Do paladins need a buff?

Numbers aside let's focus on reality. Assuming normal 7f (not the state it's currently in) Dragon fury and Brandish have great vertical range. Makes it so that if you want to hit fishes and monks you're pretty much guaranteed to hit them both regardless of where you stand. Paladin's yes our cleave number is good but god damn you spend more time trying to find the right spot to cleave everything. If you wanna cleave the top 2 fishes on the right shelf, stand on that same platform and cleave 2 fishes only then go back down and cleave that 1 fish below with the rest of the monks. Numbers are great, putting it into practice not really. When you start mixing in HH it gets clunky and sad because you then take longer to clear and that snowballs into spawn rates and etc. I get around 45-50m dpm in 7f duo before and since then i just dont bother.

Edit: This is not to say I want an acb buff or for pallies to be good at 7f or anything. acb as a skill is fine as it is imo and doesn't need a range buff. We can get alternate sources of exp from places where drk's and heroes are awful at (hello duo/solo verga and duo nameless) which is incredible amounts of exp/time.

 

Dont mix me in with prehistoric ht methods. That test came from single target (full left side). You can see slightly larger numbers if you cleave, but in doing so you are only cannabilizing the squad's total damage output to make your number look a bit better. I think even the right side of ht has more losses than left, but it at least has value to the team, especially without sed mule or if right head is a designated threat (or even a hybrid run where you do half left/half right). The only places for our cleave that I can think of would be a cleave-less party that wants to nuke lh and then move right. Even then, I'm not sure cleaving would be better than focusing heads, outside of rounding off charge or having something to hit during double cancels.

Our problems really stem from a combination of factors. Useful support means that having high damage as well is downright broken. Second, multiclient is unfavorable for us specifically. Dexbucc removal actually doesnt help us as much as youd think, but more hurts the classes that depend on our buffs until we gain a larger, more reliable playerbase (which I think has actually started to happen). Losing mage as an si target entirely is probably our biggest "nerf" in the history of the game, as now there are entire meta compositions that can be made that wont have any use at all for si (at least bish was a party staple that liked us). Lastly, we have an atrocious growth curve that means we wont shine until the endgame (I dont think it's purely sp related, but rather a high scaling to attack, combined with high avoid, iframe, and stance that adds up to create ability to have lower losses from damage).

All that said, our biggest barriers are in lower level buccs. I feel we've been building their skills wrong, and arent pulling out our best by trading higher level damage and utility for slightly better damage at early zak level, and losing out in the 140-170 range. Our new avoid is actually a nerf at low levels, when we arguably need it the most.

I've derailed a pally thread enough about bucc imo, but have to agree with Nise on this one; if we have even remotely similar damage to pally, what's the use of a pally in bossing squad? Threaten?

 

I'll chime in one more time to say even though I've effectively quit for now I still think "paladin best melee DMG" (only 10% more the heros....) is still the wrong way to go about addressing the class.

If you rounded up every high level paladin and asked them "would you give up 10?20?30?% of your damage in exchange for being good cleave or offering a useful party buff?" They would all say yes no question.

Your counterpoint to this might be you don't want to make classes all the same. Paladin is unique because it is the single target damage dealer(once again 10% more then heros lol). In which case I would say you should have thought about that years ago. Changing your view on the class now just spits in the face of all the current paladins who put time into their characters. If I knew this is what Paladins were going to be when I made my character I would have made a different class (so would have many others).

 

On bucc growth curve, one thing I noticed is that while other 4th job attacking skills tend to have reduced scaling after either level 10 or 20, pirate 4th job attacking skills are all completely linear. Perhaps rescaling bucc attacking skills so they're more effective at earlier levels can make early/mid game buccs a bit better?

 

Funny thing is, we dont even scale linearly while maxing ST as the 10 seconds per point that get shaved off get progressively more impactful. Making demo scale harder earlier could make it come online sooner in a ds+barr first build, but I wouldn't recommend putting off our demo/st that long anyways, as both should be maxed asap to do more damage per st cycle than non-transform variants.

 

Clearly they don't care about playability.
Less than 1% of the population being able to do ht a bit faster is clearly more important to them than palis being a viable class like they were (comparatively) for months / years pre patch. Then empty promises that they'll fix it "some time" when in reality it's a minimum of a month+ more likely 6+ months before they even attempt a change.
Nerfing showlin 1-6 so it's even harder to traverse, removing safe spots from 1-7, because screw being able to play the game.
Nerfing 3rd job strafe by 15% (average damage % not %) because "noone ever trains with strafe 3rd job" (because HH, MPQ, etc. clearly don't exist), even after re-nerfing their mastery (A point I brought up multiple times and was clearly ignored). Also the fact that strafe min damage is now 25% lower (375 vs 400%) compared to GMS, a fact that negatively affects even high level MM meaning they can't 1h or 2h consistantly, in fact, the minimum strafe damage 3rd job is 65% lower than for rangers (375 vs 440).
The infamous crit chance change, and the fact that after reverting that change the nerf to alchemist still exists
Nerfing SI for mages
Pretending they actually changed something at NT, or that it will ever be a viable training spot (I'm convinced they made it worse somehow)
Empty promises for months that they'll fix buccs.
nerfing mannies and not even attempting to provide an alternative for literally months, leaving us with one "meta" training map (cd cancer) from 70-115 instead of the 3 pre nerf

In fact, the only recent "nerf" they did that actually had somewhat more positive impact on real players than negative was the avoidability change (at least post next patch) to buccs.

