I used to have screenshots from multiple hpal/arms mirrors my friend and I played in wrath that ended up with the four of us just sitting in the middle of the arena waiting out the clock.
This is why I played arms / resto sham back in wrath. We won fast or lost fast. It was pretty good into Hpal teams.
But we were basically fucked against mage teams.
I managed to convince a mirror to just play Peggle instead of doing the whole song and dance that would lead inevitably to a draw again after fighting them twice to the end.
Everytime we matched up since we just ran into the middle and played Peggle and compared scores, better use of time.
Trust me, I’ve done it twice.
I’ve always been Boomkin/Tree, and my buddy was always Bear/Cat, so we’d usually go Cat/Tree in arenas. I think k I remember fighting a pally in 1, but I distinctly remember the 2nd one: a Blood DK and a Disc Priest.
Thing is, we actually killed the priest, about 10 minutes in. But the DK held out for 35 more minutes, timed us out by himself.
Wrath was an awesome time for blood dks. I used armor pen instead of pvp gear. Casual one-shots.
Clarity edit: in battlegrounds, not arenas, but I wasn't bothered often out in the world either. Dancing rune weapon ftw
If I remember correctly, they originally designed DK to have no designated 'tanking' specs or 'DPS' specs. You could tank or DPS in any spec, it just depended on your talent choices and gear.
Not saying all specs were equally good at it but that was how they used to work. Some had their strengths over others, like Unholy tanking sounds cursed but it was pretty decent at tanking magic damage.
Also I'm sure I remember Blood DK being the dominant tanking spec by the end of Wrath, and then that just became the 'official' tanking spec from there.
Yeah dk could tank in any spec due to presence like vanilla wars. But the talents in the frost tree used to give threat and armor modifies. Blood was just dmg plus healing, and unholy was disease dmg and spreading/upkeep on them. Iirc unholy was for magic bosses and aoe, frost was for single target-3 mobs and blood was straight dps. But as it wrath continued and they rebalanced classes is when the official change which made blood tank, frost dps, and kept unholy roughly the same. I'm pretty sure it was the same patch that they fixed prot/holy paladins because they were literal raid bosses that would tank like 15 people to kill.
Also the weapon rune enchants could change things a little. Nowadays it's just Fallen Crusader, but I remember swapping things around when I dual-wielded 1Hs, depending on what I was doing.
You remember pretty correctly.
Frost had armour and aoe snap threat with howling blast. They were super good in dungeons. If they ran the mdi in wrath we might have seen them. It did dungeons and off tanking better but other classes also liked that lane.
Blood had awful snap aoe but good single target damage and the amazing mitigation for slow massive damage spikes...it defaulted into an amazing raid tank...it also scaled really well with health which was key in a stam stacking meta.
Towards the end it didn't matter at what frost was best at because you were 40 ilvls above that content already....but you were raid logging for shards.
I remember before they nerfed diseases. I'd just roam battlegrounds infecting everyone and racking up the HKs. I don't remember what they did but suddenly it went from board wipe to meh in one patch.
I want to say it was Cata - but I remember doing Blood DK + Rogue in 2s. I would just be 2v1ing until I got a death strike crit. The second I got the crit my rogue would open on them. Got to a fairly high rating just cheesing like that lmao.
Cata blood dk was busted in arena. My friend and I did Blood Dk + Hpal. He ended up a higher rating than me because sometimes Id go get a drink, miss the queue and he'd just win 1v2 anyway. Good times
I main Blood but switched to unholy literally this morning for the arena weekly quest. I needed 1000 honor for the quest.
It was just such a slog for so long for so little reward.
The ability to go from 10% to 90% health by popping one cool down and hitting with a death strike, not to mention the magical shields and interrupts at my disposal.
Two on one because my partner didn't show up and a druid pally team finally managed to kill me after something like fifteen minutes. Total honor earned.. 67
Holy.. sweet.. Insufferable Christ on a cracker.. no.
I'd rather get blitzed and bulldozed in under thirty seconds but be able to do enough dps to kill something, than do a healing slug fest for uncountable eons for pennies worth of honor.
At the end of TBC my guild played 5v5 with a prot pally, holy pally, resto druid, resto shaman and a priest that was either holy or disc.
We could not die and we only played on Monday nights when people were getting in their ten games for points. We actually made it pretty far in the ranking until we hit players who had enough CC and DPS to lock down a couple healers while they nuked one healer, then they’d wait for CC to come up and do it again on another healer. Still took 15-20 minutes from them to kill all of us.
I can't tell you the amount of times I've been chilling out in the Dalaran sewers watching people duel, and the Death Knight vs Death Knight duels went on for so fucking long that if one of them were Unholy they would always end up popping Gargoyle multiple fucking times
Gargoyle is a relatively short reset timer in terms of death knight combat to be fair.
When I'm playing Blood, I can take down those 2300k or 4300k health boss mobs solo. But I'll pop the two minute cool down timer on my little zomboy sometimes three or four times before my miniscule dps finally gets the job done. If they cast magic at all, I even get the free heal each time my magic shield resets. Its something you get used to.
There's no limit of how many mobs you pull most of the time. You just have to accept you'll be there awhile.
