PLD video analysis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hkOE3d7MT0


First of all let's talk about weapon choice. 

Here are the general options:

Long delay 1 hand sword (bastard, etc)
Generally for dealing damage, this used to be very common.  Along with a good shield this combo worked wonders.  With the meta the way it is now this has fallen out of popular use.  With the update this may come back into the fore.
Mid-delay bonus stat sword (sanguine, talekeeper, sagasinger)
Used for their bonus stats.  Bonus HP/MP and whatever else can't hurt.  The Sagasinger actually has great delay and plenty of nice stats - maybe the best possible weapon for a hybrid rook guard / stat boosted PLD.
Short delay 1 hand sword (cermet, etc)
Rook guard material.  Standard.
Dagger (Mercurial kris or other)
Not really used at all, although Shadowstitch can be surprisingly effective.  The MP-draining weaponskills aren't worth the TP.  Without heavy parameters for Cyclone it isn't very good either.  I think it's good to keep one on you though for those rare times when all you need to do is stop someone from quarrying.  A sort of set-it-and-forget-it method for shutting down a potential quarry threat.
Staff (Chatoyant)
For healing (bonus healing from the latent) and regenerating MP.  Chatoyant's resistances (20 of each) are icing on the cake.  Spirit Taker can do some good work (100~150) and Earth Crusher is good for doing quick magic damage stacked with Holy.  Lacks rook guard delay but that can be made up for with a fast bow.  Also the damage over time with staff is very weak.
Great sword (AH stuff, Ascalon, hey shut up it's awesome)
Hey.  Shut up, it's awesome.  Seriously though if I was elvaan I would probably rock this..
Polearm (Borian spear, etc)
.. Or this.  Paladin needs merits to use Penta Thrust but it can actually dish some nice damage.  PLD's accuracy is very bad with spear so you need to compensate.  Leg Sweep can come in handy too, but you already have a stun if you're 1-handing.

You want to be using a lamian kaman +1 for rook guarding, regardless of your main weapon.  Lamian kaman +1 beats aureole out now after one of the several, completely unnecessary ranged updates.


As for general equipment everything is pretty standard.  Start with your MP gear and unless the enemy has some serious aspir power, just keep it on so your random elixirs and mana powders recover more MP.  You won't be targeted until later on.

With the update mentioned above, full-on vorpal damage PLD just might make a comeback.

Right.  So I would go with the staff in a bigger game or the short-delay sword when it's just a small 3-3 or 4-4 and the PLD is the only healer.  There will probably be more times during that small match that you need to stall a scoring DD until your front line comes back to the fight.

Okay let's take a look at this video.  Starting off, the PLD can't do too much.  Can't cure because your DD want to die for their hyper.. so basically I try to dedicate my time to interrupting the other team's quarry.  It helps to flash that first weaponskill from the SAM or DRG in this situation when the beatdown is coming on your DRK, but I tend to keep my provokes for quarry interruption.  I try to get a rhythm for the mirror PLD's quarrying.  Lots of back line players tend to spam the crap out of their quarry macro so you can catch them doing it on time.

I guess the most important thing for the first half of the match is to keep your quarrying clean.  Get those petras and get a lot of them.  Do your best to toss your returning DDs a protect III.  Your WHM will be busy, so be a gentleman and take care of this task for her.  In addition to these, keep an eye on people to flash, and do a check of enemy petras on the regular.  Yeah, I didn't do a very good job of checking in this video..

If you choose staff, I find that samurai make the best targets for Taker as they (assuming they're prehyper) are going to be wearing -evasion, low def equipment and will be rocking berserk.  The worst thing is to blow your hard-earned TP into cureskin.. so keep an eye out.

5:40~ Hustle over to the rook to quarry a quick echo drop to fix silence.  You'll almost always get echo drops when silenced .. even more so if you're near the rook.

7:00~ Chose elixir over hi-elixir because I was expecting some shit to break out late game (MP was alright + we were losing at the time) and the hi-elixir could be the difference, NQ elixir maybe not so much (consider yourself scoring with people on you, you want that beefy hi-elixir in your bag)

8:00~ 7 minutes left in game but we went with WHM kill.  Sometimes it's the only way to claw back into a game you're losing

9:15~ Blargggggh forgot to put holy on my new macro sets (remade them all for new pc), this could have been a badass holy kill if I was a bit quicker.

9:55~ It's up to their team now to make up for the change in the game.  Their WHM can't really build petra anymore so the front line need to be getting as many petra as they can while we've got our focus on killing their WHM.  It's also time for any unkilled mages to suit up because the hurt is coming.  Usually.

12:00~ Got a bit crossed up here, really wanted to keep an eye on Sepia but I had time to lethe the PLD for sure..  who knows man.  After watching this a few times, that could have come back to bite me in the ass if they had had enough petra to make it close.

Late game, the PLD or any secondary healer needs to be on WHM-watch and help them weather the storm.

For the rest of the game I basically creep around with a lethe +1 but never use it.  My team managed to shut down their WHM for the most part and we kept them from scoring too much otherwise.  They really seemed to fall apart after the WHM went down and it was plain sailing from there.  Sepia did a good job staying alive for a while when they came for him and nobody bothered with me.  Arabull had some good quarry luck and was on blast most of the game.