Bloodbath pairs well with Fight or Flight.

Foresight gives about 400 defense at iLv230. It's roughly like wearing a second chest piece.

Stoneskin for PLD is effectively a "cooldown by proxy". There are some absurdly hard hitting attacks later in certain fights, or attacks that leave targets at low HP and ready to die, that healers should be able to handle but you might not actually be playing with effective healers who can handle them. Ex: Prey in Heart of the Creator is a hard hitting triple AoE attack that will kill (at least one) someone if the healers aren't all there, and the damage you lose from taking the time to cast Stoneskin on the target before this attack is far less than the damage the party loses if the healers let someone die.

Protect is for rebuffing people who've been raised. Every Protect that the healer casts in combat is a lost tier II heal. You have infinite MP, so it's better for you to cast it than a healer.

Mercy Stroke does so little damage it's not even worth it -- it doesn't really shave off any appreciable time, since if you're in a position to use it, someone else most certainly has the killshot queued already. It's only there because there are no better options. Especially in the case of dungeons, where your attack just killed something that would have died to the next AoE anyway.


In short, most of the PLD cross class panoply isn't an impressive one and mostly serves to do other people's jobs for them. But these five are the least bad, so take them and learn to recognize when to use them.