Paladins...is it as bad as they say?

[Tal]

You're assuming that the warrior is only using those three attacks.  He'll also be getting two to three (dependant on weapon speed) normal attacks in.  Assuming he's Axe-spec, like most Arms Warriors are, it's not unreasonable to assume at least three of his attacks will crit.  If they're normal attacks, it's 200% damage.  If it's a special, it's 220% damage.  It's very possible to crit for 1000+ on plate-wearers with an MS or WW crit, and 800-920 normal crits aren't uncommon, either.  Execute crits, while only operating on the target's last 19% HP, can do truly obscene damage.

Sure, I haven't been fighting Pallies wearing 7/8 Lawbringer and 1/8 Judgement, but I'm wearing little more than a few pieces of Valor and some random blues and the occasional odd green.
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Just a quick question - do most of the paladins you face use two handers? I find I tend to survive longer after that initial mortal strike by switching to sword and board.

[Artega]

Just a quick question - do most of the paladins you face use two handers? I find I tend to survive longer after that initial mortal strike by switching to sword and board.
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All of them have been using two-handers. I guess they don't have weaponswap macros :)

[Drasca]

Just a quick question - do most of the paladins you face use two handers? I find I tend to survive longer after that initial mortal strike by switching to sword and board.
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Most solo paladins I face depend on pathetic melee dps, and slow 2 handers are usually required. You're smarter to use S&S to absorb damage, which is more appropriate to paladin - wear down enemy strategy. The smart ones play healer / debuff remover in plate and optimize that.

I laugh at solo paladins. Most pick extremely slow weapons that almost never interrupt casts, and now that I have plenty of +dmg equip, I may simply Curse of Tongues, shadowbolt while they chink at me with slow melee, fear and finish them off.

Felhunter to remove silly HoJ stun and interrupt heals is optimal, but any pet is nice.

[Arnulf]

Unleashing this Seal's energy will judge an enemy for 30 sec, causing Holy damage spells cast on that enemy to generate additional threat. Only one Judgement per Paladin can be active at any one time.

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Oops! I confused healing with holy damage! This is a quote from the tooltip.

[lemekim]

All of them have been using two-handers.  I guess they don't have weaponswap macros :)
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If a paladin is using a two-hander in group PvP, he should be kicked out of the group. It's not really the issue of immunity bubble, but the fact that with 8k armor, and 3 additional healers in the group, it will take a long time to kill that paladin, far more then could have been spent on killing a priest/druid.

Thus a lot of time a good tactic is not to kill those paladins, but mana drain/burn them instead.

[MongoJerry]

Ah, but you're not trying for a takedown, you're trying to force a bubble. If your team is aggressive towards paladins, but only till the bubble then all refocus it is an effective tactic

Once you get into the rythym of it you'll find that often in trying to force a bubble you'll meet a pally with bubble on cooldown and get a kill instead

Yeah, that's definitely true. If there's nothing else immediately taking my attention (say, a paladin leads a group so the rest of the party hasn't quite engaged yet), I do like to damage a paladin a bit with a mind blast and I like it when I see a hunter or mage throwing a shot in or two in just to let a paladin know that he or she can't walk around with impunity. It's especially a bonus if we can force a bubble. The easiest "force a bubble" technique is simply sheeping the paladin. So many paladins instinctively bubble themselves out of sheep even when in a party with other dispellers. If they do that, then that paladin will be a sitting duck 12 seconds later. A good paladin will be patient and willing to wait for a dispell and only bubble out of sheep when the situation is particularly dire. Of course, this is assuming that one is playing with a group that knows to dispell as much as possible (spamming decursive a couple of times between heals and attacks is so powerful). If it's a pickup group, then your mileage will vary widely.

[oldmandennis]

Speaking of decursive...

How well does it work in AV and MC fights where people are in seperate packs? I recall some of our priests having trouble with it if it tries decursing people who are out of range.

Is it possible/easy to configure it to ignore people/groups you know are going to be out of range?

[MongoJerry]

Speaking of decursive...

How well does it work in AV and MC fights where people are in seperate packs?  I recall some of our priests having trouble with it if it tries decursing people who are out of range.

Is it possible/easy to configure it to ignore people/groups you know are going to be out of range?

The modern version of it is really amazing and does the range check. If the person is out of range, it'll come up with a message that so-n-so needs dispelling but is out of range but then it will keep going and try to dispell other people. It makes things too easy, really. Like I said, in PvP fights, I just hit decursive a couple of times between heals and attack spells. I still keep regular dispell on my hotbar, too, just in case I want to make sure I dispell a particular person like a flag carrier or cast dispell on an enemy player.

