Rumor: Paladin Broken Vitality at 75?

[Armando]

Re: Rumor: Paladin Broken Vitality at 75?

IMO, PLD can earn a place in merit party. Not as "tank", and not even as "DD". But, as a hybrid job--pry critters off the puller, reduce damage taken by others, help cure, and contribute some damage. It is especially good in those single mage parties; an additional cure source really helps the party to keep going instead of stopping because the front line took extra damage for a battle or two and the healer run out of MP.

It may not be real tanking or real DD'ing, but it is fun. And, challenging.

I definitely recommend it to every PLD to at least try to put together a DD set by the time he or she reaches Lv.70. (Or earlier.) Though, I'm not promising it'd lead to a better invite rate--my DD PLD is pretty much LS party only.
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In short, the lack of a regular provoke/flash at the start of the battle made a already slow group even slower, and more dangerous.

So, anyway, the moral of the story: "Pry critters off the puller" may not sound very glamorous, but it's important. Don't just dismiss that and snub it with "But it's not tanking!"

Quoted for truth ^^

It sounds like another thing worth remembering is that DD vs. turtle isn't exactly an all-or-nothing sort of thing, and some pieces will give you more for one style or the other...

That's true. It mostly depends on the camp. If you overhunt, it's almost impossible to go DD PLD. If your party has little MP recovery (say, you've got a WHM main healer and a BLU backup healer and no Refresh/Ballads) there's also a good chance you won't be able to go DD without holding the party back. The third case is mobs that can one-shot you. I would NEVER go DD against Erucas, for example; they can already one-shot me while turtling with Incinerate, going DD would just increase the chances of one-shots. It also basically boils down to the party's ability to heal the damage you'll be taking, and the mob's capacity to OHKO you.

[Lmnop]

Re: Rumor: Paladin Broken Vitality at 75?

Turtles parse between 3-7% party damage.

18% is stellar.

[Callisto]

Re: Rumor: Paladin Broken Vitality at 75?

I think a lot of the issue with the notion of DD PLDs taking loads of more damage is just from crappy/lazy PLD play. With Haste you can easily squeeze out 2 Flash a fight, one at the beginning and one in the middle, that along will save you 2-300 damage. You can Reprisal about every other or every third fight, this is also a pretty big boost to damage mitigation. You have Sentinel every 5 minutes, 30 seconds of taking almost 0 damage...and you have Shield Bash, which when used properly can stop a big TP move or nuke.

Absolutely none of this requires you to change out of your DD gear(although I do put on AF legs for Reprisal because I'm not sure if Enhancing Magic plays any reasonable role in block rates/Spike resist rates and I like to play it safe.) There really is no reason why a DD PLD would be bleeding damage compared to a turtle tank on normal XP mobs, aside from Sushi vs. Seafood or full-time Berserk(well 60%) vs. full-time Defender. The difference in VIT doesn't noticeably affect damage taken, and the difference in DEF is just really not that big.

As Armando stated several times, the issue is shitty PLDs, lol. You have to be very proactive to pull off DDadin well, however a good DDadin will generate substantially more hate than a good turtle tank, the math of the game just rewards doing solid damage with hate more than it does turtling up.
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I would NEVER go DD against Erucas, for example; they can already one-shot me while turtling with Incinerate, going DD would just increase the chances of one-shots.

I've actually had my best results with DDadin on Erucas, lol. I've been 1-shotted a couple of times, but unless your Turtle gear includes Pidgeon gear, Breath Reduction gear and Pescatora, you're still going to to get one-shotted by Incinerate in your Turtle gear. If anything DDadin helps even more here as you can open with a WS to take a chunk of damage off and get its HP as low as possible before its first TP move, taking a possible chunk off of it's Incinerate damage.

[Armando]

Re: Rumor: Paladin Broken Vitality at 75?

I'm sure you could DD on Erucas if your party is smart. But my parties weren't that smart D: Insisted on fighting mid-high IT Erucas, sometimes didn't get a Refresher, and the DDs often didn't make an effort to focus the bulk of their damage at the beginning of the fight. If I had a Refresher, smart DDs and we fought lower level Erucas, I'd do it, but those conditions just weren't met ; ;

[Callisto]

Re: Rumor: Paladin Broken Vitality at 75?

The amount of times I end up with no Refresh is astounding, like 75% of my parties, and in most cases I get no Haste either, lol. I don't know if people are just desperate to get XP or what, but the fact that people even attempt things like Imps with no Refresh is beyond me.

I got into the habit of being stingy with Shield Bash on Erucas, so that if I ate an early Incinerate I could Bash > Cure IV, I've only been outright 1-shotted once b/c it literally opened the fight with it and did 1k+, but generally the worst Incinerates leave me sitting 1-2 hits from dead, so the opportunity to stun and Cure is still there.

I really want to get back to leveling but I'm sitting at only 11k AN and I want Iron Ram Hose to ding into. I zerged the absolute shit out of HL2 and MGS4 so I can focus on leveling PLD in my spare time again, lol.

[Lmnop]

Re: Rumor: Paladin Broken Vitality at 75?

The difference in VIT doesn't noticeably affect damage taken, and the difference in DEF is just really not that big.

I feel compelled by my morals to point out how close this is to on-topic.

Here we have it, summed up. It'll make a difference, but it'd take somewhere around 20-30 to actually be able to eyeball the difference. And even then, it won't be a huge one.

[Callisto]

Re: Rumor: Paladin Broken Vitality at 75?

I personally would have gone with:

Most players suck. PLDs included. It should come as no surprise that you're getting DD PLDs that fail. Most of PLDs fail in the first place, some of them just happen to be DD PLDs.

In seriousness, honestly if you really want to Turtle in XP, you'd probably be better served still using a Hybrid/DD gear setup and just using Defender full time. At the least you're maintaining a high hit rate, albeit for less damage, and I've seen some surprising WS #'s come out when I went into ohshit mode, popped Defender, and forgot to take it off.

Keep in mind when we say that stacking Defense won't do much for you, we mean in terms of gear, where like I said my Turtle set vs. my DD set only loses something like 13 Defense at the most. Adding a much higher amount like 15-40% will in fact have a noticeable impact, but there's always a point where the amount you pile on just stops having a noticeable impact.

In terms of DDadin though, unless you are taking so much damage that you're forcing downtime on the party that wouldn't exist otherwise, the only thing that will bring in more XP/hr is killing faster, not taking slightly less damage per hit. DDadin both contributes to that cause, as well as creating more hate in the process, in return for taking what should not be a noticeable amount of greater damage in the first place. If it does make a huge difference in whether or not the party can consistently chain quickly either A) the party setup/choice of mobs is poor, B) the healer/support are poor/non-existant(see A), or C) you're doing it wrong.