Paladins and 1.9

[savaughn]

Well the other issue, apart from defense being possibly boring, is that the areas that blizzard has chosen to direct it's post 60 game do not allow for defensive play.  in the 20/40 man raids the only defense you have is to control agro and possibly utilize terrain.  In PvP the only defense is a good Offense.  Paladins obviously can't do either control agro or put up a good offense.  If blizzard continues to direct the post 60 game further in these areas the grievances of paladins will only grow.
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Exactly. As of right now, once you get to level 60 "defensive" play has all of one use and that's guarding a flag in AB.

Oh joy. An entire class that does that one thing well. The new seal system guarentees a Paladin can't pull aggro off of a cloth wearer so they actually can't offtank much if at all. On my runs on the test server, a 60 Pally couldn't hold aggro over a frost mage - one or two misses and that blew it. And once aggro was gone, there is no mechanism under the sun that will get it back.

This despite the fact that there's now a bonus 50 holy damage per block, with or without sanctity aura, and spamming holy shock and/or consecrate like mad. It's just going to be damn hard for a Pally to tank now. The improved fury talent just takes your holy damage and gives it a 1.9 bonus multiplier. As a result, all white damage is pretty much pointless and judging fury used to give better than a 1.9 - at least it certainly felt that way.

So, in reality, the only "defensive" play you get comes in one of two locations. 1) you're soloing so nothing can get peeled off of you, 2) AB. Aside from that you're a cleanse/buffbot.

Joy.

>>Have paladins healing capabilities been cut down so much in 1.9?

It's always been tricky for a Paladin to be a main healer in anything they aren't over-levelled for. The way I was doing it was blessing of light, judging and sealing wisdom, and then casting Holy Light. You can actually get a whole lot more healing out of your mana pool with the FoL, but let's face it ... FoL heals so little it might as well be a HoT. That meant that you were limited to HL and that meant you were going to be running out of mana. The judge/seal combo really did wonders with that, though.

With a 10s limit on renewing your judgement, though, that means you end up having to re-judge several times during a fight just to keep that up. With a 2.0 attack weapon, you get 4 shots at renewing a judgement. If you have to cast 2 heals during that time ... you get one. A miss/dodge/parry and you have to lose mana and casting time to re-judge. A move that was already skating on thin ice as it was teeters over the edge to just becoming dangerous to the party.

I may be wrong on this. It still may be possible. Unfortunately, I can't test this since the test server, right now, has a build on it that is not refreshing ANY of my judgements.

Oh, one other thing. Vengeance is, as of right now, not boosting Seal of Command damage anymore. That's about an 8% damage loss to the "critadin" crowd. This may be a bug though, Blizz hasn't commented either way.

<edit - a healing paladin may be more viable with a faster weapon like a Flurry Axe to proc wisdom. Unfortunately, I can't afford Flurry for my Pally. In case you were wondering, there are all of 3 weapons in the entire game that are 1.5 speed for a pally. I predict the number of clerics running around with Hanzo swords is going to go up, post patch>