Why does the community hate Paladins so?
So I can’t make my mind up if I want to rant about enchanting vs gathering professions (protip people are selfish) or why everytime Paladins get nerfed the community responds with absolute, unabashed glee. I would have flipped a coin but my main is a paladin and my alt is an enchanter – therefore paladins win.
So you ask, why does the community hate paladins? I am glad you asked!
Reason the first: paladins are a strong class solo – meaning bad players (especially bad players who think they are “pro”) can’t beat them in duels.
Yes, paladins are a plate wearing class that can heal. Yes, paladins have an immunity effect. Yes, they can both heal and do damage during that immunity effect. Yes, paladins have SOME burst damage capabilities. Yes, paladins have a stun. Finally, paladins can both heal and do damage while you are stunned.
You know what? Outside of a very brief window in 3.0 you should never have been stunlocked to death by a paladin. Even if you discount the enormous numbers of classes that have abilities to keep paladins at range indefinitely, or stuns of their own, the developers have been ruthless in jumping on paladin burst damage. Utterly ruthless. Not to mention the fact that not one paladin spec can do all of those things well. Holy has NO offensive utility at all. Holy paladins are the only healing spec that doesn’t have a caster spec within its class.
Just think about that for a second. All that spellpower, crit and haste that other healers have is useful (if not ideal) for a damage spec of the same class. Holy paladins don’t. Which is why they are basically useless as non-healers. The reverse is also true. Other than enhancement shammies and feral druids all damage dealing specs of healing classes have SOME stats in common with the healing spec. That means that a boomkin or a shadow priest or an ele shammy can toss a heal if needed. The only thing ret paladins have in common with holy paladins is mana. Ret paladins can cast what 4 HLs before going oom?
Bad players – especially those that prove how “leet” their pvp skill is by duelling – struggle to beat paladins because they treat them like any other class. Blow your cooldowns early to either force an easy win or make the other player play defensively. Since almost all bad players are much better offensively than defensively this is a winning strat. Paladins have the ability to effectively reset combat – except this time the bad player doesn’t have his cooldowns up. Of course it would be much better if the bad player instead of wringing his hands like a fool also reset combat (eat or drink, stealth, mend pet – hell do anything other than ineffectually whack on the bubbled paladin). Force a bubble and then burn cooldowns.
Reason the second: paladins have traditionally been underpowered in at least 2 specs – meaning people treat them as a joke
Anyone play a ret paly during BC? Of those who did, ever get into a pug raid? lolret. Ret paladins were the red headed step-children of BC. Shadow priests were universally loved for mana goodness. Enhancement shammies buffed your rogues and warriors (who for some reason didn’t pay the hybrid tax). Kitties and Boomkins also provided big buffs (and battle rezzes), though they weren’t as desireable. Ret pallies? yeah they provided laughs and someone to sit at the bottom of the DPS chart.
Bears tanked magic bosses and hard hitting bosses – because they had a ton of health and dodge. Warriors were the main tanks of two expansions. Paladins? yeah they tanked the trash cause it was quicker that way.
Healy paladins? Well they were the only spec viable in vanilla wow, but the further BC went the less viable paladins became. By black temple the raid damage was vastly exceeding the tank damage. By Sunwell holy paladins were sitting on the sidelines. There were two classes that got absolutely hosed by Sunwell. Mages (who have the lowest survivability of any class along with the lowest dps of any main dps spec) and Paladins (who couldn’t dps hard enough, or heal enough targets quickly enough or survive bosses well enough to justify a spot) sat outside Sunwell buffing people on the way in.
Reason the third: blizzard have always been wary of letting paladins be too strong.
There are several blue posts on this point. Blizzard are concerned that a healing, plate wearing class could essentially dominate all other classes. Consequently paladins get hotfixed nerfs while other classes remain OP for an entire patch.
Reason the fourth: the three paladin specs are so diverse that they have nothing in common
There was an embarrasing number of prot paladins asking for nerfs to the holy prot pvp specs. Do you see bear druids asking for tree nerfs? Of course not, because Druids play as a class. Plus trees and chickens share gear to an extent, as do cats and bears, they have an indentity to an extent. There is no paladin community. There is a ret community, a tank community and some people who play holy paladins. That is all.
