The Daily Spoon: Why I hate my Paladin

This is more or less completely my sole opinion. It’s not bloody likely that I can be dissuaded from my position on this but I’m open to hear all of your thoughts. It’s a little long and very much a QQ rant.

The very first class (even before Warrior if there was even such a time) was an Alliance Paladin. It was great. I was healing better than most people and was asked to instance contantly because of it. I was able to level with ease as a Holy/Retribution build way back in the 1st year of this game. Somewhere along the line though I realized that this was boring as piss and I should roll a Warrior. The rest as they say is history as the legend of Spooner began but when I came back to the Horde finally, I started a Blood Elf Paladin.

He’s been leveling as Protection pretty much the entire time until I got into Outland at 60 (wanting to have an epic mount in Hellfire obviously, too much ground to cover on a slow mount) where I decided against everything in my body to go Retribution. Don’t mistake me, I’m not saying Retribution is bad, I know a lot of really well geared and flat out insanely good Retribution Paladins, but I fucking hate it. Read on if you dare!

Having to eat and drink after every fight is vastly annoying. I’m the kind of person that really can’t stand downtime and with such a dismally low mana pool, I’m better off bandaging or eating food to get health back instead of using up my precious precious mana. Once you do get into a fight you just sit there. Honestly that’s it. No interrupts, nothing new or exciting or even fun for that matter. Tap Seal of Blood, hit the mob, use Crusader Strike, repeat, pray the mob dies before the seal wears off and you have to dump more mana into reapplying it but don’t bother judging it because you’ll take damage and cause yourself more downtime. I guess if I used all my trinkets, cooldowns, and a health pot every fight I could 2-3 shot most mobs… that is unlessfor some reason my HOLY DAMAGE GETS PARRIED. HOW THE FUCK? SERIOUSLY! How is that holy damage can be blocked, dodged, or parried? I refuse to accept this archaic and stupid mechanic.

I can cut away all the frustrated comments and make my point with one sentence. A robot or a monkey half trained can play my retribution paladin. There are 4 buttons at most you’ll ever press during combat. At least with other auto attack classes (enhancement shaman) you have more options (shocks, totems, purge, stormstrike) and you deal more consistent damage with bursts that actually go off. You can easily go 10 swings of your slow ass 2H weapon without having one single seal of command proc, so I didn’t bother getting the point for it when I respec’d at Lv. 66.

The real kicker is that I’d mad right now about it, I wanted my Paladin level 70 so I could spec him Holy and heal for my friends and such. But after spending time on the Beta and playing my Death Knight I have left my Paladin still dead in Terrokar for a little over a week now at Lv. 68. I can’t bring myself to even log on him anymore. For me, personally, there really isn’t anything fun about the class and build at all. No attention getting move or big number punching attack to make me excited, nothing but the paladin bubble which means I can piss off bad rogues that want to do terrible things to my impotent ass. More than once I’ve thought that it’d be easier to just vendor everything on him, clean house, send the gold to my Shaman and keep doing these dailies for some more easy gold to help the DK fund.

In Wrath of the Lich King though it’s a completely different story with seals lasting 2 minuts now, judgements being completely different, more special attacks, better synergy between spell power and attack power, higher mana pools, in other words; they fixed the broken crap that needed an overhaul since before Burning Crusade.

-end rant-