Monday, June 23, 2008

Protection Paladin PVP - Part II

With my paladin now having dinged 70 I decided to toss myself into the AH and grab myself some gear to bring my defense rating into the 490 range. I am still not sure if it will carry significant benefit to boost DR for PVP over other stats like resilience + agility but at least I can savely do some 5-mans when I feel like it.

In the meantime I spent a few hours doing Eye of the Storm and AV in order to get some honor together for the PVP merciless gladiator weapon and shield which is bound to hit the honor vendors on wednesday night.

I am starved for stamina at the moment since all that extra defense rating came at the cost of about 1500 HP but there is something to be said for the extra dodge/parry/block rating.

A few matches in I decided to drop my green spell damage mace for something more substantial namely a main hand fish.

Ironically I couldn't really feel the difference between using a fish and an actual weapon so I spent most of the day slapping people across the face with a large smelly fish hoping they would get annoyed enough to start bashing my shield and taking some real damage.

And it went well... no... better... it went excellently. The protection paladin makes for an excellent protector of flag spots or anything else that needs defended. Those sneaky rogues that would rip my warlock apart in mere seconds now skewer themselves on my holy shield unable to do much damage if at all unless I am actually stunned.

Tunnel vision turned out to be my greatest ally. I could toss myself into a crowd of melee players and they would go crazy on me without taking into regard other people around me or as much as consider disengaging after they see I am practically taking no damage.

At some point I was holding the flag point in EotS against 2 warriors a rogue and an enhancement shaman (I think) and managed to tie them down long enough for reinforcements to arive.

Even in shoddy outland greens and blues the survivability of the protection paladin is amazing to the point where they dedicated a priest to mind control me and jump me into large gaping holes in the ground (although I suspect I am not the only victim of that deplorable tactic...).

The prot pally also seems to make an excellent flag runner. With temporary immunity to movement impairing effects blessing of freedom is great and those pesky arrows hunters shoot at me result in little more than a lovely block sound.

There's 2 significant problems with the protection paladin as is though.

1. Damage: You do appaling damage unless you funnel your reckoning charges into a cloth wearer and even then it's not amazing
2. Disengage: People do disengage once in a while (especially rogues) and there's almost nothing I can do about it.

I am thinking a few modifications on my paladin spec to include pursuit of justice and some heavy investigation in Engineering bombs and other goodies might be able to at least partially solve my problem. A rocket launcher, a net-o-matic, an oversized stack of frost grenades and fel iron bombs should give me some of the utility I need.

I wonder what else engineering has that could be useful.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My prot warrior is very hard to kill in the BG's. I can barely kill an AFK player though.

Captain The First said...

Hehe yeah... I quietly hopeful that I can do some damage with some of the engineering bombs and whatnot. Maybe a death-ray. All we'd need is some hard hitting poison :P