what happens if second half of Alex is all physical?

[Sleigh]

Oh and PLD utility is an absolute joke right now aside from HG being able to mitigate full damage allowing other jobs to maximize their potential during the same window- and even that would be miraculous if your healers were aware enough to switch to full dps during Hg's duration. Our other "utility" is quite negligible atm with the way the abilities trigger.

Well, other opinions on PLD aside, it doesn't exactly take a genius to make use of HG for DPS purposes. Especially in a static group with communication.

[Kemas]

That's the thing- you need to be in a static group with good communication to make use of nearly all PLD utility abilities. That's a problem for 90% of content regardless of the PLD's skill level. Warrior and Dark Knight simply don't have that problem and have increased enmity modifiers and dps in addition to that. Let's just stay hopeful that SE is taking this long to ensure balance is maintained if they actually make the correct decision to fix some PLD abilities. (Clemency,Shelltron,cover::range::, and Divine Veil) unfortunately that's not a small list of fixes but they're all quite necessary to make PLD as viable as DRK/War in raid environments.

This isn't taking into account what someone mentioned prior, nothing a PLD can do will mitigate raid wide damage taken like Reprisal+Storm's Eye- thus on any fight with aoe damage you're instantly getting much more mitigation raid wide from a war/DRK combo and they would essentially need to add a reprisal equivalent to PLD to justify bringing one over the other two. :/

[Airswimmer]

That's the thing- you need to be in a static group with good communication to make use of nearly all PLD utility abilities.

This really isn't an issue since all content outside of Alexander (Savage) is PUGable with any party composition, and you shouldn't be attempting most floors of Alexander without a static at this point in time.