The WoW Paladin - No "Blessings" in disguise.

[Nar]

Alright...so before I complained about the Paladin changes, I wanted to give them a shot.
For the most part, I am pleased. I like that I now have the ability to keep a +attack "aura" and a +mana regen "aura" on the members of my group that need them, in the form of "blessings".
I can even get use to the Paladin self only seals, and Judgment. Not too bad, overall, an improvement.
I am, however, very displeased at a couple of things.

Paladins have difficulty holding agro. This is compounded by the fact that I need to stop attacking every FIFTEEN seconds (Judgment is a 15 second refresh spell, and removes your seal) to recast my instant cast seal. This was very poorly planned out. Even if I do not use my Judgment, the seal only lasts THIRTY seconds. There is no reason for this seal to last for this short a time. At the very least, make the seals last 5 minutes and overwrite eachother.

Blessings are great. You can custom buff your group rather then just having an aura that effects everyone, however...blessings are a 5 minute recast. Its a huge PITA to have to recast them constantly on everyone in the group. Make the group only, and have them last 30 minutes, or maybe as long as the Paladin is grouped. Spells requiring refresh every 30 seconds is retarded.

No more Healing Aura? Thats just ghetto. I used that Aura quite a bit to lower my downtime.

[Zeik-Retired]

Seal of Fury.

Have you tried out the new Seal of Fury at the highest rank you can get? With a 2 hander and Seal of Fury going, I can pull aggro off a priest that just healed me for 2000 with just 2 swings. (150-200 damage each.)

It can build MASSSSSSSIVE aggro. Hell, I can hold aggro on 2-3 mobs at a time if I keep switching between them and getting a swing or two on each.

Blessings are the price we pay to be able to keep more then one aura up at the same time, heh. Really, with Wisdom now as a Blessing, Might as a Blessing, you can buff every person how THEY need it, rather then just having one thing going always.

Although I do miss healing aura too. That's the only bad thing I've seen so far.

Edit: And I'm not sure why you say you need to stop attacking to recast seals and Judgement? You can cast them while in combat, and you don't even need to change targets anymore like with the old seals system.

Edit2: Oh yeah, don't complain about having to recast seals. I mean really... you only need to pay attention once every 30 seconds now, instead of every 10 seconds with Holy Strike.

[FoghornDeadhorn]

Haven't seen it yet, I know some changes looked promising to me. For the first time in a long time, assuming he's still around, I'm going to log into my PvP paladin and see how things go. As far as the recast times, why is it you have to stop fighting, are these non-instant cast spells? I was used to casting some manner of spell about every fiteen seconds, aside from holy strike, because it was about the only damned way to hold aggro. With the increased DPS of Warriors, they seem like they will still be the kings of single-target aggro even with the taunt nerf, the real question is, can a good paladin do the job like a warrior now? Considering Holy Strike was one of the only reasons we could hold aggro at all, even with SoS, this is going to be interesting.

Whoever said playing a Paladin was brainless was off their fucking rocker and/or couldn't play Paladin worth a damn.

[Jabberwhacky]

I third healing aura. Very handy way to get some HP back without using a heal and thus losing mana regen for 5 seconds.

How much do you guys do during fights? I'm only 20 and it's pretty boring. I was killing the undead (lvl 21-22 warriors, 22-23 mages) down south of Darkshire and it was dull. I'd start with Crusader and the undead nuke and then just auto attack, only tossing in another nuke if I had been missing a lot. Then I toss a single heal on myself, refresh Crusader and start the next fight at 100% HP and about 50% mana. As HP goes down, mana goes up (since it regens during combat). Did that all the way to 21. I know you can blow seals but they just seem to do too little for a decent chunk of mana and effort. I even tried using the Holy Debuff (off crusader) but it only seemed to add like 10-15 damage to the nuke at the cost of like 150 mana.

[Zeik-Retired]

Seals and Blessings are ALL instant-cast, and, so far as I know, all have no cooldown.

Honestly, with the taunt nerf.... I'd say we could possibly do a BETTER job at taunting then warriors can. New Seal of Fury is just that uber.

Edit: As for the holy debuff, it doesn't really do much for us. But what it can do alot for is priests with holy smite, and maybe the one Seal that lets us do holy strikes randomly during swings. (I forget the name, but it's part of the Retribution tree.)

[Vorph]

Originally posted by Nar
Paladins have difficulty holding agro.

Join the club. No one can hold aggro at the moment. :/

[Kolle]

I don't understand why Bliz does this with buff timers. Everything is so short.

I can understand a super priest self melee buff being short. Things like stamina and other buffs from different classes should last at least an hour or two.

I know for a fact these people played the old EQ, right? Being a shaman was a nightmare on a raid.

[Itzena]

Originally posted by Zeik-Retired
Honestly, with the taunt nerf.... I'd say we could possibly do a BETTER job at taunting then warriors can.

Whoa, EQ flashbacks.

[Nar]

I guess I just feel like I've gone from "Anti Undead Warrior" and "Healing Tank" to "Blessing bitch".
Like I said, refreshing spells on 6 people every 5 minutes is stupid, especially when they are instant cast...thats just unnecessary buttonwork.

[Sorran]

Paladins becoming bards perhaps?

Cheers,

Sorran.

[xilsharn]

The (mostly legitimate) gripes about this game are really starting to sound like (mostly legitimate) gripes I heard in EverQuest.

These blessings sound like shaman buffs (especially avatar) and bard songs. What exactly do paladins gain in exchange for these uber short duration buffs? I'm honestly asking, I don't know.

[Charron]

Paladins went back to the way they were many patches ago. Originally you had auras and Seals. many of the Seals were 5 min buffs and included the Seal of Might and Seal of Wisdom and a few others that were good. Those were turned into Auras in one patch and you were only left w/ some utility seals. I guess they were changed back into "seals" and renamed Blessings. They are back to their 5 min buff status. I must say these are a total PITA to keep up all the time.

So if I understand correctly you now have a couple of auras, seals and blessings. The blessings are the 5 min buffs and the seals continue to be utility spells.

[Tuco]

So the seals aren't group buffs then?

Because if the seals were group buffs that could be casted while meleeing, that'd be fun... hell, it's better than 18 seconds or so like in EQ =)(as a bard)

[Charron]

Ok, I just read the first 4 pages of the paly feedback thread. It has become clear that most people (including myself) are totally misunderstanding the way the paladin is supposed to work now.

The Seals are minibuffs... BUT they are also our new combat abilities. The seals work in conjunction w/ the Judgements to transfer the seal from you to your target and which causes some negative effect.

So typical combat might be something like:

Seal yourself, pull, autoattack, judgement onto your target, re-seal yoruself, switch target, judge them, re-seal, etc.

So it's certainly a far cry from buff, autoattack, *yawn*. I'm going to have to go and re-read all of the seals and judgements and see how they work together. This is clearly not as simple as most people are making it out to be.

Go read the paladin feedback thread and you'll see 4 people saying how it sucks, its boring, I'm twiddling my thumbs, i'm a buff bot, and then 1 guy saying its amazing. Time to do a little more research.

[Cynax]

I hope people keep hating it. Let some other class be the Flavor of the Month for release.