The patch notes were updated, two highlights I find interesting:

1. (Hunter) Scare Beast: The range on this spell has been increased to 30 yards and it is now instant cast.
2. (Paladin) Seal of the Crusader: This ability now increases the damage dealt by Crusader Strike by 40%.

Looks like druids are going to get hurt by hunters really badly come 2.4.2, not even talking about ferals. The second change is another attempt (after changing CS to 110% weapon damage, without spell damage shit) to redefine retribution as a pure melee spec, not all pallies are satisfied with it, but even if it doesn’t turn SotC into the pew pew seal, it’s definitely a step in the right direction (and since we have a retri pally in our new 5v5 combo, I hope it works pretty well ;p).

Terhix

UPDATE: Added MatsT’s comments

Why would you pick a Paladin and not a Druid? I don’t know, you might know someone you used to play for months in wow or even before who got well geared Pally (my case), you might not know any Druid, or all the Druids you know already do 2v2 with a warrior, or better yet, a warlock or hunter. Either way, you are foolish enough to want to get your ass up on the ladder with what you have, since if you don’t have what you like, you like what you have. So here is a short list of tactics for most popular 2v2 teams you might face:

WARRIOR/DRUID
Status: winnable

It’s very unlikely you will win a mana war with such team, since it’s very easy for druid left alone to drink, while hots keep his warrior alive. What we did against that setup was simply killing the druid, you will need Mace Spec for that, a bit of luck, good timing on pummel, good to have freedom under your feet, and the druid MUST have Judgment of Justice on his ass. Since the druid starts in stealth, start on the warrior but don’t beat him too hard, get as much rage as you can for when the druid shows up. You can trinket one cyclone and than you have to pummel all the rest.

Warrior/druid: You are partly right here, as killing the druid is the way to go. However, it’s quite a bit more complicated than you make it sound. Against a good druid, you have little to no chance to catch him and kill him straight up, even with a JoJ. In order to win, it is imperative that you can also help your paladin to drink, until you finally get that lucky crit+mace stun streak that will kill the druid. Sometimes, a simple hamstring+freedom can let paladin get away and drink on other side of pillar. Sometimes, you will have to wait until druid tries to drink, then nuke warrior hard, to force the warrior into turtling and meeting up with his druid, while your paladin drinks. We have never lost this matchup in season 2 nor 3, but the wins often take as long as 15 minutes, when trinket+NS is on cooldown and i i get lucky.

WARLOCK/DRUID
Status: pain in the ass

Basically same thing as with warrior/druid, except this time you are killing the druid with a timer, that timer is your pally’s mana being constantly drained. You can also try to do it the “normal” way, push on the warlock, kill the pet, back on the warlock, kill another pet, your pally can drink now, push on the warlock and if they do enough mistakes you have a chance to win. Pummel all fears and mana drains you can.

ROGUE/PRIEST (HEALER)
Status: this is your day!

Try to get in combat, find the rogue or do whatever not to get pally sapped. Picking your target depends on what the rogue will do, if he goes for your pally you have to go for the rogue, if he goes for you, you can go for either priest or rogue. If you decide to go for the priest with rogue on your back (not good idea if it’s dagger rogue btw), prayer of mending will heal for some nice amounts every time you use whirlwind, there are two solutions for that: a) don’t use whirlwind or b) use sweeping strikes, I prefer b, you will have tons of rage anyway from rogue beating you. If you stay on the rogue and your pally is smart enough to LoS mana burns, you will win mana war, the priest can’t really do many mana burns since after evasion fades he will have to drop heavy healing bombs on the rogue. It’s good idea if your pally will assist you with hammer of justice on the rogue when he use evasion, also use intercept to stun the rogue whenever you can, stun means he can’t dodge, and dodge is what makes keeping MS debuff on him difficult, either way you should deliver him a lot of pain.

Rogue/DiscPriest: After the HARP nerf, this is one of the better matchups. However, it’s not nearly as simple as sticking on the rogue and winning the mana war. If your paladin can stand still and keep you up with flash of lights, yes, his mana will last longer. However, the other team won’t let him do this. The priest can easily keep the rogue up while still having plenty of time to chase paladin with fears and mana burns. If the paladin is forced to use holy lights to keep you up between LoS-ing mana burns, the priest’s mana will last longer. In addition to this, keep in mind that even ONE dodged mortal strike will cause mortal strike debuff to fall off for at least 2 seconds, which is more than enough for their priest to land a greater heal. The strategy to winning usually involves staying on the priest whenever there is an opportunity to do so. Your damage output becomes a lot higher, and your paladin will have a lot more freedom to stand still and heal, or even drink. Once their rogue manage to peel you from the priest, you usually have no choice except hitting the rogue, especially when pillars is involved. The priest will typically heal himself to full and try to drink. If you can not follow him, you must instead nuke the rogue to force the priest to come back. This may be a win opportunity if you have HoJ and/or intimidating shout to cc druid while finishing rogue with paladins help. If you don’t think you can pull it off, intercept the priest as soon as he comes back into LoS. This will put pressure on the priest while the rogue is still on low hp. Hopefully, the priest won’t have enough to heal both himself and the rogue and still get away and drink more. Eventually the priest will oom and die.

