Some questions from a new Gladiator/future Paladin...

[Travel]

So, bit of a conundrum that me and my group is now facing; our current Tank, previously a Warrior, is looking to leave his tanking stuff behind and become a Machinist. Out of our little 4-man group, that means that I'm going to be taking over as the Tank; I've had some decent experience with tanking - Gunbreaker is at 70, Dark Knight is at 62, and Gladiator is at 7 - but I still feel inexperienced with tanking overall.

Hence, I was going to be going back to basics with my Tank stuff. I was going to go ahead and level Gladiator, so I could eventually become a Paladin; out of all the Tanks, that one has the general design that I'm looking for as a roleplayer. However, I know very little about how Gladiator/Paladin actually plays; I know about keeping Tank stance active at all times and such, but everything else is something of a mystery.

Hence, I got a few questions I was wanting to ask before I REALLY dive into this job:

- The first and simplest; how difficult of a job is it? I mean, I'm more than willing to learn the ins-and-outs of a job; thanks to the guys over on the DPS boards, I was able to learn how to get a second hotbar up, which is rather helpful as a controller player.
I'm just wanting to know the general vibe of a high-level Paladin; whether it's an insane button-mash that'll put my history of Guitar Hero to the test, or if it's a simple matter of hitting a few buttons at a time and waiting for cooldowns.

- How team-oriented is the job? While I understand that tanking is pretty much the lifeblood of any team, I was just wondering on the nature of the buffs and such that it uses; does it rely on AOE buffs, or does it focus entirely on a single target? Does the job have some form of self-sufficiency, in case the healer starts to lag behind again, or does a Paladin have to rely entirely on their allies for heals?

- Any advice for pulling in general? This is something that always ended up screwing me over as a Tank before; in some dungeons, I would get criticized for pulling too slow, and yet in dungeons such as Aurum Vale, if I tried to pull anything larger than just a few enemies at a time, it was pretty hit-or-miss on whether or not the healer would actually be able to keep my health up. The past few times I ran GNB in several dungeons - including the Aurum Vale, incidentally - I've been getting some rather good encouragement and commendations from my teams of randoms, but I'd still like to improve in any way I could.

[Mikey_R]

1. At max level, PLD is mainly GCD focused with only 5 oGCDs used for damage, the rest are the defensive kit. The rotation is a very static, strict rotation, there are optimisations, however, unless you are in a setting where you are lining up cooldowns, you are better off ignoring them.

2. All tanks at max level have some sort of healing baked into their regular rotation, in the case of PLD, their magic phase has a heal attached to everything, pair this with their defensives and a good team, your healer can do fairly little, even in big pulls. The downside is they do not have a heal like Aurora or Equilibrium, however, since they have better access to their short cooldown, you can use that to supplement healing requirements. If stuff has really gone south, Clemency is the best healing tool available and can carry PLD's through most dungeon encounters, though it is a DPS loss to use it.

3. For ARR dungeons, pulls are...weird. Since this is before the time they added walls to prevent you from pulling everything you do need to have better knowledge of what you can and cannot pull together. It will mainly be about trial and error. From then on, you should be able to pull wall to wall, assuming your gear is up to par. As a general rule, do not forget your defensives, and do not stack them, try and times them so that, once one falls off, another should start up, once the pack is small enough, you can stop using them and remember, Hallowed Ground is not an oh crap button, it is a button that should be used to help, especially in packs that hit harder. You should be able to get it off 2 times max in a dungeon, once before the first boss and once after the second boss.

[Katsuragi_]

PLD rotation doesn't take 500 IQ. It can be optimized per encounter, yes, but because of that same flexibility it also makes it easy to do more than enough. Also, it's pretty soft on the keyboard. GNB and DRK have the highest APMs, WAR the lowest.

Tanking in general I'd say is the easiest role in the game. Mechanics are different for tanks so expect to be playing your own different game from the rest of the party in raids.

PLDs used to be about trading personal mitigation for being more team-oriented. While I'm not whining about it, I don't think there's very much of a reason to pick it over other tanks in general. It's still good for going in blind I guess, and you can pull some sleek carrying in roulettes with bad groups and stuff, but if you're just clearing with a capable group you trust ... I mean ... you can play PLD because you enjoy it (you can play any tank), just saying practically, there's not much reason to. It's great for saving other people from themselves, but people shouldn't be screwing up to begin with.

For the last point, it's mostly the same thing that's already said. Pulling in old content isn't easy because those dungeons aren't patronizing. Just take it easy honestly, not much else to do. It's just a matter of experience. Newer dungeons pace the pulls for you by having walls between packs. You want to not stack defensive cooldowns so you can hopefully rotate them and always have one available. Also you can literally just run at the packs and AOE them as they make contact with you.
Also, dont think about saving Hallowed Ground, in fact you should use it first and on cooldown since it's the longest to cool down.

[Anienai]

Any advice for pulling in general?

Wall to Wall and don't forget to space out your defensive cds.

[Caster-LB]

Easy at first but then you get into things like passage of arms snap shotting and buffing intervention, also have to be wary when / if you ever use cover so it doesn't kill you

well SCH and PLD make a good tag team, can divine veil whenever you want and embrace will proc

And using sprint pre-pull ? I'd always wall pull on the first just to test, if all goes well then will pull everything if not will adjust from there ofc it always a team effort, everyone has to do their job for smooth pulls but in ARR plenty of DRGs who haven't done job quests so no doom spike, RDMs using jolt in AoE , benefic 1's ect. common red flags

( for aurum specifically,can hug left over the poison, pick up the mushrooms then take all mobs into the bossroom corner and line of sight the ranged )