Originally Posted by Praetorian
Another thought: Shamans and paladins originally were meant to be very durable targets as compared to other healing classes that completely crumpled when DPSed directly, but priests and druids have been given more and more survivability talents and abilities to the point that, in practice, a 12000-armor shaman is a much softer target than a 3000-armor priest.
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I think this is completely true: the design behind the paladin class, and to a lesser extent shamans, was to be the most durable, most hp/sec healer in the game. In return for not being the most durable, priests and druids got utility that made up for their lack of pure defensive power. However, the game (in smaller brackets) has progressed to the point where paladins have less survivability and less healing power compared to the other healing classes due to crowd control, and specifically counterspell mechanics, and they don't have the utility that the others do.
There are two solutions: 1) Buff paladin utility. Add some offensive abilities, some cc or something. This isn't going to help paladins heal any better than they do, it will just make paladins more of a control class, which goes contrary to their philosophy of being the ultimate anti-cc, defensive class. It would make it more fun to play though, and isn't entirely without precedent (see cyclone).
2) Make it harder to lock down paladin heals. In this day and age of cast bars and focus macros it is arguably the easiest time ever to land a counterspell. From the ptr diminishing returns on silences, although they were shortlived, it is clear that blizzard is looking in this direction for a change. It's just too easy for a good mage to lock a paladin out, despite BoSac and divine shield. Something needs to change in the current silence model, whether it's reduced duration, DR timers, perhaps allowing downranking or something during a silence, I don't know. Maybe give paladins a counterspell ward, 5 sec duration, or add that functionality to divine focus. The casted heal model is losing out to the HoTs in hp/sec, and that shouldn't happen.
I don't think the solution to this problem is to turn the paladin into another support healer / utility bot. BoF and BoP is already solid utility, I hate to jump on the poor shaman bandwagon, but if paladins get more so should we
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I actually cant think of one situation where a Resto Shaman is the best fit for a 2's, 3's, or 5's team.
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Anything where you need the burst of bloodlust. 2s this doesn't happen, 3s it used to happen with spriest/ua lock and perhaps will return with rogue / ice mage (icy veins for <1.5sec frostbolts woo!) although the current metagame doesn't have much to do with burst damage but with control and mana wars, 5s with a 4dps setup or a 2345 that prefers burst to draining.