Paladin balance changes suggestions

[Larirawiel]

What part of "outside of normal content" (paraphrase) did you not get? Paladin is extremely overpowered in normal content. It's only underpowered in like 1% of the games content where they have to eat auto attacks over a long period of time from a raid boss that slaps. There's also no reason for it not be balanced better for raid content either.

Hi, the problem is, when you start to balance the classes for every content then the consequence will be, that most classes will lose their identity and uniqueness. Exactly that happened in WoW Retail. My tank paladin, my marksman hunter, my enhancement shaman, my moonkin druid and my demon warlock have the exact(!) same game play mechanics. You spam 2 cheap abilities and you wait for a procc. When the procc applies then you use an other ability which is now stronger or much cheaper than without the procc. Only my discipline priest has a different gameplay mechanics. The WoW players wanted an almost perfect balance and Blizzard delivered it. With the consequence that the differences between the classes are different colors and different icons of their abilities.


Cheers

[AbremSev]

my word, much salty.

I do apologize, I missed the part where you said it was for the ultra elite content.

In that case, sorry no, I dont think it needs to be "balanced" for what you do. game developers have a VERY hard time doing that and not screwing up balance everywhere else, so, think I would prefer the current system. catering to the elite is usually the way most mmos start their downward slide in general playability and the start of large swings of nerf and counter nerf. So, I respect your opinion that its "broken" in your thought, but I think most prefer a bit of class "balance" stability than a flurry of FOTM building with each new patch

It's not broken though it's just needs a small balance fix. The other thing is that Paladin is overpowered in normal content. The suggestion I made would be better for everyone. No tank should be able to solo all the normal content in the game so easily without at least some skill involved. For Paladin right now that's as easy as a single button press.

And you're right I am salty mainly because of the shitty responses I get. "Paladin doesn't need to be balanced at the high end because it's not content I care about" or "It doesn't need a fix because I don't player healer in X content and I don't care if you get annoyed and have to drop GCDs" It's asinine.

Like if you don't care that PLD is annoyance to deal with in UCOB and TEA for healer don't post

[Curisu]

Paladin has by far the best support healing of all tanks.
Yes, normally you don't use it but when you have to use it then you got the strongest single heal spell of all classes

Yes, he has no self-healing in his normal rotation but when something goes wrong then you have the PLD as 3rd healer.
And that is something I like about the class.
I can't count the amount of runs and further progress I've saved/ enabled just because I can full heal a DPS with 1 clemency from 10% to 100% while healing myself for a lot.

If it's needed PLD has the strongest healing of all tanks.

[AbremSev]

Hi, the problem is, when you start to balance the classes for every content then the consequence will be, that most classes will lose their identity and uniqueness. Exactly that happened in WoW Retail. My tank paladin, my marksman hunter, my enhancement shaman, my moonkin druid and my demon warlock have the exact(!) same game play mechanics. You spam 2 cheap abilities and you wait for a procc. When the procc applies then you use an other ability which is now stronger or much cheaper than without the procc. Only my discipline priest has a different gameplay mechanics. The WoW players wanted an almost perfect balance and Blizzard delivered it. With the consequence that the differences between the classes are different colors and different icons of their abilities.


Cheers

You know I agree that homogenization is bad but none of the changes I suggested would do that. Clemency wouldn't suddenly become TBN. Passage would still be way different from HoL, Dark Missionary and Shake it Off. (Requiring the group to be stacked behind the tank to use.) Basically Job identity would still be preserved.

[AbremSev]

Paladin has by far the best support healing of all tanks.
Yes, normally you don't use it but when you have to use it then you got the strongest single heal spell of all classes

Yes, he has no self-healing in his normal rotation but when something goes wrong then you have the PLD as 3rd healer.
And that is something I like about the class.
I can't count the amount of runs and further progress I've saved/ enabled just because I can full heal a DPS with 1 clemency from 10% to 100% while healing myself for a lot.

If it's needed PLD has the strongest healing of all tanks.

There's some theoretical scenario where this could happen.. but I've been doing savage for 6 raid tiers and only ever seen a PLD save a raid like once. I've been raiding for like.. 4 years now? Most Paladins would rather wipe the group than lose DPS healing even if it was actually necessary at some point.

It just has too many problems the way it currently works. It's both a DPS loss and balanced around being used some non-zero amount of times in a fight.

Imagine if TBN was a guaranteed DPS loss.
Imagine if all tank CDs were a DPS loss

Nobody would use them ever. The worst part is we'd all still clear content. Actually that's how tanks used to work when tank stance was a DPS loss and stance dancing was a thing during Heavensward.

Simply put the playerbase will never use something that will be a DPS loss in high end content. They just won't, so balancing a job to be squishy without using it is just punishing healers.

[LittleImp]

It's funny how many completely clueless people who don't raid are in this thread treating OP like an idiot. Everything they've said is essentially correct. PLD has 0 hps sustain under optimal circumstances (discounting natural regen), and its block DOES NOT make up for it. Veil and Passage are some of the worst party mit in the game, due to the caveats behind their usage.

Veil - has to be proc'd by a gcd heal (lol)
Passage of Arms - has to be coordinated and can only really be used in situations where the party can stack up.

