I think thats way off... you're implying that adding paladins to horde would make them the only class available, when in fact its more like adding another character to play, because, thats what its doing.

Boring? You find enjoyment in the fact you cannot select a class you only see in PvP? How is adding paladins to your faction boring? Would adding two more classes, one for each faction somehow be more exciting?

Well see, now you're talking about PvP. I don't even see this as a problem for PvP either. Wouldn't it make the games that much more reactive? ... and interactive?

Definitely.

Dibs on being Pally. But I really wouldn't like to see this happen, they just really really need to improve shaman buffs apparently. I don't see the problem with raid totems, there's usually only so many shaman and totems have a specific range so raid and totem placement would just be part of the strategy.

I've always considered Alliance to be the defensive faction and the Horde to be the offensive one. Survivability VS Damage Output but I'm led to believe with all these little changes that horde is just going to be weaker PvE wise and perhaps PvP too.

And thats what this change is doing. We could call them another name if that helps. But if your goal is two unbalanced classes stacking onto what we already have, blizzard has clearly proven they can't control the numbers.

A Shaman/Pally Flag running team would be great, earthbind, Frost Shock, and using BoF on themselves.

This would make PvP (of course PvE) more exciting, since there would be more abilities to use and counter.

Perhaps you don't like the idea of us getting paladins? :)

Zug zug?

45-50 man raids in TBC?

Combined power of Shamans and Paly's, encounters could reach a whole new level.

It'd finally be worth it to kill Visc and get my Ring.

The horde reagent vendors already sell Pally reagents. It's all coming together now... :P

The change would balance things. Sort of a let down (since different is fun) and another class's loot drops would be annoying but balance would be there. I think that's everyone's primary desire.

At least there will be more people to drop the Ashkandi triplets that drop every week.

I doubt this happens.

If it does though, yeah, a couple healers might reroll, yeah... but I'd strongly advocate, especially if our turnover is close to what it's been lately or we have willing DPS people, to swtich to carrying about 18 "healers", as having something along the lines of 5 priests 5 pallies 4 druids 4 shamans would be nice... shadow priests, feral druids, and balance druids can all do reasonable dps with added benefits to the raid dps as a whole with the druids also having innervate... not as familiar with them to say if they can sustain it, but I'd think elemental shamans, enhancement shamans (they would have windfury up anyways >.> ), or both could probably be acceptable raid dps... shaman buffs up raid dps so much that it would be worth it imo... pallies can't really dps to a high enough level and sustain it, but they have the most mana efficient heals in the game if I recall correctly, so not having them heal would be silly.

Course, to really make this work, shadow priests, feral/balance druids, and elemental/enhancement shamans will need as much access to appropriate gear for those roles as classes do to their sets now, preferably with some healing stats as well since the price of tacking a few of those on rather than those last couple points of dps stats is just going to get lower comparatively... we'll see though, no real point worrying too much about it right now.

I'm honestly surprised to see many folk saying 'zomg I'd roll a paladin'.

In the past, I've raided a paladin for a long time, and I have to say it takes a unique mentality to play a class who is by far the least efficient at every major raid role in the game - except for one blessing spell that you cast a couple of times on 15minute intervals.

Raid leaders pick the number of paladins in a raid to optimize blessing usage - they don't take paladins because they can heal. To some extent it can be said that paladins heal just to give them something useful to do between casting blessings.
The paladin cleanse spell is fantastic - you'll love it on Chromaggus where you can remove 3 debuffs per cast... and does anyone remember Lucifron? They're good there too.

A paladin fully kitted in their tier 2 set does less sustained dps than a naked priest using a Wand of the Qiraji Nobility.
Paladin heals are the least efficient in the game. The only thing which makes them competetive is Blessing of Light - and you typically don't have enough paladins to bless the whole raid with that - maybe just the tanks get it. Even with blessing of light, you'd rather have a priest or a druid healing because they're better at it.
Yeah, paladins never run out of mana healing - but that's mainly because max-rank Flash of Light is roughly equivalent to rank-2 Flash Heal (given appropriate tier2 geared paladin/priest). If a priest casts rank-2 Flash all day, they won't run out of mana either.

Oh, you say - paladins get to wear plate! Yeah - and ask any paladin when is the last time they got hit in a raid in an encounter you weren't already wiping to? Paladin heals generate 0.25 threat per point healed, not 0.5 like it is for every other class. This means, even though the paladin is the best kitted to actually take damage, the mob will run after the priest who is generating more threat per point healed and healing for more per cast.

Paladins can't tank in any reasonable way unless you happen to have a soft-hitting mob that nobody is going to hit for a few minutes. If a paladin empties his entire mana bar into a mob, he might be able to hold aggro against a raiding rogue or mage - but only if the dps class happens to be sleeping.



