PLD changes

[Eorzean_username]

• Divine Veil
• Sheltron

Cool. Thank you, SE. These are sensible changes that improve Paladin's defensive functionality.

Bulwark

Nononono! You didn't understand, here...

Blocking is a problem, because Blocking is fussy and selective about when it works, and what types of attacks that it works to reduce.

Bulwark needs to have the Camouflage treatment of an additional flat, unconditional damage reduction. Otherwise, this is going to be a gimmick, rather than an actual reliable additional defensive tool.

Oath Gauge

Still a sloppy mess. Still makes defensive mitigation contingent on melee uptime, which is warped, and not an issue that other Tanks deal with. Still accomplishes nothing that simply putting Sheltron on 2 charges wouldn't also accomplish.

Oath Gauge remains a pointless tacked-on gimmick. I mean, yes, most Gauges are pointless tacked-on gimmicks, but Oath Gauge is especially-egregious.

Cover

Still a hollow shell of its former functionality. Still overpriced. Still excessive CD for the underwhelming and mediocre effect. Still doesn't need a Gauge cost.

Still yet another action that's bloating out the Paladin action-set not because it really serves any good purpose, but simply because SE feels like "Paladin has to have this!", and refuses to think of a way to make it actually belong in a regular, functional usage system.

In a game with limited action slots, each action should feel meaningful, and see regular and satisfying usage. There's no point giving Paladins Cover if it's a trap button outside of the most exotic niche gimmick situations; if it's something that's meant to be iconic, then its usage should be supported and encouraged. Give it whatever shape or form it needs to allow that, rather than letting it wallow off in a dusty corner of most hotbars.

Clemency

Still junk, especially with the excessive MP cost. But Clemency could be free and it would still be junk, because it eats a GCD to do something that no one needs a Tank to do, and no one expects a Tank to do.

Trading out damage for healing in XIV is barely ever an effective decision, and most cases argued in favor of Clemency are selective-memory bias from players that either don't understand the game fully, or want to believe that they made more of a difference than they actually did.

Clemency will continue to exist mostly as a trap for new players who need excessive comfort-zones when tanking trivial content, or who enjoy dragging/carrying underperforming and unprepared players through simple content where sandbagging your own damage output doesn't preclude clearing.

"But one time in prog with my static I saved a healer" is not justification for an action that's almost always a useless trap. You could have done that with Nascent Flash too, except it wouldn't have sandbagged your own output and derailed your rotation.

Clemency continues to be "flavor bloat" in an action set that's swollen with a lot of this kind of, "But ALL fantasy Paladins have to have this!" fluff junk.

Passage of Arms

I think that aggressively-defending the cone-channel function of Passage is a perplexing opinion, and a pointless hill to die on, as well.

The very fact that you have to put on thick black-rimmed hipster glasses and tip your chin upwards in order to brag about how clever you are for using Passage correctly, is exactly why Passage is poorly-fit to the current game. It does not belong in XIV in this state.

The fact that the biggest defense of Passage is "but you can just flash it really quick, so you never have to see it, nor actually use it as intended!" just underlines how poorly-designed the action actually is.

The fact that Passage is, by-and-large, only effective in situations where mechanics happen to work out in your favor such that you can actually rely on coordinated players to stand close enough together for the Paladin to be able to spin around and "flash" an ambiguous conal animation out their backside for 0.2 microseconds, and then rely on lingering snapshotting to hopefully mitigate something (maybe)... is not the endorsement that some players think it is.

Complaining that changing Passage would be "homogenisation" is like complaining that someone who has a leg amputated is "homogenising" themselves by being fitted for a functional prosthetic. Yeah maybe, but who cares? It's an obvious practical improvement. Sometimes, it's actually okay to want to be like everyone else.

"But I can keep hopping around on one leg because I practised!" That's cool? Impressive even? But it's not grounds to ban prosthetic fittings from everyone else that wants them and benefits from them.

Currently, for the vast majority of users, Passage serves only one practical purpose: putting up unnecessary additional "bloat mitigation" during 10-second-long untargetable boss-ult wind-ups, so that you can look cool, and pretend that you're actually accomplishing anything meaningful or noticeable.

And that's nice and everything, but I think that hotbars should be filled with actions that are more than just fancy real-time GPosing, and have an actual practical and functional purpose in most content.

Dark Missionary just works. Heart of Light just works. Passage of Arms should fit the same pattern, and just work.

If SE is going to such lengths to standardise problematic and niche outliers, they need to do it consistently, rather than this bizarre whack-a-mole approach.