Ret paladin viability

I’ve never ever tested it in actual Vanilla. I played a Warrior in 2004-2006 and this Rogue. And I only got at max 5/9 T3 in the 2 Rets I played during other forays into Naxx on private servers.

However. Playing RetroWoW, an instant-60 5-man raiding server, I had full T3. Nothing was scaled to be strong, mobs were just scaled to die easy.

A lot of awesome private server PvPers came here to hone their craft, because every BG is people with max T3 and full R14. You literally play against guys who have the best possible gear in the game and are good. Guys like Perplexity and Stormling played there.

Having full T3 there, yes, cleanse scales with spell power. Coupled with the libram that reduces cleanse cost, you can see how insane this is. You have over 9000 armor and 7500 hp as a full T3 Paladin. And then your cleanse heals for not just 200, but a % (I think .25%) of your spell power. I’d be spamming cleanse for little-to-no mana for anywhere from 400-700 a heal. Insane and utterly broken.

That’s exactly what I’m thinking. The tooltip from Classic DB makes me think that it heals for a flat 200. Also, because cleanse has no base healing amount on its own, I would tend to think it would not scale with healing power or spell power. But I would be pleasantly surprised if anyone with confirmed vanilla testing could prove me wrong.

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Yep I haven’t ever found any data on the issue, I just know in that scenario I found it to be the case. Regardless, that entire set with a Paladin is a nightmare in PvP. You simply cannot cut through them, and it takes like 4 or 5 Priests mana burning 4-5 times to cut through their pool.

I used to run around with Scarab Brooch as well and Divine Favor Holy Light for like 5400, which was like having a Priest’s Power Word: Shield.

Scarab Brooch so broken >_>

Nice! My absolute favorite playstyle in PvP is a defensive outlast approach. I went Druid back in vanilla, and loved it’s veratility, but never got geared enough to be a threat in duels. Also probably didn’t help that I’m not a very good twitch gamer, :joy:.

Regardless, I plan on going Pally this time around. I’m wondering what spec shores up your weaknesses the best. In duels, seams Pallys do decent against most physical damage dealers that can’t heal. But I would bet we struggle against any burst class like PoM Pyro mages, elemental shaman, and SM ruin Locks.

Also, I can’t remeber where I read this, but didn’t they take away spell power scaling with shard of the fallen star before 1.12? So sad… that Dernos Spell damage Paladin video is my fav vanilla PvP video of all time.

I would wait for Classsic TBC if you want to play ret.

In one of the first posts in this thread I linked a video of the US-2nd Nefarian kill by Death and Taxes. In that video you have Ryuujin, a Ret Paladin, using Sulfuras. He healed and swapped specs but remained Ret into BC, WotLK, and beyond.

My guild had a Ret Paladin named Galmorthal during Vanilla. He was actually “disabled” because he lost a finger in the military. He DPS’ed all the way through to 6/15 Naxx with us.

I know where you’re coming from, but Ret was a thing in Vanilla. It was exacerbated in private servers due to several bugs with spell coefficients and how abilities scaled, coupled with retail players coming in to try it out. A lot did extremely well due to these bugs.

But even Theoloras who used to post frequently raided Naxx back in the day as Ret. He’s offered so many videos and data proving the potential, viability of Ret in a raid.

No one’s saying its optimal over any pure DPS. No one suggests a Ret is going to parse #1 DPS logs on Majordomo Executus or be the best DPS in a guild. No one on private servers that plays Ret to be #1 DPS, not even Esfand. With how laughably awful the toolkit for damage is, some of us simply marvel at the potential burst Ret does. We enjoy the utility and enjoy the class. We play WoW for a multitude of reasons, and one of those reasons is that Ret is like Forrest Gump. He’s a straight up mentally-challenged guy. Who somehow finds himself in the thick of every actionable and historical event in the history of WoW.

Just like my boy Ryuujin. Sitting there when people didn’t know what raid meant, thugging Dragonkin adds and bombing dispels on Nefarian, achieving nearly the first US Nefarian kill.

Max pepega and max effort, maximum fun.

