My main is a resto Shaman, but I've been spending my spare time either leveling a Rogue or gearing up my Ret Paladin. It is a completely different experience. I've spent hours in the battlegrounds and have managed to earn the honor for the Merciless Gladiator's Greatsword. Thus far is has been a real challenge for me.

I have a harder time with the Paladin than the Rogue. In the battlegrounds my first reaction when I see someone going down is to heal them. I do drop an emergency heal here and a bubble there, I know that my heals are generally crummy. I should just keep swinging my sword and leave the healing to the healers. With the Rogue, there is no option for healing, so I just keep Slicing and Dicing away through the levels. On top of that, I'm used to trying to get away from my opponent, not trying to stay on top of them. The whole paradigm shift has been difficult for me, but I've learned a lot from it.

How do you feel when you play something totally different from your main?

Let's face it, folks. A lot of raid leaders have very little idea what they're doing when they're brand new to the raiding thing. I was there once, too. Until you have some experience in the 25-man raids, you have very little idea how group synergy works or anything of that sort. As a hybrid, especially one specced in a tree other than your healing tree, this could cause you some issues when looking to break into raiding from the ground level, rather than filling a gap in an existing raid that generally knows what's what.

You will most likely find that you'll need to sell yourself to raid leaders. What can you bring to the table? What can you do that a mage can't? What can you do that a rogue can't? The answer: Quite a bit! First thing to keep in mind, though, is that as a hybrid, you will probably not do as much damage as the other DPS classes in the raid. Healing specced, you will keep up just fine. Damage specced? Well, you won't keep up on every encounter. That's okay though. You don't need to. Why? Because you specifically allow those other classes to meet their maximum potential.

I'll go through each of the damage specs one by one. Tanks, healers, sorry. You come next week. I'm writing a column, not a novel!

Hybrid Theory returns under the banner of column-newb Alex Ziebart. Incredibly biased opinions await you. If you are reading this, you have already been made a victim of his inability to create interesting graphics. No World of Warcraft players were harmed in the creation of the previous image, though that does not mean it won't hurt you.

When I decided on my topic for today, I was mighty excited. A fire raged within me, and my fingers flew over the keyboard as soon as I sat down at the computer. My first column! Awesome! Yes! About three paragraphs in, I realized I should probably make sure my predecessor, Jason Lotito, hadn't done the topic yet. Unfortunately, he did. Fortunately, I completely disagree with what he said in every possible way.

Perfect.

What is a hybrid class? The basic answer is pretty simple: A class with multiple viable roles. Paladins, Druids and Shaman are obvious examples of a hybrid class. If you disagree with the fact that they're hybrids, you must be playing the wrong game. Holy, Retribution, Protection. Feral, Balance, Restoration. Elemental, Enhancement, Restoration. All of them are viable specs, especially in raiding. As fun as it is to mock Retribution Paladins, even they have a place in the end-game.

Basically, Shamadruidins are hybrids. Don't try to argue that they aren't because you will lose.

I don't think I've ever used an exclamation point in a headline before, but this deserves it. It appears that Paladins' Retribution tree will be getting some passive threat reduction, as of patch 2.3. Posted just recently in the official forums by Eyonix:

After further patch testing and some serious discussion, we've decided to add threat reduction deep in the paladin's retribution tree. As a result, fanaticism will now reduce threat caused by all actions by 6/12/18/24/30%, in addition to its current effect of course.

How does that sound? 30% passive threat retribution seems pretty darned solid to me. Let's hear it for Blizzard -- looks like they do listen to what their customers want after all.

Shamans and paladins have long been in an "evil twin" type relationship, though which one is evil, I couldn't possibly say. Probably both. Anyway, since Enhancement Shaman improvements possibly destined for an upcoming patch were previewed at Blizzcon, it seems only fair that we should see some Retribution Pally buffs as well. And here they are!

• Crusader Strike cooldown reduced to 6 seconds, from 10.
• Vengeance duration increased to 30 seconds, from 15.
• Improved Seal of the Crusader replaced with Sanctified Crusader.
• Sanctified Crusader replaced with new talent, Sanctified Seals, whose tooltip reads: Increases spell and melee crit by 3% (with 3 pts) reduces the duration sanctified seals. World of Raids notes that this tooltip doesn't entirely make sense and is probably not finished.

So what do you think? Do these changes take some of the sting out of the Death Knight, which many see as a slap in the face to Retribution? Note that these changes are still under development; don't count on these making it into the live game intact. Allegedly, they are bound for patch 2.3, which is still a ways off. At the very least, these can be taken as insight into how the devs are thinking about Ret.

[via World of Raids]

First Tobold, and now Mastgrr of Paladin Sucks has exited Azeroth.