[Kevin]

While heroic strike damage may be pretty minimal, I never use it solo, ever because it's so horribl rage inefficient.  It takes almost as much rage as shield slam but does 1/5th the damage or less.  Pretty much ANY other skill is a better rage dump than HS, mostly because everything else gives an additional chance at triggering overpower. 
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So I wanted to test. I was down in Un'Goro beating on fire elementals while hunting Rich Thorium. I would do my best to have a 2:1 Herioc Strike:Shield Slam ratio on each mob (generally not hard to do) so that armor and level difference would even out. Using recap here are the numbers. I was in Battle stance for everything (generally opened with a charge for the 15 rage).

HS: 56 hits, 15410 damage (0 misses). 14 crits (25% crit rate).
SS: 29 hits, 11531 damage (0 misses). 7 crits (24.2% crit rate)
Normal attack: 289 hits, 44016 damage (15 misses), 48 crits (16.6%)

So HS average damage is 275.2
Slam is 397.6
Auto-Attack is 152.3

So HS does 122.9 more damage than AA. That is 8.2 damage/rage for me.
SS does 13.25 damage/rage

In all that time I got 7 overpower hits and 1 overpower miss. No crits. I took an overpower whenever I could. I always tried to keep 5 rage, but I would burn rage as soon as I cound on any attack.

So overpower as extra damage is really pretty much not there for me, like I suspected. I did 55% of my damage from regular melee attacks, 19% for HS, 14% from slam and 10% from execute. 94.8 DPS over all the fights for those who care, sword and board the whole time.

So yeah, not using Heroic strike is a good idea which pretty much all warriors know, but shield slam is still only moderate damage per rage and while all warrior attacks are more consistent damage than a paladins (and I've never tried to contend otherwise), I don't think a retribution/holy paladin's average damage is that far behind a protection warriors average damage. My paladin is still only L47 so I can't really do a fair test. Of course my test above had nothing to do with damage I could put out. It was a test of HS vs SS on my build. Improved HS would have put me up to 9.45 damage/rage on it, not a huge improvement either. :)

I would need to use my 2 hander with swaps to sword and board for a slam to see about what my real average DPS would be when really trying to do damage. I can't really see any other skills to dump rage in that would have much of an effect on upping my damage other than execute and since most farming mobs don't have that my HP saving for 100 rage executes doesn't look to be the best way for maximizing damage. A 15 rage execute on the last 20% of most mobs HP is generally good enough to finish them, or get them to a point where another swing will do it. I would also want to try and have 2+ mobs by me all the time for cleave and whirlwind extra damage but I don't have tactical mastery or anger management so my damage will be slowed compared to some protection builds. Of course the extra down time of the multimob pulls might counter the higher DPS of my multi target attacks. I may test that later. I just wanted to get some numbers from my build for heroic strike vs sheild slam was all. Wasn't really trying to prove any points with this test. Just confirming what most warriors know. Heroic Strike sucks. :)

[Artega]

I typically start using Sunder Armor instead of Heroic Strike around Lv.22, when Sunder Armor II becomes available. It doesn't affect rage generation like Heroic Strike, and it's a sort of passive DPS increase :)

[Kevin]

I typically start using Sunder Armor instead of Heroic Strike around Lv.22, when Sunder Armor II becomes available.  It doesn't affect rage generation like Heroic Strike, and it's a sort of passive DPS increase :)
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Yeah that was about what I did with Gnolack as well. But around L40 or so I started to use Heroic in instances again as a rage dump when tanking since I had no tactical mastery and the initial damage of the mobs or lack of CC meant it was just best to stay in defensive. I really had not other option for rage dump. No anger management either so keeping it for the next fight didn't really help either.

So since I now had a new rage dump toy for def stance on my no tactical master no anger management build I decided to see just how good it was. Of course I was in battle stance when testing so the damage numbers are higher for both Heroic and Shield Slam than they would have been in defensive but it was nice to confirm what I already knew.

Of course I've given in to the dark side. I'm still 31 protection but I have dropped piercing howl for anger management. I kept 4 points in improved dem shout though I still want the theme to be you can't hurt me or my friends you bastard and while there are better ways to accomplish that than a 31 point protection build I'm not going for the best tank in 90-95% of the situations you are in. :) My personal opinion is that 15 points in protection (just to get defiance and toughness and I would recommend shield spec over anticipation for this) and the other points in arms or fury will allow you to tank 90-95% of the encounters better than my build will. I think I have the advantage on some of the top end boss mobs and on casters since I can silenc and stun them at will. Improved Sunder and Improved Taunt only give me a little more advantage when things go wrong. I even dropped Iron Will after playing with it for a bit. It did help a few times, but it's like paladin damage, it's so unreliable that 5 points in 1H spec are more valuable than it. :)

So I'll stop hijacking this thread now. :)

[Rinnhart]

So I'll stop hijacking this thread now. :)
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Bah, it's dead and you guys were just getting interesting.

