Thread: How would they fix PLD 4.0?

Originally Posted by Lambdafish

Says the "Marauder". It's pretty common knowledge that the tank meta is out of whack, with DARK and PLD fighting over a spot and WAR being king of everything, and a meta which relies on DPS, which the tanks vary in (usually shafting PLD). The tank classes are much better than they were in 3.0, but to say that there isn't anything wrong is either naive or just plain blind

PLD has been the ginger step child since 2.x, and WAR the do-no-wrong golden child.
The current damage meta guarantees WAR takes precedence over any other tank, regardless.
SE needs to up the defensive buff from tank stances, and reduce the enmity mods on abilities so it's impossible to hold aggro outside of the tank stance.
At the same time, buff sword oath (or abilities when used under sword oath) to make PLD OT on par with DRK and WAR dps.

That sounds super boring. Figuring out how far you can push non-tank stance is a fun part of progression.

Paladin is too similar to Dark Knight (or rather the other way around, but whatever), so until that changes we'll have the situation of swapping in the appropriate one for the fight. To fix it the devs should

1) Choose a gameplay theme for paladin and focus everything on it. Warrior has stacks and stance shifting, everything in their kit is focused on that. Dark Knight has Dark Arts/MP restoration, so everything is focused on it (even the high number of oGCDs mesh well with the MP restoration of Blood Weapon). Paladin has a bunch of disconnected generic tanking abilities because it was probably the first class to be developed. It also has a few scattered support abilities. Pick a theme and actually make the class unique.

2) Figure out how to make PLD/DRK, WAR/DRK, and WAR/PLD each have *something* unique to them. Right now war/pld and war/drk have the highest physical and magical reduction respectively, but pld/drk has nothing. There's a lot of ways to do this, but it'd be nice if the pairing you chose wasn't necessarily dependent on the enemy, but on the rest of the party (for example pld/drk goes well with red mages and astrologians but drk/war does well with black mages and bards, etc)

and that's it. It's hard to speculate on specific changes that should be made without knowing how they're altering combat overall in Stormblood.

Originally Posted by hakurou46

Dark Arts Power Slash

Whats dark arts power slash? I dont think you know what a dark arts is usefull for.

Originally Posted by ChloeGrace

PLD has been the ginger step child since 2.x, and WAR the do-no-wrong golden child.
The current damage meta guarantees WAR takes precedence over any other tank, regardless.
SE needs to up the defensive buff from tank stances, and reduce the enmity mods on abilities so it's impossible to hold aggro outside of the tank stance.
At the same time, buff sword oath (or abilities when used under sword oath) to make PLD OT on par with DRK and WAR dps.

Making any tank do same damage as a war will make war useless.
PLD was godly in 2.x idk what your talking about.
And making tanking impossible with out tank stance would make tanking the most boring shit on earth.

They just need to focus on a few core mechanics for Paladin. I'd most like for them to have something that can accelerate and diversify their weaponskill rotation both from baseline traits and from Sword Oath, each contributing differently, while offering Shield Oath some new utilities, rather than leaving each stance with only a tank/dps distinction. Being able to push out as much dps as possible is fun. But so is having additional control of utility and mitigation. And being able to do both in each Oath, distinctly and in some ways rotating between them based on timing and circumstance, would be the perfect icing.

Off-topic, sort of:

Sadly, the best revisions I can imagine for most tanks all center on the idea of TP, or rather TP as it could have been. That is to say a resource that skills both generate/build and consume/spend, at proportions inherent to their costs. For instance, though (almost) all skills would generate TP, and possibly all could consume a greater maximum amount of TP for added effects or influences as to ramp up with time, what we call combo finishers now would be the most expensive of these skills and, while the most efficient over time, would regenerate only a small portion of their TP costs while what was previously a combo "opener" would cost nothing or almost nothing and generate proportionately huge amounts. (The combo bridges, of course, would be somewhere in between.) What we would now call combos would at most be simple sequence paths in which part of the TP regenerated is reduced from linked skills, but not so greatly as to force that choice, where that discount drains over time until used, rather than being lost immediately if a non-combo-ed ability is used. In this way, a Savage Blade need not only exist for the purpose of a Rage of Halone or Royal Authority, and a Rage of Halone or Royal Authority need not follow immediately in order to be "charged" by it.

Additionally, this TP doesn't need to start from 0. Its resting position could be enough to just barely afford a finisher off the bat, for instance. A fight need not begin by a party and a mob pack running towards each other, yelling heroically or whatnot, only to begin poking each other on arrival for a necessary 2 to 4 GCDs to really get started. (Re)build-up would still occur; it just wouldn't be so rigid.

The larger benefits however would involve, as I said before, tanks. Given that TP could be generated from damage taken or mitigated as well, this then opens up a whole new longhand resource for tanks, especially if they then have the option between using their added resource generation for an increased rate of finishers, which can themselves involve mitigation, or perhaps even for mitigation more directly. That would gives a whole new possible side to "stance-dancing", and by merely adjusting those TP generation formulas, or by embedding mechanics directly into that smooth but risk-capable progressive resource, you could much more greatly diversify current and future tanks. The Oath ideas I mentioned above can be done much more smoothly by influencing TP. The very idea of the Inner Beast can be more thematically applied by duplicating over a portion of TP generation as Defiance, Abandon, or a combined Wrath that inflates your attack power, defense, maximum health, and health generation when spent (at variable maximum cost), proportionate to how much was spent. And better yet, it could unlock a number more possibilities by which Dark Knight weaponskills and themes of steel and shadow and blood magics could have a smoother, more pervasive effect on its gameplay.

Of course, all this would imply that now that our combo "openers" and "bridges" are no longer excused by our finishers alone as part of a bloated single-decision-yet-multi-step skill, that each would have individual usage, and would more closely function to how they would appear to. Those skills that looks like cleaves, for instance, ought be cleaves. Savage Blade should be every bit the counterattack it appears to be, while Skull Sunder should be able to stagger enemies with its blow, and Full Thrust perhaps even able to launch enemies skyward as a form of unique CC.