Playing a Paladin
Ever since World of Warcraft first was released I have been almost addicted to the game. And most of the time I was playing I played a paladin. In the early days of wow, pvp’ing on a paladin was basically a joke. Then came the Burning Crusade, with new spells, and abilities we rocked the early arena seasons. Now the Wrath of the Lich King has been released, and someone over at blizzard was feeling a little paladin love. So it doesn’t matter what spec you play, you can hold your own in most scenarios on a Paladin.
We can start with PVP on a Holy Paladin. I usually play arenas with a holy spec and I really love it. The buffs to Holy Shock have made it an invaluable tool, and with procs for instant flash of lights, combined with sacred shield, our instant cast spell arsenal has improved dramatically giving us the mobility we lacked in previous seasons. The true trick to 2v2 and 3v3 arenas is you capability of using line of site to your advantage. Jumping behind pillars for just the amount of time needed to through a heal or to, then getting out of sight before you enemies can cast on you is invaluable.
The days where Holy Paladins could just stand back and cast are long gone. I usually find in most arena matches enemy melee players love to chase me around the arena wailing on me. The trick to surviving lies in your ability to kite, and we have been given some very unique tools to enable this. The most important of these is properly using Blessing of Freedom, I rarely have this spell off cool down, and you shouldn’t either. You can it to buy you some precious distance between you and the guy chasing you, or toss it onto and ally so they can stick on the opposing healer.
By combining Blessing of Freedom with Judgment of Justice you get a very exceptional combo, which enables you to outrun and potential pursuer. This increased speed lets you use the built in arena obstacles to the maximum advantage. Now if you are reading this guide at the moment and you still use your keyboard to turn your character you should stop now. No advice I have to offer compares to the dramatic skill increase by simply learning to use your mouse to turn and move.
In order to take the advantage of the built in arena obstacles, and use them for kiting and line of sight, just learn this simple trick. Start by running one direction around an obstacle with your pursuer hot on your heals, then simply instantly change directions and run the other way. It takes them a second or two to get back on you and a few seconds in an arena match can be game changing.
The most important thing to remember while kiting is the current location of the rest of your team. It will accomplish nothing for you to kite around all match only to find yourself out of range when you ally desperately needs a heal.
An extremely important skill for you to learn is the art of juking. In many of the matches you play you will be forced to stand there and cast some longer duration spells, when you do this you open yourself wide to spell interrupt abilities. These can be devastating to your team if you get a full duration counter spell at the wrong time.
But how do you prevent this? The answer is simple though the trick takes a lot of practice to master. You have to learn to juke the enemy, this means to stop casting in the middle of your cast right before the opponent attempts to silence you. Sounds easy right? Learning the timing for this can make a huge difference in your teams ability to succeed in arenas. Knowing when to stop casting also depends upon the player you are up against and how fast their reaction time is. Typically I break off my casts before the 3/4 marker on the cast bar, and unless the other player is very fast with their reaction I have found this to be quite successful.