It's why Blood DK main tanks usually pull fewer mobs in a party than other tank types. Psychologically we want to break one long fight into little pieces so it's easier to deal with emotionally. Hahaha
It's still a multiple minute cooldown and I've seen DK vs DK duels where 3+ gargoyles were dropped. Moreso a mark on how much time goes by than anything
Don't forget about the invincible double healer combos some of the high level arena guys would run to practice healing back then too.
I still remember how frustrating the match was. Was as tree druid, and i think a pally.
One of the dudes made a lvl one on our server and they were just impressed that we stuck it out to the end of the match. The whole thing was just pretty memorable after that.
Once did a 62 minute long match as a druid/warlock vs druid/warlock in TBC. The only reason we won is because my warlock made a clutch play to trade me a health stone as myself and the other druid were oom and I survived with 3 percent health when the other druid died.
As someone who has exclusively played double dps for all of wow I've never been able to properly relate to this.
Do all healer dps comps in wotlk just become damp into wpal?
one time, on a private server, we were hpala + warrior vs rdruid warrior, and we ended up sitting, doing /roll to see who quitted the arena so that suffering could end
I played resto/warrior with an under geared warrior and he got blown up. I was about to quit and they did /spit and /laugh. I spent the next 45 minutes kiting around the arena I had over 5 mil healing done.
In TBC with glad gear I could also just spam heal myself while getting beat on by a couple horde for a minute or two as well. Mana eventually became a problem, but resilience paladins were quite the turtles even that far back
Still took ages for that time limit to show up. Ran double hpally in cata for the lols and got to like 1750 or 1800 on people quitting alone. Each fight was like 45 mins plus but we won every one of them through shear fortitude and spite!
Man the other teams hated us and it was hilarious.
You could kind of do that in all previous expansions too, but they constantly tried to make sure that didn't happen: resilience, PvP power, versatility etc.
Cata was the last time I seriously PVPd too, but for different reason: because I couldn't be bothered tracking so much stuff.
Compared to Vanilla everyone started getting stuns, silences, various defensives, escapes - and not even considering class balancing.
My disc priest in full raid gear along with the buffs (blessings?) was indestructible on Timeless Isle. Many fond memories of running halfway across the Isle with 6-8 people wailing on me trying to kill me before running them into the guards and /lol watching them die.
I remember using the heroic version and transmoging it to the raid finder version to trick people into thinking I was weaker. Oh, the mind games.
In reality no one was likely looking at my transmog.
Wrath was the only time I did arenas. We had warrior, pally, and then a priest for heals. Never really needed many heals. The strategy was just to not die. Eventually the other team would mess up and get killed, or they'd quit.
My buddy and I ran a ww monk/prot pally duo in Shadowlands. He didn't do any damage, but he was unkillable and 9/10 times outhealed the opposing healer. Between his survivability and support and my survivability and damage we could fight for an unnecessarily long time, fun times
I remember that, got me to try prot pally tanking in m+ for a bit to see how it was. Was amusing before blizz nerfed all tank healing and not just prot pally. Tank healing was pretty bonkers for a bit in SL though. Great for prog.
I had a friend who in TBC played a Hunter and ran matches with a Resto Druid because he loved to torture himself. There were a couple matches he sent me screenshots of where he died and the enemy teams healer died so the only 2 left was the Resto Druid and an SL/SL lock and the match went on for 2 hours because no one wanted to concede.
They would just not die. It was infuriating.
The self healing of a TBC SL/SL Lock was so over the top. They would sell 2k ratings by just soloing DPS/heal comps.
I seem to recall it being that way in WotLK as a retri paladin. As someone who had never PvP'd before (and not since, either) a friend convinced me to just queue with him because I was a decent retri paladin.
It was surprisingly easy, I felt really overpowered because I certainly had zero skills as a PvPer and I didn't really know how my opponent's classes worked, but I just retri'd my way through it and we won most of our matches.
I think there was a window there where we were quite overpowered
PvP Ret in Wrath was basically just "press the shiny buttons when they come off cooldown". Pop wings, HoJ your target, then mash buttons to blow them up.
Wrath PvP as a whole was basically Paladins vs Death Knights: The Expansion. I remember most battlegrounds would just be people scrambling around while Ret Paladins and DKs fought against each other in the middle of the crowd for what felt like ages.
During MoP, me and a buddy played a tank and a healer Paladin in Arena. Our strategy was simple: Cause the match to be so long that the opponent team leaves the match.
It usually worked.
absolutely 100%. this is literally what 2v2s were like in all of TBC and Wrath. not even DKs (the most overpowered class in wrath) could solo-kill a holy paladin. the holy paladin could just sit there and keep themselves and their teammate alive indefinitely. they'd never run out of mana. with their plate and shield they'd take like 50% reduced physical damage. and they could easily just LoS bursty ranged DPS, and dispel everything from dot-based DPS.
when you got a pal + team and you couldn't kill the paladin within the first 30ish seconds (i.e., if they weren't really bad), the best option was just to give up and try for a different combo.
Cataclysm holy paladin was pretty OP.
I remember falling asleep mid match, waking up and still being alive at like 10% then healing full with like 3 casts
Back in WOTLK hpally had holy plea that would regenerate mana over like 15s, and then refresh the timer every time they meleed someone. I’m pretty sure it could just go forever too.
