Pally Changes

[Skandranon]

In other words, the way things are right now.

Sigh.

I firmly believe that Horde have even more of a complex about Paladins than Alliance have about Shamans. And given how much Alliance are freaked out about Shamans, that's saying quite a lot.

I don't deny that paladins in large group PvP have roles and are significant and powerful in their own way. I do argue against the Horde proposition that this constitutes omg overpowered imba, just as I'm usually the one pointing out to the Alliance that shaman aren't omg overpowered imba either.

You're not getting one thing:  Paladins can't dish out as much damage, but Paladins don't die.

This is an amusing myth. Paladins are only slightly more survivable than shamans, priests and druids on the battlefield - and that's if their shield is up. If their shield is down, they're not more survivable than any other healer class. Probably a little less.

Divine Shield's amusing because its greatest effect isn't making the paladin invulnerable. Its most powerful effect is scaring and demoralizing Horde players, which it does surprisingly often. Horde players look at a paladin, think, "if I attack him, he'll just bubble...I'm not going to bother". It's funny because Horde players would never think the same thing about a mage with ice block. They boast confidently about how mages who ice block are dumb and that it just delays their death by ten seconds. But a paladin? OMG noes. Let's not bother, they're invincible.

Plate matters, sure. I don't dispute that paladins take less damage from physical damage classes (though not significantly less; the mitigation difference between a paladin and shaman is around 10-12%, and disappears entirely if the paladin's using a two-hander and the shaman is using a shield). On the other hand, when the opposing team's focus-firing (and really, why would they not?) the majority of any character's survivability is not mitigation but healing. The paladin can dish out ~1400 points of healing every 2.5 seconds. In a desperate situation he can force crit it for about 2100 points. Shamans, meanwhile, get around 1k healing every 1.5 seconds, druids can get 1k with a 1k HoT every 2.0 seconds assuming they somehow miss their 50% chance to crit with regrowth, and priests can instantly shield 1k and flash heal for another 1k every 1.5s. Shamans and druids can NS-bigheal in desperate situations. When they're being focus-fired, I've seen shamans and druids and priests heal themselves through it. Paladins, however, have to bubble. They have nothing else.

Fun tip: send a beast specced hunter's pet into Bestial Wrath and unleash him upon a paladin. The paladin will have to burn a shield in order to live.

Paladins also are not immune to any form of spell interruption. You can screw with their heals the same way you can stop anyone else's. Counterspell, kick, pummel, earthshock (oh hi counterspell with 500 damage attached). Not only that, paladins have a bigger window than anyone else to interrupt. They can't even bubble out of it, since interrupting a heal puts all of a paladin's shields on cooldown.

The idea that a paladin somehow "doesn't die" more than any other healer is absurd. More upfront mitigation at the cost of far less healing trades off, in my opinion. And if you think a paladin doesn't die, you've clearly never bothered to focus fire a druid.

There are some serious issues with totems.

Granted. Yet I caution everyone not to underestimate earthbind, grounding, and tremor totems. Especially in Arathi, well placed Earthbind totems can stutter the Alliance flow of reinforcements badly. Tremor totems give the Horde an enormous advantage: fear-bombing is a powerful tactic and Alliance has no way to counter it, while the Horde does. As for grounding totems, they effectively pre-emptively cleanse all harmful debuffs on the party before they land, especially given their current bugged state where they absorb everything instead of just one thing every 10 seconds. Yeah, they can be tracked down and killed, but you'll find that very few people have the attention to spare to kill totems in the middle of fighting.

I know it's not fun being on the other side of a fight involving a paladin, that's for sure.
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And I think this is the core of the problem. No, it's not fun playing against a paladin (fyi: it's no fun playing against a shaman either). But that's not a reason to cry imbalance. The way human memory works, we all tend to remember the frustrating incidents and forget when we didn't have that hard of a time. Hence the overwhelming sentiment from Horde that DS is BS, and the strongly communicated impression from Horde that paladins can invuln whenever they feel like it and that they don't die. You remember the times when they don't die, you remember the times when they bubbled and healed to full and you hated it. You don't remember the times when they were countered or didn't have the shield up and died quickly.