What Makes a Paladin? An Essay on Paladin Identity

[Reynhart]

I find it funny someone would call Awareness a wasted slot and then cross class Flash on a WAR.

I use it :

• When I'm pacified
• When I don't want to wake sleeping monsters
• When I don't want to kill monsters, like the bomb with the slime in Copperbell
• When I don't want to hit the target, but still gain enmity, like when Ravana can counter me
• When I want to delay the death of a target like when I'm the only one on an Oppressor because the DPS went to the other to close the health gap
• If I have to gain enmity on mobs all around me and I can't hit them all with Overpower
• If I need to save TP in heavy AoE situations and I can't pop Deliverance+Equilibrium

It's far more options that lots of cross-class skills can claim...

Partly because this is for players more than SE, who I don't expect to take even the simplest parts of it, I prefer completion over brevity. To me, that finally looks about complete. There are slight buffs I'd like to make to WAR and especially DRK to balance it, but that's a good looking PLD in my mind. Reordering a bit though, to put the most significant first, etc.

You still face the risk of people dismissing all of it for sheer length with a simple "nah, it's OP". The mere idea of allowing a battle raise can launch a Flame War...

[Brian_]

I look at that list and only think "none of this matters."

Seriously... waking sleeping monsters? Copperbell Mine and Ravana...? If the Oppressor is close enough to death that you need to stop DPS on it, you should also have no need to generate any more aggro. Having issues hitting every mob with OP? Shouldn't you take your own advice regarding RI and just position properly? Even the only practical point about flashing while pacified is only relevant when you are MTing and healers / fairy doesn't instantly remove pacification.

I used to cross clash Flash. The only time I ever used it was on the older dungeon pulls -- stuff like Brayflox HM and Haukke Manor HM where the pulls really were massive. None of the new dungeons have pulls that Overpower can't reliably cover -- and when I pull dungeons, I pull everything I can up until a wall.

So it just sits on your bar doing nothing for like 99% of situations. In the meanwhile, Awareness actually does something. It doesn't do much, but it does something. Potentially smoothing out spike damage during moments of healer stress is a lot more valuable and relevant to common content than whatever Flash brings to the table. Preventing wayward RI crits when you are forced to dodge AoEs while having 10+ mobs constantly spreading around you because of collision is a common situation unless you slow roll dungeons. At the very least, at least Awareness is something you can constantly use off CD for a minimal benefit as opposed to the incredibly situational uses of Flash.

[Reynhart]

I look at that list and only think "none of this matters."

Right, none of this matters because "I'M A WAAAR, I don't care about anything besides doing more damage ! screw strategy !"

If the Oppressor is close enough to death that you need to stop DPS on it, you should also have no need to generate any more aggro.

I'm pretty sure you're still taking hits, so healers keep gaining enmity by curing you...

Having issues hitting every mob with OP? Shouldn't you take your own advice regarding RI and just position properly?

Ok, so let me get this straight. You try to convinve me that Awareness is wonderful with Raw Intuition, implying that I can't position every monster in front of me, and then dismiss Flash because I should always be able to do it ?

Even the only practical point about flashing while pacified is only relevant when you are MTing and healers / fairy doesn't instantly remove pacification.

Yes, because healers and fairies have frequently far more important things to do than denying you few precious points of DPS.

I used to cross clash Flash. The only time I ever used it was on the older dungeon pulls -- stuff like Brayflox HM and Haukke Manor HM where the pulls really were massive.

Oh, you're right, too bad we never do this things anymore...oh, wait, we do we we queue for duty roulette

So it just sits on your bar doing nothing for like 99% of situations. In the meanwhile, Awareness actually does something.

Again, if you dismiss Flash because you can keep monsters in front of you, don't try to convince me that Awareness is useful. And remember than poppint Raw Intuition in that situation is a waste. If you need to mitigates attacks from all direction, just use another cooldown.

[Brian_]

What is strategy? Sleeping mobs? Seriously?

If healers are about to pull aggro off of you when an Oppressor is near death, you are a god awful tank. And, you are an even worse than god awful Warrior.

My point is if you are going to argue that Awareness is wasted on RI because you should be positioning stuff in front of you, then the same logic applies to Flash and Overpower. You made the point that sometimes Flash is useful when you are surrounded. Guess what? So is RI when you can pair it with Awareness. It still parries all attacks from your front. That is still significant mitigation. And sometimes, a significant amount of mobs are still alive after your Vengeance and Thrill have worn off. "Yo healer, have fun healing me without any dCDs active while I wait for these mobs to die so that I can use RI when there are only a few mobs left and you wouldn't need me to have a dCD active anyways." Makes sense.

