I leveled a pally in TBC and realistically the only thing that really changed pre level 40 was the speed.
With alot of careful zone/spec selection you can quest quite efficently with a bare minimum of respeccing. I bounced between ret/prot or a hybrid of the two upto the point where I entered the portal.
Personally I enjoyed prot leveling over ret simply because it was even harder to mess up and you could pull off some neat aoe leveling tricks at varying points throughout the leveling experience.
Hindsight is 20/20 and with people playing on private servers almost a decade and a half after the original game came out, they can figure out some jank stuff. While it might not be 100% accurate (and may be changed with Classic), Reckoning is apparently the best leveling spec for Paladins no matter what. Since you can just /sit and take a crit, stacking it is easy and you can do a lot of damage instead of waiting on long swing timers.
Itâs like Warriors with Fury, only with Paladins, Protection is the best.
I was thinking about older dispel mechanics. Is it possible to pad / protect important buffs like freedom with seal of crusader rank 1 or something like that?
Can aura be dispelled? If so is there a mana cost to them? I donât see any on the older tool tips.
Auras cannot be dispelled, and they have no mana cost.
It is possible to pad important buffs with rank 1 seals and the like. IIRC, in Vanilla, dispels stripped off random buffs, so just having as many buffs as possible was the best safety. (I think at one point it was changed to âmost recent buff gained is dispelled firstâ, but I think that was in BC. I could be wrong though.)
(The buff padding mechanic was also the reason why a lot of fights as a shaman start with âAlright, Iâm gonna just cast Purge four or five times.â If you strip off all their buffs at the start of the fight, itâs a lot easier to remove any important ones that may be applied mid-fight.)
Yeah, was thinking about that from playing a priest alt in BC, and wondered if it was similar but couldnât be certain because time and all that cloud the memories.
All that evidence & youâre still wrong Theloras, when people talk about using /sit to level they are thinking that if a mob hits them while sitting they will get a reckoning stack (like in pservers), theyâre not talking about that scuffed lag-abusing method from actual vanilla that might get you 1 proc every 5 or so hits. That method is useless for leveling even if by some miracle it even still works in classic because it will take you probably a full minute to save up 4 stacks.
Pallies are going to hit 34 in classic, respec for reckoning, sit down and let a mob hit them then wonder why they arenât getting stacks.
It works on private servers. However, the best historical information that we can find indicates that while it worked at one point in Vanilla, it had been removed by 1.10 (and certainly by 1.12). (Note: There is also some record indicating that a server lag exploit was possible, but using lag to trick the server into changing a mechanic for your benefit is explicitly an exploit and such an action would be bannable.)
However, âthe best historical information we can findâ, as it often is, is just guides and forum posts. To the best of my knowledge, there is no direct proof of how it worked in the 1.10-1.12 range, so we donât actually 100% know how it will work in Classic. Personally, I think itâs likely that it will not work in Classic, but it might.
Yeah, I have found that old forum posts and old videos or screen shots are so insanely subjective that they cannot be trusted as fact because so much needed frame of reference data is entirely missing.
This is why I am very skeptical about the supposed accuracy of the private servers.
Iâm before ironsides tells me they used genuine blizzard data straight from blizzard servers.
And managed to get the warlock pet summons wrong in addition to paladin spell mechanics that Theloras has been stating he helped correct, in addition to God only knows what else they have wrong.
My source is this old reckoning guide written during patch 1.10 in 2006
(I canât link it but if you google âGuide to Reckoning V2 (Current 1.10)â itâs the top result)
Can I sit down to force a crit and gain a charge?
Charges will not generate off auto attacks or npc attacks by trying to sit down and force a crit. However, ability crits from physical abilities such as Sinister Strike, Hamstring, Auto-shot, Aimed shot, etc will generate a charge if youâre sitting.
NPC hits while sitting didnât generate procs outside of that unreliable /sit spam bug which is useless for trying to level. The only hits that would generate procs were other players using special abilities while sitting, which is also useless for levelling.
All abilities/talents that procced on being crit did not work while just sitting until 2.3 (outside of some mobs/players that had special abilities that would proc them).
In vanilla, in order to get abilities/talents like reckoning to proc required using a /sit macro that had to be spammed. You had to be sitting when the game decided whether the damage would be a crit or not and standing by the time the game calculated any on-hit/crit abilities.
Even if you did this, sometimes it would not work, whether that was because you mis-timed it or your latency was decent enough to not work with it.
As for levelling, you could probably get the best out of either going prot and aoe farming (if you can find enough mobs for it) or going 1-hand ret. With 1-hand ret you could tank dungeons, have some of the survivability that tankadins have, and have a little bit better DPS than a holy/prot pally. You could also just switch between 1-hander and 2-hander for survivability vs. damage.
using /sit is not the same as mashing your X button - Iâve been clear and upfront about this and likewise have stated that I donât know how Blizzard is going to handle this come Classic.
Seal Twisting is in the same boat as this given the fact that it used Server Lag to enable Blood Elf Paladins to be able to activate Seal of Command and Seal of Blood at the same time - which allowed them to do stuff like thisâŚ
You will get 2 blood procs and one command proc⌠You get 1 seal of blood proc from your white swing and since your command proc counts as melee, you will also get another blood proc. So basically White swing + seal of command + seal of blood + seal of blood = pwnage (in one swing). https://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-guides/153093-how-paladin-seal-twist.html
Faptamerica
June 20th, 2008 - 10:10 am
20:53â˛52.859 Faptamerica gains Seal of Command
20:53â˛54.093 Faptamerica gains 1 Attack from Windfury Attack
20:53â˛54.093 Faptamericaâs Swing hits Brutallus for 1166 Physical damage (glancing)
20:53â˛54.453 Faptamerica gains Seal of Blood
20:53â˛54.453 Faptamerica gains Windfury Attack
20:53â˛54.546 Faptamericaâs Seal of Command hits Brutallus for 1661 Holy damage
20:53â˛54.546 Faptamericaâs Swing hits Brutallus for 1393 Physical damage (glancing)
20:53â˛54.671 Faptamerica gains 20 Mana from Mana Spring of Mana Spring Totem V
20:53â˛55.328 Faptamericaâs Seal of Blood crits Brutallus for 1858 Holy damage
20:53â˛55.328 Faptamericaâs Seal of Blood crits Brutallus for 1907 Holy damage
20:53â˛55.687 Faptamericaâs Seal of Blood hits Brutallus for 633 Holy damage (201 resisted) http://web.archive.org/web/20080706232318/http://www.retpaladin.com/warcraft/2008/05/how-to-seal-twist/
Got linked over to this post from I assume Theloras, and I can shed a little light on Reckoning. Some of the info from my 14 year old guide was a little out-of-date: IIRC when the sticky dropped I stopped updating the guide.
Normally if youâre sitting down you would not get Reckoning charges from auto-attacks. However, you could gain charges from random NPCs by constantly sitting and standing up due to server lag: mob would try to attack you as your were sitting, so itâd be a forced crit. However, if you stood up just as you were getting hit, the server would see you as if you were standing and get a Reckoning charge.