How to Get Players to Love PLD Again.

[FuriousCupcakes]

Hey Guys,
Cupcakes here. That guy who got bored and made a Tonberry fight. To everybody on Sargantas and to the wonderful Dev Team, hiya! Now just a glance at these forums tells me this road has been taveled many times, but I'd like to touch on what made PLD my favorite class in the early stages, whereas I never touch it anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I still believe it's a good class, and I still like it, but I believe in order to "fix" PLD correctly, we have to highlight it's unique identity by going back to its roots.

For those of you that remember Beta both closed and open, and even the early stages of the game, can you pinpoint what made PLD unique and tank-worthy? That's right, the use of a shield, and manual blocking. Now I'm not saying we need to go back to mashing a button to block again, although holding one down to block wouldn't be a bad idea. I'm offering a simple versatility option choice that would be fun and easy to implement. I'm talking about stances.

In this game's infancy, if you started the game as Gladiator, it was nothing special. You did about the same damage as everyone else, you took a little less. But as soon as you acquired your first shield, now that was something special. Suddenly you would push a button and become an iron wall. Mobs would hit for 1 or 0, and you could take anything thrown at you. You chose what to block and when, and when you did, you blocked like you were holding a real piece of steel and not a paper fan.

Everyone seems to be concerned about PLD's "damage" for hate control. But you can't have DPS and tanking ability, if you did you'd just be a WAR. And as we can see, that just leads to a constant stream of overbuffing and nerfing. But what about choosing which you are and when?

Getting to the point: In my opinion, the best option is to offer 2 distinct stances for PLD to utilize.

• Stances would be toggled with a single skill, and only one could be active at one time. Example? Berserk and Rampage. Niether stance is required to be on, and without the stance PLD functions the same as it does now.

1. The first would be a Melee DPS oriented stance, where the PLD "dual wields" his sword and shield, alternating attacks between the sword and shield. The original Roman Gladiators relied on their shields just as much as their swords for offense, and isn't the base job of PLD a Gladiator? This stance would decrease attack speed by 25% and be a dual wield based stance, filling that gap of dual wield people have been craving since they saw secondary weapons first pop up in the offhand window. Shield damage would be matched to 50% of mainhand weapon damage, and each "attack phase" would be Sword swing > Shield Bash (2 hits like PUG/MNK). Example: Ifrit's Blade has 102 DMG and 2.7 DELAY with a DPS of 37.77. Using this stance would offer a DPS comparable to (102x1.5=153DMG) / (2.7x1.25=3.37DELAY) = 45.4DPS, not much more than comparable DPS classes. It would give PLD a chance to put out the DPS that makes it unsuitable for certain fights and scenarios currently in the game and now make it a viable option. Blocking would NOT ACTIVATE AT ALL in this stance, your shield is a weapon only.
2. The second stance is the tanking stance. Again drawing inspiration from Roman Gladiators and the highly effective Phalanx formation after which we love to name GLA's skill, this stance would plant your feet and root you down, throw up your shield and cause a 100% block rate. That's right, I said 100%. On top of this, blocks in this stance offer a 40% general damage reduction and you are immune to knockback. Now you're saying, "wait wait wait Cupcakes, that's OP!" Wrong. Want to know why? You're rooted. when using this stance, you cannot move. You also no longer auto attack. Blocks still generate TP and skills are still usable, but auto-attack is gone. This creates the effect of "Hide behind shield, leap out to attack, return to behind shield."

I've played a lot of MMOs. Even recent Betas, to be honest, even games that are in Beta right now. But I always come back to FFXIV. Final Fantasy offers a unique experience among MMOs in that it is community driven and requires unity to accomplish great things. The current Dev Team seems to have a firm grasp on this and are considered by the majority of us as members of our own community and not segregated as "those guys in Japan collecting the money." I love the communication between the Devs and the players, and really hope to see a response to this.

Happy Adventuring Eorzea!

Update 05/24:
After reading Eagleheart's topic and views on PLD here - >>>>http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...9-with-Paladin<<<< , it reminded me of a very important problem I had forgotten and made me question revising my defensive stance idea.

I'm not a big fan of nerfing. I don't believe other classes should suffer and be made unfun just because another class needs improvement and people refuse to play the "OMG ITS OP NERF NOWZ" class. So I'm all for making ALL classes "feel like" it's OP by disguising the balance behind it (BLM does too much dmg! = increase everyone's damage, increase mob HP, now everyone feels badass, mob is pretty much the same difficulty.) In any case I'm getting off-topic. I'm keeping the original stance idea up for review and revision, however this is my revision idea listing options for this stance below at this time to address MP Generation with changes in red:

• The second stance is the tanking stance. Again drawing inspiration from Roman Gladiators and the highly effective Phalanx formation after which we love to name GLA's skill, this stance would plant your feet and root you down, throw up your shield and cause a 100% block rate. That's right, I said 100%. On top of this, blocks in this stance offer a 40% general damage reduction and you are immune to knockback. Now you're saying, "wait wait wait Cupcakes, that's OP!" Wrong. Want to know why? You're rooted. when using this stance, you cannot move. You also no longer auto attack. Blocks still generate TP and skills are still usable, but auto-attack is gone. This creates the effect of "Hide behind shield, leap out to attack, return to behind shield." Blocks restore MP = 50% of damage taken.
  
