I Forgot To Title This One

Ghostcrawler wrote, in response to this forum thread entitled "Hybrids and thier dps 'tax'" (spelling not corrected):

"Why am I a hybrid if I am only there to do dps?"

Here are two situations:

1) Your guild is forming the raid. The raid leader has all the dps slots full. The mage isn't going to come. The shaman can say "Hey, if I respec to heal, can I come?"

2) Imagine a rogue and warrior compete for dps slots. Imagine the rogue beats the warrior and for purposes of this argument assume the warrior cannot possibly improve his skill or gear. If the player is really frustrated, he does have another option. He can give up his dps career and be a tank. Yeah he'll lose some good gear, but it won't take that long to get another set. He may already have some pieces.

Now flip that situation around. The warrior does better dps and nothing the rogue can do will top that. The rogue's option: reroll.

Because of situations like these, we don't think there would be many pure dps players unless they knew that it was theoretically possible for them to "win the meters." The risk of being useless would be too great.

If you are a warrior who promises never to tank, or a shaman who swears you will never ever heal, then I am sympathetic. However, to flip things around still risks the above problems, which we think are the greater of the two evils.

Again, the difference is so small that realistically, very few of your guilds will even notice it. If you have bad rogues and good warriors, the warriors will be on top of the meters. For nearly all of the people reading this thread, you have many things you can do that will improve your dps by 5% or more, such as get good gear, experiment with a better spec, or just learn to play better. If you are in the top one or two guilds on your server, then you probably will notice dps differences among the classes. However, you are probably not the ones at all worried about losing your raid spot.

Reading that post, I have a worry. I understand that "pure" classes need some incentive to stick with it otherwise they'll feel useless. However, the "hybrid" classes are usually only able to flip between two roles.

Priests can DPS or heal.

Shaman can DPS or heal.

Warriors can tank or DPS.

And so forth.

Paladins, however, can DPS, tank, or heal. In terms of the holy trinity of MMO's, paladins can do anything. Does this factor in to the DPS tuning of retribution? This is what I'm wondering. In light of the fact that paladins can do anything game-wise, is retribution tuned to do less damage than anyone else?

A penny for a developer's thoughts...

EDIT: And as uke pointed out in comments, I'm stupid - druids can do all 3, too. Sorry druids! I sometimes forget you crazy cats/trees/moonkins/owlkins can do it all. Question stands though - are ret/balance/feral DPS tuned to a lower standard because of both class's ability to tank and heal?

Necessary AND Evil

Raiders cried out that the Replenishment effect is a necessary, required raid buff. The crab responded that the devs balance raids with Replenishment in mind, assuming that all raids will have it. To date, only 3 specific talent specs can provide this "necessary" raid buff: shadow priests, survival hunters, and ret paladins.

If the whelpling's preview becomes reality, we can add another one to that list: demonology warlocks.

Improved Soul Leech – this talent now provides Replenishment (similar to shadow
priests)

I'm not comfortable with this.

Granted, this is just a preview, not a "we're patching this in tomorrow" sort of thing. I wonder why the devs targeted warlocks with this change, though. To me, warlocks have always been a "me me me" sort of class, with most of their spells and abilities focused on themselves and even garnering additional outside attention to them (Life Tap -> Heal me!). The Replenishment effect is a very outwardly-focused effect. It doesn't fit, in my eyes. I'd think it an elemental/restoration shaman ability much quicker than a warlock ability.

With that said, if Blizzard considers Replenishment an integral part of raiding, why not just fold the increased mana regen into all classes and not even bother with the ability? Buff in-combat mana regeneration by 0.25% of max mana per second for all mana-users, take Replenishment out of the hands of players, wipe your hands, and walk away. It seems silly to start handing the effect out to everyone and then having to "balance" the replenishers' damage down slightly to account for the increased utility.

I don't know if Replenishment is Blizzard's way of encouraging people to bring "underutilized" or "underpowered" specs to raids, but this seems like a round-about way to go about that.

Unless Replenishment gets given to everyone, raiders are still going to bemoan the fact that there is a special seat at the raiding table that needs to be accounted for. There's the tank seats, the healer seats, the DPS seats, and some of those DPS seats have a "reserved" sign on them for V.I.P. Replenishment-providers.

Giving Replenishment to additional specs does not change the fact that a raid is required to bring one or more of those specs to a progression raid.

I'm not trying to create a value judgment here, so don't take the above the wrong way. I don't care if 3 more classes can bring Replenishment. What I do care about is band-aids over problems. If Replenishment's presence (or absence) in the raid is presenting a problem, fold it into baseline combat regen and stop dicking around!

