#0 - July 18, 2009, 5:56 p.m.
I'm sick of the healers problem, and every DPS spec class feels like me, well I hope. But mostly every other class has some tools to counter healing, whether it's short cooldowns interrupts, snares, MS effect, silence or fear spam, while Ret can only rely on dispellable high cooldowns.
Ghostcrawler said that he doesn't want classes to be homogenized as it would be boring, and that is true. But then he's lying, because every melee dps has a 10 seconds cooldown interrupt, MS effect and / or spammable snare, while paladins have no interrupt , snare or MS effect AT ALL.
He's lying even more, since in 3.2, mages and shadow priests are going to gain a little MS effect, which will allow them to down a healer a little better. That is cool to me, I don't play holy or prot healer, but I know how hard it can be when you're a DPS team. I approve this change.
Now, where I am (and probably most ret paladins, good or bad): I've tried PTR, and there is no change to the real ret problems. Duels? I'll keep winning every time. No DPS stands a chance against me. Burst is stil high enough to allow me to solo Chillmaw and 2 Hordes. PvP / PvE damage? Nice, I do 10-20k more damage than second highest DPS in BG's, and I'll finally be able to get into raids with PvP gear, lol.
But woops. here comes a healer, now I can't do S. H . * T. Mana regen boost to their gear, and nothing to drain their mana nor to counter their healing, while they probably have some damage reduction talents as well, cool.
2vs2 went to scrap because of restriction on weapon and shoulder? Yes and no, it was already scrap for me because of healers, anyways I always wanted to play more 3's or 5's for most points per week.
But for when is the balancing going to happen so I can call rogues, warriors, and hunters a challenge in duels and BG's, while being able to go up in arena instead of sitting on 1700 because ret is animal defecation on healers, whether playing with DPS only or with a healer? Ghostcrawler said they'll be working on it later, but he's been saying this forever, and I have never seen a good change except for the 3.0.2 OPness.
I've heard a lot of good ideas to play around balancing Ret down with other DPS, while going up against healers, here are a few:
-Mana drain, dispel, snare or spell power reduction debuff with Crusader Strike, maybe on chance with the new 4 seconds cooldown
-Give another effect to SoC, so it becomes the prefered seal in PvP, while not being as powerful as SoV
-Retribution aura redesign: reduce healing by a small percentage, and give the Retribution tree a talent that improves its effectiveness (catching up with mages and shadow priests would be the most sincere thing at least)
-Make Divine Shield a Protection or Holy Talent, or lower drastically cooldown and duration, and remove forbearance, or cause it to not be able to deal damage at all and remove the lock time from Avenging Wrath.
-Separate the fake interrupt effect from HoJ and add a 10 seconds cooldown melee ability, or make a glyph with Hand of Reckoning to be usable in PvP so it adds an interrupt effect while increasing the cooldown to 15 seconds, since it's a ranged ability.
I'd rather hear that Ret is never going to be fixed than soon. Ghostcrawler, are you going to ignore this post too?
