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How does a Paladin's pulling compare to a Beastlords pulling?
I'm looking for a spellcaster/tank
paladins make slightly better pullers than beastlords, but not by much. Paladins get two pulling tools in my view, the pacify line, and root.
Paladins stop recieving upgrades to the pacify line at level 49 though. Lull is the first in the pacify line of spells. The way it works is that you cast it on a monster, and as long as the monster does not resist the monster will be calmed. Meaning that when you pull Other mobs the Calmed mob will not attack or assist the other mobs he will stay. so if there is 3 monsters in a space and you want to single pull one you will lull 2 of them and pull the other un-lulled mob.
Paladins get upgrades to lull, soothe at 25, calm at 43, and pacify at 49. all these spells are capped meaning that they will not work on monsters if they exceed the level cap attached to the spell (a red message appears saying "your target looks unaffected". the main problem with this line of spells for paladins is that because they are also cleric spells, we don't recieve them until later levels than the clerics, which sometimes means that the monsters our lull spells work on are so low level that they aren't very good xp.
root on the other hand is not really the best pulling tool, but it can still work to an extent. For example back when i did LDoNs i would try to root the add(s) and pull 1 unrooted mob back to my group. then i would use dispell to take root off the next mob and pull that. Root of course is unreliable and wears off often, in which case i would just tank the add instead of trying to move and root it away from the group, since i was the main tank And the puller in that case.
At 60+ paladins pacify'ing skills become useless pretty much, as we stop recieving upgrades to the line. Which means that
at high levels, neither paladins Nor beastlords make very good pullers. The best pullers at high levels are monks, bards, necros, and SKs, if I'm not mistaken.
Beastlords do not get any form of root, nor any kind of pulling utensil that i can think of but i could be wrong.
As for a tanking comparison between paladins and beastlords it should be pretty obvious that paladins are better; they are a plate class which means the highest AC armor for a players given level range will be available to a paladin where as a beastlord will have to wear leather. Paladins also get Stun spells (too many to list, these are our main tool), which are good for tanking because they are not only great aggro (i keep 3 stuns memmed at a time and spam cast them), but if the monster is low enough of a level the stun spell will stop the monster making them unable to attack, and thereby decreasing their damage output and saving your healer mana :) stuns also become very important for stopping monsters that try to cast heals on themselves, or monsters that try to cast gate.
At high levels and/or with good gear a beastlord actually makes a pretty decent tank, i have seen some uber beastlords, they are fun to play with. I'm not so sure on how good of a tank beastlords are at lower levels, or if they prefer using their pets to tank at low levels. beastlords are much more damage oriented than paladins, where as a paladins spells are defensive/beneficial for the most part.