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Healing as a Paladin
By Justin J Frederick | June 21, 2009
Ever since World of Warcraft first was released I have been almost addicted to the game. And most of the time I was playing I played a paladin. In the early days of wow, pvp’ing on a paladin was basically a joke. Then came the Burning Crusade, with new spells, and abilities we rocked the early arena seasons. Now the Wrath of the Lich King has been released, and someone over at blizzard was feeling a little paladin love. So it doesn’t matter what spec you play, you can hold your own in most scenarios on a Paladin.
We will being with Holy Paladins in PvP, which is where I personally spend most of my arena time. With the new improvements to Holy Shock, as well as instant flash of lights plus sacred shield, well our mobility has just never been this good. The basics of being a pvp great start with your ability to use line of sight to your advantage. You need to learn to use the arena terrain to your advantage, hiding out of line of sight until you must cast, then jumping back out before you opponents have time to react.
But long gone are the days when Holy Paladins were able to just stand back and cast. Now days anytime the opposing team has a melee player I usually spend most of the map with him relentlessly beating on me. The trick here is Kiting, and Holy Paladins have some very unique abilities to enable us to do this successfully. The first of which is Blessing of Freedom, I rarely have this spell off cool down, either using it to enable me to put some distance between me and the melee player or tossing it on my of my allies so that they can stay on top of the target they are trying to kill.
By combining Blessing of Freedom with Judgment of Justice you get a very exceptional combo, which enables you to outrun and potential pursuer. This increased speed lets you use the built in arena obstacles to the maximum advantage. Now if you are reading this guide at the moment and you still use your keyboard to turn your character you should stop now. No advice I have to offer compares to the dramatic skill increase by simply learning to use your mouse to turn and move.
Now back to using obstacles successfully, Pillars, and the tomb in Ruins, are amazing for kiting running around a pillar with a melee player hot on your heels, then partway around running the direction you came from can buy you precious seconds to get off that Holy Light you desperately need.
One thing you must keep in mind while kiting is the location of all other players in the arena, it will do you no good to successfully kite and keep yourself alive if you allow your team mates to fall. A Holy Paladin standing alone is soon a dead paladin.
Another skill that you need to practice and master is juking. There will be many times when you simply must get a longer cast of, and with all of the abilities out there that can be used to silence a player during casting you have to learn how to avoid getting locked out.
But how do you prevent this? The answer is simple though the trick takes a lot of practice to master. You have to learn to juke the enemy, this means to stop casting in the middle of your cast right before the opponent attempts to silence you. Sounds easy right? Learning the timing for this can make a huge difference in your teams ability to succeed in arenas. Knowing when to stop casting also depends upon the player you are up against and how fast their reaction time is. Typically I break off my casts before the 3/4 marker on the cast bar, and unless the other player is very fast with their reaction I have found this to be quite successful.
Topics: Paladin | 1 Comment »
June 21st, 2009 at 5:10 pm
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