EDIT:
And to add to the fun, Bornakk chimed in on mana regen! Here's the paladin highlights:

• Divine Plea healing penalty increased from 20% to 50%
• Spiritual Attunement changing "somehow"
• More classes getting access to Replenishment (aside from warlocks, I assume - waiting on part 3 of the class preview)

The Spiritual Attunement change scares me. I await the news on this with baited breath.

Let The Blessing Crusade Begin

Step 1 - Post blessing idea to the Suggestion forum, with cross-posts to the Raid & Dungeon forum and Paladin forum.
Step 2 - ????
Step 3 - Profit!

Cross-post, linked above, follows -

In the past, Ghostcrawler and other Blizzard posters on the forums have openly stated that one of their goals is to make the game more fun and remove/change things that are viewed as monotonous or tedious. I'm here to posit that the paladin blessing system is tedious.

Since the blessing system is class-based, a single paladin will have to cast at least 10 times each time he wants to buff in a well-balanced and diversified raid. If the raid has differently specced hybrids of the same class (for example, an elemental shaman and an enhancement shaman), the paladin may need to cast a 10-minute blessing over the greater blessing to provide one or the other with the proper buff (for example, Greater Blessing of Might on shamans and then Blessing of Wisdom on the elemental shaman). Consider this in conjunction with blessing duration (30 minutes for greaters, 10 minutes for regulars), and over a 4 hour raid with all classes represented, a paladin will have to buff 80 times, and that's only if no one dies and there are no deviant hybrids. This is and of itself is a measure of tedium. When you consider it in the context of other raid buffs, however, it appears even more tedious. Priests, druids, mages, and other buffing classes can cast their buffs (Prayer of Fortitude, Gift of the Wild, Arcane Brilliance, etc.) with one cast on all raid members, and benefit from an hour duration. So, a mage over a 4 hour raid will only need to cast Arcane Brilliance four times, when compared with the paladin's minimum of 80 casts and 15-20 seconds every half hour spent simply re-casting his greater blessings.

In my view, what keeps paladins from being able to move toward a raid-wide buff system instead of the current class-based buff system is the dichotomy of Blessing of Might and Blessing of Wisdom, especially when considered in relation to hybrids. Let's say there are 3 paladins in the raid - a ret, a holy, and a prot. Normal blessing conventions will have the prot doing Sanctuary on tanking classes (feral druids, death knights, warriors, himself), the ret doing Kings on the tanking classes, and the holy doing Might on them.

But what about the boomkins and restoration druids? They certainly don't want Blessing of Might, they'll want Blessing of Wisdom! And Blessing of Sanctuary isn't a huge buff for them, since they aren't primary damage targets. So now you're faced with the decision of giving the caster druids Greater Blessing of Wisdom and having the holy paladin cast Blessing of Might every 10 minutes on the feral druid, or the prot paladin cast his unimproved Greater Blessing of Wisdom on the caster druids and then cast Blessing of Sanctuary on the feral druid every 10 minutes.

Melee DPS hybrids want very different blessings from caster hybrids, but they both use the same resource pool. A ret paladin wants Blessing of Might and Blessing of Wisdom, he just wants the Blessing of Might a whole lot more. What can we do? Roll Blessing of Might and Blessing of Wisdom into one, catch-all buff. This way, you have 3 blessings - Kings, Sanctuary, and the Might/Wisdom conglomeration. In a 3-paladin 25-man raid with all classes represented, you could then have one paladin on Kings, one paladin on Sanctuary, and one paladin on the Might/Wisdom conglomerate, with no need to babysit 10-minute buffs on deviantly-specced hybrids. This would also free any barriers preventing greater blessings from being a one-cast raid wide buff with an hour duration to match the buffs of priests, druids, mages, etc. The mana cost and monetary cost of Symbols of Kings would be increased to match, of course. This, coupled with increasing blessing duration to 30 minutes, would bring paladin buffing in line with other classes and remove the tedium surrounding blessings.

If rolling Blessing of Might and Blessing of Wisdom into one buff would be overpowered in PvP for the mana-using physical DPS classes (hunters, enhancement shamans, ret paladins), then simply making greater blessings a raid-wide, one hour duration buff and increasing blessing duration to 30 minutes would be a decent "meet us halfway" point. For the example of the holy paladin in the 25-man 3-paladin raid, he could cast Greater Blessing of Wisdom on the entire raid, and then Blessing of Might on 2-3 warriors, 2-3 death knights, a retribution paladin, a feral druid, and an enhancement shaman. If nothing else, that just reduced the number of casts per raid by half by increasing the duration, and reduced the number of blessings per buff round by one. Repeated wiping would still be a bear for a paladin, but if all goes well, this would be less time spent and less casts required. At the very least, the situation remains the same for one paladin, but the other two paladins will likely see a reduction in their blessing casts required. The Kings paladin especially will simply buff once and drink.