I don't know anyone that still does 50 Dungeon roulette outside of leveling. Even when leveling, most people don't do it because you can get more EXP through other means. Even then, why are we are talking about level 50 dungeon roulette?

I'll be frank with you. If all you are doing is roulettes and casual content, this degree of min-maxing is irrelevant. You can cross class anything and be fine. You don't even need provoke.

[Freyyy]

Awareness is still great with RI even if mobs are all in front of you anyway. Crit comes before parry, so if RNG decides that a mob will crit you, even from front with RI up, you'll not parry. Using Awareness with RI makes it 100% sure that you WILL parry everything from front.

Whereas flash... I personally almost never use it on WAR (if ever at all). It is only useful when you poorly timed your Berserk and you're pacified when you have to pick up adds and the healers are too bad/too focused on anything else to dispell you.

[Reynhart]

If healers are about to pull aggro off of you when an Oppressor is near death, you are a god awful tank. And, you are an even worse than god awful Warrior.

Or, maybe I'm just good enough so that Critical Hits during Raw Intuition was never an issue...

Awareness is still great with RI even if mobs are all in front of you anyway. Crit comes before parry, so if RNG decides that a mob will crit you, even from front with RI up, you'll not parry. Using Awareness with RI makes it 100% sure that you WILL parry everything from front.

At least that's a believable usefulness.
Yet it's far from worhty of calling Awareness "amazing".

[Freyyy]

It's not amazing but it's still useful in very much more different situations than Flash.

[Bravely_Default]

flash is a bad AOE enmity generator sorry to say. There are better things WAR and DRK could be grabbing then flash. The only reason I could think of that a warrior would take it is if they were severely under-geared for a dungeon or had problems keeping enmity up.

[Malicewolf]

As a PLD who relies on flash, it's crap for producing enmity in comparison to an Overpower. I could do 2 flashes on a mob and a WAR with 1 OP could take the entire mob from me. I know this because my FC mate is a WAR and we often do dungeons together for fun and try to fight over being MT (jokingly). Anything where I can't use my Circle of Scorn (so lower than lvl 50 sync dungeons) and I will almost guarantee I won't hold the aggro. I can beat her out on single targets, not on mobs though. She does cross class flash for situations where she messes up with TP management, or just to quick grab a mob that's surrounding her instead of positioning for the OP. But that's more so just preference on her part to get the aggro quickly instead of re-positioning.

As for awareness vs. flash debate. Both are useful in situations honestly. You CAN utilize awareness very well with RI if you want to. You can also utilize flash if you WANT to. Hell, you can utilize swiftfoot if you WANT to with haymaker. It's all about preference. Some people may find that in 4 man dungeons with lower lvl sync's the evasion works well enough (since you can't use RI and therefore, awareness becomes less useful). Flash could still be useful in lower dungeons, but maybe you see your party doesn't contain anyone with slow and there's a decent amount of mobs that produce AoE attacks. It's all about the situation and how you utilize.

As a side note, by no means am I saying swiftfoot/haymaker combo is great. But I'm saying, you could utilize well if you WANT to. Flash is useful and so is awareness in their specific areas. You can debate all you want on which is better. The fact is, they are both situational and pending your particular situation it would be hard to say which is better. Higher lvl runs, I'd probably say you're better off with awareness imo. Mobs hit harder so the awareness with RI is a good combo to ensure you don't take extra damage and are instead mitigating more. Lower level when you have to spam out more OP's on mobs to keep aggro, I'd say flash is a great fall back to save yourself from losing aggro or to use in situations where a more subtle approach is necessary (such as the not waking sleeping monsters scenario). Cause nothing's more infuriating to a magic user that uses sleep on a monster than someone immediately waking it up. Because then it simply was a waste.

[Jpec07]

What's interesting to note is how lackluster either of these abilities is on their own--and how both of them are also not unique to GLA. So the cross-class skills from Paladins are themselves a reflection on the job: lackluster, and not at all special by themselves. And when you compare these abilities to the cross-class abilities from MRD, they are completely flavorless.

As a note, since I don't have a level 60 WAR, I don't really have an opinion on the discussion at hand, but rather just wanted to throw that out there.

{ ... a whole lot of mechanical changes ... }

My only problem with these is that they wouldn't really do much of anything to give Paladins a solid identity, but would just alter the current status quo to be more aligned with other tanks. In essence, these would be a band-aid on a wound that is far too deep and far too fundamental to the job for that to work.