PSokar

I guess the first thing I want to respond to is the OP's suggestion that the paladin would be the best class in an arena team to be operated by a poor player. Well, that sort of question just seems like asking somebody how they would like to die, firing squad? Lethal injection?

Though he does have somewhat of a point. If another team leaves you alone (this is the opposite of my experience though), then the class doesn't take too much skill. With possibly the exception of warrior, most classes have it easier when left alone. I guess since this is a pvp thread I will just relate some of my experiences in pvp since I've done all 3 ladders a bit. Also I don't really like comparing say shamans to paladins in pvp healing because their role is different. I think they play the healing support role very well, and I think it'd be hard for them to match paladin healing because they are doing tons of other useful stuff. Totems, purges, bloodlust, earthshocks, etc... but we are talking 1,000's of mana spent that does not go into healing, and oh yeah; I love mana tide so much.

2v2 - So far I've only played w/ a warrior (Hieu - Dragonmaw US if you are interested). I guess all I have to say is that it is literally impossible to be consistent in this format. If your good I suppose you'll just win more than you lose and rank up, but it seems to me that with the paladins hyper-vulnerability to spell locks/CoT/Fear things can go wrong easily. I nearly always use a shadow reflector against teams with warlocks in them in this format. I usually use the shadow reflector when I am not aware of the felhunters spell-lock cooldown and absolutely must get the heal off. So far I agree with the general sentiment in this thread that a fair amount of stam is important in this format.

I've done a bit of 3v3 with a hunter/rogue/warlock and at that time it was just mostly for fun. With me as the only healing class in a 3v3, it really ended up being pretty similar to 2v2. Then me, Hieu, and Echoik (shaman) made a 3v3, and catapulted to 2150 in 50 games. That was really fun, and with another healer there, It wasn't quite as intense since he could heal me when I got locked down, although the shaman was most frequently the target. Somebody mentioned windfury tots getting killed quickly early in the thread, and this applies to 5v5 as well; the totems get killed but the buff stays on the weapon for another 5-8 seconds, plenty of time to drop another totem.

5v5 is what I really enjoy and is the reason I quit playing my priest. Our set-up was Paladin, shadow priest, hunter, shaman, warrior. This set-up was really fun, and we got to 2150 very quickly, (up from like 1750 which is what our old class set-up was more or less capped at.) Then we had a bad night (hunter was not there) and the team unraveled.

There are several things I find difficult about the paladin class. Spell locks are pretty much my bane. Somebody earlier mentioned Sck's video, which I enjoy a lot. The guy has a far greater degree of situational awareness than I do, and while it may just seem like a nuance to the paladin class I believe it makes a huge difference.

The second thing that I dislike is the 30 yard range of my blessings and cleanses. Generally I prefer to be as far from the fray as possible when I am healing (to avoid spell locks and be able to see people coming for me), but being close enough to bop, bof, cleanse when it is needed is important. I guess that just kind relates back to situational awareness. Which kind of leads me into my next point. I really feel that I have two primary roles in the 5v5 format that are of equal importance. One is obvious; keep my team up, and the second is to with intelligent use of cleanse/bof enable my dps as much as possible (or w/ frost trap keep people alive). In my experience having your team kill people is as important as not having your team die.

And I guess the last thing that I find difficult is intelligent use of ds. Right now I pretty much use it when I know a spell lock would certainly result in the death of a team-mate. Although I think in general that shield use is something that will just get better with experience. I can only recall two 5v5 games in which I was not the last, or 2nd to last player to die. I think going for a paladin is a bit (only a bit) under-rated, but generally I don't have a problem in 5v5 with being the target of dps. I think the reason for this is that they don't actually have to kill me to make me useless. I've played some teams with what I thought were great mages, because I went insane trying to stay away from them, but they would always manage to cs me. After that happened their team would trinket up and take someone out. I know paladins seem to have different opinions on this but I am eagerly awaiting the imp concentration aura change. A lot of those cs's would not have been deaths with the 2.1 changes. Kind of a different topic altogether though.

Right now the set-up I play most often with is Paladin, warrior, rogue, mage, priest and I can't even articulate how much I miss the hunter. I always thought that the only real benefit of it was to freedom kite and keep people alive, but now I realize how much it just controlled the other teams. Spell interruption was never an issue for me w/ that set-up. Maybe the teams were worse, maybe the trap just helped me (by hindering the other team) to get better positioning. It sure feels different.