Pretty much any caster+healer combo is "laughable" to a mana burn team. Mana burn is, in my humble opinion, very very powerful, especially in the smaller team size brackets. Some days I feel like mana burn is the only game in town.

I run with a Ret paladin in my 3v3. Team makeup is resto shaman(me)/ret paladin/warrior. We do pretty well, usually rated around 2100. Ret's burst is very good, and a timely repentance on a healer followed up by an earth shock on the next heal usually means a dead clothie. It'll only get better in 2.3.

My paladin's armory: The World of Warcraft Armory

Also, in 2v2 I've run into a shockadin/warrior team that could output some ridiculous burst. What they tried to do in our games was pull my warrior around a pillar, hammer him, and then burst him down before I could get a heal off. If the initial burst failed, the paladin would fall back and heal until HoJ was ready, and then they'd try to burst again.

This paladin's armory:
The World of Warcraft Armory


So, specs other than pure healing can work. I can see that shockadin/warrior setup becoming more common once people discover the power of it... the burst really is vicious.

Wow, cool. I almost ran that as our 3v3 this season, but we went with the 2 healer + war thing instead. I figured it had almost no chance of being successful at anything past like 1800 rating. How do you guys handle normal setups like 2 healer + war, mage/rog/priest, and such?

2 healers + war beats us almost every time, unless we get some big hits on the squishier healer. Mage/rogue/priest we can do fairly well against, with BoF on the warrior and purge spam on the priest.

What sort of benefits would there be to giving up some +heal, Int, and resilience for considerable Shadow Resist gear? Swapping out some choice pieces (neck, cloak, bracers) for 150 SR could aid in resisting CC more often?

It really depends where you are in what bracket. At a certain point in 2s and 3s, you can basically guarantee you'll be fighting a shadow team and can safely tack on 200SR without worrying about the odd matchup where you don't get them. But I think that varies widely by battlegroup, and so you need to be aware of what teams you are most likely to play.

Heh, a few guildies and I are debating an all paladin 5v5 as well. Our thought is, hey, if our shammies can do it, we could probably make it work too.

Just do 4 paladins and a shaman for windfury, heroism, and purge and let the good times roll.

This might be a little OT -

But Post 2.3 with Holy Paladins receiving viable burst, and Mages recieving some buffs, would a Holy Pld/Frost Mage be a viable team?

I really enjoy playing with a good mage for a partner, just for the sheer versatility, coupled with ice block, pet, nova, sheep, counterspell and nukes + spellsteal. Will these changes allow this team to be viable finally in 2v2?

I still don't think so, mages just don't have the staying power in that bracket to compete at the high-end easily with a healer. A few hundred extra damage on shock and judgment isn't really going to change that.

Hi there, i don't know if this is the place to ask, but with the upcoming new PvP trinkets in 2.3 i'm curious it it's worth to get them.

I'm currentyly using insignia with 20resi + Scarab of the infinite cycle OR Xi'ri's Gift (32 spell crit, and nice burst "on click")

Since you can't change trinkets anymore i'm curious if any of the new "last stand" like trinkets are worth it to spend 30k honor? I'm thinking about getting either the spell crit one or +heal, ofc.

Personally i don't see a big difference if you look "on equip" gains like 40 crit (32 Xi'ri's Gift) or +8x heal (+70 scarab) compared to what i use. So it's all about the "last stand" thing... is it really that good?

Thanks for your comment, that's what my thoughts are, too.

It's rather expansive and i'm almost never at all focused, anyway. I'll stick with the ones i have, i think.

Might be nice to have it in certain BG situations as a healer, but that doesn't concern me much, after all.

What do you think can be the new ret pvp build?

Some examples (69 points because of 3 points PoJ):


Prot/Ret
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
with Vindication vs Sanctified Judgement

good dmg, best cc and terrible heal^^


Holy/Ret

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

straight forward, but also capable of emergency heals


Exotic :-)

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This seems to be a difficult spec because of our new itemization and would work better with t6/S2 but lack of resilience might hurt. SoR scales not as good as SoC with buffs but in PVP there are less buffs and you have a nice burst and similar dps. With spelldmg/int equipment you can still heal pretty well.

The problem with Paladins stems purely out of the fact that the class is completely identical to the way it was in 1.0 and has not been updated even remotely similar to other classes. Everything is basically outdated. Paladins received nothing from TBC of value. I use Avenging Wrath, but it's full of undeserved drawbacks. Why is this spell still dispellable? Seriously. Hammer of Justice is a complete antique of an ability and needs to be updated. It's highly resisted, dispellable, on a 60 second cooldown, and critically limited by range. Holy Shock needs to be overhauled in lots of different ways -- it sucks. Divine Illumination has pretty questionable value. Absolute best case scenario which never happens is 7 HL11's. Most of the time, Divine Illumination will only save around 1-2k mana. Cool and worth taking, but I can't really help but feel they missed a good opportunity to add something actually interesting.

