Paladin buffs, while boring on paper, were fun for me. I liked buffing people. Why was this removed?
7 Likes
Because once upon a time Blizzard purged nearly all the buffs for some unknown reason, probably because the community always cries about maintenance buffs and how unfun they are when involved in gameplay. Blizzard misheard and misinterpreted this request.
Things like Slice’n Dice got baked into specs while things like our blessings and Mark of the Wild got removed. But truth be told buffs are fun, buffing strangers with blessings as you ran by was always seen as a kind and random gesture.
This is what happens whenever the community wants changes. The Monkey Paw always curls.
7 Likes
its not an unkown reason. its the reason why so many classes have b rez and lust now. they dont want to restrict raid gorups by requiring a ton of one class aka pallys.
1 Like
Kings please!
5 Likes
As someone who was a Paladin main in original WoW / BC (Troggdor the Dwarf Pally of Lothar server) and came back in S3 Shadowlands) It was an incredible shock how different and unrecognizable Paladins are now. Partially that makes sense for the 10+ year gap between the times I played WoW. But I think it also speaks to something feeling “missing” in the Paladin class.
I think it’s the giant lack of utility / support the class offers in group content compared to the original design. We used to be the kings of buffs / support. Wild cool downs like original talented LoH and Devine Intervention to name a couple.
Paladins currently just feel like a generic magical warrior class in a game with LOTS of magical warrior classes. And they all do the magical warrior thing better. I think the new Ret tree is shaping up to be at least a strong improvement in our damaging abilities. But I do miss the overall Buff / Support aspects the class long ago lost.
9 Likes
It was lightly touched on here but it was during the time of “bring the player not the class”. They wanted to limit the forced reasons for certain classes being required or always having a slot for certain types of content. So more classes got access to certain types of abilities like brez and lust. Maintenance buff type things somewhat disappeared with a few coming back recently, with some of them being altered so they are not as large of a gain as they were.
In my opinion they should have just given some kind of maintenance buff to every class so there was a reason to bring at least one of each instead of going in the opposite direction which just ended up with FOTM (high DPS or certain utility) classes and builds getting the majority of invites to most content.
2 Likes
As someone who buffbotted all through vanilla, I don’t want normal blessings back. Freedom, Protection, more contextual buffs are fine enough for me. I do wish Blessing of Seasons would be removed from its Shadowlands context and normalized to generic paladin abilities though.
Blessing of Summer → turn into Blessing of Might
Blessing of Winter → turn into Blessing of Wisdom
Blessing of Spring → turn into Blessing of Light
Blessing of Autumn → turn into Blessing of Kings (I guess?)
Game got rid of RPG and turned into Action.
5 Likes
I would love to be able to buff people again bring that class fantasy that blizzard is always talking about.
4 Likes