Knights

paladins need a way to generate threat while healing themselves/others. They also need some way to further scale their self healing potential. On top of having the worst mitigation of the 3 tanks, paladins also have poor self-healing - with their self healing being nearly unusable when they need to generate threat. Paladins lack major personal cooldowns or "oh shit" buttons like SK and warrior have. Paladins only really have LoH, while warriors have NOW!, enrage, resil and SKs have leech touch and the ability to /s 7 on demand for insane self healing. Paladins also get less defensive value out of vah back because their self healing does not scale with damage like the other tanks. They also get less offensive value because their DPS while tanking is comically bad.

paladin defensive stances are non-existant - /s 4 is actually worse or equivalent to /s 3 while also draining stamina.

paladins are by far the worst tank class for tanking EXP groups

outside of certain undead bosses, paladins are almost always a worse choice than the other tank classes. And even on those select undead mobs, its often better to just use the paladin as a DPS or have them go conduit mode. Paladins need some serious buffs to become a competitive tank options in most scenarios.
 
Yeah, between the two knight classes, Paladins definitely get the shaft on scaling. I think if their self healing got buffed and/or had some mechanic where it generated aggro (maybe at a rate of X% of the hate a priest would generate?) that would help on their aggro and defensive capabilities a lot. I agree that warriors are OP and need to be tuned down. Paladins also definitely need either a revamp on s4 or a new defensive stance. I think you're underselling the value of a paladin, but I think you're right about the issues facing the class.
 
With a paladin raid wise you mainly get protection of the lady, r1 (which is made worse if the paladin is tanking healing wise for...reasons??), undead crits and probably conduit. The first two would be useful for kite group on thaz but then we'd have to bring a paladin somehow and that's not an easy fit. The rest of the time a paladin (exception Ix, an undead monster) is a drag on high tier content due to the mechanics of fights needing high damage, especially in silent halls. The mitigation or healing they could potentially provide does not outweigh the extra babysitting they need tanking wise or the drag on damage they are compared to potentially another damage class (or hell, just bench them for another healing class if you're that hard up).

Tanking wise it's even worse, warrior mitigates drastically better and foelock picks up adds quickly. SK aggro is a complete joke, veil the melee group then you can just use all your mana spamming deflux (well, mostly) to not only do damage but pad healing. With apper tanking I can go ham and not have problems, with kharras I have to watch initial but after a bit I'm fine. With a paladin I'm scared shitless half the fight wishing I had room for jolt on my bars or jolting initially and swapping songs.

That's not even going into how much magic damage benefits an SK.
 
Paladin's and SKs have identical average mitigation in /s 3 when taking 10000 dps over 15 minutes from 10 level 70 mobs. (Using the same equipment aside from Vah Sword)
(The SK took 1.27% more average damage, the only differences were - Blessing of Malath on CD vs Deflux on CD and SK Nautilus vs Paladin Nautilus)
100% over healing was allowed on the test.

Paladin /s 4 and SK's /s 6 also have identical average mitigation over the same time frame. However. The paladin stance drains more stamina and is evasive, resulting in a max 6 second burst dps that is 5% higher than a SK.

Evasive skills are less valuable as enemy mob level increases. Itemization plays a larger part in this discussion, ie, a paladin with a Spirit-Harvest is noticeable.

All three tanks were tested creating equal amount of threat on 6 level 70 mobs.
Warrior was click one button E.Z.
Paladin resists were annoying, but threat was strong when unresisted, being the largest gain over 6 targets.
Shadowknight mana usage was a huge draw, using about 10% more of its mana-bar than the paladin to create equal amounts of threat on the same 6 targets.
 
Thanks for the numbers Cole. I always kinda suspected this was about how it would shake out and I appreciate that the time was taken to determine this and to share the results.
 
No problem. That is a gross summary. I tested each tank's self healing. Tanks with different weapons. Aggro with different weapons. After a while its just numbers. It was mainly for my own curiosity and what could be done with the scripting. I also thought that maybe there is a lot of ideas about tanks that might not necessarily be true and that we should have some numbers before we start making changes.

Its interesting because everyone's vision of what tanks 'should' be is different.
 
Could use some more information like gear and things like that. Average hit, how the mobs swing (is it just a 10k round, or 4 2.5k, etc), are these like Dev-Supreme monsters that seem to have insanely high accuracy?

Tier makes a pretty big difference with some stuff gear and threat wise, like for example a taesh bracer is a pretty nice pickup aggro wise for an SK. When you have more options for magic damage to improve lifetaps that also helps. Group makeup also has a pretty big impact on aggro also. Sure SKs with their own tools might struggle to pick up mass adds compared to a warrior or an SK but veiling someone who can aoe kind of solves that issue.
 
Dev-Cole said:
Paladin's and SKs have identical average mitigation in /s 3 when taking 10000 dps over 15 minutes from 10 level 70 mobs. (Using the same equipment aside from Vah Sword)
(The SK took 1.27% more average damage, the only differences were - Blessing of Malath on CD vs Deflux on CD and SK Nautilus vs Paladin Nautilus)
Click to expand...
you said the paladin and SK mitigations were identical, but then later say the SK took slightly more damage on average? can you elaborate on this part a bit. does casting remove the ability to use defensive skills (dodge/block/parry/riposte)?

