How to Win Friends and Influence Priests

[Kevin]

As it stands now a Paladin has three means of holding (haha) aggro. Seal of Fury, consecration and dps. Seal of fury works fairly well as long as I get the first hit in and stay on the upside of the Aggro mound. If a mage or priest overpulls aggro it is very, very difficult for me to get it back. Consecration is a AoE DoT that works fairly well, again, so long as no one overpulls aggro. It also has the effect of breaking sheep, sap, and mez. Granted this isn't as much of an issue if you fight the main mob out of range of the CC'd mobs. DPS on a paladin is a joke so unless I'm partied with lowbies, I won't pull aggro that way. So if you have a paladin as main tank, and things go wrong™, there is very little I can do but go OOM healing and smacking things with Seal of Fury and finally as a last resort hit divine intervention.

Now some would say that this is working as intended™ but I believe it isn't. Blizzard has stated that in their class vision for the paladin that they wanted a group who had a paladin as MT to not feel gimped. This is certainly not the case as it stands in the game now.

Lets look at the other hybrid class in the game, the Druid. The druid in bear form has a taunt ability but not as many skills for holding aggro as a warrior. The difference is that druid heals do cause aggro, especially if done on the person that has drawn aggro off the druid tank. However, I can go /OOM healing folk when things go bad without drawing aggro off anything. You saw this first hand in the fight before the boss of Gnomeregan. I fully healed Aleri twice and healed you for half life once without drawing any more mobs that what were already pounding on me. This would seem out of whack to me in what Blizzard intends for the the heal to threat ratio.
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I agree that paladin could use some other aggro gabbing tool, but I can see way too many exploits if it is a heal. I understand the frustation too, but a pally heal generating as much aggro as a priest or druid just looks too exploitable to me.

Remember a Druid can't really tank in caster form and it takes considerable amounts of mana to form shift. That limits how frequently a druid could use a heal as a taunt form while tanking. If you are tanking anything and shift out and cast a heal, you will take enough damage to need another major source of heal on yourself. At least that has been my experience. Also keep in mind that a bear druid can't use pots (and I don't think it could use a soulstone either) so it loses that out and really won't want to be shifting as an aggro hold. At least it's been a pretty bad idea for me when I've tried to shift and heal while tanking.

The paladin should not be as good a tank as the warrior. It should be right around what a shaman or druid could do. I agree there are issues with the paly in this regards. Shaman can pull and hold aggro easier than either of the two (earth shock and rock biter), but they can't take as much beating. But if you give pally heals the aggro gen of a priest or druid it just feels like they will tank better than a warrior and have more party benefits with the buffs and auras they can do.

It's just a tricky area.