In content like Ultimate, the difference in healing resource commitment becomes apparent pretty quickly if you decide to run a PLD. The job is essentially terrible in the 70 ultimates due to its hilariously low DPS and relative squishiness. The only real upshot is that my RDM and I have saved quite a few pulls that would be wipes with chain rezes and req+clemency spam.

Personally, I'd like to see PLD get an additional gauge spender that allows them to throw an oGCD mini-clemency or something.

edit: I don't really get all this talk about balance in normal mode content either. Normal mode content already isn't balanced. Half of it can be completed without a tank or healer, because it's tuned around people who can't roll their GCD, finish combos or use aoes. The most recent endgame dungeon can be solo'd lol. It makes more sense to tune jobs around the content where their tuning actually has a genuine impact.

[VictorTheed]

Leave Clemency alone, it's great, I had to solo the last boss of the 5.3 dungeon, I think he had 15 to 20some percent health left, cause my party died, using Clemency and mp combo did the trick.

I agree with Littleimp about divine veil, they could probably rework that move.

But Pld is in a good spot, they just really need to trim down some moves cause button bloat is bad on Pld but other then that it's great.

[AbremSev]

It's funny how many completely clueless people who don't raid are in this thread treating OP like an idiot. Everything they've said is essentially correct. PLD has 0 hps sustain under optimal circumstances (discounting natural regen), and its block DOES NOT make up for it. Veil and Passage are some of the worst party mit in the game, due to the caveats behind their usage.

Veil - has to be proc'd by a gcd heal (lol)
Passage of Arms - has to be coordinated and can only really be used in situations where the party can stack up.

In content like Ultimate, the difference in healing resource commitment becomes apparent pretty quickly if you decide to run a PLD. The job is essentially terrible in the 70 ultimates due to its hilariously low DPS and relative squishiness. The only real upshot is that my RDM and I have saved quite a few pulls that would be wipes with chain rezes and req+clemency spam.

Yeah, I wanted to suggest something about Veil but I honestly couldn't think of an acceptable alternative beyond "Press button get shield". Divine Veil really should be more interesting than that. The problem with Veil is that.. it's 2021. Healers do not heal raidwides with GCD's anymore. It's a holdover from when content and combat design were very different.

So for my idea about changing Clemency I was thinking making it 50% as powerful as a current Clemency and giving it 3 charges that recharge every 30s. That would give the PLD at least 1 Clemency per minute. It's decent sustain in content that requires it and can burst someone up quickly when it's saved. However this would make it competitive with TBN which.. I'd be ok with it if DRK had higher dps. Part of the reason PLD is very popular right now in savage is because it has higher DPS than DRK but is easier to play than GNB. The precise numbers would certainly not be easy to tune without making DRK irrelevant but that's the gist of it.

Interestingly, your PLD saving the raid with Clemency was the same place my current PLD saved the raid lol. Freaking UCOB man it was legendary. I mean we didn't clear that pull of course but it was amazing. UCOB is incredibly forgiving to deaths when it comes to certain parts of the fight.

As for the normal mode balance stuff.. actually you're correct. When I did my edit of the original post I also changed the thing to include Clemency being OP in normal content. I did this because I didn't want to waste a ton of time trying to correct people who were incredibly clueless about what I was saying. I mean I didn't lie though, Clemency in normal content is ridiculous and so is dualcast+verraise. You're absolutely correct that normal content balance is basically irrelevant, it's practically designed to force people to clear whether they want to or not. Basically I was thinking of things in terms of what was expedient for me, for that you have my apology. That said though a man can dream.

[Jeeqbit]

One time in A11S in Heavensward, one healer was dead and the other healer was on a few HP and about to die to a raid-wide AoE. I knew a 2.5 second heal cast wouldn't happen in time for the raid-wide, but my 1.5 second Clemency would. I used it and got the healer to full, and we recleared that pull.

This was in the days before there was a red mage in every party to heal and raise. It was before healers had as many off global and instant heals as they do now. In those days, if the healers died, it was over because summoners were rare. Now we are in a world where we have red mages, an extremely popular class that can raise lots of people at once. If the healers die, it's not the end anymore. After Stormblood released, everything changed.

I don't think changing Clemency is the answer, but paladin's thing is blocking with its shield so just buffing that and making it more significant to make up for the lack of sustain would help a lot.

[AbremSev]

One time in A11S in Heavensward, one healer was dead and the other healer was on a few HP and about to die to a raid-wide AoE. I knew a 2.5 second heal cast wouldn't happen in time for the raid-wide, but my 1.5 second Clemency would. I used it and got the healer to full, and we recleared that pull.

This was in the days before there was a red mage in every party to heal and raise. It was before healers had as many off global and instant heals as they do now. In those days, if the healers died, it was over because summoners were rare. Now we are in a world where we have red mages, an extremely popular class that can raise lots of people at once. If the healers die, it's not the end anymore. After Stormblood released, everything changed.

I don't think changing Clemency is the answer, but paladin's thing is blocking with its shield so just buffing that and making it more significant to make up for the lack of sustain would help a lot.

You my friend.. Are correct. The solution isn't binary. I want a clemency fix so PLD keeps its flavor and it isn't lost from the game. However, just making PLD blocks more significant so it doesn't fall behind the other tanks in Ultimate content (or occasional savage content like the door boss from o12s) is a perfectly viable fix.