Holy Pally turned down for 5 mans

My experience has been that the WoW community (in the actual game moreso than the forums) can be surprisingly conservative. I think it has to do with the game being so complex that many people can manage to understand their own class and mechanics but get overwhelmed when faced with 10 different classes (and races, and tradeskills, and gear...).

Honestly, I see a lot of pugs say relatively ignorant things. I see guildies say relatively ignorant things too. But most of them will come around over time. Players only wanted warrior tanks and priest healers for a long time until they realized there were options. Players laughed at Retadins and Boomkins even up through beta.

You also have to be a little careful of self-fulfilling prophecies. It has died down a little, but the forums used to be resplendent with "pallies need an AE heal" posts. People read that kind of stuff and it gets propagated through the net as some kind of conventional wisdom as "paladins don't have the tools they need to heal" or just "Paladins can't heal."

Pugs can be understandably lazy. They don't want to take the time to get to know you because they might not ever run with you again. I've seen druid tanks asked for their defense cap or hunters told they can't CC. I pug a lot, if only to try to make sure I share the experience of players who do it a lot. I have been really frustrated sometimes, but every once in awhile you get in a group that just clicks even if nobody knows each other and you just blast through the content .Those moments are awesome. You should get a heroic badge for it.

Paladins are fantastic healers. We are relatively happy with healer balance overall, certainly compared to dps balance, which still needs some work.

Q u o t e:
Why should things be easy for most classes, and a challenge for us? You give all healing classes the ability to single target heal, but dont' give us the option to AOE heal. How is it possible you don't understand this? How can you be this daft? It takes us 5 GCD's to do what an instant cast priest spell can do. Using bacon is not an AOE heal, it takes just as long for us to recast it on 2 targets as it would to just single cast heal on 4 targets.

Oh I can be much dafter. You do have AE heals. They just don't affect the same number of players as those of other classes. But your single target heals blow theirs away too. There are definitely encounters where paladins work harder and there are encounters where druids or shamans or priests work harder. It isn’t a goal (and probably wouldn’t be a realistic one anyway) that every encounter is of equal difficulty to any group.

Now if paladins were such terrible healers that we thought only the most skilled players could heal 5-player dungeons, that would be a problem. I don’t think that is the case though.

There aren’t any 5-player encounters where you simultaneously need to heal more than two players at once or risk them dying. You have the tools you need to heal two at once (with Bacon) and then quickly heal the others with your very fast heals. Often one of the best uses of Bacon is to put it on yourself so you can then focus on just flashing any of the other four who are low.

It’s also a two way street. Players cannot just do whatever and expect the healer to be able to keep them up. You are supposed to run away from Loken. You are supposed to not stand in fires.

You can say they are spoiled by CoH, but we are also nerfing that spell. We think AE healing is too trivial right now. We don’t want to make it any easier for anyone at the moment.

If we gave players every ability they asked for, you look at all of the requests for which abilities to give which classes, we think we’d end up with classes that look an awful lot alike. We certainly don’t want paladins (or anyone) to be shut out of groups, but we also don’t want players to feel like the experience is exactly the same no matter which classes they have. Things like character race and sex are pretty irrelevant when playing WoW. We don’t want classes to go that direction too. That is why we may seem recalcitrant on this issue.

Q u o t e:
Your anecdotal evidence doesn't mean anything. Paladins are broken healers to the point where the rest of the game agrees.

Um, unless you can really speak for the rest of the game, this is actually the anecdotal evidence. We actually do have access to a lot of data. We don't just make calls like this based on our experiences in game.

I feel like this is one of those situations where some of you aren’t listening to other players in this very thread who say paladins can heal heroics just fine, and are instead trying to invoke a silent majority to make the problem seem monumental. Try and understand why other players don't think there is a problem instead of just trying to talk to me. Sure, you'll always get some players with the dumb "Heroic Halls of Lightning is srs bzns" attitude, but I don't get the sense that is what is going on here.