The Problem with Paladin

[PiedPiper]

I hate sages. I only have a preblem when you just spit out opinions. your posting a giant post and its mostly opinionated. its okay to have some, but for a majority to be nothing but baseless self drawn conclusion serves only to create a giant false idea of how everything works. this has been going on since day 1 of the forums when people just post nothing but self decided fact.
I have no personal hatred toward the posters but here is a fact i think you should consider before posting a page and a half about tanking

Emnity is the focus of the mob. by holding focus your team can attack. having a larger amount of emnity then other group members in no way increases damage. the early formula More tank hate = higher dps = more loot. is completely false and has nothing to support it. having a high DPS does make the DPS have a higher hate. but emnity is generated many different ways one of which is damage. more emnity does not mean more dps. a tank can maintain hate doing little damage. your DPS can only chain skills based off of cooldowns and TP/MP usage. meaning they have a limit due to cost. your damage level is not formulated by hate. a mage stealing aggro is more a sign of poor spell sequence then anything else.

As a quick note, I never once claimed to be a sage, just gave an example supported argument based on my experience. Tessa Jalloh was just kind enough to say it.

Mayhap's you read only the bolded sections, but I gave rather thorough examples and argumentation for my opinions. More importantly, I wonder if you really understand how DD'ing works. Yes, there are cool downs, just like there are cool downs for us, but, most tanks don't realize a few important things.

I have met many many tanks who will say "well, I've never lost threat so clearly I'm good." What they aren't realizing is that DDs are usually having to not use their cool downs the second they become available in order to manage their threat. When a DD sees that their threat is red and not green or yellow, they will slow down. This isn't opinion, this is fact. Try finding some very well geared and experienced DDs and talk to them. Go for an Ifrit speed run (I am currently in a group that wants to video a 5 minute kill) and talk to the DDs, find out when they are holding back. Every time they hold back, their dps is lowered, and you, the tank, are the reason that is happening. With buffs like paeon and ballad, or invigorate on MNK and DRG, TP isn't really much of a limiting factor on DDs. In fact, I would argue that part of a DD's job is to learn a rotation which maximizes their available TP and minimizes the time they spend waiting on it. The same is true for Blackmages and their MP. You have to remember, most of these cool downs actually aren't very long-- a monk with fists of wind is almost never waiting. This is why I say that damage is limited by hate, if they are able to put up more damage than you are threat, then they are limited, the kill is slower, and thats less open chests. I am making one unstated assumption that I will clarify: I am assuming that the DD's in the group are just as good or better than the tank in terms of skill and equipment. And, since its an eight person group, odds are someone has better gear than you.

So Summed up

Overall, it seems like SE wanted WAR to remain a DPS and secondary tank option and cement PLD in a position where it could only tank. However I wouldn't doubt SE wrongly thought WAR was at a disadvantage in hate gaining / damage mitigation, thus gave WAR all the boosts in those areas in the update and ended up backfiring hard against PLD with WAR's comparable but unrestricted tanking abilities and far superior DPS.

I don't really agree with the thought that War is supposed to somehow be a support tank / dd. It is very well set up to be a main tank (as I think nearly everyone has seen). It parrys at same rate as gld/pld blocks (if not more) it has essentially the same force-negate ability (foresight vs boon, granted boon gives a 703 heal), and it has all the same "get hit for less" cool downs. I think war and pld are both supposed to be main tanks, just tanks that function in radically different ways. PLD is supposed to rely on Spells and Abilities to generate hate, War is what you might call a classic "blood tank" -- it gets hit and it hits back hard to hold threat. That is to say, it relies on Damage done and Abilities. Its not as good as a DD as MNK, but it has voke/collusion/antagonize/vengance for that. If PLD could freely use its mana to build threat (hate generated by over curing) it would be just as good as warrior while maintaining two equally viable play styles--Magic and (in theory) more survival vs Damage and (in theory) slightly less survival.

Honestly, I'm not even sure I believe that more mitigation would make it somehow more viable. End of the day, bosses hit us for less than one cure/cura from a well geared White Mage, that seems about right. Granted, FFXIV currently functions such that the damage taken by a tank from a boss is only marginally less than that taken by any other class, but the idea is that the tank is keeping all that damage in one place. Take a look at the excellent work done here to see what I mean about mitigation being a rather marginal thing at the moment http://kanican.livejournal.com/55915.html Maybe it should be, but if my pld suddenly gets hit for half as much damage, it still won't have enough threat to unfetter my DD's. More over, I'm not sure I want my gld to parry. Yes I played at launch and it was cool, but parry clearly exists to be the equal of shield usage. Then again, if I have a sword and a shield, why can't I use them both as defensive tools? Come to think of it, you may be right. IF they give us parry AND make our MP a viable means of threat generation, Paladin would be a balanced and viable tank creating a paradigm of "Do i want to contribute to group DPS more and rely on the healers" or "Do I want to be more self sufficient to lighten healer load and rely on the DD's."

As a further side note, many people in this thread have underestimated warrior's ability to self heal. If you have rampage up (which you should) and you pop mighty strikes, then you can very easily heal yourself to full. That is just a potent a 15 minute ability as paladin's, if not more so. Shortly after patch I was doing ifrit with all jobs, hellfire killed nearly everyone, I got down to 100 health, blew Mighty Strikes, side stepped, Godsbane combo, boom, full hp and whm's get raises off. That strikes me as exactly the sort of thing a main tank should be able to do once in a blue shit storm.