Hate control... Flash II, Can I Have It?Follow

Ok looking at that NM then its possible his craptacular damage was from that. That door works for everyone though, all your other melee will also have crap damage (relative to a non super def mob). Really its not hard, stack haste + attack + crits and go to town, abyssea really is broken in that RR and Crour buffs make accuracy a non-issue.

I'm at a loss as to how some people here are claiming that the core design of the Paladin class was not to be a tank, but to instead be a damage dealer with some defensive abilities.

Face the facts, the trinity system of tank, healer and damage dealer existed long before this game, and this game did nothing to try and change that or iterate on it in a tremendously meaningful way. Every single one of Paladin's abilities and traits focuses on mitigating damage taken by themselves and the group, not only that, most of them also increase enmity by a substantially larger amount than abilities of other classes.

When designing classes I am sure that there was a core concept they intended to achieve with each class, a specific role and style of play that they hoped to encourage and develop. We don't say that White Mage is primarily a damage dealer with a few support abilities thrown in because they can equip clubs and use hexa strike and cast Holy.

Now certainly, classes have abilities that allow them to perform multiple roles. Samurai has seigan which allows them to tank a bit but they are obviously designed to focus on dealing damage, focusing on the use of weaponskills, with obvious abilities to complement this from their 2 hour to Meditate and Sekkanoki and their Store TP traits.

Even with all the changes that have occurred in this game, it is still sitting nicely within the trinity system. In any sort of difficult fight, there is always a tank, a healer and a damage dealer. Sometimes who is performing each of these roles is blurred, sometimes these roles are shared, and flip flopped. Even when 2 RDM are kiting an NM, one is tanking (whoever has hate and is kiting) this may flip flop between the two of them on and off.

Some jobs have had their roles adjusted and altered over the course of the game. What began as a support/DD in Ninja became a tank. Some jobs had no clear role to perform like SMN where SE obviously wanted to implement a job from the series but had no distinct vision about what to do with it. Paladin has had no changes to the class to indicate that there was ever an intention to separate it from it's original role, which was and still is tanking.

Paladin was always the king of Enmity their role was to mitigate the damage taken by the rest of the party and focus it on themselves. Simply increasing PLD's DPS to match NIN or MNK does nothing but make the classes more homogeneous, which is I am sure the opposite of what anyone actually wants. The reason FFXI keeps me occupied is how many classes there are and how different each one plays.

People talked about making cover passive, and giving abilities to mitigate damage taken by the party, I agree with this approach alongside some more enmity tools. Something like Subdue to reduce enmity for others on the hate list, a trait that acts like cover would be nice, but it would have to be a chance to proc, hopefully a rather high chance, but an all the time cover would be overpowered.

Paladin should make it easier for other jobs to get in close and deal damage without worrying about getting hit, to make up for the fact that their damage won't rival NIN or MNK. Some kind of redirect or absorb buff for allies would be nice in this case. Not something to mitigate damage dealt to allies in a way that would cause people to want PLD in the PT to enhance another class tanking, but an ability that would help the PLD prevent DD from getting wasted by AoEs.

Apoc Atma or Alpha/Omega would have been a large improvement. The two most important factors with VB is the number of hits (thus indirectly accuracy) and your critical hit rate. Critical hit damage is important as well, but not sure if it's worth it to use atma for more than what RR gives over say a high triple attack rate.

Edit: Ifrit - food should always be applied. Even if its just a meat mithkabob. Theres still more attack on a lowly mithkabob then there is on 99% of atma. Yellow Curry bun is the standard, but I spam mithkabobs at times. Also, w/o something as basic as food, those numbers dont mean much. Although im agreeing with most the stuff your saying.




yeah - no lol. If that were the case, pld would still be sought after.

The main reason MNK's are prefered is becasue A) they can tank, and B) their DMG output is huge compared to other DD's with the typical RR/VV/Apoc setup.

The main problem I see, is PLD has always been the big fight tanks, alliance battles with 1-2 pld's etc. The games changed now so you need less than 6 ppl to complete content (even poorly geared players are included in this). Hates not the real issue here, because even if a PLD could hold hate would ppl still use it? Probably not becasue the job would still slow them down.


~Abyssea is just an interim event to the 99 cap, the game changes every 5 levels - it wouldn't suprise me if SE does something so everybody wants PLD's and DRK's by 99.

Edited, Feb 2nd 2011 4:43am by Sandmasterr

Why is everyone only using "MNK" as their reference? MNK is the single highest DPS job in the game, it was @75 and it only got stronger since then due to how H2H skill scales. Using this logic then MNK's should be the only job used period because they can do the most damage ~and~ tank.



