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retail is awesome.
Classic and Vanilla don’t belong in the same sentence. They’re completely different games. just the same skin.
One was a flow chart a dummy could follow, the other was a living breathing game and with that - challenges and adaptation that evolved.
What seperates Vanilla, Classic, and Retail isn’t necessarily one feature or the other. It’s simple. It’s the concept of time. The more streamlined things are, the closer it gets to Retail. You can take the same feature set as Vanilla, make them super streamlined and less time consuming, LFR, 5 man raiding, face roll leveling, and it’ll feel just like Retail. It’s why Wrath is closer to Retail than it is Classic Vanilla.
Edit: Casual Retail i should say. Not the “harder” part of it.
They claim they’ll be reverting those (soon). Druid changes were never reverted, auto shifting was the first I noticed. It’s still there.
You aren’t understanding why these things are important to a player that wants their game to look and respond in a way that mirrors being in Vanilla. I’m guessing that’s because it’s not important to you, but you are not we.
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Idk about you but I dislike Dragonflight on its own merits, I’m not simply “against retail” out of principle. I love classic but I don’t hate everything that isnt classic due to some cult stance. I dislike Dragonflight because Draonflight isnt very good. But i wish it were good.
I don’t underatand the inherent hate of SoD before its even out yet, just because it has retail features. What if its good? What if this a new design that Blizzard actually gets right? I totally understand disliking a game if its bad, but you guys have become so cynical and culty that you’ve become closed-minded about anything that isnt the same rehashed 1.12 patch over and over again, before you’ve even tried it.
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Wrath is retail 
Soon as the game introduces any of the following it becomes retail:
- Paladins as dps class
- Flying
- Vehicle quests
- Transmog
- Dual spec
- Resilience
- Arenas as primary source of pvp gear (would love some arenas for honor w/ hidden mmr or something in vanilla though)
- Dungeon finder
- Paid level boots
- Any microtransaction / token
Probably a lot more as well, but add a single one to era and it is now a form of retail.
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Perhaps - but it feels a lot like the changes in TBC and, from a vanilla perspective, they wreck the game. The SoD changes seem to go even further at turning classes into specs than TBC did.
But perhaps it takes 3 times to learn 
If I am wrong and SoD is near as good as Era than I will be happily surprised, and update my views accordingly.
Im giving it a shot before jumping to any conclusions. World pvp is my favorite part of classic, so as long as they don’t add flying mounts or distrupt wpvp in some way… i suspect I’ll get some enjoyment out of it.
I play retail, and when WOTLK came out… i thought to myself “yeah this is retail lol, this definitively is not classic”
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I agree there (though not 100% sure I’ll play it much).
However, the forums are place to speculate and give our views based on the current knowledge that we have.
And the changes brought by the runes don’t feel ‘new’ they feel very similar to what was done in previous expansions (the biggest change, between SoD and like TBC, is the world remains mostly the same and no flying added - which I do think is a step in the right direction).
LOL
10 chars
Odd quantifier. Seems particularly anti-Ret.
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Ret is amazing for leveling and pvp - but should never be a competitive pve dps class. That’s what warriors are for
As soon as they become competitive in pve, you will unbalance pvp. So you have to make artificial tweaks there, then you end up unbalancing something else, and by the time everything seems good again - ret is either way too OP or horrible - and you managed to destroy the game along the way.
There is such a simple solution - don’t let ret become pve zug and balance is so much easier across the board.
It will all make a bit more sense in a few weeks, and a lot more sense in a year
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Ret is not amazing for PvP. Probably the least effective spec in pvp outside of Prot War. Ret is not a dominant pvp spec in WotLK so I dont see your points as being correct.
Ret should be a competitive pve spec. There isnt a reason for it not to be.
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Both ret-rek and holy-rek are very strong support pvp specs - you get all the support abilities of a paladin and HUGE burst potential. They are hard to play and most ret players do not play them, instead they go deep ret and chase down targets uselessly all game (which is also what they do when buffed).
So ret being weak in Era pvp is false, just a skill issue of 95% of paladins.
Edit: There are also some good deep ret paladins in Era, but I’ve generally seen more prefer the hybrid builds.
Ret in pve is a huge mess and not useful they should roll warriors instead of destabilizing the entire game.
We will see during SoD how the paladin dps yellow attacks they are adding will cause non-stop balance issues
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You dont really get that support. They cant heal because of Mana and no +healing. They really need to save thier Freedom for themselves because of no charge.
Ret is just taking up a slot on the team that another better suited DPS class could take.
Elemental Shaman is miles ahead of Ret in terms of usefulness on the battlefield.
There is nothing that Ret can do that a paladin geared for healing and prepared to heal can offer outside of the rare burst damage that many dps classes can do.
While I dont mind warriors being top dps, they are so far ahead of other classes that Classic Era is busted. Various classes bringing near the same damage does not hurt a Classic raiding environment, at least I hope it doesnt.
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They usually wear t2.5 for zug and t3 for much more hybrid. Both have plenty of mana, +healing, and t2.5 also has spell power.
Paladin t2.5 is useless for everything except ret… (or tank…)
They can also wear the pvp gear or t2 which are really good in earlier phases, but now that we are deep in p6 the other gear just have a lot more stats.
They should NOT be putting freedom on themselves if the rogue or warrior or FC nearby needs it. They have a buble for a reason, can FAP, nobody is going to target a ret paladin lots they can do.
You can take holy or paladin or a support-ret both can do pretty similar things. If the paladin is going O the ret is often better at it.
Nah the better player will be more useful 100% of the time, class doesn’t matter in that comparison.
Most logs have 1 pumper warrior on top, followed by a pumper mage / rogue, than mid pack of warriors / rogues / mages in multiple orders - Skill, gear, and consumes is way more important in 99% of raids - outside full bis speed runs.
My prediction is that SoD will be near-impossible to balance and there will be constant issues all around the fact that paladins are given multiple yellow attacks in an attempt to let them zug in pve.
Edit: You already start to see the cracks with the resilience helm they added - though I think that was more for hunter issues at low levels. But the way runes are it seem more and more of these attempts to ‘balance’ by forcing players into certain gear paths and such will be added.
Classic WoW isnt balanced. SoD will probably be more balanced but if it isnt, so what? The original wasnt. Era raids are full of warriors doing much more dps than other classes.
I have mained a paladin from Classic Era through TBC and WoTLK. In Classic, I was 20/31 Holy/Ret. I wore all healing gear and was an excellent PvP healer. I’ve seen it all in PvP and Ret, while not a trash can, is not as valuable as a dps in BG’s as others.
Ret is going to be more of a threat now, with instant strikes and rebuke, but other classes are getting insane abilities too. It will be interesting to see if Ret actually even rises in the ranks of PvP specs, or if it remains in the lower tiers.
As for PvE, for which I dont care as much, they will obviously do better in comparison to Era and thats fine. They were F tier, and thats not fun.
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I went to TBC and it was horrible and been playing Era / SoM / another fresh server since then, and in my view classic is incredibly balanced - all classes and nearly every spec has their moment to shine and players can choose to play whatever they want to be the best at something.
We will probably never find alignment here - but SoD will help us get a better understanding of both of our views.
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Stumbled across a random vid from 2020 (phase 5) of a ret-rek paladin that plays pretty well. The editing is also nice
Imagine all that power but now with 2 new yellow attacks 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_tIiCnseHA
Edit: hahahaha just started watching their vid from phase 6 and it being with them healing than swapping to ret after raid - pure gold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3xLfG8dC14