Still love it. WoW wouldn’t exist without it.
https://archive.org/details/World_of_Warcraft_World_of_Warcraft_BradyGames_Official_Strategy_Guide/page/n122/mode/2up
If you look, they have talent trees. Paladins had extremely basic talent trees prior to the overhaul and the guide has the release trees which specify release abilities.
Anyway. Beta paladins were even worse off in the dps department. Crusader strike may have given you an extra 150 holy damage every 10 + swing time seconds (the cooldown of holy strike +auto delay); by itself it gave you 103 non-scaling physical damage and was a mana hog if you spammed it.
If you didn’t mind being even more subpar in dps and dps support, you could basically cast seal of reckoning and those crazy rogues and even more crazy warriors could basically self sustain indefinitely with 50 healing per hit guaranteed. Combine that with another paladin using seal of sacrifice and your ally probably wouldn’t die. At least paladins would have guaranteed slots by basically breaking raid encounters that would have to be balanced around both alliance and horde.
So I mean if OoM is your thing, then maybe beta paladin is more fun.
I’d still love to have that on demand damage for pvp because we are hurting for it big time.
It’s a matter of scaling really.
For leveling up, a Retribution Paladin was perhaps 2/3 the damage of a Warrior, but had bubble and large heals.
For raiding purposes, assuming both people have P1 BiS, a Retribution paladin suddenly has 1/3-1/2 the DPS and less self heals (Bloodthirst will heal for more over time). By the time P6 BiS rolls around the difference will be much worse.
You can kind of see where the original designers saw Paladins just by looking at the Lightbringer/Judgment set. Basically melee warriors that had the ability to heal others. They just could never get it to work without totally gimping the warrior part of totally gimping the healer part.
To expand on it a little farther, in Beta, they even stripped the lore aspects away from Paladin. In Warcraft II/III, Paladins were undead killers. In Beta, they had a 5 minute seal that drastically increased AP against undead by 600? at level 50. They could also fear undead/exorcize (including “Forsaken” players). So if you were an undead clothie, picking on a paladin was not a good choice. Fast forward to vanilla, and Undead warlocks fear paladins. 
I can’t say that Holy Strike isn’t a classic Paladin’s fix all for dps, threat, and a boost in burst.
Oh god no there is way too many issues for that, but it would be something.
Sadly, allowing the casting of heals (or even just FoL) while swinging a weapon would have been all that was required to give paladins that extra niche (and make them nigh unkillable by the creature known as “noob”)
The fear part bugs me the most warriors literally get an aoe fear that works in pvp but I get one that only works on undead mobs and is single target?
Preferably splitting seals into dps (SoR and SoC) and utility (the rest) while allowing them to stack would help tremendously without actually improving burst in pvp other than giving SoJ an actual use.
People forget that Vanilla WoW was a work in progress. The designers focused on the pure classes and never got around to redo’ing the hybrids. Furthermore, they lacked a lot of the simulation software that is readily available today, so there was no way they see how things scaled.
I think what would’ve meshed well with the whole original Paladin design and stayed true to the lore of the Warcraft retribution paladin:
- Target Retribution DPS to be ~2/3-3/4 of Warrior in same gear
- Holy strike damage heals for the same amount to the lowest health person in the raid.
Yeah found out how disappointing SoJ was I was kind of hoping the judgement would root them but I guess not.
In Beta, paladin fear and priest shackle were great counters to Will of the Forsaken (which was up full time, no CD). I think it really helped immersion as well by making the two sides very unique.
Must have been great feels like any undead class (except warrior which is practically non existant) are flat out counters to me. Had unyielding faith once for less chance to be hit by fear, but I have never seen it work so I wonder if it even works at all.
To be fair, what brought warriors to astronomical dps numbers was the combination of the warrior talent revamp (adds dual wield specialization) and the patch 1.8 dual wield +hit change (removed the one thing keeping dual wield numbers remotely near 2h). Take both of those away and warrior raid dps drops by nearly a quarter across the board on the high end. I still advocate that the DW hit change was the worst balance change ever made as it basically invalidates an entire play style just by existing.
