by Bruennor » Sun Oct 26, 2008 12:39 am
I will tell you how it worked for me. I hung with a friend who boxed a few toons, and he mainly focused on his warrior. We were part of a mini raiding group, stuff like the serpant in vergalid, sverag mini's and boss, mistwalker and the spider in the same zone. He did tons of group stuff, and his warrior got to the point where I could not hold a candle to him, even though we had the same gear level, most of the same ac augs, and so on. The warrior owned my dps past disgusting with one of the fabled sol ro weapons and epic 2. He out tanked me on everything, a very good example being garn, I think it was, a minotaur named in mmm. In any situation with adds, he owned me, one whirlwind, then chanter mez's, no mess. I buffed to 4300 ac, he buffed to 4700 on norm.
I know paladins heal well, but what good is it to heal when you are in 10k ae's, and your group heals arent 500 hp stronger than ones from 2 years ago? Our single target heals own, but........now druids and shaman's have a nice big heal, and clerics always owned us. I know sk's love to list all our abilities as pluses on raids, but what they don't seem to understand is of our abilities, most of them don't stack, you have one paladin, you don't need more. Plus, a lot of our abilities are easily done as well or better by other classes.
Now due to this, paladins have a lot of little jobs on raids, but unless a guild is hurting for some classes, paladins are owned by other people. Paladins are the most successful in guilds with low warriors, low clerics, low shamans, low druids, and/or combinations of that. Small problem with those guilds, most of them struggle on stuff the high end guilds can 2 group due to that lack of those classes we can share jobs with. While raiding with my little mini raiding group with my friend, I was constantly finding less reason to play my paladin and more reason to play my wizard, who wasn't even 80 and only had 150 aa, or I played my rogue who didnt even have 100 aa or lv 80. My wizard was ok dps. My rogue was the same dps as my paladin on live content.
Now, that mini raiding group only had 2 geared warriors, and yet on most content, it was more than enough. I played my paladin for around 60 percent of the raids, but at least half of those left me bored. The only reason my friends let me play my paladin, I think, is because it was the class I met them on, and I helped them gear up using my paladin, as I was the best geared when I met them, and while they were losing tanks on shyra, I was the recovery tank, meaning when a warrior fell, I took over, and we won. Nowadays, I just can't compete though.
I was happy to see sk's got a sharp increase in a niche role, meaning they are now the "undisputed" rulers of kiting. Paladins need a similiar boost in power in one form or another. Undead dps is not the route we need. We either need unparalleled single tanking power versus anything but boss mobs, or any other interesting idea's that would make us interchangeable with warriors. Sk's have kiting as a solidified raid job. Warriors have boss tanking, which they are untouched on. Paladins....have nothing. All 3 of us can off tank, but we aren't the best at that and are better off replaced with a warrior. Our only niche is battle rez, which, with the aa's from sof, isn't really a good niche since clerics can do it much easier, as their aa rez casts faster, and is usable between spell casts, so they can play both battle rezzer and heal crew healer.
Sk's, today, can now go on a raid, mash an ae hate aa, and then immediately shadowstep ahead of the mobs and use it again and again as needed to get range to use their ae ability without getting hit, at all. We have no such job, and that is a huge weakness now. I am not sure paladins should be forced to wait another year for an actual ability to do something on a raid that makes people say, lets get paladins to do this, they are the best at it.
EDIT
I just remembered something interesting. During fabled PoP, a ton of the bosses were easily interruptable by our non lv based interrupt aa. I would interrupt fire mini's, including the flash step bird, interrupted some of the fennin ro script bosses, interrupted bertox to I think, can't remember that though, and completely massacred grummus once I got the timing down. That aa was very powerful and useful during fabled. Thats a possible job. The big issue with that as a primary raid skill though, is that nobody else can do that to lv 90+ mobs, so the only way we could become the best at that is if another class or 2 get a weaker ability to do the same job, to keep paladins from becoming required on fights that would use that niche ability.