Its not just the +healing that helps, its the Int gear that makes for a much bigger mana pool. Its also the shield that gives the paladin much more armor. The role of dedicated healer is what makes paladins strong.
Cleansing the mage of mana sting. BoF on the warrior. Heals. BoP on the priest. Holy is where the power lies. Ret has to be selfish with those abilities due to a tiny mana pool and needing to tunnel for kills.
With SoD, Ret gets mana back on Crusader strike. Has Rebuke and Divine Storm. Its a more powerful class BUT some may still see it as a wheelchair spec.
The support abilities do, or else you would never want a paladin since they have no purge so you also are forced to stick a priest with them anyways. Whether they are O or D you need a purge so the paladin is basically always next to a priest.
Ret paladins in t2.5 or similar gear have plenty of mana, and paladins spell cost like zero mana. Just drink mana pots on CD if having mana issues.
Kills rarely matter in WSG - the only competitive pvp in vanilla - the only important kill is the EFC everything else can be ignored. And you don’t really want the paladin on D unless you absolutely have a cluster of a team (or the paladin is the FC - in that case I much prefer holy but that’s a diff discussion and not important if you have a druid on team)
It will become 100% easier to play ret with the yellow attacks, because you don’t have to seal twist, be sneaky with reckoning procs, or even think, just run up and press crusader or divine storm and boom you basically kill nearly any enemy. (well chonk them for a lot of HP and have done the ‘most optimal’ thing you could do for the class)
The whole game is being watered down so I don’t really care what they do, and will probably roll a paladin (or hunter) to wreck on people for a tiny bit, but that won’t be very fun for long. I rather play a game in which I can continuously improve and the skill cap is high, instead of maxing out the class with just a couple abilities…
Why do the balance issues always start when ret gets something?
Vanilla WoW was NEVER balanced and no class was particularly hard to play decently. Why suddenly, in a different game, care about balancing vanilla WoW?
Counter argument. My gf got into wow in Legion and the idea of SoD made her give classic a try for the first time ever and she discovered she’s actually into it. We are both slowly purging our way through Westfall and it’s great.
As someone that was there back in the day, I find the slight novelty great, though I agree with you that while great to have, paladin taunt or priest penance are not exciting to me. We need more unique stuff!
could be… but the fact that the new abilities are limited to runes makes me suspect that they runes will be eliminated and any new gear is eliminated and then the characters can move on from SoD to either Era or Cata, heck maybe even retail??
Hypothetically, if / when SoD ends, and they send characters somewhere permanent, they should delete anything that doesn’t exist in Era, or replace it with something close that does exist in Era, then transfer the characters to Era only.
If they transfer the characters to retail, cata, etc., I’ll just assume they’ve been deleted. Zero interest.
Reminder to Blizzard: Era is not the dumping ground for unique seasonal content. Content bleed over, like with SoM, in any capacity, is unacceptable.
What is “retail lite”? All the good parts of retail with none of the bad parts? Because that sounds amazing.
Runes were added because they couldn’t change the talent tree. Otherwise they would’ve just made fresh talent trees. I understand that there is a superficial similarity with heart of azeroth or other bowered powered stuff but it’s not. The SoD is actually offering us new class fantasies. Something the retail team wouldn’t even understand.
I don’t like druids having windfury or hunters having blessing of kings. But the experience overall to me still feels like classic with new abilities. NOT like retail. Retail feels like hollow death to play.
As of right now, it feels closer to Classic Vanilla. There is no flying, no LFD, and there are people running around all over the world. LFG is being spammed like crazy. And yes Crates are annoying, but its incentive to do professions. People are PvP’ing. But the openness of Classic Vanilla is there. It doesn’t feel as insulated - yet. Only time will tell. The rep requirements I think and all sorts of other “tedious” things are what will keep it more like Classic Vanilla. Once start Blizzards starts catering to everything players want, i.e. Warlocks crying, that’s when it’ll start to feel like casual Retail.
Tried SoD. It’s ok but I already went back to Classic. Never even bothered buying the latest Xpac for the first time ever as Retail has been bad for years.