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Terhix

Current world top 100 player ranking representation to class population:

Druid: 24% arena / 10% pop = 2.4 ratio
Warlock: 20% arena / 11% pop = 1.81 ratio
Warrior: 22% arena / 14% pop = 1.57 ratio
Priest: 13% arena / 11% pop = 1.18 ratio
Rogue: 7% arena / 11% pop = 0.63 ratio
Paladin: 5% arena / 10% pop = 0.5 ratio
Mage: 4% arena / 13% pop = 0.31 ratio
Shaman: 2% arena / 8% pop = 0.25 ratio
Hunter: 3% arena / 13% pop = 0.23 ratio

Population data from Warcraft Census. Hunter situation is a very funny one, they are on the bottom of the food chain in representation, yet they are actually most potent arena class atm. Hunter/Druid teams got up to the 3rd most popular setup above 2200 rating in 2v2, which is one of the reasons why warriors went down, as druids are switching over to hunters for the most part. I guess forum nerfcallers can finally see the truth: It’s not warriors that were shining in warrior/druid 2v2, it’s druids, you tools! That doesn’t mean Blizzard should nerf druids, they should just remove water from 2v2 bracket and problem is solved! It’s much harder to drink in 5v5 than it’s in 2v2, and druids are masters of exploiting it, especially night elf bastards with shadowmeld-drink.

What’s inspiring, especially for me, is that there is still a fair amount of (4.3% which makes it 5th most popular) warrior/paladin setups, with the rise of the druids one could expect paladins go up as they bring one excellent tool to counter druid teams - Judgement of Justice. That being said warrior/paladin is still far from the X/druid easy mode, no free drinks, not much CC, yet I like to play it as it really feels rewarding.

On a side note, last week paladins were on an uproar (when they are not?) about retribution viability in arenas claiming that they, as a hybrid class, should have more then one role in pvp metagame, which is something you can’t really disagree with. Either way 5 minutes of analyzing situation made me come with those particular suggestions for the paladin class:

Step one: change repentance with crusader strike in retri tree.
Step two: make repentance trainable for all paladins at level whatever.
Step three: put charge at 41p retribution.
Step four: give paladins fear ward.

What this fix: Gives retribution paladins a way to enter melee combat, they already have tools to stay in melee combat despite not having snare ability - it’s not perfect, but neither is hamstring - they just have nothing to get back into melee once casters start to kite their ass. 30 second c/d in combat charge with immobilize effect like druid one (might be without spell interrupt as well) would be gimped enough one not to make it overpowered, yet good enough to make this damned spec work. Crusader Strike as 31 talent point is just cosmetic and brings them closer to what enh shamans have. Trainable repentance would bring a bit of CC for all teams with paladins, making them more viable especially in lower brackets where paladins stopped to shine after S1, long cooldown long range CC which breaks on damage, it’s not a cyclone, but I guess it would make it a bit more even in fights against teams with warlocks. Fear ward is something that I would also see on them, warlock/priest can really push it on paladins, and it’s easy to back this up with lore, heck, paladins in D&D have passive fear immunity since level 2, they are holy warriors, they are not afraid of some clowns in pajamas.

Terhix

Saw this on the official boards and got a good laugh:

“Warriors complain that they suck in solo PvP, and are told to find a healer if they want to be good.

Pallies complain that they suck in solo PvP, and are told to STFU and heal.

Pallies and Warriors decide to PvP together.

Now people are asking to ban them from PvP.

Amazing.”

Funny because its relatively true. The difference between pvping on my own (charge, maybe kill 1 person before roasted by every ranged unit on the enemy team), and pvping with a pocket healer (charge, kill all of those ranged units as they feed me rage) is night and day. Too bad I could almost never find a reliable pocket healer since the vast majority of priest pvpers are shadow and pally pvpers are ret.

That being said, on my 2v2 arena team all it takes is a silenced or cycloned paladin and we lose.

Veritas

Not so long ago I wondered where are the paladin tanks, seems Blizzard also noticed the problem. Tseric’s post:

The devs actually mentioned today that Paladin tanking wasn’t exactly where they wanted it to be and there would be attention paid towards that end of things. Overall, they do expect Paladins, Druids and Warriors to fill tanking roles in end-game, whatever they may be. While there may be a flavor distinction between tanks, we don’t want to (or want the players to) find some rigid hierarchy by which classes are measured in their tanking potential to the third decimal point.

So, they don’t want us to make a hierarchy? Well, if tanks should be equal but distinct to each other, that would mean we have to take 3 main tanks to a raid, and change them for different encounters that would favor different way of tanking. For me it means that either Blizzard have no idea where and how they want hybrids to become a viable tanks yet not exceed prot warriors OR it’s all just PR crap, since they can’t just go to the Paladin forums and say “lololo u can spec prot but u can’t tank raidz noobz!”.

Terhix