See, this would at least be a role. Execution phases are always important, so having a class that is specifically tuned to help burn a boss out of a phase would make us desirable, to an extent. They could easily balance this by making our support options viable so we sort of play as an off-healer until it’s time for something to die, fast, now.
The only problem with this philosophy and why blizzard seems like they have no idea what they are doing is because of how hard it is to balance. Mostly in regards to pvp. Where burst is like the strongest thing to have. If you can kill an opponent without them being able to fight back it’s not exactly fair.
The issue in PvP was we were predictable. We literally went super saiyan when we were ready to kill, and outside of that time we didn’t do anything but occasionally harass the enemy healer. Mind you our WoG was definitely an issue, as no class should be getting full heals off a spammable spell, but once that got gutted it our utility was pretty much gone.
PvP unfortunately is balanced around casual pvp. And in casual pvp burst is just dominant. Most players do not know how to avoid it. If you looked on the forums back when Burst Paladin was dominant everyone was complaining about getting 1 shot by ret paladins. Then blizz came in and gutted them and they just dropped off the ladder.
I never thought ret paladins were all that overpowered. Most players do not know how to kite or to properly cc, or really understand what half of their opponent’s tells/abilities even are.
I was there for that. It’s one of those things where the only people less happy with the direction of Ret are the casual players who had to face Ret. It exacerbates the issue, then, to know that Blizzard was more than happy to take a quick bat to our abilities, with seeming indiscrimination, without offering us any compensation.
The sad fact of the matter is this isn’t even the first time. It’s the way it goes: Ret starts off overtuned compared to the low collective ilvl, Ret gets nerfed without compensation, ilvl raises as the season/xpac continues, and Ret, which had been tuned comparatively to the Ilvl at the time, gets left in the dust.
We need an actual fix. We can’t let this go any longer.
Being a bit better than average at one thing, and worse than average at another is one thing. Being good at only one thing (single target burst), and sucking at everything else (as we do now) is another.
Ahaha, rejoining pally after 3 expansions and switched to ret – I played for less than an hour before going “Why can’t I throw my hammer at a bunch enemies like my Demon Hunter’s glaive?” and Googling multi-target and AOE. This thread is insightful.
Sims show comparison of gear / talent builds in varying conditions. This is going to be a single target vs aoe build in most cases. The core question being:
Why do you have to choose between aoe or Single target?
If you want to optimize for a certain build (AoE) then you would change your gear / talents to maximize for damage. Same if you want to optimize DPS for single-target, you’d change your talent tree.
If you want to maximize your AoE, then you’re changing your talent tree. If you want to maximize for ST, then you’d change your talent tree. Using the AoE talent tree will get you 108K against a ST, while if you went with a ST build, you’d be at 163K.
Again, there are three variables here
Talent tree
Gear
Fight type (AoE vs ST)
You really can’t get AoE performance out of a ST build, and vice versa.
Scroll down and you will see the difference. It’s significant for the majority of specs, with Ret losing the most. 22% single target for AoE with some of the specs losing less than 5% and average around 10%. This isn’t anything new, the loss of single target for ret in exchange for AoE has been an issue going to back to at least the birth M+.
Sad truth is some of the specs can go for AoE, have higher AoE than a Ret AoE build, while doing more single target damage than a Ret would do if we were single target build.