Some of you may have noticed that I have a split personality depending on what character I am posting as. My average-equipped human Paladin took it hard on the chin. Severely nerfed. Almost unplayable. On the other hand, my legendary/Adept III equipped, high level armorer Paladin fared quite well. I am conflicted about the combat changes. If you look at the plate armor fighters we are fairly well balanced between ourselves. When you compare the plate armor fighters to brawlers, we are not well balanced at all.
I did once represent Paladins in a semi-offical capacity but I found it too constraining. I felt constrained from expressing my opinions as I needed and wanted to in this forum. I am loyal to my own Paladin character and to the Paladin community, not to SOE though I do want to see their and my favorite game succeed. I have not had any official contact with SOE in some time nor do I expect to in the future. What I state here is my own opinion and is not based on anything I have heard from SOE. I have not heard anything from them in several months.
I think what SOE is doing is taking a wait and see attitude to the combat changes. I think they ran their parsers, balanced the numbers and when they got rid of enough bugs, the combat changes went live. I believe that their numbers told them that the fighter subclasses were balanced when the combat changes went live. I think that SOE is hoping we will get used to it, get over it and move on. I dont think they want to have to make major revisions in the new combat system and will try to avoid doing so if possible. There will probably be some adjustments made but not as many as some would like.
Almost every subclass thinks that they were nerfed, including brawlers. Talk to a brawler and they will tell you how weak at tanking their subclass is. One look at an uber brawlers stats might lead others to label them the uber tanking class in EQ2. I dont know how much of DoF has been explored. I dont know if all of the new uber items have been found. I think there is a lot we dont know. Maybe SOE expects us to go find out what we need to know to make our characters stronger. Maybe there are some little-known uber items that few if any have found. The problem with finding them is this:
If we are not strong enough to tank the RAID mobs that the drop the uber items we need, how are we going to get them? What tactics, stragegy or whatever are needed to kill them? I have yet to be in a single raid that fought one of the new 55+ raid mobs that was not wiped. I have been in x2, x3 and x4 raids with my high elf paladin. Right now, we need fabled tier6 items. Unfortunately the mobs that drop them are extremely hard to kill. The best most of us can do right now is pristine handcrafted legendary teir6 gear and adept iii spells and CAs. Not even that seems to be good enough to do the job. Advancing our level doesnt seem to help that much either. Maybe all the subclasses in the raid need to be a certain level to get some sort of synergy going.
Honestly, I think we are on our own. I dont think we are going to get much if any help anytime soon. All of us plate armor fighters are in the same boat together. We need to share information with each other so that we can figure out what we need, where we can get it and how we can get it. For myself, I intend to level my 51 armorer paladin up to 60 armorer so that he can provide my guild with the legendary chain and plate armor they need for tier6. I dont know what else to do. I do know that I am tired of going to raids that get wiped. I hope that Rajinn can and will help us. Until then, we need to help each other 