What's the purpose of ret in PvP?

PvP in arenas has a straightforward goal: make the other time die before your team. In fact this is pretty much the entire game. This can be broken down into three aspects in two general categories.

In the killing category is damage, DPS, attacking, whatever you want to call it.
In the not dying category are damage reductions and healing. Healing is straightforward, it's essentially the reverse of damage.

Damage reduction is more complex and can be broken into two areas. One is mitigating or avoiding damage after it has been dealt. This covers things like armor, resilience, resistance, grounding totem, spell reflect. The other side is preventing the damage completely by in some way controlling the player who is doing the damage. Crowd control and interrupts cover this side. Kiting falls somewhere in between and line of sight can be seen as affectively kiting for ranged and spell attacks.

BoF and snares are a mix of these since they can help to either keep an enemy in range for damage or to keep an enemy out of range for damage.

So where does ret fall in this? It must have some use, otherwise it is... useless.

Obviously ret covers the damage part, but that's pretty common. All damage parts also include some amount of either post-attack damage reduction (almost all classes have interrupts or some form of spammable CC) or healing. Ret isn't especially great at healing, but in WotLK that will change, a lot. But is it enough? I don't see the off-healing abilities of ret being enough to compensate for their weaker damage reduction capabilities in PvP. But they do have some abilities, HoJ, repentance, BoP.

Is ret going to be a sort of hybrid, having strong PvP damage but weaker damage reduction and healing, though still both? I suppose we'll see how it all pans out, but it looks like PvP will continue to be heavily based on CC and no amount of off-healing will fix this. If Blizzard doesn't want paladins to get a lot of CC, how about a lot of anti-CC, preferably that isn't easily removed.

Oh right, I forgot, on the killing side there's also prevention of healing: interrupts and CC. Ret is weak in that area too.

On Whining

It really is annoying how the slightest change to anything causes whining on the forums. It would be nice if people were more calm and reasonable, or at least didn't feel like their individual whine (which is not a unique or beautiful snowflake) is worthy of a separate thread. Besides, it's beta, things change. It seems silly to spam "time to reroll" or "Kalgan hates us" when nothing is anywhere close to done.

But, it's beta, things change. This is the best time to get changes and also the best time to guide (reverse or encourage) changes. If we get nerfed now it is best to express problems with it now, rather than waiting. While I realize that we don't know how things will play out at 80, it seems safer to be overpowered while leveling (who cares?) and then get nerfed at 80 rather than waiting to then to get much-needed buffs.

I hate the spam, but I don't want a repeat of the 6-10-6 seconds CS. If only there was a middle ground, like a lot of threads with calm discussion and reasonable arguments.

WotLK: perfectly timed?

TBC was, is, great. It improved many aspects of the game, carried on the lore, brought new content, fixed major class flaws. But something just feels lacking. It just doesn't feel right. Maybe it's the admitted (I wish I could find the quote from a Blue about this) overabundance of purple and pink and fancy technology (that doesn't even explode!). Maybe it's that we're off invading Outland to kill Illidan when he seems mostly content to stay there and deal with the Legion, keeping them occupied, while Arthas only gets stronger in our back yard.

But in WotLK we're coming how. The flaw is fixed. The fight that we left in the Plaguelands is back and I imagine that this time we can finish it. We all know the cold, we were in Winterspring after all. We all know the Plague and Undeath, we have two zones dedicated to it and an entire race caused by it.

This is the expansion for paladins and their fallen brethren: death knights. This is our playground. TBC was for warlocks, demons everywhere to enslave, or work with. WotLK will be the place for death to reign, or end.

I hope this is the time for Blizzard to get back to telling great stories, without even needing words, just the environments.

Told you so!

My heroic SH group wasn't eager to do the side pulls with the gladiators. I convinced them and on the third group savagery dropped and I won the roll. They saw no point in doing the last pull, but again, I convinced them. It dropped again and the other enchanter got it. Then the chest had a BoE blue healing shield.

Kargath down, no fist. We missed the timer by maybe 5 minutes but at least I got the quest done. :(

Effective Health and Healing in WotLK

Tanks are getting buffed, this is great, but I see a huge problem now getting even worse.

Currently a major theory in tanking is Effective Health. The basic concept is that when your avoidance fails, how much damage can you survive? It ensures that no matter what the RNG does, you will survive. It can also be expressed as time to live, or time to heal, showing how quickly healers need to be landing heals. It is pretty much the standard method of gearing when trying to move rapidly through content. The stats it considers are armor and health, though defense has a side role in that your effective health plummets if you are able to be crit, so get that 490 defense! Armor can't really be stacked very much; there are few enchants, no gems (unless you're going to use agility at 2 armor per agility), and the gear with extra armor tends to either be rings or just plain better gear. But stamina (health), that can be stacked. There are several enchants, many trinkets, and most importantly: gems.

