The Newbie Paladin Experience

These newbie paladin whelps are spoiled rotten these days. Back in my day, we had to walk uphill to Stormwind, both ways, in the snow. These kids don't know how good they've got it. They're born with a silver spoon in their mouths. I blame it on the influence of those shilly-shallying blood elves. Seriously, those pansy elves spend so much time preening in front of a mirror, they wouldn't have the muscle to lift my old [Verigan's Fist].

Take that young whipper-snapper Zubon over at Kill Ten Rats. He rolls up a paladin and goes prancing merrily along:

I was amazed to see that she out-nukes the Mage: the damaging taunt does not activate global cooldown...

Taunt? What's this damaging Taunt nonsense? Back in my day, paladins didn't need a taunt. We held aggro because we were real men who used Seal of Fury, and the DPS understood they would die if they pulled aggro.

...so I can Exorcise immediately after starting the pull.

Pull? Bet these fancypants new paladins pull from range too. We had to learn to body-pull, and guess where we learned that? That's right, the school of hard knocks.

And Exorcism could only be used on Undead. Not fake undead, like the Forsaken, but real undead, who would scare the pants off these mincing dandies. Why, I didn't even see an Undead until Darkshire.

Drop a magic hammer as it arrives in melee, get that big first swing in, and the enemy is usually around 25% health.

Drop a magic hammer right at the start? In my day, we did things properly. First, we debuffed the mob with Judgement of the Crusader. Then we activated Seal of Righteousness (or Seal of Command if we were feeling lucky). Fifteen seconds later we were privileged to Judge again (and re-cast our Seal). These punks are lucky enough to have 10-second Judgements (8 with talents) and they still complain about being a 1 button class.

These youngsters are spoiled. Seals and Judgements scale with Attack Power? Hah, in the old days we stuck with the base damage. If it was good enough for us, it's good enough for them.

That takes less than a quarter of my mana, and the blue magic hammer gives me mana for hitting the enemy.

Getting mana back? We had to Judge Crusader just to improve our damage to moderate levels. If we wanted to Regenerate we used Seal of Wisdom, and just did white damage to the mob for a few minutes. And we liked it.

Sigh, do these cubs have any redeeming qualities?

It really is satisfying to crush your enemies with a giant hammer... My only disappointment is that her current best weapon is a big axe rather than a comically huge hammer. I like its numbers, and she gets huge crits all the time due to Retribution talents, but hammertime was both cathartic and classically Warcraft.

Well, Daisy, maybe the kids are going to be all right after all.

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On a somewhat serious note, this is a major reason I don't agree with complaints about the "B Team". The modern paladin is light-years more fun than the paladin of 1.0 used to be.