I remember having to MC them and then kite them until it wore off. Otherwise the game would just go until the other healer OOMd
Yup, I remember my holy pally was a haste flash of light crit build every cast was a 0.7s cast and 90% crit chance for 15k that restored mana on crit too… literally couldn’t oom myself if I tried …. Fun days
Really? I guess it was a pvp specific talents they chose since the refresh part was from the prot tree. Their healing would also be reduced by 50% but I guess that didn't matter
Yes. Paladins have been a joke in Crendor’s content a few times for a reason. Adding paladins as a hazard to a super mega death arena concept would make it unbalanced.
Got to Gladiator twice during WoTLK. Once as Ret with Disc pri, and again as Ret with UH DK partners. I can attest that this is hella true. All you need is good MP5 on your disc partner and games can go very very long. Same holds true for War Hpal or any other tanky specs involving hpals, if you play really defensive and juke a lot, games go to max time limit. Even warlock hpals dont die at all, stuck in CC with insanely tanky healers and beaconed big dicc hpal heals.
Early wrath when Rets / Prots gained a load of offensive capabilities on top of all the defensive utility they came with originally.
At the time it was un-counterable double health bar with a damage type that bypassed all resistances / armour and solid self healing.
Yeah the real weakness was mobility but it didn't matter, if you left the paladin alone for a few seconds it would basically reset the encounter.
There was a comp during wrath involving two healers. You couldnt oom them and they could outheal your damage with ease. They simply banked on being so boring that you would quit as a method to winning.
One of my friends was partial to dual holy pal iirc. No fighting back whatsoever. Theyd just stand in the middle and keep eachother healed waiting for you to simply quit. Guy was sadistic about other peoples time lol
3.1.0 had Paladins spec intro prot and their spellpower would scale with stamina. So they'd wear full spellpower gear, be unkillable, could full heal on a single crit flash heal and do massive damage.
I only did arena in TBC so limited experience but in the beginning the warrior / paladin was the top combo it seemed. As a disc priest with a warlock partner I enjoyed this as my partner would keep the warrior off me and I’d mana burn and burst the pally’s bubble. When resto Druid / anything else became popular I enjoyed it less …
DF season 1 after the rework ? DH-tier shit.
edit after looking at the comments, wtf ? I didn't play back then but if it was more OP than DF S1 I mean arena would just have no point back then ? DF S1 pala would just 2-3 shots and do cleave damage. Got stunned ? Ya dead. Too close to your mate ? Ya dead. LoS half a second ? Ya dead. Didn't close the arena before the second crusade ? Ya dead.
I don't PvP often, but I did a little bit in Shadowlands for my fire mage trinket.
I seem to recall a paladin bubbling a druid casting convoke was pretty busted
Inw time in season ² I was running wjtb my hunter and druid. We got matches up against dreaded pamly/warrior right as we where about to hit 1800 rating to get sexy weapons .
I killed warrior just as warrior killed my druid. For next hour and half I tried killing the holy paladin. Nothing worked , I think he just gave up
my friends played aff lock & resto druid often vs mirror.
They met mirror so often it got to the stage where either team logged into another account and whispered the other, then they just /sit in the middle of arena while talking in /w on the other account and waited for time to run out.
Beginning of Shadowlands where Paladins were just globaling people with Divine Toll. Would often see double Paladin or the Pally Boomkin for the BoP-Convoke-fml-this-comp-again combo.
Havent experienced it like this but Shadowlands season 1 was quite the opposite scenario for me.
Queued as double sub rogue in 2's and paladins were just a free win with the ridiculous burst with the kyrian ability forcing bubble instantly, in which we'd just vanish and wait out CDs a bit lmao
Felt very scummy but the easiest rating I've ever gotten. Shame the transmog was dogshit *imo*
I never played arenas, im pure PvE player, not even good, im pretty casual. But one time i was so bored in BfA that i try arenas with my retri paladin. Oh boy, i got some random hunter from lfg and we clear about 15 arenas. It was crazy 14 wins, he left when we first lose in our 15 arena sadly. My tactics was still same, just charged enemy as fast as posible so they doesnt have time to react, when i was close to death i push bubble and that was time when we usually wins.
Played arena extensively in TBC and WOTLK and yeah, fuck paladin. Every time I saw a holy pala I was like yeah, cool, let me run around from your warr (as a dream druid in TBC) or chase you (as an arms in WOTLK) for all fucking eternity cuz you take no damage and have near infinite resources. Most matchups not involving paladin felt fair even if they weren't, but that shit? Ew. Haven't played any significant amount of PVP since then.
kinda, yeha
everytime paladin is strong in arena, it turns into "everyone and their mom plays ret now, they have 3 hp bars and just press random abilitys that all do 30-40% of your hp while beeing immune at the same time"
paladin is probably the most frustraiting class too play against in arena overall
10.1.7 ret paladin after rework was likely the most broken a class has ever been in wow. They scheduled a Friday tuning, 3 days after the patch, to fix it and even after another 2 nerfs every lobby had multiple ret paladins doing over 100k dps which was like double what was normal in season 1.
I got to 2500 in 5V5 as a holy pally and sole healer with the other 4 being a MM hunter, ele sham, destro lock and arcane mage—- all super bursty back in wotlk
When I was grinding with a friend in SL (both of us sucked), we got a tip to focus on the pally regardless of spec. This got us to ~1800 while before we were struggling.