Before you yell at us for saying the sky is falling (again), that's not what we're saying at all. WoW has lasted for a long time for a lot of people-- more than almost any other videogame out there (in some cases, ever). For some people, including this first round of bloggers, it's run its course. Just because they're quitting doesn't mean the end of the world (of Warcraft) is upon us. In fact, it doesn't even mean the blogging is over-- Tobold quit a week and a half ago, and he's still blogging about WoW. My guess is that both bloggers will be back when the next expansion hits.

But then again, it's kind of sad that these WoW veterans are stepping out of the game. At least it's productive-- Tobold quit partly because of attunements, and they were lifted the next day. Maybe now that Pally Sucks is RIP, that ret Paladin review will come sooner than we think.

Retribution paladins are in strong contention for most ridiculed build in WoW as today. Personally, I'm sure they don't deserve all the scorn that's thrown at them, but it's probably true that Ret is not as strong as many other trees. Well, Blizzard seems to have (finally) noticed this, and they're taking a look at it:

Hello again, I just wanted to let you know that the developers have taken part of your suggestions, and are looking into improving the retribution paladin spec. You can probably expect something along the line of more sustained DPS in a raid and more raid utility, but we are not ready to reveal any details. This is still work in progress, so please be patient :)

Good news, eh? Or as one forum responder put it: "Hell, it's about time." So if Ret gets more sustained raid DPS and more raid utility, will you be happy with it? What would you change in the tree?

Everyone wants to DPS. And if a Paladin wants to DPS, he's likely to look at the Retribution tree. However, that tree has been somewhat de-emphasized as of late; the developers have out and said that the Paladin is a tanking/healing hybrid, and its DPS is meant to be somewhat sub-par. Of course, this implies that Ret is not a very strong talent tree: if Pallies are meant for healing and tanking, it stands to reason that Holy and Prot will probably be stronger trees than Ret.

Indeed, many players are currently dissatisfied with the state of Ret, and Kalgan (a.k.a. Tom Chilton, the WoW designer responsible for classes, among other things) recently stopped by the forums to chat about Ret a bit. Here's what he had to say (the responses are scattered through this thread):

However, while I don't disagree that there aren't many highly rated ret pallies, it's worth pointing out that there also aren't many highly rated prot warriors, destro locks, balance druids, survival hunters, enhancement shamans, etc.

While trying to get each spec to be arena viable in the different formats is a noble goal, the reality is that it isn't an immediate goal for every spec to be optimized for every aspect of the game (arenas, battlegrounds, solo-ing, raiding, heroics, etc).

In the case of arenas, it seems to me that getting each class reasonably represented in highly rated teams is a more important goal, and unfortunately the paladin class happens to be somewhat grossly over-represented in this regard.

So...there's too many Paladins in arenas, therefore they can't buff Ret, because that would cause even more Paladins? Hm...

With the disappearance of dishonorable kills, many people are hoping for the return of innovative world PvP. As an example of "innovative world PvP," and how angry people get when it actually occurs, we present last month's Mal'Ganis Flightmaster Hostage Crisis.

Mal'Ganis is a fairly overcrowded PvP server, hosting both some of the world's best guilds (Ret, Elitist Jerks) and some of the world's best drama (the guildmaster who threatened to kill a guy who gquit after spending a month in the hospital.) One of the native Mal'Ganis guilds is Goon Squad, a giant Horde crew that was formed from readers of http://www.somethingawful.com. Goon Squad is known for pranks and odd ideas, the most well-known of which is their "I Summon People Off Cliffs" warlock PvP video.

On the night of November 4, Goon Squad snuck into Theramore and kited away the Alliance flightmaster. Soon after, they posted a ransom demand on the Mal'Ganis realm forums: If the Alliance bought out two Lightforge Belts listed for 1500g each in the neutral auction house, Goon Squad would free their hostage. If not, wrote Stuul from Goon Squad, "It would be very unfortunate if we were forced to hold him for the weekend while you try to raid." To encourage the Alliance to pay up, they also camped the Ratchet boat and kidnapped the Auberdine flight master.

A large group of Alliance joined in the fun and vowed to hunt down their beloved flightmasters rather than pay the ransom. Goon Squad soon posted that the hostages were in Bael'Dun Keep in the southern Barrens, and challenged Alliance to come and get them.

Unfortunately for the Horde, enough people complained to GMs that the incipient world PvP battle was nipped in the bud. Five hours into the hostage crisis, GMs struck down the kited flightmasters with instant Curse of Dooms, killing them and allowing Alliance to fly free in Kalimdor once more. "Your flight masters were slaughtered by a overexcited GM," Arktdnonoobs wrote. "We had no part in their deaths."

Goon Squad received commendations from both Horde and Alliance on several servers. Even a CM on the Customer Service Forum, Batta, noted that while the GMs had to kill the flight masters to keep them from being "lost", he admired Goon Squad's ingenuity in pulling off the caper.

So is this an example of innovative world PvP, or a bunch of Horde being jerks? Do you have any plans to spice up your server's PvP in the future?