Hearthpwn

Quote from samuellima91 >>

Quote from Skyi101 >>

Quote from FrustratedPallyMain >>

Hammer of Wrath is crap at 4 mana, it would see play if it was 3. And so is Call to Adventure. People talked about including it after Aldor Attendant got reworked to 1 mana and it got cut very quickly. If either of them are as good as you guys say, please explain why they doesn't get run in any decks and why even the best players at Legend don't run them.

What's really funny is nothing that I suggested goes outside the boundaries of Paladin identity, yet you're accusing me of wanting cards outside Paladin identity. Plenty of "fast" damage nowadays is minion-based. Just look at Restless Mummy. When Witchwood was first released Paladin got a Rush card along with the other classes, and I believe this is the first expansion post-Witchwood where we've gotten a Rush card that we can use. Paladins have traditionally been about minion combat, Rush uses minions as removal and establishes board at the same time - the mechanics aren't conflicting. Neither is card draw outside Paladin identity, yet you're accusing me of whining and wanting something that shouldn't be available.

 I legend this season with a homebrew pure libram deck that runs 2 hammers of wrath. After 50+ games I'm over 70% with the deck. So are you saying my winrate would be higher if I dropped them?

Hammer is far from useless.

Also, you have totally misread and made up a wrong interpretation of what I said. No where did I say paladin shouldn't have draw... Draw is also not a class mechanic it's a card game mechanic.

PS rush minions are reactive at best. The problem if any with pali is that it's a tempo class (sometimes combo) and tempo has generally struggled against the hyper agro decks out there or the casino RNG decks that are Mage, Priest and Rogue.

That doesn't make the class bad.

 If you had better options then you certainly would have better winrates. The baseline card for draw in Classic is 3 mana draw 2 (Arcane Intellect). Drawing a single card for 4 mana is really terrible. The other good comparison is Shadow Bolt which is 3 mana deal 4 damage to a minion and that's considered generally bad. Hammer is worse than a bad card for the purpose of removal. And when it comes to direct damage it pales in comparison to Fireball and Kill Command. So, Hammer of Wrath as a baseline card just sucks hard compared to everything else. Combining all three types of effects (draw, removal, direct damage) isn't good if the card ends up too weak on each front. This card perfectly showcases the issues within the class: it's an amalgamation of multiple mechanics without any focus.

Rush minion aren't necessarily reactive tools, either. They are in fact very proactive. You make an immediate value trade and you leave a body to threaten your opponent and the rest of their minions. That's good tempo. Paladin would benefit a lot if they had more of those. As a tempo class, it just sucks compared to Hunter and DH. Even Warrior is doing better than Paladin in that regard. Just because you are doing well that doesn't mean everyone else is. The class struggled extremely hard during AoO and only got a little breathing room after DH was completely demolished by nerfs. And, according to Vicious Syndicate, DH could easily regain their original position in the meta with just a few adjustments and that would be very bad news for Paladin and Shaman. There just isn't enough time left for the meta to settle once more. The class isn't bad but it's very, very far from good.

 Bang on on Hammer of Wrath being mediocre and Rush not being purely reactive - they can establish board while at the same time taking something out. Look at the Warrior 5/8 Rush, Darius Crowley etc.

Hammer of Wrath is crap at 4 mana, it would see play if it was 3. And so is Call to Adventure. People talked about including it after Aldor Attendant got reworked to 1 mana and it got cut very quickly. If either of them are as good as you guys say, please explain why they doesn't get run in any decks and why even the best players at Legend don't run them.

What's really funny is nothing that I suggested goes outside the boundaries of Paladin identity, yet you're accusing me of wanting cards outside Paladin identity. Plenty of "fast" damage nowadays is minion-based. Just look at Restless Mummy. When Witchwood was first released Paladin got a Rush card along with the other classes, and I believe this is the first expansion post-Witchwood where we've gotten a Rush card that we can use. Paladins have traditionally been about minion combat, Rush uses minions as removal and establishes board at the same time - the mechanics aren't conflicting. Neither is card draw outside Paladin identity, yet you're accusing me of whining and wanting something that shouldn't be available.

