First off, to eliminate confusion, this wasn't a "please tell me how to play a paladin" post, but more of a "let's share our experiences and thoughts on paladin abilities." I do play on a 5v5 team that's been consistently floating at about 1900 rating and we've played almost 500 games. I'm pretty sure we've seen all top 10 teams in our brackets at least once, sometimes quite a few times. I've made a point to really watch their paladins to try and learn, and in general my feelings have been that I do almost exactly the same thing, because it is really straight-forward and easy.
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Originally Posted by Solipse
Paladins are never a glory role. You will notice the best paladins far less often than you notice the poor ones, because those are the ones who are keeping out of range of mages/locks/priests and generally moving all over to make CC impossible/hard. The ones who sit there spamming gheals are typically the ones you will notice and it won't be too hard to shut them down.
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It's not really about glory, per se, its about the capacity for skill to make a huge difference in game play that I'm mostly talking about. I can put it another way. A priest who is "average" in terms of skill and gear is all but completely useless on a 5v5 team in my opinion. They will die almost instantly due to their vulnerabilities and contribute nothing. By contrast, a good PvP priest can completely control a match. Priests managing to survive assist trains by using LOS, healing/fearing/mind controlling and whatnot, coupled with knowing when and who to dispel, mana burn, fear, heal, and so on. There is an immense variety of choice and tactics, and thus skill becomes a huge part of playing a priest. Now look at paladins: even a poor paladin has plate armor and divine shield, and is almost guaranteed to be able to spam 2 second Holy Lights for at least 12 seconds every game, and realistically probably more since many teams still ignore paladins.
Put even another way, if you had to take one poor and one skilled player on your team, and for whatever reason you could choose what class would line up with what,
I think I would put my worst player as the paladin every time.
Am I completely off base here?
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Originally Posted by goss
I disagree, its just harder to see the paladin win the match. Paladins exercise an enormous amount of control over who lives and dies (specifically on your team, but on the opposition as well). You have 2 trump cards, DS and BoP, then a couple lesser cooldowns that nonetheless significantly influence a match (HoJ, BoF, PvP trinket, Scrolls of Blinding Light). Choosing to use those equalizers, and when, and for what purpose (offensive BoP off the bat? Wait for your cloth to come under fire? Wait to remove a MS? BoF on which slowed teammate...sometimes its defensive too) are not easy decisions. You may not see immediatly that your choice tipped the match, but given the massive amount of control you do possess, its inevitable that it did.
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I'm certainly willing to entertain the notion that the contribution is less visible. In some games it is very obvious - Solipse described a situation I have seen a few times, in which you end up with just yourself and your warrior vs their paladin and warrior, and you win because you outplay the other paladin. It happens, and games like that are awesome for this reason.
But, consider all the "invisible" things that other classes contribute, and weigh them versus a paladin. Does it really just seem like more of the same, or is your contribution vis-a-vis skill incredibly limited comparatively?