50 PLD - fill in cross-class abilities or go for 60?

[Lyraele]

Thanks to some super patient DF groups, I finished ARR MSQ last night! So now... Better to work towards PLD 60 or backtrack a bit for things like Stoneskin and Mercy Blade?

[KazuneHypnotik]

I would get some cross class skills, foresight and blood bath are some good cds. I wouldn't really worry about stone skin during endgame as all that does is piss other party members off apparently lol.

I personally use Blood Bath, Foresight, Protect. You can have Cure on there as well but Clemency will be better once you unlock it. Mercy Stroke is optional to but I personally don't use it

[Brannigan]

Mercy Stroke and Stoneskin are nice to have but almost no one will notice if you don't have them. Foresight is the most important crossclass for paladin and you already have it. I'd go for 60 so that you can start getting weekly tomestones, Wondrous Tails, 24 man raids, etc.

[Lyraele]

Yeah, I have Foresight / Protect / Bloodbath. Mercy Stroke and Stoneskin were the ones I thought I might should pause for. But sounds like it doesn't matter so much, so will plow towards 60 and only pause if stuck/bored. Thanks!

[Fernosaur]

PLD is the class that benefits the least out of cross-class skills, tbh, so you're not missing anything at all once you get Foresight, which is the only one that I find truly necessary. Stoneskin is a nice boon in situations where there's downtime, or to help out healers in protecting weakened DPS before incoming raid damage, but tbh if you have it or not won't make or break it. There is no real reason not to get it, so I would recommend it once you hit 60 and feel fine in going back to a low level class.

My Cross-class skills are:

Foresight + Fracture + Protect + Stoneskin + Mercy Stroke

I only have Fracture because it's a slight DPS boost when I do lvl 50 roulette, but not much else. I should take it out of my hotbar in favor of Bloodbath, but I always forget lol.

[Warkupo]

If you're already at 50 I'd just push to at least clemency. Stoneskin is nice in that it can save a bad party for a wipe, but a party that knows what its' doing won't ever need you to cast it. I usually take it first just so I don't feel so at the mercy of my healer being decent. That being said, Clemency mostly replaces the uses you'd have for Stoneskin, and since its' such a meaty and quick heal you can get yourself or someone else back in the game really quickly so you aren't biting into your DPS too badly. You can usually get two casts off before you run dry of mana, and then an Ether or a couple of Glory Slash combos will get you in a third. It can also pair with Convalescence and Divine Veil which can take you from almost dead to back to full health, which is kind of how I'd recommend you start using those abilities.

Bloodbath is actually a pretty potent amount of damage mitigation, and I'd recommend getting at some point. Pair it with Fight or Flight (or is it Flight or Fight?) and just pop it when its' ready to help take some burden off your healer.

Mercy Stroke is nice to increase your DPS. It's not going to suddenly sky-rocket you to the top of the charts or anything like that, but its' nice to have if you really care about your performance. It -can- have some actual utility in boss fights: Pull an add, burn it down, and finish it off with Mercy Stroke to get a nice juicy heal. Sometimes difficult to pull off if your DPS is on point but then... you probably don't need the extra healing if your DPS is actually trying.

Fracture stops mattering as soon as you get Glory Slash, and is a very tiny DPS increase otherwise. Foresight technically increases mitigation, but by such a small degree that its' almost negligible. Protect is nice if you're soloing or to troll your healer every 30m by casting it before they do. You can't use Raise in battle so its' practical use is extremely limited; It's usually faster to just let the guy walk back rather than hope the PLD has it sloted.

I'd suggest at least Bloodbath and Mercy Stroke, although neither is strictly necessary. You're mostly out of the content where stoneskin would have been useful.

[LilLemay]

Personally I use protect/stoneskin/foresight/bloodbath/and fracture

Protect can honestly make healers love you, because if alot of people are dying then you can throw out a protect to make their lives easier

Stoneskin cause I didn't really know what else to do

Foresight is a.. meh.. thing it's not really a powerful CD in any sense of the word so you could probably get away with not having it.

Bloodbath cuz dem hp regens

and fracture because it's nice to have a DoT before you get goring

[Fernosaur]

Foresight is a.. meh.. thing it's not really a powerful CD in any sense of the word so you could probably get away with not having it.

While Foresight by itself is nowhere near being good, it becomes quite powerful when you pair it up with Sheltron for physical tankbusters. The fact that Sheltron is only on a 30 second timer means these two "meh" CDs can become a good CD when used together instead of forcing you to use Rampart. So I would say Foresight IS mandatory on PLD.

[LilLemay]

While Foresight by itself is nowhere near being good, it becomes quite powerful when you pair it up with Sheltron for physical tankbusters. The fact that Sheltron is only on a 30 second timer means these two "meh" CDs can become a good CD when used together instead of forcing you to use Rampart. So I would say Foresight IS mandatory on PLD.

That's a fair point, though I don't think relying on just ShO/sheltron/and foresight to take any sort of tankbuster in savage content is a good idea unless you want to stress your healer, dungeons or regular a9-12 go for it, but if you're using your cd's right you should always at least have rampart or sentinel ready. If I recall scrapline in a9s does roughly 14k to me if I use ShO/sheltron/rampart (no sch shield), just relying on ShO/sheltron/foresight there isn't gonna do you much better than simply taking it to the face in ShO. In most cases you're better off simply using foresight to mitigate a bit of incoming damage over time, as opposed to weaving it together with bigger cooldowns for a buster

[Fernosaur]

Snip.

You're not really stressing your healer because we usually prepare for tank busters too, so unless you take one without any CD or in SwO without a big CD, there's really no extra stress there. If it's one of those cases in which the TB happens as a lot of raid damage is going off (eg. Flatten+Earth Shakers+Tornado in T13 or the Heavenly Heel inbetween Ancient Quagas in ThorEX) you usually save the bigger CDs for that anyways.

With ShO+Foresight+Sheltron you'd take around 16k damage, 17.5k TOPS from Scrapline, tbh. Tanks are currently sitting at 30k HP, so I don't see how being left with 40-45% of your HP is bad at all. I'd say being left with that amount means your mitigation worked, as you're probably gonna be tossed a Cure/Benefic II or Tetra/ED/Lustrate after it and quite possibly recover 11k+ just from one spell. If you're too worried about it, combine it with Convalescence. Or better yet, if you're doing Savage you're probably voice-communicating with your healers, so let them know when you're going to use a slightly weaker CD beforehand so they can Virus or shield you. Even then, 40% of your HP is hardly a dangerous situation, specially when the only thing coming immediately after are auto-attacks.

Not to make pointless comparisons, but remember back when Str tanks were the meta? You only brought what you needed for the fights. Heavenly Heel used to deal around 14-15k damage on tanks with 17k HP, and that was perfectly fine. The first Heel could be taken with Foresight and Sheltron with no problems.