Whiny Friday: Paladins are horrible

| Friday, October 15, 2010
First off, I've heard bad things about holy. But since healing frightens me, I've not tried it. Moving on.

Holy Power.

Holy. Power.

Extra. Periods. Which. I. Use. To. Emphasize. A. Point. Which. I. May. Or. May. Not. Have.

I want sacred shield back. I liked sacred shield. It was an excellent button to press if I had no other buttons to press. And it turns out it was giving a significant bit of mitigation.

I'm actually enjoying ret. The holy power system adds some variation, some interest to it. It's mechanically fun. But it lost a lot of damage and even more self-healing. With divine storm no longer being spammed constantly thanks to t10 and no more instant flashes of light, my healing has pretty much vanished. Seal of insight helps, but it scales pretty slowly. I can use HP for HP, but that means no HP for DS to give HP and damage, so I'm having all sorts of HP problems with the HP system. Also, acronyms. Still, I like ret so far and I'm confident that some DPS tweaks can put it in a solid raid position. Also sprint judgement is pretty nice, though it could stand to be a little bit faster.

But prot. Prot prot prot. Prot. Prot. It has painfully slow HP generation, with only hammer of the righteous or crusader strike and they share a CD. It ends up feeling slow and clunky. Ret also has one ability to spam for HP, but it also has quite a few 40% procs for additional HP and they're on the common abilities, including the finisher moves. I like some of the ideas of it, such as picking between a damage finisher for aggro and a heal finisher which will bubble if it overheals. I like the reseting avenger's shield for something to change things up. I don't like being unable to get pursuit of justice at this level. I might have to switch my boot enchant to run speed, a clearly abominable act considering they currently have rockets on them. Replacing fine goblin engineering with... magic? Ugh. Even worse, magic done by someone else. How do I know if its unreliable?

What I think could help is adding a HP chance to AS. That would speed up the HP generation and make it so AS fees like more than just a misused interrupt. Also put the damage back on hand of taunt.

4.0 has all sorts of strange flaws which are bugging me. Sound effects randomly drop, while at times I can hear the sound of spellbooks being searched and bars being reshuffled. The new character display is great, but I don't like that it shifts my name over when I open the stats tab. Random gives no indication of how many justice points it gives, which incidentally isn't very many. The very worst thing: NPC names and health bars. Health bar display seems to be entirely random; just toggling it on and off will bring up new and exciting mixes of not all of the information that a player needs. Sometimes NPCs show their names above their heads even when not targeted, with the display option turned off. This creates a horrible appearance of all this smashed text floating over NPCs 50 yards away that cannot even be read. Actually that's one of the things that I loved about WoW compared to other MMOs: it didn't have stupid ugly immersion-breaking crap like that. It just looks awful. I'm sure it's just a bug as they sort out what seems to be a new feature, but it's not making the near post-patch experience much better.

It's not all bad though. I like reforging. I like the new way of organizing portals and teleports. I uh... wow, that was a short list.

P.S. Arcane is OP and frost is taking forever to kill anything.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Personally, I'm enjoying Holy healing. I keep saying it feels like Draenei healing, because logically the Draenei would actually do things quite differently from Azeroth's older citizens, and somehow the more varied and mobile way of doing things just FEELS right for them.

But I'm a baby pally who's only been playing for seven months and who hasn't quite reached 80 yet. It's definitely not what Holy used to be, and I can imagine that a lot of the old hands are finding it difficult or impossible to enjoy, because they played Paladins for a good while, and they LIKED it, and now it's like they're an entirely different class.

Edawan said...

Sometimes NPCs show their names above their heads even when not targeted, with the display option turned off.

It's a new option. Something like "display quest NPC names".

Leah said...

I haven't tried holy or Ret yet, but i did try tanking last night and it actually wasn't so bad. clunky yes, much harder to keep AoE threat especially on the kind of large pulls that everyone got used to and I had to be very very careful with the usage of consecrate (its like that switched up consecrate with avenger shield - it was my top damage ability last night) and I definitely didn't like the whole "if you want your shield of righteousness to hit harder, you must wait" with essentially only one ability to build up holy power. I found myself autoattacking a lot more then I did pre patch where every global CD was taken up by something. but holy hell, mana. I don't remember last time when I had ZERO mana problems in 5 mans. I was basically at full mana the entire time as long as I kept judging :/

I guess we'll just have to get used to new mechanics, but yeah, another button to push would be lovely..auto attacking just feels wrong :/

Leah said...

oh yah, forgot to mention - I love the new holy wrath, love it! I've always loved that ability, seemed very paladiny, but could only use it situationaly before. Now I use it all the time, but unfortunately it still doesn't fill in the gap of auto attacking until Hammer/crusader strike is of CD :/

River said...

I shelved my Pally just concentrating on my main...The Mage. As for Arcane being OP....I don't know bout that.

Dazed Sheep in PvP though is HOT!

TheGrumpyElf said...

I am leveling a ret pally and was deciding on the second spec, at the moment Holy seems the way to go being tanking no longer really seems fun for anything other then a death knight based on all the QQing I read on the forums. They are the only ones not complaining which pretty much means it must be nice and easy.

Arcane is amazingly OP. My level 63 Mage is pulling 2300 DPS on dungeon bosses. I'll enjoy it while it lasts, there is no way in hell that is staying in the game like that.

Anonymous said...

With the right rotation you wont have any breaks in your prot rotation.

Learn to use Holy Wrath as a new filler.

AS
CS/HR
SR to get holy shield up
CS/HR
Judge
CS/HR
Consecrate
CS/HR
SR
CS/HR
Holy Wrath
CS/HR
AS should be up by then

Faeldray said...

I might have to switch my boot enchant to run speed, a clearly abominable act considering they currently have rockets on them.

They're making it (if they already haven't changed it) so that enchants can be placed alongside engineering tinkering. So you can have both!

SlikRX said...

As Ret, I despise the Holy Power BS.

If I wanted combo points I would have levelled a rogue or Kitty Drood.

Our "rotation" is STILL FCFS (but with only 2 or 3 spells), but with a couple glaring holes while we wait to spam-CS to let us hit DS or Templar's Verdict.

(I hated the T-10 DS bonus, it never helped my DPS and I ran out of mana constantly - so I never wore it)

Xaxziminrax II said...

> How do I know if its unreliable?

Just make sure your enchanter of choice is a goblin, and have them use materials one tier lower than those normally required. No, make it two tiers. That should make it unreliable enough for an engineer's standards.

Anonymous said...

For the sound effects try changing your sound hardware acceleration to 'basic.' It's in the Control panel for sound, just select advanced options for speakers and look under the performance tab. Dxdiag allows you to change this option as well.

A number of people with Realtek audio devices, myself included, resolved this issue with that change.

Best of luck.

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