You Should Proabably Expect Some Kind of Nerf SoonFollow

careful who you ask.

still up on wow.com since day 1:



sure this is terribly outdated and way before the tank/heal/dps renaissance, but it's still up so i'm using it. this takes us now to:


why not? the other tanks get active heals. however, their's are not on a 20min CD with a penalty attached. besides:



next we go to:


i'm nitpicking, but a blue should be more selective with throwing around terms.

Tanking: holding aggro while avoiding damage.
-well, in pvp aggro is subjective.
-other than bubble and SS, a Ret cannot avoid incoming damage.

i'm pretty sure a Ret is NOT tanking in pvp, more like combat-healing.


lastly, are we really comparing Arms to Ret? with MS, Shattering Throw, and stun resists Arms should really be a Ret-counter. if it is not, blame the warrior, not the pally.

also @ Blues: please stop comparing melee classes to pallies when trying to illustrate overpoweredness. we've known for 5yrs that pallies eat rogues. show me QQ from an Arc/Frost mage, then we can discuss.

aren't we discussing pvp here? no threat in pvp. i'm confused.

a Prot pally in pvp has 3 options for self-heals:
1)JoL/SoL
-mana is such a strong commodity to a Prot pally in BGs that JoL often pales in comparison to JoW, even though JoL is rather powerful for Prot.
-i cannot remember when i last used SoL instead of SoV, sorry.

3)Heal(big and lil)
-spec'd Prot/Holy this is where its at...as long as you are not running a flag or something
-spec'd Prot/Ret this is pretty pathetic...if you are getting punched by said Arms warrior with MS on you, you are risking Holy lockout and losing massive hp since you can't defend while casting. not viable for self healing in BG.

2)LoH.
-topic at hand


other tank's healing:
DK - a bunch of healing stuff(esp in Blood) and/or a pet!: all available while attacking/moving AFAIK
Druid - as a bear: imp Pack and a HoT, plus Survival Instincts: all avail while attack/moving
Warrior - Last Stand, Comm Shout, and Enraged Regeneration: all avail while attack/moving

You're right, sorry. I momentarily forgot because it was the only reason I could imagine you'd argue for why a Pally couldn't use heals with cast times.



First of all, every heal for every class has downsides. It is important to establish this from the start.

1. Fair, yes. But, you ARE making a choice to use the different seal. It is viable to use the other, you just choose not to. If you feel you are getting better mileage out of mana, fine. But it is important to note that the mana you are regaining can still be used to heal. So, just because the seal isn't directly giving you life, doesn't mean it doesn't contribute to healing, survivability and damage.

3.-The only class I know of that can adequately heal itself while running a flag is a Druid, and maybe a Disc Priest. Plus, honestly, it isn't a position where one SHOULD be able to heal themselves too much. If a single player can make it down a field without support, there's a problem.
-A, the lockout point is irrelevant unless we are going to compare it to instant heals. Every single player with a cast time suffers the same risk. A Priest and Shaman are just as culpable. Furthermore, using MS as an example isn't useful, as it is an ability aimed specifically at cutting healing, and applies to ALL classes. It doesn't matter who you are or how you are getting the heals. Paladins are not unique at all here. And you can bubble and still heal. Many classes can't do anything about that.



A non Blood DK has TWO possible ways to heal. Not a bunch, two. That's it. They can Death Strike (which requires diseases on a target, which can be hard if you don't get the jump or they are managing to keep you out of melee range most of the time) and will only heal 5% of total health per disease, at the cost of damage (again, for non Blood DKs). The other option is to sacrifice your pet for 40% of your max health, which I'll agree may be OP. However, it comes as a cost. As you pointed out, the pet is important (and extremely so for Unholy DKs). You are much more vulnerable without it. So the Health comes at a big cost.

Blood DKs potentially get more. They can boost incoming heals (the ability will NOT heal them at all itself), or heal for 10-20% of their max health every minute to thirty seconds, depending on their glyphs and talents (it takes 3 additional talents and a glyph to get the lower duration and the extra 10%, so it is quite an investment). They can also use Mark of Blood, which is somewhat mediocre against anything that attacks slowly. It's only really effective against DWers (specifically, ones with fast weapons). Not attacking a DK at this time will severly diminish the effect of the ability. Blood Worms, if spawned (by chance) are a small HoT, and cost three talent points.

I'm sorry, but most DKs don'thave a "bunch" of self healing. Most won't even have the normal 2-4% damage dealt self healing, since it is usually superior to use Unholy Presence in PvP.