Reason the fifth: holy paladin gear is useless to everyone but holy paladins
So it gets de’ed a lot. You don’t need a lot of paladin healers – once they have their gear you de it week after week. Pisses off clothies a lot (cause more people want cloth gear than anyone else).
The latest nerfs
Forget about the lay on hands nerf except for one thing. How could anyone at blizzard have thought this was a good idea? Lay on hands is most useful when levelling. Its also occassionally useful (less than once a night) as a crappy tank cooldown. Its somewhat useful as a mana potion. It is not game breaking in any way. It effects fucking duels and can be used once a battleground. Its just something else bad players complain about cause they don’t want to accept they are bad. It makes you wonder if anyone has any idea what they want to achieve?
Paladins don’t have a lot of iconic abilities for a class that is basically the face of Warcraft. Why take this away for no reason?
Sacred shield? Sacred shield is a shit ability. There I said it. I admitted it. Its fucking crap in PvE. Theoretically it should be good but in practice its just disappointing. However, as an aside, you can’t fucking fix the holy tree by nerfing current abilities and making them deep holy talents. Someone, somewhere, needs to apply some thought to the actual issues facing holy paladins and redesign things so they work. Stop applying bandaids (beacon, FoL hot, all the set bonusses other than tier 7 4 piece) and address the fact that at least 50% of the holy tree is filler shit, the fact that there is no synergy between the 3 trees at all, the fact that there is no synergy between the 3 specs at all, the fact that plate spellpower gear is crap and the fact that no-one seems to have a consistent design vision for what a paladin should be.
Sitting down or sitting out?
I’ve been out of town for a while. It was great aside from a massive hangover. I’ve been thinking about where to from here raiding and guild wise. I applied to a new guild, slightly more progressed than my last one that wasn’t too far from shutting down either. Of course half a dozen or more of my former guildies applied as well.
I am not sure that I want to join to be honest. For a start they have a few holy pallies already. Second I am feeling a little tired of the constant expectation of being on trial. Also I may be moving interstate which means that now isn’t the best time to be applying to a new guild.
The biggest problem is the first. It may be arrogant of me, and I could well be wrong, but I think I am as good as any holy paladin on my server. I have pretty good gear, a reasonable amount of experience and the right skills to do the hard stuff. However, joining a new guild I am starting at the bottom again. I don’t want to sit out all the hardmodes trying to impress on normal, farm content. To make things worse the healing lead is a paladin – meaning that any 1 paladin fight I am no chance, no matter how good I am.
There don’t seem to be a lot of other options. I could always server transfer but to be honest there aren’t that many Oceanic guilds that are really progressed and I am somewhat reluctant to leave a server where I have a lot of friends that I enjoy running with. I expect to find out tonight how my application went but I am not going to join this guild unless I have a reasonable expectation of getting a good amount of face time. I am not going to be bench filler, I’d rather not raid that content then be expected to sit around night after night watching other people raid.
In the meantime, I’ve been trying to organise a gun heroic 10 man team. I’ve got tribute to skill and last attempt got to Anub with 46 attempts up – a run we never finished in the break up of the guild. I think we have a strong team. To be honest I prefer 10 mans anyway. I’ve given 25s a chance but if my more hard core guild has taught me anything its that as long as you still have to rely on other raiders then success sits outside your control. You can’t carry a 25 man through to success. It may in fact only be an illusion that you can do so in 10s but I like the greater responsibility and control you have in 10s. Of course serious 10 man raiding is basically unheard of – in any event you lose so much by not getting 25s gear that its at best niche.
In the meantime I’ve made some positive steps towards getting a job. At least I am progressing something.
More changes coming
You know what is worse than a guild exploding from drama? A nice guild slowly dying.
Its happening everywhere of course. Basically I think it comes down to the massive gap between normal modes and hard modes. Until very recently only 2 guilds (1 horde and 1 alliance) had killed the first boss in H ToC 25. Normal ToC 25 is puggable. This means that there are literally thousands of players on my server who have full cleared normal and 50 who have cleared the first boss on heroic.
