Paladin Q&A Released

The Class Q&A feature in the WoW website was been rolling smoothly with quite a number already done. We’ve seen the ones for Shaman, Mage, Death Knight, and Warlock come out already. Now it’s time for us to see what Ghostcrawler and the development team has to say about the Paladin class moving forward. A lot of what they said in this Q&A aren’t really new if you’ve been following the PTR patch notes for patch 3.2 but I guess it’s nice to be able to hear straight from them why some changes were made.

Paladin

For Holy Paladins, they talked about the mp5 stat as well as the changes they made to Beacon of Light and Sacred Shield/Flash of Light. While mp5 benefits all paladin specs, the Holy paladin is the spec where it probably would have the most impact. But for now mp5 seems to be quite an undervalued and overlooked stat compared to crit, spell power or intellect. They’re making mp5 more beneficial for all classes by increasing the mp5 values on gear by 25%. They did mention something about collapsing spirit and mp5 in the future (since spirit is pretty much junk for paladins and shamans) but that will have to be done carefully. Instead of collapsing both stats maybe they can approach the problem the way they made spirit more useful for classes like mages and warlocks – adding a bonus to something based on your spirit.

They changed Sacred Shield so that when Flash of Light is used on a shielded target, the target will also get a HoT worth the 100% of the FoL amount. Beacon of Light was also changed so that the healing it does is now based on total healing done including overheals. They also mentioned that they would consider giving paladins more healing spells down the road.

For Prot pallies, they talked about how they wanted Blessing of Sanctuary to be the main blessing for them, which is why they buffed it making it also give the same amount of stamina bonus as blessing of kings but will not stack with it.

Ghostcrawler said that Ret pally dps is currently too low and they addressed that for 3.2 by redesigning Seal of Vengeance/Corruption so that it will be the go to seal for most fights, especially on boss fights. The spell now does 33% weapon damage as Holy with 5 stacks and crits do double damage while the DoT component of the spell got changed to a melee attack instead of a spell. Seal of Command’s niche would be more for shorter fights like trash mobs in dungeons and in PvP.

For PvP, they’re bringing back the use of Exorcism on player targets but added a 1.5 second cast time. This way Paladins can’t use it on the go as they’re closing out the distance between players. They’ll need to make a decision on when to use it and probably only when it becomes instant cast through Art of War procs. Ghostcrawler also touched on a plan to redo the entire dispelling system wherein one idea would be to give all healers the ability to dispel Magic but to prevent offensive dispelling altogether (so would this mean spells like Spell Steal and Purge would be out?) or at least prevent the dispelling of buffs classes should have like Arcane Intellect.

Lastly, they touched on a plan to make Librams more prominent aesthetically just like quivers for Hunters. They understand that Librams were a big part of the Paladin look especially in Warcraft 3. It’s something they’d like to do in the future but they warned that it could take time, citing that it took them this long to implement the new druid form art.