Seal of Wisdom should be a lot better than it is, especially considering the massive Water Shield buff. It should cost zero mana and restore more mana when faced with the huge limitation of melee. Holy Paladins don't use Seals at all in pvp, except when your team is destroying them and you have the time, mana, and safety to waste to swing at a random player with SOJ. Every healing class except the Paladin has a way to restore mana outside of drinking. Shamans have essentially unlimited mana when receiving hits and Mana Tide, while usually killed fast, can restore a good amount of mana group-wide if properly placed and well-timed. Of course, Priests have a Shadowfiend and Druids have an Innervate (in addition to the highest mobility in the game which is only increasing with trinketable JOJ and faster shapeshifting which naturally leads to more opportunities to drink. Shadowmeld + Drink is simply devastating). Against any team of value, playing as a Paladin is basically a race against the clock until you're out of mana with no "emergency" way to restore it.

Warriors get swallowed up by Rogues in 2.3, which weakens the matrices that Paladins can play on. With the addition of Chastise (which is really better overall than Repentance, the 31 point Ret talent, lol), it's basically inevitable that you get hit with it and Mana Burned. Mana efficiency as Warrior/Paladin against Priest/Rogue is completely in the toilet because Mortal Strike will not stick and Wound Poison is up 100%.

The healing conversion into damage is great and all, but when comparing the damage options between healers, it's pretty easy to see that it benefits Paladins probably the least. You need to be within 10 yards to use JOR and within 20 to Holy Shock. JOR is also a 10 second cooldown and Holy Shock is 15 seconds. Compare this to Wrath and Moonfire, which are both zero second cooldowns and chain castable (resto druids have plenty of time to cast, they already pretty much sit in bear waiting for the best opportunity to feral charge after stacking full HOTs), Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death (8, 12 cd), and Lightning Bolt and Shocks (0, 6). Every other healer has more damage options and they are simply better as well, especially in range and cooldown. Not to mention the "effective" time it takes Paladins to apply damage is much higher than other classes, much more predictable, and counter-intuitive to the way Paladins need to play (running in where you're vulnerable, toggling a Seal, dropping it, running out to proper los).

It's really to the point where every healing class can contribute a lot more both offensively and defensively. Resto druids can lock down a target for around 20 seconds with a simple Cyclone sequence into Feral Charge into Bash WHILE keeping full HOTs.

Plus, Divine Shield doesn't break Cyclone, which is hilarious in itself.

The million dollar question is what really do Paladins have over other healing classes? The common answer, BOP and BOF, are really very trivial now. BoSac is gutted and gets worse in 2.3 with all buffs visible. Plate armor? Pretty trivialized against the survival options of other classes (2.3 druids with Barkskin and 3x Nature's Perfection have approximately as much damage reduction as a Paladin in full plate IN CASTER FORM). Efficiency? Longevity? Not so true and pretty trivial as well because a lot of matches come down to drink abuse which lowers the impact of Paladin efficiency while casting. Paladin healing options are flimsy and *completely* exploitable and offers very little over the competition. You will be completely abused against any good team. Druid HPS is too high at virtually no risk.

With no offense intended, Ret Paladins are still on the worthless tier as far as competitive arena is concerned and it would really take nothing short of giving the spec a snare and a spell interrupt to fix, and even then it's pretty questionable. It's also good to know that they have conveniently left out updating Divine Purpose to this point.

I agree with you. A Paladin is the most defensive class ingame. I also think most of our spells are "outdated" as they are now, even when we count in talents wich mainly focus on improving excisting talents for paladins (impr. SoR, aura mastery, imp. FoL/HL, impr. HoJ, ... it goes on) we still get nothing even close to the utility a priest or druid has.

Sure priests have some nemesis classes like warriors/rogues if they are poorly equippt, but they scale far better with better gear than a paladin does. Our heals are reactive, if we are countered we can't do shit, except autoattacking for 80dam white hits..

