There is one key addendum to your point, and that is that you need a supportive guild.
Our guild certainly prioritizes some items for certain people, but loot is more considered a reward for showing up, doing your best, and proving that you are putting in the effort needed to the best of your classes abilities.
Warlocks are far inferior to mages in terms of DPS at this stage of the game. I can only hope to beat a mage I vastly outgear, or vastly outskill. In a raiding guild that cared exclusively about min-maxing, only mages would get caster DPS gear.
But a good guild understands that you bring the player AND the class, not just the class. You need to reward good players with good gear. When you don’t have someone swinging a nightfall, your casters do way less damage (i.e. we lost our ret pally who had one, though we did give him gear). Giving your ret paladin an item on equal rotation with your warriors means that each warrior loses 1 item they would otherwise have gotten every month or so, and in turn every mage and warlock gets procs of 15%. Same for enhancement shaman and totem twisting.
So as a caveat to OP: Don’t play ret / enhancement, UNLESS you will be in a guild that supports it. Makes more sense to plan to be holy / resto, but to let your GM know you would like to be first to switch specs if they support you.
Sorry to say, but this is “working as intended” according to the views of the people in charge of classic.
Furor and Tigole HATED “non-pures” (Furor especially. The man organized server crashes in everquest to show how much he hated paladins for not being second class citizens), and so it was an intentional design that people with healing spells be told “BACK OF THE BUS”. They blatantly gutted and stole the paladin’s combat system and gave parts of it to the warrior WEEKS before launch, and so the paladin’s virtual lack of any none AA combat is directly their fault.
This is part of classic’s design: You sucking and being utter s* was how the Vanilla world was MEANT to be, you were intended to feel ridiculed and s* on for not knowing that your place is healing the REAL classes like the warrior.
This is one of the major reasons I look forward to BC, when cooler heads prevailed and realized that s*ing on people for not wanting to exclusively heal with their class wasn’t a bad idea, and Druids, Shamans and paladins started to get the ability to do other roles. (Ret was still a very niche thing that relied on Blood elves though, since Seal of blood was what made their damage okay enough for their other buffs they brought to even things out. If you want to tank, go Alliance Paladin for SOV, Horde if you want to DPS. Though SOR is almost as good as SOV for tanking, and Tankadin’s really didn’t need SOV to work)
My guild is pretty elite with loot and BiS lists cause our players are competitive. As a result, most of the crappy Tier sets are rolled off, especially the paladin pieces. People are free to roll them for PvP (as any PvP item is typically rolled for among the potential users).
To be honest, we can’t even KEEP a meme spec. We didn’t mind 1-2, as we had a Ret Paladin early in MC, and a Cat Druid in early BWL, but neither stuck around and quit/joined other guilds for some reason. Our Bear Druid got benched for consistently poor performance.
Wasn’t just them, but some others too. Kalgan would duel paladins on his warrior when testing the game, and every time the paladin won, they’d try to find some way to nerf the paladin.
This, however, isn’t necessarily a part of it. The strike system was unsustainable, and far more of a mana hog than the seal system. The seal system was designed in mind of the paladin using utility abilities between swings, rather than having their GCD’s clogged up.
The problem is that hard-cast heals interrupt the swing timer, meaning you can’t use the heals of your toolkit - you are either healing or attacking. Seal system makes sense, and isn’t part of the otherwise obvious poor-tuning bias. I think the perception of paladins and their gameplay would’ve been totally different if their heals were all more like holy shock; strong instants on a CD. More of a true support melee than a lamer priest or janky melee.
Poor warrior mains who need a big strong testosterone-infused avatar named something along the lines of “Bulk Squatthrust” to make up for a frail IRL ego. The fact that warriors are the only “hybrid” that doesn’t pay the hybrid tax makes this obvious.
The problem is that TBC ret was still trash for alliance. I think a lot of people confuse belf ret performance with overall TBC ret performance, forgetting that Alliance ret doesn’t really get any better than it already is in Classic now.
It’s still a barrel-bottom DPS, gaining only slight value from imp sanc aura and imp sotc buffing others better. In that, they’re kind of like feral cats are now - they can be decent on their own every now and then, but are mostly brought for crit. This means they are still generally low on prio for loot, and aside from crusader strike being added, still have a rather bland gameplay.
What really happens in BC is the scaling issues that made the most powerful DPS specs of vanilla so cheat-codes levels of OP is dialed back. Lowering the top end made the lower end look not-so-bad, even if by the metrics set by the bosses relative to the level and gear never changed much.
There was also gear tailored to these other specs as well, whereas in Classic, you really only get it in T2.5 and dungeon set 2.
I mean… it’s unneeded. We have a token shadow priest, and that’s kinda it right now. Unless one of the ZG splits decides to bring someone’s meme spec alt, we’re pretty confident the specs just aren’t popular enough to play in an upper level raiding environment.
Popularity has nothing to do with it and you know that is the case. It has to do with the 1 minute off the total clear time of the raid. It really is that small of a difference.
Again, you aren’t getting them because you’ve publicly said “Hybrids heal THE END.” If you’re not at least 31 in your healing tree, your guild has said BENCHED.
They will always leave your guild due to this so they can have fun. And you have that guild where you’re having fun. Everyone has fun and no harm.
We literally had no performance expectations back when we brought rets and ferals. We recruited both, specifically to try and reap the benefits of a Bear (pre-raid) and a Cat (BWL). The guild was fine with the Ret in the beginning, and our casters asked us to get a Shadow Priest (the only one of those still in the guild).
So, nah. It’s not because of the guild; none of the players wanted to stick around. We only benched the bear when BWL opened because he couldn’t seem to taunt when necessary or take a hit to save his life, and I became the OT and took his place, so that we had a consistent tank for BWL.
Content is so easy a caveman could heal it…(stuff)…
Implication: Classic raids could carry half a dozen meme specs and not wipe, but a lot of raids will growl because the meme specs would slow the parse timez…
As a ret that cleared BT and had my full T6 and going into sunwell… No, alliance rets weren’t trash. A big problem with ret pallies is that they’d be put into the group with the prot pally for extra threat, or in the caster group for the concentration aura, then they’re compared to the warriors and rogues getting windfury. Seal of Blood wasn’t THAT major of a difference. Horde just understood that slow heavy weapons + windfury is an amazing combo, so they put their rets in the melee group, instead of the tank or caster groups.
Uh, because Tier gear isn’t useful to our holy paladins, and none of our paladins want to play Ret in raids right now. How does that not compute? What else could it mean? Judgment and Lawbringer aren’t optimal to healing.
The Ret quit back in very early MC. No one else has even asked, and there’s plenty of items that go out that are just, “Hey, does anyone want this?” Such as Fallen Crusader. All 2hs are rolled for PvP weapons, but people are free to straight up ask for them as an item, since everyone has a PvP weapon now.
or you could raid as holy 1 or 2 days a week, and respec ret to have fun solo and farm (what I do, and it’s a blast). 10 minutes of research ahead of time and you would have known enh and ret (among other hybrid specs) are useless in vanilla PvE content.