Quote from Skyi101 >>

My post wasn't flaming in the least. It was critical. I even went back and read your OP/rant. All my points stand.

And in libram deck there are 4 draw cards auto include, and 2 cards that refill your hand. Resources are not an issue for paladin ATM. 

 

 The only draw cards which are auto includes in Paladin are your two Hand of Adals. Please don't suggest Call to Adventure, that card is garbage. Make one of the best statlines in the game into a Senjin Shieldmasta that doesn't have Taunt is an amazing card, isn't it?

On Lightforged Crusader: let's skip by the problem inherent in Pure (Bombs/Albatross tech utterly ruins it and being forced to use a very narrow and underwhelming card pool) and focus on the card itself, it generates 5 class cards. So you get a bunch of spells and minions. Most of the spells you get from Lightforged don't help. They're usually buffs and Secrets. Buffs don't help swing board states unless you have a token left on board which can attack, Secrets are garbage in general. All the minions in Paladin are slow as fuck. It's a good card to play when your board is ahead but if you fall behind, you can't turn things around with this card unlike the other classes who can pull removals and board clears to pull the board back from a losing position.

The biggest two problems in Paladin right now is lack of good card draw which makes the mini-combos they have useless and inconsistent. Hand of Adal merely replaces itself, it cannot dig for answers. Lay on Hands is too expensive for what it does. Card generation is unreliable and rare; most of it is restricted in ways that make it not very useful, generating tokens for the most part (First Day of School, Bronze Herald, etc) and spell generation (i.e. Vulpera Scoundrel) which in other classes can provide win conditions and removal to flip board states is completely useless because the spell pool is so diluted. This makes it completely impossible to maintain meaningful card advantage.

The second problem is the lack of "fast" damage cards. Warrior, Rogue, Hunter, Mage, Priest, Warlock etc can play Rush minions, destroy cards, damage cards. Paladin gets very little of this (Turalyon is, if I recall, the first Rush card we're getting since Witchwood). When other classes can deal with enemy boards at any time, Paladin has to play your stuff and give up initiative to the opponent to pick and choose their best trades, hope the stuff you played survived, and then try to take advantage of stat manipulation and buffs to get a good trade in. How is a board centric class supposed to maintain board presence without having means to affect the board efficiently? It makes 0 sense.

This expansion was greatly disappointing as Blizzard either seem unwilling or unable to print any cards to alleviate these issues. We got a few good cards like Argent Braggart and Goody-Two Shields, but again no card draw and no way to affect the board outside of solutions that have been tried over and over and have failed (stat sticks and buffs). It's a frustrating class to try and make work.

Darkshire Alchemist is 5 mana. This is 4. AND it has Taunt. It's not like it's an amazing card that's going to singlehandedly break decks but it's solid.

On that note, how much spell generation does Shaman have? Can't really think of competitivr high cost Shaman spells bar Earthquake and Scheme, so it might have to count on random card generation to proc consistently even if it's not totally awful without the heal

It's not that great of a card. I would also disagree with "if you get a 3/3 it's good." At the end of the day you're investing two cards into activating this card which is by itself a hefty price to ask for Paladin, a class that has been lacking good draw for a while now. 

Avenging Wrath requires that you run Avenging Wrath in your deck. It wasn't that bad with 2 mana Equality but I mean what you're essentially doing is playing a one time only Priestess of Fury and having to set up and pay two cards for it.

Most high cost spells in Paladin simply aren't worth running bar Libram of Hope. People mention Duel Paladin but that is fundamentally a weak concept since it requires you to draw your deck in exactly the right order or lose, in a class which has not had good draw mechanics for a while.

2 attack without any other effects is also not a huge deal, so you really want to abuse the Spellburst portion of this and even in the 4 mana slot your plays are rather questionable. Consec is a good card but comes at the price of losing the ability to AoE (Consec by itself is not very useful anymore against a lot of decks) while Blessing of Kings is usually cut from most decks anyway.