On Pallies in WoW

I am thinking on writting up a dissertation on them and posting it in the wow pally forums. I have my ideas about them, but I was wondering what other people who play them think.

Do you think they are fine after 1.9? Do they need to be buffed, and if so, how? What do you think, specifically, should be improved about them? What do you think about the judgement and seals system? Is there a whole other direction you think they should go with them?

Take the above and consider it from a PvE and PvP perspective. Some things may be fine for one, but not the other.

Some general thoughts I have are:

5 Minute blessings: Asside from the 5 minute irriation and the now 15 minute irritation, they are not nearly powerful enough to warrent such short timers. Either the blessings need to become much stronger or the durations much longer. I think they should go with the 30 min / 60 min with reagent system. I think it would be much more intresting to make the blessings far stronger and keep thier duration short, then going with the longer duration model.

Judgements and Seals: Seal of Command is proabbly the best seal out there, and that is not to good. Relative to other seals, its great, but relative to other DPS talents and powers it is not. Judgement of the crusader only gives 50% of its damage boost when applied to judgement of rightousness. Against SoC, it is a mere 29% yield. Seal of Light / Wisdom and Judgement of Light/Wisdom hardly are worth it. The amount of manna/health returned is very low, and the proc percentage is very low. Overall the effects of judgements and seals are very small.

Auras: Dev aura only gives me about 3% more damage reduction. My resistance auras only give me 60 pts. That is 60 pts that do not stack with ANYTHING. Looking at my guy with no auras on, I have 15 shadow resistance. I turn on my 60 pt shadow aura, and my total resistance is 60 pts, not 75. Retribution aura does 20pts per hit to a mob. When mobs have 4000hp, and are hitting for 100pts, that is hardly useful.

Ok, so where should all this go? When looking at warriors they can change modes by switching stances. You want dps go offensive or beserker, you want to tank? go defensive. Druids turn into bears to tank, cats for DPS, and casters for healing and CC.

I think a pally should have the same choices, only his blessings, auras, judgements and seals are used to accomlish this. Blizzard needs to focus these abilities and make them much stronger. Ill go into details once I write my dissertation on pallies, but I wanted your thoughts pallies too.

Auras and Blessings kicked the crap out of totems pre 1.9. Post 1.9, they kick the crap out of them more. I dont think you can make them any better than they already are.

olaf

My primary thought is that it sounds stupid when people call them “Pallies,” especially since it’s only one letter shorter than “Paladins,” so it’s not actually saving any time. Then again, I can’t stand it when people call shotguns “shotties” (that’s not any shorter than “shotgun,” dipshits) or grenades “'nades,” either, so maybe I just don’t like stupid abbreviations in general.

As for actual Paladins in WoW, I’ve never played one before. I was thinking about starting one, but now that I read your post, it kinda makes me want to start a Warrior instead. I didn’t know they’d messed with the Paladins’ abilities like that.

On paladins… http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=Yhm1ClW5uAY&search=world%20of%20warcraft

I have a lvl 16 one but I dont think I’ve played it for 6-7 months. Its basically become a mule. Several paladins I know of aren’t too fond of them. There are some really good players though in pvp with them. In AB and WSG a paladin that heals/buffs and can hold control points is necessary and at times insanely hard to kill.

I like the idea of them, but rather then a discussion on like/dislike pallys (paladins sounds to verbose and formal for my tastes, sorry), Id like a discussion on what could be done to imrpoved them beyond simple things like more DPS, etc…

I absolutely loathe most of the internet dialect that grows up around online games. I’m a crusty old fashioned type of nerd and I wince at talk of frags and pallies and l33t and pwned and uber anything.

But complaining about language won’t change it so I’m just gritting my teeth and trying not to seem too codgerish. Semicolon. Right Bracket.

That is 60 pts that do not stack with ANYTHING. Looking at my guy with no auras on, I have 15 shadow resistance. I turn on my 60 pt shadow aura, and my total resistance is 60 pts, not 75.

You’re doing something wrong, then. With my fire resistance gear on, my FR is around 160. Throw a paladin with the FR aura in my group, and it goes to 220. It doesn’t stack with the +all resists bonus from Mark of the Wild, though, which really sucks. :(

Clarification: My Error, it doesn’t stack with anything but +res gear. No potions, not spell effects from trinkets or from castable buffs (like the priest shadow resistance).

