Avarice Alliance takes down Onyxia again...

[Kevin]

but I think it's silly to say "Who says Alliance has to realy on Fear Ward and Fear removing trinkets" when Horde does it every day.
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And everytime we mention that we've beaten Onyxia on these boards fear ward has been brought up in a fashion that makes it seems like since we did it with alliance players we suck and had to use fear ward. That is why the quote, it's to the damn lurkers specifically who keep bringing up fear ward.

As to Blessing of Salvation. I know it was down on me by the middle of phase 3 (we had a sloppy transition so things started taking longer) so I'm assuming that most of the rest of the raid didn't have it at that stage either.

I'm not going to argue that paladins don't bring more to the table in most of the raid encounters than shaman. I play both sides and while I haven't done 40 man raids horde side I feel safe in extrapolating how things will work to them from my experiences with my L56 horde and my 3 L60 alliance. I do think paladins offer more to a 40 than shaman and that shaman offer more to a 5 man than a paladin.

In my book the most powerful paladin blessing is the one that never gets mention. Blessing of wisdom. It returns more mana than a mana tide totem will and you can put it on all mana users not just one group. Judgement of light and wisdom are also huge huge benefits that never seem to get brought up. Salvation helps but not as much as people like to claim. Kings for the extra HP is also a very big deal when 100 HP can mean life or death. Salvation can be lived without, might will help with DPS but the shaman totems will do just as well if not better for the people they affect (and shaman can buff hunter DPS a lot more than a paladin can and since hunters get to zero out aggro at intervals that is a big deal too). Cleanse also puts them ahead of the shaman. Survivability is pretty much a toss up because I see both raid shaman and raid paladins in a mix of cloth, leather, mail, and in the paladins case plate. Neither of them should be taking much in the way of physical damage though so again it's just the resists that they have on that +healing +int +stam gear they are wearing that really matters as the few hunder more armor that drops the hit from 1550 to 1545 won't really matter.