Simple Fix to PLD

[Wincy]

I play healer 90% of the time and as such I love when a, well played, paladin is in the group. Tanking or not, a paladin bring a lot of ability that greatly increases a party's survivability.

Just a few things I've seen a great paladin do, when not tanking.
-Time his rampart with the warrior;s rampart making rampart up 100% of the fight.
-Use enmity WS with collusion, granting extra enmity to the warrior.
-Throw cover on the tank when the tank had low hp, get a block, use spirits, and help heal the tank.
-Covering melee so he can start is front combo line,
-With single WHM run the tank died. The paladin took threat, used Hallowed ground, tanked while raising the dead tank. Then took over tanking.
-Take over healing when the WHM died. No really! Everyone gets better mana regen when in passive mode. He healed until the bard could get the WHM back up.

A well played paladin is fantastic and can replace the need for a second WHM. I love running with paladins, sadly few groups let them. Good paladins stop wipes from happening and have the tools to do it.

This is a good post. I'd like to add my 2 cents, as I was considering something very similar the other day. Now I will preface this by saying that I am not into endgame yet (I just capped PLD this weekend), so I could be off base and you can feel free to correct me if that's the case...

I joined a Natalan wolves PT from lvls 43-50 on my PLD. We had 50 WARs tanking, switching up between them so each person could get xp on what they wanted to level as well. Obviously, at 43 I was useless as a tank (actually I was pretty much useless for everything). I spent my time in passive mode, support healing.

But as I leveled up some, 47, 48 I started to be strong enough to take a couple wolves at a time. What I ended up doing for the party was sort of a combo of off-healing and off-tanking. I would throw some heals around after the WAR did his big Whirlwind or whatever. Then if any mobs peeled to the DDs, I would Cover them, pull the adds off them and continue healing as required. I was also able to Protect/Stoneskin and Raise when needed.

So in this way I was performing a sort of hybrid support role. Now I do usually consider PLD to be a heavy tank, and I would probably prefer it to be that way, HOWEVER, I do think this vision of a hybrid heal/tank support role fits in with what a PLD should be as well. Indeed, not every Paladin in every MMO has been a heavy tank. Some have in fact filled roles similar to this, so I don't think it's too foreign. Basically the Paladin is a jack-of-all-trades safety net for the party.

NOW, I do know exactly what the first response to this would be: "But Wincy," you say, "this is no good for speed runs." And I would agree with you, good reader. All I can really say to that is, judging by the apparent dislike this community has for speed runs (myself included), they will hopefully not be a cornerstone of future content...

Actually I personally think speed runs might just be a mechanic to help the servers' load stay low (consider the problem with AV/CC "filling up" when too many parties are running it at once). But that is another topic.