The first time I toyed with a Paladin alt was in The Burning Crusade.  At this time you had to refresh your Seal upon every Judgment and Retribution still was not the “FotM”.  I didn’t stick with it, not because it was too hard, but because I was putting my entire focus into my Rogue.

I sound like a broken record many times when talking about this, but I miss healing.  I played a Holy Priest exclusively throughout Classic and most of TBC and I missed it terribly.  I have been leveling a Paladin again, this time it’s substantially more fun, but I can’t help but want for more buttons to push.  Was it painful at times, even at level 17 to refresh my Seal every time I Judged a boar in Westfall?  Of course.  But when playing a Healadin at level 73 I cannot help but want for more buttons to push.

I suppose a Holy Priest may be, at this very moment, a better fit for me, as the toolbox is certainly bigger, but thankfully I have high-hopes for Cataclysm bringing an element of strategic thought to the Paladin healing game that isn’t present at the moment.

Before I anger any of my Paladin friends (of which I have nothing but love!) I will say just how much fun the Paladin class is.  I am so supremely happy with my little Dwarf Paladin that I’ve all but confirmed in my little gamer-heart that he will be my main come expansion.  Despite having only a small handful of spells to choose from in terms of on-call heals, I still love healing with him.

Sometimes, when a random LFD is going particularly well, I’ll switch back and forth from Holy Light to Flash of Light healing, throwing in Divine Plea and Divine Illumination, just for a little bit of added strategic thinking.  I will say this, I freely admit that I do NOT use my entire toolkit properly.  I constantly forget Aura Mastery and Divine Favor.  Also I rarely if ever use Hand of Freedom in an LFD.  Yes I know that’s more for PvP use but it can come in handy on fights that I know those effects will be coming.

This is certainly not a dig on the Paladin class, lord knows Paladins have a lot of buttons to push, I feel the same way about playing a Rogue which in large part has boiled down to pressing maybe 4 buttons at most and concentrating more on timers than anything.  I think I just have an issue with needing to press a lot of buttons.  Perhaps that’s why I’ve grown to despise Steve Jobs as much as I do (that and the turtleneck/ill-fitting jeans/tennis shoes motif he’s trying to pull off).

Am I completely off my rocker?  Absolutely.  However, I am so very much looking forward to Cataclysm and the emphasis on crowd control, the increase in abilities, the addition of damage-to-heal mechanics such as Holy Power and the like.  I just plain love the idea of having an entire keyboard mapped with different macros and skills and functions that all need to be pushed in perfect timing or I blow up the raid.

Yep, I’m nuts, I know.

Cheers!

~Ril

PS.  I’m having a horrible time getting heroicallyrandom.com set up.  I have never worked with self-hosting and I’m having a lot of issues with getting the wordpress theme uploaded/setup.  I haven’t had a chance to get tech-support on the line with the web hosts but I’m hoping to this afternoon.