As for Warriors, Last Stand and Commanding Shout aren't heals. One buffs health, and the other buffs healing. Neither "Heals" the Warrior. The minute either ends, the health is gone. I don't think CS even gives health, it just increases the max. Enraged Regeneration isn't bad, but it has the requirement of a Warrior needing an enrage effect active (consuming it) and can only be used once ever 3 minutes.

Neither DKs or Warriors can heal themselves between battles.

Druids, I'll agree, are up there with the survivability problem. The difference is that they are extremely squishy when trying to cast a large heal (a Paladin retains most of his passive defenses). So, if you dispell the HoT, they aren't bad at all.

Plus, they need to choose between damage and survivability. Cats can be pretty squishy, and bears don't strike fear into the hearts of clothies.

my bad. i was thinking Shadow priest when i wrote that. Disc has always been a PITA for Ret!

I have watched it. I saw one with 27K health run down the whole field yesterday, with me and two other DpS wailing on him. Using every stun and CC we had (two melees. Don't remember what they were). I can't say anything about them, but my normal DpS in that set is about 2.3-2.4K. I don't know how resilience would affect that, but that's still a lot of damage (I had whipped out Gargoyle, too). He didn't even have to struggle to get down the field.

Furthermore, this isn't really relevant to the discussion. We are discussing Paladin survivability vs healing vs damage. Your example is one where most players won't be putting much of the second two out (Druid is the only flag carrier that tends to heal itself, that I can think of). I get WHY you picked it. You wanted to say survivability isn't OP, because there are times you can't bubble. But, if you aren't going to try and insure the integrity of the argument, then there is no use having it. Logic only works if you post logically.

[EDIT]


Again, what you DO do and what you CAN do are two different things.

A Pally, who sees an incoming wave, can whip out a heal. It may be less efficient, but that won't matter if they die.

A DK or Warrior is out of luck--they can only get one to three tics of food. And that's if they are willing to sacrifice a terrain advantage.

Edited, Nov 30th 2009 12:20pm by idiggory

Last Stand is a way to buff enraged regeneration so I tend to look at it as a heals of sorts from that perspective. Whacking Last Stand then hitting Enraged Regen gives Warriors a HoT that is very strong, especially as a tank. In S3 of Wrath it was one of the only ways Warriors could beat Rets 1v1.

As a tank I'll drink till my mana bar is full then heal back to full and drink again. Eating to full health just takes way too long.

Edited, Dec 1st 2009 2:49pm by arthoriuss

It's not holy getting that damage, just to be clear since that was the comment...that all specs put out high damage.

Also, the damage bonus seen by prot pallies in ret (dps) gear is not that different from what you'd see on a prot warrior. You're taking a spec built around defense that has to have some way to allow their stats to scale with gear for threat and itemizing it around damage at the expense of PvE defenses. It's not all that different from the bears that used to cruise around AV in kitty gear.

I'm not trying to argue that everything is all well and good in PvP land. My point is simply that you can't do a whole lot to pallies right now because everything that people are complaining about is a baseline ability for all paladins, and if you once again start nerfing the hell out of ret survivability, it's going to affect the pally tank in your raids. It would take a substantial revamp of the trees and base abilities in order to separate ret from prot in order to cut the survivability of ret, leave prot alone, and then address the damage if necessary.

I just wish that they'd come up with a viable solution that stops nerfing my stuff in PvE, where it is fine.

I've always been so sick of these nerfs aimed at PvP, that end up nerfing my class in PvE.

I don't even Do PvP; I'm sick of my class being nerfed because of it to be honest. Is there, like, no way they can figure out how to balance this class in PvP without switching things all around in PvE when it is perfectly fine? Paladin tanks are working quite fine, Paladin DPS seem fine to me, maybe just slightly 'up there' on the scale but not too godly so (look up Warlocks sometime...) and Paladin Healers are pretty decent too, though even they have some weaknesses.

Taking away the ability for tanks to use LoH is kinda dumb; it was one of the better things (if used right) that made Prot Paladin a cool class to play, it allowed us to do some nice things.

Now they're even nerfing *that*. Ugh.

All because of something I don't even do in the first place...

From this i'm guessing you're a mage and to that i say look up your lore and you'll see that paladins hate mages and if not for a truce between mages and paladins vs burning legion lich king etc paladins would be hunting mages for merely being "Evil".

Yes i know that it only counts to alliance paladins but there must be 3x more alliance paladins than horde since horde hasn't had paladin class as long.