I don’t bother to rage against that machine. When in Rome, so I say pally and shammie and lol and woot and all the rest of it.

I think the psychological idea behind “pally” may actually have to do with verbalization – i.e. saving spoken syllables rather than saving typed characters. That is to say, the “speaking” part of the brain gets its wires crossed with the typing part.

Either that, or it’s just the desire to sound informal for social purposes or to project a sense of familiarity. Like when people (verbally) call me “Gordo” despite that it uses up just as many syllables as “Gordon.”

Pally is one less syllable than paladin.

Paladin blessings are fantastic. Blessing of Kings, for example, is basically like upgrading everyone in your party/raid an entire armor set, in terms of stats. Giving everyone but the tanks a 20% reduction to threat through Blessing of Salvation is huge. Giving a Main Tank 60 more fire resistance through an Aura is huge - that’s 1/5th of the FR they need for fighting Ragnaros.
Combine Blessing of Wisdom with Judgement of Wisdom on a mob and that’s a large amount of mana back to the raid each tick.
In addition, Judgements and Blessings work for everyone in the raid, unlike the party-based benefits that Totems provide.

I say this as an Alliance character in a raiding guild, by the way. Paladins are a huge part of our success. When 15 minute buffs came in, we noticed a huge improvement in efficiency
Your concerns all seem to revolve around PvP, it seems. You want lots of spike damage. Consider that currently, a properly played Paladin in PvP is like a priest wearing Plate armor. With the proper auras and on-the-spot healing, a Paladin is a huge contributor to PvP success

Haven’t played a pally, but pallys are definitely tougher after the patch.

In small scale PvP a pally that heals is scary. A pally and a warrior are a really tough combo to beat when the pally heals instead of trying to lay on the DPS. With a priest or druid healing, I’ll try to kill the healer and worry about the tank after. You can’t kill pallys fast enough though so you have to save them for last. It really makes it tough when they heal. Fortunately, many of them only heal themselves.

From what I’ve read around the net, it seems a lot of people are disappointed with the direction of paladins because they expect them to be holy warriors, but the way they play in WoW they act more like priests in platemail. Paladins really have very few combat moves or maneuvers, and the majority of their powers and effects are spell-like in nature. This does seem to go at odds with the whole “warrior” image.

I’d much rather see Paladins move towards longer-duration Blessings than stronger-but-still-short ones. Recasting buffs over and over and over drives me bonkers in MMOs. One of the best features of DAOC was their buff system… no need to recast most buffs ever!

I have a 43rd Pally (love ya) and I definitely feel this way. If I were to specialize in healing, I could be a damn fine healer and not be wearing cloth. That said, that’s not what I want to do. Seal of Command is the best I can get and it’s MUCH worse after 1.9. I’ve actually started using a shield and and a fiery weapon so I can take more hits before I get thrown down. I do heal, myself and others, and buff and so on, but I’m not wanting to play a priest in platemail, so post 1.9, the Pally isn’t as much fun… At least I’ve found it to be so.

Now, that’s not talking about PvE. We still own up and down in PvE. It’s PvP I’m talking about.

But DAOC’s buff system’s vulnerability was that it was so easy to just make a botted character so you could benefit from the buffs. One of the critical downfalls of that game.

I’ve seen botted characters in every MMO I’ve ever played. DAOC’s system doesn’t strike me as particularly good or bad in that regard.

Wow set the classes up fairly well so that there really is no need for botting. pretty much every class has the ability to buff itself in some way, and the availability of alchemy at release (and potion drops) means people are much more used to healing themselves with potions and bandages. Blizzard is also much more … enthusiastic about stopping botters, which is something Mythic never did.

Anyhow, don’t want to turn this into a daoc vs wow buff discussion.

10 minutes on the paladin blessings would be cool I think, I am wondering if they have them so short to cut down on making them into some sort of buff-bot though.

A pally jerk robbed me of one of my warrior’s set pieces my last run through UBRS, so they can all go to hell.

Why did he take it? It’s not like he can wear it.