Not sure I get your point with holy paladins, they extended the range on judgements and tried to make the game play about more than spamming one button. How is that a bad thing? Judge light on a fast hitting DW boss like Prince and you're looking at an awfully nice HoT as it's not PPM based.
Either I'm missing something here or you are, but let me quote the JoL spell
Unleashes the energy of a Seal spell to judge an enemy for 20 sec, granting melee attacks made against the judged enemy a chance of healing the attacker for X. Refer to individual Seals for additional Judgement effect. Your melee strikes will refresh the spell's duration. Only one Judgement per Paladin can be active at any one time.
The healing effect is granted based on the attack speed of the tank etc, not the mob/boss in question. Anyhoo, my point being that the judgements consume mana (as they should, I'm certainly not asking for them to be free) at a rate of 5% base mana. They also (more importantly) consume the GCD. In a raiding situation there's often not enough time to get a Cleanse off because that eats the GCD - how am I expected to fit a judgement in when spamming FoL and HL on a tank to keep them up? The simple answer is that I can't. Judgements are out of the window in PvP for the same reason - if I have a spare GCD then chances are it's going on Cleanse.
I keep seeing complaints about class homogenisation and to be honest I think they're all cobblers. All that's happened is performance in all roles has been balanced, the player now matters more than the class.
The logical conclusion to that direction is surely to give everyone the same talents, spells and gear. It's not the way I like to play, though you're perfectly entitled to your opinion.
I dislike the rogue playstyle but I like the enhancement shaman, it doesn't matter which of us you bring to the raid because we can both do roughly the same DPS. We bring diffferent utility but in 10 man raids you can't have the presence or lack of utility be raid breaking or it causes problems like our 4 month long nightmare with Aran due to our lack of a warlock. It can make things easier or harder (sheep still > *) but it's not the be all and end all.
I'd argue that the Aran fight was flawed in design by requiring a warlock rather than stating that other classes should be able to take care of it rather than "fixing" by granting class-specific skills to other classes. Again, this is just my opinion.
Any competent tank can tank anything, any competent healer can heal anything, and any competent DPS can keep up with the pack, that's the WoTLK design.
I'm not suggesting that this shouldn't be the case, and I honestly don't think things were that bad when TBC hit. Sure, some instances were better served with a Paladin, Druid or Warrior tank but they could all be effectively tanked with any one. Healingwise you know my feelings re. MrT, but I guess this is what the JoL buff was aimed at fixing. Other than that I'm pretty confident that a Paladin geared at the appropriate level for an instance could hold their own as a healer.
They still do things in different ways though, for example druids get a fast cast direct heal because they could only heal heroics when overgeared but their raiding bread and butter is still HoTs and nobody can compete with them there. Paladins get a HoT because they were totally stuffed for silences otherwise but their bread and butter is still fast cast direct heals and they're still the best at that.
Again, I'm not disputing that any healer *should* be able to heal any instance. I just don't like the way that all classess seem to be getting folded into one. As for the fast cast direct heals I'd argue that as only being part of what a paladin brings to the table: the mana efficiency of those fast cast direct heals was a large part too. That mana efficiency is now completely out of the window unless I spec roughly half retri, meaning I lose my 51 pointer.
[/quote]Same goes for the other classes too, hunters won't be competing with mage AoE because volley had it's cooldown removed but when there's an AoE pull they won't be a waste of space. Most of the buffs are duplicated somewhere too, replenishment can come from a shadow priest, survival hunter, or retri pala. They don't stack but any of those can bring that buff to your raid. Encounters are balanced around the assumption that all buffs are present, if you want 10 man raiding then you either make people bring one of every class or you do what they did and duplicate buffs.[/quote]
...or they stop designing encounters to 100% require all of those buffs perhaps?
This seems an opportune moment to interject Robert Heinlein's opinion...
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Interesting theory, but I have to be honest and say that I disagree, and the next time I need some plumbing done I'll get a plumber in to do it.
Instead of needing X class of Y spec you just need 2 tanks, 2-3 healers, and 7-8 DPS. The game is about player skill now not whether you rolled the right or wrong class. A balanced raid is still best but an unbalanced one isn't totally fucked, this is a good change as it means people can play together with their mates without having to worry too much about who rolled what.
And at this point we agree to disagree I think.
To summarise my thoughts on the paladin changes (I almost put this in GD but then my original post ended up being about paladins so it seemed only fair to put it here): something needs doing about mana efficiency, and can we have judgements off the GCD please (though on their own cooldown would be fine).
