Paladins and 1.9

[Kevin]

Really?  You must be talking to a very reasonable set of paladins.  Also, the "raid buff" thing goes way past convienence to a substantial PvE buff.
Some people think that slow gameplay that powerfully helps their teammats is fun.

I'm actually calling for some shaman buffs, especially to restoration, and some changes to some skills in the other trees as well. They have some completely useless talents on the order of the old hunter 31 point survival .6 DPS bleed talent and they have some issues with game play as a hybrid though not on the paladin scale.

Go play WC3, people.  I think they have done an admirable job of bringing the feel of the WC3 pally into a MMORPG.  In WC3, pally's ran around with knights, and had crappy dps.  When one of the knights started going down, you healed him.  When your opponent got tired of that and FF'ed you, you shielded and ran, then went back to healing.  It is really powerful, but maybe not fun for everyone.

And play WC2 and see that this isn't the paladin. :) Blizzard still doesn't know what the paladin is in my book.

And if you don't like the Pally game play, WHY DID YOU DO IT?  It was the same for 60 levels.  It just boggles my mind how you people stuck with something that is "broken, boring, stupid" for probably upwards of 240 hours /played.

Several reasons. At times I like the simple play, or course I will play my warrior that way at times too, just letting auto-attack do most of the work and hitting a big rage use skill every now and then. I do it with my hunter at times as well. I won't touch my rogue, mage, or warlock when in a mood like this. I'm not a huge fan of soloing a class that can't self heal because even if the combat takes longer I'm not a huge fan of banage or eat/drink after a fight. Blizzard has promised change for a long time as well so I didn't want to shelve him until those got around. As you mention later group play with a paladin can be quite fun. I also am taking every class to 60 at some point (got 4 there and 3 more over 30 the rest over 20). I also have roleplay reasons behind every character I have except the mules and those helped drive me too.



As to the changes. Well they are still hard to talk about as they keep changing them. What is on the test realm today isn't current either as they said BoK was going to move to a new spot and it still hasn't.

Is the class more interactive now? Somewhat. Do I have more control on my DPS? A little. Do I tank as well as I used to? No. Do I heal as well as I used to? Depends on the spec. Is my DPS better or worse? Burst DPS is better, DPS + downtime is a little worse with the 2 builds I've tried on test and I don't see much in the way of items to help it. I do have more builds to test.

I like the new judgement system, though it is generally wisdom that is judged so that I can keep up mana levels. But not having to refresh the judgement on the mob while solo is nice. The change to the range on judgements is nice helpful change that removes some frustrations I used to have with that. Seal of Command and Seal or Righteousness deliver pretty much the same damage over time regardless of weapon choice from what I've seen. This includes judging them more frequently. The damage scaling by weapon speed on righteousness and command on weapon damage seem to make them basically the same skill now. It is not clear that one is better on a faster weapon than another to me anymore.

A 33 retribution/18 holy paladin plays pretty much the same as 31 holy/20 retribution paladin. The holy paladin has more control over damage though.

My 31 ret/20 holy build in 1.8 holds about 135 DPS in Tyr's hand with 0 down time (If I'm low on mana I just mana up on the next mob and do less damage). The 32 retribution/19 holy build holds about 145 DPS but has much more down time as I lost several of my healing and mana regen tricks (no free crit heals, 6 mana per 5 from no more imp blessing of wisdom) I was not able to mana-up on a mob as effectively as I used to be able to mainly because I couldn't get a free crit heal when I wanted. A 31 Holy/20 retribution held about 110 DPS with 0 downtime. I'm still planning on doing some 3 tree builds and a heavy prot build as well.

Raiding with a paladin still makes you a buff bot/healer. I don't mind that only the holy paladins will be judging the seal of light/wisdom on boss mobs in MC because you don't want to be meleeing on many of them which other builds without the talent would need to do to keep the judgement up. I can live with a paladin not tanking there because a shaman can't either. A shaman will still offer more in the DPS department it seems and their healing isn't much different. Paladins sill offer more with their blessing and the judgements than a shaman did with totems as well. But I've always felt the paladin offered more to a raid than a shaman. That hasn't changed.

A holy and a retribution pally still play pretty much the same, the trees don't differentiate play style that much right now, though again I haven't tested protection yet. Some of that may have been because both my test builds had holy talents though. I can still make self heals uninterruptable from damage.

The changes do feel like they point you to a raid build or a PvP build.



Edit: Well I just refreshed the talent calculator http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classe...s2/talents.html and it now reflects the changes to kings and repentance they had mentioned earlier.