Paladin easily my favorite class but I really don’t want to be stuck as a healer. Managed to get a ret to level 26, leveling is actually fine and many situations where a class like warrior where it would 100% death I can escape from.
I understand there is a huge stigma about rets in classic in general, but I’ve also heard people say if you know what you’re doing, and have gear tailored for ret and not holy you can actually deal decent damage in raids as well as bring super valuable buff slots.
Anyone who is a ret or played with a ret can tell me their experience? Is it worth it?
What is your goal with HC? Do you just want to hit 60, do dungeons at 60 or raid? While you can certainly level as ret, and likely and be accepted for dungeons at 60, the sad reality is ret damage is beyond poor in classic, as they have really have no real attacks and most gear even when you get things like AQ40 gear is poorly itemized for them. Even with full buffs/consumes you will find a ret paladin will often struggle to keep up with a good tank.
While I certainly can’t speak for the HC raiders as I am not bothering with raiding in HC at this point both due to time as well as my dislike of the use of Petri flasks, in classic, ret paladins for the most part did not get DPS spots in most good raids, and while there were some, any other class would provide far more benefit. Yes being a good raider is important in areas such as mechanics, but lack of DPS will put you at a huge disadvantage.
If raiding is your goal, probably the best thing to do would be to reach out to several of the raiding guilds, talk to the raid leaders and get feedback from them on if you would be accepted, or turned away as for an open DPS spot as ret.
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ret will be fun to level to 60. most groups will be fine with you being a dps / buffer if you make that clear in the beginning. if you ever raid yes you will be expected to heal 
but that’s waaaay off. you can always reroll a different class instead. to me, HC is about 1-60. raiding is just a bonus.