A video showcasing all of Paladin's removed job actions. Thoughts?

[Maulclaw]

A video was posted that shows all the job actions that have been purged from a Paladin's skill list, including a few that people seem to talk about a lot (in a bad light). Reddit didn't seem to care much, but I've been curious about this kind of thing as I was only able to start playing when Shadowbringers came out.

You can watch the video in the following link:
- https://youtu.be/er9huBEamPg?si=kASt2UQWMVUNfRfo

I never got to see any of these skills live in the actual client, so I'm curious to see what people have to say or think about any of these; or if there's any you'd like to see brought back to the game. Some look pretty cool, but I can see why SE ended up cutting most of them. I seriously don't get the point of stuff like "Shield Swipe" and "Flash". How did the stances work?

It is interesting to see how the original "Provoke" and "Rampart" ended up becoming actions that are now shared across all tanks. Did these make Paladin stand out in some way back then?

These animations also aren't all that interesting to look at compared to what Dark Knight lost.

[MistakeNot]

"Flash" was one of the few ways Gladiators/Paladins had of getting enmity on multiple enemies at once, so it was used a lot.

Back when we had cross-class skills, "Provoke" was the main reason all tanks needed (in practice if not in theory) at least 20(?) levels of Gladiator so they could equip "Provoke"

[Cabalabob]

Shield swipe was originally higher potency (something like 210) and was a GCD action which was a dps increase because it was higher than your average combo potency, you could only use it after blocking an attack, it was essentially a counter attack and a dps increase for blocking. Later it was reworked into an oGCD only available after a block to simplify things. It was removed because they didn’t want tanks using their mitigation to increase dps anymore.

Flash was literally PLDs only way to generate AoE enmity, it had no damaging skills for AoE other than circle of scorn at 50.

Provoke was always shared across all tanks but it used to be a gladiator cross class skill, meaning you needed to level gladiator all the way up to 22 (still fairly easy but not as easy as it sounds back then) just to basically function as any other tank.

Every tank used to have a rampart equivalent, WAR had inner beast and DRK had shadowskin. They just decided that they didn’t want to make a rampart clone for every job going forward, so they simply removed every other tanks version and reworked the cross class skill system into the role action system and made rampart one of them.

There were 2 stances, shield oath and sword oath. Shield oath reduced your damage taken by 20% but also lowered your damage dealt and increased enmity, it was your “tank stance”. Sword oath just added extra damage to your auto attacks but couldn’t be used at the same time as shield oath, it was your “dps stance”. The idea was obviously use tank stance when you want to tank and dps stance when you’re OT or solo. But players soon realised it was very easy to hold hate in dps stance and make up the mitigation loss with cooldowns so the devs spent the next 5 years fighting the player base who wanted to just tank in dps stance with STR accessories while they wanted you to tank in tank stance with VIT accessories until in shadowbringers they finally took their ball and went home (made tank stances how they are today and forced tanks to wear fending accessories).

[Mikey_R]

Just to talk about the ones the above posters haven't talked about (except PvP actions):

Savage Blade - this was a combo ability with Fast Blade that formed the enmity combo with Rage of Halone (Fast Blade > Savage Blade > Rage of Halone). This is before Shadowbringers where they changed how enmity worked. Back in Heavensward, it also formed a combo with Royal Authority (Fast Blade > Savage Blade > Royal Authority) but RA was changed to combo off of Riot Blade in Stormblood.

Flash - Whilst it was the only way to get AoE enmity initially, that did change in Stormblood when Paladins finally got access to Total Eclipse, which is the first AoE damage GCD they got and even then, it was only obtained at level 44 IIRC (assopposed to level 6 where it currently is, where Flash used to be).

Rampart (Original) - The original was also 20%, like it is now, Gladiator just had a trait to boost it from the 10% shown in the video.
Provoke (Original) - Has been changed slightly in that it now boosts your enmity a bit over the highest as opposed to giving just 1 enmity over lead.

Awareness - Prevents crits, not really useful as they are just RNG, which meant it either done it's job, or it done nothing, except for a few special circumstances. 2 are Shiva EX in her Bow phase, she had a high crit rate then, so it proved quite useful as a reliable as a damage mitigation tool and Hallicarnasus Savage (O3S) where the tank buster always done a critical hit, so you could negate it that way (it is worth noting that critical hits do also prevent you from blocking or parrying the damage). As of Shadowbringers however, they have all but removed critical hits from all mechanic based attacks (and it might even be all attacks, I do not quite remember). So it really just became useless. Gladiator did have a trait here to make it better.

Convalescence - Whilst extra healing sounded nice (Gladiator also had a trait to boost this), it really didn't matter much. It didn't help you survive anything, so you would always pair it with mitigation anyway and the healing bonus wasn't necessary. It probably didn't help it only worked on GCD healing IIRC and with healers trying to keep GCD healing to a minimim, it saw barely any use.

Tempered Will - This has just been replaced with Arm's Length and it also had a trait for Gladiators to make it better. It didn't have the added slow enemies who touch you though, so Arm's Length is better.

[Icecylee]

Awareness and Convalescence might not've been great for raids, but they were extremely useful for mass pulls in dungeons at the time. That said they *would* be pretty worthless in modern FF14.

[Absurdity]

Awareness and Convalescence might not've been great for raids, but they were extremely useful for mass pulls in dungeons at the time. That said they *would* be pretty worthless in modern FF14.

They were great...just not on Paladin, but on Warrior instead, lol.

Convalescence combined with Defiance made for some ridiculous Adlo shields and with the high HP pool (boosted even more by ToB) you could survive busters with just your face.

Awareness on the other hand negated the major flaw of Raw Intuition (attacks against your flank or back being 100% critical).

[MsMisato]

YOu all are forgetting the tanks had an aoe called Ultimatum the AOE Provoke. The issue with that was it only provided temp enmity so for example it would add 50 to whatever the mobs had in the range of it and then a few seconds its goes back to zero. Instead of fixing Ultimatum hey created the spin to win to replace 3 skills they removed in 5.0.

I do miss shield bash because it had the added benefit of pacify. I also miss Butchers Block for Warrior it was a nicely animated skill XD

[Mikey_R]

I do miss shield bash because it had the added benefit of pacify. I also miss Butchers Block for Warrior it was a nicely animated skill XD

Shield Bash never had a pacify, you are thinking of Shield Swipe, which was a GCD in ARR and an oGCD onwards that could only be used after blocking. I only remember one real use for the pacify and that was Ifrit Hard, Pacifying the last set of eruptions that filled almost the whole room. This was back when CC was baked into the combos so stunning it wasn't a reliable option, but noone else (from memory) could pacify, so there was no chance to have the enemy CC resist it.

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

YOu all are forgetting the tanks had an aoe called Ultimatum the AOE Provoke. The issue with that was it only provided temp enmity so for example it would add 50 to whatever the mobs had in the range of it and then a few seconds its goes back to zero. Instead of fixing Ultimatum hey created the spin to win to replace 3 skills they removed in 5.0.

lol no it didn't work like that even remotely. It was an AoE provoke that placed you at the top of the enmity table simple as that, same way provoke worked until they added the boosted enmity modifier, all provoke and ultimatum done was put you at top of the enmity table.

[Maulclaw]

Your comments provide a lot of further clarification, thanks!