• The second stance is the tanking stance. Again drawing inspiration from Roman Gladiators and the highly effective Phalanx formation after which we love to name GLA's skill, this stance would plant your feet and root you down, throw up your shield and cause a 100% block rate. That's right, I said 100%. On top of this, blocks in this stance offer a 40% general damage reduction and you are immune to knockback. Now you're saying, "wait wait wait Cupcakes, that's OP!" Wrong. Want to know why? You're rooted. when using this stance, you cannot move. You also no longer auto attack . Blocks do not generate TP and instead restore MP = 100% damage taken. TP regens naturally in this stance at a rate of 25TP/sec (approx 1500TP/MIN, or 1 WS every 40sec) Skills are still usable.

Or a variation or balance between these 3 variations of the stance, but either way I see potential in these combinations.

[Daniel_Fury]

This reminds me alot like Aion. The tank had shield stances that mitigated alot of damage and prevented stuns, but they could only auto attack in this stance. I think this is a really good idea.

[Denmo]

I'm all for utilizing my shield more.

[Musaid]

I'm all for utilizing my shield more.

I would play pld again.

[SwordCoheir]

I like where your goin with these ideas Cupcakes, but one thing that does concern me is Enmity generation with the second stance. Auto-attacks make up a decent chunk of Enmity and the tp returns on blocked attacks are much smaller in comparison to an attack round (Unless your talking about Outmaneuver's TP bonus effect) so I don't think we'd be able to spam combo's nearly as reliably, letting us lose hate much more quickly. Of course if we got a hefty Enmity boost equal too or a major percentage of the damage taken from the blocked attack it might settle out the Enmity differences from loss of auto-attack.

The first ability I love altogether just because I've been trying to find some way to make PLD into a semi-decent DD outside of tank situations or in more offensively required situations, and since we still have a shield we don't lose out on half our abilities like if we went to using a 2h weapon like a G.Sword. I can deal with the sacrifice of losing some of our defensive capabilities for offensive boosts, if WAR has proven anything defense isn't always needed for tanking content, and it would allow PLD at least some of the flexibility WAR's have.

[FuriousCupcakes]

Thanks for the support guys, and thanks for pointing that out Sword Coheir. It was pretty late when this idea popped into my head last night and after thinking it over a bit more, there shouldn't be any TP reduction from the defensive stance in order to keep DPS for Enmity generation at an acceptable level. I also added an immunity to knockback.

I picture tanking with these stances going something like this: Engage DPS stance, run in and grab hate on the mob. Build up enough TP for a combo very quickly with the dual wield, find your spot and BAM, just as Coincounter uses 100-tonze swing, or say Ifrit uses Incinerate, switch to shield stance and hold your ground. At this point, you maintain enmity through Enmity+ skills (Rampage, Provoke, Taunt), weaponskills, and healing. If a party member starts to build high enmity or the enemy enters a less destructive phase, switch back to DPS stance and start swinging.

[Forerunner]

Maybe with the upcoming changes to GLA I can rebuild my DD GLA spec.

Protip: Rage of Halone was overpowered @ 500 damage every 15 seconds.

Now I'm lucky if it breaks 280. Damn accuracy rework.

[Taggerung5]

Cupcakes, you deserve a prize.
*emails you a cupcake made of awesome*

Also, I remember on XI where I could out DD some lesser equipped MNKs and WARs and junk with my PLD DD gearset lol. For merit pts and junk, not actual tanking situations :P. Unless we were farming waters or ulli i'd whip out a 1500~ retribution once in awhile too

[Hoshikogi]

I love the stance idea. A few people mentioned that the defensive stance may create an emity problem; however, your description of the additional stance sounds as though it's a temporary life-saver that must be used strategically. All I could add to this stance is possibly a reduced chance for magic cast interruption or perhaps an increased cure hate generation while in defensive stance. I believe these to be fair additions since the PLD is incapable of auto-attacking according to your description.

[Alerith]

I like the idea of a defensive stance, but I'm not too keen on locking you out of your abilities. As stated by Hoshikogi, it would be an "Oh snap!" skill, which we already have in the form of Hallowed Ground.

Rather, I'd like to see them bring back the "Block" ability, where you raised your shield and could still use abilities. The trade off would be disabling auto-attack and hindering your TP generation.

In this block stance, we could have increased Phalanx damage, maybe a more potent shield bash, but a reduction in sword based WS potency.

There are plenty of options to go about something like this, but locking us out of our skills isn't a good idea I think, especially with trigger happy mages lingering around.