Curtently leveling a paladin in worlk as a ret (so far loving the class), but thinking of prot or holy as a dual spec.
Ay of you have some experience of which of them seems fun, boring, or challenging? Never tried either of them at full.
How is the specs for raids, dungeons, pvp?
Any tips or tricks?
Ret is kind of a mediocre mana battery, until the ICC4p, which makes them ridiculously strong
Prot is the best tank of the expansion by a margin of not even close. They’re tough, have insane aoe threat, can passively just not die and have spectacular utility which boosts the entire raid and makes the whole raid take less damage.
Holy is the best healer by far, when people actually start taking damage. Their mana pool is colossal, their single target healing on two targets is unmatched and they bring most of the same utility Prot does. Don’t go Holy until you’re on level cap and Glyph of Holy Light(the one that makes it heal surrounding targets) is a must have. Also learning windows where you’re gonna do lots of healing to maximise the effect of the mana discount ability is very important.
(Admittedly Icy-veins is probably gonna do a better job of giving you tips and telling you how to play well than anybody on this forum myself included)
As a holy main, I welcome you to the light.
If you like PvP, then go holy, you can heal heal with pretty much the same loadout …
Otherwise, I find both prot tanking and holy healing quite fun and since both are pretty damn OP, I dont have issue swapping for either …
Go Prot, it’s by far the best way to dungeon farm your way to gear for any/all specs and Paladin is the best all-round tank with great survival and great damage.
I dunno about Holy Paladin but as a Warrior I know more about WOTLK Warrior than whoever wrote the guide. Of the two mainstream guides (Icyveins, WoWhead) I think both are bad, not just suboptimal but bad. They are good enough to get noobs landing on their feet and that’s about it.
Icyveins guides have always been suspect like this, but especially so in Classic where they aren’t being done with nearly the same scrutiny as on retail. There are plenty of people on these forums who know every detail of every aspect of their class going back several expansions, and those guides are meant as a baseline for people who know nothing.
Holy = Best Healer in WOTLK(Basically spamming just spamming holy light, so wouldn’t be that fun for most)
Prot = Best Tank in WOTLK.
And that’s pretty much what they’re there for. It’s a structured, easy to navigate tool for players to familiarise themselves with a new class/build. Usually done by a streamer or some person from one of the higher end parsing/speedruning guilds so milage may vary.
Tbh the only thing i care to know about Warriors currently is that if you’re fury then you’re a useless trolling sandbag waiting for armor pen gear so i’m not one to judge warrior guides =D
Hey Fury can do well on cleave, Loatheb and Thaddius! But the problem with the Icy Veins guides is they lead players down roads that are wrong.
Example
Hit Rating
Strength
Armor Penetration
Critical Strike Rating
Expertise Rating
Haste Rating
Is the Icy Veins Fury stat priority.
When right now it’s actually closer to this.
Hit to 8% (3% talents, only 163 hit needed)
Expertise to 26 (remove dodges)
Strength
Crit
2 AP
Armor Pen = Agility
Haste
Hit (above 8%).
Any hit rating above 8% is almost worthless, due to the Heroic Strike bug. Their stat priorities are both backwards and misleading, and go directly in contradiction with established theorycraft that has existed since 2010 and is still valid today. Armor Penetration does eventually become very good, you just can’t even get enough right now for it to be strong, it’s at best slightly better than haste.
This is just one aspect of the Icy Veins guide, there are issues with the entire thing. Most of their guides are like this, they are either bad or lack context which is important and can be misleading.
Generally if it takes more effort to still be among pvp speced bottomfeeders and utility, without utility your spec is in a pretty rough spot.
They explain basically the same thing you said over the remainder of the article along with their reasoning. The biggest disparity being expertise, where the author reckons it’s limited on early gear and as such fussing over it too much can hinder you.
Fury has Utility. Brings Sunder, Shatter, 5% Crit, Commanding Shout/Battle Shout, offspeccing UA tank is also useful since it’s the highest dps tank by quite some margin, great for Patchwerk 3rd tank. The spec being weak right now isn’t of much concern when content is so easy, and the spec becomes pretty good in Ulduar already due to buffed loot, and by ICC it’s one of the strongest dps in the game.
Their guide is misleading, it says you need 263 hit rating for the hit soft cap while also recommending the standard build, which is to run Precision meaning you’d only need 164hit from gear. It also says nothing about the fact that hit is very very weak beyond that point, giving the false idea that the stat is a high priority strong stat in a general sense.
Then the whole part on Expertise is just based on nonsense, you can gem expertise and it’s stronger per point than other stats below the cap, it’s also on an absolute tonne of easily available gear. The whole thing is poorly written and misleading to people who aren’t in the know. Many people will read the priority list and not have the understanding to decipher the context from the expanded explanations, some of which are wrong/misleading anyway.
The BC dungeons would be a good place to try out both I guess
Prot is fun but go holy.
Most easy spec to gear up. Most wanted spec of pala. Easy to get spot in raid.
You sure? There are so many hpaladins and less healers needed these days for naxx. Besides, they tickle against bosses when theres no dmg inc. I rather have rshams that can pull off the extra dmg than hpaladins that are idle and static.
I could argue with this comment. “The best” is subjective term.
Yes, protect brings a ton of utility along with the “random death stopper” (I dont count sanctuary as advantage because it does not stack with Priest talent - Renewed Hope). However, you need two tanks for most raids and despite all the advantages and “the best tank status”, you don’t want two paladins at the same time because you will be unneccesarily losing Hysteria. Trust or not, but even now we can see some speedrunner groups running two Blood Death Knights as their tanks for two Hysterias.
And now for Holy paladin. Holy paladin is the best healer not because of raw healing output (later on Resto Shaman even surpasses paladin in this regard) but because of the number of multi-purpose cooldowns it has. And again, even tough holy paladins cooldowns are excellent and no other healer has that much cooldowns, you ideally don’t want two or more holy paladins in your raid group. This has to do with holy paladin playstyle. Holy paladin is a straight up spot-healer, picking low health targets and quickly topping them with holy light (and automatically healing the tank in the process). Now if you have two holy paladins, chances are (and pretty big chances in most cases) that they pick the same target resulting not only in one of the heals going to overheal, but also your tank getting too much unnecessary burst healing going also to overheal. Again, look at speedrunner groups - their usual healer combo is Holy Pala, Discipline Priest and either Holy Priest or Resto Shaman (note that they don’t care about Revitalize atball which I don’t agree with, Revitalize is great), very rarely you’ll see 2x holy pala and a discipline.
Remember, things are not only black and white.
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.