metagame that niche was closed off as well.

I believe Alexander Savage is really just a data collection point for rebalancing classes and regaining that synergy and as we learn more about patch 3.1 that will become clearer.

[Iagainsti]

@ercapote tldr #nochill