Ok so, imagine you have been faithfully raid healing for a few years, and your guild decides to take a break from raiding for a couple of months. You’ve managed to acquire some good off-spec PvP weapons and trinkets by spending your DKP, and decide to respect to mess around and duel outside ironforge for the months that your guild is on break. What spec do you choose? A couple caviats:
Whatever talents you pick, you have to stick with for the next 2 months. (Again, all you will be doing is dueling.)
You will be dueling all classes (yes… I know you’ll need to go out in the world to find shaman) and want a spec that gives you the best change against THE MOST classes.
I can see reckbomb being really good against melee, but aren’t pallys already strong against melee?
Also, are we certain Reckoning procced off spell crits in Vanilla?
Even if it does, it seems to me that the classes that Pallys are weak against are classes with good burst and a reliable way to prevent you from healing (counterspell, silence, spell lock…etc). Which means that you need a reliable form of CC to safely heal.
Speccing into the prot tree for reckoning would be good on one hand, because you could reduce HoJ cooldown. But does this really help against Mages and Locks?
Mage blink spell was on 15 sec cooldown in Vanilla, right? So if the mage always waits until AFTER HoJ to blink (while you are trying to heal), the mage can Blink TOWARD you, and counterspell, which means duel lost, right? But if you have Holy Shock you can DF + Holy Shock insta-heal, Or if you have repentance CC again, and get a heal off.
Against locks, assuming you have your blacksmithing anti-fear trinket equipped, you can get a heal off with DF +Holy Shock. Or, HoJ the fell hunter, repentance the lock and get a heal off. But then, I’m not sure what the preferred pet is for a lock against a paladin. Succubus seduce has the same diminishing returns as fear, i think, but I can’t remember the duration. Might last long enough to chain.
Assuming that Reckoning works with /sit in Classic, then Reckoning would be a strong option. if it does work, this will be the highest burst a Paladin can do.
I played 20/0/31 in Vanilla, which I found Repentance to be incredibly useful in PvP. Since you use it to CC the target while you self heal, it opens up Hammer of Justice for more offensive options to try and secure a kill or to give yourself another heal.
Having 20 in Holy also gives you the most important healing talents, plus Consecration which can be useful against Rogues and Druids. I know you said dueling is the only thing in this scenario, but this does allow you to play healer in PvE at basically as effective as a full blown Holy Paladin.
If I’m not mistaken, Reckoning was nerfed before 1.12.1, in that all it did was stack to 5, and then grant 1 extra attack on your next 1-5 swings, depending on your stacks.
There were no “Reckoning bombs” in 1.12.
That said, Holy was the best and most versatile paladin spec. As someone said earlier, it basically did as much if not more damage than ret while having more effective heals, and prot was just for lolz.
Really good Warlocks and Mages could be a close fight. Warlock has CC you can’t trinket out of if they use a Succubus, and Mages can blink out of HoJ and make you use a lot of mana on Cleanse + Blessing of Freedom to continually remove their slows. Plus being hit with Counterspell is near crippling to a Paladin.
Your best bet is to use a faster weapon with Seal of the Crusader to try to pushback their spells as much as possible.
The thing with Paladin is that if you aren’t using Reckbomb, then you need to fight defensively because your damage output isn’t top tier even if you have 31 Ret. You basically want to outlast your opponent, so snything that can push sustained pressure on your defenses or if you get a heal interrupted at a bad time can end a duel.
Especially with spell interrupts, you have to be mindful of the fact that ALL your spells are holy school. Getting Holy Light interrupted locks you out of a lot of your abilities for the duration.
The one exception to the burst thing is 2 minute Mage builds designed around doing massive burst and then being weak until everything comes off cooldown. Just Divine Shield to make them waste their cooldowns.
Reckoning was nerfed to cap at 5 stacks, but still unleashed up to 5 extra attacks at once in Vanilla. It was the 2.0 TBC patch that turned it into chance when hit to get 1 extra attack.
Also Holy’s DPS isn’t necessarily better. It costs a lot of mana, and is partially reliant on Consecration which is very unreliable as a sustained DPS source goes in PvP.
Short of Reckbombs(which we aren’t 100% certain that /sit will work with Reckoning, which hurts just how good that build is if it doesn’t), nothing a Paladin does in PvP is top tier damage but Retribution will put out more reliable DPS.
You get crit a lot in pvp, so even if you don’t get 5/5 vengeance/Repentance you will do massively more damage and cause them to focus their disruption on you and you get the HoJ cooldown reduction.
Versatile if I wanted a versatile paladin dueling spec I probably would go something like 31/3/17 or something for redoubt and the eye for eye if it is there.
On my full Tier 2, spell damage geared Holy paladin, I could reliably beat my friend’s rogue who had Vis’kag, full tier 2 and he was a very good pvper. I wasn’t the best dueler by any means, but Holy was a beast with a lot of spell damage.
Having 20 in Holy means you’re picking up nearly all the good healing talents, with the exception of +5% Holy spell crit from Holy Power. That’s certainly good, but not going to make you a garbage healer without it.
Other than that, Divine Favour could be picked up instead of Repentance if you prefer that. Imp BoWisdom and Lasting Judgement aren’t things every Paladin in the raid needs. Holy Shock is extremely situational because it’s too inefficient on mana.
Reck bomb pally with hand of rag. Dueling extensively on my warrior, only classes that could keep up were ret pally and warlock. Some classes might take someone out with lucky rng now and then (Rogue, mage, enh shaman), but those two were consistently my only competition.
The ability to force a crit on demand is clutch. Holy Shock is inefficient, but also possibly clutch. IBoW and LJ are not required, but very nice to have. There is a wide gulf between “basically as effective as a full blown Holy Paladin” and “not…a garbage healer” is all I’m saying.
The thing is those are all either situational abilities, or offers no benefit for every Paladin in the raid to have.
The best ability in that list of Divine Favour by a pretty significant margin, and it’s on a 2 minute cooldown on top of the fact that as a Holy Paladin you should already have a rather high spell crit to maximize Illumination.
It’s certainly not comparable to a warm body you bring just to have the spot filled and don’t care how crappy they are.