2 is to prot as 3 is to _____. Hint: ret

2.0 was the patch of protection. Looking at talents it wasn't a gigantic buff. A few percent mitigation here, some stam there, a minor mechanical fix to a few talents. The real magic is more subtle. You won't notice it immediately. It's really a bit dull. It has no flashy graphics and won't give OMG HUGE NUMBERZ!

Spiritual attunement transformed paladin tanking. This was the ability that made prot a real tanking tree.
Tanking gear without class: Warrior was the second big change that isn't really all that amazing looking back. Two years later, it's hard to imagine a time when if you were not a warrior you did not have tanking gear.

This is the time of less-than-amazing changes for ret. Divine Storm was the eye candy, but in the end, it's not the thing that makes it all work.

Judgements of the Wise transformed ret paladins. Oh sure, it's been nerfed heavily, but it is regen. Mana regen is serious business, just ask any caster. This is what will allow ret to DPS for more than a few minutes and what will ease the burden of needing intellect and mana/5 on gear.
Sheathe of Light should be renamed "You are a hybrid." This is the talent that makes ret heals worth a damn. This is also the talent that makes their heals worth more than a damn.

Nerfs hurt, but it's the few changes such as gaining regen or SP that remake a spec. This is the time for retribution to gain even more acceptance, and acceptance beyond a 3% crit debuff.

BoE epics?

Today I heard something about BoE epics from raid bosses being srs bns. I'll just assume that this is true and that they are in fact srs bns and not like current BoE epics. By that I mean upgrades from blues which you shouldn't be wearing for long anyway. So, as with all srs bns, these would need to be distributed. I normally would encourage my "Klepsacovic distributes everything however he feels like it" system, but apparently people read this and the popularity of this system could lead to a lot of extra work for me.

In unrelated news, hot chocolate with a shot of espresso in it is one of the best hot drinks ever, unless it's made by whoever made the one I just finished. Moving on.

Useful BoEs mean that lots of people want them and everyone can get them. Clearly this requires a more nuanced system than the current one for handling drops that few people want and only 10-25 people even have a shot at.

To start off, I think it's pretty standard that people who are in the raid have higher priority than people who are not there. Of course special circumstances could be created: we need X for this boss but long-time loyal raider could really use this piece, but he's stepping out for you, if there are no objections we'll give it to him. I probably wouldn't go for an exception like that, but there is one universal rule: Anything is okay as long as everyone involved agrees to it.

So, let's look at who is in the raid, all the possible combinations of priorities.
The highest is clearly a main character getting an upgrade for a main spec. After that comes, in no particular order, alts, mains going for off-spec gear, and alts going for off-spec gear. The first two I'd put as a tie since they're approximately equal in usefulness to the guild (wrong character ~= wrong spec). The last is last since it's the least likely to be of any help to anyone, including the person getting the gear.

Now let's go outside the raid. There are again mains with main spec upgrades. Alts with main spec, mains with off-spec, and alts with off-spec. I'd say a similar order could be used.

This system isn't at all perfect. On one hand, it rewards attendance by prioritizing those who show up. On the other hand, it would potentially give gear to alts or off-specs over non-present mains of main spec. However if the supposed main with the main spec isn't showing up, is he actually more useful than the alt or off-spec? Maybe overall he is more useful, if it's like my earlier situation where he's only not present in order to free up a much-needed spot. However if he's taking up a needed spot and isn't missed, perhaps he's not the most useful class/spec and would be better off somewhere else instead of dropping raids and still getting gear.

What is loyalty worth? He's loyal, but is his loyalty of any benefit? Everyone might benefit more if he was loyal to a guild that actually needs him. But I've gotten off-topic.

Perhaps an entirely separate system is needed for BoEs. Maybe there could be an auction once a week to raise funds. There could be a separate DKP system, mirroring the system used for BoPs, but with its own pool. Officers could give out gear as it is requested and proven to be an upgrade, similar to BoE gems currently.

It's pretty simple to treat the BoEs as BoPs when they're in the raid, but not everyone will want them and sharding them isn't a very smart option. How they are handled once they leave the zone is going to be an issue that all guilds will have to figure out on their own.

Is leveling as a healer bad for healing?

Holy, holy, resto, resto; they're the four healing specs. They're also the worst leveling specs. Even worse than slow leveling, they might create bad healers.

While leveling up, any instance can be healed by any spec, assuming decent gear. It's not always easy, but it's possible. Being a healing spec would make the healer more effective, so how can that be bad? It teaches a false sense of security and power.

When someone makes a bad pull in a lowbie instance and have a shadow priest healing, they might die. Do the same with a holy priest and they're more likely to live. The more effective healer shelters people from the consequences of their actions. No deaths, no learning.

