Comments on: The State of Paladin

By: Rom Johnson

Rom Johnson — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:56:13 +0000

I don’t thing Blizzard really knows how to “balance’ hybrid classes well between PVE and PVP. If any attempt is made to balance hybrid, its allways in favor of PVP, but the game is a MMORPG first with PVP mixed in. So if classes are balanced for PVP in mind they suffer in PVE and thus the 21 plus Paladin nerfs that bascily left them 2 steps behind everyone esle in PVE.

By: Cionna

Cionna — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:07:41 +0000

This same silliness hit druids recently too, which made me think of swapping to my spriest, who also then got messed with for no reason.

So I’m thinking a pure class and spec seems to be the only thing left really.

By: Rom Johnson

Rom Johnson — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 23:23:15 +0000

Thank you.

You have summed up very nicely how the Paladin community feels about all these changes. There have been a lot of carelessness and duplicity on Blizzard’s part towards the Paladin class and that needs to be dealt with before all this anger and bitterness goes down.

By: Taraske

Taraske — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:36:51 +0000

@Amiens: Sorry, but honestly, what good will it do levelingwise when they buff holy-dmg in a month? Or do you really think they will buff it next week? I am just not enough of a masochist to level holy at the current dmg-output….
Every other healer class has gotten its dps buffed, except palas. And we had the worst dps to begin with because of the lacking synergy of our dps and our healing gear. For healing we need spellpower and caster stats. For dps we need melee stats. Every other healer has a spelldamage-dps option (shamans-ele, priests-shadow,druids-balance). And they have real synergy between their dps and their healing tree…

@OP: You forgot to mention that the damage % of AW was turned down too… So aside from the holy point of view it got nerfed pretty hard…

By: Mathias

Mathias — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:49:40 +0000

Ghostclawler has announced on the forums, that they will “eventually” put Avenging Wrath on a 30 sec shared cooldown with Divine Shield.
That is totally fine with me and i guess most of the Paladin population.
Anyway, the way how these past few weeks played out was the evidence of incapacity for Blizzard’s Paladin work. How could they even get it so wrong in the first place?
It also shows, that the massive force of QQ on the forums actually effects something. Very much even.

By: Amiens

Amiens — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:57:44 +0000

Do I agree with Blizzard’s changes? Not necessarily, but I definitely think that people take things out of proportion, especially when its concerning their class. Blizzard has said that they’re going to bump up prot/holy damage as soon as they get the ret numbers down right, so that matter is only an issue of time (already they switched HotR to be 4x multiplier rather than 3x).

From the perspective of a holy paladin, I was happy to see with this expansion’s beta how blizzard has definitely did a lot of work on revitalizing holy paladins. I enjoyed playing beta because I could feel the amount of change that has happened. We have a lot more healing options now, we are much more mobile, we now have many more toys to play around with.

Remember, that even with the nerfs in the past 2 weeks, the overall TBC->WotLK transition has been a huge buff for paladins of all specs, all of our specs seeing bigger buffs than almost any other spec in the game. Perhaps only boomkin got similar magnitude of changes.

By: Harmun

Harmun — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:40:24 +0000

The mistake Blizzard made was on timing. If they had changed from pre-3.0 to what we have now (beacon of light, pushback fixed, judgment fixed, tank dps upped, ret viable), people wouldn’t complain.

It’s just that while they did a bunch of awesome things, they also worked in a little too much burst damage and made the game unbalanced. The process of fixing that feels worse than it would have if they had not changed the class at all.

By: Hammardin

Hammardin — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:17:22 +0000

Well said. I know exactly how you feel – everything looked so promising at one point in the beta and now it’s really just depressing. I thought at one point things might turn out like BC where we started out strong, and then things go downhill. But now I don’t think we’ll even get that.

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:23:33 +0000

My. Sentiments. Exactly.

On the money, as usual, Siha. I just wrapped up a rant of my own on the topic – it boggles my mind why they didn’t hotfix AW to a simple bubble-lock out instead of reversing their decision to detach it from Forbearance.

The good news, though, is Ghostcrawler has insinuated that a 30 second lockout might be the solution they ultimately go with, assuming they also detach it from Forbearance (again)…

By: gt

gt — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:09:03 +0000

I have avoided posting/talking about the Pally nerfs because you and Rohan do a better job of it! I just link my guildies to your blogs.

The ennui from nerfs continues… logging into find the AW hotfix was not a happy day for me. What happened to surgical nerfing of Ret? The giant nerfhammer is slamming Holy and Prot a lot harder than I expected. Its hard to stay hopeful and not spend more time on my alts.

When I dinged 70 I was Holy and AW was this thing that looked cool and I knew I would never use in my entire life as a raiding Healadin. Then the blues said “we want Healers to use AW but we don’t want to do a straight healing boost because that would be dull.” And they did it anyway and it was nice to have! And now its gone… I think I will pretend I never had it to begin with.