What do guilds do who 1 shot everything on normal easily but can’t even dent heroic? Ulduar is old content, there simply isn’t widespread enthusiasm anywhere for smashing into Ulduar hard modes. Fights like Freya +3 require a LOT of learning time. Those people with limited time or who are gear oriented simply don’t / won’t do it.
The other issue is that, after years of raiding (and towards the end of the expansion) people are simply burning out. Most of your serious / top tier raiders seem to be the TBC generation. Sure there are people around from vanilla but I get the impression that the majority cut their teeth in kara. Kara is 3 years ago now. People are just over it.
ToC has not helped. Its far too clearly stop-gap content. A semi raid tossed in to level out the gear curve. Something to occupy people while IC is built. Some of the fights are poorly designed (faction champs, icehowl pre-nerf) and the difficulty level is extremely non-linear (eg beasts is much harder than jaraxxus, heroic anub exceeds the difficulty of the other fights by an order of magnitude).
Its a shame because my interest in raiding has been rekindled to an extent by moving into a more serious raid team. Its eye opening that they are suffering the same problems that we were in my old guild, especially with regards to solid attendence. More to come here for sure.
bits and pieces
So not an allergic reaction – something about viral illness etc. I knew I was sick the Friday before last because I couldn’t even log on. Its a rare day that I am too sick for anything. Supposed to be gone in the next couple of days. Bout time I look like I have fucking leprosy.
Dropped my first two wall of text posts on my new guild’s forums. Yeah I am that guy who spends half his life typing shit on your guild forum that no-one will ever read. I hope they do read it though cause last night was fucking ordinary and there are some key people who need to seriously improve if we are going to get anywhere in H 10man ToC.
Yeah last night was bad. In fact this week has been tough. Difficult to get the hang of raiding with, and leading, a new crew. Only made a couple of mistakes that I could see. The biggest one was that I listened to what the rest of the raid said about swapping targets in faction champs (we should always have killed the shammy first). I should have stuck with my original instinct. Had to rejig our Anub strat – hopefully it will work this time. Going to be fucking tough on the healers but I’ve rarely put out a strat variation that wasn’t (some things never change – good news is I can lean as heavily on the healer core in the new guild as I could in the old one).
The most important lesson learned from the first week? Who you should listen to when they tell you “I died because of x”. Some players you should listen to because it shows a flaw in the strategy, something to watch for. Others, well to be polite it seems like they die very, very regularly in very extraordinary circumstances.
Of course it didn’t greatly help that we had an ugly group of opponents – a prot warrior also offers something insane on that fight, or would have if we had one. We had no-one who could reliably lock down their heals. Fucking sad panda. It didn’t help that our clothies stayed in the middle of the floor like they were fucking nailed there. Some of them (our gun disc priest especially) were brilliant at kiting the dangerous (read: melee) adds out of the middle and surviving. Others? they’d get run over by a fucking glacier and all the while be insisting that they didn’t have time to move.
Vudho goes ok. Not great but ok. Current set up ensures that I focus much more on my assignments (tanks much closer to the middle of the screen). Lose a little bit of raid healing but probably a bonus. There are a lot of options, most of which I turn off. Don’t need any of that shit. Since I bound all the same spells to the same keys its not that big of a transition.
Guild is a little stuck. Need a solid progression kill this week. In truth I think we need to fuck Ulduar right off and hit H ToC 25s hard. People are sick of Ulduar and we aren’t getting anywhere anyway. I got some ideas around a 2 tank, 5 healer strat that might make up for our slight lack of DPS on beasts. I am trying to convince the GM to be a bit more agressive on where we go and what we do. I tend to get 10-15 attempts into something before I’ll admit it won’t work. Our GM won’t send us in if we don’t have the best group for it. Mostly a DPS issue since we have eleventy billion healers now.
Of course we’d have better DPS if we didn’t lose 3 or 4 to dc’s every fight. ToC = most bugged instance this expansion.
You wonder how your group members take being sat for fights. Not all the officers agree on who should be in when of course. You wonder if the healers know, for example, when the healing lead has their back (so to speak). Numbers don’t matter that much but the healing lead seems to have a strong handle on who the strong performers are. Not that the strongest group always gets in. I sat 2/3 people who struggled ball watching for twins but we did one shot it. I am still coming to grips with who are the most reliable performers. I got a different perspective on that too since I have only come to the guild recently.
