With the steamers I don’t like nor hate the actual streamers, but their fanbases are often completely unbearable as they’ll treat the word of the streamer as gospel.
I plan on trying to avoid the servers that have any major streamers specifically because of their fanbases, not the streamers themselves.
The devs I think people just wanted something to blame. They’d rather there be some kind of conspiracy against hybrids than admit that maybe the devs just miscalculated.
I don’t hate streamers, nor do I think their word is gospel despite being a fan of a few. Hell, I actually turned off one of TipsOutBaby’s YouTube vids in frustration because I disagree with him on some things and he was acting like everything he was saying was fact.
I don’t plan on playing on any streamer servers either. Mostly because I know they’ll be busy and I don’t want to bother them. lol
What sort of crazy pills do you have to be taking to believe a video game designer “hates” a playable class in the video game they’re working on, and why would a person so out of touch with reality even be given the time of day?
You would be surprised, it’s a myth I have been trying to dispel for over a decade.
A certain set of Druids and Paladin are specifically hell bent on this myth being true because it legitimized their personal lack of effectiveness in game.
The truth was they were never that good at playing Vanilla or TBC for that matter, and were looking for buffs or broken game states that existed temporarily to justify their very brief moment where they felt “powerful”.
When the real truth has been very simplistic all along.
It’s not even unique to WoW.
It’s rather common that I see people thinking the only reason certain things are in games is because “the developers hate their players”.
The reality is that the far simpler reason, that the developers made a mistake, is the truth in most cases.
Especially considering that game design is not an exact science.
Was there intentional hate? No not really, there were just a number of design decisions made that sounded good on paper but didn’t work out in practice.
I can’t say I ever believed that any class was “hated” by developers. But it was clear that some of them were rushed, and most of them didn’t have the polish at launch that they needed.
I think you need to look at the classes through the lens of WoW’s “parents”.
WoW was the result of an Diablo II making sweet love to Warcraft 3 in Everquest’s bed.
Compared to D2, all the classes were finished, and all specs viable.
The “faction bias” tinfoil hat war continues on to this day. Just look at the GD and warmode forums.
Actually… Diablo II had nothing to do with it. WoW didn’t start getting Diablo-esque design until Timeless Isle came out and then Blizzard started designing expansions with hostile mobs up the wazoo.
WoW borrowed the talent tree system and loot systems from diablo, not to mention the fact that multiple classes in d2 have direct parallels in WoW.
I remember watching an old Blizzcon panel where they mentioned talent trees got some inspiration from Diablo 2.
Though Diablo 2 only had 1 role: Killing hordes of monsters.
That made it a lot easier to balance.
I don’t think they actively hated any class, and envisioned them all to be really cool.
Players though, they only want the absolute best in any given scenario for tryhard guilds. That quickly becomes the meme. Whether Ret Paladins could DPS or not is not the point, because the guilds who cleared everything said they are bad.
It is really interesting to hear that they envisioned Warriors, Paladins and Druids all being able to tank end-game content. Warriors can tank everything, Druids a lot of things, Paladins… if you try really hard a few things.
I love the game the way it is, but it just goes to show that their very best intentions for any class is not how it turns out necessarily. MMOs are super hard to develop, who knew. 
Heh, yup!
It is, and it’s a shame that they had to wait for TBC to make this a partial reality. That’s Vanilla tho!
At the start of BC, you can time machine these threads…
Warriors complaining about being out-tanked by a Hunter’s pig. “A pig!!! Blizzard!!”
Feral Druids being the best tank for Karazhan and top DPS…
Jeff Kaplan (Tigole) kindly reminded us of the Warrior mantra… “Get geared and learn to play!”
I did remain jealous of a Paladin’s ability to AOE tank for the entire expansion. Gives me carpal tunnel to think of what it was like on Warrior to be the same effectiveness
They were doing that in AQ and Naxxramas also, it was just not common because a lot of players did not know any better.
Taunt didn’t really help at all for AE tanking, and I don’t remember Paladin taunt in TBC being very good either from my perspective.
Paladins remained really bad boss tanks through BC.
However, if there was a 5 man or a bunch of adds a Paladin was the man for the job.
Warrior it was tab targeting and hitting threat abilities until you break the damn keyboard by comparison.
They were the kings of AOE pulling and tanking in 5 mans with a group geared enough to kill the adds before the Paladin tank dies.
We had a Warrior MT (me), Paladin OT, and Druid backup all through BC. That Paladin could hold huge packs spamming Consecrate and Shield of the Righteous (and whatever tricks he had). To the point I stopped worrying about big packs and just took whatever was big, hit hard and peeled it off away from them to tank.
Sadly I don’t know much about BC Paladin mechanics, but my OT was amazing at it.
The gap between tanks in BC(and on for that matter) was significantly less than in vanilla. It was actually a valid discussion about finer balancing points in BC not just one tank being completely superior.
And in all fairness druids tanks were nerfed pretty early on in BC.
Williams, I am not picking on you. Do not take it at that way at all.
I do not personally feel that Taunt is a reason that Paladins could not tank bosses in BC effectively.
From a Warrior’s perspective I put out immense threat single target doing my priority rotation of Shield Block > Shield Slam > Revenge > Devastate > Devastate. Queue up a Heroic Strike as needed. A full 30 seconds of that executed perfectly and nobody was going to catch me on threat. I could DC and get back in game and still be in the lead (it actually happened).
Paladins were curiously not built for single target threat in BC. My OT which as a keen Paladin and a good player could not hold enough threat on a boss at any point in BC. However his AOE threat was literally impossible to pull off him. You could drop a nuclear bomb on a pack and not pull aggro off this guy.
When Paladins were given strong single target threat abilities in WotLK, then we saw a massive difference. I was still highest TPS on all bosses I tanked, but in many cases a Paladin, Druid or Death Knight was just more appropriate. All things considered, up until I quit the game, Warriors were still the best single target TPS while in progression “don’t die” gear.
This is the kind of stuff that makes this game super fun btw, so take no offense to my nerd post on it.
Oh I totally agree, I was just pointing out that Taunt had little to do with anything regarding tanking for paladin.
I was pointing out that the lack of Taunt was not what held them back overall, but a lack of available gear for that use. I just did not spell it out so clearly before.
The more I have been looking into the options for different builds in Vanilla, the clearer it becomes that the only thing that really held Paladin back regarding vanilla anything was gear, and only gear.
Outside of that the class actually looks fairly solid if the player is willing to consume a few mana pots and come to the event properly equipped with that consumable.
PS not feeling picked on at all man, I enjoy the dialog!