EH plays a huge role in the habit of players to gem for stamina, endlessly, almost completely ignoring other stats. There is also the influence of players just looking at health since avoidance is invisible to outsiders, but I'm going to focus on EH. What's wrong with this? Well, I can't honestly give a good reason, it just feels wrong. It seems strange to have one gem be incredibly valuable while the others mostly fall to the side, relegated to a few paladins still going for uncrushable. It seems wrong that socket bonuses are constantly ignored, ironically they are sometimes even stamina. Gems were supposed to provide customization, instead they're just a massive gold sink for more stamina.

From the looks of it, WotLK is only going to make this worse. I wrote before about time to live, or time to heal. Time to heal means that the tank has to get this much healing in this much time, or he's likely to be dead. Avoidance helps, or does it? It can't be relied on, so healers will be healing anyway, avoidance just means they overheal. Downranking used to help, dropping the healing output a bit for lower overhealing and greater efficiency, or at least lower mana usage so that regen could keep up. With downranking gone, but time to heal not going away, healers are going to end up doing massive overhealing unless they are all getting new mid-size heals which can be spammed. The overhealing could be avoided by just requiring more healing, making bosses hit even harder, but that's just going to push EH requirements even higher, making worse the problem of stamina stacking to the exclusion of other stats.

Something has to change. Avoidance should mean something, not just be a source of overhealing and missed opportunities for rage. It's time to put an end to boss damage just getting higher and higher and pushing tanks into ridiculous gearing. Effective health must die.

[edit] An easy way to reduce the need for effective health, while maintaining damage outputs, is to make bosses swing softer but faster. This would also make blocking more significant for mitigation.

Raid or die never got fixed

Pre-BC there was little gear benefit from PvP. The best gear was incredibly hard to get (at least until 2.0 when PvP gear went to a simple honor grind with no ranks). But despite the effort, it was not the best PvP gear. Raids gave better gear for PvP.

"Raid or die." It was pretty simple, PvP gear was from raids, so people were forced into PvE to get gear for PvP. This wasn't much fun for people that just wanted to PvP and had to choose between sub-par gear or doing content they didn't enjoy.

It got fixed in TBC, sort of. Now PvPers can get all the gear they need from PvP. Great, right? Not exactly. The problem just got reversed.

PvP gear has few restrictions on who can wear it and doesn't require large raids or lockout timers. It's incredibly accessible. It is also very powerful, with S3 blowing away T4 for many classes. Unless you're in very high end content, PvP is going to give more powerful gear than PvE.

PvE people now have the choice that PvP people used to have: inferior gear or unwanted content. Raid or die didn't go away, it just got turned around.

My name is Klepsacovic, and I'm a switcher

The last couple days I've been playing my shaman again. I forgot how fun he really is. DPS is so much less stressful than tanking and the numbers are bigger, and who doesn't like big numbers? I know my tank doesn't, since the only big numbers I ever see are incoming damage.

Today I did heroic Slave Pens, had a blast. Our tank was a pretty good paladin. Nothing much good dropped, again. But it was fun and didn't burn me out, so I don't mind running it again tomorrow.

Later I did heroic Underbog, respeccing resto. Our tank was a paladin too, but I didn't like him much. He never judged, claiming that JoW didn't give aggro and he only cares about aggro. As expected, he was OOM every pull or two. Oh yea, and he didn't judge crusader either, claiming it doesn't give aggro. That got a triple dot and an offer to give some advice, which he rejected. Still I got through, got a new healing hat and some badges.

It was a little strange switching to healing. I've not done much healing in months, except for last night when I did regular crypts with an overgeared druid tank, so I mostly threw around lightning bolts. I was even still elemental. I added a new bar, loaded it with various ranks of healing wave so I could find just the right rank to spam. That bar got mouse-clicked, I am ashamed to say.

Earlier in the day I'd tried heroic SH, but our tank was terrible. He would taunt while pulling (even though DPS had learned to do NOTHING for a few seconds while he pulled), then had terrible aggro generation. DPS would get aggro and he'd shield slam instead of taunting. More than a single mob made him fall apart completely. Four was a guaranteed wipe, excluding those of us who ran for the door.

I can understand learning, but this was not a time for learning. SH isn't an easy heroic. His gear was pretty good too, he'd at least been to Karazhan up to Curator, and had some rep gear. Maybe he gathered gear as fury or arms and then when prot, but that seems a bit backwards from what I've seen. The thing that really confused me was his lack of gems, totally empty sockets, not even uncommons or strange choices, just nothing at all. I left soon after noticing that he had 13k health, buffed.

Yesterday I got my fishing hat. It looks cool.

Although, my racial ability does kinda suck.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpoGKw6L4cM

My poor characters

They'll be totally neglected while I'm away for a week. Maybe I should hire a Chinese guy to take care of them.