I’m convinced that people who sell paladins short for PVE have not done any high-end raiding (MC/BWL/etc). Paladins are absolutely invaluable in the end-game. Aside from being excellent healers (some of my guild’s pallies can rival our priests on the healing meter), they also bring many more benefits to the raid. Their various blessings are a huge help (anyone who says that the 10% to all stats from BoK isn’t that big a deal needs to have their head examined) and with the recent changes to judgement of light and wisdom everyone in the raid is getting a nice refresh to health and mana almost constantly. I can’t tell you how great it is being a rogue and seeing +57 (or whatever the number is) to my HP everytime I land a melee hit.
For some fights we even use paladins – and only paladins – to be our main tank healers. At Vael, for instance, the paladins heal the MT while the priests and druids focus on everyone else.
I could see why people who think their paladin should be a dealth-dealing holy warrior would be disappointed in the class, but for what they are – a support/utility class which can greatly enhance the effectiveness of a raid group – they are amazing.
There is the discoonect. Pallys are not supposed to be anything. Blizzard has go so much as to say so.
No one is saying pallys are useless after level 60. Far from it. When you turn 60 and start doing raids you turn into a heal bot or cleanse bot.
Therein lies the problem. I did not ‘sign up’ to be a heal bot or cleanse bot. If I wanted to do that, I would rolled a priest, not a pally.
From levels 1 to 59 I am a holy warrior, I beat stuff down. Not as good as I should, but it is still the game play I chose. At 60, once I move past scholomance, strath, and all that, the only place left for me is as a healbot or cleanse bot in the PvE arena.
Its a raw deal. It is very bad design. And no, the seals and judgements were not designed around raid encounters. Just becuase the actually happen to be effective during raids does not mean when they thought of them, that was the purpose behind them.
Its the same boat druids used to be in before they were fixed. The idea of feral was really neat, but then the numbers just didn’t add up and so druids were now all sitting there as healers. They were not happy about it, nor should they have been. Now, with thier changes in, a feral druid can tank as well as a warrior, and kitty dps is pretty damm high. No longer are they relegated to the back ranks as 2nd rate healers.
Pallys need the same kind of love. This 1.9 patch was mostly just a lateral move. It had some improvements, but there still needs to be a lot done.
I believe Blizzard went so far as to officially state that the goal of their recent changes to the paladin class was to move them from behind the lines back up to the front of the battle. In that regard they clearly failed. To be fair, paladins are stronger now, it’s just that the class isn’t what most of us want it to be. This has nothing to do with wanting our class to be stronger.
And no paladin wants warrior DPS with priest healing ability. That’s absurd.
On the Valor discussion: I know a few pallies who wear Valor, because the stats are generally pretty nice, while Lightforge stats are kinda useless for warriors. In every raid I’ve been in, however, it’s generally been considered bad form for a pally to roll on Valor against a warrior that needed it. I’ve never actually had a pally roll against me, although I’ve seen Valor passed to pallies when none of the warriors wanted it.
My most annoying abbreviation: UT2K4. Unless you’re talking about one of the Sega sports games, where 2k is part of the official title, shortening 200x to 2kx has got to be the most retarded, lazy abbreviating going today.
Heck yeah, that’s what I want – and I’ll go to great lengths to get whatever gear I can find to boost up my ability to deal and heal damage.
From an overall design perspective, making paladins dps kings with top-notch healing powers would totally throw things out of balance. But, fortunately, I don’t want that for the paladin class in general, I just want it for me :)
My pally is way beyond warrior DPS, at least in the PvE stuff I have done in scholo and DM north. However, its far beyond a good sample. Maybe the warriors had crappy gear or were not well specced out.
However, DPS is only part of the equation. I high DPS warrior who can heal isn’t neccairly unbalanced vs one who can not. You need to take other abilities into the picture.
For example change, shield bash, and intercept. In PvP a skilled warrior can keep you locked down on spells all the time. A pally can not do that.
A warrio has AOE fear and fear immunity, a pally doesn’t. A defense specced warrior can suck up far more damage then a defense specced pally, even if he is healing.
There are a lot more ‘tricks’ a warrior has. So look at it this way.
Warriors usually do considerably less DPS in raids because they’re using shields and they’re in their defensive stance I would imagine. In PvP, I would estimate that a warrior can pump out over twice the DPS of a comparably equipped paladin.
Why do you imagine that? What leads you to this conclusion?
You do know that holy damage goes right through armor right?