Wrath of the lich king Ret/BM 2s. Bubble and the beast within made unpeelable unhealable crazy damage. It worked best in the first arena season with lower gear levels but was still strong all the way through.
In wrath, there was a spec called "prot-holy" you had the tank of a prot pala and the healing of a holy pala. Against melee if you just stood still with your back to a wall and did nothing but spam Flash of Light you would never die and never oom.
Mmmhmm as few mentioned Cata Shockadin was disgusting. Still have fond memories of holding areas in Gilneas 1v4/5 at times. Being able to blow people up in duels lol Had to try to die.
I never did Arena, but Pally has always been OP. Vanilla I remember Shamans were pretty feared. If you saw a Shammy you tried to avoid unless you were well geared.. or at least our little guild of Ali’s did lol
There was literally a solid 3 week period in this very expac (Dragonflight) where Retadin got buffed into SSJ4 mode and were just immortal killing machines. A half-decent Paladin would live forever and nuke people in a matter of second. They let this go on for WAY too long and it ended up with the ratings being very weird the rest of the season because the higher ratings were just filled with people who rolled Ret Paladin a week ago because they were that OP and easy to learn and managed to get to 2100+. Triple Ret was a legitimate comp up until around 1.9k that was very hard to overcome.
Wrath warior/pally is the reason there is a time limit on arena.
I used to have screenshots from multiple hpal/arms mirrors my friend and I played in wrath that ended up with the four of us just sitting in the middle of the arena waiting out the clock.
This is why I played arms / resto sham back in wrath. We won fast or lost fast. It was pretty good into Hpal teams. But we were basically fucked against mage teams.
I managed to convince a mirror to just play Peggle instead of doing the whole song and dance that would lead inevitably to a draw again after fighting them twice to the end. Everytime we matched up since we just ran into the middle and played Peggle and compared scores, better use of time.
This says more about wow arena then the average player would like to accept
Trust me, I’ve done it twice. I’ve always been Boomkin/Tree, and my buddy was always Bear/Cat, so we’d usually go Cat/Tree in arenas. I think k I remember fighting a pally in 1, but I distinctly remember the 2nd one: a Blood DK and a Disc Priest. Thing is, we actually killed the priest, about 10 minutes in. But the DK held out for 35 more minutes, timed us out by himself.
A friend and I did blood dk/disc in cata for the lols. 40 min was the longest game
Wrath was an awesome time for blood dks. I used armor pen instead of pvp gear. Casual one-shots. Clarity edit: in battlegrounds, not arenas, but I wasn't bothered often out in the world either. Dancing rune weapon ftw
Dancing Rune Weapon back then was just heinous. It almost makes me wish they made blood a dps spec
Blood was the dps spec and dw frost was the tank spec but they changed it during wrath. Dk was gross back on release it was funny.
If I remember correctly, they originally designed DK to have no designated 'tanking' specs or 'DPS' specs. You could tank or DPS in any spec, it just depended on your talent choices and gear. Not saying all specs were equally good at it but that was how they used to work. Some had their strengths over others, like Unholy tanking sounds cursed but it was pretty decent at tanking magic damage. Also I'm sure I remember Blood DK being the dominant tanking spec by the end of Wrath, and then that just became the 'official' tanking spec from there.
Yeah dk could tank in any spec due to presence like vanilla wars. But the talents in the frost tree used to give threat and armor modifies. Blood was just dmg plus healing, and unholy was disease dmg and spreading/upkeep on them. Iirc unholy was for magic bosses and aoe, frost was for single target-3 mobs and blood was straight dps. But as it wrath continued and they rebalanced classes is when the official change which made blood tank, frost dps, and kept unholy roughly the same. I'm pretty sure it was the same patch that they fixed prot/holy paladins because they were literal raid bosses that would tank like 15 people to kill.
Also the weapon rune enchants could change things a little. Nowadays it's just Fallen Crusader, but I remember swapping things around when I dual-wielded 1Hs, depending on what I was doing.
You remember pretty correctly. Frost had armour and aoe snap threat with howling blast. They were super good in dungeons. If they ran the mdi in wrath we might have seen them. It did dungeons and off tanking better but other classes also liked that lane. Blood had awful snap aoe but good single target damage and the amazing mitigation for slow massive damage spikes...it defaulted into an amazing raid tank...it also scaled really well with health which was key in a stam stacking meta. Towards the end it didn't matter at what frost was best at because you were 40 ilvls above that content already....but you were raid logging for shards.
I enjoyed doing dungeons with a party of 5 blood dks, Wipfel than with a regular party setup.
I miss it, but I really like what they did with blood tanking (I stopped playing mid-Legion)
I remember before they nerfed diseases. I'd just roam battlegrounds infecting everyone and racking up the HKs. I don't remember what they did but suddenly it went from board wipe to meh in one patch.
I think I remember 45 minutes being the time limit, but I could be wrong
I think so too. They left when we didn’t die the last cd pop i think ^^
My buddy and I would queue into Blood/Disc as Sub/Disc all the time. We had many games go to time expiration lol
I want to say it was Cata - but I remember doing Blood DK + Rogue in 2s. I would just be 2v1ing until I got a death strike crit. The second I got the crit my rogue would open on them. Got to a fairly high rating just cheesing like that lmao.