Yeah, I paint a negative picture of paladins, but a well played paladin is a strong asset to a raid. The difficulty is finding a well played paladin - they're a very rare breed. And yes, paladins can be enjoyable to play - provided you understand that you'll never do any dps, your healing options are much more limited than other classes, and that your main contribution to the raid is blessing every 15min, support healing, and casting JoW/JoL on appropriate mobs.


As to the idea of horde/alliance having both shamans/paladins, I've long held the opinion that bliz should enable this. One of the biggest limitations for the paladin class is that bliz cannot design encounters that *require* the unique skills of a paladin because the horde do not have the class. This doesn't help focus the class into its role and doesn't provide any spotlight encounters where paladin players can really shine. Players need this focus for the class.

Personally I love the idea of undead paladins (deathknights) who would use unholy magic in the same way that a paladin uses holy.
I also think that bliz should allow cross-faction grouping for endgame instances. There is a lot of storyline supporting the idea - mainly around the fact that both horde and alliance fight the same enemies, and therefore it makes sense to put down traditional hostility to band against the Silithid or vs Kel'Thuzzad, etc. The Argent Dawn is an example of in-game cross faction cooperation. In fact, the lore already has examples where the factions have cooperated in the past, so I don't see this as a particularly tough stretch. On a more practical note, on a PvE server, horde and alliance may as well be on different servers given how much they interact. Cross faction raiding would allow better use of the endgame player pool.

Crazy-talk, perhaps, but hey people are talking about Draenei shamans :)

I'd hate to see this happen. I don't want silly paladins, I want my class to be balanced. Also, since it has been mentioned in this thread a few times, I don't like the idea of "greater" totems either. We don't need totems to effect the entire raid group. We need more totems that are actually worth casting. In a raid group a shaman should be able to enhance their particular group slightly more than a paladin would. This is balanced because 5 paladins will enhance every group in the raid, and 5 shaman will only enhance 5 of them. It's also a lot easier for 5 paladins to provide a raid with blessings, than it is for 5 shaman to provide their groups with constant totems. The main issue right now is that totems have every drawback, and their effects are also just plain worse than blessings.

A good example of this would be Tranquil Air Totem and Blessing of Salvation. Tranquil Air has every drawback here. A much shorter duration forcing the shaman to spend mana on it mid-fight. The restriction of a short range. So why, if Tranquil Air Totem has every drawback in comparison to BoS, should the effect also be worse? Tranquil Air should be 30%, and BoS should be 20%. Not the other way around.

We need more useful totems. Stick me in a group of mages, hunters, or healers, and I can only give them two totems that they will even notice. Why is this? Why can't I have a totem that increases spell crit %? Or a totem that increases damage/healing? I should be able to give every group composition four desirable totems.

We don't need raid-wide totems, we need our totems to actually be worth using. If they are going to slap every drawback known to man on these spells, then they should at the very least have a more powerful effect than a 15 minute blessing. Stoneskin Totem, Flametongue Totem, Healing Stream Totem, Windwall Totem... Why can't these be turned into spells that are more useful?

Everyone seems to be talking about the 40 man raid sizes as the main reason that paladins and shamans won't be introduced to both factions. But we're taking for granted that there will be a lot of 40 man raid instances in the Burning Crusade.

Blizzard has been having to deal with a lot of people complaining about not wanting to have to get 39 other people to help them get epics - the casual players. Smaller capped instances would help address this.

The only expansion instance we have details of is an epic sized ten man instance.

In the past 12 months, there have been just as man 20 man instances as 40 man instanes introduced. Much of the gear in the 20 man instances rivals the 40 man instance gear.

We don't know if there will be many - or ANY - 40 man instances in the expansion. If you have 9 classes on a 10 or 20 man, it's much easier to fit in 1-2 of each class, plus a couple wildcards. And look at group make up. With four groups, having just shaman or just paladins, only 2 groups would get party buffs. With 2 shaman and 2 paladins, every group would get their own buff.

There are a lot of reasons to make this change, and not a whole lot against it.

Erm Sammyl - we;ve had plenty of info on 40 player instances. What Blizzrad *has* said that in addition to the 40 player instances, there will be wings for smaller groups so they get to see the content as well. So Hellfire keep has a 20 player wing and a 5 player wing, as well as the 40 player wing.

They aren't reducing the raid cap size in any way - both Tigole and Furor know what that did to EQ.

I dare say thats one of the better lore explanations they could make, no worse, certainly, than Blood Elf terrorists blew up the Erad...errr...Draeni mothership and it crash landed on Azeroth. Portals to other worlds and dimensions I can deal with, but the Draeni thing reminds me too much of the, oh what was it, the alien looking God in EQ who had a giant spaceship on a stick for the trainer house in Qeynos. They could certainly do worse than adding Paladins to Horde and Shamans to Alliance, and if Kaplan wants animosity to endure, WotF and NE Stealth should keep the forum trolls busy for years to come.