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Just do what you want OP.

I played a feral Druid and a Ele/enhance shaman in vanilla and I got plenty of invites.

They weren’t bleeding edge content groups or anything, and sometimes we barely got halfway through the raid. But at the end of the day, sometimes just filling the raid is difficult, and ret dps is still better than no dps.

Pff, Apparently you have the knowledge of a greek god, prideful and ignorant. Do you even know what being carried was back in vanilla? I sure do. Having a group of 40 with only ever having 30-35 fighting at any one time sure as hell isn’t a party. Also, making assumptions out of the blue like that really goes to show why you want the spotlight off yourself.

It’s quite possible though. The set bonus does use a unique effect compared to any other item I can find. However, no matter how unfocused Blizzard was at the time it would be hard to believe they wouldn’t have touched it. Even if it doesn’t scale, 200 spammable instant cast healing for such a low cost is still an amazing ability in and of itself that no other class has.

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We’ll say it once, and we’ll say it again. Ret pallies have never been viable in PvE. No gear or buffs will make them an optimal choice over a Rogue or Warrior. The concept of playing a ret pally is great, but since they are a hybrid class they fall victim to having significantly lower PvE viability, such as balance/feral druids and enh shamans. However, just like the dps shaman and druid, they’re great in PvP. (Although I would argue that a rogue is better than a druid, but that comes down to player ability and playstyle.)

And then you can continue to be wrong. Ret is perfectly viable, it’s just not optimal. Those words don’t mean the same thing.

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vi·a·ble

/ˈvīəb(ə)l/

adjective

  1. capable of working successfully; feasible.

“the proposed investment was economically viable”

synonyms: feasible, workable, practicable, practical, usable, possible, realistic, achievable, attainable, realizable;

informal doable

“it doesn’t sound like a viable solution”

op·ti·mal

/ˈäptəməl/

adjective

  1. best or most favorable; optimum.

“seeking the optimal solution”

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If you think a ret paladin in the raid is going to doom it then tell your mages to stop AFKing in the back.
The bare minimum dps requirements are less than what a ret can pull out and when you have mages putting out 4 times that just spamming 1 button, you can’t say the ret will doom the raid unless you’re carrying a raid full of afkers.

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No no no. You are talking about raids, the smallest part of PvE possible. That’s like looking at a penguin and saying all birds can’t fly…

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Don’t forget that PvP isn’t just BGs either. Raiding is the final goal of PvE, but dungeons are waaay more prevalent, especially early on. A Ret is very useful because of the blessings and potential offhealing (or even offtanking, or outright tanking at lower levels). If you have a Druid healer, a Ret is amazing to have - or at least a non-Druid hybrid.

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Has less to do with that and more to do with “I know how hard it is to find competent players, so why would I intentionally add another variable to the equation that is already a 50% detractor?”

Couple that x40 and you have the reason real guilds (read: not JUST the bleeding edge 1% people doing world first races; competent guilds that will have stuff on farm before it is outdated, so more like 10% of guilds)

Pray tell, what other pve is available at top level that gets you advancement, hm?

pray tell, how many people in vanilla actively raided again? oh that’s right. not many.
furthermore, because people like you seem to forget it, classic had 60 levels worth of content and a lot of people never saw level cap.

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have you ever had any officer responsibilities in a raiding guild?
Filling and maintaining a roster requires alot of effort and sometimes it’s better for the guild to be filling the raid with a couple of sub-optimal choices that are dependable vs an epeener that only shows up for farm night.

The advantage to classic is even if mr reliable is not amazing they still bring something to the table.

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… and in case of ret paladins they bring the feeling you not sucking with dps ;
a good thing to raise morale of some stamina/spirit-geared warriors;

i had some “responsibilities” and i’d very like to see here any mathematical justyfication of ret paladins in raid;
without consumptions that others are terribly bad players;

the possibility of compleating encounters with 35 ppl, does not means that something is viable without a reasonable impact,
you could fill a few slots with something without dps/healing or any useful abilities at all, and still sucsseded but it doesnot make it viable or usefull

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