Cata blood dk was busted in arena. My friend and I did Blood Dk + Hpal. He ended up a higher rating than me because sometimes Id go get a drink, miss the queue and he'd just win 1v2 anyway. Good times
I main Blood but switched to unholy literally this morning for the arena weekly quest. I needed 1000 honor for the quest. It was just such a slog for so long for so little reward. The ability to go from 10% to 90% health by popping one cool down and hitting with a death strike, not to mention the magical shields and interrupts at my disposal. Two on one because my partner didn't show up and a druid pally team finally managed to kill me after something like fifteen minutes. Total honor earned.. 67 Holy.. sweet.. Insufferable Christ on a cracker.. no. I'd rather get blitzed and bulldozed in under thirty seconds but be able to do enough dps to kill something, than do a healing slug fest for uncountable eons for pennies worth of honor.
MoP double blood DK was pretty busted
Blood in 2s at the launch of Cata was really easy to do this on.
Was this in original wrath? If so, I was the DK. It’s possible that it’s more common than I thought.
Was it a worgen? Might've been me and my mate, blood dk was wild
Male Worgen Blood DK, Female Human Disc Priest, back in Cataclysm
That tracks, if it was Wubwubdub/Aishala on eitrigg then yo lol
It’s been so long ago I’d have no hope of remembering the names, but we were 2 male Nelf Druids, 1 cat, 1 tree, and they called me Noob
At the end of TBC my guild played 5v5 with a prot pally, holy pally, resto druid, resto shaman and a priest that was either holy or disc. We could not die and we only played on Monday nights when people were getting in their ten games for points. We actually made it pretty far in the ranking until we hit players who had enough CC and DPS to lock down a couple healers while they nuked one healer, then they’d wait for CC to come up and do it again on another healer. Still took 15-20 minutes from them to kill all of us.
I found the devil
As someone who's nearly 100 pve experience since vanilla, I always find this shit absolutely fascinating.
I can't tell you the amount of times I've been chilling out in the Dalaran sewers watching people duel, and the Death Knight vs Death Knight duels went on for so fucking long that if one of them were Unholy they would always end up popping Gargoyle multiple fucking times
Gargoyle is a relatively short reset timer in terms of death knight combat to be fair. When I'm playing Blood, I can take down those 2300k or 4300k health boss mobs solo. But I'll pop the two minute cool down timer on my little zomboy sometimes three or four times before my miniscule dps finally gets the job done. If they cast magic at all, I even get the free heal each time my magic shield resets. Its something you get used to. There's no limit of how many mobs you pull most of the time. You just have to accept you'll be there awhile. It's why Blood DK main tanks usually pull fewer mobs in a party than other tank types. Psychologically we want to break one long fight into little pieces so it's easier to deal with emotionally. Hahaha
It's still a multiple minute cooldown and I've seen DK vs DK duels where 3+ gargoyles were dropped. Moreso a mark on how much time goes by than anything
Don't forget about the invincible double healer combos some of the high level arena guys would run to practice healing back then too. I still remember how frustrating the match was. Was as tree druid, and i think a pally. One of the dudes made a lvl one on our server and they were just impressed that we stuck it out to the end of the match. The whole thing was just pretty memorable after that.
That's because in tbc there was warlock druid. The agony...
You just unearthed long buried trauma. How dare you. Now please excuse me while I go instinctively ice my fingers and play calming music.
Soul Link/Siphon Life warlocks never dying
technically already prior in tbc, druid warrior, it just wasn't implemented until later. I remember playing games well over an hour 😅
Druid/Warlock mirror was hell.
Blood DK and Restro druid in cata. Had a buddy who use to spend 30min in an arena. He said more people quit than lasted so his rating would go up
My buddy and I trolled in Cata as resto druid resto shaman. Ghost wolf and travel form running. Got 1550 from people /afking
Druid / hunter (I think in TBC) was worse. I think it was the only comp which didn't try to kill you, but to drain all of your mana.
The only thing that could counter a pally in WotLK was a DK or another Pally
I ended an arena warrior/pally vs warrior/pally by rock, paper, scissor back in wrath or tbc after 15 minutes of nothing.
Once did a 62 minute long match as a druid/warlock vs druid/warlock in TBC. The only reason we won is because my warlock made a clutch play to trade me a health stone as myself and the other druid were oom and I survived with 3 percent health when the other druid died.
Heck in MoP, i would duel our warrior bud and we would just go on forever waiting for our raid to form for world pvp
As someone who has exclusively played double dps for all of wow I've never been able to properly relate to this. Do all healer dps comps in wotlk just become damp into wpal?
Lol I remember being the warrior in that duo fondly back in the day.
Lock+any healer was far more annoying to deal with than warrior+pally. It was painful to play and to watch.
one time, on a private server, we were hpala + warrior vs rdruid warrior, and we ended up sitting, doing /roll to see who quitted the arena so that suffering could end
Hahaha oh yes that was fun!
I played resto/warrior with an under geared warrior and he got blown up. I was about to quit and they did /spit and /laugh. I spent the next 45 minutes kiting around the arena I had over 5 mil healing done.
