Hello once again,
it’s me Ogb, the same guy that asked for paladin buffs back in wrath. And I’m here to do it again! Just for reference I’ve been playing paladin as my main since vanilla classic 2019, I played two paladins in TBC classic, I played 3 three paladins in Wrath Classic, and I currently play FOUR paladins in season of discovery. I have a massive body of work when it comes to playing this class, this isn’t a complaint from someone who doesn’t know paladin very deeply.
CURRENTLY, the state of ret paladin make no sense at all. Our best options for dealing damage involve going back to last phases’ raid for our bis weapon, and then having to swap to either the FLURRY AXE (a 750g rare epic world drop) or Sul’Thraze (rare epic from combining rare boss drops) after our crowd pummeler runs out.
This is NOT acceptable. Forcing rets to continuously farm gnomer and then have to spend hours on end farming in ZF for two rare drops just to do dps that barely beats the tank? I mean Come on man. This is ridiculous.
There’s also another problem that’s been created by the addition of melee hunters, another class that wants windfury and melee buffs, but ZERO additional sources of windfury for the alliance. Since ret provides no real group buffs and also does poor damage, it is being pushed out of the melee groups and forced to perform even worse. I have some suggestions that I believe could fix this, and make a lot of paladin players happy since you guys have said yourselves that your goal is to make all the specs feel op.
First I’ll address the weapon situation. In order to keep us away from automatic crowd pummeler, Ret needs a non-normalized hard hitting attack. My suggestion for this is to add something that’s already well known and loved by all paladins: an offensive version of the reckoning talent. Call it “Zeal” instead as a tribute to fast attacking zealer paladins from diablo 2. Every time the paladin crits, you gain one stack of “Zeal” stacking up to 5 times. When unleashed, zeal instantly attacks the target for 75-100% melee damage for each stack of Zeal accumulated. Having these crit based stacks would make consecrate much more appealing since now it can crit as well.
Zeal (or whatever you want to call it) could be a new ramping/stacking type of attack that can fill in our GCD’s and give something to build up to press that feels good. pressing a “Zeal” would feel very similar to landing a sweal twist, all the swings popping up and critting. but it also works like a builder/spender which is what a lot of the cata/retail players lean towards and have directly asked for in the discords.
Having a hard hitting attack like that, non-normalized, would force us to leave last tier weapons behind in favor of the new ones. Many ret players are upset by the fact that the spec is being pushed towards more buttons doing smaller damage instead of few buttons doing a lot and this could bridge the gap.
Second, the windfury situation. Alliance needs another source of windfury. Adding a new melee spec and then making it super popular because it’s the highest dps in the game without providing any form of additional melee group buffs makes no sense for alliance. The perfect candidate for alliance windfury is very obviously Sanctity Aura. Sanc aura deserves to be buffed in the first place, given that it helps no one except ret paladins and it’s meant to be a party wide buff. Sanctity Aura Should be reworked to provide windfury.
ADDITIONAL FIXES NEEDED:
Horn of Lordaeron
This rune is garbage. It needs to be made a baseline skill to actually be worthwhile. Horn should be baseline, raid wide, and also provide MP5. This would allow solo paladin groups to actually take advantage of blessing of salvation or light without taking away a massive chunk of AP from the melee or mana from the casters.
Crusader Strike/Judgements
do I really need to say more? make crusader strike refresh all judgements like it’s supposed to. It’s actually a joke that we have to take judgement of wisdom away from the ENTIRE raid just to put up a holy dmg debuff to increase our mediocre dps (and no one elses). either make Crusader strike refresh all judgements, or add a book that changes improved crusader judge to also apply judgement of wisdom. Also, even with the shift to 100% holy damage crusader strike hits for next to nothing with a 2.00 speed 2h so if we’re going to keep those as the meta CS damage needs to be increased.
IN SUMMARY:
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Paladins need a new strong physical attack that makes crowd pummeler less attractive and increases our damage, the current situation is unbearable at best and malicious at worst
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Alliance deserve to have another source of windfury and it should come from paladin’s Sanctity Aura
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Horn of Lordaeron needs to be stronger, raid wide, and a baseline skill.
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Judgements for all paladins should be refreshed by crusader strike, or improved judgement of crusader should also apply wisdom.
Implementing these changes would make paladins actually desirable in a group buff setting and ease the frustration of sorting the now higher number of melee players into useful groups.
I encourage anyone else reading this to add your ideas about how the class/spec could be made more comparable to our horde counterpart the shaman. Unfortunately Shaman are far more impactful and valued in a raid on the horde side than paladins are for alliance, especially rets who most will be looking to reroll soon if things don’t change. Please keep us from using crowd pummeler at level 60 and beyond.
Respectfully,
Ogb