At least we can say we’ve done the “learning” part of H 10 ToC now (half our group hadn’t done a single fight). The expectations are higher come tomorrow – after all tomorrow is a new raid week.
New tier bonuses
So I think I am currently in the midst of an allergic reaction to something. Seafood probably (which is weird cause its never happened before). Anyway its 1:45am here and I am awake. I’ve been considering logging on to WoW but I completely rearranged my UI today (swapping from healbot to Vudho, taking out 90% of my bars, x-perl’s party AND raid frames and just cleaning up) so I am a little bit reluctant to see what damage I have caused.
Ultimately it came down to having soooo much space taken up by 2 different types of raid frames and all this various crap that I didn’t need. I think it looks cleaner now and hopefully I’ll be able to heal as well (if not better). I have previously tried this with grid and I ended up reverting back to healbot mid raid cause my output was so much lower. I don’t think that will happen this time.
I’ve also taken a look at the new tier 10 pally bonuses. As you may know I’ve decided against taking the tier 9 recently (I’ve replaced 4 pieces of tier 8 with 245 so I am pretty happy with that). The tier 10 bonuses are as follows (thanks mmo-champion)
The 2 piece bonus WAS a 60 sec reduction in divine favor. They’ve definitely stepped in the right direction – that bonus was only matched by the 2 piece tier 9 bonus in pointlessness.
Lets talk about the 4 piece first (cause its easier). I like the concept of the 4 piece bonus. I liked the old infusion of light talent (which if memory serves was a 1 sec cast time reduction on HL with a HS crit). An added bonus was the synergy between the tier 7 set bonuses (easily the best this expansion) and that talent (2 piece increased HS crit, which procced more IoLs).
The problem lies with the poor scaling of HS. HS is both less HPS and HPM than HL. Since you can also get your HLs much closer to the GCD now (something not even remotely considered in tier 7) the benefit of the faster HL is less – not to mention the fact that it is a MUCH smaller reduction this time around. While I loved the HS fast HL combo as a great tank saver, I think these days its not nearly as potent as it was two patches ago. That said, its a fun bonus (insofar as I like the playstyle options) and so it passes.
The 2 piece is… well different. I really don’t know how to feel about it to tell you the truth. It gives you another offset on the divine plea healing penalty. It could boost throughput in circumstances where throughput boosts are useful (phase 3 heroic anub, steelbreaker last IC). My concern lies (and this is unquestionably a math issue) in whether using it for those purposes will reduce its mana efficiency effect.
Right now divine illumination is quite powerful as a mana management tool. Like all mana management tools the aim is to spend as little critical time under the divine plea penalty as possible (non-critical times, eg between beasts, between phases on mimiron is fine to take the penalty). Divine illumination should be used early – so it can be used multiple times in the fight. Ideally, if you can successfully manage mana without using divine plea, then that is ideal. While you shouldn’t wait till oom to use Divine plea, it should be used later. In fact using divine plea too early will result in less mana being returned than using it later.
This makes divine illumination much more of a choice. Do I hold off on divine illumination so I can safely divine plea mid fight (wings + divine illumination will reduce the penalty markedly, though probably not 100% as the effects are multiplicative)? Would I be better off to simply divine illumination early so I can get another 15 sec window later on? Do I need to keep divine illumination for an intense healing phase (something that I haven’t ever really done with wings but could consider)? Currently its macroed into HL so that, at least, will have to change.
Something else to think about. The tier pieces have not been well itemised for the last 2 tiers. In fact at best 2-3 of the 5 pieces have been ideally itemised. This means however that you COULD pick up only the well itemised pieces and STILL get the (potentially) very powerful 2p tier bonus.
An interlude with the dark side
My crappy dk dinged 80 recently. I picked up 7 or 8 epics within 2 hours of dinging. I could probably fake achievement my way into a VoA pug now!
I don’t begrudge people easy epics though, despite having to grind my gear out to a certain extent. After all gear is simply a means to an end, someone else having as good (or better) gear than me doesn’t make me any worse a healer. It certainly doesn’t make them any better.