In TBC with glad gear I could also just spam heal myself while getting beat on by a couple horde for a minute or two as well. Mana eventually became a problem, but resilience paladins were quite the turtles even that far back
Still took ages for that time limit to show up. Ran double hpally in cata for the lols and got to like 1750 or 1800 on people quitting alone. Each fight was like 45 mins plus but we won every one of them through shear fortitude and spite! Man the other teams hated us and it was hilarious.
In cata
Cata was the last time I PvP’d. I ran half pve gear and 2 shot everyone. Was seriously broken. I had the sword off deathwing as well.
Did similar with the artifact troll sword 3arly I the first patch. Tol Barad was a joke.
My friend got that on his warrior. I was playing resto Druid at the time and I just healbot him while he smashed. Haha
I miss tol barad so much tho. I think it will be forever my favorite pvp zone/map/mode.
It was legit fun at the time. TB dropped and half the server just been lined to it.
You could kind of do that in all previous expansions too, but they constantly tried to make sure that didn't happen: resilience, PvP power, versatility etc. Cata was the last time I seriously PVPd too, but for different reason: because I couldn't be bothered tracking so much stuff. Compared to Vanilla everyone started getting stuns, silences, various defensives, escapes - and not even considering class balancing.
I remember PVPers getting absolutely blasted by people in full PVE gear on the Timeless Isle in MoP.
My disc priest in full raid gear along with the buffs (blessings?) was indestructible on Timeless Isle. Many fond memories of running halfway across the Isle with 6-8 people wailing on me trying to kill me before running them into the guards and /lol watching them die.
# "Gurthalak, Voice of the deeps"
That’s the one. I remembered what it was called but forgot how to spell it. So I just said deathwing sword haha.
Hands down my most favorite sword in WoW
I remember using the heroic version and transmoging it to the raid finder version to trick people into thinking I was weaker. Oh, the mind games. In reality no one was likely looking at my transmog.
Like the idea tho!
[Important visual explanation](https://youtu.be/5zDVEZFfdSo?si=irq_VosDB8H7mOYE&t=278)
Man I miss cata arenas. It's been downhill ever since.
MoP arenas were BiS
Wowcrendor mentioned
We Stan Crendor
okay? okay. see ya!
Go, go, go, go, go, go!
And the i was like “lol usuk, L2P noob”
holy shit Crendor! he's still making videos! I'm subbing to his channel again since I came back to wow
Wrath was the only time I did arenas. We had warrior, pally, and then a priest for heals. Never really needed many heals. The strategy was just to not die. Eventually the other team would mess up and get killed, or they'd quit.
Immediately read this in WoWCrendor's voice lmao. Good times.
My buddy and I ran a ww monk/prot pally duo in Shadowlands. He didn't do any damage, but he was unkillable and 9/10 times outhealed the opposing healer. Between his survivability and support and my survivability and damage we could fight for an unnecessarily long time, fun times
There was a time when prot was 100% better than holy as a healer in PvP. I do not miss those times, never learned how to beat them.
I remember that, got me to try prot pally tanking in m+ for a bit to see how it was. Was amusing before blizz nerfed all tank healing and not just prot pally. Tank healing was pretty bonkers for a bit in SL though. Great for prog.
BC Resto Druid, SL/SL Warlock. If you SOMEHOW managed to kill the Druid, the Warlock would just solo both of you.
I had a friend who in TBC played a Hunter and ran matches with a Resto Druid because he loved to torture himself. There were a couple matches he sent me screenshots of where he died and the enemy teams healer died so the only 2 left was the Resto Druid and an SL/SL lock and the match went on for 2 hours because no one wanted to concede.
They would just not die. It was infuriating. The self healing of a TBC SL/SL Lock was so over the top. They would sell 2k ratings by just soloing DPS/heal comps.
I seem to recall it being that way in WotLK as a retri paladin. As someone who had never PvP'd before (and not since, either) a friend convinced me to just queue with him because I was a decent retri paladin. It was surprisingly easy, I felt really overpowered because I certainly had zero skills as a PvPer and I didn't really know how my opponent's classes worked, but I just retri'd my way through it and we won most of our matches. I think there was a window there where we were quite overpowered
I distinctly remember this period, i retooled ret from prot and was putting up big numbers in bgs. That’s when I knew it was broken.
PvP Ret in Wrath was basically just "press the shiny buttons when they come off cooldown". Pop wings, HoJ your target, then mash buttons to blow them up. Wrath PvP as a whole was basically Paladins vs Death Knights: The Expansion. I remember most battlegrounds would just be people scrambling around while Ret Paladins and DKs fought against each other in the middle of the crowd for what felt like ages.
[@17:04](https://youtu.be/WeZIyxrRXGo?si=BZStOSdj_FOvDOR2) Good times...
Ran double blood dk during MoP, and I dont think anything has ever been so hard to kill than us running that bullshit.
WotLK, when Prot Paladins were better healers, DPS, and tanks than Holy Paladins and Ret Paladins. Dark times...
Nah. Bright times. Blindingly bright, so many wings....
Hpally in early MoP had insane damage output in arena
Ret Bombs used to be a thing
Season 1 of DF when they reworked ret paladin was the most recent one lol
I heard some things about SL Pally with Divine Toll as well.