On the healer's side, it's about as bad. They are more efficient and heal for more. There is very little challenge. What will happen when they get to heroics or raids where being specced for healing isn't just an advantage that trivializes the content, but a requirement to even stand a chance? Healing while leveling is easy enough already, doing it with a healing spec is overkill.

Finally there's just the fact that healing specs kill slower, so they're inferior for soloing. This makes leveling take longer and it can become frustrating. That results in more alts stuck at low levels with the player turned off to the class.

My new scapegoat for ret: double-dipping

With the exception of SoC and an insignificant AP benefit on SoR, paladin abilities used to be single-coefficient. They either benefited from SP or from AP. This was pretty bad for ret since it only had AP. Then two things happened. The first (not in chronological order, just order of me thinking them up), was awesome and was called Sheathe of Light. The second has no name and it ruined everything, it is the addition of AP benefits to just about every paladin offensive ability.

Back when ret had no SP the second thing made sense. But now ret has SP, from AP, so adding AP bonuses just means that ret gets to double-dip. Sheathe of Light is great, keep it. But...

What if abilities benefited only from AP or SP? The problem isn't sheathe, the problem is that everything was changed to allow ret to double-dip. If SoR was only SP, it could have a much higher SP coefficient. Judgements can be pure SP (as they used to be), since all specs have SP from somewhere.

Anyone that needs SP either wears SP gear (holy) or gets SP from other stats that they wear (prot and ret). Anyone that needs AP either wears str gear (ret and prot) or they don't need it (holy).

Weapon-based attacks: AP (from strength)
Shield-based attacks: BV (from strength)
Spells (including heals): SP

There, everything is fixed. Now Blizzard can buff back up SP coefficients while removing AP bonuses on most spells; leaving ret unchanged and the other specs stronger.

I'm sorry moonkin, but...

With one, only one exception, every single moonkin I meet in game is either bad at his class, rude, or both. I do not know what causes this. It's not a pre-existing anti-moonkin bias which causes me to negatively interpret neutral phrases. No, that is (actually by now, was) reserved for arms warriors and all classes of hunters. That list has since changed, with no hatred for arms, less dislike of hunters, and the addition of rogues. My point is that moonkin are jerks and/or noobs.

The first one I met was a jerk. But, I decided to go against my instinct and not make a fuss about him. He rode the epic train in my guild until we got to the slightest challenge, then ran. In retrospect I should have recommended that he be gkicked and blacklisted months back.

Then there was a general assortment of jerks in PUGs. There weren't a ton, since fortunately moonkin weren't and still aren't very common. Still, even with a small sample of only a dozen or so, a 100% occurrence of jerks seems to indicate something.

The exception continues to confuse me. He's a moonkin, but he's neither a jerk nor a noob. Fascinating. He's in my guild, but as the first example shows, that's not always a guarantee of positive ratings.

Most recently is was the jerk in a PUG with my priest. The situation was a bad tank who didn't talk much, which put him squarly in the middle of the group. The other people were a mage that didn't talk much, but could reliably sheep and eventually found her iceblock key, a shaman that started off the run by whining about a harmless fear (which saved the mage), and a moonkin that had no concept of aggro, off-healing, off-tanking, or shutting up.

So the tank pulls a bunch of mobs, or a pack and a pat, either way, there were too many mobs for him and I ended up with one on me due to aggro*. Seeing as no one except me was dying especially fast, I MCed one and set it on the other. Not a normal technique, but all the mobs died and all of us lived. As any good player knows, there are only two types of healing: enough and not enough. Seeing as I did the first, clearly I'd done my job. But no, the moonkin and shaman still didn't understand the concept of shutting up.

So, I suppose that's that. In my entire experience (that I remember, so I suppose that narrows it a tiny bit, but seeing how rare they are, you'd expect me to remember them), I've met one that wasn't in some way awful to be grouped with.

I have tried to be careful to speak only of my experiences and not moonkin overall, but maybe I slipped here or there. I have met non-terrible moonkin, just not in-game. So clearly there are some out there. Maybe I just attract terrible moonkin. I wonder if I will ever solve the Mystery of the Mean Moonkin. If you are a moonkin and not terrible, screenshots or you don't exist. :P

*
http://pc.gamespy.com/flintlockes-guide-to-azeroth/episode-14-the-scarlet-hootenanny/675466p1.html

Role forums killed class forums, at least paladin

The class forums, as long as I can remember, have been pretty crappy. But there were still good posts here and there. The 500000 rate my gear, can I tank X, rate my spec, etc. are not what I refer to. Those may be annoying after you're posting for three years, but let's be honest, in the absence of stickies and having a weak search function, they are necessary. Hell, they're productive. Thanks to those threads someone out there is a little bit better.

Everything seems to have gone downhill.

The serious helpful people seem to be leaving. I can understand. Why stay in the nearly unmoderated forum, full of trolls and spam, when you can go to the role forums with a Blue, no, a DEVELOPER apparently hovering over them 20 hours a day?