DKs still, after all the nerfs, feel very strong. I’ve never specced or played my pally ret (shocking I know) – I levelled prot to 70 and then holy to 80 – but I imagine that a ret pally and a DK play much the same. Sitting around waiting for either procs or abilities (or runes) to come of cooldown. DK rotations are a bit less “whack whatever is off CD” and more “hit A, then B then mash C until A and B are ready again”. Melee dps is of course a painful exercise in dancing around mobs (tanks NEVER stand still).
I had a very small amount of levelling energy recently, all of which went into my DK. I originally worked hard (it felt like a REAL struggle let me tell you) to get him to 65 so he could pick up 2 max level trades to benefit my other toons. He got there (and only learnt one profession – one I also then took up on my main, fuck hodir AND his sons – and then sat there for a *long* time. I am still not sure where the motivation to level him came from. I find myself not spending so much time outside of raids on my pally. I do raid reasonably often, but given my badge situation and my lack of interest in PvP there tends to be little point in sitting around on him.
I am not sure where this all leads to however. I have my original 80 mage. I actually raided him again on the weekend. He is in just awful gear at this point in the expansion. I still have BLUES!! In fact some stupid wanker in the raid spammed a gear score mod before the raid and I was last! I finished 5th on DPS though. 4.3k DPS in Naxx 10 gear. Stick that up your collective. I find raiding as arcane fun and so it wasn’t that bad as something different to do (I was much to sick to go out into the real world). I do NOT have any interest, time or inclination to raid two toons in two guilds though. Which defeats any purpose in continuing to gear either my DK or my mage. Sure its fun to have a geared alt and belt through things in a different role but I LIKE healing. I also like having weekends off raiding.
I’ll probably partially gear my DK as a “something to do when not raiding” but once that becomes too time consuming I’ll almost certainly stop, even if the dark side does have better cookies…
4 piece Tier 9?
I have 150 triumph badges in my possession.
I have no pieces of tier 9 currently.
Realistically in the next month I am likely to see 2/3 max trophies.
What do I do?
The biggest issue is that neither of the tier 9 set bonuses are overwhelmingly good. The two piece set bonus (increased judgment duration by 10 sec) is just ridiculous, put in by someone who has no idea how to play a holy paladin. If I am judging at all then I am doing so as often as I can (cause its free mana assuming that I can’t seal of wisdom to victory). Almost always before the original buff expires. In any event you should never rely on a holy paladin to keep up a judgement buff if you can afford it – its why *no* important buffs are given to healing specs.
The tier 9 4 piece bonus is less straightforward. Doubling the value of the hot from FoL is certainly interesting conceptually. I had a look at a couple of recent logs to see what my hot uptime / throughput is
10m ToC clear – 3.8% of total heal (44% uptime, 65% overheal – average tick is slightly under 200)
VoA, some Ulduar and Ony – 3.1% of total heals (52.5% uptime, 80% overheal – average tick is 100)
First half Ulduar (incl Leviathan) – 2% of total heals (27% uptime, 70% overheal – average tick 185)
So the hot is a long way from groundbreaking. Since it sits at or around 70% overhealing and 3% of total healing we are looking at a maximum benefit of 1-2% of total heals from the set bonus. To get the 4 piece tier 9 I am probably going to have to take 2 pieces of tier 9.1
Now there are only 2 pieces available from badges that are non-set. These two pieces (provided I get the mail helm, which you better believe I will) are quite well itemised.
The reason I have been hesistating to commit to breaking my tier 8 bonus is that if I can pick up 1 or 2 “free” pieces / trophies now then it may be worth holding the badges in the hope that I can somehow score the remaining pieces quickly. I don’t believe that the tier 8 bonus is that strong, despite world of logs insistence, I don’t think that the extra proc is useful given that most bosses swing at 2.0 secs or slower and most tanks dodge or parry every other hit. I am mostly in 219 tier (3/4 pieces) though so the upgrade to the 245s will more than outweigh that change.
This will then give me the ability to take offset pieces from ToC with impugnity, chasing itemisation rather than trophies. There just aren’t enough trophies to go around. I’ll have enough badges to get the pieces should some of those trophies fall my way anyway (another full clear of ToC on 10s and 25s will put me back to 60 even after buying the remaining offset pieces).
I’ve basically stopped running the daily now, I doubt I’ll bother with it at all if I decide to go non-tier.
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