For example take a warrior and pally with identical gear. Lets say they both have 50% damage redcution due to armor.
Over 1 minute SoC will proc 7 times, doing 490% of weapon damage (assuming no crits, and btw the crit for it is based of melee, not spells). If our weapons do 300 damage on average, that means the pally does an extra 1470 pts of damage that is not reduced by armor, or 1637 if he has sanctity aura up.
In addtion he will be judging you every 8 seconds for another 200pts of holy damage (assuming you are not stunned and it never crits, which incidently, is also based on melee crit chance). This also is not reduced by armor. Over a minute that is another 1400 pts of damage that goes right through armor.
Now sure the warrior has some enhanced damage to from his skills, but you need to reduce it all by 50%.
So, please tell me how a warrior with similar gear will out DPS the pally.
On these raids, I was doing closer to 4x the warriors DPS, not merely 1.5x or anything. So even if you doubled his dps, id still leave him in the dust. It is not to unusual for my dps meter to stop near the 240 mark after the few seconds of no combat action. My gear isnt all that great, I have quite a few green things, only two LF peices. My best item is the Icy Barbed spear fron alterac, which ill admit is a very good ‘blue’ weapon.
I do not know, I doubt it. I have not been in a group with a rouge and someone with a damage calculator. I am also sure it really depends on what I am fighting. Lots of undead where I can use AoEs, I would not surprised if I was. Non-undeads, very doubtful.
As warrior gear gets better, their damage goes up exponentially due to rage generation being tied to auto-attack damage. A warrior’s two-handed damage is only capped once they have sufficient rage generation to whirlwind and mortal srike every time the skills cool down. At this point, you can start to use slam to increase your damage, but that’s more situational.
They need to focus away from spellcasting “priests with platemail” style paladins, and retune them so they have more combat-oriented abilities. Give them something to do other than cast spells in battle. They should be warriors first and spellcasters second.
My main criticism of WoW-style paladins is that they play like spellcasters, rather than like warriors. Sure, they have holy spellcasting abilities, but that should be a supplement to their warrior-like abilities. I don’t imagine holy crusaders charging into battle in full plate regalia, only to stop and start chanting and spellcasting the rest of the fight. IMO, 75% of a paladin’s abilities should be passive - auras are good and blessings upon weapons and armor are good, but active-use powers should consist of combat moves (and occasional healing) rather than the cycle-of-spellcasting that exists today.
I’m too lazy to dig up formulas, but I can tell you that when I duel good warriors with my paladin, my life bar goes down way faster than theirs (even though I almost always end up winning because I can heal.) When I duel with my mage, his lifebar goes down way, way faster when dueling warriors than when he duels paladins. I know that’s not a scientific way to prove that warriors do 2x DPS as paladins, but it’s all I’m going to offer. I recommend you look closely at warrior abilities like mortal strike and execute and such and realize that they can do this with much greater frequency than our SoC rate. As far as autoattack damage goes, warriors and paladins are pretty close I’d imagine.
Part of the problem is that paladin DPS depends on a roll of the dice. You buff up, and just do auto attack. If you are build to judge, then judge every 8 seconds for bonus damage.
I really do not know who would win in a duel with warriors a lot. For me its very luck based. If I get one of those streaks, they hit the ground fast. If not, then its always a close battle. One thing to never do is let your health get below 20%.
There are a lot of conceptual problems with the Paladin design, but they’re not a weak class. I feel that a lot of the complaints about Paladins stem from bad itemization, and the realities of leveling to 60. Paladins are willing to sacrifice healing for DPS because they can kill mobs for EXP without needing to heal much, and a few extra points of Strength and Agility will save a lot of time leveling. That’s one reason why Paladins roll on things like Valor.
The other reason is that until recently there was virtually no pre-MC plate with caster stats. (Even Lightforge is light on Intellect.) There’s a lot more blue caster plate than there used to be, but players conceptions have been slow to adjust. Just look around IF at all the Paladins proudly wearing full Lightforge, when there’s so much better stuff out there.
So, coming into MC, most Paladins had a decent set of blue DPS gear and a back-up set of (partially cloth) healer gear. Then they get the Lawbringer set, and suffer a reduction in their Strength and Agility to gain an incredible amount of Intellect, Mana Regen, and Healing. The question is not whether they can make the transition to Healadin, but whether they want to.
I will say this: as someone who has both a level 60 paladin and a level 60 mage, I personally find the mage to be a considerably worse class. The paladin is a strong class, it just lacks a clearly defined role.
