I forgot how boring Ret Paladin was in Classic WoW

[Greatperson-incendius]

Unfortunately the only way to be useful as Ret is to carry Nightfall.

In terms of gameplay i can’t help ye.

[Billgatez-tichondrius]

Nightfall’s proc rate is so low compared to private servers that it’s not even a viable strategy at the moment.

[Neme-whitemane]

Wait until TBC, man. That’s when Paladin became its best, imo, before they just overhauled the class to be boring in wotlk

For retritbution? It was pretty bad in TBC, but at least it was not meme spec (except in Arena). WotLK is where Ret was actually a fully viable DPS class and PvP class.

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.

If you’re damaging, you can’t heal. If you’re healing, you can’t damage is what prevents hybrids from being… a hybrid in Vanilla and TBC. WotLK onwards, they just abandoned the whole idea of hybrid classes in the sense that each spec fulfilled a singular role at any given time.

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.

Traditionally, you would have 3 factions because if one faction is overpopulated, the 2 under-dog factions would band together and form a balance. It’s much more difficult to mess up balance with 3 factions than 2.

[Zeliek-moon-guard (Zeliek)]

If you’re damaging, you can’t heal. If you’re healing, you can’t damage is what prevents hybrids from being… a hybrid in Vanilla and TBC. WotLK onwards, they just abandoned the whole idea of hybrid classes in the sense that each spec fulfilled a singular role at any given time.

Which was my point. Blizzard missed the opportunity to allow dual function for hybrids. Paladins possibly could have had FoL not reset the swing timer to make up for the fact that interrupting our swing timer is extra harmful to us. Having the healing be a secondary function to a damage ability as you had proposed just makes it passive and necessary for blizzard to increase the cost of the ability in one way or another to balance the fact that it does so much more. By keeping the abilities separate allows the individual pieces to be tuned as needed and keeps the player in control

Traditionally, you would have 3 factions because if one faction is overpopulated, the 2 under-dog factions would band together and form a balance. It’s much more difficult to mess up balance with 3 factions than 2.

Well, with any faction v faction scenario that has enforced hostilities you will more often than not have imbalances unless you actively enforce similar populations. There are plenty of ways to enforce a balance; however, blizzard as a policy has never been one to inconvenience players on purpose except for technical issues. Players inconveniencing other players has always been allowed and basically encouraged up to a point by inaction.