Pally Changes

[MongoJerry]

I don't deny that paladins in large group PvP have roles and are significant and powerful in their own way.

You don't need large group PvP for a paladin to shine. I'm talking as small as 3v3 and maybe even 2v2. A warrior-paladin duo is *nasty*. A warrior with *two* paladins is godly.

This is an amusing myth.  Paladins are only slightly more survivable than shamans, priests and druids on the battlefield - and that's if their shield is up.  If their shield is down, they're not more survivable than any other healer class.  Probably a little less.

Unbelievable boloney. Druids can maybe last the longest of the three you mentioned if there's a very small battle so that there's not enough concentrated fire hitting them to prevent them from healing when they switch to human form. But if they're being hit from multiple directions, they'll die quickly. Shamans, same thing. Priests? A holy/disc priest can be killed quickly by a single fear immune MS warrior. If a second person helps with damage, that's gravy. A fully shadow priest can survive a solo MS warrior, but meanwhile the priest has been occupied and isn't healing or dispelling his or her party (sheep, frost trap, entangled roots...), and anyway, there's never just one MS warrior on a priest.

Paladins on the other hand can HoJ and Repent opponents and heal to full if there's only a couple people beating on them. Then, physical immunity shield if it's physical people beating on him (yes, it can be dispelled if there's a shaman or priest nearby, but there's reaction time involved which is long enough to allow either the paladin himself or someone else on his team to heal him). Then, if there's enough fire directed their way, *bam* Divine Shield heal to full as well as dispel and heal other teammates. Oh, and if it's an important part of the match, Laying on Hands to full, too. To kill a paladin, you have to kill them four times. Meanwhile, of course, the Horde team is being slaughtered by the rest of the paladin's team.

Divine Shield's amusing because its greatest effect isn't making the paladin invulnerable.  Its most powerful effect is scaring and demoralizing Horde players, which it does surprisingly often.  Horde players look at a paladin, think, "if I attack him, he'll just bubble...I'm not going to bother".  It's funny because Horde players would never think the same thing about a mage with ice block.  They boast confidently about how mages who ice block are dumb and that it just delays their death by ten seconds.  But a paladin?  OMG noes.  Let's not bother, they're invincible.

A mage can't heal or dispel while ice blocked. That's the cheesy part of Divine Shield. A paladin is fully functional while shielded, while a mage isn't. (The attack speed debuff doesn't matter, because attacking isn't the paladin's primary role anyway -- and a slow attack is enough to break someone trying to tap a banner, which is also ridiculous).

Fun tip: send a beast specced hunter's pet into Bestial Wrath and unleash him upon a paladin.  The paladin will have to burn a shield in order to live.

Preaching to the choir there, but at least a paladin has two shield options to survive it. Priests just die from the pet and hunter's barrage.

The idea that a paladin somehow "doesn't die" more than any other healer is absurd.  More upfront mitigation at the cost of far less healing trades off, in my opinion.  And if you think a paladin doesn't die, you've clearly never bothered to focus fire a druid.

I have. Druids are tough. But they're only tough in bear form, when they can't heal other people. When they switch to human form, they go down like a stone. Besides, Druids (and shamans) can't dispel crowd control abilities, so they aren't as tactically important as paladins and priests. Once one team's dispelers are dead or controled, the fight is over -- at least in any reasonably skilled fight. Once sheeps, entangled roots, freezing traps, frost novas, slows, and damage dots aren't being dispelled, the fight's over.

Granted.  Yet I caution everyone not to underestimate earthbind, grounding, and tremor totems.  Especially in Arathi, well placed Earthbind totems can stutter the Alliance flow of reinforcements badly.  Tremor totems give the Horde an enormous advantage: fear-bombing is a powerful tactic and Alliance has no way to counter it, while the Horde does.

Earthbind totems are useful. Tremor totems? Come on, the range isn't big enough. Chances are that most of the party isn't in range for the tremor totem to help. The biggest advantage horde has is that they typically have some undead who can WOTF out of the fear. Of course, if Alliance priests are smart enough to be dwarfs, then they can Fear Ward important players anyway. (Well, OK, I admit that shadowmeld can be very nice, so yeah it can make sense to choose a night elf priest, too).

And I think this is the core of the problem.   No, it's not fun playing against a paladin (fyi: it's no fun playing against a shaman either).  But that's not a reason to cry imbalance.  The way human memory works, we all tend to remember the frustrating incidents and forget when we didn't have that hard of a time.  Hence the overwhelming sentiment from Horde that DS is BS, and the strongly communicated impression from Horde that paladins can invuln whenever they feel like it and that they don't die.  You remember the times when they don't die, you remember the times when they bubbled and healed to full and you hated it.  You don't remember the times when they were countered or didn't have the shield up and died quickly.

No doubt that selective memory does play a role, but it's less of an effect than Alliance players think. The survivability of paladins goes beyond Divine Shield. They have plate+shield, two stuns, the physical immunity shield, and the ability to dispel all magic dots and snares. And Divine Shield is far more devastating that the Alliance players here are admitting. It lets the paladin live far longer than 12 seconds, because you only use DS as the last resort. If it takes 10 seconds to finally get that #$@# paladin down to a small amount of life (that's if you're concentrating fire on him), then DS lets the paladin survive 12 seconds, heal to full, and effectively start the fight over again. So that DS basically let the paladin live an extra 22 seconds, which is an eternity in a PvP fight. And all that time that the Horde team has been trying to kill that paladin, their team is being ripped to shreds. And all that time, Horde can't crowd control for anything.

You play a Priest. Killing a Paladin is trivial. You cast Mana Burn on him 3-4 times, hit him with a Dispel Magic, and he's done. Hell, if you want, at that point your Priest can probably beat him in melee. I've been wanding them to death because it makes me giggle.

Yeah, in an outdoor 1v1 situation where you have an eternity to finish up a fight, a priest can use Mana Burn and eventually take down a paladin, but in the real world which is rarely 1v1, there's no way a priest is going to get off several 3 second casts of Mana Burn in a row. And anyway, a priest has more important things to do like healing and dispelling. The best thing to do is to run up to paladins and psychic scream them. Hopefully, that gives your team enough of a chance to take an Alliance player down before the paladin gets out of fear. Of course, the Alliance team is doing the same type of thing, so that's not a guarantee.