Paladins and 1.9

[MongoJerry]

If you can get a group like that, if decursive still works, if. if. if. if. if.  Sorry Mongo but each time you throw another "if" on there just takes you one step away from this "real" pvp you always seem to harp on.  Everytime you bring up the power of the paladin you always fall back on a proof that happens in some overly-controlled situation.  nobodys arguing that in these types of situations paladins can't be powerful.  What we are saying is that these situations are not prelevant in, nor can be extrapolated to cover, "real" pvp, in any shape or form.

The times you are playing with a warrior is an extraordinary situation? Warriors are one of the most common classes in the game and nearly every battleground you enter will have at least one if not three or four. Pick one to be your partner and go with him or her. I do this with my priestess and it works very well -- until I, being a priest, die of course. A single paladin with a single warrior alone is a powerful two-person combination. Instead of an unusual situation, this is the situation you should *always* be in if you are a paladin. If you think that PvP is running around by yourself, then no wonder you're having problems in PvP.

Then, my further comment is that after you get used to the paladin-warrior combination, try the more advanced tactic of working with a fellow paladin. The paladin-paladin relationship takes more practice as it requires trust between the two partners (for example, trust that your teammate will dispell you so that you don't burn your trinket or shield). This may sound like a strange and unreasonable "if" statement to some, but I have this funny idea that Lurkers are social people who tend to hang out in guilds with other players. And I don't think it's a stretch to imagine a Lurker paladin whispering to a fellow guildie paladin to say, "Hey! Let's team up in some battlegrounds!" Once you get the paladin-paladin relationship right, then getting warriors to work with you is easy. Even pickup warriors will jump at the chance to be in a group where they'll get heals and dispells. However, again, I have this odd notion that Lurkers tend to hang out in guilds that have warriors in them, so it doesn't seem like a stretch to imagine that they could convince a couple of guildie warriors to go with them. But heck, if you really can't find any warriors to play with you, try partnering up with a rogue or two. Paladin-rogue combinations can be pretty good.

I consider "real PvP" to include situations where people are working together toward a common goal. In these situations, paladins are one of the most powerful -- to the point of being overpowered -- classes in the game. This is true no matter what battleground you're in or even in open field PvP. If you consider "real PvP" to only be those situations where no one in the battleground is listening to each other and where everyone is running off on their own, then it really doesn't matter what class you're playing, because you're going to lose. And, yeah, I suppose in those situations, I'd rather have shaman, since they're better solo fighters. But since you should be working together in groups, in "real PvP," the paladin is a dominatingly overpowered class.

Regarding Decursive, first, Decursive still works. Second, I played on a PvP server for eight months without it and managed to dispell my groups just fine. You have a full second of global cooldown after casting a spell during which to target the next person and then cast your next spell. Decursive makes things easy -- way too easy -- but I suspect that if it didn't exist, you'd adapt just as people who played before Decursive became popular did.

I wish I had the vaulted survivability attributed to my class so often. When Sharanna pvp's I find myself CC'd early if I pop out of it with a shield (don't have the trinket yet) then I find myself dying shortly thereafter due to focus fire. The ONLY time I've been able to stay alive for any length of time is when the horde is dumb enough to ignore me and let me heal someone else. 9 times out of 10 I am targetted for destruction before any other class. If I use my shield then to heal through it then I can count on being sheeped/seduced as soon as it wears off.

Tal, you definitely need to get that trinket, and since it's one of the first things you can get as a PvP reward, it's not a hard thing to get. Paladins who bubble the first moment they get sheeped do get laughed at on the Horde side, unless it's a desperate situation where it is actually important that they bubble. I suspect that the reason you don't see the survivability attributed to paladins is due to simple inexperience in PvP. All classes play differently in PvP than in PvE. I ended up rearranging my hotkey bars, when I realized that my original setup which was so good for PvE was not helping me at all in PvP. This is one reason why I was so saddened that so many Lurkers went to PvE servers rather than PvP servers, because I think people have missed out on experiencing a whole different side of their characters because of it. Yes, I know that you can PvP on PvE servers, but unless you're practicing your skills and learning PvP skills and tactics from others on a regular basis -- and playing against people who are passionate about PvP (who tend to congregate on PvP servers) -- , you're not really going to get to experience the richness of PvP in WoW.

One small tip I have for you is that you don't have to necessarily trinket or bubble out of the first sheep you get hit with. Let's take as an example (Note: This is an *example* to demonstrate the general principle. This is not the only case where this works) the situation where you are defending an AB flag with two other people. A party of five enemies comes at you and a mage immediately poly's you. If you trinket out of it immediately, the mage will just poly you again for eight seconds. If you bubble, you'll have wasted your valuable shield. However, there is a third choice: just sit there. Your teammates are at full health and probably are using whatever tricks they have to stay alive themselves and keep the enemy from tapping the flag while calling for reinforcements. They don't necessarily need you in those openning seconds. So, you can sit there and watch the action unfold and decide what's best to do.

Often the sheep will break early due either to your resistances or due to a careless attack by the enemy (a badly placed aoe attack, for example). But if not, at worst you'll be sitting there for 15 seconds, knowing full well that you can break your sheep at any time. If the situation requires you to break your sheep, then you can trinket out of it. By this time, the mage will likely be targeted on someone else, so you can probably get a spell or two off (maybe stun the mage!) before you get cc'd again. Then, if necessary, you can break that cc with your shield, heal a teammate if you can or toss an EZ-thro dynamite at the flag. Hopefully, by the time your shield wears off and by the time you've used all your other tricks to stay alive, reinforcements will arrive and/or have rezed up.

However, I sometimes find that I can go ahead and let the full 15 seconds go. Mind you, this is a little easier as a priest, since I can let a teammate's health drop pretty low, since I can shield instantly and use Flash Heal to heal in 1.5 seconds after I get out of my sheep. But, if I am able to do this, then I'm in a good position. If the mage then sheeps me a second time, I can just trinket out of it. If the mage sheeps me a third time, diminishing returns will have kicked in and it'll only last like three seconds.