World of Warcraft Class Q&A Series: The Paladin

Blizzard continues their World of Warcraft class Q&A series, this time with designer Greg Street tackling questions about the Paladin.

Q: Where do paladins fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do you see them going from this point forward?

A: The paladin is an iconic class from fantasy role-playing, and one which Warcraft has been able to put its own stamp all over. Obviously they figure prominently in the lore, up to and including the Lich King himself.

The paladin started out as a defensive buffing class. Early on, buffs were pretty much the entire reason you’d want to group with a paladin. (And if you want to put a fine point on it, it took about all of the paladin’s attention to keep those buffs up).

End-game paladins in vanilla World of Warcraft were pretty much healers, which was disappointing for some players to discover once they reached level 60. As most of our readers probably already know, the paladin class was exclusive to the Alliance. We realized that we kept pushing the paladin and shaman abilities closer and closer together to solve faction imbalance issues, and that process was hurting the classes, so we’d be better off just having paladins and shamans on both sides. In Burning Crusade, paladins gained the ability to tank and could do so quite well in some situations, but were still positioned more in an off-tank role. In Wrath of the Lich King, we finally embraced all three specs of paladins: Protection paladins can tank anything. Retribution paladins are a legitimate dps spec in both PvE and PvP. And of course, paladins could still heal.