 

Yes, yes. Bring back HH mules. :^)

 

Regardless of what you think of HH mules the thought process the game balance team went through for the nerf still doesn't make any sense to me.

There's been like 5 paladin threads at this point but I don't think there's been a single post from one of the balance team saying Paladins were too OP before the nerf. Every response is HH mules needed to be addressed Paladins are still good without it. If HH mules didn't exist HH wouldn't have been nerfed.

This is why people are so mad. They put so much focus into fixing mules and somehow the entire paladin class as a whole was just an after thought. "They'll be fine". It's laughable.

 

Exactly. Treating an entire class base as mules by nerfing them then telling them they're fine, or telling them they'll "totally get a buff some day" isn't particularly tactful. Especially considering how we've seen buccs get treated. Funny how they only mess with meme classes this way. No actual major nerf for dpm classes more people actually play that would seriously affect someone's DPM, e.g., BMs, NLs etc.

And no, I think HH mules are a shitty mechanic and probably should be dealt with, but playability should always be the priority over nerfing someone's ability to make money a bit faster. Last I checked they can still only do HT twice a day per char, so it's not like this is even letting them do more HT, it's just improving their efficiency.

 

Before the changes, the main theme of threads that frequently popped up on forum were complaints towards the small group of 'elite' players that were ruining the skillbook market by 'abusing' HT with their OP strats. :eyes:

 

I'm pretty doubtful this will affect that much tbh. If they're deadicated enough to spend however many hours on HT per day already, it's not like they're going to just do less HT because it takes a bit longer.

 

That was exactly the same argument made in defense of HH mules then, yet people still found a way to blame and complain.

 

Funny how certian people complaining constantly gets gms to nerf a class very few people play by 75%, yet we probably won't get a buff till december at the earliest.

 

The 1-6 showlin nerf I referred to was the one 6+ months ago where you made it significantly worse to traverse (takes me like 4 mins to get from 1-7f sometimes after this, but i'll probably get told this is my fault for not having an HS mule to door myself) and removed most of the "safe spots". I haven't been to showlin this patch because it's supposed to be broken. Considering how broken this update is can you really say taking a week for the patch maintenance would have been worse? Then mabye you could have buffed palis in the same patch as the nerf and avoided this whole situation? Now we have to wait, what, 6+ months for an actual buff instead.

According to one individual the crit change was compensation for the alchemist nerf (so that nl's were less reliant on SE after nerfing their ability to reliably use apples / other damage pots. If this is wrong, whatever. Still pretty shitty to leave them in a worse state, even if that's the biggest nerf you've given NLs that I can recall (funny how it seems like palis are the only ones who get nerfed this hard despite there being much more overpowered classes).

When I said there was no attempt, I meant at the time of the nerf. It wasn't for another 3+ months till you even attempted a buff, then another 3 before you attempted another set of buffs. My exact quote was "nerfing mannies and not even attempting to provide an alternative for literally months", so I think listing this claim as a counterargument is pretty disingenuous / misleading, and possibly even malicious. In addition, the only one of those maps that are even remotely used are CDs.

Then there's the fact that despite being level 100 mobs (so party exp is granted at 95) a player can't own a map at himes until level 105, by which point himes are even slower. This is because of another change caterd towards one specific group of players, that fucks over other players, and gets swept under the rug any time someone brings it up.

Not to mention the fact that out of every single map listed (outside of mannies), none are A) efficient due to garbage hp to exp ratio and B) soloable because they're all giant maps where you have to spend more time traversing than killing. These two reasons are part of why cds are the only buffed map that actually stuck.

The points around SI for bishes is interesting, still seems extremely shitty to nerf a class calling it a bug.

 

Heros are signficantly easier to play due to how much more consistant their damage is, the vertical range of brandish, the fact that they can fight any boss that doesn't resist physical attacks (unlike palis who can't fight bosses such as krexel, ergoth, etc.). Not to mention DKs are probably the best party / consistant damage warrior class (provided they can stay at the right zerk ratio). Anyone who claims pali is the best class is just looking with rose colored glasses.

 

Because krex resists every element? Just like ergoth? Just like the shitty flying statuss debuff machines in NT? Just like PPQ boss? I've literally brought that up in a post, and your reply was something to the effect of it being Neckson's design decision and you can't speak to that (to which I replied "isn't it the balance team's job to correct Neckson's imbalances"). I can get you the quote if you want.

I've been on this server consistently for about a year, and the only non hammer related changes to pali's I've seen were allegedly upgrading the range of blast and acb. I say allegedly because acb's range is still garbage and as a result I still can't consistently tell if I can actually hit something. Claiming you've buffed palis then nerfing hammer by 33% then another 75% on top of that, and they should be greatful is remarkably tone deaf.

 

If for some reason you guys thought paladins were the best warrior class (hint they weren't) why not buff other warrior classes instead of gutting paladin? Why always resort to nerfs? It leaves players disappointed and angry. It throws away their hard work and they are just supposed to accept it? Stop playing for 6 months maybe you throw them a bone? It's a terrible way to balance especially when you don't offer an option for the community to voice feedback to potential changes and what they mean.