How to win in CTF

[Megwynne]

This cracks me up.  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.

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Hey thanks for the props!

I may as well throw my 2 cents in on the whole mess as well. Personally, I love playing my paladin, but am embarrassed by a good 75% of the class. To be honest, there really are way too many completely clueless people playing paladins. The obvious reason is that with the wide mess of defensivefe extending abilities they have (Diving Shield, BoProtection, cleanses, heals, etc.) it gives people a lot of room for error. So people become one-trick ponies hitting shield and running for it when they can't kill something. A good pally should be able to BoProt the healer/caster about to get whaled on (gnomes are hard to target :D ), cast their cleanses as soon as they see the need, back up heal as necessary, off tank as necessary, consecrate/holy wrath to draw aggro, put out some melee damage, etc, etc, etc.

For me though, I always tried to explore all the aspects of this hybrid class. Instead of just assuming that it meant we werent very good at healing/tanking/damage, I tried to see what I could do to maximize each of those areas.

In MC/Onyxia stuff a pally becomes a secondary healer/cleanser for the most part. For healing, the biggest problem is a limited mana pool, so in a healing role, I wear most of my LF set, +int items, +heal items, and carry the Hammer of the Grand Crusader which has +26 int and +22 healing. If you can spring for the +int enchants and librams of rumination, you should be in good shape. Without even having sprung for these yet, I hover close to 5k mana when buffed in a normal MC/Onyxia raid. Also, its important to be mana efficient, there is no excuse for a pally not to have CastParty or some other intellegent healing mod, we dont want to overheal because we have less room for error in that area.

For tanking I always hear we cannot hold aggro well, but what people should say is that we cannot steal aggro well. So just make sure you are doing good crowd control pulls and you get the first few licks in. If I make sure my 5 man group is sporting BoSalv and I'm sporting Seal of Fury (not even improved), I have had no trouble being MT for 5-mans in LBRS, DM (N, E, W), BRD (easy one i know). And the last time I did UBRS without a lock, I offtanked one of the general's adds, I had it down to 9% health by the time the whole rest of the party managed to kill the first add and come over to help finish mine off. If i crit on something a couple of times with my Skullforge Reaver, its not going anywhere, and if a mob does get loose for whatever reason, I keep my stun in reserve and use it at that point. The other thing to remember is that tanking is very gear dependent. I dont wear my LF for tanking, and as warriors know, even Valor is junk for tanking. The biggest thing to be aware of is +def when tanking. The higher defense stat you can get, the better you will do at not getting crit on by mobs and being able to dodge/parry/block. To that end I can now get up to 383 defense. Not ideal yet, but I'm working on it.

My favorite is the pallies dont do damage statement. True, our base stats are mainly stamina and strength focused. So the question is, we can carry some heavy duty weapons, but how do we hit hard with them? Mainly we lack in agility and crit chance. I think a full retribution build with 5 talents in +crit get you to about 10% crit chance and thats about the end of it for most paladins. I now have every blue +crit plate item. Together with some agility enchants I have a 20% rate to crit unbuffed and a fairly high attackpower which I can augment with BoMight. So basically at this point with my Doomsaw against a plate-wearing target, I can crit for over 1000 damage with Blessing of Might and possibly over 2000 if Seal of Command procs and crits (stop laughing you rogues). Is this better than the best a mage or rogue can do on a regular basis over the long haul? No, but at the same time its not negligible either. Take this together with an undead instance where I can use Exorcism and Holy Wrath (Baron/Scholo), I can usually make 1st or 2nd in damage on most pickup raids. I tend to drop to 4th, 5th, 6th in damage on UBRS runs though. Is this amazing, heart-stopping damage? No, of course not, but it doesn't suck either.

So I guess what I'm trying to show is that while it may be easy to play a pally in a mediocre fashion, a lot of thought, planning, raiding, etc. go into really maximizing what a pally can do for themselves and better yet, what they can do for their group/raid.

On the other hand maybe its good most pallies don't do this... The nerfs would come fast and furious!


Raj