Pally Changes

[mjdoom]

If they stand there and heal.  Smart druids and shaman know when they're being focus fired and immediately travel-form/ghost wolf and get the hell out.  It presents the attackers with a conundrum: chase down the target and let the rest of the team rip them up, or change targets to something closer (and let the druid/shaman get back and start healing).  In general, you have to pick the second choice because chasing down a ghost wolf or travel form on foot can result in quite the merry chase and a lot of death.  The moment a new target starts receiving damage, the druid/shaman starts bombing in heals from 40 yards away.  It's a tough situation to be in.
[right][snapback]93999[/snapback][/right]

Nothing is more annoying... Oh, he's almost dead, one more shot to execute... OH CRAP! He's running away, intercept on cooldown, ARGH! :P With travel form my only hope to stop that druid from running and resetting is to pray that I can intercept without getting myself swarmed and killed. Shamans usually don't even bother with ghost wolf; they drop an Earthbind totem and slow everyone down to let themselves get away.

This was supposed to be a pally change thread but I guess we devolved to some PvP stuff so I shall follow:

I play a pretty well equipped warrior and I must say that I am pretty powerful even though I don't sport the big bad Mortal Strike (I can't stand slow 2h weapons). Give me a dedicated healer and I need to be seriously focus fired to be taken down in my offensive gear; put me in my tank gear trying to run a WSG flag and I can run straight through the horde with a decent support team. The mentions of warriors being powerful have merit...

But, we can still be countered and I think Bliz is working things out. It used to be that if I ran across a warlock without a succubus that warlock was dead. Period. Now that deathcoil is actually useful warlocks with solid gear can give me a run for my money and certainly delay me a bit longer in the worst case. Time is money in BGs when you have organized teams and 2 or 3 seconds can be the difference in a flag cap attempt in Arathi Basin.

Mages are slowly starting to get more damage boosts as Blizzard is finally adding to the pool of +damage gear equipment. This was a necessary thing but now that it's happened I'm not sure that mages are THAT gimp. The mage is one of the few classes that can delay their death when under severe focus fire via blink and ice block. Sure, a focused effort will still kill them; but once again time is money. HKs are always nice but sometimes it's those delayed deaths that have the greatest effect on winning and losing.

I also see complaints about resists and the like. Sure there is decent amounts of resist gear out there but who wears all of that in PvP? If I want to be a big bad warrior that people fear I'm not running around with any significant amount of resistance. Even if I decide to try to pile on resistances I have to pick what I want... being highly resistant to shadow, frost, and fire at the same time is not really possible. If the other team is highly loaded to priests, fire mages, or frost mages I can try to tailor it but that's not a common theme. I'm not a miracle worker... in the rock/paper/scissors world I have some advantages over certain casters but still if I face two casters I'm as good as dead without a friend.

This makes me think of one of our priests in my guild. I could duel Heda forever and ever and with my lack of MS I will never win; even with it I'm not sure if I could. Sure this does not directly translate to BGs but that's kind of my point. If people load up and spend talents in such a way as to beat your class then they will with any skill (surprise!). If things are arranged the other way around then the results will be opposite. For example MS warrior vs. fire mage will probably produce different results then Fury warrior vs. ice mage.

It's always easiest to see your side of the fence though.

As for paladins; they certainly make good defenders. This is especially due to the time is money thing. Paladins are great for delaying incoming rushes in order to allow backup to come. Druids, Shamans, and Mages have some extent of this ability as well. Thanks to their bubble they have a way to delay even overwhelming forces which I think is where some of the (warranted) frustration comes from. Thankfully this (and LoH) are on a long cooldown which can be exploited if you are smart about it. The counter is that they are not so great for offense.

If you want to talk about balance between factions (as opposed to amongst classes) you have to look at Paladins vs. Shamans. With the combination of ghost wolf and earthbind Shamans have some delay tactics at their disposal but they still don't match the pally. The shaman will add more offensive capabilities and utilities though. In the end it is not much more than a simple tradeoff. Everyone on one side of the fence wants a piece of the other's pie but the reality is that for faction balance you simply get some more offense for Horde and some more defense for Alliance.

As for class balances, imo superior numbers and skills outweigh everything in group PvP. Better gear helps immensly but unless the gear gap is huge it doesn't always turn the tide of battle; it just expedites the effects of the superior skills, numbers, and tactics. The relative skills of the various classes will be used well by a good group and will be wasted by ragged PUGs. This is simply how the game works and I don't see much problem with it.