As for the lore, paladins have always been able to heal and swing at the same time, but I find that taking player agency out by making Holy Strike a smart heal just doesn’t feel right considering the micromanaging history of the warcraft paladin.
So many times in pvp I thought, “why do I have a seal that actively hurts me by being pathetic and why is the judgement an overly strong buff for my enemies?” At least before the paladin revamp, the improved SoJ talent made it semi reliable (if only the original JoC actually did good damage /sigh) and worth using against casters and helped when chasing targets. That is until diminishing returns unfairly over nerfed this ability.
I find that mages aren’t too difficult. The problem with fears is that warrior’s is a physical spell so you would only ever get a 1 in 10 chance to resist for a long cooldown. Warlocks and priests can get the +hit chance talents that can negate Unyielding Faith entirely as it works off the to hit roll and not the resistance roll.
Some times I like to think of what it would have been like if you had 4 factions based on the 4 factions in WC3: Alliance, Horde, Night Elves, and Forsaken. Having strengths and weaknesses based on race wouldn’t have been such a bad thing in such a scenario. What ifs are always only going to be what they are though.
- Leveling Rotation
a) Keep Seal of Righteousness up.
b) Melee.
www .icy-veins.com/wow-classic/retribution-paladin-leveling-talent-build-from-1-to-60
ret paladin isnt even that good in pvp. if it was, it would have become immensely more popular on the pserver communities. another example of this would be shadow priests. everyone says it so casually, “spriest is great at pvp”, but really they aren’t bringing more value than a holy paladin or disc priest. don’t get me wrong, paladins with end-game levels of gear can spec ret and do pretty much everything a holy can. but if you have end game gear as a ret, that means that others in your pvp group also have that same level of gear, which means there is plenty of damage, so why not just spec holy instead.
one example of a spec gaining a lot of recognition during the pserver years is elemental shaman. someone can correct me if I’m mistaken, but hardly anyone tried the nuke ele build in original vanilla. People on nost-core servers and kronos servers discovered its playmaking ability with aoe burst dps, so it became a legitimate, popular pvp spec to play.
the same phenomenon did not occur with ret dps or shadow priests. people tried them, discovered how limited they were, and mostly abandoned them to the memes.
Wait until TBC, man. That’s when Paladin became its best, imo, before they just overhauled the class to be boring in wotlk
Don’t hear much good about ret in TBC except that it was somewhat feasible for horde. My priorities might change in TBC because I don’t imagine alliance is going to do so well on pvp servers when we lose our exclusive perks.
Here’s the thing about ret in TBC. It still doesn’t do as much damage as pure dps classes, but what it does bring is synergy for the rest of the raid outside of just blessings.
Ret provides a static +3% crit to a single target for the entire raid, +2% static damage for its group, and it keeps up judged seals on a target put there by the holy paladins. So the 2 holy paladins each judge light and wisdom, and the ret paladin keeps them refreshed using crusader strike.
I really don’t give a s#!+ what the pserver autists have come up with in terms of pure numbers and efficiency. I don’t care. What I do care is that a ret paladin in TBC is a better benefit to raids than it was in vanilla. So I think you will commonly see at least 1 ret paladin in a 25man raid.
And yes, horde paladins have better dps over alliance paladins due to seal of blood, but the dps difference between blood and command is not so significant to render alliance paladins completely useless in raiding.
As for my excitement for TBC, let me put it this way:
Paladin is my favorite class, and I love being ret, and I love being a prot tank.
I know paladins can’t tank raids, and I am not impressed with their role or dps in raids as ret. I do not want to be a pure healer. So for classic, I have been avoiding end game raiding. I did tank all the 5 mans a bunch, and that was a lot of fun and a challenge, but that’s the extent of my experience in the end game pve content.
But in TBC, we become viable raid tanks and dps for the reasons I listed above. So I will be doing a lot more end game content with my favorite class as either a tank or dps, depending on what’s needed. I am honestly looking forward to it.