Yeah defender has been gone for a loooong time. Aegis boon is fine as is - being able to call out an attack to negate is great. If they were going to change it at all I'd rather they just expand what it can block to magical attacks, breaths, etc.

WAR - Damage tank that requires mage attention.
PLD - Mitigation tank that doesn't need mage support, but deals minimal damage.
The problem with this is that paladin will never mitigate well enough to make up for the damage/HP difference from warrior. Like 10% flat mitigation could address the HP difference, but the damage difference is still huge. If they just make paladin take like tons less damage than everyone else then they need to make things hit hard enough to threaten paladin and everyone else just gets destroyed.

Ideally I'd like to see Warrior toughness at like 85-90% of Paladin, and Paladin damage on a single target at like 75% of Warrior.

Some changes that could help make that happen would be stuff like:

-Bringing GLA HP up to near MRD levels. Paladin loses some HP and Warrior gains some, so they're still higher but the difference isn't so severe.

-Reduce the Riot Blade cooldown to 45-60s and tie its combo condition to front, any, or side.

-Further buff Spirits Within (recast) or make the damage depend more on HP

-Slightly buff sword DPS across the board.

Another big problem with Paladin is that its subclasses are really lackluster. Provoke is good. Raise is okay but PLD can't really use it effectively in combat. That's pretty much where it ends. With White Mages existing, Sacred Prism->Cure and Stoneskin aren't really that amazing. Bloodbath is alright but paladin WSes don't hit hard (except for Spirits, which won't do as much damage if you're actually recovering HP with Bloodbath).

When you compare it to Warrior that gets Flash, Sentinel, Rampart, Featherfoot, Second Wind, and (as a DD) Blindside, PLD subskills look really bad. If we could parry then foresight would be pretty good. That would also open up Overpower in some situations since we have no AOE weaponskills that deal damage. If they wanted to go really crazy they could move Tempered Will's effects to Enduring March and make that non-exclusive, then add a new Gladiator exclusive ability in its place.

Anyway I'm sure stuff like this has been posted before so it doesn't really matter. They'll probably end up fixing paladin somehow but I just hope they figure out a way to do it without invalidating warrior as well. I don't really enjoy warrior that much but I know some people do and it'd suck for them to be useless.