A Look Back at Protection Paladin in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist - Editorial
25.01.2024 - 13:13
/ wowhead.com
/ Dragonflight
/ Wishlist
With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Protection Paladin Writer, Lincoln, offers a retrospective highlighting Protection's journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec's next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.
Our Guide Writers have reviewed their specs throughout Dragonflight and share wishlists of what they'd like to see in the War Within. Check out all of our released editorials below.
Dragonflight Retrospectives & War Within Wishlists
Restoration Druid
BM Hunter
Fire Mage
Assassination Rogue
Restoration Shaman
Affliction Warlock
Protection Paladin Retrospective & War Within Wishlist
With War Within alpha on the horizon, I thought it would be a good idea to take another look at how Protection Paladin in Dragonflight played out and ask key questions about Blizzard's stated design goals.
I personally think Protection Paladin has gone in the wrong direction for the last two expansions. I have been extremely critical both publicly and privately of the reintroduction of Holy Power and other changes that I feel have done more harm than good. Thinking back to the last three versions of Prot. Paladin, I think that Dragonflight Prot. Paladin is a worse design than Shadowlands Prot. Paladin and Shadowlands Prot. Paladin was a worse design than BFA.
The design has gotten progressively worse with each expansion. In fact, I would go as far to say that Blizzard used tuning as an attempt to recover from design choices that did not work out as intended. The current meta strength of Prot. Paladin overshadows how poor the underlying gameplay is.
But Blizzard tried to improve the design going into Dragonflight but for whatever reason, it just didn't work out. The first question I want to examine is: What did Blizzard try to do in Dragonflight?
What Blizzard Tried in Dragonflight
Blizzard tried to reduce Shield of the Righteous uptime and the primary way was through resource starvation and removing the Holy Power from Avenger's Shield. But this had two primary consequences.
It made Avenger's Shield worse to press. Blizzard attached Barricade of Faith and Crusader's Resolve to Avenger's Shield but these added effects never hit the mark or gave the feeling that getting one Holy power gives. - Blizzard didn't reduce effective uptime. If you compare logs between Shadowlands and Dragonflight, you won't see much of a difference in effective uptime. You still covered every relevant damage event with it.
Why would Blizzard want to reduce Shield of the Righteous uptime? After thinking about it, here is how I would explain it.
Shield of the Righteous became a passive buff that's always up and active with the reintroduction of Holy Power in Shadowlands. This was a
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