A lot of folk compare paladin blessings with shaman totems, when in fact the logical comparison is paladin auras vs shaman totems. They have very similar mechanics - both party restricted, have a range requirement etc. Shaman 'auras' are stronger effects and hence have a mana cost and a requirement to refresh them.

Paladins get blessings, and shamans get damage (frostshock, etc). In the average players experience of the game this *is* balanced.

The problem in a raid setting is that the paladin blessing ability is multiplied by 40 in terms of the value it brings to the raid, whereas the shaman abilities are not (they don't have raid wide blessings at all and one frostshock isn't going to make a whole lot of difference).

Many folk arguing for cross-faction balance actually want cross-faction equivalence. There are arguments for making totems affect the entire raid, salvation/bok/wisdom equivalents for shamans. In all honesty if shamans got BoS/BoW/BoK the factions would not be balanced. In order to re-establish balance, paladins would need frostshock and windfury-aura and perhaps a buff to healing utility. And perhaps there should be some balancing of the mana cost/cast requirement for totems and the plate/mail armor. However, once done, it's pretty obvious that there is little substantial difference between the two classes - we've just created the shaman-din or whatever.

The two logical outcomes are either, give both factions access to both classes and preserve the diversity and uniqueness for the classes, or merge their abilities till you cannot tell the difference. Both ways will make it easier for blizzard to design encounters that really push the limits of players playing shamans or paladins - something that cannot easily be done today.

I cannot understand why people say that the only way to balance pve is to give each faction access to the other's unique class.

Thats complete bullshit.

Do you REALLY believe that after all the excellent work thats gone into this game, it would be so hard for them to change a few numbers, add or modify a few spells and then be able to balance the raid efficiency of both classes in the major aspects? They have the numbers, they have plenty of talented people working for them. The catch of their situation is they are very concerned with not going too far, and being Blizzard tend to take a long time to do anything, but that doesn't mean they can't.

Hell, I can come up with ideas in a couple of mins that might be heading in the right direction. They probably have dozens of ideas that are being discussed, or have been sidelined for various reasons.

Since I'm bored anyway, heres 2 basic ideas.

1) Shaman spell Bloodlust - to address kings on tanks and raid threat management vs salvation
Increases target size by 10%, HP by 10%, Threat by 30%.
Each shaman can only have 1 bloodlust affect active
Add some sort of upkeep cost e.g Drains 50hp per sec from shaman, or costs shaman half of mana pool, something to balance the positive aspects.

(requires removing TA from the game, but who the hell would miss that anyway)

2) Elemental shaman talented totem - (Nii from Vindictive had a good idea but I've forgotten the link, mine is just rough ideas of direction. Intent to balance the mana restoration of BoW
Fire totem
Crits from offensive casters on the target restore x of the mana back. Just balance the mana restored to an acceptable level.

Melee DPS output is already pretty close. Now 2 spells doesn't make perfect balance, but with a little thought you can see that they have ample room within the existing shaman mechanics to make changes that can bring parity, its just how they choose to do it. Fuck having paladins, alliance can keep them.

On that note, how the hell would it unbalance anything if paladins had more melee DPS?


And personally I feel Kings should be changed to adding static increases to each stat, and then scaled via the addition of new ranks. This doesn't necessitate a nerf, it just stops the spell from becoming every increasingly more unbalanced as the game goes on, but I honestly think they'll do this in the expansion anyway. Hard for people to complain too much if they adjust it while adding a bunch of new talents ;-)

Adding Paladin/Shaman to the other faction is the easy way out. The basic problem right now is that a Paladin is a buffing defensive specialist. They have no offensive abilities or DPS. In 5-mans or small-scale PvP, it's somewhat balanced with the Shaman's ability to DPS or heal as needed. In a 40-man where there's no need to be a hybrid role, and specializing is key, the Paladin is just better than the Shaman.

If the factions/classes remain the same, then there needs to be a huge nerf to either the Paladin's defense or the Shaman's offensive abilities to make them similair to each other for purposes of balance. Adding the classes to each side lets them sidestep that issue and they can balance raids around having both Shaman and Paladin in the expansion.

For what it's worth, I play a horde Priest - if this (admittedly far-fetched, at least lore-wise) idea came to fruition, I would reroll Pally no question.

Don't get me wrong, I love playing a Priest in PvE - but I've always been quite passionate about PvP as well. I bulk up on +stam gear when I head into battlegrounds and still get focus-fired and annihilated. I see these Pallies, just pumping out heals while no one bothers trying to kill them, and think wow... that's the life for me. I love playing the role of a healer, and I'm well aware that Paladin's aren't half as good as it as Priests are. But damn, that sort of survivibility on a healing class? It would just suit my play style beautifully.

I agree that in terms of faction balance it would be a giant cop-out on the part of Blizzard, but meh. I think they've gotten away with worse and 6 million people still shell out their dollars every month.