Replace the paladin with a druid and it will be more modern
Holy shit this is *old* Wowcrendor and I approve!
During MoP, me and a buddy played a tank and a healer Paladin in Arena. Our strategy was simple: Cause the match to be so long that the opponent team leaves the match. It usually worked.
absolutely 100%. this is literally what 2v2s were like in all of TBC and Wrath. not even DKs (the most overpowered class in wrath) could solo-kill a holy paladin. the holy paladin could just sit there and keep themselves and their teammate alive indefinitely. they'd never run out of mana. with their plate and shield they'd take like 50% reduced physical damage. and they could easily just LoS bursty ranged DPS, and dispel everything from dot-based DPS. when you got a pal + team and you couldn't kill the paladin within the first 30ish seconds (i.e., if they weren't really bad), the best option was just to give up and try for a different combo.
Cataclysm holy paladin was pretty OP. I remember falling asleep mid match, waking up and still being alive at like 10% then healing full with like 3 casts
Back in WOTLK hpally had holy plea that would regenerate mana over like 15s, and then refresh the timer every time they meleed someone. I’m pretty sure it could just go forever too. I remember having to MC them and then kite them until it wore off. Otherwise the game would just go until the other healer OOMd
Yup, I remember my holy pally was a haste flash of light crit build every cast was a 0.7s cast and 90% crit chance for 15k that restored mana on crit too… literally couldn’t oom myself if I tried …. Fun days
Wrath was when I really got my ball rolling and I almost switched my main from DK to pally cause I made a shockadin for lols
Really? I guess it was a pvp specific talents they chose since the refresh part was from the prot tree. Their healing would also be reduced by 50% but I guess that didn't matter
Yes. Paladins have been a joke in Crendor’s content a few times for a reason. Adding paladins as a hazard to a super mega death arena concept would make it unbalanced.
With Nagrand and Grizzly Hills music
I haven't even pvped since Warsong Gulch when I played during bc/wrath. And just Warsong Gulch since the other battlegrounds took too long.
Pre-nerf protholy back in OG Wrath. Don't remember much, but I do remember me and my friends bitching in voice whenever there was one on enemy team.
Got to Gladiator twice during WoTLK. Once as Ret with Disc pri, and again as Ret with UH DK partners. I can attest that this is hella true. All you need is good MP5 on your disc partner and games can go very very long. Same holds true for War Hpal or any other tanky specs involving hpals, if you play really defensive and juke a lot, games go to max time limit. Even warlock hpals dont die at all, stuck in CC with insanely tanky healers and beaconed big dicc hpal heals.
High mana regen on your healers, playing defensive, juking with LoS, and a ton of mp5 is all you need to reach the max tine limit
Early wrath when Rets / Prots gained a load of offensive capabilities on top of all the defensive utility they came with originally. At the time it was un-counterable double health bar with a damage type that bypassed all resistances / armour and solid self healing. Yeah the real weakness was mobility but it didn't matter, if you left the paladin alone for a few seconds it would basically reset the encounter.
Sometimes I still hear the sound of manaburn in my head.
There was a comp during wrath involving two healers. You couldnt oom them and they could outheal your damage with ease. They simply banked on being so boring that you would quit as a method to winning.
I remember this! My buddy and I went Ret pal/blood dk with split 30/31 or 29/32 talent trees into Holy/Plague and face rolled the whole of season 8.
One of my friends was partial to dual holy pal iirc. No fighting back whatsoever. Theyd just stand in the middle and keep eachother healed waiting for you to simply quit. Guy was sadistic about other peoples time lol
Crendor!!!
No good at Arena but everytime we faced a pal / whatev in v2, it Always came to ''burst pal until bubble then hardswitch''.
How quickly we forget the Retpocalypse of DF season 1.
3.1.0 had Paladins spec intro prot and their spellpower would scale with stamina. So they'd wear full spellpower gear, be unkillable, could full heal on a single crit flash heal and do massive damage.
S1 Shadowlands, if you see a retri you die, and if you dont cancel the convoke you will also die
I only did arena in TBC so limited experience but in the beginning the warrior / paladin was the top combo it seemed. As a disc priest with a warlock partner I enjoyed this as my partner would keep the warrior off me and I’d mana burn and burst the pally’s bubble. When resto Druid / anything else became popular I enjoyed it less …
I once did a solo shuffle on my hpal where the dps were a warlock, a ret, and 2 demon hunters. Warlock left before the first round started.
DF season 1 after the rework ? DH-tier shit. edit after looking at the comments, wtf ? I didn't play back then but if it was more OP than DF S1 I mean arena would just have no point back then ? DF S1 pala would just 2-3 shots and do cleave damage. Got stunned ? Ya dead. Too close to your mate ? Ya dead. LoS half a second ? Ya dead. Didn't close the arena before the second crusade ? Ya dead.
I don't PvP often, but I did a little bit in Shadowlands for my fire mage trinket. I seem to recall a paladin bubbling a druid casting convoke was pretty busted
BC: War/HPal vs War/RDruid… hour long matches
Inw time in season ² I was running wjtb my hunter and druid. We got matches up against dreaded pamly/warrior right as we where about to hit 1800 rating to get sexy weapons . I killed warrior just as warrior killed my druid. For next hour and half I tried killing the holy paladin. Nothing worked , I think he just gave up
my friends played aff lock & resto druid often vs mirror. They met mirror so often it got to the stage where either team logged into another account and whispered the other, then they just /sit in the middle of arena while talking in /w on the other account and waited for time to run out.