This system is purely player invented and large complete and utter BS. Where do jobs like DNC / WAR / MNK / THF / NIN / DRG/mage / BLU and even RDM fit into that? PLD doesn't have a "damage -10%" hidden JA, they get the same from gear that any WAR or DRK gets. Not a single one of their JA / JT take away from offense, their abilities only increase their defense side. If anything people should be arguing that PLD's lack of offensive JA/JT is what hurts them, they must rely on subs to increase offensive ability's past what is already built into the job. This leaves them with a lower attack then a WAR or DRK of comparable level.

And if we're looking at maximum damage possible look to the following alternatives.

Main: Badelaire +2
Sub: The OaT sword has better DPS over time then either a Shamshir or a Joyeuse (D48 Delay 264 1.4 proc rate)
Body: Grim Cuirass, don't need the acc from any body only pure attack, 2% crit when your already at 70%+ shouldn't be much.

Atma
SA / RR / GH

Gives retarded attack / crit rates vs harder stuff, about the only thing I can see if switching SA out with Apoc for the TA but now your running low on attack, possibly ensure using higher meat might balance it out a bit.

Ultimately the argument isn't that PLD is ~better~ then other melees (especially the highest ranked DPS job in the game bar none), is that it is comparable to others while still being self sufficient and hard to kill. PLD's can use damage just as effectively as a WAR, BLU or a MNK to hold hate and should be doing this. I would dare to say PLD is the better "dangerous" NM tank due to their ability to regain hate quickly after a NM does a hate reset move and is running after your BLMs. This become more of an issue then anything else, the tank never dies but the NM likes to zap hate then go running around. A PLD's ability to modify his damage level while still holding hate is a positive when your trying to proc !! on a tier II and don't want to kill it too fast.

This game is no longer about "how fast can you kill something", SE changed all that the moment they introduced the "!!" procing system. Honestly we could zap just about any NM we wanted to in a few min (most under 60s) without brewing if we wanted to. having a MNK instead of a PLD would make absolutely zero difference in kill time.

I'm not nearly as good with the math as yourself, wouldn't the twilight body trump what the perle body does though? You had it listed in your ws gear but not in your TP gear. Maybe my perception of DEX and crit isn't correct, but I was under the assumption that you get a 0.5% +crit rate after a certain amount of dex over the mobs agi; in abyssea with RR this should be simple enough to do and as such the DEX from Twilight would outdo the 4 dex/2 crit rate on perle. Deep down I know this isn't true otherwise atma of the omnipotent would almost always be used, but regardless of that I can't see how perle could be a better option over the twilight body.





PLD + NIN duo combo for farming key items works great and they compliment each other well, despite 'sharing' the same role. I have a NIN friend that we duoed a fair chunk of Briareus.

To add to this thread about hate control/dmg... I finished Almace (85) on Monday. I haven't gotten a whole lot of time to test its inner workings out... might not be able to get to that until next weekend. I will say this though, inside Abyssea that sword is an absolute game changer for PLD. I still have a long ways to go on my tp gear and ws gear.

That being said, I won't say that I outdamage a class that's made for damage dealing like MNK or NIN even without them having an empryean weapon, however it feels like the 'jump' in damage is more then what other jobs might get.

Keeping that in mind, having this sword is great, but because of the way the game is currently structured I wouldn't say it makes PLD a more desirable tank then a MNK or NIN or THF in a plenty of situations. If I'm doing Buhkis for example, I'd have a tough time keeping up shadows on PLD due to his double attack and thus would have to rely on shield blocks for damage mitigation, as opposed to a NIN or THF who would have a decent evade rate even in their dmg sets, or a MNK who would just counter those hits for more dmg. Thus I would prob go /war. The problem now becomes that I can't maximize both my damage output and my damage reduced to match the jobs mentioned above, and this is with an Aegis as my shield.


Long story short, simply increasing the damage output a PLD can do isn't going to fix the current issue. Some other forms need to be looked into as has what's been suggested in this thread. In the mean time however, going pretty much all out DD is the way to go to justify a spot in the party.

Off handing any reasonable weapon adds a large boost to your damage simply because it adds an extra hit to your weaponskill, even if you have a low dmg weapon like joyeuse. Plus, I think that hit qualifies for an extra double/triple attack proc.

Max number of hits in a weapon skill is 8, this means you have 4 hits from VB, 1 from off hand weapon, and 3 "extra" hits that can come from double/triple attack.

Edited, Feb 2nd 2011 10:45pm by xypin

What about something like this:

Eyes on Me:
All enmity gain by a player in the party is taken by the PLD. Also, eliminates hate caps. After effect is over hate decreases normally.

Duration: 5 seconds
Recast: 3 minutes

So your DDs would have 5 seconds to go crazy with the PLD getting all the hate. It would also allow you to go over the caps and have a period of time where all the mobs attention is on you, but after a bit the effect is gone.