#0 - Jan. 26, 2010, 2:17 p.m.
A lot of people complain about warriors and maybe hunters being overpowered; and they are, but take a moment to think about it and you’ll realise that every single zerg/cleave setup in the game (beastcleave, wizard cleave, tsg to name a few) is currently running with a holy paladin due to the obscene amounts of utility, healing power and mana efficiency which they provide.
Lets take a moment to look at all the utility that holy paladins bring to the team:
* Single target sacrifice – Dispellable* with good rng – 2 minute cooldown
* Sacred Shield – Dispellable* with good rng
* Aoe Sacrifice – Undispellable – 2 minute cooldown
* Aura Mastery – Undispellable - 2 minute cooldown
* Trinket – 2 minute cooldown
* Divine Shield – Dispellable* by priests Lasts 5 minute cooldown
* Hand of freedom – Dispellable* 25sec cooldown
* Hand of protection – usually not needed defensively and can be used to remove stuns or blind (dispellable*) 5 minute cooldown
*dispelling is unreliable at best due to 30% dispel resistance, i’ll touch on this in a later blog though.
The issue with warriors and hunters is not their damage alone, (although ridiculously high in it’s current state) it is bearable with enough cc which warriors in particular are very susceptable to. The issue is the fact that a good paladin can keep his entire team crowd control free for the duration of 2 sacrifices, aura mastery, trinket and finally bubble should they need it. Lets add up the collective durations of all the utility paladins have to remain free of crowd control assuming nothing is dispelled (aside from fear, though any warlock is probably going to have a hard time fearing with two melee breathing down his neck and the paladin can just stay at 40 yards anyway, no harm done).
As the damage of other classes increases, the defensive healers – druids and paladins become more and more overpowered and the offensive healers – priests and shamans become worse. This is because when damage goes up, the offensive healers can no longer play offensive due to the need to heal up the obscene amount of damage going around. Paladins are becoming so overpowered now because they allow the high damage classes to stay on their targets for longer, something that no other class can do anywhere near as effectively. The difference between paladins and druids is that the paladin has slightly less crowd control than the druid but more utility and with the way that the game is now, druids do not get much chance to use their cc as they are forced to heal constantly. For example if you compare almost any setup with a druid to the same setup with a paladin, the setup with a paladin will almost always be the stronger of the two.
* Single target sacrifice – 12 seconds
* Aoe sacrifice – 10 seconds
* Trinket – ~1.5 seconds (aside from the fact that it DR’s the following crowd control)
* Divine Shield – 12 seconds
That’s roughly 35 seconds that a paladin can allow his team to zerg a target such as a priest without interruption. The priest is in turn unable to remove single target sacrifice or bubble due to the insane amount of pressure which he is under due to two melee training him non stop as he needs every global cooldown to stay alive.
Sacred Shield
Counterspell you say? The sad truth is that a good paladin will never need to take a full counterspell due to two spells, holy shock and sacred shield (on top of this they have aura mastery if they really need it). A good paladin can simply holy shock, then fake until his next holy shock is up, or cleanse in the mean time if need be. The main reason for this is due to sacred shield, the spell that myself and kalimist believe to be the most over powered spell in the game by a very large margin. Let me explain why.
Currently sacred shield will proc every 6 seconds for holy paladins on live and with ~3200sp each proc will absorb ~3400 damage, not only that but every single time it procs the paladin gains 50% flash of light crit for 6 seconds. All of this in return for one global spent when the opposing team does not have pressure. This causes paladins to do very little to sustain defensive power compared to other healers and allows them to use their defensive cooldowns offensively. This is the main reason comps like tsg and beastcleave seem so overpowered.
Lets also compare sacred shield to the priest equivalent:
Sacred Shield: Absorbs ~3.5k every 6 seconds, does not need to be recast, two components to dispel. Also grants the paladin 50% crit on flash of light when it procs. Mana cost: 474 mana
Power word: Shield: Absorbs ~6.5k every 13 seconds (assuming 4set pvp bonus), needs to be recast, one component to dispel. Mana cost: 888mana (untalented)
There are a few options that could be taken in order to balance sacred shield:
* Reduce the absorb coefficient to 50-60% rather than 75% of spellpower.
* Make the internal cooldown 8 seconsd rather than 6 seconds so that it procs less often.
* Make it undispellable but have the main buff last a shorter duration (say 15 seconds) and increase the mana cost to rougly 1k.
In my opinion the last option is probably the best since it balances the spell for all teams since right now sacred shield is even more devastating for teams without offensive dispel.
Something atleast needs to be done because with the resilience changes, paladins will be gods next season since they’ll top all other healers in terms of utility, healing throughput and mana efficiency (with the exception of maybe druids, hi innervate).
What do you think?
Being a Rshaman i feel totally replaceable by a Hpala at all times,
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Sancruz - Balnazzar
Sancruzlol - Balnazzar
Sancruz - Frostmane aka the alt hunter h3ro
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