On Pallies in WoW

Same reason most of them tend to roll on warrior gear. It’s epic, it’s plate, and it’s got phat stats. I don’t even think these people pay attention to class specification; every instance run it’s the same tug-of-war chat during drops and I tire of it. Not that I mean to lambast ALL pally players, I’m really not the type to take this stuff all that seriously, but this warrior doesn’t need em.

I hope you’re not talking about the Valor set, because it’s not class specific, just plate-specific. Feral Druids wear Shadowcraft a lot, and I’ve seen hunters wearing Elements gear and shaman wearing Beaststalker.

Also it’s not an abbreviation, it’s an insult. Using the ‘ie’ or ‘y’ suffix is a normal English way of implying a diminutive and is often used to make something seem less threatening.

I think saying pally instead of paladin because of how it is spoken, not based on typing a few less characters.

Anyway…

In certain circumstances, pally dps is extreemly high. IE: Fighting undead, and now demons. Last night (and this was not the first time) on a baron run of 10 people, I was #3 in dps, almost number 2 which was a mage. The top spot went to a hunter. In damage taken, I was #2 as well, so I was doing a good job tanking.

However, that was undead. Without that, my dps would be far lower.

The seals and judgments do not do very much, and I think they need to be boosted significantly. Asside from SoC, the rest of them have very little impact on game play. Perhaps the seal of rightousness is next one to use if you are doing 1h damage, although a surprising number of weapons still get more boost from SoC then SoR. Anway… my point is they need to be looked at.

And blessings are not that hot. 30 manna every 5 seconds? Outside of boss fights on the scale of magmidar, it makes little difference. BoK… sorry again 10% bonsus to stats does not make a big difference. It helps a little, but thats it. I think druids get the best benifit since they need alll stats.

Overall the problem is that a paladin can not switch modes easily (without respeccing) like a warrior and druid can. Since they can not, then whever talent build mode should be very strong. IE: You go a DPS build, your DPS should be extreem. You go defense, hitting you should be like beating on block of iron, aka a much harder target then a defense specced warrior.

The holy tree is just odd and not a good fit. Its got some healing and buffs, however, even a holy specced pally will never be a good 2nd tier healer. And if you do go holy spec, you kind of give up the warrior half and you end up with a tuff priest who isnt that hot at healing.

BoW reduces downtime when mowing through lower level dungeons.
Even non-raid bosses can take a couple of minutes to take down. That’s 720 mana right there, or 2 extra flash heals from a priest for nothing. Sounds pretty good to me.

10% to stats makes a huge difference. With my current gear, BoK means 100 extra Ranged Attack power (5ish dps) and a few hundred hit points. Maybe this is coming from being in a raiding guild, but if you get 5 or 6 Paladins all organizing proper blessings, you will notice a huge difference in efficiency. Mark of the Wild may increase all stats, but that boost to spirit and int doesn’t benefit a warrior with max weapon skills. 10% stats is probably a significant amount of HP, and armor and dodge from agility

Also, one of our top healers is a Holy/Protection Paladin. He’s also a pretty good tank/damage dealer. If I’m not paying attention when going on a DM or BRD run with him, he can sometimes out-damage me

Have just started playing WoW for the first time, and I chose a dwarven paladin to start off with. I am enjoying playing him a lot, but I had been thinking that the couple of seals I have available don’t do very much. I was hoping that was because my level is so low.

Typically I’m using Seal of Righteousness I believe it is for the little bit of extra damage but mostly for the judgment as a finisher. I sometimes switch to Seal of the Crusader when I seem to be having trouble hitting a target. Not sure why you would use righteousness once you have SoC, unless you have low mana.

I’ve been futzing around with the talent trees, which seem very Diablo II-like in nature. Having experience with that game, I immediately began to see which end-of-tree skills I wated to get and the truth of the matter is none of them rock my world. While I have no doubt that conventional wisdom is to max one of the trees, my current thinking is to do something a little like this 15/18/18 split

For a while with my pally (I’ve never got one higher than 19) I was using Seal of Crusader, then immediately judging it, then putting up Seal of Righteousness so that the Holy damage would be enhanced by the Crusader judgment. I eventually gave up and got annoyed with this rather fussy progression. I have no idea whether it’s in any way optimal in terms of damage/mana, but now I just put on Righteousness and bash away, judging at the end of the fight. (Still don’t have a pally above 19 so more complex stuff is out of my grasp.)

Sure he can, if it was an UBRS run, it would have been a valor set item, and yes, he could wear it. Doesn’t mean he was right to roll on it, though. Master Looter for the win!

My biggest gripe about 1.9 is that it took my build (high 30s-low 40s) and made it impossible to re-create even at 60, AND cut down on SoC.

That said, I like the “melee hits restart the judgement timer” change. I like the changes to some of the seals/judgements (not SoC, but such is life).

In PVE at low 40s, I’m a solo machine with almost no downtime that can take 2 (sometimes 3) mobs at or 1-2 levels above.

As for the holy warrior thing, it seems like people wouldn’t be happy unless they did almost as much damage as a warrior and healed almost as well as a priest. That just sounds horribly unbalanced.

Multiple pallies with co-ordinated blessings are solid. I agree that the short buffs are a pain, and I’d rather they were bumped to 15 or 30 minutes than an increase in power. I love being able to throw a Salvation on the healer, Might on the fighters, Wisdom(or whatever the +mana regen one is) on the mages. I hate having to remember to do it every 5 minutes.

