Level 59 paladin on Earthen Ring (RP), checking in.
It strikes me that there are three separate, legitimate issues here. First, people hate fighting against paladins. Second, people don’t like having a paladin in their group. And third, some paladin players don’t like their class.
People hate fighting against paladins. This is due to the design of the class. They’re really irritating to fight in one-on-one duels, because they get knocked down, but they get up again. You’re never going to keep them down, at least until they run out of mana. This is due to being one of the two most heavily-armored classes, and having access to both invulnerability and heals that don’t get interrupted by normal damage. In addition, the bonus stats on plate tend to hevily favor stamina, so paladins usually end up with lots of health as well. All of that adds up to make paladins very difficult to beat in duels, where your damage output doesn’t matter as much as your survivability. And duels are often erroneously used to gauge how strong classes are in general PvP.
To my knowledge, paladins in the closed beta were significantly weaker than their current incarnations, but still shared the powers of invulnerability and healing. Even then, Alliance players kept crying out to Blizzard to nerf paladins because they would dominate duels. So in this sense, it’s the core concept of the class that “too strong”. I feel that another factor in the crying out for nerfs is the exclusivity of the class. All Horde players get to see of paladins is the abilities they have that the Horde don’t get access to, and their strengths in PvP. Compare the constant cries from Alliance characters to nerf the Horde-exclusive class, shamans.
In general PvP there are a few ways to deal with the paladin’s survivability. You can simply ignore the paladin, which isn’t great because they’re respectable healers. If the paladin charges out in front, it’s generally simple for everyone to target it and keep it stunlocked, feared, etc. until it dies, without allowing it to activate invulnerability. The best option is to get rid of the paladin’s small mana pool, after which it can either be ignored or killed easily, without threat of healing. This is applicable in duels as well, if the class the paladin is fighting has the ability to drain mana.
People don’t like having a paladin in their group. This is much less of a game mechanics issue than the first one, but there are some mechanical issues at work here. Paladins are hybrid classes, and pure classes are usually favored for groups for their sheer power at what they do best. A paladin acting as primary tank is acceptable, but not something you look forward to. A paladin acting as main healer is marginal at best, although still survivable. They only really shine when you already have both roles covered. In these kind of groups, you’re left with a very flexible, capable off-tank and backup healer, with many other nice utility abilities to help out the group.
Another problem that comes with this flexibility is that some hybrid class players prefer to concentrate on some aspect or another of their class to the exclusion of the others. This makes the class appear as little more than a bad warrior or bad priest to those who group with these people. It also takes some devotion to learning how to use the abilities to be capable with tanking, healing, utility, and switching between them all as warranted by the situation. For example, a lot of people claim that many paladin abilities are useless. So far I’ve found good uses for them all except one, Divine Intervention, and that only because I can’t imagine it’ll be useful often enough to justify using up both a bag slot and an accessible ability slot.
Finally, people with a certain range of personalities tend to favor playing paladins, so in general, more paladins have a certain undesirable traits than other classes. The classic undesirable paladin is overbearing, loud, stubborn, and refuses to either heal or tank. It’s not that these traits are unheard of in other classes, or that all paladins exhibit them- there’s just a significantly higher concentration of them among paladins, which is somewhat ironic for a class that’s supposed to be highly charismatic and well-liked. Also players who primarily enjoy doing lots of damage may choose to play a paladin, which is just terrible to all involved, as I’ll talk about next.
Some paladin players don’t like their class. This is the problem with the simplest solution- there is likely another class that these players will like better. The problem with that is that they lose most of their progress, and they were probably expecting one thing when they selected about the class and got another, which is not at all their fault.
There is an interesting disconnect between MMORPGs and most other games when it comes to heavily armored fighters. The strong, slow, tough fighter is a very common archetype in gaming, so it is a reasonable expectation to enter an MMORPG hoping to play that archetype. However, many MMORPG designers have split the archetype up into the strong fighter and the tough fighter, as putting both in the same class reduces the co-dependency necessary for interesting group dynamics. WoW further exacerbates this problem by making the “strong fighter” into the rogue, which is not at all the flavor many people who enjoy doing melee damage want. So players who pick a warrior or paladin expecting to be an armored damage machine, or even who enjoy the armored damage machine archetype, are going to be disappointed. The best solution to this problem seems to me to be adding an in-between hybrid of damage sponge and melee damage machine, such as the death knight (ignoring the lore problems that would bring up). Alternately, the shaman is already similar to this, but lacks the flavor many would prefer of the knight in shining, or dark, armor.
Of course, there are a lot of factors at work in all of these situations, and I highlight only the ones that I think are the most relevant. Personally, I’m still very happy with my choice of class, and enjoying my rogue alt for the times when I feel like just ripping through things as quickly as possible. I preferred off-tanking in other MMOs, and being a backup healer, so a class that combines the two is wonderful for me. I imagine that regularly grouping with both a priest and a paladin who prefers to tank also aids in my enjoyment a lot.
