You get swift blade for blue procs. That's one use more than BST, SCH, or PUP gets.
Really, shut up about fixing Paladin. It's unnecessary for -good- players to use because you can easily tank things on DD jobs instead. BST, SCH, PUP, DRG, RNG, SAM, DRK are all largely unused for the same reason(you can easily tank things on better DD jobs while doing more damage.. or in SCH's case you can use RDM or WHM to outdo it depending on situation). If you're a hardcore PLD-only obsessor for some reason, your job still provides more survivability and has access to a moderately usable WS(chant/vorpal), a magical ws that does decent damage(sanguine blade), an aoe ws for farming chests(cataclysm), and native phalanx. You're far from useless, you're just less than ideal.
If you can't deal with being less than ideal, level WAR. The hierarchy will change over time, that's natural progression of any MMO.
The real problem is that PLDs think they're entitled to something making them awesome just because the mentality 2 years ago was that you needed a PLD for everything(No, you didn't. No, I don't want to argue about it. Yes, it was the group mentality.).
Pandemonium.Ironguy said:
war is far from the glass cannon many preach it to be btw, i'd still take it over pretty much every single job in the game aside from pld/nin/sam as far as defensive purposes go
Disagree. Every job(maybe one or 2 are missing? Really don't think so at this point, I know MNK NIN SAM are fine) can get 50 PDT with shadow mantle.. every job can get 25 MDT with shadow ring and a fair bit of MDB in other slots.
That's a terrible basis for saying WAR has survivability, especially considering that you need to ride hasso and use retaliation for it to pull notably ahead of any other DD. This means any proper comparison is assuming WAR isn't using seigan(retals cut in half, lose 10% haste, self-scs are gone besides sekka/med), as a seiganed war is both doing less damage and mitigating less damage taken than a NIN or MNK. I assume you already know better than bringing up WAR/NIN.
If you do fulltime hasso and retaliation, it's true that most of the monsters in the game are too weak to kill you regardless. However, on the few that can, it's a pretty big sacrifice to lose out on the 70% melee mitigation from a 5-shadow ni every 25s or the >50% melee mitigation(cs) and penance/subtle blow from MNK's abilities. Furthermore, on things with additional effects, you're sacrificing either damage or survivability by using WAR(Apademak and Azdaja come to mind.. on either of them, a WAR fulltiming hasso will stay alive but will end up behind an equally equipped MNK or NIN in damage due to additional effects). You can say that melee damage is irrelevant, but your PDT set is pretty useless if you get DA->TPed(You can call this unlikely, but the reality is that most fights will have this happen at least once <25% even if you kill quickly. Your melee swing and it's DA are giving it over 50 tp in seconds.. better hope it doesn't have a good TP move.). Any TP move that is too fast to PDT set for is going to be much more threatening to a WAR with 1700 hp than a MNK with 2000(x1.8 in abyssea, I know).
I use WAR far more than MNK(both have empyreans/full af3/50 pdt/50 mdt/etc, both have full merits, character is galka so survivability is less of an issue than any other race), don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that it's very misleading to act as if it's survivability even compares to that of MNK or NIN. It'd be more accurate to say survivability is largely irrelevant.