[Saxywoo]

Hail!

Figured that I would add my experience with the Paladin into the mix.

I've been "doubling up" my Pali named SaxyCoo with Bolty's warlock named Boltie. We started together, and we play these characters together.

At first, I was going with the s-h mace/shield combo, since it was something that I always loved doing (not to mention that I thought it looked cool), and was Protection spec-ed. This wasn't a problem, since we were going from lvl 1 to approx lvl 35 this way. I'm not sure how Boltie was spec-ed out, but I know that it wasn't Destruction based. All seemed well.

At about lvl 30 or so, I went and coughed up the cash to respec. Looking through the talent tree, I saw that just about everything that I had to look forward to in the high-end Protection tree really sucked. The only thing that looked like the high-end talent was worth getting was the Retribution tree. So that's what I went with.

Once I changed to the Retribution tree, it was nice to have single mob fights back down to a 30 second kill time. Then when Boltie was forced to respec after the last patch, he went with the Destruction tree. I later found that it was increasingly harder for me to keep the aggro off of him, since his DPS was a heck of a long way beyond mine.

At that time, I was forced to switch to a 2H Mace, foregoing the shield. Sometimes, it's still difficult to keep the aggro off of him, but I can usually pull mobs off of him with a SoC Judgement and the Seal of Command number generator liking me. I've found that I will crit somewhat often (thankfully). There have been times though where I couldn't due to one of this Shadowbolts getting a crit on top of the damage that his pet is doing, and the battery of curses that he places on the mob.

We did go through SM in some pubbie groups, where I was the main tank as well as the primary healer. There was another time when I was the secondary healer and off-tank since we had a lvl 38 druid along who took up the primary healing.

As for equipment, I have noticed that all this while, I've been running with a mixture of STR/STAM and SPI/INT. Some items would be good for a Pally, and others would be good for a Warrior. I have noticed that I am starting to lean more towards the cater's equipment, and looking for weapons that will give me the strength bonuses.

However, when I do run around alone working on grinding my smithing or grinding for ore. I'm able to keep my fights down to about 15-20 seconds for green mobs, 30-45 seconds for yellow, and about 1-1.5 minutes for red.

But I'm level 47 now, and the training wheels are off (and have been for the last 7 levels). Mobs hit me for a heck of a lot more, and my DPS hasn't really increased as exponentially as it used to, which is forcing me to change the way that I play the character. One good thing though is that when I'm playing with Boltie, if I can keep him from getting aggro, it's a perfect excuse for me to go all out, and just hammer away at anything that comes our way.

I have learned that when we've done instance runs, it's always been good to ask the party what kind of Blessing they would like. I know that Boltie prefers BoK. Zippy (when we did Uldaman) wanted BoW, as do most other casters. But I think that what blessing that a person gets is purely subjective, as they should know (imo) which blessing would better fit their playing style.

-SaxyCorp

[Tal]

Silly question but when you're trying to keep aggro off Bolty are you judging seal of fury, using retribution aura and either firing up seal of fury again or seal of righteousness? A two hander and seal of command is inadequate IMHO for keeping aggro against a caster or healer.

[Saxywoo]

Silly question but when you're trying to keep aggro off Bolty are you judging seal of fury, using retribution aura and either firing up seal of fury again or seal of righteousness? A two hander and seal of command is inadequate IMHO for keeping aggro against a caster or healer.
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We're pretty much questing below our level (hitting the green quests), so all the fights are really short. Sometimes my judgement timer doesn't finish resetting in time for the next fight, so in most cases peeling off a Seal of Fury wouldn't help in time to help.

Botly does hold back at times, and will usually let me drop a consecration or two before we start on the second mob (if an add) before he really lays into it. However, I've found that a strategicly timed Hammer of Justice will delay another attack by the mob long enough for us to kill it.

-SaxyCorp

[Bolty]

Botly does hold back at times, and will usually let me drop a consecration or two before we start on the second mob (if an add) before he really lays into it.  However, I've found that a strategicly timed Hammer of Justice will delay another attack by the mob long enough for us to kill it.[right][snapback]84936[/snapback][/right]

Three things here:

1) Doesn't Seal of Fury hold more aggro even without judging it? I can't recall. Paladin experience is light for me, only having played one to 22 now.