The DPS forum is shit. Really, it's awful. But it's still better than the paladin forum now. The tank forum is great. Not perfect, but still, not much trolling, no spam, helpfulness out the wazoo, and a surprising amount of tank unity. Healing is a bit whiny, but I can understand it. If you're going to end up with the least well-designed role in the game, the least you could ask for is that your class be excellent at it.

The paladin forum seems to have collapsed. The trolls don't have the sort of urgency, flavor of the week, this is important, sense of a week or two ago. It's not as if they jumped on a bandwagon. That left. Now they're just sort of there. There were trolls before, but they were rarer and just seemed different.

There's nothing much productive anymore. The annoying, but useful "rate my X can I tank X help me with X" is fading or gone. There isn't even elaborate theorycrafted complaining. Instead there's a general sprinkling of whining and exaggerated claims of doom.

It's almost like a ghost town, except instead of normal ghosts they are from 12 years-old who died from lead poisoning. There an aura of trolling, desperation, and stupid. The sheriff seems to have left, but there's nothing worth looting. Instead people are wandering around in a drunken stupor, looking for cheap whores, but not even having enough money for them. There's no life anymore. I almost wonder if it is worth keeping open or if it should just be put out of its misery.

Well timed.. starfire (?) stun, bro

The old combination of mace spec, stormherald, and the stun meta was incredibly annoying. I hated it. I thought it needed nerfs for a long time. Lo and behold, mace spec is now much different. My warrior is pretty noobish, but it seems like a decent talent. It's not flashy now, but I like it. The rogue mace spec was changed in the same way, or at least similar enough for me to not notice.

Enter starfire.

Obviously I can't say that we'd have won the matches, but at least twice I saw starfire stuns completely ruining the match for us. The one I remember best was in Ruins of Lordaeron with a balance-arcane team. The burst was pretty ridiculous, but that's a rant for another day. I was trying to keep myself up without having to burn a five minute cooldown, and I was doing okay. Holy Light was about to finish, and then the stun lands. It was bubble or die. Later I had to wander around, sheeped, as my partner got pounded. His bubble was down due to the previously mentioned burst. Sheep wore off, I attempted to help, and woosh: cyclone.

If not for that stun, I'd have had my bubble. I'd have been able to bubble out and save my partner. By then the other team wasn't doing the greatest on mana, so we had a good shot at beating them.

I'd like to get back to that displaced burst rant though. Ret burst is being nerfed and has been nerfed. Over and over. Balance and arcane are currently doing what feel like comparable damage, at range, with ranged CC and tools for kiting. Compare this to ret that bursts, but has no tools to close gaps. Their burst can be consistently applied, ours cannot.

Yet we get nerfed? Even more, hotfix nerfed. This isn't the old old old reckoning we're talking about. World bosses aren't getting one-shotted. Oh no, someone e-peen shrunk because he lost to a ret paladin, now he's going to lose his... oh wait no, they froze titles before 3.0. There was nothing that should not have waited for a patch and the ability to update tooltips. I'd guess at least half of my spell descriptions are wrong because Blizzard had to nerf ret NOW. And yet resto druids for three seasons, where were the nerfs to knock out half their spirit regen or to disable travel form? Where were their crippling nerfs? NOWHERE. Bullshit. It's not a matter of balance, ret needed adjustments, it's about showing the slightest bit of consistency. Two days and we get nerfed, two, no three seconds, and they aren't touched. If there was the slightest bit of fairness, Blizzard would go back and strip titles from every team with a resto druid, take any gear they got, and send them a warning for exploiting game mechanics.

Put holy in ret gear

This could actually be done with only small changes to the spec and a single change to the class overall.

First, move AP->SP to a baseline ability.
If holy heals end up too weak, buff Holy Guidance.
Make Divine Intellect a AP->int talent.
Buff Illumination back to 100% to compensate for the loss of regen on gear.

Currently holy is the only class/spec that uses spell power plate. This goes against the push to unify gear, to make it wanted for multiple specs and classes. Clothies all want SP cloth. The two classes that use leather also use AP/crit. Balance and resto can share gear, at least partially. Mail classes either use AP/crit or they are resto and elemental and can share partially. Plate classes all use AP/crit or similar tanking stats.

When holy gear drops, only holy wants it. When ret/prot gear drops, holy doesn't want it. No other spec has such poor sharing with others. Even the second worst, druids and shamans who would want much different amounts of hit, are still not so wasteful. They can make up hit elsewhere or for the healers, have a slight stat loss, but not a near-total waste as with holy.

Switching holy to strength gear benefits everyone. Holy can draw from a larger gear pool. Other plate classes don't have to groan when they see holy plate drop. Blizzard doesn't have to design as much armor, saving them time after the initial investment of converting holy.