Suggestion - Paladin Identity and new stance?

[Ercapote]

I don't really remember the hundreds of times I breezed through fights I know. I do remember the times when someone messed up, everyone upped their game in response and we just scraped through.
Close fights are fun and tools that allow you to recover from mistakes when they're used well are fun. A PLD with decent healing capabilities probably wouldn't be useful very often, but those times when it is useful would be great.

that's the thing, it cannot be...just decent...it needs to be execptional like WAR fell cleave + every buff and uitlity offers to the DPS support.... it has to be something you will actually chose a PLD over a WAR or vice depending on what your party wants...more healing and defense or more dps and utility.

[Reynhart]

that's the thing, it cannot be...just decent...it needs to be execptional like WAR fell cleave + every buff and uitlity offers to the DPS support.... it has to be something you will actually chose a PLD over a WAR or vice depending on what your party wants...more healing and defense or more dps and utility.

Actually the whole idea would be to adjust PLD DPS so that the overall DPS of the party is the same, wether you chose :

• 1 MT, 1 WAR, 2 healers and 4 DPS
• 1 MT, 1 PLD, 1 healer and 5 DPS

And to expand on that, let's say that, on those DPS, you probably have a BRD/MCH who can't DPS full time because he needs to "support" the party, so the setups would be :

• 1 MT, 1 WAR, 2 healers, 3 full DPS, 1 support DPS
• 1 MT, 1 PLD, 1 healer, 4 full DPS, 1 support DPS

And to put the final piece (almost), I'd made some little changes to DRK to make it put "leech" effects as an OT, so that the party could recover either MP or TP. And having a DRK would allow the "support DPS" to become a "full time DPS", still for the overall same party DPS, as a third setup :

• 1 MT, 1 DRK, 2 healers, 4 fulls DPS

And the real final piece would be to adjust the DPS of tanks so that all three would do the same when MTing. With that, the MT wouldn't matter, and the "most efficient" setup would be built upon what is the OT.
We all that, you still have to keep in mind that it would only be meaningful to early high end progression. For most of the content, the setup wouldn't matter, exactly like the lesser DPS of PLD don't.

[Loony_BoB]

The reason Paladins cant have raise is because they can out-survive almost anything (All tanks can, but Hallowed makes it look easy.) Lets set the stage for a game breaker:

Super Hard hitting Aoe is coming, example Ravana EX Bloody Fuller. DPS messed up with 5 Butterflies. (OUCH)
Everyone is dead but the PLD and the other PLD.
Casts Tempered Will. Raise Healer. Knockback does nothing. Healer Gets up. Laughing Rose (White AOE): A PLD Covers/Hallows or Suicides to get rid of Vulnerability stacks as the Healer LB3's. Everyone gets back up, MP restored and all Debuffs removed and move on to Prey....


Its sort of a more Band-aid Extreme Cheese liek how Hallow and Living Dead make Double Prey a tank mechanic instead of a party mechanic. Mess up and PLD's can fix it. Could something better be in place? Yeah I think so, but WHM already give very nice Cross class skills with little in return. You can't really ask for more.


Personnally I really took a liking to changing Clemency a little.

Cure Potency: 300 potency HoT
Duration: 12 seconds
Cast time 1 second
20% less MP cost than it is now.

Additional effect: While in Shield Oath, Increased Emnity.
Additional effect: While in Sword Oath, MP cost is reduced by 50%.


But this is all coming from a Healer's PoV. You won't get bigger DPS numbers but its a plus to AOE aggro, increased surviveabilty and longer DPSing windows for healers. (Think Healers casting Regen/Medica II prepull and not gaining aggro)

I'm just trying to figure out how this is bad. I mean, seriously, the odds of a team surviving that kind of situation are incredibly slim as-is. 2x PLD won't be OP, won't take over the healer spot, etc. Yes, they will survive more,could raise a healer from that point and slowly raise rest of the party, but chances are still strong that everyone will end up dead. Personally I wouldn't, however, object to Raise being substituted with some other skill. I just feel Raise being on cross-class means it has to be able to be USED. The entire purpose of PLD is to be a tank with healing functions. Why give it a skill it can't use?

[Loony_BoB]

PS. FWIW, PLD already has Cure, Protect, Stoneskin, etc. How often are these used? Basically never. I really don't get how people are legit worried this would undermine the point of having healers. PLD should never be even half the healer WHM/AST/SCH is. But it should be able to help in dire situations, and more than it does right now.

[Jandor]

PS. FWIW, PLD already has Cure, Protect, Stoneskin, etc. How often are these used? Basically never. I really don't get how people are legit worried this would undermine the point of having healers. PLD should never be even half the healer WHM/AST/SCH is. But it should be able to help in dire situations, and more than it does right now.

I use protect and stoneskin now and again. Cure is totally useless though.

that's the thing, it cannot be...just decent...it needs to be execptional like WAR fell cleave + every buff and uitlity offers to the DPS support.... it has to be something you will actually chose a PLD over a WAR or vice depending on what your party wants...more healing and defense or more dps and utility.

Meh, PLD could be mandatory in every raid tomorrow if the devs just decided to go nuts on our potency numbers. I wasn't really looking at things from the perspective of raiding savage mode, more of a 'some useful healing/protection stuff would be nice flavour, could come in handy when things go wrong as well' perspective.

[Februs]

The changes to Shield Swipe help a bit with respect to the value of the shield, but I think that more needs to be done. Since the effectiveness of our shield was reduced so much, a compensating factor could be to make them effective against magic as well.

