This guy gets it. To hell with the meta, none of you are going to be going for server firsts anyway, so why bother caring. Play the class you want to play for 99.5% of the game, and see how raiding (aka the other 0.5%) goes when you get to that bridge.
Any decent band of players worth their salt can clear at least some earlier raid content regardless of raid comp. Just don’t suck and you’ll be fine.
More guilds than those who shoot for the stars, only to burn up and crash in the ocean. Who’s more deluded; those who think their guild is going to be a Classic method/limit, or those who want to raid as a non-optimal spec?
If reality is going to smack non-healing hybrid players in the face, then so too will it pummel those who fail to step back and look at the whole picture for what it is. The best players will be poached into the one or two successful competitive progression guilds per server, while the rest crumble and either don’t raid, or are forced to relax their standards and lower their goals to something more realistic.
The same thing happens to this day. The guilds that last the longest aren’t those who clear the hardest content, but those that recognize what kind of players they have, and set their goals accordingly. I’ve seen heroic and mythic guilds fade as quickly as they pop up, not because the content broke them, but because there was nothing keeping the players together other than a desire for purples and a place on a leaderboard.
I can’t see the future, nobody can, but if the life cycle of guilds with progression as their only goal is any indication, these guilds won’t last long after Naxx. The guilds that will stand the test of time are those who enjoy playing with each other over all else.
So there is better gear outside of the raid in a great number of cases, but you can’t list any of the gear or where it drops? What evidence did you use to form the option there was better gear outside of the raid?
The only thing I can think about is the MCP for Spelladin build… and world drops. But that’s about it.
It’s on a private server, the gear the guy has in unknown, he has over 24 buffs.
Consumables stacked differently and raids pretty much always get world buffs (plus DMF if available) on everyone. Having that many buffs isn’t unheard of, and gear is kind of important to do high damage… you won’t see anyone in MC gear doing that for example.
If a Druid can pull that damage, they deserve the slot because of the utility and flexibility they offer.
So one level 34 item that drops in Gnomeregan?
Again that was on a private server, you start posting videos of druids with equal gear and buffs as a similarly geared and skilled DPS class doing the same or slightly less DPS on a live server than you’d have a point.
For Retadins doing Spelladin build and Feral tanking/DPSing, yes, it’s the best piece. But largely, the best gear comes from raids or from random BoE drops in the world. Not sure what that guy was talking about.
Do you want me to bookmark this thread and then reply in nearly two years, or something? We can’t possibly do that - at all. Powershifting was a rarity in vanilla, using MCP and other Feral unique strategies was unheard of. We’ll have to wait and see how it’ll look in Classic.
We also thought Hunters were garbage in Naxx, when in reality if they melee weave (run in between auto shots and while your spells were on CD and hit the boss with a Raptor Strike while using a fat 2h), you could hit a much higher level of DPS.
Yes please. You can’t use evidence based on a dissimilar situation with very little data.
I would need to see some actual evidence before believing any of that.
What I meant was I haven’t looked specifically for holy pally gear.
But I’m guessing all those spirit pieces in MC are pretty much terrible and can be replaced with much better itemised blues with no spirit and more int for a larger mana pool. Or pieces with crit vs spirit.
It’s not my job to tell you exactly what pieces your class should be aiming for. But in alot of cases tier is complete trash compared to dungeon blues as the set bonii don’t outweigh the terrible itemisation.
Firemoss boots and Hands of the Exalted Herald from BRD are both better for a healbot paladin than Lawbringer boots and gauntlets, just for a couple examples. More/comparable int and more +healing. A healadin doesn’t want or need strength or stam, neither do they want a set bonus that gives melee crit.
Lawbringer, like most vanilla paladin sets, was designed with a hybrid playstyle in mind. That’s why it has strength on it, and that’s why its set bonuses grant spell/melee crit, and an on-melee chance to heal. It’s obvious that Blizzard’s intention for paladins was to be a supportive melee fighter(just like their WC3 inspiration, go figure) just by the set designs alone until they caved into what was popular and made T3 a proper holy paladin set that wasn’t a mix of cloth and leather.
Was it because hybrid playstyles didn’t work? No. It just wasn’t the absolute most efficient, and naturally people lean towards the path of least resistance when competition is all the rage. Competition, participating in a race long over, has no long-term point in Classic unlike vanilla, because Classic isn’t going anywhere.
Most casual guilds wont hit any kind of wall regarding group comp and dps checks until aq40 and naxx.
