Savage Alexander and the Paladin Exodus

[Kyne_Lyons]

We're up to 7 kills worldwide now of A4S and looking at all the Dark Knight/Warrior comps and watching streams of other groups working on the fight, I can say with confidence that it will be at least a couple more weeks before any Paladins kill it, if there's anybody left playing the job by then. I'm working on it now as Paladin, but I'll be switching to Dark Knight because Paladin is a dumpster fire on this fight to the point where being there is detrimental to progression. Our shield is worthless outside of the 10-15s a single add is up during the encounter because all damage is Magical. Our DPS is the worst of all 3 tanks which makes the adds stay up and put stacks on your longer than any tank (thus taking more damage), and your utility is literally worthless. You can Divine Veil the phase transitions and that's it. That is the only thing you can bring to this fight. The legs that you have to stun cost 150 TP and are on GCD, which really strains TP by the third leg and breaks your combo every. single. time. When I didn't see any adjustments to the class in 3.07 I took that as a signal that the developers think the class is working as intended, and to me that was my signal to get out of dodge.

Paladins are the worst tank by a mile this tier and despite pushing really hard to stay on my favorite class, A4S is the straw that broke the camel's back. You could hack it on A1S and A2S, and in A3S you have to spend the majority of the fight in Sword Oath and tax the ever-living bananas out of your healers just to post the DPS needed to clear the fight. Tanks from the world's top FCs have all had to switch off Paladin because of how detrimental it is in current content, and if you clear A3S with a Paladin you're not going to clear A4S unless you're okay with waiting an additional month to let everyone get the gear needed to carry you through it.

If the content were designed more like T13, there'd be a justification for Paladin. If damage and tank busters were split more evenly between Physical and Magical damage it would totally make sense. Early on I as well allowed myself to be deluded by my progression (A1S and A2S week 1, A3S took 3 weeks) and thinking hey, Paladin's aren't so bad. We can clearly do this content.

After 2 weeks of A4S learning, I can't justify it any more. There are real glaring issues facing this class despite what maybe 2 incredibly misguided posters on the Tank forums seem to think but in end-game content, Paladins just have to wait an extra few weeks to let everyone get the gear to make up for their bad design. The developers even decided to give Monks a DPS boost despite the fact that more groups were clearing content with Monks than Paladins. I'm not going to post my crackpot ideas for how to fix the class. That's not what I want this thread to be about. I want the developers to respond to what's happening in the game, right now, among top groups. If the developers are truly okay with letting Paladin wait weeks if not months to clear content compared to Dark Knight and Warrior, fine. I'd just like to know ahead of time next time around instead of buying gear for a job I can't take to this raid tier's final encounter.

A RESPONSE FROM YOSHI-P:

http://ff14net.2chblog.jp/archives/46326984.html

Per Yoshi-P, "I don't think PLD is weak".
- PLD will continue to be the best defensive tank.
- There will be adjustments to its skills in 3.1.
- Magic will never be able to be blocked.
- There will be more physical attacks in raids.

[lawlHT]

There's nothing wrong with the class itself. Pld is, in a vacuum, a hell of a lot better and more flexible than it ever was in 2.0. The reason it's falling behind right now is because current endgame content does not play to pld's strengths (passive physical mitigation, high survivability), but instead is mostly magic focused and expecting more dps than the dps players can possibly put out with current gear potential, forcing tanks to have excellent dps output to compensate. Now that there are 3 tanks, there are going to be instances where one of them is weaker than the others. Even now, pld is an excellent choice for a2s, where their shield makes a difference. Just give the devs time to make more fights instead of calling for buffs to a class that fills its niche quite nicely

[Kyne_Lyons]

If you're suggesting -- after many major FCs have had their Paladin switch jobs, including Lucrezia -- that Paladins have to wait until 3.2 content I'm going to have to say that just isn't good enough.

[OPneedNerfs]

"Wait for next endgame raid and pray x class does better there"

If devs actually thought that way, WARs would still be the way they were in 2.0. The only fight they had issues with were T5. They made it so that stacking classes would be a disadvantage back then when there were only 2 tanks so it was a must to bring both.

Now if the game started off with 3 tank classes and only WAR was underperforming in T5 back then, with no world 1st/2nd/3rd/etc clears with a WAR for T5, I'm damned sure anyone who put in time/effort in a WAR would complain and ask for buffs (which they eventually did) but simply because the fix came along with the fix to T5 twisters, people started to see WAR world firsts and all was well because they technically didn't miss out much.