I don't see any mention of /s 7 use on the SK - arguably their strongest self heal/mitigation tool. Or veil from a shadowknight - possibly the single strongest threat generation spell in the game.

The mobs are doing 10k dps - but how large is each incoming hit? When SKs are swapping into /s 7 they mitigate smaller hits better.

The numbers are neat but they lack context
 
It was tier 14 gear. I copied a few of the pieces and added 20000 hp so the tank had 56000 HP. I made all the gear all/all.

I did two tests when it concerned max damage. One with a mobs min damage at 667 and max at 1333, averaging 1000, and a second with a mobs min damage at 1334 and max at 2666, averaging 2000 base. Both with 5 attack rounds. 10 mobs. (This is more to speed up the test)

I did both these tests again with level 65 mobs and then level 70 mobs.

Im recording change in HP over time. So if a paladins total average dmg taken over time is a bit less than a SKs, its probably just the paladin having a larger self healing than the SK. There was no loss in overhealing with my test paladin.

I didn't look at single target aggro and from what it sounds like paladins fail at that.

I can do more tests if you want. It takes time.

I saw the paladin /s 4 as better than /s 3. Could players share any numbers concerning that?
 
Wasn't paladins tanking stance nerfed a really long time ago or am I misremembering.
 
Dev-Cole said:
I can do more tests if you want. It takes time.
Click to expand...

I'd be interested in seeing more tests, single target aggro definitely interests me because post new R2 Paladins saw a solid boost in aggro, which I suspect would mirror earlier tests roughly, SKs still probably can generate more single target aggro but at a much higher mana cost.

The other thing I'd be interested in would be a dps test. I get that a dps test is much more difficult because what exactly is the optimum spell/disc/stance/whatever order is up for debate for each class, but that certainly would fall under the reasons for this thread. Really I think the important thing would try to get an idea of what the goals for each class should be, get an idea of where they are in these criterea and work out from there (super obvious I know). *shrug*
 
Thuug said:
I'd be interested in seeing more tests, single target aggro definitely interests me because post new R2 Paladins saw a solid boost in aggro, which I suspect would mirror earlier tests roughly, SKs still probably can generate more single target aggro but at a much higher mana cost.

The other thing I'd be interested in would be a dps test. I get that a dps test is much more difficult because what exactly is the optimum spell/disc/stance/whatever order is up for debate for each class, but that certainly would fall under the reasons for this thread. Really I think the important thing would try to get an idea of what the goals for each class should be, get an idea of where they are in these criterea and work out from there (super obvious I know). *shrug*
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If you discount the fact that Veil exists, the first statement might be true. Paladin aggro is incredibly mana intensive, nerfs their healing by removing the ability to crit, and requires pretty much every single spell cast to be dedicated towards generating threat - vastly limiting their ability to heal themselves/others.

The issue with comparing tank DPS is not only the DPS disparity between tank classes, but the fact that tanking with a shadowknight lets your DPS go full throttle. With paladin threat certain classes have to wait to engage or not cast significant portions of their damage.
 
Dev-Cole said:
Im recording change in HP over time. So if a paladins total average dmg taken over time is a bit less than a SKs, its probably just the paladin having a larger self healing than the SK. There was no loss in overhealing with my test paladin.
Click to expand...
I don't understand how an SK spamming deflux is doing less self healing than a paladin that is only casting blessing of malath on cooldown. Unless paladin nautilus is proccing off of riposte from mobs that aren't the paladin's primary target I'm kind of stumped on how these numbers came up.

An SK is able to deflux 5-6 times in the cooldown period of blessing of malath. Airek's (the literal best geared paladin in the game) blessing of malath heals for 2377 during the daytime. Versul (a tier 11ish SK) can deflux for 889 during the daytime - without bardsong. An SK 3 tiers lower would be doing close to double the self-healing, while doing significantly more damage and generating significantly more threat. This doesn't even include the fact that the SK could be stance tapping as well, which would effectively double their self healing again (and this doesn't even include the healing from auto attack damage, bracer procs, casting a spear etc). In fact, I think 1 runic spear cast in /s 7 will outheal blessing of malath on its own.

Thats just comparing Airek to an SK 3 tiers lower - a t14 SK like apper is defluxing for significantly more.
 
Tevinter said:
If you discount the fact that Veil exists, the first statement might be true. Paladin aggro is incredibly mana intensive, nerfs their healing by removing the ability to crit, and requires pretty much every single spell cast to be dedicated towards generating threat - vastly limiting their ability to heal themselves/others.

The issue with comparing tank DPS is not only the DPS disparity between tank classes, but the fact that tanking with a shadowknight lets your DPS go full throttle. With paladin threat certain classes have to wait to engage or not cast significant portions of their damage.
Click to expand...

R2 does not remove their ability to crit. Its just a 50% penalty to healing done, most of the parsers read +/- healing potency effects incorrectly.
 
Yeah, you can’t even tell I’m self healing while running R2 because my health bar barely moves when I heal in bigger pulls/bigger bosses. Then I have to wait the long cooldown to try again. Sometimes you sit there knowing you could really use a heal to pad/help healers but there are still two server ticks left before you can heal for over 1k. On over 13k hp... yikes.
 
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