Warning! What you’re about to read is an opinion/suggestion and nothing more.
TLDR; I prefer vanilla ret playstyle over TWW ret playstyle. I want to see who agrees with me and would like to have a Retro Spec option implemented in the current game for all OG classes.
I’ve been playing ret pally since WoD and mained ret pally for pretty much all of my time playing Classic WoW since it released until TBC Classic came out. Quite frankly, I fell in love with the playstyle of Retribution as it was in vanilla. I feel like in today’s game, there’s just so many buttons to mash nonstop to do a “simple” rotation and I really enjoyed the simplicity of the way the spec was back in the day.
I know I’m not the only one that appreciates the playstyle of some older specs before they were reworked. I wouldn’t say the modern day ret spec is boring or needs fixing, but it’s just not enjoyable for me to play. How cool would it be for us to have an option to choose a Retro Spec that allows us to use similar talents and skills available in classic wow but with a modern day twist? The idea is to capture the playstyle of these specs but make them viable in the current game.
With the way ret pally was in vanilla, the playstyle was very auto attack reliant with utilizing your seals to heal you, regen mana, deal spell damage on weapon swings, and casting judgment to proc the second effect for the respective seal that you have active. This kind of spec wouldn’t be meta in today’s game by any stretch but dangit, this class’s kit was just so COOL! Surely blizz can make this happen in a way that will bring the nostalgia and enjoyment of playing the oldschool specs for the people who are just tired of years of mashing their keyboard with all these new spec reworks…
Just a thought. I would love to know who else feels the way I do about enjoying playing vanilla version specs and if you may like to see an option to opt into spec’ing into a retro spec on your main in The War Within.
2 Likes
or you can stay in classic???
4 Likes
SPIN 2 WIN should stay in classic
This is sort of how I was imagining how Hero Talents would’ve worked when they were announced to be a thing. Not that we would go back to vanilla necessarily, but that they would drastically alter the way a spec plays. Kinda like a “sub-spec”. And this could have been Blizzard’s way of implementing class fantasies that doesn’t really have enough material to be an entirely new class/spec. But for better or worse, sub specs are not what we got.
And I mean, it would not be hard to create a “Vanilla Ret” sub spec. But it would be a bit messy since a lot of it would either have to negate or ignore a lot of the spec tree.
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While i don’t mind the idea of seals returning. That kind of playstyle won’t work in retail due to the game being vastly different from classic now.
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yuck I hated seal twisting…
2 Likes
Yea for the record: I am not a fan of seal twisting and as I recall, this wasn’t even a thing in original vanilla. It was the classic minmaxers who popularized seal twisting.
You want the classic ret that was bottom of the barrel dps, and hoping to god you a get a double swing proc?
Pass
I agree that Classic ret pally would not work if you just copy and pasted it into today’s game. What i’m proposing is for Blizz to create a refined Classic ret spec to keep that same auto-attack based playstyle but giving it the tools necessary to be able to be a viable spec in modern WoW.
There are youtube videos from ~2005 showing off seal twisting. But it was seen more like a funny quirk than something actually useful. It wasn’t until mid TBC that people realized seal twisting had practical uses, and even then it was only for Horde paladins (seal twisting blood/command was a ~15% dps increase over just using command).
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No, seal twisting was vastly popular in vanilla. It was just annoying because addons weren’t much of a thing to use weakauras to make it more fun. So you needed to get an ultra slow weapon, think it was 3.20 speed, so you can seal twist and keep your eyes on the buff to know when to switch off.
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Aye, same. Why I could never play the auto attack seal buff gameplay of vanilla paladins. Now I am having much more fun with holy power and actually using the light to attack instead of just buffing me.
if they gave me the choice between seal twisting and holy power I would take holy power 100 out of 1 times.
Never could get into ret tbc either because it was “still a thing”
3 Likes
I also loved the simple vanilla auto attack ret pally, but I fear it would either be too op or too weak.
Maybe if they added some “twisting-lite” mechanics to crusading strikes, like what if you needed to press one seal on the first swing and the other seal on the second swing, and different combinations of two seals could give different effects. Or have buffs that spend stacks on each swing, and you would spend CGDs on maintaing the full roaster of buffs. Or, maybe even make the order matter, so that the buff you activated the first, would spend its stack the first, so it would be like a “buff rotation” that would be consumed by auto-attacks, and you would have to constantly put new buffs into the pipeline in optimal order. Sort of like a delayed rotation throttled by the auto-attacks.
no, classic is the worst version of Paladin; because it wasnt even the intended version of Paladin. If not for dev hate for Paladins we would had kept Crusader Strike and Holy Strike. The devs even made stupid excuses like it burn mana too fast but as we see with SOD, its a very simple solution to the problem; just make some abilities regen mana…its a no brainer.
I wouldn’t mind getting seals back to have a modern playstyle added onto the SOD playstyle but not the classic trash.
Go play SOD, its a far better version of what vanilla paladin should had been like.
Seal twisting existed for alliance too.
Once you get seal of truth debuff 5 stacked, you switch to another seal (command/righteous)
Seal twisting was stupid, don’t understand why people “enjoyed” it.
Just more minmaxxer stupidity. Oh wow, everyone’s so impressed by your 2.3% damage increase, I’m sure everyone at the party thinks you’re so cool for that
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no one wants to seal twist my man
request denied
I don’t either. The vast majority doesn’t want it.