Quote Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim View Post
Well, sort of. Two minutes is a long amount of time, so between planned usage to handle specific mechanics in a way + usage on demand (like actually saving a teammate) you may have less room for error with a 2min Cooldown, i.e. the "opportunity" cost.
Right, but that'd be like saying the opportunity cost of finding $100 on the street that I can take for free with no strings attached is that once I spend the $100 I never had before anyways... then I won't have the $100. Just seems a weird mental gymnastic to make just use a specific term on an ability that, as far as we can tell, hasn't come with any cost, seeing as PLD would be fully competitive even if Cover were removed.

The removal of Cover's 20% mitigation trait had nothing to do with them figuring out how to make mitigation usage better
I mean, they pointed out when they added the trait that it was a stopgap measure until they could get the transferred damage to be mitigatable at both ends --since if one Covered as OT an MT in Grit or Shield Oath, the tank pair in total would end up taking 25% more damage than if it had just been left on the MT (barring vuln stacks on the MT, etc.)-- until it could use the greater of the target's or one's own mitigation. That was the explicit reason given, and the feature added fits the cause stated.

Block also had a strength of 28-32% mitigation and Sentinel reached 40% as well, so Paladin was extremely well suited for this.
Blocks couldn't be done without being the one attacked, though? So how is that relevant to whether PLD was meant to be better at OTing than MTing?

Moreover, the strength of Intervention was specifically in swapping out, not in using it solely from an OT position, as you could provide a bunch more free mitigation by popping Rampart 19s and Sentinel 9s before Intervention, doubly buffing it at no cost. Without having actually used those CDs for yourself, though, you'd have wasted more than half their total mit instead of getting almost half again extra.

The "OT-esque" additions in Stormblood didn't improve pure OTing relative to proper swaps; it increased the reward for proper swaps, making them even more important.

The 20% tank mastery is nothing but Shield Oath (old tank stance with mitigation)
Never said otherwise, but going from <15% of our raid uptime to a forced 100% non-option, it also ended up balanced around in very different ways. If you can't not be in it, damage can, well, assume that you'll be in it.


As such, Block 30% -> 20% still ends up, after Tank Mastery, with 6% more mitigation than before (only 64% of damage taken) relative to Sword Oath, Parry 20 -> 15% likewise ends up with 12% more mitigation, with mostly just the RNG being de-emphasized.... which probably had a hell of a lot more to do with Shelltron going from blocking a single hit to blocking all hits over a duration and Camouflage being added to the game.

My point was merely that if you were in Shield Oath before, as you almost certainly should have been as OT, you would have taken the same amount then as you would now via Tank Mastery; there was no net nerf to your sustainability relative to how you normally played, let specifically alone as OT.


Accordingly....


The more I think about it, my own ordered preferences would just be...
  1. Remove the Gauge cost and keep the full mitigation, allowing PLD to be a bit OP for purposes of flavor (and ideally determine how other tanks might be that "tiny bit OP relative to other tanks" in their own way.
  2. Just reduce the cooldown slightly.
  3. Remove the Gauge cost but transfer damage directly without being mitigated by Tank Mastery and reduce the cooldown slightly.
  4. Keep it as is.