Paladin Ideas!!

[Lyth]

The reason that PLD has cast times on its spells is because the job doesn't involve any real MP management. If you bottom out on TP, you can't do anything. In contrast, you can happily bottom out on MP in the short term, and then switch to TP-based skills while your MP naturally ticks back up, assisted by free MP regen from Riot Blade. If you look at a timeline of MP on the average PLD in raid content, you'll find that they spend the vast majority of fights maxed out. MP primarily serves on an upper bound on the number of times you can use these abilities. The true restriction comes from the cast time.

Clemency and Equilibrium are both 1200 potency heals (DRK has the weakest self-healing out of the three tanks). On the surface, Clemency seems like it should be a better skill. It can be used on another player while simultaneously giving you a self heal. The heal effect is not stance locked. There is no recast outside of being on the GCD.

In spite of this, Equilibrium is frequently touted as one of the most overpowered skills in WAR's toolkit, while Clemency is perceived as relatively underwhelming. This is partly because Equilibrium is a two-for-one ability that doubles up as Invigorate. It's also partly because it's oGCD on a 60 second recast, while Clemency is locked behind a cast time, so it just sees a lot more use.

If you want to address the problems with Clemency, you need to do one of two things. Either you can copy the approach used with Equilibrium, in which you make it free, oGCD, and with an associated (probably longer) recast. Alternatively, you tie it in to a resource that is meaningful to PLD. You could give Clemency a TP cost, or switch around PLD's skill set so that all of their attacks (including combos and oGCDs) are MP based. Alternatively, scrap MP costs on PLD altogether and give it a new resource system to manage. As it stands, MP costs on PLD are kind of meaningless, and they force the devs to place restrictions on skills like Flash and Clemency that leave them weaker than their counterparts on other jobs. No risk, no reward.

[Mikazuki_Aura]

The problem with the Paladin is that while it is designed to be a defensive fortress, defense is a very crappily scaling mechanic. You either survive or you do not.

If you need the defense to survive, any main tank with sub-Paladin defense will die, making the Paladin compulsory for a fight, which breaks Tank diversity in favour of Paladins.
If you don't need the defense to survive, any main tank with higher DPS will be better than the Paladin, which breaks Tank diversity against Paladins (current situation).

The design of Paladin is that it is meant to be a main tank. That's what the base defense is supposed to be for. That's what Shield Swipe is for (although in current iteration it is inferior to the Dark Knight's mechanic of gaining MP from damage).
Thus, to fix the Paladin, we need the Paladin to be able to do far more damage than both the Dark Knight and Warrior against either a ridiculous number of targets, or a ridiculously strong single target. Against smaller numbers of adds, the Dark Knight should do more damage. Against a single target, the Warrior should do the most damage. This allows for DK/War groups to be optimal in dungeons with small numbers of stronger adds, Pld/DK groups to be optimal in dungeons with spammed weaker adds, and Pld/War groups to be optimal in dungeons with bosses with larger numbers of weak trash summons.

The simple fix to the Paladin will be to add a passive damage reflection effect to Shield Oath, whereby a percentage of all damage mitigated by the Paladin (either through cooldowns, or through base armour stats) will be reflected back onto targets - something that is large enough to provide a damage boost over Dark Knights when the number of adds is 5 or more, but inferior to active offense when the number of adds is about 3, as well as turn Shield Swipe into a PBAoE with reduced potency but some Threat (which makes it useful for taking on groups, but not useful for taking on single targets). As for Sword Oath, make it capable of reflecting a large portion of exactly one hit after activation (so that it becomes a counter-skill against telegraphed/HP% based tank busters, but generally a waste of cooldown against any other attack). The idea for a MT will thus be to stay in Shield Oath for much of the main tanking phase, then activate Sword Oath to absorb and reflect one hit, immediately followed by the OT using a Provoke + Aggro combination to take over while the Paladin, now in DPS mode, can do damage while recovering cooldowns and HP via Regen-type effects.

With damage reflection, it doesn't matter that Flash doesn't do any direct damage, because keeping Aggro will be identical to dealing more mitigation-based damage, and Blinded mobs that miss will deal more mitigation-based damage to themselves than if they hit for any non-zero amount. Any form of immunity conferred by Adloquium or Stonewall will also deal damage, allowing healers to do more damage by trying to prevent it.

This way, the difficulty of Paladin play will be in knowing how and when to mitigate and stay alive against large numbers of mobs, which is its intended purpose of being an iron wall (since mitigation will scale with damage, a better defense will literally also be a better offense), the difficulty of Dark Knight play will be in managing resources, damage and aggro, and the difficulty of Warrior play will be in keeping debuffs up and doing optimal single-target damage while mitigating larger hits with cooldowns. At the moment Paladin play has little difficulty, and little reward, making it useful for possibly terrible pugs, but kind of the last choice for any form of coordinated group, which is a very bad situation for the class.

There's no need to even change any existing content. The current level tree can be kept, and the modified buffs to Shield Oath and Sword Oath tacked on in the lvl 60-70 range, together with some form of tutorial as to the new utility. The idea of defense being an offense isn't new to MMORPGs - Br/Hu in PSO2JP function in the same way, where players good at maintaining aggro and doing perfect mitigation will greatly outdamage any other player in the same class using a normal attack rotation, while also being the second best healer type in the game. It's a rather simple solution that baffles me as to why they haven't thought of it yet, and insist on doing defense vs dps 'balancing'.

[phr0st]

Another interesting solution I'd like to see implemented to buffing PLDs is go the AST route. Create a situation where paladin utility to the party is so good that it outweighs their lower DPS. Here are some ideas for implementation.

- Give flash a blanket Vulnerability up debuff or a crit chance against flash opponent up debuff.
- Give sheltron debuff that gives physical vuln up to the target who strikes the PLD when PLD has sheltron up.
- Give Bulwark a debuff that gives magic vuln up to the target who strikes the PLD when PLD has sheltron up
- Give Sentinel a Damage reflect component or stacking vulnerability debuff ala lust pomander in POTD for the duration of it's effect that last 15-20 seconds after the last stack is applied.

You could attach these debuffs to anything really, mag. vuln could go to Circle of Scorn, or spirits within, or whatever.

I think the route of utility over buffing paladin damage is a better way to go.