We have to stand and fight, therefore we wear a shield, plate and got divine shield, but all of that is becoming more and more usless in arena. Almost any class can stop us for good amount of time from healing if they want to - except other paladins, at least if they are human :P
Divine shield is not used to survive imost of the time it's there to be able to have the opportunity to throw out at least some heals early on before the "run/hide or you get CCd to the end" game starts. If you face a priest this is pretty much pointless, too.
Casters can fool us around if we let them and even if we don't they can burn down our teammates fast enough to force us out of our little hideout.
We have to run and hide 90% of the game with small "outcomings" to cast BoF, or throw out a heal, before we have to run and hide again OR we are just CCed for the whole freaking match.

A Priest has a ton of instant casts both offensive and defensive. A druid can always change form to get away or to sit it out in bearform (wich is more viable for PvP than any plate wearing mana depending class, due to the utility in bearform like charge, demoralizing roar and even more hp, ....)

You may call this whining, wich might be even the case. However i'm waiting for the day where Repentance or any other viable "deep tree" talent a pala has to have to be at least somewhat of a competition becomes a free available skill. Just like cloak of shadows gave rogues both survivability and the freedom to spec into other trees.

I played in the 2k+ region in all brackets, but the higher you get the more you loose control over the game because your opponents play better and better the manadrain/CC game it became in arenas more and more. And as a Paladin it's just annoying to sit there in plate (woot!) with maybe 12seconds (divine shield) where you actually can do something for your team except for BoF and BoP wich are on CDs and pretty much purged/cleansed right after you placed same anyway.

We need more options, stuns, a viable instant heal (or at least no cd on holy shock, wich is ways to mana inefficent anyway to be spammed) or something that allows us to have some viable input on whats happening. And even when we are quite important in 5on5, maybe even more than priests/druids (wich are way better for 2on2/3on3 than a pala) this doesn't make up for the lack of utility we have in the lower brackets.

I mean even if all this is just a bunch of awesome crap, just take a look on how easy it is to burn down a paladin after he used his shield, even as a melee heavy team. Why? Because you can interrupt him to death forever .... and there comes in the awesome plate, even a PoM/Shield/HoT spamming priest (besides of having more mitigation against casters, too) will survive longer at this point - in clothes

just my 2 cents

I would place money that Blizzard is afraid of giving Paladins the buffs and changes they so desire because of the abundance of the class pre-bc and in season 1. I mean, think about it- throughout all of WoW's history the Paladin class has been considered *the* healbot. It's only recently that this label is being questioned.

With Paladins being so far down the left side of the graph in terms of defensive versus offensive healers, they -should- posess the persevation and survivability that their class has been known to flash. But, I don't think that Paladins can be justified for buffs until some changes to Divine Shield are made. I mean, think about it; they can't really get the buffs they need because of its indirect impact on an already strong "oh shit" button. The stronger you make the Paladin's stand-alone class, the larger impact Divine Shield will make on the outcome of the match.

I believe that Divine Shield has cornered the class into a point of questionable design. They are in a "meh" state with one of their few real one-ups being able to reset their health to full and wipe off all of their debuffs. The rest of their abilities are pretty easy to anticipate, and their lack of mobile healing makes team coordination more painful than it really should be. They are almost forced to play with a warrior due to the contributions the two classes can give to each other.

Would I like to see a total rehaul on 40% of the classes' abilities? Definatly. But, I think that has a snowball's chance in hell at going through. The best solution I can see is nerfing Divine Shield to the point where it is reasonable to give the class it's needed changes. Why, I think that many of the Paladins in the higher end of the bracket would discard the spell entirely for some mobile heals and a possible variance in spell-type (e.g. not being entirely useless when a counterspell lands on you).

This is slightly off topic but there are so many things you could do to make life more interesting for paladins, that Blizzard is unwilling to do. Blessings for instance could be made far more reactionary and less of a raid buff. Seals could and should come in both damage and utility types, allowing a paladin to maintain one of each type at once. Judgements from the damage types should be more powerful and effective. Judgements from the utility type should scale better.

Divine Shield is still the worst design for an ability I've ever seen and it's sad that most paladins have come to rely on it completely in favour of far more interesting (and slightly more risky) abilities other classes have for themselves.

I play at the 2100~ bracket (as a paladin) with a warrior in 2s. We do comparably well in 3s and 5s, but 2s are the bracket that we focus the hardest on.

The +dmg change to healing gear in 2.3 sounds promising and it will definetly facilitate dealing with warlock pets (particularly soul linked ones) but I still don't see myself using many more offensive abilities post patch than I do now. I'm still not going to be spending my time indiscriminantly shocking/judging mana drain teams to death.