Even casual guilds could clear the first 2-4 bosses of naxx before hitting a wall, beyond that the difficulty ramps up exponentially and sapphiron is a big cockblock due to frost resist gear requirements and the limited nature of frozen runes. Our guild effectively locked out competing guilds from progressing on sapp for WEEKS because we had bought nearly every single available frozen rune from any guild or person on the server willing to sell it in preparation.
It’s not that you can’t down bosses with elemental shamans or ret paladins, but that you are knowingly playing a spec that needs to be carried by the rest of the raid because it does non-competitive dps.
Nobody wants to carry snowflakes and most of those healers would like to raid as dps as well but they DON’T because they have more respect for their teammates.
Right, so regardless of spec, you were still doing the role I and many other people have no desire to do, which is still disingenuous compared to how you framed your original response.
Most of the Hybrids healed during raids, they simple were not competitive DPS, or Tanks, nor brought enough other utility to be doing those things.
The only one that broke that mold was Bear Tanks I believe.
Thats just a reality of the game if you are looking to min/max.
If you are NOT looking to min/max, I bet content will be cleared with all manner of specs and classes.
Once again, I think it’s not about min-maxing but having respect for the rest of the guildies.
If a druid player wants to join our guild and dps in raids, I’m going to flat out say “no”. If he asks why, then I’m going to point out that I’m a druid and I would like to dps in the raids as well, but I don’t because I want our raids to succeed.
Playing however you want to play is a perfectly valid mindset for solo play. But when you start playing in groups or raids, you need to be a team player and perform whatever role works best for the group. If someone can’t understand that or is unwilling, then raiding simply isn’t going to be their thing.
You say that, but while it’s technically true where you can ride the ride at your own pace, I do see one issue with it that I want to avoid at all cost:
I see vanilla’s long term audience being one group: People with unfinished business. There is a massive wave of people who never raided before or very little in vanilla that have a lot more experience now and they want a second crack at it. They will get in, go through the first release of every content patch, become content when they kill KT, and move on with life.
To that end, most of the good players you would want to raid with that will be capable of not needing to be carried will be the competitive types that are concerned about NOT wasting tons of time struggling with sub-par performances.
My feeling is that, just like live, if you get behind the curve, you will have a bad time as far as raiding goes. You’ll be left with the free spirit “yeah we raid once a week and are thinking of pushing into heroic maybe next month!” “Yeah, I play arena and am a solid 1200 right now!” “Yeah, I play BGs! No no, not RBGs, but maybe at some point!”
Those types of players never get anything done. I spent the entirety of vanilla playing with those types because I refused to budge on the “I will be ret and I will do DPS or I won’t group with you” front. Never again.
And then who will be left playing? An audience that leaves after finishing naxx is not what I’d call long term. Those who form relations, get to know each other, have more reasons to play the game than purples - they are the true long term players.
It’s all about being realistic, and setting goals that are in line with who you are as a player. In modern WoW, I’d never set a goal to clear mythic, because I know I’m not that type of player, and neither are the people I play with. In Classic, I won’t set goals for Naxx because I don’t care; if I want it, I actually do have time to get there eventually without it ever becoming truly outdated. Never before has this been possible in WoW.
Well, that’s kind of the thing about paladins. They were not meant to do any one thing(the majority of their tier sets is evident of this with their rainbow stats), but that’s kind of hard to enforce when the only classes that can heal happen to be hybrid, thereby making them the best healers by rule of being the only healers. Naturally, people lean towards the path of least resistance, so in vanilla’s prime time when competition made more sense, it was only natural that the best guilds had their paladins go holy, just like they’d have all the druids(and shamans if horde) go resto.
I imagine these paladins did so very willingly because it takes that kind of mindset to be in that type of guild. However, ask a paladin who hates healing to go holy, and they won’t last long as they’ll just get bored of playing something they don’t enjoy.
It also doesn’t help that paladins didn’t get a much-needed rework until 1.9. At that point, most of the firmly established raiding guilds had well-regulated roster. A role as an important as a healer going DPS would screw up raid composition, and they’d have to change whole strategies. That’s not to mention the amount of time it’d take to build a DPS set, and the fact that there really wasn’t much time to fully experiment with it. That’s a luxury we have in Classic - to experiment, to do things ‘just for fun.’
T1 and T2 will already be considerably easier than when it was new by virtue of all classes being their finalized iteration, better itemization, and 16 instead of 8 debuff slots. All that holds the gates is farming the necessary resist gear and consumables.
There indeed will be people coming back to finish things left incomplete, but there will also be those coming back looking to try something different. Classic is the most “sandbox-like” WoW will ever be. If your goal is to be competitive and smash through those gates you were once locked behind, be it by mechanics or players themselves, then go for it, but I do hope you have a plan for when it’s all over.
Well then it sounds like you’ll be healing?