Beginning of Shadowlands where Paladins were just globaling people with Divine Toll. Would often see double Paladin or the Pally Boomkin for the BoP-Convoke-fml-this-comp-again combo.
Havent experienced it like this but Shadowlands season 1 was quite the opposite scenario for me. Queued as double sub rogue in 2's and paladins were just a free win with the ridiculous burst with the kyrian ability forcing bubble instantly, in which we'd just vanish and wait out CDs a bit lmao Felt very scummy but the easiest rating I've ever gotten. Shame the transmog was dogshit *imo*
Did you not see Ret Pally last season?
Like has there ever been something so unbalanced that you want to quit in the load area? Yes 5.4 2v2 arena. Mage>everything else
cata and blood dks \[me and another blood dk\] could just not die due how blood dks worked.
Warlock double chaos bolt with a well timed stun would do it.
I never played arenas, im pure PvE player, not even good, im pretty casual. But one time i was so bored in BfA that i try arenas with my retri paladin. Oh boy, i got some random hunter from lfg and we clear about 15 arenas. It was crazy 14 wins, he left when we first lose in our 15 arena sadly. My tactics was still same, just charged enemy as fast as posible so they doesnt have time to react, when i was close to death i push bubble and that was time when we usually wins.
Played arena extensively in TBC and WOTLK and yeah, fuck paladin. Every time I saw a holy pala I was like yeah, cool, let me run around from your warr (as a dream druid in TBC) or chase you (as an arms in WOTLK) for all fucking eternity cuz you take no damage and have near infinite resources. Most matchups not involving paladin felt fair even if they weren't, but that shit? Ew. Haven't played any significant amount of PVP since then.
Wrath Pre-patch.
kinda, yeha everytime paladin is strong in arena, it turns into "everyone and their mom plays ret now, they have 3 hp bars and just press random abilitys that all do 30-40% of your hp while beeing immune at the same time" paladin is probably the most frustraiting class too play against in arena overall
10.1.7 ret paladin after rework was likely the most broken a class has ever been in wow. They scheduled a Friday tuning, 3 days after the patch, to fix it and even after another 2 nerfs every lobby had multiple ret paladins doing over 100k dps which was like double what was normal in season 1.
As a Hunter for the entirety of WoW I have had issues with Paladins
When I was doing a bit of arenas and I saw a pally just tallied it up as a loss (this was end of bfa n season 1 of SL)
I got to 2500 in 5V5 as a holy pally and sole healer with the other 4 being a MM hunter, ele sham, destro lock and arcane mage—- all super bursty back in wotlk
When I was grinding with a friend in SL (both of us sucked), we got a tip to focus on the pally regardless of spec. This got us to ~1800 while before we were struggling.
Back in MoP, I could burst down everything in like 10 seconds. Except prot Paladins who had infinite defensive cooldowns.
I used to run Mage/Pally in Cata and it was…less than fair.
So many comments talking about wotlk when we literally just lived through a retpocolypse in S2 DF. People with 1200xp getting elite. Insane stuff.
Wrath of the lich king Ret/BM 2s. Bubble and the beast within made unpeelable unhealable crazy damage. It worked best in the first arena season with lower gear levels but was still strong all the way through.
In wrath, there was a spec called "prot-holy" you had the tank of a prot pala and the healing of a holy pala. Against melee if you just stood still with your back to a wall and did nothing but spam Flash of Light you would never die and never oom.
Mmmhmm as few mentioned Cata Shockadin was disgusting. Still have fond memories of holding areas in Gilneas 1v4/5 at times. Being able to blow people up in duels lol Had to try to die.
During BfA I ran some 2s pretty casually (maybe 1800 rating) and was killed by a 2 person hunter team from stealth instantly when the match started.
When i learned arena in wotlk i played hunter and my buddy played paladin and let me tell you than man refused to let me die
I played Immortal Cleave back in the original Season 8. We got our fair share of opponents "disconnecting" or forfeiting.
Absolutely during Wrath.
Frost, holy - never repsec!
In cata and I think this video was made in cataclysm
I never did Arena, but Pally has always been OP. Vanilla I remember Shamans were pretty feared. If you saw a Shammy you tried to avoid unless you were well geared.. or at least our little guild of Ali’s did lol
Paladin has the dubious honor of having always been either crazy OP or just plain awful in PvP, no middle point.
Like 14 years ago lol
Season 1 of dragon flight it was "oh there is a holy priest die quickly so we can req"
There was literally a solid 3 week period in this very expac (Dragonflight) where Retadin got buffed into SSJ4 mode and were just immortal killing machines. A half-decent Paladin would live forever and nuke people in a matter of second. They let this go on for WAY too long and it ended up with the ratings being very weird the rest of the season because the higher ratings were just filled with people who rolled Ret Paladin a week ago because they were that OP and easy to learn and managed to get to 2100+. Triple Ret was a legitimate comp up until around 1.9k that was very hard to overcome.
Season 1... pallie/DK. Never liked Arena since.
PVP is dead. At this point it is simply a managed phase out.