So unless A4S is fundamentally broken as a raid, asking anyone who put time/effort into gearing a PLD to "wait it out" is just illogical and I question their concept of balance in an MMORPG.

[Keyln]

Balance is overrated.

[Alistaire]

"Wait for next endgame raid and pray x class does better there"

If devs actually thought that way, WARs would still be the way they were in 2.0. The only fight they had issues with were T5.

What? 2.0 WAR was noticeably worse than PLD at tanking in any content from stone vigil normal on up.

[SpookyGhost]

So what problems specifically do you have with PLD in A4S? The DPS? Because mitigation-wise, PLD's actually quite good there (Bulwark/Sheltron vs Dolls and Strafs, Hallowed whenever you need it, Ramp/Sent for whenever you want). DPS-wise it falls behind DRK by ~80, but I think that is one of the few things that PLD needs buffed as DRK handles magic damage equal to how PLD handles physical damage and the discrepancy in DPS doesn't really make too much sense.

[Kyne_Lyons]

So what problems specifically do you have with PLD in A4S? The DPS? Because mitigation-wise, PLD's actually quite good there (Bulwark/Sheltron vs Dolls and Strafs, Hallowed whenever you need it, Ramp/Sent for whenever you want). DPS-wise it falls behind DRK by ~80, but I think that is one of the few things that PLD needs buffed as DRK handles magic damage equal to how PLD handles physical damage and the discrepancy in DPS doesn't really make too much sense.

Dark Knight mitigation is better on this fight by a country mile. Dark Mind is up for the things you actually use tank cooldowns for on this fight since almost all the damage is Magical and gives you a lot more freedom where you decide to use Shadow Skin and Shadow Wall. Sheltron and Bulwark are unreliable at best on the adds. You only use Sheltron to try to absorb the Panzerfaust on the Quarantine adds but often times even if you try to time it either an auto-attack will eat it (thus rendering it useless) or the buff will go up just before Panzerfaust lands, which means it won't register for the attack. There's a delay between using the ability and it registering as present on your character to block an attack, if you've played Paladin in end game content you are very intimate with this. Often times you will only take 2 Panzerfaust hits during the add phase, and there's been plenty of times where I'll run Bulwark and it won't block these hits. So I, like every other tank, use my universal cooldowns because they are simply more reliable. If I had better DPS I'd kill the adds faster and take less damage than if I was playing Paladin.

The only truly useful time to used Hallowed on this fight is if you're the laser target during the third/fourth leg. You can use it, and then your raid doesn't have to intercept the lasers! Except that Hallowed Ground has a 7 minute cooldown, using it locks you out pretty much for the remainder of the fight, and Holmgang/Living Dead can do the exact same thing giving Paladin zero advantages in this regard. The healers can top you up easily if you're the only laser target here so the fact that you take no damage is meaningless.

Stunning the legs so that Perpetual Ray doesn't nuke your raid for super damage, plus the TP and MP drain isn't hard but the 150 TP cost rears it's head the longer you go into the fight, and it breaks your combo thus setting your damage back even further. Since you are locked to the GCD you also have the shortest window to stun the leg as getting caught in a GCD delays when you can stun it and get back on your kill target. No other tank in the game has to deal with this and it's a huge, huge disadvantage. DPS is also extremely important because you need to push the phases before getting additional Discoid orbs and Straf dolls spawns.

So if I were to summarize the problems in this fight are less DPS, no advantages in mitigation, the worst TP of any tank class.

[Soda]

Stunning the legs so that Perpetual Ray doesn't nuke your raid for super damage, plus the TP and MP drain isn't hard but the 150 TP cost rears it's head the longer you go into the fight, and it breaks your combo thus setting your damage back even further. Since you are locked to the GCD you also have the shortest window to stun the leg as getting caught in a GCD delays when you can stun it and get back on your kill target. No other tank in the game has to deal with this and it's a huge, huge disadvantage. DPS is also extremely important because you need to push the phases before getting additional Discoid orbs and Straf dolls spawns.

This right here. It's such a huge deal that I am having to level DRK to be able to deal with this interrupt mechanic. Call it what you want, but 150 TP and interruption of combo on a 13minute fight is a huge issue. I was putting it off thinking we could make it the whole way but with how tight A4S is you just can't spend 150 TP and interrupt your combo so many times like that.

[ckc22]

Imo this is just a symptom that basically all endgame content right now is designed as hard enrage dps checks - which is an entire problem in itself.