How to win in CTF

[MongoJerry]

Honestly, Jerry, did you ever think of "all paladins [as] noobs" back when you played Alliance?

Actually, yes. Not as intensely, but yes, I've never liked the paladin as a class or the typical player who came to play them. Yes, of course, there are good players who do decide to play the class, but the general average paladin, no, I never liked them. When I played alliance, I always felt the paladin as more of a liability than a help. In the typical 5-man group situation -- say, warrior, priest, mage, rogue, and paladin -- the paladin doesn't tank, the paladin can't dps very well, and the paladin typically doesn't heal very well. Oh, sure, they get their licks in and cast an important heal once in a while or whatever. But, never in months of playing did I ever have an experience where I said, "*Whew!* I'm glad we had a paladin along!"

Mostly, I invited paladins into groups simply because it was so impossible to find a second priest or druid to act as the secondary healer. The groups where we did find a second priest or druid, though, were always much stronger. The best most efficient 5-man group I ever played in was a warrior, 2 mage, 2 priest combination that blew though BRD at the level 55 cap more than 50 times that I went on personally and more than 150 times all told. The people playing the part of the mages and priests rotated, but the tactics were the same. Whenever we had a paladin take over one of the priest's spots, though, it hamstrung the group and we ended up having to go much slower and be less aggressive, because the paladins just couldn't take on any role well.

The biggest job of the paladin that I ever saw in any instance group was to sit out of fights and rez the other four people when they suicided attacked mobs. That is, the other four would attack a boss's minion, knowing that they would wipe but would at least reduce the number of mobs by one for the following fight. (This was before the armor durability penalty. Stopping this tactic was in fact why the armor durability penalty was implemented).

The natural question is then what do I think of shaman? The answer is, I think they're great, and I would love to have them in my groups and would intentionally invite one in many cases over a second priest. The difference between shamans and paladins may simply be player attitude, but whatever the difference is, it's real and it matters. I think the typical paladin sees him or herself wearing plate and being able to wield big weapons, so he or she thinks of themselves as primarily being out front banging on things. However, shamans in general seem to know that their class is a support class. They can do decent dps, but shamans tend to focus more on supporting the group using the right totems at the right time, doing things like interrupting spellcasters, and healing far more often than typical paladins. Hillary's comment that, "Play with Sharanna, Triarius, Megwynne, Katrin, or Altrius at your back when you're a healer and then tell me how noobish they are. They'll save a priests ass - this priest's ass, at least - every time" made me laugh, because I'm confident that if she played with another priest, druid, or yes, shaman, she'd find her ass saved a lot more often by them than by a typical paladin.

But then, PvP comes along, and then all those stupid paladins suddenly get their automatic "I win" buttons. Thinking of smaller group PvP like CTF, the Alliance gets this huge advantage that Horde can't compete with. One needs healing and in particular dispells to function effectively in a group PvP encounter. But in PvP, there is no aggro control, so suddenly all the best priest defenses in having tanks and being able to reduce their aggro go away. In a typical CTF fight in the middle, two rogues and a warrior (Mortal Strike to lower healing by 50% and berserker stanced to be immune to fear) will instantly converge on a priest, killing him or her in 5-8 seconds. This is something that a paladin will never have to deal with. First, it doesn't happen because people have just learned not to bother even trying to kill paladins, so paladins live to heal and dispell all they want. And second, if people did try to kill the paladin, paladins wear plate and can therefore take a lot of punishment, and just when he or she is about to die, suddenly they can noob bubble heal to full and waste the time of the other team. Meanwhile, of course, the Horde's healers and dispellers are dust, because they don't get to cast noob bubbles of their own.

The Horde side can't go without priests or else they couldn't dispell so many crowd control and damage spells, and yet at the same time, the Horde has to expend all kinds of energy protecting very fragile party members. In fact, now that I think about it, I don't know why the Alliance side would bring a priest to a CTF match. A party of three paladins (plus a druid for both healing and flag capturing) would cover all the healing and dispells needed and yet would be practically invulnerable to attack. All the Alliance dps could be focused on the Horde healers without any worry about defending squishy healers of their own. The only challenge the Alliance side would have would be to convince the paladins that they really aren't dps machines and that they should step back and play the role of priest-in-plate.