Burning Crusade Paladin Review - Playing the Devil's Advocate

Whilst I’m a devoted holy paladin, and will be playing well into the expansion, let me play devil's advocate a little here in this review of the BC paladins. Thoughts Appreciated.


The New Seals

In general terms, paladins currently have a "chance on hit" SoC for 2-Handers, and a "damage every hit" SoR for 1H/Shield. The former for dps, the later for tanking. The two new seals simply seem like a reversal of these. SoB is a damage every hit for 2H'ers, whilst SoV is a chance on hit for 1H/Shield. SoB seems more offensive, SoV seems more for tanking. When u run the numbers, (30% damage for SoB, and an assumed 50% chance on hit (like SoW/SoL) for SoV), then there does not seem to be an increase in damage compared to SoC, SoR. For example a weapon with speed 3.0 proccing SoC 7 times per min will average 30% weapon damage per hit. However this is all dependant on their co-efficient of course. High +dmg coefficients will make them superior to SoR/SoC. If this is the case (as it should be), alliance will get a nice new tanking seal and horde a better than SoC damage seal. Since the current paladin population is 100% alliance, will the retribution paladins be too pleased that new horde paladins, along with their imba racial are getting a better damage seal than them?


Retribution Tree

We all know of the damage scaling issues felt going from 40-60. This will no doubt continue from 60-70, and whilst we do get new damage abilities, since all other dps are getting some very nice new skills/talents, will any of the gap be bridged between a retri-paladin and dps class making us viable raid dps'ers...

Avenging wrath increases our average raid dps by 3.3%. Crusade will give us a further 3% damage increase if we are fighting certain mob types. Empowered Judgment allows us to increase our rate of JoC due to less mana cost, however with SoC probably the best dps seal for alliance paladins which never hits for it's max against bosses (immune to stun), then this isn't going to be as big an increase as we would like. A 10% crit increase to 'non max' Seal of Commands will increase dps a little and help keep vengeance up but the increase again is minimal. Finally the 2% crit from the 41pt talent tree gives a paladin a reason at least to spec retri in a raid, but again is only a small increase in their dps.

All in all, there is a dps increase which I guess we should be happy with, but I don’t see this increasing our dps by more than 15%. With other classes dps scaling much more generously, there will still be a big gap, and thus a dps paladin in raids does not seem a viable option.


Protection Tree

After the initial "wow" factor, the dust settled, and it appears as blizz were slightly confused with some of their implementation choices. Each of the 3 trees have awesome defensive talents (Argent Defender / Blessed Life / Divine Purpose)....all of which are at the 30-35 point level. All three are must have tanking talents, but we can only have 1. I hope blizzard moves Blessed Life/Divine Purpose. Redoubt / Reckoning are more pvp as they rely on you being crit, which tanks try their best to avoid. In addition, Tier 4 & 5 of the tree are weak for pve. Yes there are some nice talents, but putting more than 3 points in these tiers seems like a waste (luckily by putting more points in lower tiers these can be sidestepped).

Now it's not all whine. Our ability to gain mana from heals is a very nice solution to the OOM tank, and the snap-agro taunt is very nice assuming it gives permanent agro like taunt/growl. If it doesn’t it's a waste of space. My final concern is holding agro. Now I’m now talking about holding agro against blue geared MS warriors, I’m talking about holding agro against tier 3 rogues/mages/fury warriors. With no additional high threat skills, I’m skeptical how well we will hold agro, but this of course is a wait and see scenario.

Holy Tree

My views here are mixed. I like the Divine Illumination / Light's grace spam healing potential, and Holy Guidance is so so. Would be better if it was a fixed heal increases as opposed to the +Heal increase I assume it will be. Aside from that, I feel Blizzard ran out of ideas:-
Aura Mastery - wonder where they got this from? situationally nice, but situational being the key word.
Pure of Heart - When soloing, a curse resistance is nice, but diseases/curses when standing in a raid healing don’t really bother me as they tend to be removed instantly. The thought of giving us a disease resistance talent when we can cleanse them immediately just baffles me.
Purifying Power - If u spec 41 in retr/prot, then u cant get this talent and it's benefits from lower mana cost consecration and increased crit exorcism/holy wrath. For a healadin, these benefits are not much use for me, and to be honest I very rarely find cleanse being the bane of my mana problems, so this talent is a complete waste where it is.
Blessed Life - Wrong tree blizz

So again, there are 3 nice talents here, but there are a number of wasted talents here which blizzard obviously didn't think through


New Spells

Consecration - very happy its now trainable. Shame they couldn’t make SoC trainable since SoB is, and all alliance paladins who want a life outside raids will be forced to spec slightly into retri.
Spiritual Attunement - Great work blizz, was hoping for something like this, and they delivered.
Righteous Defense - if this is a permanent taunt, then I love it. However the challenge of seeing a mob run loose, targeting it, targeting it's target, casting spell, retargeting mob will need a little macroing.
Seal of Justice - I do like the new change to the judgment and the possibilities it holds. Though some sort of chance on hit sunder effect for threat generation would be even nicer.
Avenging Wrath - 3.3% average dps in raid. How about Righteous Wrath which is a permanent buff like righteous fury applying a permanent 30% buff along with a detrimental healing debuff which lasts for 60 seconds after the buff is removed (to stop switching between dps/healing quickly)
Seal of Crusader - I could swear one of Blizzard's designers is allowing his 6-year old kid to design our new talents. When the paladin review came out the kid shouted, "Daddy, make paladins run faster", now in the expansion he is crying "Daddy, make them go broom broom fast on their horsies". What are paladins, a taxi service to get everyone to the instance faster?


In Conclusion.

Well, I may have been overly negative in this review, but whilst I feel there are some good paladin changes or at least some good intentions, I feel the retri tree will disappoint many who strive for damage, the prot tree whilst giving us potential for tanking is poorly designed and could have agro issues, and the holy tree has some nice new talents, but has some completely useless talents indicating Blizzard ran out of ideas.

I'll be specing 42Holy / 19Ret initially, maybe playing with a prot/holy build depending on how our final prot tree is and how game mechanics allow us to tank.

I just pray that blizzard does not decide to make our "Tier 4" a hybrid set with +Crit, +def and +Heal. Their item level system does not allow for hybrid sets and would result in my tier 2.5/3 being my main sources of offence/healing.

Nice post. Doesn't deserve a new thread though.