2) A Warlock's pet does not count for aggro against the Warlock. The Warlock and its pet are both separate entities in terms of aggro. This is one of the main reasons why Blizzard does not recommend Warlocks for newbies to MMOs - because they force you to learn aggro control from a very early age, and they force you the hard way. That's what the Voidwalker is, after all - an aggro inducer that does no real damage; it just tanks things for the Warlock.

The exception to this is that if the Warlock's pet dies, the aggro the pet had will then transfer to the Warlock. This is not good for the Warlock.

3) If Boltie steals aggro from you, it's Boltie's fault, not yours. Either I'm doing it because I figure it doesn't matter due to the fact that we'll kill it so fast, it doesn't matter because I can fear it without it bringing more adds, it doesn't matter because I have so many hit points, or I just plain got aggro when I shouldn't have. You are correct that at this point, if I didn't hold back any it would be damn near impossible for you to hold aggro due to my Destruction talent build. I have a general idea as to how much I can wail without getting aggro, and it's not your job to make up for me going over my limit. Well, not to say you shouldn't work to save my rear, just saying that you shouldn't blame yourself for having to do so!

Now, if you were TAL and I got aggro, it would be because I wanted to in order to watch Tal run around like a ninny trying to get it back. This is because I know Tal enjoys showing me that I can't keep aggro even if I want to, and enjoyed proving it at times when my Priest went Mind Blasting. Then Tal would whip out his Seal of Fury, slap a Blessing of Salvation on me, and whoop in glee when he got the mob's attention back again. But that's another story.

-Bolty

[Tal]

1) Doesn't Seal of Fury hold more aggro even without judging it?  I can't recall.  Paladin experience is light for me, only having played one to 22 now.[right][snapback]84945[/snapback][/right]

Judging it allows your retribution aura and seal of righteousness proc's garner hate.

Now, if you were TAL and I got aggro, it would be because I wanted to in order to watch Tal run around like a ninny trying to get it back.  This is because I know Tal enjoys showing me that I can't keep aggro even if I want to, and enjoyed proving it at times when my Priest went Mind Blasting.  Then Tal would whip out his Seal of Fury, slap a Blessing of Salvation on me, and whoop in glee when he got the mob's attention back again.  But that's another story.

-Bolty
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Nerf Tals :whistling:

[nobbie]

I don't care much about what people say about Pallies - I have 4 Horde chars now, and one Alliance char, a Night Elf Druid. Once the NE and Tauren Druid are 40, I'm pretty sure that my next char is a Dwarven Pally - free mount, easy to play and forgiving etc. (goal = level 40) ;)

[Arnulf]

1) Doesn't Seal of Fury hold more aggro even without judging it?  I can't recall.  Paladin experience is light for me, only having played one to 22 now.
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It should. It should! But it does not always. I have 33 points in Protection, having improved Seal of Fury and a good 1H weapon now (I think). Casting Seal of Fury on myself and hitting mobs three to four times should keep aggro on me. But once it's gone I have a hard time getting it back..

I admit it, I'm envious of warriors. They have so many skills at their disposal to regain hate that it's stupendous to me.

Now, if you were TAL and I got aggro, it would be because I wanted to in order to watch Tal run around like a ninny trying to get it back.  This is because I know Tal enjoys showing me that I can't keep aggro even if I want to, and enjoyed proving it at times when my Priest went Mind Blasting.  Then Tal would whip out his Seal of Fury, slap a Blessing of Salvation on me, and whoop in glee when he got the mob's attention back again.  But that's another story.
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Well, out of sheer exasperation I have one last resort for trigger-happy casters in my group: Blessing of Protection. Sure-fire way of removing hate from them ... and hopefully to me.

-Arnulf

[Raven Vale]

1. Exorcism. Direct holy damage, instant cast, 505-563 damage to undeads. The 15 second cooldown and the relatively low mana cost of 345 make this skill a staple of Paladin vs Undead combat (note: not undead players. Why? I'll never know. They're undead too...). It's got long range, instant cast, a low cooldown, and relatively low mana cost; can't really ask for more when it comes to a direct damage spell. BUT, it's undead only, so that severely limits its use, making it PvE only.

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Some thoughts about paladins from a paladin. :)


If I had one wish from Blizzard then it would be: Let Sense Undead sense the Undead players too. I've got ambushed on the docks of Menethil way too often...


-Arnulf
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But we are not Undead , we are Forsaken , I seem to remember back in one of the Beta's we were undead and all those rules applied , but not anymore :P