Am I a masochist, or have things gone too far?

The trend in paladins since I started playing early in TBC has been better, and easier to play.

In some ways this is good, but we should remember that wow is not a chore we have to overcome. It all about the fun we have on the way.

Paladins went from a niche tank in TBC to, as of 3.2, arguably OP.

Niches arent always bad. When I raided in TBC we had me a druid and a warrior. I ussually tanked adds, and the druid tanked knockdowns like tidewalker, and the warrior tanked fears like archimond. We were best friends, but I have to admit, if my guild had recruited another prot paladin in gear equal to the druid/warrior, I would have felt threatened. Now, anyone who fills your role (and even those who dont if their duelspec does!) is competing for your raid spot and rolling on your loot. You can still be fiends, but imo it was nicer when there was simply more niches, and more variety in gear to outfit people filling those niches.

Being overpowered isnt always good. People will start rightfully hating you. I didnt like deathkngihts when they have 80% frostpres and even at 60% more recently. We could still get along, but again, imo its nicer to be equal or the underdog, than hardcore OP.

Paladins (and pretty much all classes tbh) went from being complex and at times tedious to ridiculously easy. This is not good. A balance has to be maintained, but right now, we are too far on the cruise-control side.

Seals and judgements and blessings were awesome. For ret, you had to make a decision in advance what debuff to use. And, you quite often used more than 1 over the course of a fight....in pvp especially. It punished you for not meleeing for too long because you had to put it up again. Ironically, this is pretty similar to the idea of SOV now, except seals/judges were far more eloquent. If you used a special blessing you had to remember to put your normal one on when it ended. Tedious? Maybe, but it also gives you something to think about, and rewards good players rather than facerollers. For prot, it was pretty much just the feel that ruining seals/judgements ruined, but thats still kind of important. On a somewhat related note. Spells benefiting from AP just doesnt make sense. And it wasnt even needed (if it even was needed at all!) since prot and ret both get a talent to gain spell power from a stat they stack anyway.

Permenent divine plea is the end of "blue rage". A warrior doesnt get infinite rage as long as he autoattacks once every 15 seconds. Relying on dmg taken, or else having to swap seals was fun. There were limitations, but thats the point of a game, you have limitation, and try to surpass them. Prot paladins mightaswell not have mana anymore. They just have abilities they they mash when they are off cooldown. No regard for mana, and the kindergaden-level combat system that replaced seals and judgements makes for not much fun. A little leeway with mana/rage regen to prevent reverse scaling is ok, but when it pretty much eliminates the need to take dmg.....it has gone way too far.

Eliminating the need to take damage is awesome.

Nope, you're a masochist. :P

Also just warning in advance, if we're going to have this discussion please keep it civil everyone.

There was some grim satisfaction, back when, in being able to take our then-TFPOS class and squeeze more out of it than most people thought was possible. But don't forget, it was also a serious struggle getting to tank anything then. You'd be used as flypaper on Hyjal trash, but when a boss came along it was entirely possible that some Fury warrior would get the nod before you would.

If you're as hot as you think you are, people will still notice even now. It'll just take a little longer for them to notice the little differences between you and the not-very-hot masses.

Its not cause I want people to think Im good (because Im really not =/). Its just for the fun that more unforgiving gameplay adds.


As to mana regen, yes its awesome. BUT, why shouldnt we have to pay attention to our mana? Why even have a resource system if its not going to be relevant?

My favorite fight in TBC was bloodboil. I suppose this counters what i said about niches, because this was completely the opposite, but it was fun because everyone tanked (even the dps sometimes!) and all the tanks offtanked. You had to be very careful with mana because if you went oom and stoped pumping threat youd never get him back on you. I remember always judge/sealing wisdom and putting sac on the fel enraged person during those enrages because he droped threat so I had nothing to lose by swapping seals at that time.

I dont see how this was broken, I see this as being hella fun. I guess it doesnt matter what I think though, because wow caters to 11 mil people now, I was just wondering if anyone shares my confusion over a problem that needs fixing, and a challenge that needs overcoming.

Squishums wrote:As to mana regen, yes its awesome. BUT, why shouldnt we have to pay attention to our mana? Why even have a resource system if its not going to be relevant?

Do you really think warriors ever go out of rage when they're main tanking a boss? It's inherent to getting hit really hard to have a full "rage" bar. We still go oom too if we don't skip consecrate and if things don't hit hard enough.

I'm one of those who enjoyed BC a lot more than now. It was total culture shock for me coming back to WoW after 1 year, the leap from 2.4 to 3.1 was huge. Very very huge. I loved tanking. I enjoyed every instance. My mentor, the one who got me to switch from ret to prot after I hit Outlands (after having wasted so many levels as ret) left the guild after a series of hacks to his account, leaving me the lone pally tank. It felt great to be unique, and I did enjoy that "underdog" feeling.

One year down the road, I come back to WoW to find that everything changed. It took me a while to warm up to the changes. I was still switching seals and tossing out judgements throughout combat, before realizing that there were different judgements and I kept tossing out judgement of light. And seals are now pretty much blessings. I had to pop back on here and re-learn the prot pally from scratch.

But it felt sad to have countless paladins in the new guild, and everyone of them having a prot spec. Honestly, I have yet to see a pally with a holy/ret setup.

Combat-wise, I enjoyed the BC era one a lot more. It was more exciting somehow. Not the OOM part though, I love Divine Plea combined with BoSanc. No more drinking in between fights.

