Blizzard's Vision

Q u o t e:
While I agree Ret should be viable in arena, I can't be certain Blizzard does. Since Ret representation has dipped, what steps have been taken to correct it?

Ret should be viable in Arena and all aspects of the game. You have to be very careful when you analyze Arena statistics however. If say Shadow priests aren't viable in Arena, then many Shadow priests would rather stop competing than to go Disc. We have found that many paladins will switch specs at the drop of a hat for PvP purposes. You individually may not, but that doesn't prove the trend invalid. So if actual Ret spec paladins are low, you have to ask yourself how many of them are essentially behaving like Ret paladins but going to get a great talent deep in Holy or Prot. How many of them switched to Prot because Prot is too good at healing? You can't just jump to a "buff Ret" solution.

Q u o t e:
Normally a statement about the actual vision should follow but it didn't. I'm simply asking what is that vision?

The point of that whole post I made was that nearly always when experienced players are asking what the vision is, it's not because they don't know or because not knowing somehow affects their gameplay. It's because they want to have a handy weapon in their arsenal for arguing for buffs or nerfs. "Blizzard said we have potent defenses. I die too fast. Therefore Blizzard has to buff me."

Players who are very new to WoW might legitimately wonder the difference between a paladin and warrior or a mage and warlock. If you're here posting almost by definition you are not new to WoW.

Q u o t e:
People are failing to realize the actual point of the SS change and what Blizzard is minorly attempting to do with this patch. The Paladin class has always suffered from one core issue - too much of their healing utility is base-line with very little actually coming from Holy talents. We see this time and time again with each and every real change made to the Paladin class. Holy simply does too little in terms of providing healing out-put. this puts down an issue where not only does the Holy talent tree need to change drastically, but so too does the base-line Paladin abilities.

Quoting Murmurs here, and it's probably worth going back to read his whole post.

I'll add it's also a problem where paladins as a whole are too defensive and not just the Protection spec ones. You see people describing fighting a Retribution paladin as a three phase boss fight. You might get them down, but then they can reset the fight with Lay on Hands. You get them down again and they bubble and heal. Compare this to an Arms warrior -- do they do great damage in PvP? Yes. Are they invulnerable? No. It's cool for paladins to care more about healing than do warriors, for I hope obvious reasons. However, if you are up against a Holy paladin, you should know that one of your greatest challenges should be dealing with their capacity to heal. If you are up against a Prot paladin, you should be concerned with their capacity to take hits. If you are up against a Ret paladin, you should be concerned with how much damage they should deal. You should not, generally, be nearly as concerend about the Prot's ability to self-heal or the Ret's ability to tank you.

I said this recently, but to reiterate, for most of the other hybrids, picking a role in a fight is much more of a commitment. Sure the Arms warrior can go Defensive Stance and put on a shield, but that doesn't turn them into a Prot warrior. Nobody is super concerned about Feral druids shifting out to heal. We had big problems with DKs earlier being able to tank and deal damage with the same set of tools, but that's in a better place now. Shaman maybe the only other class besides paladins that are able to shift on the fly from dps to healing, but with their mail armor and lack of major defensive cooldowns they just don't feel as hard to kill.

Q u o t e:
The post you made seems self-defeating, or I'm not understanding it at all. At the beginning you say Ret should be viable in Arena... yet at the end of the paragraph you're saying Ret paladins are going deep into Holy and Prot--doesn't that mean Ret *isn't* viable? Ah, but I know what you'd say--you'd say "representation doesn't necessarily reflect viability."

Yes, that is all I meant. When A >>>> B, you can't really claim B is too weak vs. other classes or specs based only on the evidence that so many people choose A. Try to focus less on linking to easily found statistics on Arena comp or max dps. Most players are aware of them and without really strong analysis, just linking them is rarely contributing much to the discussion. Many threads between this one and my original mocked this as “GC sez go Holy.” Make fewer inane conclusions like this and you will probably see me post more.

Q u o t e:
I think the biggest problem is that Blizzard keeps changing the "view" of each paladin spec. The OP is correct in that Blizzard HID the fact that the only end-game viable spec in Vanilla was purposely Holy.

“Keeps changing” = Vanilla has 1 spec. BC has 2 specs. LK has 3 specs.

