Attn: Horde, Paladin summary.Follow

First, my credentials: Paladin class captain through ZG, Ony and MC. Not a lot compared to some others. If im full of beans its very possible you are right :P

Hell, alliance doesnt seem to understand half this crap, so here's a heads-up.

Blessings. My pet peeve.

How do blessings work?

Greater Blessings cost reagents and are 15 minute. They are cast on a class not a group. Group 1 does not need Might. Group 2 does not need Wisdom. Rogues need Might. Priests need Wisdom.

The 15 minute part is important. Most strategies, ready checks and other dinking around that goes with most new encounters takes longer than 15 minutes. Dont ask for blessings when the strat hasnt even been discussed. Otherwise the pallies will just make fun of you for being retarded behind your back in the paladin class channel. Mage, Druid and Priest buffs are hour long. Those can go out during strat. I liked to cast my blessings on final ready check.

Each pally can only cast one blessing per class. If there are 2 pallies in your raid and you, the rogue, have might and salv, dont go asking for kings*. And remember the greater blessings go to the entire class. It's up to class leaders to decide what buffs their class wants. Regular, 5 minute blessings can be handed out, but will likely be handed out when you ask for them and expire by the time the fight starts. They also override whatever greater blessing that pally gave you.

*Kings has to be specced for. So not all pallies have it. Same thing goes for Blessing of Sanctuary.

Judgements

In our guild, when I raided and was class captain, I made it a point to have Judgement of Light (health regen on melee hits) and Judgement of Wisdom (Mana regen on melee and spell hits) on every mob, trash or boss. This is not unreasonable to ask of your pallies. Its amazing how helpful it really is for the entire raid.

For judgements to be kept up they have to be refreshed. There are three ways to do this:

1) Meleeing the target.
2) Ret Pally with Crusader Strike can keep all of the judgements up, even from a different pally.
3) Re-Judge the target.

So if a pally is spam healing/cleansing something it is very possible he wont be able to refresh his judgements very frequently if at all. Crusader Strike is great for this.

Heals and Cleansing

At this point in the game, pre BC, Flash of Light spam is really all there is to healing. It seems Holy Light will be more useful in the level 70 encounters. Pally Cleanse removes disease, poison, and magic. They are a great cleanser and, even though other classes can dispel too, should be the first choice for cleansing duty on encounters whether they like it or not. It bored me to tears in MC. Not sure how bad it will be in XPac.

Blessing of Protection

This ability makes the target immune to melee damage and unable to attack with melee damage.

Untalented, it's a 5 minute cooldown that is great for casting on AoEers since it doesnt inhibit casting. If cast on a tank it will wipe aggro and bad things will eat your raid.

Also overrides whatever blessing that pally cast on you.
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So thats what you hordies have to look forward to. If one person reads this and gets a better understanding of the paladin class, I have not wasted my time... and im bored anyway.

Just please, dont be the "BUFF PLZ!" guy.

for pvp, id like to mention the oft-overlooked Blessing of Sacrifice. its a very short buff, 30s i think, and what it does is transfer damage done to the player its on to the paladin who casted it.

so if KT and i were guarding a node in AB and a mage comes along, KT can hit me with blessing of sacrifice. the mage will then (being a smart mage) poly the healer (KT) and since im a warrior, proceed to pwn my face. now, lets say that KTs bubble is down; he cant break poly on his own, and his pvp trinket is on cooldown. WORRY NOT! blessing of sacrifice will deal damage to KT the moment the mage hits me, and since polymorph breaks on damage....well, our little mage is gonna be screwed.

granted, this is more pvp than pve, but BoSac, comboed with stuff like blessing of sanctuary and curse of weakness can mean a LOT of damage reduction from bosses.

its cool. i figured you more for a "quality" pvp than a "quantity" pvp. that is to say, you dont pvp often, but when you do, you take on 2-3 raid groups of horde all at the same time as theyre about to enter MC.

BoSac is also great for trying to keep people up through multi-mob attacks. For instance, the small spider packs in Naxx, start with BoSac on a warrior who challenging shouts, then BoP the mages that are AoEing so that they don't get aggro, is a very clean way to clear those kind of areas.

It's also a very useful thing when first trying the Panther boss in ZG, as an example. Use it on the guys tanking the adds.

I have gained understanding. Thank you for the informative writeup, TBH i did not know one word of what a pally is.

Im never knew their shield wipes aggro, also that it can be applied to other players. I could see how it would be a wonderful tool on a mage.
When they put the shamans and pallies combined, I cant wait to see how awesome the groups will become.

To me i still see shamans as more viable than a paladin, (thats only because I play one, and also because I dont understand everything to the fullest extent of a paladin).

Rate up!

Yeah, remember what the horde always said, "Pallies make alliance PvE easy-mode."

It will be fun having both though.

Yes, a Greater Blessing hits everyone in the raid of that class. They are really really good.

You can have 1 judgement per paladin on a mob. It takes a debuff slot (which used to be 16 but is now 40). Of the paladin debuffs there is Light (chance on hit to heal for a small amount), Wisdom (chance on hit to gain a small amout of mana), Crusader (increases Holy damage), Justice (prevents the mob from mob from running and prevents movement speeds greater than run speed), and 2 other Judgements that deal damage and do not debuff.





Edited, Jan 9th 2007 5:04pm by baelnic

I made that comment because, I have one and I dont want her to become obsolete. :( Boohoo!!

But if it came down to it, shamans will definately not be used raiding as much (I think paladins will be stepping on our toes the whole way to thunderbluff), pvp sure shamans will be better (once again depends on spec), general questing/5 mans sure shamans will be better (there is always use for a filler, and something tells me that a paladin will be used more often for a tank now rather than a healer, whilst a shaman will be used more as a healer, and priests are the hardest class to come by). It all depends on what spec the shaman/paladin is in all of those situations.

So really in the end, the group/raid situations will fill their spots with the person who is the the right spec for what they need. If they need a healer and find a resto shaman and a ret paladin, what would be your choice? And vice versa.

On another note, they are all gonna make grouping even harder to come by a group with my hunter. /sigh

I guess its once again time to re-roll.

Edited, Jan 9th 2007 9:12pm by lauisifer

I have a pally question. What is Consecrate(sp?)? I read that it is an AoE type spell-and I've seen the word pop-up tons of times while in AV on my Horde characters. But according to one thing I read it is a talent, but when I looked through all the talents on the main WoW site I could not find it. At what level can you learn it and how effective is it?

Thanks for the help! The highest I've ever gotten a pally is level 14, so I am hoping I can stick with my new one to at least 40. =)

Consecrate used to be an 11-pt Holy talent. It's a AoE DoT effect that's Holy damage. When used with Righteous Fury (+60% boost to threat from Holy damage), it makes a Paladin's job of AoE aggro generation so much easier.

As of patch 1.11 (I believe, it may have been 1.12), Consecrate became a trainable skill for all Paladins at level 20.

Since my paladin (mix Protection and Retribution talents) has started tanking instances, it's a very nice addition to her aggro generation capabilities. There's nothing like watching a group run by, pop Consecrate, and watch them stand there pounding on you.

The only draw back to it, is the relatively high mana cost. For Rank 3, it's almost 300 mana per use.