No one is saying you can’t play.
If a top player chooses a bad spec, he’s still a good player. Stuff will get done. It’s just unfortunate that he chose a bad spec. Muggsy didn’t choose to be 5’3". He played well and got stuff done. Given a choice, I doubt Muggsy would choose to be 5’3", but that’s what ret paladins are doing in classic.
Nobody is saying people can’t play Ret, but a lot of people are saying that if you go Ret you 100% will be forced to heal and virtually nobody will accept you as a damage dealer.
Which is the “it’s not optimal, so it’s bad” mentality that many say has very little place in Vanilla WoW unless you’re in a top 1% guild.
and when some of us say that’s not entirely the case, those people claim we have no evidence and any we provide is “cherry picking” or “wont be the case this time” despite those people having no evidence of their claims either.
Every time we give them something, they simply move the goalposts so that our argument is no longer “good enough” for them, so it’s seeming a lot like the anti-Ret people just wont accept anything short of us showing Ret Paladins facerolling 1000+ DPS in their sleep against a raid boss with extremely complex mechanics that isn’t undead.
Plus, WoW is a game played for fun. If I were being paid a lot of money to play it at a top level then yeah, I’d be optimizing my character and not playing a Ret Paladin for DPS.
I consider a Shockadin a ret pally.
I never see that these days, but if they’re coming from 2nd edition then I can see why they’re saying that. Chances are though they weren’t playing a paladin at all because the amount of restrictions on the paladin was almost as long if not longer than the class description. Paladins were rare for a reason 3rd edition is when they were actually able to come out if somebody says they feel weak it’s because they were nerfed going into it but in exchange they gained freedom and the ability to actually play the class because nobody was playing it in 1st and 2nd edition unless they were ignoring class restrictions.
It was well worth the trade considering the RP elements is about 90% of the game.
Private servers may be off tuning wise, but it reflects more or less how things were in Vanilla. So far, there’s been a grand total of one video showing a Ret with Hand of Rag dpsing on Nef. We can’t see any dps meters so we can’t even judge how well he’s doing. However, you can check realmplayers at any time and see exactly where Ret sits on any bossfight in any raid. Personally I take this as a far more accurate metric than some heresay and anecdotal evidence, and one 240p video.
There’s no big conspiracy to keep Rets down and not allow them to do anything. It’s like giving Rogues the job of a healer and telling them to run around bandaging people with first aid. It’s stupid and unnecessary and doesn’t play to the strengths of the class. A paladin wanting to dps doesn’t play into the strengths of being a Paladin, is stupid and unnecessary, especially when there’s always thousands of other proper dps classes willing to do that job.
This. People claiming that ret is “viable” are being completely obtuse. This silly thread is approaching 600 replies of private server idiocy, assumptions, and semantics. Ret is LOLret for a reason. It is what it is.
People did play very differently. They didn’t have the knowledge (or access to) to fully realize the full potential of their classes. And rets still made it into raids that successfully completed content.
With all the knowledge there is today, that’s going to leave more room for less than optimal classes to fit into a raid and for that raid to be successful. The biggest issue raids will face is warm bodies. Bringing a subpar spec is not going to be an issue and this whole mentality that, because it is subpar, should automatically disqualify it is laughable.
The only class you absolutely cannot do a raid without is a warrior and that’s only on fights where you need a tank to be able to push crushing blows off the table and needs a taunt.
“They didn’t have the knowledge (or access to) to fully realize the full potential of their classes”
This goes doubly so for every other class and guess what, they pull even further ahead. Something as simple as getting truestrikes/savage gladiators/edgemasters as opposed to gunning for plate because warrs back then didn’t know any better.
You can have all the knowledge in the world but it doesn’t change the fact that all of your dps as a Ret comes from autoattacking and Seal of Command procs, and there’s only so much you can do to augment it.
Or to drive the point home better: There’s a reason that very few rets got a chance to raid until wrath.
