Would you have made Paladins a Hero Class?

This isn’t just about Paladins, but I was reading up on Hero Classes the other day and I discovered that Blizzard considered making Paladins one in WoW back before original flavor launch in 2004. And that got me to thinking about how strange it would be, as someone who played Alliance back in Vanilla, to either not have had Paladins, or have had them as some kind of Death Knight-style addition to the game later. As much as I deeply enjoying giving Pallies grief, I honestly don’t know if the game would feel at all the way it does today if Paladins hadn’t been there at launch.

The idea of Warcraft III heroes (which Paladins were, a hero class in WCIII) as Hero Classes in WoW leads to some weird paths. In many cases the heroes from the RTS games have been absorbed into WoW classes — Arms Warriors have quite a few of the Blademaster’s toolkit (although Mages got Mirror Image) for example. Warlocks had so much of the Demon Hunter’s bag of tricks that they ended up losing them when Blizzard decided to put DHs in the game. So would you have stripped down the original classes to a basic few and then had all these WCIII heroes as Hero Classes? How would that have worked?

It’s interesting to consider. What do you think? Did we end up with the best choice with Paladins as a starting class in WoW? Should we have had Mountain Kings and Blademasters and Tauren Chieftains instead of Warriors? If you could design WoW‘s classes and Hero Classes from scratch, how would you do it?