Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Bringing Retnoobs?

Another interesting post concerning Paladins, over at WoWInsider. Basically, it asks what do you think it would take to get a Ret Pally invited into mainstream raiding guilds (you know... the hardcore type)? One of the better posters there, Maedhras, says in the third post of the thread:
I wonder how high the same ret pallies would score on the dps meters if it factored in the extra dps the other 24 raiders got from his/her blessings/judgements (and the fact that 1 ret pally can keep all other pally judgements up on the mob by himself).

Once again, relying on DPS meters only to know who to invite and who to reject can make you lose some quality players.
And I think he's absolutely on the ball with this post. One of the huge issues that Damage Meter (or whatever variant of that program you use) is that it only rates who does what damage themselves. It doesn't count buffs, it doesn't count group or raid effecting abilities or talents. Just their own damage.

My guild leader is (and pretty much always has been) a ret specced paladin. He loves the Magical Warrior (emphasis on combat side) and when we played FFXI together, he played a Dark Knight, which bears more of a resemblance to Ret Pallys than any other class/spec combo in WoW. When WoW came out, he rolled a Paladin, since it was the only class that truly fit into the idea of the Magical Warrior. For a while he did a hybrid spec, something along the lines of 10/15/26, if I recall correctly. Still an emphasis on Ret, but not full or deep ret. After 1.12, he changed to 0/10(then 20)/41 full ret with a bit of Prot on the side. He's not specced to be a healer, but if needed he can and will heal.

I bring this up, because I would, in theory, prefer to bring him in a Ret with a side of healing, role than I would to bring a pure Holy spec paladin. While I do well understand the value of a Holy spec, with recent changes to Illumination, Paladins no longer are the greatest thing under the sun for healing. Many people say the ideal number for Karazhan is 2 tanks, 3 healers, and 5 DPS. What about 2 tanks, 2 pure healers, 2 healer/DPS hybrids, and 4 pure DPS? For fights like Moroes, where you need to take advantage of Shackle Undead, thus there will be moments when your priest(s) are unable to do the healing thing, so having an extra hand or two of healers would be solid gold.

2 comments:

Sean said...

Thanks for the comment! Definitely need to add this to my list of blogs.

Personally, when I was organizing raids, as long as I had the minimum required tanks and healers, I'd be comfortable taking pretty much any other class to fill the remaining spots. Like you said, ret pallies may not have the highest dps, but the utility they bring to a group with blessings and auras is great!

Kaziel said...

Thanks for the add. I've been reading your blog for a few weeks, but never had much to comment on. ^^