Well considering a well balanced raid would have 5 of every class, how many spots of those should be retribution?
Shoulda used dem eagles.
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Based on old developer posts, Fangtooth noted during Vanilla: “The developers liked the idea of being able to make Paladin’s into a healer with the Holy Tree, a fighter with the Retribution tree, or a tank with the Protection tree.”
However there were a few stipulations about that:
- They didn’t consider raiding the only thing worth balancing around
- They weren’t supposed to be as good as pures at the role. They later noted that Prot Paladin should be able to main tank up to about 20 player raids.
- They weren’t intended for the player to tunnel vision that role. They figured that a Ret Paladin should still use their support abilities as needed.
The biggest thing was #1, because much of the playerbase did see raids as the only thing that mattered but 40 player raids are not a very good environment for hybrids as they existed in Vanilla.
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“Frontline” could be the guy judging light, autoattacking, and buffing/cleansing/healing. The reason they had so few DPS abilities was to provide gaps in their “rotation” so they could do all of those things.
The raid should be flexible enough to not need 5 of every class so it can meet the ever-changing and amorphous population.
Barring that, I’d say the number of rets out of the paladin slots should as closely match the percentage of rets as possible. Rounding up, that would mean 4/5 slots are ret and 1 holy. Rounding down that means no need for holy.
90% of the community plays DPS, while raids demand far less. This is why modern wow has issues with healers and tanks. Realistically, raids should need maybe 5% tanks and healers. This is why being a healer or tank is essentially a free ticket in vanilla (and even still in live), and why hybrids got shoehorned.
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That is pure speculation on your part. The interview with one of the OG vanilla devs said they just didn’t have the time to focus on ret properly amidst all the other complaints as well as realizing that you couldn’t have true hybrid gameplay in a raid setting and it was a bad design choice they regretted.
If they didn’t want raids to be the only thing worth balancing around, they shouldn’t have made it the only way to realistically get good gear. If they did say they didn’t think raids were the be-all-end-all, they’re either lying or inept. Can’t put the best rewards behind one type of content and expect that to not be viewed as the pinnacle.
source on 90% of all paladins playing ret?
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I said community; and I translated that 90% 1:1 to the three specs for paladin. There aren’t any meaningful ways to scrape that data now, especially with free spec changing.
Closest I can give you is that there are curently ~90k ret parses, 30k holy, and 30k prot for the past two weeks in heroic.
10k holy, 30k ret, 10k prot for normal.
So I suppose the distro using live numbers would be 1/1/3 tank/heals/ret.
The last time I checked, that would be 60% “ret”, NOT 90% as you claimed.
You wouldn’t intentionally try to distort the truth to further your agenda to try to see paladins buffed, would you?
It’s pretty clear when I made the initial 90% comment it was a stat pulled out of my rear end and I amended it with the actual statistics after doing research when someone asked me to provide a source. I literally explained that in my post…
My agenda isn’t to get paladins buffed. Never has been. It’s simply that they’re garbage as ret and are dead weight to carry as far as an actual good guild is concerned and the only way I’d play one again (which I really want to, mind you) instead of rolling the known OP warrior is if they’re buffed.
I’m also on a crusade to crush all these delusional “ret is fiiiiine, go ahead and roll it you’ll be loved, we promise!” people.
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As I thought, apparently just throwing random falsities to support your agenda to try to see paladins buffed.
Nice straw man there. You should really reroll a lvl 1 troll. I just guessed at the stat because I know what the most popular role is by a long shot, like 10:1, and I know the number of ret slots is not enough and the number of holy slots is too much versus what the population actually wants.
And look! Even without my overstated stats I was still right. That’s the point of my argument. The numbers don’t actually matter. As long as the number of slotsf or each of the pala roles doesn’t match the percentages of actual players, something is wrong in my book from a design perspective.
Strawman?
Are you saying that you did not just throw out a number you KNEW was not likely correct in order to further your agenda to see paladins buffed?
Correct. Because the actual number was immaterial to the argument. Could be 1 too few ret slots, or 100. Point is: the number of slots don’t accurately reflect the population. Like I said, even without the hyperbole, I’m still right.
You admit that you threw out a random falsity to further your agenda to try to see paladins buffed, but accuse me of a “strawman” when I point that out?
Keep digging. Maybe you’ll eventually dig yourself out of that hole.
I’m pretty sure that’s what most of my guild’s Ret paladins did. One of our full time Holy paladins took BoK, the Rets had Imp. BoM, and then the other Holy paladin took Imp. BoW. There’s your general paladin buffs covered, since BoSanc isn’t really needed (but could be nice).
But yeah, according to the forum warriors here you better be 31 Holy and put on a dress and min-max if you ever want to even raid UBRS.
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The devs have said a lot of things they regretted doing, but the things they’ve done to rectify those regrets have only led to class/spec homogenization. Which is ironically, one of the main motivations for getting back to classic.
If the devs were to go back and make a game with all of the things they’ve learned over the years it would be more akin to diablo than WoW vanilla.
When I wasn’t Ret I loved going deeper Protection and having less healing output than my counterparts, for the sole sake of Blessing of Sanctuary. I focused more on dispelling and raid sniping heals.
As it stands though, even as Ret, you can collect enough +healing gear and just swap it in, and de-rank FoL. Just chug mana pots and dark runes and you’ll do well. Then, you toss back on your Ret gear and go bubble-pull Garr and get to work. Slowly chopping and two-steppin.
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Unless you want to go all in on a Ret DPS build, Paladins have the advantage that this is their core healing talents: https://classicdb.ch/?talent#sVxhbx
With those 20 points, you’ll be 95% as effective a healer as any pure Holy Paladin when you have healing gear on. Within that, Spiritual Focus and Improved Lay on Hands are negotiable as well. You just need something to fill up the points to get to Illumination.
It’s actually possible to do a 20/0/31 build that can heal almost as well as a pure Holy Paladin and DPS almost as well as a pure Ret Paladin(depending on gear, of course). The difference is missing 5% holy spell crit for healing or 3% hit for Ret DPS.
Paladins had a lot of freedom in talents, even if only because Blizzard screwed up and put most of their healing power in the first 4 rows of Holy =P
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