I miss BC. I didn't spend enough time enjoying the level 70 end-game, and now I keep finding myself having to catch up to the others in the guild, but somehow with so many other pally tanks, I start spending more time on alts.

Heroic strike replaces white dmg, so if you spam it you get no rage from dmg delt. Even on a boss that does moderate dmg, you can run out of rage if youre dilligently spamming HS.

On a hard hitting boss warriors have unlimited rage, and paladins have unlimited mana with just spiritual attunment. This is ok, because this is where tanks are in their element: the center of attention.

It's probably more that I have become jaded with the game, but I enjoyed TBC because every boss fight (I was our guilds progression tank when others wouldn't even let pallies tank, love my guild) I felt like it was a challenge, will I survive this.
Partially because of the lack of tanking tools and mana conservation issues I guess.
I have never had that feeling in wrath, I go in expecting to win, and I do. I guess this is why my alts have seen so much love recently.

Squishums wrote:Paladins (and pretty much all classes tbh) went from being complex and at times tedious to ridiculously easy. This is not good. A balance has to be maintained, but right now, we are too far on the cruise-control side.

Seals and judgements and blessings were awesome. For ret, you had to make a decision in advance what debuff to use. And, you quite often used more than 1 over the course of a fight....in pvp especially. It punished you for not meleeing for too long because you had to put it up again. Ironically, this is pretty similar to the idea of SOV now, except seals/judges were far more eloquent. If you used a special blessing you had to remember to put your normal one on when it ended. Tedious? Maybe, but it also gives you something to think about, and rewards good players rather than facerollers. For prot, it was pretty much just the feel that ruining seals/judgements ruined, but thats still kind of important. On a somewhat related note. Spells benefiting from AP just doesnt make sense. And it wasnt even needed (if it even was needed at all!) since prot and ret both get a talent to gain spell power from a stat they stack anyway.
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that's not really looking at the whole picture from what a paladin used to be compared to what it is today though. we have way, way, way more buttons to push than what we used to have, especially compared to vanilla beta when we just went around mashing holy and crusader strike till we were oom

there's no significant gameplay in constantly recasting short term blessings and buffs. its just annoying. i did like judging/re-sealing, but todays paladin would have to fit that into a rotation that consists of much more than just putting a seal up again. you didnt have to worry about strikes, shield slams, divine storms, art of war procs, tossing out salv, etc. it was just pretty much autoattacking and putting a new seal up and replacing a blessing. that was the paladin combat system. tbc came and we got more stuff to do, then wrath came and we got more stuff, etc. naturally they had to adjust the old base paladin system so that they could grow and expand it

in comparison to other current classes, yeah, some stuff could be a bit more skill dependent (ie they just made pallies watch for exorcism procs), but you can still be a bad pally because you dont really know what youre doing, dont have any situational awareness, etc.

but in comparison to the old clunker autoattack pally, no thanks. ive screamed my lungs out on forums over the years to get a more interesting class that can actually compete out there and im sure tons of other folks here have done the same

could it use improvement to make it a bit more skill-oriented in some areas compared to other classes? sure. but pretty much all classes get into their rotation-lull's eventually. there are some aspects of our class that are a bit harder than others as well- imo holy has a higher skill cap than other healers when you start tossing in aoe damage and what not

If I recall my tanking rotation back in BC was: Start of Seal of the Crusader, Judgement (back when there was only one ^_^ ), Consecrate, Holy shield, judgement... so on and so forth. I had seal of Righteous macroed to my judgement so every time I judged I refreshed my seal. Really it was lack luster at best, all I could do is hit three buttons and pray that it all worked out in the end. I twas quite boring to be honest, and it made me feel like I was a porcupine and relied on solely on being hit to build threat. The only real excitement I got was if someone pulled more mobs then I just move my consecrate. It just wasn't much for me.

I really started to love tanking even more then before once I got my -20%, hammer of the righteous (Trying so hard not to make a macro that makes me yell "HAMMER OF THE RIGHTEOUS!" ) my own shield slam, hell my own o shit button. I am glad I got all these tools, that is when tanking got interesting.

The very idea that we needed to take damage in order to get mana to gen threat was just asinine.

It got us benched for boss fights because there were other options out there that could actually focus on NOT taking damage. When there was AoE, we had a job. Otherwise it was strap on the ret (or holy) gear and basically take up space.

I am more than happy that those days are gone.

Squishums wrote:Heroic strike replaces white dmg, so if you spam it you get no rage from dmg delt. Even on a boss that does moderate dmg, you can run out of rage if youre dilligently spamming HS.

On a hard hitting boss warriors have unlimited rage, and paladins have unlimited mana with just spiritual attunment. This is ok, because this is where tanks are in their element: the center of attention.

The rage-on-avoid mechanism they added has made heroics a lot better on my warrior now. I have the rage to use my tools now, instead of being rage-starved all the time w/o taking off some gear.

These kinds of feelings were bound to come out. When I first started becoming a regular here, I wondered how many people were attracted to the class because of the personality trait of wanting to be the "underdog." There's nothing wrong with that, but I wondered how much of a factor that actually was.

moduspwnens wrote:These kinds of feelings were bound to come out. When I first started becoming a regular here, I wondered how many people were attracted to the class because of the personality trait of wanting to be the "underdog." There's nothing wrong with that, but I wondered how much of a factor that actually was.

I definitely rolled my Paladin to be Completely Awesome in all regards. Boy was I wrong... ha HA.