The class really needs some love. I'm certainly not trying to say that paladins are bad, because I don't believe that for a second. However, I feel the class is really in need of an overhaul particularly in the role judgements play in pvp. Despite the flaws of the totem system, the fact is it is class defining in a way that makes the class interesting and unique. You can't play a shaman and not use totems; you can play a paladin and just not use judgements. And so far, even with the nerfs and changes to paladins since TBC, there's been nothing that's changed that. Disallowing gear swapping, the long cooldown on sacrifice and the freedom nerf just highlight some of the big problems that a class that one would think should be good at buff stacking and management because of the low mana cost of blessings actually have. Felhunters, spell steal and soon arcane shot are really just as effective as purge or dispel. The lack of an instant heal compared to the kinds of mobility and healing druids are capable of while being able to cyclone and interrupt more than once a minute with a dispellable stun is pretty depressing.

I agree that Paladins have weaknesses. Some of these might even deserve some minor buffs or fixes. A common complaint is that they don't bring enough utility to the game.

But while they can only do one thing, they do it extremely well. No healer is has as much passive and active protection, and no healer can output the same single-target HPS with so much efficiency. While lacking in utility, their superior mainstay healing has earned them quite a lot of slots on 5v5 teams. Granting them the desired utility or improving the effectiveness of judgments might make them all too good, edging out other healers and classes. The nerfs they have received were justified - as a paladin I readily agreed to them.

So I'd agree that they are good, and certainly not bad. Any changes that come through would not be in the form of straight buffs, since that would bump them from "good" to "too good". Rather, improving Retribution and Judgment utility should come hand in hand with decreases to outright healing ability to balance things out and diversify potential roles.

Passive/active protection and HPS are of little to no import in the smaller arena brackets. 2v2s and 3v3s are all about control or burst, and we are not good at either. Not to mention that our efficiency is greatly overrated due to the fact that you can drink in arenas, an aspect that favors classes that don't have to be directly healing their target (druids, and to a lesser extent priests). A druid that is not directly being attacked can throw up a regrowth, rejuv, and triple lifebloom stack, and then has 7 seconds in which he can either go drink or do something else while his target is still being healed, while a paladin has to constantly be casting/in combat. Once the 7 seconds are up, the druid can even afford to wait longer, because he can come back and hit a swiftmend for 2-3k and start the cycle all over again.

Both druids and priests have better offensive capabilities than paladins, in addition to hots, and stronger instants. Druids have a very very powerful crowd control ability that can be used to do a few things, most notable of which include keeping a target from doing any damage, keeping a target from healing, or keeping a target from being healed. Priests can mana burn. Both are more mobile than a paladin.

Paladins have higher armor (good against 3 classes), 12 second immunity on a 5 minute cooldown, 10 second physical immunity on a 3 minute cooldown, and a pair of decent utility spells. However, we have a very very weak instant that's mana inefficient and has a 15 second cooldown, and both our staple healing spells are casted, require direct line of sight and are easily stopped by CC and interrupts.

I too feel that paladins are still a good class, however, our toted defense capabilities come down to a 5 minute cooldown and plate armor that is useful against 3 classes. Meanwhile, we lack the healing versatility of the other two classes and our utility is nowhere near as powerful. I would like another instant perhaps, or Holy Shock to be buffed, but I can survive with the class as it is currently.

Right. But they didn't nerf the class for the sole purpose of igniting up the Paladin forums. It was the druid of season 1.

Despite how useless Divine Shield might seem in the grand scheme of things, it has (and definatly used to) have the potential of winning the match through the power of uninterruptable crit heals. We actually prefer running our paladin for setups like PMR or War/Lock/Dru. I most definatly do not think that the class is overpowered in the least (I play with one in 2's, after all), but it is far from being as bad off as everyone likes to tell themselves it is.

I truely believe that two of the sole problems with paladins as it stands is balancing the class around Divine Shield and the addition of water. Shaman are in the same boat as far as the latter is concerned, but they can get away with drinking through earth shield/NS.

Paladins aren't bad, they just can't compete with the utility a Druid/Priest brings to a team and honestly our only efficient heal is FoL, HL is horrible more or less compared to greater heals from Druids/Priests (wich they don't need to cast most of the time). Especially in the lower brackets, 5on5 might be fine. But that's only 1/3 of arena gameplay.

FoL is just not enough to outheal some real burst AND you can't chain cast anyway with such a heavy vulnerability to CC while standing around to cast.

And like it's already been said, we just never come out of combat for really long enough to drink due to the fact that we are mostly running/popping out a heal if we can. And we can't Hot/shield or just HoT/come back and swiftmend/instantheal a target while hiding to drink. There goes our "manaefficiency" again.