As it is right now, I actually hate the change they made to shield swipe. Firstly, I am well aware that it is a DPS increase (On bosses only), but the overall utility of Shield swipe has been diminished by taking it off the GCD (especially for mob tanking), and it killed two Pld cooldowns.

Firstly, I seemed to have used Shield swipe differently than a lot of people. For me, Shield swipe was never about dps. It was about enmity gen and pacification. The old way, I could pop bulwark for a big pull, run in, shield lob, flash, CoS, and then rotate RoH combos and Shield swipe throughout the targets, alternating enmity generating moves (RoH, Savage Blade, and Shield swipe) on different targets and making sure that RoH, specifically, landed on a new target each time to ensure that I was debuffing as much incoming dmg as possible (including pacification). Pld enmity with this method was so efficient that I hardly ever needed to use Flash. Shelltron and Bulwark became staples within my rotation, and the biggest tragedy about Pld Mob tanking was that Bulwark has such a terribly long cooldown that I couldn't use it more often.

The way shield swipe is now, I can't do this, and I have to rely on Flash a lot more to hold peripheral aggro (especially if there is a caster in the group). On paper, it looks mostly the same. It's still a combo that has 7 moves (six of which actually outputting dmg and have enmity gen bonuses), but instead of spamming (not exactly, but you get the idea) a move that does actual dmg I'm over using a move that does 0 dmg to any target. I hold aggro fine, but my mob Dmg has dropped substantially, especially because the less I can spam Shield swipe, the less I can hold aggro while rotating a Goring blade combo on alternate targets. The old way, after initial pull I could use goring blade and alternate a shield swipe between each move, thus holding aggro without ever having to resort to the Flash dance. Now I cannot.

Even in bosses I feel the pinch. Shelltron/Bulwark are practically useless now, since my shield's default block rate is high enough that I usually get shield swipe off without having to use either of them, so now I just pop them on CD, because, really, there's no point in saving them for when I might need them. Sheild swipe might be on cooldown, or it will be up without them.

[Kosmos992k]

As it is right now, I actually hate the change they made to shield swipe. Firstly, I am well aware that it is a DPS increase (On bosses only), but the overall utility of Shield swipe has been diminished by taking it off the GCD (especially for mob tanking), and it killed two Pld cooldowns. ...For me, Shield swipe was never about dps. It was about enmity gen and pacification. The old way, I could pop bulwark for a big pull, run in, shield lob, flash, CoS, and then rotate RoH combos and Shield swipe throughout the targets,...

The way shield swipe is now, I can't do this...

Even in bosses I feel the pinch. Shelltron/Bulwark are practically useless now, since my shield's default block rate is high enough that I usually get shield swipe off without having to use either of them, so now I just pop them on CD, because, really, there's no point in saving them for when I might need them. Sheild swipe might be on cooldown, or it will be up without them.

Indeed. I haven't played half as much as I should since 3.1, but I noticed a lot of what you are talking about, another poster mentioned this earlier and I agreed then as well. I'll actually go back and edit my original post here because I hadn't really thought hard about Shield swipe until reading this post and the other I referenced a moment ago.

Based on the reduction in potency and the imposition of a 15s recast cool down, any player taking good advantage of shield swipe before will have seen a pretty large reduction in dps and a drop in enmity, and since it's off GCD now, TP use may have gone up for those players who were able to trigger a lot of swipes before the change.

Kind of sad about this now, what I initially thought was a boost in dps has the potential to further reduce our DPS and increase the issue of TP starvation.

[Bravely_Default]

Have ran out of TP quite a few times when I was trying to help out some FC mates in A4. only time I didn't run out was when we had ninjas on our team using goad. Even properly applying DOTs and using shield swipe when available it is easier to run out of TP now since I can't do sprees of 5 shield swipes anymore.

[Kosmos992k]

Have ran out of TP quite a few times when I was trying to help out some FC mates in A4. only time I didn't run out was when we had ninjas on our team using goad. Even properly applying DOTs and using shield swipe when available it is easier to run out of TP now since I can't do sprees of 5 shield swipes anymore.

Yeah, once I stopped and really thought about how Shield Swipe operated before, it's actually quite easy to see how many players may be at a relative disadvantage now.

[Februs]

Kind of sad about this now, what I initially thought was a boost in dps has the potential to further reduce our DPS and increase the issue of TP starvation.

It has been pretty painful, and considering the Dps increase on bosses is imperceptible to anyone who doesn't have... erm... "mystical ways" of divining Dps, its most certainly not worth it.

When they first implemented an enmity bonus to shield swipe it was glorious. Pld mob dmg + aggro went way up by comparison to the traditional Flash dance/RoH rotation, dmg mitigation got a boon from pacification, and Bulwark (a long since underused ability for Pld) was given a dramatic boost in utility. It wasn't just there to be used anymore. You could actually plan to use it strategically. It was a tremendous step forward in balancing Pld, and, for once, I didn't feel like I was miles behind Drk and War in holding Mob aggro... and then they did this, which essentially took Pld two steps backwards (3.0= +1 Bulwark. 3.1= - Bulwark and Shelltron) Worse yet, it took them two step backwards before the majority of the Pld community even realized that Bulwark had been given new life.

It's definitely hurt Tp consumption as well. I Redline on regular mob pulls now, which was rarely a problem before, because there is absolutely no delays in my Primary combo rotation. This would be fine if I had ways of regenerating TP... but I don't, so it is a problem.