I hear alot of people say that paladins are gear dependent, but what are they talking about? Are they talking about open world questing and leveling that they are more gear dependent than other classes or healers like priest or druid? Or are they talking about tanking as a paladin (because every tank is gear dependent) or being a paladin healers is also more gear dependent?
I lke to play the class but I’m too casual to get some good amount of gear so I was wondering if having lackluster gear will be worse on a paladin while leveling or occasionally dungeon healing than say on a priest?
paladins from my point of view is not that gear dependent. At least not holy, you can heal with whatever scrap int gear you got as long as you have the right talents haha.
Paladins are very gear dependent. As a Hybrid class you can basically be everything and not just because of the talents you selected. If you want to heal you need healing gear, if you want to tank you need some tanking gear and if you want to do dmg you need dmg gear. In that sense every paladin can have his bag full with different kind of gear so you can switch from healer to tank/dps on the fly (without needing to change talents). It’s also possible to heal without holy talents, just with healing gear.
If you only want to be a healbot then you aren’t that gear dependent (compare it to a warrior and his dependency on his weapon) but with better gear you will heal more and it takes longer until you go oom.
Paladins are rather dependent on gear for different reasons depending on their specs:
Holy Paladins thrive in spell crit because of the mana cost refound mechanic, gear of that type is not easily found early so you need to find really high healing bonus items so you can down rank and save some mana.
Retribution Paladins are heavily gear dependent because they need to reach the hitcap and then they need a heavy hitting slow weapon in order to maximize the procs from Seal of Command which a a “proc per minute” chance.
Protection Paladins have an heavier time gearing up because for threat they need spell damage while keeping defense, block and parry high, plus their lack of taunts makes them unviable for most of the raids. There have been cases of Paladins tanking spamming BoK on a numerous class because the threat from it is high af.
It all comes to base stats. If you have 200str, that’s 20str bonus. If you have 300 str, that’s 30.
Essentially the more stats and the heavier your weapon swings, the better the numbers scale. But even with that scaling, a Ret’s damage is mediocre compared to half the dps in raids. Simply because the only scaling thing there is are auto attacks and his holy damage drops off significantly and many other factors.