Explanation: over at Blog Azeroth, I suggested a semi-regular feature where one person suggests a topic and anyone who feels inspired can respond. This seemed to go down well, so I proposed the first topic, and here we are.

Q: What do you enjoy about the class you play the most?

For me, obviously, the class in question is paladin. I can summarise its biggest appeal in one word: survivability.

Playing a paladin has made me lazy. I think nothing of running into the middle of half a dozen mobs, slapping down a consecrate, and swinging-and-judging my way to victory. And I finish the fight on 90% health and 80% mana. In contrast, my other level 70 is a mage, and something of a glass cannon to boot. (Well, glass peashooter, really; she doesn’t have the gear to be called a cannon.) She has a lot of punch, but I have to be so careful about how and where she fights, or she just falls over like a limp noodle. And then I load the paladin back up again, and suddenly I don’t care that the mobs are trying to kick me in the face.

Admittedly, it takes me a lot longer to kill anything, but I can live with that, you know.

Now, all of that is applicable to any pally, but I’m not just a pally, I’m a healer. Truth be told, all the other healing classes have their appeal to me in TBC endgame – holy priest finally looks like fun, ditto resto shammies and druids – but I really enjoy pally healing. I like being able to pump out big heals in a really focused way – and it keeps me away from the dreaded whack-a-mole game of raid healing.

That said, I do lament the obstacles to multi-target healing on a pally – no area heals and no HoTs means that it boils down to “spam FoL on anyone in range”. But again, I’ll take the survivability of a paladin over the raid-healing ability of a priest or shammy any day; it takes a lot more to one-shot me than it does my lesser-armored brethren. (And sistren.)

Also, pallies have fantastic spell effects. I mean, those blessings are swank. It almost makes up for the armor design.

Almost.