I recently found the joy that is Judgement of Light on instance “bosses”. I haven’t used it, but I thought that it and the mana-sister were only procced on melee hits, making me wonder how useful the mana one was. I could easily be wrong, though. It’s not world-beating healing, but anything that slows down the damage for more or less free (as long as I keep hitting the mob once every 10 seconds). It scales at no cost, too. It’s also more or less aggro-less, because any hit that procs them will generate more aggro than the healing.

Can I get a definition on the term “proc”?

Some magic weapons have a chance to fire off an extra bit of magic damage or a debuff spell each time you swing them. Sometimes a buff will give the person a similar chance no matter what weapon they are wielding. In both cases, when the extra bit fires, it’s called a proc. My understanding is that “proc” is short for “process”, which is the term text MUDs used to use for that kind of thing, but I can’t explain it any further than that :)

I do not want to get into the ‘stats’ discussion again, so Ill ignore the BoK response.

Misguided as far as your pally build: It should all depend on what you want to do. If you want be be defensive, and use a sword and shield, then SoR is a good choice. If you want to do DPS, then retribution build and a 2h weapon are your friend.

Personally I reccomend the DPS build for leveling. You can still kill mobs most people can’t touch this way and you can do it much faster then someone who is going defense. For soloing its definitly the best choice. However, if you are playing with a group of friends and are the ‘main tank’, maybe defense is the way to go.

On the main BoW comment:
Most boss fights (pre MC) do not take several minutes. I know all the bosses on a baron run, for example, fall very fast, except for the baron himself. The baron himself proabbly takes less then a minute to kill. The only extended fight that sometimes happens is the banshie bitch who posseses people. If she goes nuts jumping around that can take a while, but if she doesn’t she dies very fast.

The comment about 30 manna every 5 seconds can not be looked at in a vacume. You need to look at it with respect to ther classes. A mage with arcane armor can get 45% mana regen at all times. My 60 mage with ‘fair’ gear gets 36 mana every single second. There are talents which will boost it even further. Priests under the dicipline line get a similar ability. Locks can life tap in the middle of battle, and efrecitvly can get like 500 manna/sec regen. Hunters are the only ones without any real in-combat mana regen, but then again, they are not as manna dependent as anyone else, even a pally. Shamins get mana tide totems, and druids get innervate.

So with respect to other class, the lock, priest, and mage, druid, shamin, pallys get screwed. Sure some of them take talent points, but that isn’t even an option for pallys. Spend 2 pts in improved BoW and you get a whopping 36 mana every 5 seconds instead of 30. Its a crap bonus. Seal of Wisdorm and Judgement of wisdom just do not cut it. They only have a chance to work if you hit in melee.

Take this in game example: Pally vs Druid.
Bear form is a ‘low’ dps mode for the druid.
A pally, casts BoW, Seal of Wisdom, and Judgement of wisdom. You would think he would be a mana regeneration machine. Sorry… It doesn’t work. The mana gained via these methods is nothing compared to the mana cost to fight. I do not mean it is simply a losing battle where you slowly lose ground in a fight. No it is a huge negative balance in the time you need to heal from the ‘low dps bear’ and the mana gained by just standing there swinging your sword getting the most mana regen possible.

One might think this fight could last 10 minutes, but nope… It is very short lived. its that bad.

BTW I am not making any implications about druids being impossible to beat. This test I did with a friend was just mana regen, just to see. To beat a druid you just need a decent mana pool, and high dps, which means SoC, JotC, and BoM.

This is not to say, JoW is bad. In a really long fight, like magmadar, where you got 20 mages/locks/shadow priests beating down on him, its great mana tool for raids. It just doesn’t serve the pally himself that well.

I’ve heard it’s Process on Action.

Logically it’s like this:

if (you just hit someone)
then (roll to see if your on hit effect goes off)

So the Action is a melee hit, and the proc is an effect that has a chance to fire on each successful melee hit. For instance, lots of weapons have a chance to cast an instant spell like a fireball or something on a successful hit.

It’s not intended to serve the pally himself. That’s the idea. JoW/JoL are intended for exactly the kind of situation you describe. Bigger fights where several people are going to benefit from the cheap buff.

Pallies have several skills that aren’t meant to benefit themselves. I mean, do they ever really cast the mana regen blessing on themselves? Blessing of Salvation?

proc essentially means chance on hit.

wow, look at that, a whole new page I didn’t know about.

Ah, thanks for the explanation guys. I had some items like that in Anarchy Online, I just didn’t expect that term used in this context.

Yeah, when I started playing WoW (my first MMORPG), I was pretty surprised to see two rather old, specific DikuMUD technical terms were now in common usage: proc and mob. I guess the former mudders playing UO and EQ and the like carried them over and they stuck because they were short and there wasn’t a better term available.

Proc, mob, aggro, pull, root, snare - all were de rigeur when I played DAoC, and I’d guess they were there for EQ and UO as well. There’s an unbroken chain of history for MMOs, ya know?

With regards to UO.
Proc=no, not until recently did weapons proc in UO.
mob=Not until people came back from EQ
pull=no pulling in UO, if it’s onscreen, it’s comin’ for ya.
root=para (The first MMO to discover that root should break when you take damage or it will only require an apprentice mage to kill anyone and anything.)
snare=no snares in UO

UO uses mostly Diablo terminology, such as PK, Anti, and gank. It is also the first appearance of the assrape emote with an attendant animation. (The “Bow” command, spammed quickly.) It is also, to my knowledge, the first appearance of Red names above the noggins of threatening players, and temporary flagging.