Err U do understand that they hand picked a heap of people from the top guilds in EQ, including Jeff Kaplan. They knew what they were doing.
Theres only 1 other plate class in the game.Wheres this abundance you’re talking about? Unless you’re talking about PS guilds who stack 11 dps warriors which has no bearing on how the game was designed.
Only the most try-hard of guilds are going to run with only healer hybrids and those guilds are doomed to fail simply because they have zero depth to their roster and little to no redundancy in their comp.
but hey I’m fine with that, I’ll happily scoop up a working raid while you fish for mage number 8 and warrior number 12. Sure it might take alittle more time to clear and we won’t be speed running anything but the guild will be a stable enviroment where we can let people have the time off they need.
You mispelt TBC.
Needing 17 CHA on top of decent stats elsewhere was the real kicker for 1st and 2nd ed paladins.
Top 30% of guilds that raid at all, but that might be top 1% of all guilds considering the typical guild I suppose.
Was still basically token rets until wrath when you could see 4-5 rets in a raid and not blink an eye, being swapped interchangeably as “LF1M generic melee dps”
And alli still got shafted even harder than horde rets did.
That’s fine. Just stay in your lane and stop giving bad advice to starry eyed people asking “Hey I wanna ret in raids! Will I realistically be able to?” Even without horribly misleading the average inexperienced player, you will still find plenty of scrubs and diehard rets for your roster. I promise.
Are you talking about something you have no/limited experience about again? Considering paladin representation in TBC raids were a bare minimum 3 pallies and normally had 5-6 I’d say 20% of a raid was an outlier till sunwell, there literally wasn’t enough room for more than 2. But hey you had full tier 6 cleared before 2.4 right? Or was that another one of your sooking periods?
I won’t find any diehard rets on the horde side. And not everyone is going to be alexsensual try hards. Average current heroic guilds ae going to steamroll through the content regardless of whether they have 1 ret or 5.
Your argument is like telling a billionaire
“you already have enough money to buy everything, why you trying hard for more? Just pay someone else the leftovers!” Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.
“Need” doesn’t even enter the thought process here. Just “what will get the job done the fastest with the highest chance of success?”
As for the “well pallies were represented enough, and ret was too in bc!” No. The representation in your avg raid should be reflected in what the average population of said class/spec would realistically be without anything other than what it would be if everyone was 100% new to the game with no background and made the choice. Ret wasn’t. Most hybrids weren’t.
If people are struggling in classic instances pre-naxx then the issue lies with the players,not the class they’re playing. When the first raid boss needs 197 dps to kill before submerge you don’t need to be try-harding and you can play with peoples who’s company you enjoy instead of “look at my parse types”.
But I along with most other people who are in this group are people who like people that have an attitude of “look at my parse.” At the very least they tolerate it as a necessity for upping their chances.
Source: Numerous threads complaining about elitism literally daily; the number of logs that even get posted (hint: you don’t post logs if you don’t have ego and want to see how you stack up), and literally every measuring stick ever invented and used ad-nauseam by the community from ilvl to raider io.
Like I said, stop selling a false and uncommon dream.
A toddler is closer to a tryhard than Alexensual. That guy is ridiculously bad at the game.
Practically nobody brings rets/enhances to raids on pservers because the only argument these people have is “if you can clear with 39 players, you can clear with 39 players and a ret!”. Imagine your class being so bad the only thing you’re better than is an empty raid spot.
It’s only false to try-hards and the people pushing ridic server firsts on a game thats 14 years old. Remind me how that “look at my parse” went for you in your last raid? Didn’t you end up dead on the floor thanks to copping too much avoidable damage to eke out a few more %?You get an entire raid of parse hungry wannabe’s and those simple fights will be come nightmares.I’d much rather take someone who is under no illusions and who isn’t a detriment to the raid.
I on the other hand am perfectly fine with purple parses.