Ideas for Paladin Skill Changes

[Rubytoe]

Circle of Scorn - Additional Effect: Slow Duration 15 secs.

Shield Bash - Does not interrupt combos.

Rage of Halon: Reduce target's strength by 20% instead of 10% for 20s. The Enhanced Rage of Halone Trait will total it to 30%.

Spirits Within - Adds Damage over time potency of 35 for a duration of 15secs.

Divine Veil - Using Clemency or Cross class Cure on self will be able to Trigger the protective barrier effect.

Royal Authority - 50% chance that next Clemency cast will be instant.

Cover - Take both Physical and Magical damage, instead of only Physical.

Shield Oath - Reduce damage received by 30% instead of 20%, while lowering damage dealt by 20%. Does not interrupt combos.

Sword Oath - Additional Effect: Increases critical hit rate by 30% Does not interrupt combos.

What do you think of these changes?

[Freyyy]

[fm_fenrir]

Divine Veil - Using Clemency or Cross class Cure on self will be able to Trigger the protective barrier effect. Change potency to scale on AP, not HP--not only does the current meta not support stacking VIT, it's aggressively worse for PLD's lower threat generation in general.

Cover - 33% chance upon receiving covered damage that next Clemency cast will be instant.

Cover - Take both Physical and Magical damage, instead of only Physical.

I see your suggestions, and counter with some alterations. The things I removed I didn't agree with.

Edit:

I like Spirits as-is, and your ShO adjustment doesn't fix MT PLD issues (lower threat gen and lower DPS than other tanks). Mitigation is literally the only thing PLD has going for it, and increasing passive mitigation even more with ShO isn't really necessary.
Your SwO adjustment is absurdly strong, even with PLD's lower DPS output. Consider that literally every class that can is required to take Internal Release, and that only has a 17% uptime; similarly, Battle Litany is also a massive DPS boost with its 8% uptime. Your suggestion gives double IR's bonus all the time.

Royal Authority doesn't need to interact with Clemency at all, being a DPS chain closer.
Shield Bash interrupts combos because you have to anticipate when you want to use it, and if you need it between combo pieces, that's on you. That's the price you pay for being able to chain stun things with the longest stun duration skill.

I'd love to buff Circle of Scorn's DOT effect, because its added enmity is a huge boost to group threat and characteristically something PLD is weakest at. I'm not sure how well that would play with an OT PLD who wants to keep the DOT up as often as possible, though.

[SwordCoheir]

Shield Swipe- Additional Effect: Increases Enmity of enemies in a wide cone in front of you.

The notion is to knock your enemy into other enemies, pissing them off. Enmity Multiplier based on damage done to the original target, which would give PLD a nice AoE enmity move that actually scales and allows them to be competitive in AoE hate management with other tanks.

[SpookyGhost]

Shield Oath - Reduce damage received by 30% instead of 20%, while lowering damage dealt by 20%. Does not interrupt combos.

Sword Oath - Additional Effect: Increases critical hit rate by 30% Does not interrupt combos.

Explain this.

[SwordCoheir]

Explain this.

The not interrupting combo thing makes sense, because other stance based jobs don't have this issue and we already suffer GCD and mp costs on top of that.

I could possibly see the 30% on Shield Oath only because SE wants to keep pressing the point WAR is a damage based tank, so by proxy PLD could actually be a mitigation king over the other two.

A 30% Crit increase is unreasonable imo, though 5-10% might be reasonable in comparison because we don't have the ability to really stance dance for the reasons I already stated above.

[Maggotpanda666]

Yeah some of these ideas seem nice the cover one and scorn one seem the most likely to happen but shield oath and sword oath definalty would unbalance the game in the paladins favour as would the rage of halone one. If all of these suggestions went life then the problem would be paladins receiving buffs to healing, defence and dps at once they may be a bit weak atm in terms of being picked but this would make them main tank every time single group. I do agree paladins need work but typically ideas like this lead to the opposite problem. Need a balanced solution.

[Alphras]

Rage of Halon: Reduce target's strength by 20% instead of 10% for 20s. The Enhanced Rage of Halone Trait will total it to 30%.

Shield Oath - Reduce damage received by 30% instead of 20%, while lowering damage dealt by 20%. Does not interrupt combos.

Sword Oath - Additional Effect: Increases critical hit rate by 30% Does not interrupt combos.

Completely overpowered and unrealistic.

Circle of Scorn - Additional Effect: Slow Duration 15 secs.

Divine Veil - Using Clemency or Cross class Cure on self will be able to Trigger the protective barrier effect.

Royal Authority - 50% chance that next Clemency cast will be instant.

Kinda pointless. They should just remove the proc from Divine Veil and make Clemency an instant cast (maybe increase the mp cost).

Shield Bash - Does not interrupt combos.

Spirits Within - Adds Damage over time potency of 35 for a duration of 15secs.

Cover - Take both Physical and Magical damage, instead of only Physical.

Reasonable IMO.

[Xenosan]

My thought on PLD is AoE > Enmity. It always has been a shortcoming. It's more prevalent now with tanks potentially outputting damage close or equal to DPS jobs. Reading your adjustments I think it's fair to say you fall into the camp of, "PLD defense don't compensate for the DPS gap." I understand that for sure.

But with the whole Hybrid Melds and Tank Damage Calculations stuff happening now I'm pretty confident their gonna clip those wings. An across the board reduction like that narrows the gap, and maybe the argument of PLD having a Shield + HG is justified better.

So for me it hasn't changed. IMO first order of business is give PLD friggin AoE.

And please no not adding Potency to Flash. That's adding insult to injury. If that's the solution then it should have been done 2 years ago.

Royal Authority. When combo'd let it be an AoE like Flare. 340+ Potency to the main target, diminished Potency on the subsequent targets hit. The diminishing returns prevent PLD from being some AoE monster, but at least the added potency would let PLD hold on to enmity just long enough for the next CoS to come off CD.

Then we'd be better capable of correctly using Flash as a Debuff Spell; not a needAggroz button.

Really the longer I stay away from PLD (using DRK now) the more absurd I find it that they seriously did not give PLD an AoE via the Heavensward Level Cap increase.