I don’t think it was much of a mystery that paladins were supposed to heal in Molten Core. There was no Arena back then, so it’s impossible to talk about what the Arena-viable spec was supposed to be. All of the changes since then have been to prop up Protection and Retribution as “real” specs. Sometimes we overcompensate and make them too good, at which point we have to nerf them. We haven’t really changed the vision of the paladin other than embracing that the class has multiple specs and some players like one more than the others.

Q u o t e:
1. Why are you targetting SS when it was never a big factor to begin with? Why can't ret, which had it damage reduced use SS as it does now? Where is Ret utility. We have very little. Why is SS being targetted to Holy when Holy is the spec that needs it the LEAST.

Holy needs it the most in our opinion. Holy needs to be a tree that specializes in healing (and damage prevention as a source of healing), not just the more healing-focused tree of a very healing-focused class.

Q u o t e:
2. Why does Blizzard use an AXE when a knife should be used? I think there were 1000 ways presented to fix SoC before the huge nerf. Now that SoC is next to useless in almost all scenarios we aren't even taking it. SoC is THE ret seal. What gives?

This is just “don’t nerf me, bro” talk. We have been so gentle with paladin nerfs because we’ve been so concerned with returning to lolret, that paladins as a class are still very powerful in end-game LK in both PvE and PvP. Yes, it’s not fun to be nerfed. We get that. There is very little evidence we have over-nerfed paladins at any time in the past couple of years. There is plenty of evidence that we haven’t nerfed them enough.

And now for a housekeeping note:

Q u o t e:
Quite honestly from the responses the only thing im gathering is their intention is to never help ret paladins at all because holy is way too much OP. so i guess It's time to start leveling a new character.

Sigh. Banned for excessive QQ. QQ won't help you here. All it will do is silence you. Make us spend less time deleting the garbage and we would have more time to make posts that players actually care to read. Why is this such a difficult concept? Go back and look at how much the post numbers jump around in this thread and you will get a sense for how much moderation it has required (and to be fair, not just from paladin posters).

Q u o t e:
Lay on hands has a cooldown that makes most of these points moot.

We don't think "Sure I can heal myself for 25,000+ health as a dps spec or 50,000+ health as a tank, but not very often," is balanced. Abilities can be unbalanced even if overall a character is not.

This isn't a non-issue just because it doesn't affect Arenas. Also, it doesn't mean paladins are being singled out for one-vs-one duel balance (though I'm sure I'm going to be reading that for months to come).

If we gave warriors (especially Prot warriors) an ability to cause 50,000 damage in one hit with no preparation on a 90-minute cooldown, most reasonable players would call that a balance problem. The long cooldown doesn't save it. Beyond some point you can't balance a very powerful ability just by increasing the cooldown.

In general, we've been moving away from long cooldowns anyway.

Q u o t e:
Why "especially prot warriors"? I thought we were talking about DPS specs? You know, the specs WITHOUT all those built in survival talents that they have to give up DPS for?

It's (marginally) okay for a healing spec to have a gigantic heal. It's a concern when a dps spec has a gigantic heal. The example I was making that if a non-dps spec had a huge dps button that the fact that it had a super, duper long cooldown wouldn't really satisfy anyone.

Q u o t e:
WE CAN'T USE LOH IN ARENA, REMOVE THE @!!*ING ABILITY WE DON'T CARE HOW HARD IS THAT TO UNDERSTAND??????

WHEN I POST IN CAPS CURSE SPEAK FOR ALL PALADINS AND REFRAIN FROM PUNCTUATION EXCEPT AT THE END OF MY SENTENCE WHERE I USE EXTRA YOU CAN'T ARGUE WITH MY LOGIC!!!!!!!

Q u o t e:
The 1 thing and 1 thing i Hope GC and The Dev team get from all of This is That the Core paladin Class does not reflect their current vision of the Paladin class and hasn't since Vanilla.We are no longer a defensive support class that since in the back and support heals while tossing around buffs and some powerful defensive C/D. We are a class with three talent trees each with a ditinct role. Either we are frontline 2 handed warrior of the light, Bastion of light healing our allies so we can bush the battle line or we are defensive tanks taking the damage from our brother.

Your last sentence isn't bad. That's what I would call the current paladin vision. I agree that the old "defensive support" description really isn't valid any longer. Surely there aren't a lot of paladins posting on this thread confused because they are no longer defensive support. I assumed a lot of it was "Well, you nerfed abilities I liked so clearly I must be playing the class wrong." I don't really think that's the core issue though. Abilities can be overpowered without a class's identity being in jeopardy.