Switch to Paladn or stay with mage?

[madtubs]

Hi all. My question is: for the new expansion, should I stick to making my main a mage (80) or a paladin (69) (or more specifically, which I should I level first to 85)?

I've been playing WoW since 2006 and only stopped a little before a year ago. I left the game with an 80 mage and a 69 Paladin. Since 2006, my main has always been a mage... I loved the playing style and the pew pewing. At first I was sort of a hardcore player but gradually become more casual (going to work and school will do that). After TBC came out, I was never super thrilled about how the Mage class was handled but toughed it out because I love the class. Before the Frozen Throne came out, I started to level my paladin until I stopped playing... which left him at level 69.

So I've definitely been out of the WoW loop for a bit but was wondering which class would most be rewarding for me? Not really interested in flavor of the month but let's be honest, there has been and will be classes that benefit more from certain expansions than others.

My level of play will be casual. I'll be part of a 10 man raiding guild who aren't super serious... we all play for fun. I do like to PvP a lot but with the Frozen Throne, I barely PvPed with my mage. Skillwise, I wasn't terrible but never really got into Arena gear. I have pvped a lot with my paladin leveling after 60 and it was fun (as a ret).

So yeah... not sure if I should to good ol' maging or spice it up a bit with class that dps, heal and tank. Thoughts?

Thanks!

[Hecow]

Stay with the Mage. With ports gone from shatt and dal that alone is a good reason and two he is 80 already.

[Deleted]

Mages are really cool, even more so, since 4.0.1

Play the mage, unless you want to tank/heal

[zcks]

As was said above unless you want to tank or heal stick with the mage.

Ret DPS & survivability currently is completely based around pure dumb luck with RNG procs that we have very little control of, thus skill plays almost no role in how we self heal & do damage & it does not look like blizzard's dev team will change this any time soon.

There is also the problem that our self healing & survivability falls behind all the other melee classes at 85 because it is based on AP/SP while theirs is based off of max health, we also have to sacrifice huge chunks of our dps to heal ourselves while they have to sacrifice very little. We also have a problem of being extremely weak to hunters, mages, shaman, priests, felhunter pets & prot warriors because they can completely negate all of our defensive magic cool downs.

This equates to very little reason to bring us to high end pvp because there is nothing that we bring that another person cannot bring better + extras that we cannot & little reason to bring us to high end pvp because our performance can vary widely based on current luck.

[boseguy22]

Lol Id say both, and level up based on what you want to do. If you want to DPS, above posters are right, go mage. Ret is iffy for now. Tank or heal go paly.

If you plan to make a crap ton of money, level whatever toon has gathering profs, and sell everything you gather to the people who MUST be to 525 as fast as possible.